“Nobody,” Daddy said. “When you got a district attorney as crooked as Dodge, what can you expect from the rest of them? They’re all gangsters except Mayor La Guardia and give him enough time and he’ll catch on to how it’s done.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Robinson said. “He’s a peckerwood like the rest of them. I kinda like the Little Flower though and hope he stays clean. Lord knows we need one honest man down there with them bunch of crooks. How’s your boy, Mr. Coffin? They still got him, huh?”
Mr. Robinson’s voice had changed, like most everybody’s did when they asked about James Junior, like they was talkin’ about somebody already dead.
“Yeah,” Daddy answered. “They still holding all of them.” He shook his head slowly. “I still can’t believe it’s happened, though I been warning that boy and warning him. Keep away from that gang. Stay in school and get you an education. But what you gonna do these days with these hardheaded children? I done beat him till I got sick.”
“Well, Mr. Coffin, everybody knows you’re a good family man, and you can only raise your kids to the best of your ability and that’s all you can do. And Junior was such a nice boy, too, well mannered and friendly. No, he really wasn’t the mugging type, but that friend of his. What’s his name? That Sonny. I don’t like to talk about other people’s children but he’d mug a dead man. And he wasn’t even arrested, was he?”
“No,” Daddy said. “He wasn’t in the cellar when the cops raided it.” He spoke quietly like he’d been doing ever since Junior was arrested. I thought he would have yelled and cursed something awful when he found out about it, but he didn’t. Never raised his voice, talked quiet like he was doing now, as if all his anger had gone now that Junior had finally gotten into trouble.
“I’m a grown man,” Daddy said. “I play a little poker and the numbers because I can’t see the difference between betting at the races or in Harlem. Either gambling’s a crime or it ain’t. But I’ve never hit a man in the head, black or white, and robbed him of his money.”
“Peckerwood ain’t had no business in Harlem in the middle of the night nohow,” Mr. Robinson muttered. “Heard he’d been to see that whore, Denise. Excuse me, Francie.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Robinson,” I said.
“You been down to see him yet, Mr. Coffin?”
“Four or five times. Went down there the night they arrested him and I had to threaten to tear that place apart brick by brick before they’d finally let me in, but they did. Junior told me he didn’t do it and I believe him. He may be hardheaded but my boy ain’t nobody’s liar.”
“A nice boy Junior was,” Mr. Robinson said, “and polite. Always spoke nice and polite to everybody.”
“Well, I gotta be getting on back home, Mr. Robinson,” Daddy said. “Thanks for the fiver. You get another good dream like that let me know so I can put something on it myself.”
“I’ll do just that,” Mr. Robinson said. “Nice seein’ you again, too, Francie, and soon’s you want that haircut you let me know.”
We walked back down to Fifth Avenue, me slipping and sliding on the icy streets and holding on to Daddy’s hand. The snow was banked up in the gutters in raggedy piles, taller than me, and it was filthy with dog pee and garbage just like I’d known it would be. But I hardly noticed it or the cold. I was still thinking about Junior. The Tombs. That’s where he was. That sounded like he was already dead, too, but he wasn’t, and I wished people would stop talking about him like he was gone forever.
When we got back to Fifth Avenue three of the skinniest black people I’d ever seen was standing in front of Max the Baker’s window looking at the rolls inside. The woman was no bigger than a minute and the two men beside her not much larger. We watched them for a moment and it didn’t take a magician to see that they were hungry. Then they turned and walked down the avenue.
Slim Jim passed by and said: “You were right, Mr. Coffin. It’s a four in the middle. Thanks for the tip. I got it for a dollar.”
“Me, too,” Daddy said. He rushed into the bakery and came out a few seconds later with a bagful of rolls. Running down the street he caught up with the three people just as they were crossing 117th Street.
Daddy brought them back to the stoop with him, each one of them devouring one of Max’s cinnamon buns. “This here is my little girl, Francie,” Daddy said, introducing me to Mrs. Snipes, her husband, Tom, and her brother, Joshua. “They’re gonna sleep downstairs in the basement tonight. Run upstairs and ask your mother if we got an extra blanket they can use.”
I opened my mouth to say we didn’t have any extra blankets and was sleeping under old coats ourselves, but I kept quiet and went on upstairs and did like I was told.
“We ain’t got no extra blankets,” Mother said. “What your father think? If we had any extra blankets we’d be using them ourselves.”
The next morning was Saturday and I went down to the basement to visit Lilah. That was her name, and if she hadn’t been so skinny and puny looking she might have been pretty with her brown-skin self.
We sat on two old stained mattresses, with the stuffing coming out, piled in front of the furnace. That’s where they had slept, with all those rats running loose. But I guess even with the rats, sleeping in front of the furnace was better than being out in the cold.
Lilah said they were from Virginia, sharecroppers, but things had been so poorly down there that after her baby died they decided to come north where things might be better. But now, having no home at all, they were sorry they had ever left the south.
“You had a baby?” I asked.
She nodded. “A little girl. She died when she was a week old.” She touched her flat chest. “I didn’t have no milk.”
Her husband and brother had gone out early that morning to try and hustle up a day’s work.
“They ain’t gonna find nothing,” Lilah said, “but they scared to break the habit of looking, like that might jinx them or something.”
Daddy brought home some greens and salt pork around midday and Mother cooked them and made some corn bread and gave me some to take down to the basement.
Tom and Joshua were quiet and soft-spoken. They smiled at me when I handed them the food and said: “Thank you, ma’am.” It was the first time anybody had ever called me ma’am and it made me feel funny and grown-up.
I took them down one meal a day after that, whatever we had. Mother got so hard up that she had to fall back on that gold-can jive. She didn’t even have no tomatoes to doctor it up with and we was eating it warmed up straight from the can.
I had told Mother, laughing all the while, how Daddy had refused Mr. Lipschwitz’s couch, saying ours was in excellent condition. Now I was sorry I had opened my big mouth ’cause Mr. Lipschwitz’s couch appeared in our living room a few days later and Mother and Sterling hauled our old wreck down to the basement.
Daddy had a fit when he saw the new couch and stormed into the kitchen to find Mother. “I told that old Jew we didn’t want his hand-me-down furniture,” he said.
“How come you told him that when our old couch was looking so bad?” Mother asked.
“Because I didn’t want it, woman. Can’t you understand plain English?”
“All the insides was hanging out of our couch and the living room looked so tacky I was ashamed to have anybody stop by. Mr. Lipschwitz always gives us his old furniture. How come you—”
“Because I just didn’t want it.”
Mother sighed. “I don’t know how Francie been sleeping on that old couch with those springs punching her in her bones all these months.”
The new sofa did sleep much better than the old one and the bugs hadn’t gotten into the springs yet but I knew they was coming and I felt real bad now like me and Mother had ganged up on Daddy.
Daddy didn’t say another word to Mother, just marched into the front room and sat down on the piano stool, staring at the piano keys.
“You gonna play, Daddy?” I rubbed my head against his shoulder.
He patted me absent-minded, and then pushed me gently away, still staring at those keys like they would unlock the door to somewhere. He stayed like that for about an hour, then he got up and went out and didn’t come back all night.
We were still off relief, and what with Daddy’s commissions all going to Jocko to pay for Junior’s lawyer, and feeding the people in the basement, we were even running out of the gold-can jive which I swear was horsemeat, it was that stringy and strong.
About a week later me and Mother met Sonny’s grandmother in the street. She said she had just come from the relief office and had gotten a clothing allowance for Sonny.
“Lord, how did you manage that?” Mother asked.
“I put some soap in my mouth,” Mrs. Taylor said, “and when they got to acting like they wasn’t gonna give me anything I just started foaming at the mouth like a mad dog.”
Mother smiled. “We ain’t on relief at all. We been cut off for months.”
“Mrs. Coffin, don’t let them folks down there mess with you. President Roosevelt said that money was to keep poor folks from starving and God knows he had to be talking about us. Just go on down there and act bad and they’ll put you back on relief just to get rid of you.”
Mother said she would do it but the next day when she kept me out of school and hauled me down to the relief office with her, I knew she wasn’t about to pitch no fit.
The relief place was across the street from Mt. Morris Park and all we did was sit around that office all day long, seeing one supervisor then waiting years to see the supervisor’s supervisor. What a system. We had been there since nine o’clock and had seen four people and it was almost three now.
I was standing next to Mother who was sitting at the desk of our fifth interviewer. This one, whose bumpy, thin face was screwed into a frown like she was smelling pee all day long, was the head flunky, I hoped. She preached at Mother like she was a thief for trying to get even so all our checks wouldn’t have to go to Mr. Burnett. We had sinned. She made that clear.
“Even if your husband didn’t report his janitor’s job, Mrs. Coffin, you should have done so,” she said. “After all, it’s a mother’s duty to be truthful and God-fearing and set an example for her children. Do you know you violated a section of the emergency relief code?”
Mother nodded slowly, accepting her guilt. She didn’t report that she, too, was working, bootlegging domestic work, and if she was gonna rat on anybody it should be on herself.
She spoke softly, agreeing with everything the supervisor said. She had been wrong not to report her husband’s job and she would never do that again the Lord knew but her children were hungry so please forgive us our sins this one time and give us our daily bread and another supply of dried prunes and butter and that gold-can shit.
I sat there looking like a ragpicker in my scuffed sneakers and patched skirt, one of Mother’s hungry children, wide-eyed and innocent.
Go fuck yourself, I said silently to the pimply face humbling my mother. The supervisor suddenly looked like Madame Queen, all of them did, although they were white. I was too mad to cry. I would have yelled out loud or hit the woman were it not for the look on my mother’s face. Where had I seen that look before? At whose funeral?
Never beg nobody for nothing.
Then suddenly I knew. Mother was beating herself with the thick end of the razor strop.
We walked out of the relief office fast, glad to get away from that place. Mother was blinking and sniffing and I looked at her, scared. Was that a tear in the corner of her eye? Everybody had a right to cry when they got a whipping. Everybody. I grabbed hold of her hand as we was crossing the street and held on to it hard. She squeezed it lightly, looking down at me. Her eyes were dry. Holding on to each other we stumbled on home.
We got back on relief too late to help our basement friends. They left before we even got our first check, saying they were going to try and hitchhike back to Virginia where at least they wouldn’t freeze to death while starving.
I hated to see them go. If we had been able to feed them more often and with something else besides that damned horsemeat, maybe they would have stayed up here. I thought about James Junior and Vallie cooped up in jail and China Doll and Sukie and everybody’s mother and mine begging our way back on relief. I even thought about old mannish Saralee. We were all mixed up in something together, us colored up here in the north, something I couldn’t quite figure out. But it was better up here than down south. That’s what I’d always heard people say, that folks down in Bip were just dying for a chance to come north to the promised land. This was the promised land, wasn’t it?
Mother never did tell Daddy how we got back on relief and he never did ask her. Had he known, he would have disowned us both.
NINE
A MONTH after they was arrested James Junior and three other boys were let loose. It was a nice Christmas present but nobody could get too hysterical over it ’cause Vallie and the Washington boys were still in jail. They had confessed to mugging that white man to death and were gonna be tried for murder. They swore that the others had nothing to do with it and weren’t even present.
While they were about it they also confessed to three other muggings and holding up two pawnshops. Before that, though, Sonny had gone downtown all by himself and told them that James Junior had been in the Jewel Theatre with him when that man got killed and when they left the movie Junior had gone to the gang’s hangout while Sonny went home. Everybody said that was a real brave thing for Sonny to do since they could have snatched his butt, too, while he was down there, him being an Ebony Earl and all.
Daddy went to get James Junior and bring him home. Mother cried and hugged him and cried some more. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. Sterling shook James Junior’s hand, pumping it up and down and grinning like a fool, then they flung each other’s hands away and hugged. James Junior kissed me all over my face. We were laughing and grabbing hold of Junior like we couldn’t get enough of him.
Then we all sat down to dinner together like we hadn’t done in a long time. Mother must have borrowed something from everybody in the neighborhood, ’cause we had string beans with ham hocks and potatoes, pickled beets, corn bread, and Junior’s favorite for dessert, apple dumplings.
While me and Mother did the dishes, Junior and Sterling helped Daddy practice for a party he was going to that night. Then we was all in the front room hanging around the piano and laughing at nothing like we was crazy.
“Oh, Lord,” Mother said suddenly, flinging her hand up over her mouth, “we over here laughing out loud and forgot all about poor Mrs. Caldwell.”
“Yeah,” Junior said, his smile fading, “I gotta see her. Every time she goes to visit Vallie she cries so hard that he don’t want her to come down there no more. He told me to tell her that. That he loves her but he don’t want her to make herself sick like she been doin’ coming down there and getting upset.”
Even though Robert hadn’t wanted Mrs. Caldwell to go down to the jail, like Daddy wouldn’t let Mother go, Mrs. Caldwell went anyhow, saying a boy in trouble had to have at least one parent come to see him and the devil himself wasn’t gonna keep her home.
“Well, let’s go over the roof and see her now,” Daddy said. “I’ve got to leave soon for my party.”
We trooped over the roof and it was just like a funeral over there, the whole family sitting around very quiet not discussing the news.
Mrs. Caldwell was rocking Elizabeth’s baby in her lap. Back and forth the rocker squeaked, the only sound in the room. It was worse than a wake. Mr. Caldwell’s wake, in fact, had been nice, all the neighbors bringing in food and wine. The only time it was real sad was at the cemetery when Mrs. Caldwell started wailing. But this was worse ’cause there was no eating and drinking and no funeral coming and no Vallie to put away decently in the ground.
The next day the boys’ pictures were in the Times, the three of them lookin’ thin and scared. The Washington boys
had been up to our house that time Daddy hit the number and we had a party. I read now that Luke was the ring-leader of the gang. The paper said:
“Three undersized Negro schoolboys confessed to having killed Lester Farley of 2842 Broadway, a month ago, in a Harlem hallway at 14 W. 118th St. The youthful trio admitted to having terrorized white men in their community for at least a year and confessed to three other holdups.
“The oldest boy, Luke Washington, 18, is regarded as the brains of the gang. He told how he and his brother, Calvin, 17, and Vallejo Caldwell, 16, ‘mugged’ Farley and robbed him of twenty dollars. ‘Mugging’ is a method by which one grips a victim’s neck while an accomplice goes through his pockets.
“The dead man was a salesman in a shoe store on 116th Street, was married and had two daughters, 7 and 13. All three defendants are members of a notorious street gang, the Ebony Earls.”
That was the first time I knew that the dead man had two daughters and I wondered why he had been roamin’ around on Harlem rooftops and in the movies when he had such a nice family at home. The papers didn’t say what he was doing on 118th Street when he was killed, but everybody knew he’d been visiting Denise, the prostitute.
When I saw Sonny in the street a few days later, I marched right up to him, but after mumbling “hello” I got tongue-tied and stood there forever before I finally got out what I wanted to say.
“I wanna thank you, Sonny, for doing what you did for James Junior.”
Sonny looked across the street. “Well, Junior’s my buddy, you know. We’s tight.”
“It was still a brave thing to do. Daddy said you could have been arrested, too, when you went down there.”
“Aw, Francie, it wasn’t nothin’.” He looked down at his shoes with sudden interest, like he just noticed he was wearing them.
I wanted to kiss his cheek like the girls do in the movies when they want to tell a guy they’d like to be just friends, but I didn’t know how to do it, so I mumbled again how brave he was and backed away.
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 11
