As we continued to play and to return many times to the same fraternities, we encountered seniors who had graduated and they would tell us they were now in medical or law or business school. “Boy, you people just keep going to school,” we marveled, and we asked questions. We knew we were going to be doctors, but we didn’t know the steps to getting there. We didn’t realize that you went through high school, college, and medical school, and then you were an intern in a hospital and after that a resident. When we found this out and spoke in awe of the long road that still lay ahead, Daddy simply said, “You can do it,” and launched into one of his talks.
“Right now, you’re written off because you’re black, you’re women, you’re dark-skinned. Whatever the heck a totem pole is, you’re about as low as anyone gets on it. Now, you can choose to go along with that. You can lay back and open your legs and get pregnant. But if you choose not to go along with it, your mother and I are showing you the way. You got to study. You got to always act like a lady. You got to not go around with a chip on your shoulder, like, 'You owe me ‘cause I’m black and I come over on a slave ship'. Nobody don’t owe you a thing. You owe yourself the best you can do for yourself."
“A lot of black people don’t want to work,” he went on. “They’d rather party and say studyin’ ain’t gonna help, that it don’t do no good to work hard. When someone says that to me, I say, ‘Have you ever worked hard?’ It’s like gravity. It’s a basic law. You work hard, you’ll make it. Like, you girls are gonna be doctors. People say it can’t be done. People say a lot of things can’t be done. But then somebody does it. It just took somebody makin’ his mind up to do it. All you girls got to have is made-up minds. Five doctors—now, isn’t that gonna be a great thing?”
Linda, Rita, and I listened to these talks solemnly and avidly and were filled with fresh resolve, but I suspect at this time his words were primarily directed at Donna, to encourage her, and at Jeanette, to discourage her.
Donna was struggling at Monmouth College. In the year she had been out of school and working, she loved collecting her own paycheck, being able to buy beautiful clothes and have shoes made to match her dresses, and she did not enjoy having to study again, particularly since work that Jeanette sailed through was often heavy going for her. “I’m not cut out for this, Daddy,” she kept saying.
Daddy tried to encourage her. “You’re doin’ the work, Donna. You’re not failin’.”
“Daddy, I’m not college material. The guidance counselor at high school said…”
“No other person’s got a right to tell you what you can or cannot do.”
“She said I’m good with my hands. I’m good at typing.”
‘“You got a B on this test.”
“But, Daddy, I studied for it for three days, and Jeanette studied one hour and got an A.”
“Don’t compare yourself with Jeanette. You got this far, you can keep goin’. You’ll get through.”
Jeanette, having a much easier time academically, was taking advantage of every bit of freedom she could wangle away from Daddy, making friends, running with a crowd, getting caught up in the ideas of the 1960s that were beginning to be bandied about on campuses. Daddy sensed this, and it was one of his reasons for emphasizing the importance of the band. We thought it was just the money, but years later, when we were grown and it was clear how it had all turned out, I heard him talking to a friend who was excusing the performance of his own children by saying, “Well, it was easy for you, educatin’ your kids, ‘cause the band was payin’ for it.”
“Put it this way,” Daddy told him. “If it wasn’t that the band was gonna make money, I was gonna get by. I never had depended on the band to actually do the whole thing. I wanted the band for the reason of givin’ my girls something in that so-called age of boys and the lipstick, something to continue to keep my family together. I knew it had to be other than just the lessons and the studyin’ and goin’ to school, where the other girls would be lookin’ for boyfriends, pickin’ them up, the huggin’ and the kissin’. In order to take something away from your child, you got to replace it with something. If you don’t want them partyin’, then you got to give them something else.”
With the band making money, he gave us cars because he believed in girls having their own transportation. “I don’t want no man or boy sayin’, I’ll give you a lift ‘cause you don’t have a car. From that lift he could take you someplace. He could rape you.” The year Donna worked before going to college, he bought her a new Chevy Monza, a turquoise convertible, with the stipulation that she never let a fellow so much as hang his elbows on the open window.
One day he came home and asked her, “Well, did you have a great day today?”
“Oh, yes, Daddy, it was fine.”
“Any problems?”
“No, no problems.”
‘“You know, I saw a car in Asbury Park looked just like your car.” All of a sudden Donna started sweating. “But I knew it wasn’t you because there was a guy sitting right next to this woman who was driving.”
“Oh, Daddy, didn’t I tell you…?”
“No, you didn’t tell me!” he roared. “And I ain’t havin’ some pinhead ride around on my gasoline and my car insurance that I’m payin’ for!”
When Daddy got through yelling, Donna went to wash the tears off her face and Daddy went out to the Chevy, lifted the hood, and removed the distributor cap. Donna, having had a bit of time to think, came out of the house defiantly.
“I’m eighteen. I’m working. I have a job. I’ll do what I want.”
She threw herself into the driver’s seat and turned the key, intending to spin the wheels in Daddy’s face. Nothing happened.
“Walk,” Daddy said, turning on his heel. “You think you’re so darned independent, you can just walk.”
When Donna and Jeanette went to college, they had different class schedules and each needed her own transportation, so Daddy bought them matching Volkswagen Beetles and I fell heir to the Chevy. It was fun to have any sort of car, but then I got to be a senior in high school, I was working hard, playing and studying, and I decided that for graduation I wanted a car of my own choosing. I went to Daddy.
“Daddy, I’ve never had anything that wasn’t a hand-me-down. I’m always the third one. I’d like to have the car I want.”
“I understand what you’re sayin’, Cookie. What kind of car you want?”
“I know exactly. A 1965 Thunderbird convertible with sequential turn signals.”
“What! You know how much one of them costs?”
“You got Donna and Jeanette what they wanted.”
“A Beetle is not the same as a Thunderbird.”
“Daddy, I’m getting all A’s. I’m the first black girl in Long Branch High School ever to make the National Honor Society ….”
“Okay, Cookie, you’ve earned it, I guess.”
The Thunderbird was white with a black top, a convertible, motorized so that the trunk opened up and the top came down and folded into it. Sequential turn signals and all, it was gorgeous, and driving around in it made me feel like a million dollars. That is, until the sleeting day I was to pick Linda up at school and the car in front of me stopped suddenly and I put on the brakes and skidded into it, smashing the Thunderbird’s beautiful grille.
“Oh, geez, Daddy is going to kill me,” I moaned to Mommy when I got home. I suggested that she might like to call him at work to warn him about the accident so he wouldn’t go through the roof when he saw the crumpled grille, but she said no, that I had to do it. I had never called him at work before, so he knew that something serious was the matter.
“Daddy, I had an accident.”
“Are you okay?” The question burst from him. Not a word about the beautiful new car.
Oh, my gosh, I thought, he really loves me.
“Are you okay? Is Linda okay? Fine, then don’t worry about the car, Cookie. We’ll get it fixed.”
What a generous man he was—except wh
en you asked for two dollars and he’d come up with $1.98, but that was to teach you a lesson. When we wanted something, he never said he didn’t have enough money to get it. His philosophy was: “Money you can always get. Don’t limit yourself to whether you have money or don’t have money. If you really think you need something, you pay a little down and then just work around and find a way to pay for it.”
Daddy’s mistrust of boys was such that he never did relax his rule against allowing them in our cars, nor did he come around to letting college students help us load or unload our instruments and amplifiers, which weighed a ton, and our suitcases of clothes. Daddy would thank the fellows kindly and say, “Me and my daughters know just how to take care of things, so you just show us where to go and we’ll be fine.”
We would set up on the bandstand, Linda in back with the drums, Mommy on the bass next to her, Donna and I with our saxophones in the front on the left, Jeanette on guitar, and Rita on piano on the right. When we started to play, Daddy would stand off to the side, with his soft drink on the piano and a stack of our business cards ready to hand out to anyone who asked for one. He rarely sat down, and just by catching our eye, he could somehow convey that we were doing fine or that we needed to pick up the tempo a bit or slow it down or whatever.
Even after he had said no any number of times, guys would still come up to him and ask, “Mr. Thornton, can I dance with one of your daughters?”
“They’re playin’. How can they dance?” he always answered, but the guys were persistent, and finally he sensed that they suspected we wouldn’t dance because we were the band and thought we were better than they were and didn’t want to get down and boogie with them. At that point he began to ease off.
A song like “Shotgun,” a hit for Junior Walker and the All Stars, didn’t need all the instrumentation all the time. I’d be playing and Donna would be free, so that when Daddy nodded that it was all right, she’d jump down and dance. Or we would play the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and I’d have sixteen bars free and jump down and start doing the bugaloo or whatever. When it was a place like Princeton where we played many, many weekends and came to know the fellows well, sometimes, with Daddy’s permission, a couple of the guys would join us on the bandstand, and they’d be saying, “Hey, look at me! I’m dancing with the Thornton Sisters!”
After playing all evening, swinging, stomping, belting out the songs—I’d compare Linda’s singing to Aretha Franklin’s and take an oath that she’d not come out second best—we would be starved at one o’clock in the morning. Just outside of Princeton was a place called Mom’s Pepper Mill and we would pile in there, everybody in high spirits. We’d had a great time, the music had soared, we’d sung, danced, and gotten paid for it. To top off the evening, we’d order whole dinners—veal Parmigiana and spaghetti and ice cream sundaes—and then we’d ask for cheeseburgers to go. Daddy claimed it cost more to feed us than to clothe us, even with all our costume changes and Mommy buying brocade at forty and eighty dollars a yard, but he remembered the oatmeal when he was a kid and never told us we couldn’t have anything on the menu we wanted. Along about Wednesday every week, we would have to start dieting so we could get into our dresses by the weekend.
When we went on long trips, to Virginia or South Carolina or Kentucky, we brought food from home because Daddy, like most men, hated to stop once he was on the road. We would plead with him for a bathroom stop, but it was zoom, zoom, past every service station, I suppose because with six women waiting their turn, a half hour or more could be lost.
Heading back home after a gig in the South, we often drove all night. We would pile into the car, talking and laughing about different things that had happened, comments dancers had made to us, bits of byplay noticed, then after a while there would be silence as we dropped off to sleep. Mommy would doze off, too, because she was just as tired as we were from the hours of singing and playing, and Daddy, driving on and on through the dark, would begin to long for hot black coffee to keep him awake. But as soon as he spotted a lighted diner and pulled in, one of us would wake up and call out the window, “Daddy, bring me a cheeseburger,” and then we’d all be yelling for sandwiches and drinks and another half hour would be wasted and Daddy would be fifty or sixty dollars poorer.
After that happened a few times, he tried cutting the motor and rolling silently to a stop down the street from a diner, but our bodies were so attuned to the vibration of the car that as soon as it stopped, we woke up. So then he left the motor running, and that worked pretty well. We would sleep through the stop, he would get his coffee, and we would roll on again through the night.
One morning when we arrived back home, I brushed against him and discovered his pants leg was wet. I looked closer. “Daddy, you’re bleeding.”
“Yeah well, Cookie, I had to pinch myself awful hard to stay awake. The hurtin’ kept my eyes open.
“His eyes would be open, but he’d get over the line into New Jersey and say to himself, “Geez, I don’t remember comin’ through Washington.” Driving in that automatic way, he pulled up one night at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which was miles and miles of two-lane roadway just skimming the waters of the bay. He had a sudden vision of being tipped just a bit further over into semi-consciousness by the hypnotic unrolling of the center line and, drawn by lights reflected on the bay, steering the car into the black water. It was the only time Daddy gave up, parked the car, folded his arms on the steering wheel, and went to sleep until the first light of morning.
Because this was still the early 1960s, sometimes when Daddy stopped for coffee, he was told, “You can’t get served here. You’ll have to go around back.” This happened in the South, of course, but more often it was in a border state like Maryland or Virginia, where racial prejudice seemed to be more intense and racial coexistence less worked out than in the Deep South. It was in a diner in Virginia that four men at the counter talked loudly about “niggers”.
One of the men said, “Fella asked where the niggers hang out around here and I told him, ‘On that oak tree in the center of town.’”
Daddy went to the cash register to pay the check so we could get out of there. The four men strolled out, and as they walked by the booth where we were sitting, one of them spat in Rita’s cup of tea. Daddy didn’t see it happen—luckily, or there would have been a fight despite the four against one odds because, as he said, “I can stand being Uncle Tom but don’t do nothin’ to my kids.”
“It hurts,” he ruminated when we were back on the road and we told him what happened. “Spittin’ in a little girl’s tea is way beyond forgiveness.” He was silent, studying the road, then he commented: “Why he done it was nothin’ but hate that was taught him. Because if he had been taught love, he’d have been like that nice fellow at South Carolina.”
We had arrived to play that weekend at one of the fraternities at the University of South Carolina, and when we pulled in, a fellow sneered, “Look at the carload of niggers.” The social chairman grabbed the man by the collar and hissed, “if you ever call Mr. Thornton and his girls that again, I’ll kill you myself.” Daddy was remembering that occasion, and another at Salem, Virginia, when a student called Daddy a nigger and another grabbed the fellow, told him he was a son of a bitch, and threatened, “If I hear you call anybody, especially Mr. Thornton, other than his name, I’ll bash you in the mouth.”
“It made me feel good to hear that,” Daddy said. “Like I say, there’s a lotta good white people. Let me tell you about a woman lived in Deal, next to Asbury Park, where all them big houses and rich folks from New York is. It was winter and I was workin’ my second job, pickin’ up garbage at night, from eleven to seven. I had to go around to the back of the houses. They didn’t put no garbage cans out on the street. I had to enter the yards to pick up the garbage and not make no noise.
“Like I said, it was winter and this particular night it was cold. I guess I wasn’t dressed warm enough. It got around three o’clock in
the morning and I couldn’t move my fingers no more. Another five minutes I knew I was going to freeze to death, that’s how cold I had got. There was a light in this house and I could see a lady in the kitchen. I said I got to ask this white lady just to please let me sit in the garage. I knocked on the door. She looked at me—I mean, I was the garbage man, dressed like a garbage man—she looked at me and said, ‘Come on in.’ She gave me hot coffee. She let me stay right there in the kitchen and get warm. I mean, this was the wee hours. She could have said, ‘You black ape, how dare you knock on my door?’ When I left, I kept lookin’ back at that house. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, there’s some wonderful people in the world.’"
“That’s what you got to remember, kids. You’re glad for the good people, and when you meet up with the ones that wasn’t brought up to love, you keep on goin’ past them ‘cause you know the road you’re followin’.”
It was his talking to us like this that made us philosophical about the prejudice we encountered. One night we arrived at a motel where we had made reservations weeks before, only to have the clerk stare at us and say stupidly, “But this reservation came from New Jersey,” as though we had somehow purposely misled him. He then claimed that the reservation was so old it couldn’t be honored, and anyway it had been lost and the motel was full up because: there was a convention in town.
“It’s the Chevy motel again tonight,” we joked as we piled back into the limousine.
These were blips on the screen of what was essentially a happy time, a time I think of now as Camelot, when we were all pulling together, close and directed, caring and covering for each other, a family that was making it all work. By this time, 1965 and thereabouts, colleges were booking the band as much as a year and a half ahead for their dances. What made us such a success was that we played all the big hits, the songs that the artists who made the records couldn’t play themselves because so much had been dubbed in the studio, or if they did play that one song, they didn’t have the songs by other artists that were currently popular. But we had them all.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 12
