Daddy Was a Number Runner

by Louise Meriwether

  “They told me downstairs,” Mrs. Maceo said. “Soon’s I get my breath I’ll go on down to the jail. You eat yet?”

  Sukie shook her head. “I ain’t hungry.”

  Mrs. Maceo fell down into a chair, her moriney face pulled into a tighter frown than usual.

  “Hello, Mrs. Maceo.”

  “Francie. That you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m sorry, Francie, I didn’t see you. There you are, sitting right before me bigger than life and I didn’t see you.”

  Then to my horror she started to cry, her face crumpling up like tissue paper, as if not seeing me had set her off. Sukie ran to her mother and fell on her breast but Mrs. Maceo pushed her away.

  “I want you to remember this day,” she said, her voice harsh. “It wasn’t enough for your sister to be a no-good whore. No. She had to go and kill that pimp, too. Kill him. But she never would listen to me. Never heard a word I said. Now you see what a bad end she done come to. And you, miss, you’re trying to step right into her shoes, I can see that already. You’re hardheaded just like your sister. Hardheaded and sassy. Won’t go to school, won’t learn nothing. You’re a trial to me, Sukie, a trial.”

  Sukie backed away from her mother. She slid into the wall, pushing herself into a corner like she was trying to climb to the other side.

  “You gonna put me in my grave too before my time?” her mother asked. “You gonna be a no-good whore like your sister?”

  “No,” Sukie whispered, shaking her head violently. “No. No!”

  Mrs. Maceo sighed. “I ain’t got nothin’ but my children and sometimes they’s more than I can bear.” She turned her eyes, dry now, on me. “Francie, run home and ask your mother if she’ll go to the jail with me in about a half hour.”

  As I went out the door I tried to avoid looking at Sukie huddled in the corner, chewing on her bottom lip to keep from crying. I crossed over the roof and ran down the stairs to our apartment. I pushed against the door but it wouldn’t open.

  “Mother,” I screamed in sudden panic. “Mother. Mother.” I didn’t even know if she was home from work yet, but in a moment she opened the door.

  “What is it, Francie? What’s the matter?”

  I rushed past her. “The door wouldn’t open. I pushed and pushed.” I swallowed and the lump in my throat went away and with it the urge to scream. “Alfred’s dead,” I said as I followed Mother into the kitchen. “China Doll done killed him.”

  “I know. Mrs. Caldwell told me through the window soon’s I came home. That’s why you was screamin’? I thought somebody was chasin’ you or somethin’.”

  “I . . . I just got scared. The door wouldn’t open.”

  “You know it sticks sometime. What scared you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Nothin’.”

  We looked at each other and for a moment I thought she was gonna hug me. We swayed toward each other but neither of us swayed hard enough. Finally, I said: “Mrs. Maceo wants you to go to the jail with her. In a half hour.”

  “All right,” Mother said. She passed a hand over her eyes for a moment, and I thought, she’s tired, she’s always tired, but I never heard her say so.

  After she left I sat on the fire escape leaning against the brick wall and shivering, although it was a warm Indian summer night. I pulled my legs up to my chest and thought about poor China Doll cooped up in jail. Why had she killed Alfred? He had whipped her before and she hadn’t killed him. Had he beaten her up again? I remembered her black eye and those scratches on her face that time. Then a dark thought came to me, so horrible it made me want to throw up. I ground my fists in my eyes and banged my head against the wall, trying to knock some sense in me. But I couldn’t shut that thought out. I couldn’t still the sound of China’s voice telling Alfred to keep his evil eye off her sister.

  I remembered that spark of light I had seen while peeking through Sukie’s window. Vincent didn’t have no diamond ring to catch the light of the moon. I banged my head up against the wall again. No. No. It couldn’t be. I was getting addlebrained just like Mother always said I would.

  Again I saw that flash of light in the darkness and heard the man’s low voice. Vincent’s voice was high, wasn’t it? It was Alfred who always spoke in a low rumble. And Sukie would have told me about it right away, showing off, if she had been with Vincent. That’s why she kept it a secret, because it wasn’t Vincent. It was …

  A stranger. A stranger with a deep voice like Alfred’s and a diamond ring. My heart stopped it’s frantic pounding and I shuddered with relief. That was it.

  I felt dizzy and came inside from the fire escape and went to bed, not even bothering to pull the couch away from the wall. I lay there, absentmindedly smashing bedbugs. Yes, that was it all right. A strange man had been with Sukie, and in the morning I would ask her who he was.

  “Who was he, Sukie?”

  “Alfred,” she said. “Duke, Sonny, Slim Jim, Pee Wee, Max the Baker, Vincent. Your daddy.”

  She laughed and her teeth turned into a sparkling diamond ring which kept turning off and on like a neon light, off and on to the sound of her crazy laughter.

  I woke up, frightened, and didn’t go back to sleep until long after Mother came home.

  Who was it, Sukie? Who was it? Every time I saw her I silently asked that question. But I knew she was never going to tell me. She had gone away somewhere inside herself, and she’d never tell me anything anymore.

  They was still holding China Doll. Alfred had hit her again and everybody said he was too lowdown even for a pimp and how low down can you get?

  About a week later I was walking down 118th Street just wandering around, when I saw Daddy. He fell in step with me and we walked on down to Fifth Avenue.

  “How you been, Francie?”

  “Just fine, thank you.”

  “Do you want to go to the show? I got a quarter I think I can spare.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Your mother all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Tell her I’m gonna try and bring her the rent money tomorrow. I got a hunch seven twenty-two’s gonna play today and I got a dollar on it.”

  I didn’t answer him. When we got to the corner I waited to see which way he was turning and I started in the other direction.

  “Francie.”

  I sighed loudly. “Yes?” but didn’t turn around.

  “You sure you don’t wanna go to the show?”

  “I’m sure, thank you,” and I walked away.

  Ever since that time I had followed him down the stairs I wouldn’t take any money from him but he acted like nothing was wrong and kept trying to give me a quarter and once even a whole dollar, but I refused it politely, and I never went looking for him anymore either.

  He wasn’t the only one acting like nothing had happened. Only last week when Sterling made some sassy remark about Daddy not living there no more and good riddance, Mother grabbed him. She spun him around so fast and slapped his face so hard he was stunned. “Your father is still the head of this house,” she told him, holding on to his shoulder and looking him straight in the eye, “and as long as you live you will respect your father.”

  I walked on down the street for half a block, then turned around and watched Daddy trudging down the avenue. Somehow, he didn’t seem as big as he used to, and it wasn’t until later I realized that he hadn’t hollered at me for being in 118th Street and run me out.

  SATURDAY I was looking out the front-room window when the strangest feeling hit me. It was too cold to sit on the fire escape so I was leaning on the windowsill looking at the boys across the street in front of the drugstore. They was acting the fool as usual, their knickers hanging loose, their caps on backward, whistling at the girls and falling out at their own jokes. As I watched them they didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden, just full of fun, and I didn’t want them to fall off the roof or cut each other or be hauled off to jail but just to stay there, sa
fe and sound forever, laughing in front of the drugstore. I forgave them for making me hate to walk past them while they shouted:

  “Shake that thing. Lord, look at that child walk.”

  “She’s got a naturally educated behind.”

  “Little brown baby, ain’t you got some sweet lovin’ for me?”

  I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow. I’m getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must of caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.

  That night when I went to bed I closed my eyes and heard the hoofbeats in the distance coming closer. “Here I am,” I whispered. He rode up in the moonlight, and bending down from his horse, pulled me up onto the saddle. But it wasn’t Ken Maynard. For weeks now when I put myself to sleep dreaming about my hero his features had been getting dimmer and dimmer. Now Ken Maynard was gone forever and my rider was faceless and didn’t have no color at all. We rode down Fifth Avenue, past Central Park and the Empire State Building, and up into the moonlight. But no matter how hard I tried in the weeks and months to come, I couldn’t fill in his features or make him either white or black.

  IT was on the radio and when I went downstairs in the morning it was splashed all over the newspaper on Mr. Rathbone’s stand. The racketeers had shot down Dutch Schultz and three of his henchmen. They was all dead or dying. I stood outside the candy store and read the story slowly, turning the page when it continued, ’cause it was more exciting than a movie. Then Mr. Rathbone came outside and said I shouldn’t muss up his paper if I wasn’t going to buy it, but I had finished reading it by then so I folded the newspaper back up and handed it to him with a sweet smile. He had stopped saving his day-old papers for me after Mother chewed him out that time about his fat daughter, Rachel.

  When Sterling came home for lunch, I gave him a blow by blow description of how Dutch Schultz had been sitting in a tavern in New Jersey when he got his. I felt like we knew old Dutch, since he was head of the numbers and all.

  “You think them gangsters gonna come and shoot up Jocko’s store maybe, Sterling?”

  He bit into the potted-meat sandwich I had fixed for him and looked at me darkly as if the food pained him somewhere. “You sure sound bloody, Francie. Why’d anybody want to shoot up Jocko?”

  “I didn’t say anybody would, I only asked if maybe the gangsters would be fightin’ over the numbers racket and …”

  “You don’t read the papers very good,” Sterling said, “else you’d know that a guy named Lucky something or other done took over the numbers from Dutch Schultz months ago ever since Dewey been trying to send old Dutch up the river.”

  “You already read about it?” I asked. “How come you let me tell you all that crap if you’ve already read it?”

  “Because I was too tired to tell you to shut up.”

  “The undertaker let you read while you’re suppose to be workin’?”

  “He don’t let me, I just do.”

  “I would think you’d be so scared of all them dead bodies lying around that you wouldn’t take your eyes off of them for a minute.”

  “I ain’t scared of nothin’ living or dead and stop pesterin’ me, will you?”

  Somebody knocked at the door.

  “Go answer it,” Sterling said.

  It was the white salesman from the jewelry store, a freckle-faced big man who said he came to collect on the radio.

  “My mother ain’t home,” I said.

  “Well, then, I’ll have to repossess the radio,” he said, pushing the door open wider and coming in.

  “Sterling,” I hollered.

  Sterling came into the dining room. “What you want?” he asked the man.

  “He said he gotta repossess the radio,” I told him.

  “You’re two weeks past due in your payments,” the man said, “and it’s the policy of our store to—”

  “You mean you think you gonna walk in here and take our radio just like that?” Sterling asked.

  “Unless you pay up the arrears right now, I’ll be forced—”

  “You’ll be forced to fall down all five flights of those stairs and break your fool neck if you take one step further,” Sterling said. “I been paying two dollars a week on that radio myself for the past three months and it ain’t worth a dime more. In fact, it ain’t worth half of that.”

  “Your mother signed a contract agreeing to pay two dollars a week for—”

  “For the rest of her life?” Sterling asked.

  I had often seen Daddy threaten to throw white people down the stairs if they didn’t get out of his house, like the time the electric man came to read the meter and caught the jumper in and wanted five dollars or he would rat on us, but this was the first time I had seen old Sterling in action, and he was just as good as Daddy. When he got through ranting and raving, that salesman turned beet-red and raced back down those stairs under his own steam.

  Sterling shut the door and dusted off his hands. He looked at me and we both burst out laughing.

  “Francie,” he said, and when he smiled like that he looked just like James Junior, “today we own us a ra-di-o.”

  CHINA Doll was finally released. Justifiable homicide, they said. Sterling explained that meant you could protect yourself if somebody was beating you.

  I went looking for Sukie to tell her the good news. Maybe we should go around the block and welcome China Doll home. I walked up and down the streets looking for Sukie and when I got back to her stoop I found her sitting there, elbows on her knees, her head propped in her hands.

  “Hey,” I yelled, “they let China Doll go.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Sukie said, not looking up.

  “Ain’t you glad?” I asked. Then I noticed that she was crying.

  “I wish they had kept her in jail forever,” she said.

  My heart stopped beating. “Why?” I whispered. “Because she killed Alfred?”

  “No. Who cares about that bastard? He never shoulda been born.”

  “Then why, Sukie? Why?”

  “Because everybody thinks I’m gonna be just like her. That’s all my mother ever tells me. And I’m not gonna be like her, Francie. I ain’t gonna be no whore.”

  “I don’t think you gonna be a whore, Sukie.”

  “You ain’t grown. You don’t count.”

  “Move over,” I said, and sat down beside her. There was nothing else to say. Either you was a whore like China Doll or you worked in a laundry or did day’s work or ran poker games or had a baby every year. We sat there, Sukie rubbing her nose with the back of her hand and sniffling and me getting ready to join her any minute.

  Sterling walked up. “What you two dopes sitting here crying for?” he asked.

  “Sukie don’t wanna be no whore like China Doll and I don’t like livin’ around here no more. I hate it.”

  “Move over,” Sterling said, and sat down between us.

  The sun was sinking fast and soon a dusty blanket of darkness would settle over the avenue, hiding some of its filth, but not all. The street was filled with colored people scurrying in and out of doorways, coming and going, crowding each other off the sidewalk. It was all too depressing. James Junior hadn’t come to see Mother like he promised and I guess he didn’t have a job after all, at least not an honest one. Vallie and them were going to get the electric chair and if they did get an appeal they’d be behind bars the rest of their life, so what was the difference? And Daddy didn’t come home anymore.

  I tried to get again that nice feeling I had for all of Harlem a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t. We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that was that.

  “Mother says we’re gonna move off of Fifth Avenue one of these days,” I said, turning to Sterling.

  He grunted something under his breath, then said it out loud.

  “Shit.”

  The word hung between us
in the silence. Then I sighed and repeated it.

  “Shit.”

  Afterword

  Daddy Was a Number Runner is the single fictional account in our literature of a year in the life of a young, black, adolescent girl, growing up in Harlem in the middle of the Great Depression. This fact alone gives it major historical importance, for the time was one that left deep and lasting impressions on Afro-Americans as well as all other Americans who lived through it. Within the female tradition that this book represents, it shares similarities with and divergences from Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), a novel that explores some of the experiences of another black girl coming to early woman-hood, but in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, toward the end of the same period.

  While Daddy Was a Number Runner is not autobiographical, it speaks to conditions that the author observed when she was a child. Sociological and historical studies of Harlem and the making of the black ghetto, with their statistics on crime and deviance, and their psychological profiles of juvenile delinquents and runaway fathers, appear almost meaningless as we become intimate with the flesh-and-blood people in Daddy Was a Number Runner. The data such documents provide are an inadequate measure of the feelings, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, and failures of people whose laughter and tears are of equal intensity, both welling up from the very core of their beings. As readers, critics, and outsiders, we are unable to pass judgment on the people or the circumstances in this novel by separating them into categories clearly defined as good and bad or right and wrong; not even when we consider such widely divided issues as the ambiguous illegality of playing the numbers, or the moral and judicial ramifications of a mugging that results in a man’s death. But we leave this book with a better understanding of the challenges presented each day to each of its main characters, and we have a greater appreciation for the victories of those who survive.

  Daddy Was a Number Runner, a growing-up story, belonging to a “skinny and black and bad looking [young girl] with . . . short hair and [a] long neck and all that naked space in between” (14), also belongs to all of the people who make up Francie’s world—all of the men and women and children who love and hate each other, who quarrel and fight among themselves, but who are also capable of expressing concern and tenderness for each other at moments when we least expect them to do so. These are people who feel deeply about everything, because for each one, life is a constant struggle against a barrage of circumstances that threaten to destroy all of their humanity. Like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), this narrative is the personal side of the story of living and growing up feeling entrapped by race and class in the black urban ghetto between the two great wars. And in addition to the limitations placed on the male protagonists in Baldwin’s and Brown’s books, the heroine of Daddy Was a Number Runner must cope with the problems that her gender raises. These three works, reflecting the unquantifiable side of human experiences, are riddled with contradictions and ambiguities, and tell the stories that only poets and artists have been sufficiently gifted to manifest from the beginning of human time.