IT was after eleven o’clock and we were getting ready for bed. Sterling was in his room behind the kitchen and Daddy was in, too, but James Junior hadn’t been home all day. I was helping Mother pull the couch I slept on in the front room away from the wall. Mother thought if the couch was in the middle of the floor the bedbugs wouldn’t get me. But she thought wrong. Every Saturday Mother scalded the bedsprings with boiling water and Flit, which must have been those bugs’ favorite recipe ’cause every night they marched right down that wall and bit me just the same.
When we were all settled down, Mother and Daddy started arguing in their bedroom next to me. She was asking Daddy one more time if she could go up in the Bronx and get some day’s work.
“Why don’t you stop nagging me, woman,” Daddy said. “You know I don’t want you doing housework.”
“It’s not what we want anymore,” Mother said. “It’s what we need. The children need shoes and school clothes. We’re all in rags.”
“They also need you to be home when they get out from school. Ain’t I having enough troubles now, for christsakes? What you want to start that shit all over again for? We ain’t starving yet.”
“We ain’t far from it.”
Daddy didn’t answer.
After a slight pause Mother said: “Adam.”
“What?”
“The relief people are giving out canned beef and butter. Mrs. Taylor got on last week. I don’t know when’s the last time we’ve had any butter.”
“And we may never have any again if I’ve got to let those damned social workers inside my house to get it. Bastards act like it’s their money they’re handing out. We ain’t going on relief, Henrietta, and don’t ask me again.”
“So what we gonna do? If you could find some work …”
“They ain’t got jobs for the ofays so how in hell you expect me to find anything?” There was a pause and when Daddy spoke again his voice was gentle. “I’m gonna play the piano at three rent parties next weekend. I oughta make ten dollars at each one. That will help some. It’s gonna be all right, baby, so you stop worrying now, and trust me. You hear?”
Mother didn’t answer. I trusted Daddy. I wondered how come she didn’t.
A few minutes later I heard the dining-room door squeak open. Damn that squeak. If James Junior was gonna try and sneak home in the middle of the night, why didn’t he oil that noisy door? Daddy heard him, too, jumped out of bed, and ran into the dining room hollering at the top of his voice: “Where you been all day, James Junior?” And before Junior could answer him Daddy yelled: “Don’t you hear me talking to you? Answer me before I knock you back down those steps.”
Me and Mother crept into the dining room, and Sterling, scowling fiercely, came down the hall from the kitchen.
“I been over on Madison Avenue with Sonny and Vallie,” James Junior said. He was big for fifteen and good looking just like Daddy.
“You been down in that cellar with that gang?”
“It’s a club room,” Junior said.
“It’s a den of thieves,” Daddy roared. “You cut school today, too?”
Junior didn’t answer. He wasn’t defiant like Sterling would have been, but he wasn’t scared either.
“Get me my strop, Francie.”
“Don’t beat him, Daddy.”
“Get me my strop.”
Trembling, I went into the bathroom and pulled the discolored razor strop down from its rusty nail and took it to Daddy. If only Junior would promise to stop playing hooky and hanging out with the Ebony Earls, I knew Daddy wouldn’t beat him.
But Junior was stubborn and as Daddy raised the blackened piece of leather over his head, Junior didn’t say a word. Daddy swung the strop with all his might and the thick end lashed into Junior’s shoulders. He winced, but didn’t cry out.
“I’m warning you for the last time,” Daddy said, breathing hard, “you ain’t gonna disgrace this family. Stay away from that damned gang, you hear?” The strop snapped across Junior’s chest. “Play hooky one more time and I’m gonna kill you.” Another blow landed on Junior’s back. “You want to be like Skeeter Madison? Dead in some alley because of some senseless gang fight?”
Junior dodged the next blow, knocking over a chair.
“Or maybe you want to join your friend Pee Wee in Sing Sing? You hear me talking to you?”
“Answer him,” I begged silently, but Junior didn’t open his mouth. He leaped over a chair and Daddy hemmed him up in a corner. The strop rose and fell harder and harder. Junior tucked his head under his hunched shoulders as the blows rained down on his back.
Suddenly I was crying and then screaming.
I heard Mother’s voice rise sharply over my screams: “Stop it, James Adam. That’s enough.”
Daddy stopped, looking around confused. Then he dropped the strop and strode into the bedroom, slamming the door.
“Francie, stop that screaming,” Mother said. “Anybody would think you were being murdered.”
She turned to Junior and her voice softened. “You know better than to make your father mad like that, James Junior. One of these days he’s gonna kill you. All of you go on to bed now.”
I went back to my couch and dried my eyes on the sheet. Daddy had whipped poor Junior with the thick end of the strop. Whether you got whipped with the thick or thin end depended on how bad you had been. I’d never been whipped with the thick end yet, in fact, Daddy never whipped me, not because I was all that good but because I was his favorite.
Why hadn’t Junior just promised to stop messing around with that stupid gang? He wasn’t mean enough to be an Ebony Earl nohow. How could he ever mug anybody, good-natured and nice as he was. Why, when he smiled his whole face laughed. He wasn’t like old Sterling who didn’t like anybody and whose narrow, old man’s face was full of dark, secret shadows.
Still, Junior wouldn’t get whipped so much if he spent his time reading and studying like Sterling who was always stinking up the house with his nasty chemicals. You would think Junior would feel bad ’cause his baby brother was gonna graduate before he did, but he didn’t seem to care at all.
On the weekends Daddy gave Sterling a few dimes and he’d go down to Forty-second Street and do real good shining shoes on a stand he made from an orange crate. Daddy said he wished Junior was that enterprising, but Junior acted like he didn’t hear him. Anyway, he never did make himself a shoeshine box and I don’t think he knew the way to Forty-second Street.
After the house quieted down I sneaked past my parents’ bedroom and tiptoed to the back.
My brothers’ room behind the kitchen was so small that the cot and dresser took up all the floor space. Junior slept at the top of the bed and Sterling at the bottom.
“You all right, Junior?” I sat on the edge of the bed and he scooted over.
“Yeah, Francie. I’m all right. But I’m too big for Daddy to beat like that anymore. That’s the last whippin’ I’m gonna take.”
I touched a welt on his face and he winced. Two dark lines ran down his cheeks. They were tears.
“He beat me like that,” Sterling grumbled from the foot of the bed, “and I’m gonna take that strop away from him and use it on his head.”
“You and who else?” I asked. “You can’t whip Daddy.” But Sterling just might try it and then Daddy would kill him for sure. I turned back to Junior. “Why didn’t you just promise Daddy to stop hanging out with the Ebony Earls? That’s all he wanted.”
“ ’Cause I ain’t gonna stop, that’s why.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand and lit a cigarette butt.
“The Ebony Earls had an initiation meeting tonight,” Sterling said. “That’s where you been so late, Junior? Getting initiated?”
“Yeah,” Junior answered. “That’s where I been. I’m a full-fledged member of the war council now.”
“But why, Junior?” I asked, feeling sick. “Why?”
“Man, nobody messes with an Ebony Earl,” Junior said slowly, think
ing it out. “People see me walking down the street, they say, there goes James Adam Coffin, Junior. He’s a bad stud. Everybody respects a bad stud. Don’t make no difference whether you’re bad or not, just as long as people think you are. And you naturally get a rep just by belonging to the Ebony Earls. You automatically become somebody.”
“Bullshit,” Sterling said.
“You come with me to the next meeting, Sterling,” Junior said. “You ain’t gonna get nowhere with that shoeshine box, man. What kind of money is that? Next meeting you come with me.”
“Don’t go with him, Sterling,” I cried. “Stay away from that stupid gang. You always said yourself they was stupid.”
“Shut up,” Sterling said, “and mind your own business. Who invited you in here anyhow? Go on back to bed.”
“I can’t. I’m scared to go through the kitchen. I hear a rat.”
“You wasn’t scared to come in here with your nosy self.”
I started to whimper, and with a curse Sterling got up and walked me back to Mother’s bedroom door.
“Sterling, you ain’t gonna join the gang, too. Please don’t.”
He shoved me through the door roughly, but when he spoke his voice was gentle. “Don’t worry none about me, Francie. I can take care of myself, you hear?” He touched my face awkwardly and then he was gone.
As I made my way back to the couch, I thought, that was the first time in a long time Sterling had spoken nice to me.
THREE
SUKIE finally cornered me one afternoon. I had taken my usual place on the fire escape and was reading a book of fairy tales from the library—although I knew I was too old for fairy tales—when Mother called me and told me to go uptown and borrow three dollars from Aunt Hazel. She handed me a nickel for carfare.
“What if she ain’t home?” I asked. Aunt Hazel lived on 131st Street.
“Then walk back. You’ve walked that far before.”
I sneaked on the subway to save the nickel and then walked down Lenox Avenue to 131st Street.
Aunt Hazel’s hallway smelled like all the other hallways in Harlem. Funky. I walked up one flight and knocked on her door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, Aunt Hazel. Francie.”
I heard her slide the chain lock off and then the door opened and Aunt Hazel was hugging me and pulling me inside. She smelled nice, like cake baking.
The light was on in her living room, which was always dark, ’cause no sun could squeeze through that narrow window which was smack up against the wall of the house next door. That’s why we lived on the top floor, Daddy said, so we could snatch a little sunshine. Aunt Hazel’s rooms were tiny but spotless, with everything in its place, not junky like ours, and I loved to come here.
“Look who’s come to visit,” Aunt Hazel said, as I followed her into the living room.
Mr. Mulberry was seated at a card table where he and Aunt Hazel had been playing cooncan and drinking gin. He jumped up and hugged me and made me sit in his chair.
Mr. Mulberry was a very tall, very black West Indian who worked as handyman for the same family Aunt Hazel worked for. She slept in and so did he and was off on Thursdays, same as her. I don’t know where Mr. Mulberry lived, but whenever I came to visit Aunt Hazel he was here. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Atwater, who also slept in, were also here, and the four of them would be playing whist, drink or smell, laughing and banging the cards down on the table with a flourish. The winners would get a drink, and the losers would have to wait until they won a hand before they got a sip.
“Get the child something to eat, Hazel,” Mr. Mulberry said, “and I’ll run downstairs and buy her a soda.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mulberry,” I said politely, “but please don’t go to all of that trouble,” hoping of course that he would ignore me, which he did.
“It’s my pleasure, Francie,” he said in his nice West Indian accent, and left.
Aunt Hazel commented as usual on how skinny I was as she pattered about in the kitchen fixing me a fried-fish sandwich and a glass of milk. I wasn’t very fond of fish, but I ate it anyway and it was good. Then she gave me a piece of pound cake and Mr. Mulberry was back with a cherry soda. They both watched me eat as if I couldn’t digest the food without their help.
“Another piece of cake, darling?”
“Yes, thank you, Aunt Hazel.”
While I was eating the second piece I told her Mother wanted to borrow three dollars. I had made this trip many times before—a one-way trip ’cause though I often was sent uptown to borrow money I was never sent to pay it back.
“You sure three dollars is enough?” Aunt Hazel asked, as she handed me three crumpled bills.
I smiled at her. Good old Aunt Hazel. She never turned us down.
Aunt Hazel was what Daddy called a big beautiful girl. She was no girl, though, older than Mother, and I don’t know about that beautiful part either. Daddy was always saying somebody was beautiful—some black girl with thick lips and a wide nose who everybody else thought was down-right homely. Me and Mother would look at each other and shake our heads sadly when Daddy went into his black beauty bit.
“You’re blind in one eye,” Mother would tell him, “and deaf in the other.”
Not that Aunt Hazel was ugly. In fact, she looked like Mother, only better looking, with long hair she wore in a bun on top of her head. She still had all her teeth and she laughed a lot. She was jollier than Mother, too, which probably came from drinking gin and wine. Mother didn’t drink a thing.
Aunt Hazel didn’t have any children, and was always saying she had no family in this world but us. She had been married once but the louse ran off and left her before I was born.
I squeezed the last drop of soda from my glass, got up, and was swallowed in Aunt Hazel’s arms again. I said good-bye to Mr. Mulberry and left.
I walked back home through Mt. Morris Park. When I was two blocks away I looked down Fifth Avenue and it seemed as if a huge crowd was gathered right in front of my house. My heart started its crazy thumping and I slowed down to a crawl.
This had happened to me before, especially at twilight. My vision became blurred and I couldn’t tell the difference between a normal overflowing street and a crowd of people. Crowds always meant something terrible—a fight or a killing or somebody had fallen off the roof or been run over by a car. So anytime I saw a crowd I was scared that something awful had happened to my brothers.
I crept closer. It was a crowd all right, right in front of my stoop. I saw Maude Caldwell at the edge of the crowd, staring at something on the ground. I inched toward her, my eyes glued to her face. If her face crumpled with horror when she saw me, if she raced forward to be the first to tell me the bad news, then I would know that something terrible had happened to Junior or Sterling.
When I was next to her I whispered, “Maude.”
She looked at me and nodded and then turned away. I fell apart with relief. Her look had been normal.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
Before she could answer a woman screamed. I pushed through the crowd in time to see China Doll get knocked off her feet and bounce on her plump behind as she hit the pavement. A strange brown man snatched her up and knocked her down again with a swinging blow to her head.
“Do it to your mother, you cocksucker,” China screamed.
The man socked her again.
“It’s her new pimp,” Maude explained, adding unnecessarily, “He’s beating the shit out of her.”
Nobody in the crowd made a move to help China. You just didn’t interfere in Harlem street fights, especially between a man and his woman. She might jump up and whip whoever came to her rescue.
I hated to see China Doll get knocked down like that though. She was still little, but plump, and so pretty with her slanty eyes and straight black hair.
She called the man a string of motherfuckers but he had turned away, shut of the matter. Finally, she got to her feet.
“What are you looking
at, you black bastards,” she yelled at the crowd. A path opened before her and she limped to the corner and turned down 118th Street.
It was then that Sukie saw me. Naturally I felt sorry for Sukie, seeing her sister get beat up like that, and I was going to tell her so when I remembered that she was mad at me. It was her face which made me remember. She was moving toward me, her face red with rage, her lips drawn back over her teeth in a snarl.
I didn’t even feel it when she socked me. I just hit the pavement, but my behind didn’t bounce. I fell on my tailbone and it hurt.
The crowd, which had begun to drift, came back for the new fight. Someone above me chuckled: “These Maceo girls are a fighting mess.” I couldn’t help but agree.
Sukie’s whole body landed flat on top of me, pinning my legs to the ground. I tried to rock her off but she was too heavy. She grabbed a handful of hair and yanked, setting my scalp on fire.
I squeezed Mother’s three dollars in my fist and swung at Sukie with both arms. My weak blows didn’t bother her at all. She kept punching me in the face. My nose spurted blood and I began to cry softly. My thrashing became wilder as I tried to overturn her. She had her knees in my chest now. A hard blow landed on my Adam’s apple and I started to choke.
Someone mercifully pulled Sukie off me. For a moment I didn’t even know the fight was over. My jaw was throbbing and I knew another tooth was loose. I dragged my hand under my nose and looked at the smear of blood on it as I tried to swallow my sobs. Avoiding all eyes, I got up, and this time a path opened up for me. I ran home.
Inside the hallway I really started to bawl: “Mother. Mother.” By the time I reached the fifth floor, Mother was standing at the top of the stairs.
“Sukie beat me up and I didn’t do nothing.”
Mother pulled me into the bathroom and made me hold my head back until my nose stopped bleeding. She gently washed my face and poked about the bruises, putting iodine on my scratches.
“Sukie’s been waiting to beat me up for two weeks.”
“Was Aunt Hazel home?”
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 3
