The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  We had to admit that was probably true. “Men can get old,” Daddy told us. “Even when they’re sixty, women’ll look at them and say, ‘Oh, you’re so mature. I like older men.’ But you women, you only got a certain amount of time to make it and you got to move fast. After twenty-five, it’s all downhill.”

  One afternoon, between shows, a casually dressed white boy came backstage to speak to Daddy. The fellow said he thought the band was great and wondered if there was any chance of our playing for his eating club at Princeton. As the social chairman of the Cap and Gown Club, he had bands booked through January and would like us to play on a Saturday night in February. He was hesitant when he asked about our fee because he assumed we were making star-type money, while, in truth, we were playing around Long Branch and Asbury Park for thirty-five and forty dollars a night.

  “I’m afraid the best we can do is one hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour,” the student said apologetically. “For four hours.”

  Daddy did a quick calculation. Four hours at one hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour. Five hundred dollars for one night’s work! Not wanting to look too anxious, he frowned and slowly shook his head. “I’ll have to talk it over with the band.”

  Afterward, Daddy told us that he leaped over three chairs in his rush to get to our dressing room. “Kids! Kids! There’s a college boy out there who wants to pay us five hundred dollars to play at Princeton for four hours!” He was exultant. “Princeton ain’t even that far. It can’t be more’n an hour from home. And it’d be a Saturday night. It don’t take you out a school.”

  When he’d calmed down a little, he strolled back and told the waiting social chairman that the fee was not what we had been accustomed to being paid but, nevertheless, we would be agreeable to performing at Princeton. The young man beamed. He shook Daddy’s hand and said he would call us to make the final arrangements.

  “Tell me this,” Daddy said, “do other colleges have dances on the weekends?” When the fellow said that indeed they did, then and there Daddy caught a glimpse of a possible future. Perhaps playing colleges on weekends was the stone he had been looking for to kill two birds: a way for the band to make money to pay for our education while at the same time we stayed in school and got that education.

  When September came, we were back in school. I entered the tenth grade in senior high and found myself assigned to a history class with kids who were wearing baseball caps indoors and blowing bubblegum and sailing paper airplanes. That night I wailed to Mommy that I must be in the wrong class and would she please go to school and talk to the principal for me. Her answer was that I should try to straighten it out on my own, that I was old enough to fight my own battles and that she and Daddy would intervene only if no one would listen to me.

  The principal referred me to Miss Apostolacus, the guidance counselor, who had known our family for years. She asked why I thought I was in the wrong class. “Because the work is too easy,” I told her. “Last year I was in a class where everybody was very bright and did their homework and paid attention. This is probably a very low class and I want to be with the smart kids.”

  “You think you can handle the work in a more advanced class?”

  When I assured her confidently that I could, she nodded and reassigned me to a different class, a class in which there proved to be no black students at all. Not only that, there was not a single face I recognized from ninth grade. Miss Apostolacus had leap-frogged me over the intermediate classes and set me down in an honors course for fast-track kids. Again I went crying to Mommy. Her answer this time was: “You asked for it. You got it. You’ll just have to work harder to keep up.”

  From that time on, I practically lived in the library. As a black person who hadn’t had much chance to absorb general knowledge about the world in a casual, everyday fashion from the talk and interests of people around me, I felt I was starting out about five hundred laps behind the other students. To pace myself, I looked around and identified a classmate who did not seem impossibly far ahead and said, “Let me see if I can catch up to this one.”

  Pat, the girl I’d singled out as a rabbit in grammar school, had become addlebrained over boys and no longer excelled, so now I chose a white male. When I caught up to this first rabbit and was doing as well on tests as he was, I traded him for a still brighter rabbit and set my sights on him, and in that way I kept going up in my grades until I was at the top of the class. The whole experience taught me that if you let other people hold low expectations for you or if you hold them for yourself, you will come to believe that is all you are capable of. But if you really set yourself to trying and keep going after higher and higher goals, there is no limit to what you can accomplish.

  Because I was studying so hard, I had little time for extracurricular activities, but I volunteered for the school band. Jeanette was a senior and I got a kick out of the idea of playing “Pomp and Circumstance” at her graduation. The music the band practiced was banal and I hated having to march up and down football fields at halftime in the freezing cold with my fingers and lips going numb, but I drudged away through the whole fall, winter, and spring of marching and practicing, looking forward to the moment when it would be my sister up there getting her diploma. Graduation day came. Mommy and Daddy were there. Donna and Linda and Rita were there. I was there blasting away in the band. The only person who was not at Jeanette’s graduation was Jeanette. She was still sewing on her dress, or she had mistaken the time, or she was put out because she had not been selected for the National Honor Society. Whatever her reason, the rest of us were disappointed but not surprised—Jeanette was Jeanette and danced to her own music.

  One other extracurricular activity I tried out for was a high school production of The Music Man. To my way of thinking, I was a professional musician, I had a terrific singing voice, and the least I could do was to offer to undertake the leading role of Marian, the librarian.

  “The lead?” Daddy said.

  “Don’t you always tell us to go for the top?”

  He didn’t say anything more, but he was not nearly as startled as I was when I wasn’t cast in the part. “It’s because you’re black,” Daddy said matter-of-factly. He never believed in blinking at reality. “At the end the music man kisses the librarian. They’re not going to have a white guy kissing a black girl. The parents would be taking their kids out of school so fast the kids wouldn’t know what hit ‘em.”

  I sat and pondered and I said to myself, “Daddy’s right, so let me just get on with studying because becoming a doctor is the only chance this ugly duckling has of turning into a swan.”

  In the late fall of that year, the Princeton student called, as he had said he would, and made a date for us to play at the Cap and Gown—February 16, 1963, a date all of the Thornton sisters remember, for it marked the first time we played at Princeton, and playing at Princeton was the start of so much for us.

  When we arrived on campus, crammed into an old white van Daddy had bought to transport us and our instruments, we were awed by the massive yet graceful Gothic buildings. We had not seen a university before, and Princeton’s air of serenity, benevolent lordliness, rightness, reduced us to silence. The students, too, as they crisscrossed the campus, seemed wrapped in that same air of unquestioned right. They belonged. They moved with ease among the grandeur. They looked comfortable and at home.

  But they weren’t wearing socks. “How come?” we whispered to Daddy. “Aren’t you supposed to wear socks with loafers?”

  “They’re down-to-earth folks,” Daddy improvised. “See, they’re accustomed to having so much money, it’s just not a big thing with them.”

  We later learned that what is called “Princeton socks” refers to the Princeton custom of wearing no socks at all.

  When we pulled up at the Cap and Gown, the social chairman was waiting to greet us and shake hands with Daddy to thank us for coming. He didn’t say, as we half-expected: “Go to the back door and wait till we call you.” I
nstead, he enthused, “You were so great in Brooklyn that I know you’re going to give us a wonderful show.” He even offered to help us carry in our instruments, but Daddy said his girls were used to doing it themselves. He wasn’t going to have a boy hanging around even if he was a white college boy and just being polite.

  That night we gave them rock, rhythm and blues, and James Brown-type music, raunchy, really tight stuff, and the students loved it. We played our hearts out, forty minutes on, twenty off. We were not jaded musicians rolling off a bus for a one-night stand and smoking joints out back between sets. We were kids, close in age to the students, and it was as though we were all having a party. The Princeton guys had dates from Radcliffe and Vassar and Bryn Mawr, and the girls began coming up to Daddy to ask if the band could play at their colleges. He said sure and handed out our telephone number to anyone who asked.

  Word-of-mouth about the band spread fast, and almost before we realized what was happening, we were booked for Friday night at one college, Saturday afternoon and evening at another, and Sunday afternoon at another. It was as though all these years we had walked along in the dark, taking one step at a time, never knowing whether there would be a payoff, when it might come, what it might be, and suddenly here it was: Fate had clued us in to the perfect way of making money with the band. Our schedule was the same as the students’—study during the week, play on weekends and during vacations. The only difference was that they played for fun while we had fun playing for money.

  Our success brought agents buzzing around with their blandishments: “I can get you more bookings. I can handle the paperwork for you. I can get you more money.” Daddy gave one of them, a sharp-nosed, thin-faced fellow, a try, until he discovered the ferret was charging a third more than he was telling Daddy and pocketing the difference. “We don’t need no middleman like that,” Daddy decided. “We can get cards made ourselves and hand them out.”

  The cards had “The Thornton Sisters—You Never Heard It So Good” on the front, and our telephone number on the back. When someone called, Daddy yelled to me, “Cookie, can we get to Hamilton College on the same weekend we’re playin’ at the University of Pennsylvania?” I was elected to look these places up on a map and estimate the distances between them because Donna was working at her job and Jeanette, the social one of us, was usually somewhere else. It became a given that I figured out routes and travel times and how to book in clusters so that we played, for instance, Trinity, Wesleyan, and Amherst on one weekend, and Cornell, Rensselaer, and Colgate on another.

  Knowing nothing about contracts, in the beginning Daddy just said, “Okay, the band’ll be there,” but once or twice, after we’d played a date, he was told, “Oh, gee, Mr. Thornton, we thought there’d be more people at the mixer. We just don’t have the money to pay you what we agreed.” A few incidents like that and Daddy contacted the musicians’ union and got hold of a standard contract. At the same time, he learned about something called a “binder,” and after that, it was, “We’ll send you a contract to sign, and when you send it back with a binder of $125, we’ll reserve the date for you.”

  One social chairman called and said, “I didn’t get your cover letter explaining the contract,” which clued us in that we should be sending a letter with the contract slaying, “This letter is to inform you of such and such.” As we grow more experienced and more secure about stating terms, we began stipulating that we had to have a place to dress with a full-length mirror and a bathroom reserved for our use. We needed the latter because when we had to use the bathroom set aside for the guys’ dates, they’d all have been drinking beer and the line would be a mile long and we only had twenty minutes between sets.

  Often enough in those twenty-minute breaks, we used the time to write out reports or essays or other pieces of homework we had been working on while traveling in the van. We brought our workbooks and textbooks and clipboards with us in the van and studied as best we could by flashlight while Daddy drove and Mommy sat beside him in the front seat doing last-minute sewing on our costumes. But it was hard to write with all of us crowded in and the car jiggling, so we saved the writing until we arrived.

  We knew our playing schedule, of course, and we tried to get our schoolwork done ahead of time, but often, leaving at three o’clock on Friday afternoon to drive to a far-off place like Virginia, we still had a lot of studying to do and we had to take the work with us. Mommy and Daddy would not tolerate any falling off in our grades. They wanted to see A’s on our report cards, and how we got them was our business. Their standard reply to any excuse was: “Playing in the band on the weekends is the way it is. You know it; you plan for it.”

  Mommy and Daddy rode in the front of the van with their coffee and their cigarettes; then Donna and Jeanette; then Linda, Rita, and I, and behind us, our instruments and our clothes. When we first played Princeton, we were still wearing Peter Pan collars, but Donna and Jeanette quickly convinced Mommy that we needed flashier, dressier clothes if we were to look professional and put on a good show.

  Without telling Daddy, she made us slinky outfits split up the side. Daddy’s mouth fell open when we appeared in them and he saw how sexy we looked. Only the fact that the students obviously liked the change made him admit, “Well, maybe I am a little old-fashioned.”

  He saw that theatrical clothes enhanced the act, and later on it was his idea that we should change outfits between every set, coming out one time in fringe, another in satin, another in sequins; one time in blue, another in white, another in red. The students loved it. They would wait to see what we would appear in next, and even Daddy got a kick out of the changes. He would stand there like Mr. Clean, arms crossed over his chest, and beam at us as we whisked out and up on the bandstand.

  It was his presence while the band played, off to the side next to the piano, that established a bit of distance between us and the students. We didn’t mingle during the breaks. The fellows were white and we were black, but that did not stand in the way of their liking to kid around, particularly with Jeanette. She was slender and outgoing and ebullient, and the guys were drawn to her. They would say when we arrived, “Hey, great, here come the Thornton Sisters! Where’s Jeanette?” relegating the rest of us to supporting cast.

  Jeanette would have relished bantering with the boys, but Daddy, in a joking, cheerful way, kept a tight rein on us. He wasn’t a tall man—five feet eight or nine inches—but he had biceps as bulging as Popeye’s and he was stocky and solid, a rather formidable figure despite a face that was so pleasant that people just automatically smiled at him. Perhaps if he’d been more of a weakling, the guys would have tried an end run around him, but as it was, they accorded him the same respect they did their own fathers. Deferentially, they’d say, “Hello, Mr. Thornton. How are you tonight?” and even full of beer, they did not get up on the bandstand without his permission.

  To us, he made the point again and again: “You’re not here for socializing. You play and then you get back to school.”

  At Colgate, there was that rarity in the early 1960s, a black fellow, a gentleman named Bill whom Jeanette had eyes for. The song called “Don’t Mess with Bill” was popular then, as was the Fifth Dimension’s “One Less Bell to Answer,” and Jeanette sang them with particular feeling when Bill was around, which did not, of course, escape Daddy’s attention. Bill was a light-skinned guy, prompting Daddy to one of his pronouncements: “You gotta watch out for those gray-eyed niggers.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Jeannette demanded.

  “Those light-skinned jokers who think they’re white. They go ‘round lookin’ for stupid dark-skinned black women, not to marry, but to have a good time with, and then when they’re finished, they move on to the next one.”

  The dire tone of Daddy’s voice spoiled any romantic notions Jeanette had about Bill.

  Jeanette was eighteen, Donna nineteen by this time, and they were growing increasingly restive under Daddy’s oppressive thumb. Mommy tried to get Daddy
to relax his strictness by arguing, “They’re growing up, Donald. They want to do like other girls their age.”

  But his answer was always: “They’ll do what the rules of this house say they’ll do. As long as they’re in my house, eatin’ my food, suckin’ up my heat, wearin’ the nap off my rug, they’ll listen to me, not to some pimply-faced, pinheaded rascal.”

  The bedroom that Donna and Jeanette shared at the back of the house had an outside door, and the two of them took to skipping out at night after Daddy had gone off to work. Because in her heart Mommy sympathized with their feeling that they were missing out on being young, on the parties and the fun and the laughter, she didn’t stop them or tell on them, but she had a nonsense warning for them.

  “If you have a baby, you’re not bringing it back to this house. You have it, you take care of it. I’m not like one of those mothers that says, ‘Oh, why don’t you go with Johnny? He looks good. He’ll give you pretty kids, and I’d love to have some grandkids.’ If you’re stupid enough to get pregnant, you’re out of here, on your own.”

  Donna and Jeanette, slipping out at 10:00 P.M. and back in at 2:00 A. M., stopped pleading with Daddy to let them go out on dates, and this breaking-off of the argument aroused his suspicions. One night he left as usual but returned an hour later.

  “It’s awful quiet,” he remarked to Mommy. “Where’s Donna and Jeanette?”

  She admitted they were not in the house and we all waited for the explosion. It did not come. Instead, Daddy went downstairs and came back with a hammer and a fistful of the longest nails I’d ever seen. I had a moment’s wild vision of a crucifixion, but Daddy went outside and around to the back. With methodical, heavy blows, he drove those long nails into the back door and through the door frame, one after another, up and down both sides, until there was not the slightest chance that anyone could ever open that door again short of tearing the house down.