The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  “What you doin’ home, Sugar?”

  “Daddy, I’ve got something to tell you.”

  He looked at her face and carefully put his clippers down. “You want we should go in the house so your mother hears too?’

  “She already knows, Daddy.” Donna took a shuddering breath. “Daddy, I’m going to drop out of college….”

  “Naw, you ain’t.”

  “Daddy, I’ve tried to tell you time and again I’m not college material. …”

  “Just because that old guidance counselor said…”

  “Because I can’t do the work!”

  “You’re doin’ it.”

  “There’s no way I’m gonna pass organic chemistry. And don’t tell me I just have to study harder! I’ve studied as hard as I know how.”

  “Honey, you’ve made two years. If you can do two, you can do four.”

  “Daddy, organic chemistry is a course you have to pass if you’re a science major, and you have to major in science to go to medical school, and I’ll never make it. I can’t make it. I don’t want to make it. I like being a secretary, That’s what I want to do, I don’t want to be a doctor.”

  The sentences landed hard and heavy, as heavy as the shovels of dirt Daddy had tossed as a ditchdigger. The sentences were burying his master plan. He lifted his hands, then let them fall despairingly to his sides. “Seems like you ain’t gonna let me guide you no more.”

  “Daddy, I tried,” Looking for a bright side, she said, ‘‘I’ll get a job. I’ll help you pay for Cookie going to college.”

  ‘‘You can help me pay two hundred and eighty-five dollars a month on the loan I took for your tuition,” he snapped.

  The fact that he still had to payoff the loan even though Donna was leaving college rankled him, perhaps even more than Donna’s decision, because I think he knew in his heart she was right, that she had studied as hard as anyone could be asked to and that she probably was not cut out for college. His dream had been for all five daughters to become doctors, but he could revise it in the certainty that the next daughter was going to make it Jeanette, the star of the family, the brilliant one, the one who had started Future Doctors of America when she was in high school.

  After landing a job as an executive secretary at the Bendix Corporation, Donna began going out with a guy named Danny, a light-skinned guy, one of Daddy’s “gray-eyed niggers”. Light color and “good” hair had always been important to Donna despite Daddy’s making fun of women who cared about such things, They were more important to her than the fact that Danny was a freeloader.

  At Christmas, Donna turned up with a large box, and when we asked what it was, she said it was a present for Danny, a new suit. “He’s such a good-looking guy,” she said, “I want him to have nice clothes.”

  “Oh, geez,” we groaned, “don’t you remember what Daddy said?”

  One of Daddy’s roundtable soliloquies had featured women who get involved with men who are too stupid or too lazy to make enough money to buy their own suits, “The woman doesn’t want to be escorted by a guy with turned-over shoes, by a guy who don’t look good next to her, so she says, ‘Honey, I can’t be seen with you looking like that,’ and she goes and buys him a suit. Women are like that. They’ll give and give and give. And the guys keep takin’ and takin’ and takin’.”

  When Donna realized she was living out Daddy’s prediction, she hid the box under the sofa so Daddy wouldn’t know about it. But Danny was wearing the suit one night when he came to pick Donna up for a date. Proudly revolving to show off the fit, he said to Daddy, “How do you like the new suit Donna give me for Christmas, Mr. Thornton? Pretty cool, eh?”

  “Real cool,” said Daddy with heavy irony and a glance of withering scorn at Donna. “Uh huh, uh huh, buying men suits,” he taunted her the next morning and for many days thereafter, until Donna wished she had never heard of Danny or the suit.

  It was shortly after Christmas that Jeanette announced, as calmly as though it were of no concern to anyone but herself, that she, too, was dropping organic chemistry. “I don’t like it. I can’t do it. I’m not interested in it,” she said flatly. And then, as though her news was a grenade, she pulled the pin. She was, she said, switching her major from biology to psychology.

  “I’ll still be a doctor,” she told a stunned and devastated Daddy. “It’s just that I’ll be a Ph.D. instead of an M.D. I’ll be a doctor of philosophy instead of a doctor of medicine.”

  “You won’t have a scripperscrap around your neck?” he said weakly.

  “It’s called a stethoscope, Daddy!” She was defensive under her calm, and it made her react irritably. “Aren’t you ever going to learn that?”

  She was destroying a family joke, and it made us all ache with sadness. So much was ending. Our castles in the air were being dynamited.

  The veins in Daddy’s temple swelled into ropes and he swung his head like a battered bull. “What does a doctor of philosophy mean? That don’t mean nothin’! People don’t need no philosophy!

  They need somebody can make them well!” He was sick with rage and disappointment. Language he had never before used in our hearing came pouring out of him. Profanely, bitterly, he outlined the dimensions of the mistake she was making and how cruelly she was letting him down.

  “Do you know how much I sacrificed for you greasy-assed kids! I didn’t have to stay around here. Look at your friends, look at the black kids. How many of them have got fathers? I’m not askin’ to have a medal, but I’ve done a lot of things in my life for you kids that I didn’t have to do. And now it’s time for you to sacrifice something and you don’t want to do it. All I’m askin’ of you is just to hold off whatever it is you want to do until we can get where we’re goin’.”

  Jeanette, the only one of us who could stand unblinkingly toe-to-toe with Daddy, let his argument slide off her. “I’m not going to be what you want me to be,” she informed him. “I’m going to be myself. I’ve found what I want to do. And if you don’t like it, I’m outta here.”

  Donna, with her job at Bendix, had rented her own apartment, and now Jeanette joined her until she found a part-time job and moved into a place of her own. She and Donna continued with the band, and Daddy was fair about giving them their share of whatever the band earned, which meant they had money in their pockets and freedom, the heady, delectable freedom to go out on dates and get home at an hour of their own choosing.

  What they left behind on Ludlow Street was a poisoned atmosphere, dark, roiled, rancorous. Daddy’s disappointment needed a target, and he found it in Mommy. He snarled at her for having let Donna and Jeanette go out on dates when he was at work. He charged her with destroying everything he had planned and schemed and fought for. He accused her, wildly and harshly, of conniving behind his back to subvert his teachings, and when she, goaded into answering, defended herself by pointing out that Donna and Jeanette were twenty-one and twenty and could not always be kept from having some taste of fun and normal life, the quarrels would go on until two or three o’clock in the morning.

  Never had we known our parents to fight before; now we knew nothing but. When there weren’t fights, there was silence. Linda, Rita, and I fled the house as often as possible. Between classes, I studied in the library at college, and every evening I went back there and stayed until closing time at ten. I studied intensively, not only because it was preferable to going home, but because I was determined that Daddy was going to have at least one doctor and that it was going to be me. I did not say this to him, though, for fear he would merely answer harshly, “Yeah, just like Donna and Jeanette was gonna be doctors.” And, too, I knew it would not console him for Jeanette, still the special daughter.

  In biology class the professor said, “Look at the person on your right, look at the person on your left. By senior year they’ll be gone. There are a hundred and fifty of you now who plan to major in science. By graduation, a handful of you will be left. I’m not saying anything about Monmouth College i
n general, but this is the biology department and I am chairman and I am tough. You’ll do it my way and become scientists or you won’t be here.”

  I’m listening, I hear you, I said to myself. And I can tell you right now Dr. Garner, when you look at me, you’re looking at one of the people who’s still going to be here when the four years are up. There’s no way in the world I’m going to let Daddy down.

  I did wish, though, that the professor would call me by my rightful name. When I raised my hand to give an answer, he said, “Well, Jeanette?”

  “No, sir, I’m Yvonne.”

  And the next time: “Well, Donna?”

  “No, sir, my name is Yvonne.”

  I complained to Daddy: “See what happens because you made us all go to the same college.” It didn’t strike him as important, but it was to me because I did not want to be identified as one of the Thornton sisters who had not been able to survive organic chemistry.

  Because Donna was working and Jeanette was now going for a B.A. rather than a B.S. and was on a different part of the campus, I didn’t see them except on weekends when the band was playing, and then it was with some sense of estrangement. They had fractured the circle of the family, walked away into their own pleasures, leaving us, the younger daughters, with a father who no longer smiled, with scrapping parents who no longer pulled together, with a family that had lost its common goal. But when the band played, that was still good, still tight. We made music that grew ever freer and richer because we were older now, more knowing, more sophisticated. The number-one hits we played had a Thornton Sisters edge.

  Linda, a quiet girl, a shy girl, an introverted girl, was that very rare thing in a female: a brilliant drummer. She was capable of coming out with a beat that made us all turn around and look at her in wonder. She would smile and ad lib like crazy, doing marvelous things, and later she’d say shyly, “I get going and I just can’t help myself.” The mood would infect Rita at the piano, then spread to the rest of us, and we’d carry the dancers with us, sailing into a different space, all one, all high, swept up in the music.

  New Year’s weekend in 1967, we played at Norfolk, Virginia, slept in the car from three o’clock in the morning until it was light, then drove to Charleston, West Virginia, 225 miles west of Washington, D.C. After a fabulously successful show that night, we were packing up to start the drive north to Saratoga Springs, New York, where we were to play the next night, New Year’s Eve, at Skidmore College. When the instruments and amplifiers were in the limousine, Jeanette faced Daddy. “Listen, Donna and I’ll meet you in Saratoga. We’re driving up with a couple of fellows.”

  Daddy straightened and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you? Get in the car. The band’s got to stay together.”

  “We’ll be there. Don’t worry.”

  “Get your butts in this car!”

  Jeanette emphasized each word. “Either we’re going with Paul and his friend or we’re not going at all.” Daddy’s fists clenched, the color surged into his face, but he knew he was defeated. Jeanette turned to me. ‘“You want to come with us, Yvonne? The guys’ll get a nice date for you.”

  “Unh-unh. Nothing doing.”

  Daddy made a last plea. “Listen, Jeanette, Donna, every time we got one of these long drives, I say to myself that if something happens, at least I got all the kids and I got the instruments. How do you think my heart’s gonna go if we get there and we don’t have a saxophone player, we don’t have a guitar player?”

  “We’ll be there,” they said jauntily, and walked away.

  This was about three in the morning. At four in the morning, as we drove the mountain roads of West Virginia, it began to snow. In the best of circumstances, we were not fond of these roads because of sheer drops into valleys hundreds of feet below, with no shoulder on the roads and nothing between us and the drops but cement posts with cable strung between. Now, with snow slicking the road, we were doubly frightened. Twice the limousine went into a spin, sliding crazily across the road. Daddy confessed that at these moments his heart jumped so hard it hurt his arm. At the bottom of one mountain, a jackknifed tractor-trailer hung on the wire, its cab dangling over empty space. A few miles farther on, we inched around a tangle of wrecked cars, emergency vehicles, and bodies lying in the road.

  The farther north we crawled, the harder the snow swirled and blew. Trucks threw up salt and slush, reducing visibility to near zero, Daddy cursed steadily, monotonously. The car Donna and Jeanette were riding in passed us on the road, a broken chain on a rear tire pounding the fender to bits. As if we didn’t know, the radio told us we were in the midst of a major blizzard. But on we crept. We had never yet failed to show up for a gig.

  About five o’clock in the afternoon, we arrived at the entrance of the New York State Thruway. Daddy let out a thankful sigh, almost as though we were safely there although we still had four or five more hours of driving. The man at the tollbooth warned us to take it very slow because the road was icy, but Daddy kept swinging around the snowplows, passing them because he needed to stay at a steady fifty miles an hour to make the gig on time. The drivers honked their horns repeatedly at us, we thought to warn us about the dangerous conditions. We waved, and on we went.

  We were still forty miles from Saratoga when a state trooper pulled alongside. “You’re on fire!” he shouted, ‘‘Your back wheel’s on fire.”

  Daddy pulled off the road. The wheel, when we stopped, wasn’t on fire, but apparently, as we rolled along, it shot sparks.

  “How could it be?” Daddy kept moaning as he drove the two miles to the service station the trooper told us was just ahead. “I took it to the garage, knowing we had all this drivin’ this weekend. I told the guy to take the wheels off and pack the bearings with grease, that I didn’t want no mess-up with all the weight this car’s got to carry and the heat buildin’ up in the wheels. That was the mistake: I shouldn’a let him fool with the wheels. He musta tightened them too much or forgot to put the grease back in.”

  The service station mechanic said nothing could be done until Monday morning and we’d be better off getting a tow truck to take us to the nearest town, so Daddy called Saratoga to tell them we had broken down in the blizzard and would not be making the date and to tell that to his two daughters who had, he learned, already arrived. As he was driving the car around in back of the station to wait for the tow truck, the wheel fell off. The car lurched and crashed to the pavement.

  Daddy kicked himself later that it hadn’t occurred to him to offer the tow truck operator extra to tow the car all the way to Saratoga. That way we could have made the gig. But he was so upset about the car and having to pay for hotel rooms and having to return the deposit to Skidmore and losing the thousand dollars for the night that it didn’t cross his mind.

  It was the first time the family hadn’t arrived together for a gig and the first gig we had ever missed. “God’s making us suffer for splitting up,” Mommy whispered. Daddy, when we’d checked in at a hotel, muttered, ‘‘I’ll be back,” and went off by himself, either to cry or put his fist through a wall, or both.

  The next day, carrying our suitcases but having to leave the costly instruments and amplifiers behind in the car, Mommy, Daddy, Linda, Rita, and I climbed on a bus for New York City, where we changed to another bus for Long Branch. That bus let us off a mile from Ludlow Street. The snow from the blizzard of the day before lay deep on the uncleared sidewalks, and we were dressed in light clothes—jeans, sweaters, and sneakers—no socks, no boots, no coats because it was warm in the car and all we ever did was jump out and run inside to change our clothes wherever we were playing. Mommy and Daddy marched ahead of us, their mood clearly etched in the rigidity of their backs.

  The snow soaked our sneakers and chunks iced our ankles, the bottoms of our jeans dripped slush, the wind pierced our sweaters like frozen needles, the suitcases grew pounds heavier with every step. Our feet became numb. And then there was no feeling in them at all.

  �
�We’re frozen!” we called out. “Our feet are ice!”

  “Keep walkin’,” Mommy and Daddy ordered without turning.

  We stumbled on, following those rigid backs. When we reached the house, we fell inside the front door, crawling on our hands and knees like survivors of an arctic crash. Mommy, who was wearing sturdier shoes, filled roasting pans with water and ice cubes, and as cold as the water was, it felt boiling to our frozen feet. The pain as circulation slowly returned was excruciating. We rocked and moaned as Daddy paced the room.

  “God damn it, boys have destroyed what I’ve tried to do for this family! Jesus Christ! You see what happens when the family don’t stay together? Now I have to go back up there to get the car, and it’ll cost us all the money we made in West Virginia! Those two friggin’ girls are sittin’ somewhere sippin’ on a cool one while the rest of you are gettin’ frostbite! I’ll kill ’em when I get my hands on them!”

  “Donald, it wasn’t their fault.”

  “God damn what boys have done to this family!” His eyes were red with surging blood and the veins in his neck were popping like a ship’s hawser.

  “It doesn’t do any good to get so mad, Donald.”

  “Don’t tell me not to get mad! Look at the money we lost ’cause of those damned kids!”

  “Donald, they got there and we didn’t.”

  “Cause they split us up!”

  Donna and Jeanette walked in the door, come to see if we had made it back and mad in their own right for our having made them look bad by not showing up. Daddy furiously accused them of letting boys come between them and their family and causing this trouble of the car’s catching on fire and their sisters nearly freezing to death in the snow and having to leave the instruments behind—thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of instruments and who knows whether they’d still be there when he went back for the car.