“I wasn’t doing nothing. I don’t want to ever do nothing.” I started to cry.
“Aw, Francie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Francie, please. Don’t cry.”
He wiped my face with the dress and then he kissed me on the cheek. When I didn’t move, his lips touched mine for an instant, pressing down firmly.
“You all right now?”
I nodded. “I wasn’t doing nothing with Sonny. Honest I wasn’t.”
“I believe you, Francie. But don’t let him hem you up in no dark corner anymore. He don’t mean you no good. Okay?”
“Okay, Vallie.”
We went outside, crossed over to my stoop, and he walked me upstairs to my door. I was hoping he would kiss me on the mouth again, I liked that, but he didn’t. I listened to him galloping down the stairs and then I went on inside.
The next afternoon Rebecca and I went to the Apollo Theatre. We sat upstairs in the buzzard’s roost ’cause it only cost a dime, although the sweet fumes from those skinny cigarettes the boys were smoking was so thick it gave me a headache. Ralph Cooper was the master of ceremonies and him and Butterbeans and Susie made me laugh till I hurt. The picture was good, too, Janet Gaynor and Lionel Barry-more and Stepin Fetchit in “To Carolina.” Everybody laughed at Stepin Fetchit and so did I ’cause he was funny and a big movie star and making all that money, but sometimes I wished he wasn’t such a shufflin’, lazy nigger.
When the show was over we walked right into a riot. We had walked to Lenox Avenue and saw a crowd near 126th Street and went up there. A wooden platform was up in the street and several black and white men yelling into a microphone. There were hundreds of people milling around and a whole lot of cops swinging their billy clubs and hollering at the crowd to move on. I saw one cop rap a Negro right in the middle of his forehead and draw blood. I shuddered and turned away.
A banner over the platform said: “Welcome home Mrs. Ada Wright, Mother of Roy and Andy.” We would have gone on home then except that Rebecca suddenly yelled: “Hey, that’s Robert up on that platform.”
I looked and sure enough it was. He grabbed the microphone and began hollering into it: “Do not disperse. We have a right to meet on our own streets.”
Just then a whole row of police cars drove up. As the cops jumped out they threw something into the air.
“Tear gas,” somebody yelled. “Oh, my God, they’re gassing us.”
The crowd, which had been pressing up against the platform, scattered. People grabbed their throats, strangling, as the air about them turned smoky.
Just then Robert saw us and shouted at me and Rebecca to get out of there. We turned and ran with the crowd. The cops were chasing us up Lenox Avenue. People upstairs on their fire escapes and hanging from their windows threw rotten fruit down on the police.
“Got one of the bastards,” somebody yelled, as a banana skin fell on top of a cop’s cap.
“Come on,” Rebecca cried, “we’d better get out of here before they start shooting.”
A soggy tomato fell at my feet. I picked it up and threw it at the nearest cop, then Rebecca and I ran down to Fifth Avenue and went home.
I told Mother about the riot and we sat in the dining room drinking tea, waiting for the boys to come home. Sterling came in first and then around midnight James Junior showed up. Mother made me go on to bed. Hours later I woke up and went into the dining room. Mother was still sitting at the table, waiting. My eyes met hers and I saw fear in them. She was waiting for Daddy and I realized for the first time that I wasn’t the only one in that house who was always afraid the worse had happened.
“Go on back to bed, Francie.”
“Yes, Mother.”
At daybreak Daddy came home and Mother finally went to bed.
The next day the front page of the papers was full of it: “5,000 Negroes and white sympathizers rioted yesterday when detectives used tear gas bombs to disperse an unauthorized meeting staged at Lenox Avenue and 126th St. to protest the Scottsboro case.”
The paper said the International Labor Defense Committee planned the meeting to welcome home Mrs. Ada Wright, mother of two of the Scottsboro boys, Roy and Andy. She had been to Alabama to see them and Harlem was welcoming her home. I stopped reading in disgust when the paper said that the police didn’t use clubs or pistols against the rioters. If that wasn’t a billy club that cop used on that colored man’s head then I was stone-blind.
The paper also said three people were arrested, two white men and a Negro. Thank God it wasn’t Robert, but his picture was in the paper up there on that platform and on account of it he lost the job he just got as a delivery boy downtown in the garment center ’cause he hadn’t gone to work that day but had taken off sick.
The next night the whole courtyard could hear Robert’s argument with Elizabeth. I was lying on Mother’s bed and their voices rose up plain and clear in the air shaft which our bedroom windows opened on.
“How come you let those Communists make you lose your job?” Elizabeth asked.
“The Black League for Freedom ain’t Communist,” Robert said. “We just helped the defense committee set up the meeting.”
“The papers say you all a bunch of Communists.”
“Screw the papers.”
“You care more about them Scottsboro boys than you do about your own sons starving right under your nose.”
“They’re not starving right under my nose. You’re working, ain’t you? Liz, I got to care what happens to black people in Alabama. Nine colored boys are condemned to die because two white sluts said they raped them. Ain’t that a bitch? Can’t you understand that what happens to them down south is part of what happens to us here in Harlem?”
“All I understand is I ain’t gonna be working my butt off in no laundry while you’re parading and marching up and down getting your picture in the papers. I just ain’t gonna do it so you’d better stop losing jobs and messing around with those Communists.”
“How many times I got to tell you the Black League ain’t—”
“I don’t care what they ain’t. They ain’t paying you a dime, that I know, and you laying up here like a king in my mother’s house and—”
“You want me to leave your mother’s house? Just keep shouting and screaming like that. You want me to leave?”
There was silence. I waited and waited for Elizabeth to answer but she never did. Finally, disgusted with waiting, I got into my own bed and fought with the bedbugs and finally fell asleep.
The next morning when I went to get Maude for school, Robert was still there and I didn’t hear Elizabeth arguing with him anymore either. In fact she looked kind of silly, smiling and giggling about nothing, and I wondered what old Robert had done to make her so happy like that for a hot minute.
MR. EDWARDS hit 505 for two dollars and said he was going to New Orleans to look for his wife and his cousin, Gabriel. I was glad ’cause I wasn’t mad at him anymore for making me get that beating. When I told him about it the next day he swore he hadn’t meant to get me in dutch and I believed him.
But Mr. Edwards didn’t get paid off on his hit. The bankers changed that last figure to a 6 when they found out that a whole mess of people in Harlem had that number. A plane had crashed the day before and its picture was in the News with 505 painted on one wing.
“It’s a shame,” Daddy said, “the way the racketeers can change a number anytime they want to as if the thousand to one odds against hitting ain’t enough for them.”
Mr. Edwards thought it was more than a shame. He went raving and cursing up to his collector demanding his money and got shot twice for his trouble. He died three days later in Harlem Hospital. There was no funeral because one of his relatives sent his body straightaway to New Orleans and I thought it was kinda sad for Mr. Edwards to get back home that way.
They didn’t keep that man who shot Mr. Edwards in jail no time before they turned him loose. “Niggers killing niggers don’t bother the police none,” Daddy said. “They
just don’t give a damn.”
With Mr. Edwards gone we didn’t have a janitor and our Jewish landlord came down from Mt. Vernon and offered Daddy the janitor’s job. He took it and it became our lot to pull the garbage and mop down the stairs and keep the backyard clean which was none too easy since it was simpler to throw garbage out of the window into the backyard than to wait until six o’clock when the garbage was pulled. That dumbwaiter was a filthy, slimy mess, a permanent home for cockroaches and rats, and I would just as soon open the window myself and sling the garbage out than open that dumbwaiter door.
Daddy got up at five o’clock in the morning to start the furnace in the basement before somebody started banging on the pipes for hot water, but he made James Junior and Sterling bank the fire at night, and that kept Junior a little closer to home.
We had been janitors before, a long time ago when I was four and we lived in that basement in Brooklyn with the furnace pipes standing right in the middle of every room. I remember because we were the only colored in that whole block and I used to play with a pretty little Jewish girl, Rosina, who lived up on the third floor and had a brand-new baby brother. She had the youngest, nicest parents, and her father always made us laugh by jumping into the baby’s crib to read his newspaper every evening when he came home. I used to go up there just to see him do that, then he would hug us both and give us a lollipop he had hidden in his coat pocket.
Me and Rosina started kindergarten together and were best friends because while there were two or three other colored kids in our school, janitor’s children, too, they didn’t live near me.
Now that I think back on it, things were real nice there in Brooklyn. We had a telephone and one of those radios with earplugs and we would listen to it every evening and have a good time together and Mother didn’t work and was always at home. But after we moved to Harlem we seemed to get poorer and poorer. I asked Mother once why we ever left Brooklyn and she said so Daddy could take a better job painting but it didn’t turn out to be steady because of the Depression. Now, I thought, with Daddy being a janitor again maybe things would be nicer like when we used to live in Brooklyn. But that janitor’s job only got us in trouble. It was on account of it that Madame Queen cut us off relief, because Daddy hadn’t told her about it right away.
“But I don’t receive any pay for being the janitor,” Daddy told Madame Queen, “only a reduction in rent, just half, and I was going to tell you next month after we caught up. We owe most of our relief check to the grocer and I was just trying to break even before I told you.”
But Madame Queen didn’t believe Daddy. As good as called him a liar, and to punish us, she took us off relief. Mother told Daddy Mrs. Schwartz’s sister wanted her to work part time and maybe that would help some. Daddy didn’t say anything, so Mother took the job and was gone now every afternoon instead of just three times a week.
Now that she was away so much we didn’t eat dinner together anymore. Junior and Sterling came home at different times and ate in the kitchen. Daddy would put on some mustard greens before he left on his rounds, and when I came home from school I would turn them off and cook a pot of rice. Daddy was a Geechee so we had rice every day. Me and that rice. It was either scorched or a soggy mess. Once Daddy looked at it with disgust. That day it was soggy.
“Why in hell don’t you teach this girl to cook a decent pot of rice?” he roared at Mother.
My feelings were hurt. Mother didn’t bother to answer, her silence saying louder than words that he was home all day so why didn’t he teach me himself.
“You a moron or something,” he turned on me, “that you can’t cook a decent pot of rice?”
My tears were instant. “I measure it out just like you do, Daddy, only it gets dry while it’s still raw so I add more water.”
“The gas, the gas,” Daddy yelled, “you’ve got the damn gas turned up too high. You don’t boil rice, you steam it.”
The sight of my tears didn’t make him turn gentle as it usually did. He finished eating and banged out of the house mumbling that it was a goddamn shame a man couldn’t get a decent pot of rice in his own home. I felt bad for hours ’cause Daddy seldom hollered at me, but after that I didn’t cook any more soggy pots of rice.
That Saturday night I was up late because there was no school the next day. Me and Mother were home alone. She was in her bedroom figuring out the lead for Monday, Daddy had taught her his system, and I was sitting at the dining-room table reading a library book, armed with my usual supply of weapons. Tonight I had a hammer, a screw-driver, and two hairbrushes. When I heard a noise I threw the hammer toward the kitchen and the rats scurried back into their holes. When I got down to my last piece of ammunition I would give the dining room up to the rats and go on to bed. I was scared to death of those rats. They had already bitten everybody but me. They tell me that when I was a baby they had to keep me in a laundry basket on top of the dresser to protect me from those rats.
Our rats grew fat on the poison Mother spread around each week on raw potato slices, and the sulfur bombs she was always gassing us with had no effect on them whatsoever. Once they chased a cat we had right into the living-room wall and I bet that cat kept on running till he got to Brooklyn.
I had finally deserted the fairy tales at the library—more out of shame than anything else—and had discovered a row of bookcases called the Negro Section with books in it about colored people. I was reading Home to Harlem by Claude McKay and it was strange to discover that someone had written about these same raggedy streets I knew so well. The people in the book acted just like those clowns out there on Fifth Avenue and it was very funny and kind of sad.
But I couldn’t keep my mind on the book because I was hoping James Junior would beat Daddy home so there wouldn’t be another argument.
I threw the screwdriver down the hall and just then there was a loud banging on the dining-room door. Sudden noises scared me—usually it meant something terrible had happened—so I just sat there with my heart pounding, not making a move.
“What’s the matter with you, Francie,” Mother grumbled as she went to the door. “Can’t you hear all that banging? You act more like a moron each day.”
It was true. I was getting scared of everything. It was Sukie’s mother, her moriney face redder than usual after her climb up to the top floor.
“Mr. Coffin home?” she asked. “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord.”
“He ain’t here,” Mother said. “What’s the matter?”
“You better sit down, Mrs. Coffin,” Mrs. Maceo said, bending her tall frame into a chair.
“No,” Mother said, stiffening. “What is it?”
“They found a white man dead in a hallway around on 118th Street. That was about seven o’clock, I guess. Didn’t you hear about it?”
Mother shook her head.
“Well, he was mugged to death. Didn’t have no pants on when they found him.” She looked at me. “How come you didn’t hear about it, Francie?”
“I been upstairs all evening,” I said, wondering if that was all she came to tell us. I started to relax.
“The cops just busted into that basement where the Ebony Earls holds their meetings,” Mrs. Maceo said, “and they done arrested all of them boys. Holding them for murder.”
I felt a curious stillness, like my heart and the world had just stopped running. Mother fell into a chair, her hand going up to her mouth in that familiar gesture she used when she laughed and exposed her toothless gums.
“James Junior?” she asked. “He arrested, too?”
Mrs. Maceo nodded. “Him and Vallie and four other boys from Madison Avenue.”
“I always knew this day was coming,” Mother said slowly. “I always knew I would turn a corner and run into this day, but I ain’t prepared for it nohow.”
The next morning his picture stared up at me from the front page of the Daily News. That white bald-headed man who used to hang out on my roof and follow me to the movies, he was the man Junior and Vall
ie were arrested for murdering.
PART II
YORUBA’S CHILDREN
EIGHT
IT snowed all night, the first snow of the season, and in the morning the streets were a fairy wonderland—whitewashed and lovely. Even though I hated cold weather, Maude and I enjoyed the newness of the snow as we walked to school, watching the younger kids bang each other over the head with snowballs.
Nothing much was changed at school. We were still messing up in our algebra class, reading smutty love stories and dirty comics in place of True Romances. I was also reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from the library, which made me feel black and evil toward whites. Luisa and Saralee had been left back again and were still scaring the pee out of everybody.
After school I started for home, going out of my way to walk through the park, it was just that nice a day, brisk but not too cold. The trees were so still, so quietly beautiful, their black branches bowed with a frothy icing, that I almost didn’t notice that the snow I was crunching under my feet was soaking into my stockings and making my toes numb.
It was so quiet in that park, it was almost solemn. It was like that in the streets, too, everything clean and hushed under its white blanket. But I knew that in a few days the snow would be banked up in piles in the gutter and the dogs would raise one leg and let yellow streams stain it, and garbage and ashes would freeze into it, making one big mountain of filth. But now it was all new and sparkling.
The silence was broken by somebody calling my name. I looked up and there in front of me was Saralee and Luisa.
“Didn’t you hear me callin’ you?” Saralee asked, her bottom lip poked out.
I shook my head. She had on layers and layers of sweaters and a pair of maroon pants and was bareheaded. It’s true, I thought. She does look more like a man each day. She certainly was too black and ugly with her red-headed self to be a girl.
“You think you’re cute, don’t you?” Saralee said.
“Naw,” I answered, getting nervous. “I know I’m ugly.”
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 9
