The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  At first, when a new hit came out, we would buy the sheet music for each instrument, but then, even though Daddy had never wanted us to play by ear and we didn’t, we said why pay all this money for the sheet music when we can pick it up from the record. I’d hear what the sax was playing, Rita would get what the piano was doing, Linda would pin down the beat, and Jeanette would hear where the guitar came in. Everyone of us could sing solo, with the others singing backup, or we could all sing together, and because of the variety of instruments, woodwinds as well as strings and drums and piano, there wasn’t a song we couldn’t do. The dancing kids claimed our version of something like the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” was even better than the original.

  “You women are hot!” the students raved. “You sound like men.”

  “Because we were taught by men to play like men,” we told them.

  At Princeton on big weekends, every eating club would hire its own band, and often when we were performing, people left other clubs to come to hear us. The Cap and Gown fellows would protest: “Look, we’re paying the band, you’re not paying, yet you want to come in and enjoy the music.” Eventually they had to have bouncers to keep the people from sneaking in.

  Daddy would hiss at us, “They’re diving through the windows, kids! Give it some more juice. You’re really, really hot now.” And it was true: the students literally broke windows to get in.

  In 1966, for Spring Weekend at Princeton, two top Motown groups—the Temptations and Martha and the Vandellas—were booked, and the Thornton Sisters, all to play at the Dillon gym. The Motown groups were on the main floor and we were to play in a corner up on the second tier. “Oh, wow,” we said, “we’ve got to play extra good tonight. We’re up against these famous groups.”

  We kept our cool. We didn’t do anything gauche like ask the stars for their autographs even though we were fans just as much as any of the kids there. But we were undeniably pumped up. We went for that little something special in the music, singing extra loud and cutting up. People started to drift off the main floor, up the stairs to where we were.

  We winked at each other. “We got them. They want to hear us.” The group downstairs was getting smaller; upstairs it was getting larger and larger. We were really tearing it up. “This is it! We got them right where we want them!”

  Between sets, back in the changing area, Martha and the Vandellas looked right through us, not a word, no answer to our hello. The Temptations did the same, except for one musician. He said, “You girls are good. You’re giving us a heck of a run for our money.”

  “That’s a nice person,” Daddy said. “He’s got a good heart. He’ll last.” Daddy made predictions like that: “He’ll be dead in three years.” “Her voice’ll be lost in a few years.” The funny thing is, he was often right. The lead singer of the Temptations, David Ruffin, died of an overdose; Eddie Kendrick died of cancer; another one committed suicide. Only two of the original Temptations are left, and one of them, Melvin Franklin, is the sweet guy who was generous enough to tell us we were good on that wonderful night when we played our best against the best.

  Having found we could hold our own against big-time competition, we again proposed to Daddy that we go after big-time money. He shook his head. “We’re in the right place,” he said. “You get famous like them, you get the spotlight on you, you’re up there only to come down. Us, we’ll occupy the middle. That’s where you stay out of trouble.”

  One Friday afternoon the limo was packed, we were set to go, but Donna was missing. The telephone rang, Daddy answered, and a man’s voice said, “Donna ain’t goin’ with the band this weekend.”

  “Who’s this?” Daddy demanded. The fellow hung up.

  Daddy was, briefly, in shock, then he began to steam. “Where is she? What’s she doin’? She’s afraid to call on her own. She has this guy call—this young buck callin’ the old buck to say he’s stealin’ his doe.” He turned on us. “If you’re gonna be a woman, be a woman. If you’re gonna do somethin’ against your father, be woman enough to come and talk to me. Don’t have some sneakpot comin’ on the telephone sayin’, ‘Donna ain’t gonna be there!’”

  We waited … down to the very last minute we could wait if we were going to make the gig. We couldn’t wait any longer. Daddy started backing out of the driveway. At that moment Donna turned the corner and half-walked, half-ran to the car. Daddy said nothing. Donna said nothing, just snatched open the car door, jumped in, and we were off. We waited for Daddy to say, “I’m gonna break your head if you ever do that again,” but he was silent, perhaps letting her sin against the family grow ever heavier in her mind or perhaps gloating in his own mind that whoever the young buck was, he had not been strong enough to take her away from the old buck after all.

  The only time he might have been referring to the incident was one morning the following week when, at the round table over coffee, he said to all of us, with peculiar emphasis: “Do anything you want to do as long as you, and you alone, are willin’ to pay. If I make a bad decision, I’ve got to pay and I don’t mind payin’. If I’ve got to work another couple of hours or another couple of days to cover my mistake, I know I’m gonna do it. But I’m not gonna work extra to cover nobody else’s mistake.”

  Was this one more warning: Don’t come home pregnant? Perhaps so. I think he knew his oldest girls were slipping away from him, that the young bucks were going to win in the end. He referred wistfully to a time when Donna was so small he could hang her up on the back of the door from a coat hook and first have her squeal with delight and then kick and scream to be let down. “I wish all you girls were that young again.”

  “But, Daddy…”

  “‘Yeah, I know, kids grow up. You gotta think about this, though. You can have two or three husbands but only one mother and father. Four or five husbands but you ain’t never gonna have but one mother and father.”

  He wanted us to continue to listen to him as we had when we were small, to accept his strictures on the right way to go, and we three youngest did. But Jeanette, in particular, more and more often said, “I’ll just have to find out for myself, Daddy. I can’t just accept what you say.” One day she announced that she was taking the coffeepot to college because she and some fellow students intended to stage a sit-in in the dean’s office: for Black Power, for equality, for African studies on campus, for blacks being admitted to off-campus housing.

  “The dean’s office!” Daddy fumed. “The guy I went to and begged, ‘Please let my daughters in?’”

  “That was the president.”

  “Whatever, they let you in and now you’re gonna make trouble? I’m sendin’ you there to learn. I’m not sendin’ you there to be one of those radical Black Panther people!”

  “Daddy, this is the way it is. I need to express myself.”

  “I don’t care what you need to do! You’re gonna spoil it for your sisters! Cookie’s fixin’ to go to college and you’re listenin’ to some black rat from upstate New York who comes rollin’ down here and is gonna make your own father look bad and spoil it for your sisters.”

  “I’m a woman now. I have to declare myself.”

  “You can’t be burnin’ your bridges.”

  “I don’t care. It’s for a cause.”

  He couldn’t dissuade her but he had the last word. “Yeah, well, you’re not takin’ my coffeepot!”

  The sit-in ended when the administration threatened to expel the striking students, and the black rat, as Daddy referred to him, got kicked out of college a couple of months later.

  I hadn’t been concerned about Jeanette spoiling things for me because by then I knew that Monmouth College was not where you went to be prepared for medicine: You went there if you were a kid who needed to age four years before going into your father’s construction or dry cleaning business, or if you were interested in elementary or secondary school education. I wanted to go to a more prestigious school, some place with a name, and I thought if I could get a scholarship a
t a nearby college that was really good, Daddy might let me go there instead of Monmouth.

  Miss Apostolacus, the guidance counselor whom I had made a believer of, suggested Barnard College. I applied, was accepted and awarded a scholarship. Daddy said no.

  “New York City is too far away. Anything more than eighteen minutes away, where Monmouth College is at, you’re not goin’ to.”

  “Daddy, if you want us to become doctors, we have to go to medical school, and no medical school in the country has ever heard of this dinky little college in West Long Branch, New Jersey.”

  “It’s a college.”

  “I’m trying to tell you, it doesn’t have a reputation.”

  “It don’t matter. You get A’s in college, you can go anyplace.”

  When I tried to argue with him further, he walked away. I said to myself, Well, maybe Daddy knows something I don’t know. I’m going to do it the way he tells me to, and if I don’t get accepted into medical school, it’ll be his fault and I’ll have something to hang over his head the rest of his life. The truth was that he wanted it all to stay family—nobody going out of the circle, nobody breaking into it. But it is the natural order of things for children to grow up and move out and move on. Sooner or later there was bound to be a break.

  8

  The Break

  FOR THREE YEARS, from the time I entered high school, I fantasized about my senior prom, the first time I would have a date with a boy. I didn’t know which boy. I figured Daddy would hire a soldier for me as he had for Donna and would have for Jeanette, except that she had said no, thanks, she could get her own dude. I just knew I was going to that dance. I found a picture in a magazine of the gown I wanted and badgered Mommy to make it for me.

  “Cookie, the prom is a year away.”

  “I know, Mom, but this is such a special dress and I just have to have it.” It was pastel blue satin, with a bodice of blue sequin, an Empire waist, and an overskirt of draped chiffon. The material cost four hundred dollars, money I had saved from the ten or twenty dollars Daddy gave each of us after we played a gig, except for Donna and Jeanette, who got one hundred dollars because, being in college, they needed more. I planned to wear the gown with a fox stole and perfume I had sent away to France for, and as the day approached and Mom put the finishing touches on the gown, all I lacked was an escort. Daddy turned the problem over to Donna.

  “Find somebody on campus to take Cookie to the prom,” he ordered.

  Donna thought about it. “Well, I know one boy. He’s in my class in biology, and he’s really nice.”

  “I’ll take him,” I said.

  His name was Jimmy Hutcheson, and he was tall and good-looking, polite and gallant, a smooth dancer, and I was in seventh heaven. All I could think of as we danced was: Is this what it’s like to be in love? Maybe I’ll know when he kisses me goodnight. I had the keys to every door in the house, plus the garage, and Rita and Linda had promised to make sure that Daddy didn’t drink any coffee that evening so that he would be certain to be asleep and I could get my first kiss.

  Jimmy had his hand under my elbow as we went up the front walk at three in the morning. According to my scenario, when we arrived at the front door, I’d unlock it, then turn appealingly to thank him for the lovely evening, lifting my face to his so that the light from the street lamp fell on it, at which moment he would bend and, breathing in the fragrance from my French perfume, place his lips passionately on mine. My heart was pounding. This was the moment when my whole life was about to change, the moment I was to be initiated into the mysteries. Key ready, I reached for the screen door, which always came open at a touch. I touched. I tugged. I pulled.

  The hall light blazed on, and in a replay of Donna’s experience, here came Daddy padding down the hall, barefoot, bare-chested, in boxer shorts, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I’ll get it, Cookie,” he called. “Come on in, Jim. Sit down and have a soda.”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Thornton. I had a lovely evening with your daughter. I’ll just say goodnight and go on.”

  I shook Linda and Rita awake to flay them alive for not checking the screen door, but they swore it had been unlatched when they went to bed. Not wanting Daddy to hear me cry, I buried my face in my pillow and wept until Linda and Rita complained that my sobs were shaking the bed. Such a bittersweet evening—I’d had a perfect time at the dance but I missed out on the kiss that I had ached for all through high school.

  Years later, when we sat at the round table talking about old times, laughing about it but still with a trace of tender pain, I would remind Daddy of that night, and of another night when I was in college and came home at 12:30 instead of midnight as promised. I rang the bell and Daddy came to the door.

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy, it’s me. Let me in.”

  “My daughter was home at twelve. I don’t know who you are.”

  He switched off the light and walked away.

  I begged, I pleaded, I wept, I promised, promised, promised never to be late again. And I wasn’t. If Daddy said 9;00, I was there at 8:55; 10:00, I was there at 9:30. All the rebelliousness in the family had gone to Donna and Jeanette; there was none left when it came to me.

  “If you’d done that to Jeanette,” I remarked to Daddy, “she’d have said, fine, Dad, I’ll just go party until tomorrow morning.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “I had to do something different for each one of you. I remember once with Donna, she’s like nineteen and it’s 1:00, 1:30 in the mornin’, I’m lying on the couch and I see her try the door and then look through the window. She thinks I’m asleep, so she figures to sneak in the kitchen ‘cause you girls was always schemin’ together and somebody had slipped it off the latch for her. I jump up and run downstairs and stand behind the door and she comes in. She tiptoes through the kitchen, headin’ for the stairs, and I cut the light on, I jus’ look at her and walk past her and up the stairs.”

  One time I said to him, “Dad, we’re laughing about it now, but it wasn’t so funny then. Why were you so hard on us?”

  He answered honestly. “Bein’ out there, bein’ a man and hearin’ how boys talk about girls, I knew that the weak girls would be the ones to end up with the turned-over shoes. When I see a woman who looks bad, I don’t see her as a woman but as someone’s baby, a little child who was given a bottle or nursed to health, her diaper changed, and now she’s bein’ beaten, knocked around by some man. I just couldn’t see that happenin’ to one of my daughters.” He summed up: “Why I was the way I was, I wanted to make sure my daughters could take care of themselves. I didn’t want them never to have to put up with a man who mistreated them.”

  Forewarned is forearmed, Daddy believed, so he didn’t pull any punches when he talked to us about men. “When they’re hard, they’re soft,” he told us, “and when they’re soft, they’re hard.”

  We younger ones didn’t know what he was talking about. “What does that mean, Daddy?” we asked.

  “It means men will promise you anything if they want to get you in bed. First the guy says, ‘Oh, honey, I love you. I’ll buy you a mink coat.’ And she says, ‘Oh, will you, honey?’ He says, ‘just come on over here to the bedroom.’ She says, ‘But what I really want is a diamond ring,’ He says, ‘A diamond ring? I’ll get you a diamond ring. Tomorrow we’ll go get the ring and the mink coat. Just for tonight, just go over to that bedroom.’ And she says, ‘Okay.’

  “Now the guy’s got the woman where he wants her, and after he’s been satisfied, the next morning she reminds him, ‘Honey, what about my diamond ring?’ And he says, ‘Are you kiddin’? You got to be crazy.’ That’s what I’m tellin’ you about men and that’s what you got to remember: When they’re hard, they’re soft; when they’re soft, they’re hard.”

  He explained, “It’s just human nature. That’s how we keep the human population goin’, I raised you girls to be tough, but no matter how tough I try to teach your brains to be, nature is bigger than both of us. So,
like I say, you got to choose the moment to be weak, not just let some guy talk you into it.”

  In the summer, although the colleges were closed for vacation, the band was nevertheless in demand to play at debutante balls and sweet sixteen parties, When wealthy people hire musicians, they are inclined to treat them like any other hired help: “You’re just the entertainment for my daughter. Go around to the back door. Wait until everyone else has been served. Don’t mingle with the guests.” They assume that musicians are their intellectual inferiors, and they also assume, with greater reason, that at least some of them are on drugs.

  When we arrived at a country club or an estate or a Sutton Place triplex and were unloading our instruments and setting up, we wore Monmouth College blazers so that the parents would be on notice that their sons and daughters weren’t the only ones going to college. We further confounded the parents’ expectations by being a family—a mother and father and daughters, well dressed, well groomed, and well mannered. That didn’t always make parents change their minds about treating us as hired help, but often enough it did, and we were welcomed as part of the whole festive occasion.

  At a coming-out party in Virginia for the daughter of the head of a pharmaceutical company, the members of the Glenn Miller orchestra, who were to play for the adults, were consigned to the servants’ quarters, but we had the run of the place. The debutante’s mother, when we were introduced, said, “Why, you’re a family. How very nice,” (which translated as “reassuring”) and the daughter, who knew us from college dances, welcomed us as old friends with, “Come on, kids, come see the house. Let me show you my room. Daddy won’t let me drive the Rolls, but we can sit in it and feel the lovely leather.”

  In the fall of 1965, I entered Monmouth College as a freshman and Donna and Jeanette began their junior year. As science majors on the road to becoming doctors, this was the year they had to take organic chemistry, the course with the reputation of being the toughest in college. A few weeks into the fall, Daddy was trimming the hedge in back of the house when Donna came around the side.