“Whatcha gonna do with your grandma’s cat?” Sukie asked.
“Wait and see.” Sonny walked to the side of the roof and dangled the cat over the edge. Suddenly his fingers sprung open and the cat fell.
I screamed.
“You sonofabitch,” Vallie yelled. “Whatcha do that for?”
“Come on,” Sonny said, running toward the door.
Vallie followed him and I trailed behind, not wanting to go. I turned around to see if Sukie was coming and saw that she was quietly vomiting up her lunch.
I raced down the stairs behind the boys to the basement and out into the yard where the cat lay in a tangled mess of broken bones and black fur slimy with blood.
Sonny bent over the cat and then straightened up. “The bastard is dead.”
“What the hell did you expect?” Vallie asked. “For him to jump up and kiss you?”
“I expected him to have nine lives like they always say a cat has,” Sonny said. He turned away in disgust. “They lied.”
I started to whimper.
“It’s all right, Francie,” Vallie said, pulling me up the basement steps. “Sonny is just a crazy nigger. I hope his grandma whips his ass for killing her cat like that.”
AFTER breakfast on Sunday Mother and I went to Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear Adam. Mother was a born Methodist but she had been going to Abyssinian ever since we lived in Brooklyn. The Old Man was preaching then, Adam’s father, and I used to think that he looked just like God, with his long white hair and all.
We never could get Daddy to go to church with us, although he did admit that Adam had done a lot of good in Harlem, particularly last year when he opened a free food kitchen and fed a thousand people a week. Adam was also a leader in the rent strikes. Daddy said that was good, otherwise more people would have been set out on the street. But on the whole, Daddy would have nothing to do with churches and preachers.
“King James of England wrote the Bible,” he was always telling Mother, “and he made you niggers happy hewers of wood and told you to serve your masters faithfully and you’d get your reward in heaven. You all believe that shit and been worshiping a white Jesus ever since. How in the hell could God take the black earth and make himself a white man out of it? Answer me that?”
But Mother never tried to answer. She just hauled me off with her to church and sometimes sent me to Mt. Olivet Sunday school on 120th Street and Lenox Avenue. Daddy didn’t care whether we went to Sunday school or not, so naturally James Junior and Sterling never went.
Church was packed this morning. It was a hot day and the sweat rolled down the congregation’s faces as they joined the choir in singing:
What are they doing in heaven today?
Where sin and sorrow are all washed away,
Where peace abides like a river they say,
What are they doing there now?
That song always made me think of the dead, and I was wondering what Mr. Caldwell was doing in heaven today when the lady next to me started screaming:
“Praise his Holy name. Do, Jesus. Do.”
I inched away from her so nobody would think we were together. She threw her fat self around like a top, and I felt like disappearing under the floorboards. Why did they have to shout and holler like that? Adam stood up to preach. He was a handsome, large man, so white he could have passed. Even before he opened his mouth, the lady next to me shouted again:
“Preach His Holy word, Adam. Thank Thee, Father, for Adam Powell, Jr.” Still shouting, she threw her arms out wide, almost knocking me sideways, then stiffened and leaped up. A nurse in white came running and grabbed the woman’s hands and eased her back into her seat. The nurse began fanning her and I turned to Mother. She smiled at me and I smiled back, moving closer to her.
First Adam talked about Haile Selassie asking the League of Nations for protection from Mussolini and how they was ignoring him. Then he almost wept about that terrible lynching in Florida I had read about in The Amsterdam News. His sermon was about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and how the Negro today was in worse bondage and had to free himself.
I liked Adam. He talked about things that were happening today and preached such a powerful sermon that the sisters shouting “Hallelujah” and “Amen” kept me from dozing off. By the time he finished preaching they were swooning and jumping up and down all over the church. As I followed Mother out, I was glad that while she loved Adam dearly, she wasn’t the shouting kind.
The next day after school I banged on Sukie’s door and when she didn’t answer I went looking for her in the street but she was nowhere to be found. I went up to her roof, which was two houses down from mine, and climbed down the fire escape to her apartment which was on the top floor, too. There she was looking out the window.
“Come on in, Francie.”
“I knocked a little while back but you didn’t answer,” I said.
“I didn’t hear you. I was lookin’ out the window.”
“What you wanna do today?” I asked. “If we had some money we could go to the show.”
“I got fifteen cents,” she said. “What you got?”
“Nothin’. But maybe I can get a dime from my father if I can find him.”
“Okay, let’s go.” She didn’t have to ask anybody if she could go to the show because there was nobody to ask. Papa Dan was drunk in some hallway somewhere, and Mrs. Maceo was a cook for a private family and didn’t come home until around nine o’clock at night.
I found my father in Jocko’s candy store. No, we don’t have no homework, I told him, and he gave me a dime and me and Sukie walked on down to 116th Street.
We couldn’t decide whether to go to the Jewel or Regun Theatre and was arguing about it. There was a cowboy picture I wanted to see at the Jewel with Ken Maynard, my favorite. Sukie wanted to see “Zombies from Haiti” at the Regun. I don’t know why I wasted my time arguing with her ’cause we walked right past the Jewel and headed for the Regun farther down the street and I knew that picture was gonna scare me so much I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
That white bald-headed man who used to try and get me to come up on the roof and now followed me to the show every chance he got was standing outside the Jewel. I stuck my tongue out at him as I passed. He only bothered me when I was alone so I knew he wasn’t gonna follow us.
Right in front of the Regun six or seven people was laughing at a drunk, a roly-poly black man trying to walk straight. How he could stand up at all was a miracle. With every step he took he tilted so far sideways that everybody held their breath thinking he was gonna fall flat on his face, and when he made it without tumbling over, they whistled and hollered: “You did it, baby. Go, man, go!”
The man grinned at them, happy ’cause they was happy, took another staggering step and slammed into the pavement. There was an instant of silence, a fear that maybe he’d hurt himself, but when he hunched himself up on his knees, the people cheered. After trying to get to his feet twice, he finally thought better of it and began to crawl on his hands and knees. The people laughed and he giggled with them.
Then an ofay cop walked up. “Okay, break it up, let’s get movin’,” he ordered. He grabbed the drunk in the collar and hauled him to his feet. The fat man’s legs caved in and he stumbled, almost pulling the cop down on top of him. The people laughed. The cop, red in the face, swung his billy up side the drunk’s head. The fat man pulled away, dropping to his knees again, and rolled himself up in a ball, his head tucked under his arms. The cop kicked his behind and then brought his nightstick down on the man’s shoulder.
I grunted, feeling the pain. He didn’t have to beat him up like that, I thought. He’s just a helpless old drunk.
A police car drove up. Another cop got out and the two of them rolled the drunk to the curb and hauled him like a sack of potatoes into the back seat and drove off.
A man muttered: “Damn cops, you can never find them when you want one but they’s always around to beat up a drunk.”
It was true, I thought. Last week when a guy from the Ebony Earls tangled with a Harlem Raider there wasn’t a cop in sight until those boys had cut each other so bad they both had to be taken to Harlem Hospital.
Another man said: “We shoulda got that cop, beating that poor man like that.”
“Yeah, you should of,” a skinny woman said, her mouth curled up in a sneer, “but you didn’t move a muscle, did you, nigger?”
“Who you callin’ a nigger? I’ll move a muscle and slap the shit outta you,” the man said.
“Yeah,” the woman answered, “you can do that all right.” Sighing and shaking her head, she walked away.
Me and Sukie turned into the Regun, slid our dimes under the ticket window and got our tickets. “That cop had no call to beat up that man like that,” I said.
“He shoulda whipped his raggedy ass so he could never use it no more,” she said. “I hate drunks.” She was mad again, just like that, puffed up and mad.
There was some boys in the lobby looking at the coming attractions, and as we passed by, one of them whispered: “Pussy, pussy, who’s gonna give me some pussy?”
“Your sister,” Sukie said, evil as she could be.
They fell out laughing, happy ’cause she had answered them. As I followed her down the dark aisle, I hoped the movie would make her forget about that drunk so she wouldn’t be so evil. She wasn’t any fun to be with when she was like this ’cause you had to be careful what you said. The least little thing would send her into a rage and she’d be ready to fight again, and I wasn’t ready for that.
WEDNESDAY was the last day of school and I was pleased when I got my report card. I had four A’s, two B pluses, and one C for tardiness.
Sterling was graduating from Cooper Junior High tomorrow afternoon and we was all gonna go, but wouldn’t you know he had to start acting up?
That night we was in the dining room and Mother was on her knees in front of Sterling, trying to pin up the cuffs on the pants he had on, which came down over his shoe tops. The seat of the pants hung way down past his skinny behind and the sleeves of the jacket were so long his fingertips didn’t even show.
“I won’t go,” Sterling said. “I won’t wear no dead man’s suit to my graduation.”
“You’ll go and you’ll wear that suit or I’ll whip your butt,” Daddy yelled. “Who do you think you’re talking to in that way? You suddenly so grown up you can talk to me and your mother like that?”
Daddy had bought the suit from the pawnshop. It was a good buy he said because its owner had died and the pawnbroker was letting it go for half price because it had a little bullet hole over the right pocket.
“Don’t talk about not going to your own graduation, Sterling,” Mother said, her mouth full of pins. “You the first one in this family ever to graduate. Ain’t I always said you’d be the salvation of us all? This suit don’t look too bad, do it, Francie? And when I put a tuck in the waist, and turn up the cuffs a bit …”
Sterling was almost in tears.
Daddy’s voice softened. “Your mother sews real good, Sterling. When she gets through that suit will fit you fine. And she’ll patch up that bullet hole, too. When I was a boy I didn’t have a suit where the coat matched the pants until I was twenty-one and had to buy it myself. If only that last figure had been a one today I could have bought you a new suit.”
Sterling pulled away from Mother and tore at the pants until they dropped to his feet. He stood there in his B.V.D.’s looking more naked than if he had no clothes on at all, screaming: “I ain’t going to wear a dead man’s suit to my graduation.” He jumped over the pants and ran to his room.
I expected Daddy to charge after him and slam him up against the wall ’cause sassy as he was, Sterling had never defied Daddy like that before. But Daddy just looked at Mother and shrugged. “He’ll be all right in the morning, Henrietta. Go on and fix the suit.”
But in the morning Sterling was just as stubborn. He looked Daddy straight in the eye and told him he wasn’t going.
Still Daddy didn’t whip him. “It’s your graduation,” he said, “suit yourself,” and he left to pick up his numbers.
Mother put on a clean housedress and headed for the door. “Sterling, you stay right here until I get back,” she said, and left.
I followed Sterling to his room. “I wanna go to your graduation. How come you gotta mess up?”
“Get out of here before I punch you in the nose.” He pushed me out of the room and slammed the door.
Mother came home shortly after twelve, carrying a big box. She marched into Sterling’s room and dropped it on his bed.
“Put these on,” she said, “and hurry now. I want to get a good seat up front.”
Inside the box was a brand-new knickers suit, a white shirt, and tie and socks to match.
“You’ll have to wear your old sneakers,” Mother apologized.
Sterling jumped up and hugged Mother. She wriggled out of his embrace. “Go on now, Sterling, and get dressed before we be late. Francie, if you’re going with us come on now and let me braid your hair, and wear your plaid skirt.”
We didn’t hear Daddy come in until he said: “What’s all the excitement about?”
Mother told him in a rush. “I walked uptown to Hazel’s and borrowed some money from her and bought Sterling a new suit. Good thing today is Thursday and she was home.”
Daddy looked from Mother to the clothes on the bed. “And how we gonna pay Hazel back?”
“Same way we been paying her back,” Mother snapped. “We ain’t been worrying about that before, so don’t start now. You goin’ with us to the graduation?”
Daddy took his time answering. Finally he said: “Of course, I’m goin’.” He turned to me. “Francie, when you gonna get your hair combed, it looks a mess. We don’t want to be late waiting on you.”
It was a good day after that. Sterling won a medal for high grades and Daddy was so proud he swelled up to twice his size and he was big enough already. Junior came to the graduation, too. He was late, but he got there.
That night the Caldwells and Mrs. Maceo came over to see Sterling’s medal and Daddy played the piano and we sang the old songs and had a good time.
I was in bed almost asleep when I heard Daddy get up in the middle of the night. A few minutes later, half-dressed, he came to the front door with the suit he’d bought from the pawnbroker stuffed into a paper bag, one sleeve dangling from it.
“Where you goin’, Daddy,” I asked. “What you gonna do with that suit?”
“Take it down to the basement and burn it,” he said, and closed the door gently behind him.
FIVE
IT was after ten o’clock but too hot to sleep so we were up on the roof searching for a cool breeze. My mother and Mrs. Caldwell were sitting on the divider between their two roofs talking to Sonny’s grandmother, Mrs. Taylor. Mrs. Caldwell was holding Elizabeth’s baby, a boy, while Lil Robert, five, and David, three, played at her feet.
Maude and her sister Rebecca and me were lying on the rise of the roof looking over the edge and chewing tar, which was supposed to keep your teeth white.
Rebecca was pretty, with those flashing West Indian eyes and a mouth always laughing. She was my good friend, too, although Daddy didn’t like me hanging out with her too much because he said she was too old for me. She was sixteen. Daddy was afraid she might tell me something about boys, but she never did, nobody did except Sukie and that wasn’t much. Sometimes I thought I must be the dumbest girl in Harlem.
I saw Sonny downstairs crossing the street and got the shivers. He was sixteen, too, strange and unsmiling, and every time I saw him now I remembered how he had thrown his grandma’s cat over the roof. I wondered if Mrs. Taylor had whipped his behind for doing that.
“Rebecca, you think Mrs. Taylor whipped Sonny for throwing her cat off the roof?”
“You kiddin’?” Rebecca turned her bright eyes on me. “That boy never gets a lickin’ and it’s a shame
because he could be so good lookin’ if some of that evil was knocked out of him.”
Rebecca got along good with boys, jiving and laughing with them all the time in an easy way I envied. I don’t think boys liked me much, but I didn’t care since I didn’t like them either and they was mostly going to end up in Sing Sing anyhow like Daddy was always saying, especially that Sonny, I thought. His grandmother, Mrs. Taylor, was nice, though, dumpy and wide like most mothers, but with snow-white hair.
“I got on relief last month,” she was saying, “because I just can’t do housework no more. My rheumatism, you know.”
My mother sighed. “Lord knows I’d like to get on but my husband just won’t hear of it.”
“Them men,” Mrs. Caldwell said, shifting the baby to her other hip. “Mr. Caldwell was the same way, God rest him. Rather see these kids starve than ask somebody for a dime. Robert’s like that, too.”
Mother grunted. I don’t think she liked the way Robert moved in with Mrs. Caldwell and then acted so snotty all the time, even complaining that his mother-in-law and her three daughters was gonna spoil his sons, and him not working, mind you, while his wife was breaking her back in that laundry.
Mother had told Daddy just last night: “If Robert don’t like living there, why don’t he move?”
“Because he’s got to help Mrs. Caldwell with her rent, that’s why,” Daddy said.
“Humph,” Mother said, “it wasn’t Mrs. Caldwell got all her furniture set out on the street. And it’s a shame how Elizabeth used to never have milk for her kids but Robert kept gas in that car so he could ride around Harlem like a big shot.”
“A man’s got to have something like that car,” Daddy said, “so he knows he’s a man.”
“I thought making all them babies would have told him that,” Mother said, getting in the last word.
Mrs. Caldwell was saying now that she didn’t care how Robert felt about it, she was applying for relief, too, and if he didn’t like it he could stop hanging around with all those politicians and find himself a job.
“Y’all hear about Mrs. Petrie?” Mrs. Taylor asked. “Poor thing has another one in the oven.”
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 5
