She told me later that she waited on the sidewalk under an awning with the other colored women. When a white lady drove up and asked how much she charged by the hour, Mother said thirty-five cents and was hired for three half days a week by a Mrs. Schwartz. (47)
It is little wonder that China Doll, the older sister of Francie’s friend Sukie, chooses a different kind of profession, which in her reasoning, allows her a small way to fight back.
China Doll was nice. . . . [She] often gave us a dime if she had it. . . . Once she told us that hustling was just a job to her, better than breaking her back like her mother did [on housework] for pennies a day. She said ofays were gonna get you one way or the other so you might as well make them pay for it and try to give them a dose of clap in the bargain. (120)
In spite of her “work,” China Doll has important principles of her own, and she is firm with the younger girls to “go and get [their] schooling.” She is not unaware of the undesirability of her way of life—it is the absence of options and her greater antipathy to what she considers the more oppressive nature of other things open to her that dictate her choice of this work.
The exploitive nature of the domestic work available to black women at the time, and the social denial to them of other opportunities for gainful employment based on their wishes and abilities, are further explored in the novel. There is the time when Francie’s mother is outraged at the way in which her daughter is treated on her first venture into paid work. Having agreed to accept a dollar for “just a little dusting and washing dishes and things like that for maybe five hours,” from Mrs. Rathbone and her daughter Rachel, the wife and daughter of the white candy store owner, Francie discovers she is also expected to scrub kitchen floors, sweep the carpets, and wash tenth floor windows from the outside by sitting on the ledges. On learning this, Henrietta Coffin explodes in anger at the storekeeper (although he is innocent of the matter) and assures her child:
You don’t have to do no domestic work for nobody, Francie. . . . You don’t be no fool, you hear? You finish school and go on to college. Long as I live you don’t have to scrub no white folks’ floors or wash their filthy windows. What they think I’m spending my life on my knees in their kitchens for? So you can follow in my footsteps? You finish school and go on to college. Somebody in this family got to finish school. (191-92)
Louise Meriwether is not the only black woman writer to address the problems of the black domestic worker in fiction. The earliest black novel of which we know, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, published in 1859, details the horrendous treatment that a young black orphaned girl receives during the time that she spends as a domestic drudge in the home of white caretakers. So badly is she treated in terms of the quantity and difficulty of the work, the poor food she receives and the curtailment of her rest time, that by the time she is eighteen years old and free to go into the world on her own, her health is irreparably damaged for the rest of her life. In a state in which slavery had long been abolished, this child was treated no less shamefully by the woman of the house than the most abused slave in the South. Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956), Paule Marshall’s Brown Girls, Brownstones (1959), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1972) also probe the difficulties that black women encounter in their relationships with white women who employ them to work in their homes. Marshall’s West Indian women have a profound psychological understanding of their relationship to middle-class white women and the “few raw mouth pennies” they earn each day; Childress’s protagonist is satiric in her attitudes toward her employers, and even succeeds in facing them down on occasion; Morrison’s Pauline has no respect for her superficial mistress. In every instance, the conditions of employment are so designed that only the strongest black women survive with dignity in the face of the insults they must absorb in carrying out their tasks. Henrietta Coffin is sufficiently sure of her own self-worth and pragmatic enough in her approach to the hardships of her life to have earned a place in this group. But for poor working-class black women, and even some with trade skills, only this menial work or prostitution, outside of the law, was open to them for a long time.
The denial of work choices to black women, which begins while they are girls, is further emphasized by Meriwether in a school incident in this novel. In comparison to the majority of her friends who are often left behind at the end of each school year, Francie does well in her academic subjects, but hates cooking and sewing, which she is also made to take. When she turns in a completed cookbook and a finished dress, neither of them her own work, she receives compliments from her teachers. “You might make a good seamstress one day, that’s a good living, you know,” the white sewing teacher tells her. Francie protests this narrowing of her horizon, and insists that she wants to be a secretary when she grows up. Just as other white racist teachers have disallowed the ambitions of millions of black boys and girls in America, Francie’s teacher points out to the little girl that she needs to be “practical” in her expectations, for no jobs for black women exist in the areas of her interest. In school, she is told, she needs to concentrate on the skills she will be able to exercise when she becomes an adult. To herself, the teacher wonders why courses like typing and shorthand are taught in black schools, since they can only cause frustration for students like Francie.
Despite racism of this kind, and many other factors that offer discouragements in this area, from the emancipation from slavery in the nineteenth century until the present time, education has been seen by the majority of black people as the individual’s and the group’s most dependable and desirable avenue to greater social mobility and economic advancement. As a guiding principle, it is a central issue in this novel. But it is also clear that the children of the black immigrants to the cities are rejecting the faith in education and the philosophy of hope in the American dream that their elders hold. Their measure of the rewards to be gained against the sacrifices these entail speak to their alienation from the older generation.
For the young, the politics of race generates pessimism and skepticism toward the goals and ideals of their parents. Early in his young manhood, James Junior disregards his mother’s and father’s hopes and plans for his education in spite of the dissension this creates between him and them. Choosing peer-group approval instead, he joins a street gang, and resigns himself to the beatings his father gives him for his open defiance. This action proves to be a mistake on his part, and later gets him into serious trouble with the law. The generation of the elder Coffins had asked only for an opportunity to do regular honest work for a living wage; to live modestly but decently; and to have the chance to prepare their children to take advantage of some of the social options that other Americans enjoy. Their children, by the time they become teenagers, have other ideas. They are too impatient to assume the tedious struggle against racism in a manner that yields only small, if any, personal gains, and they want to have immediate access to the “good” life, which, in their estimation, money easily procures. And they have also learned that there are other ways to get money than by hard, honest work. They choose different heroes and different goals from their fathers and mothers.
In the ultimate break with his parents’ wishes, James Junior chooses the “glamour” of the life of the pimp instead, with its promise of a regular supply of brand-new suits, suede shoes, diamond rings, a big car, and plenty of money. For a time, the Coffins see their younger boy, Sterling, who has a strong interest in science and experiments, as their “salvation,” fulfilling their wishes for upward mobility through education and a professional life. They are confident that he will complete high school and continue on to college. Once again, however, their hopes end in disappointment. After a couple of years Sterling too grows tired of the poverty that makes him look like a “rag-picker” among the more affluent white
students in his school outside of the black ghetto; of the “peanuts” he earns from shining shoes on weekends; and of anticipating the hardships he will face securing employment as a black chemist after spending years in college to learn that trade. Not wanting to confront the uncertainty of his fate through education, he gives up his ambitions to take a job with an undertaker for seven dollars a week. Our sympathies go out to Adam Coffin when he vents the depth of his disappointment and his inability to productively direct the lives of his children: “I would have gotten the money somehow,. . . I swear. I would have stolen the money if need be to get Sterling in college” (172). It is a cry of great pain. Henrietta Coffin assuages her disappointment in her sons by shifting the burden of her expectations onto the shoulders of her daughter, and once more utters the parental willingness to make the utmost sacrifice to enable a child of hers to have the advantages of a college education. Francie need not have to scrub white people’s floors.
While the larger emphasis in the novel is on the effects of the depression on the lives of the people within the black community, and on the changes in attitude toward black life in general by the first large urban-born generation of the group, Meriwether also treats the impact of outsiders on the lives of Harlemites at this time, and the effects of black crime on black families. Unlike most narratives that explore black/white interactions by looking at the ways in which blacks are treated in white settings, this novel also examines how whites who come into Harlem affect the lives of its inhabitants. Here, only black women who are domestics have contact with whites outside of Harlem, and this is reported on, not observed by readers. Two things stand out in the depiction of the influence of whites within the black community: the prevalence of sexual molestation of little girls by white men, and the economic drain on the community that results from the debilitating practices of white landlords and merchants.
More than a decade after the publication of Daddy Was a Number Runner, Audre Lorde, in her “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), would also address the issue of the sexual molestation of little girls in Harlem by white storekeepers and others like them who frequented Harlem during the daytime in the 1920s and 1930s. There is no reason to reiterate here the long history of sexual power that white men have exercised over black women’s lives since the days of slavery. However, in the narratives of Lorde and Meriwether, one a fictionalized autobiography, the other, a novel with autobiographical elements, we become aware that neither the perverse attraction some white men have had for black women, nor the desire and the opportunity to carry out their fantasies were eliminated with the emancipation proclamation or the movement from plantation to city ghetto.
As Francie tells her story we discover how early little black girls must learn to protect themselves from this abuse, and the extent to which the men—respectable tradesmen like the butcher and the baker, or the less visible men who make it their business to go into dark movie houses at the hours when unattended children are most likely to be there, or those who expose themselves for lewd purposes on rooftops or in parks—prey on the innocence of these children. Why the girls do not tell their parents of these encounters is the immediate question that comes to mind. No definitive answers are easily forthcoming, but at least partial explanations include the girls’ fear of the violence that might follow; their fear that they might not be believed, and instead, be perceived as having “evil” minds, especially in the cases involving the tradesmen; or their inability to articulate the circumstances without feeling somehow responsible for the actions of the men. One thing is clear—these children receive no sex education from mothers or older sisters. This is demonstrated when Francie has her first menstrual period. “Francie, this means you’re growing up,” her mother says, trying to calm her daughter’s anxieties over the sudden appearance of blood in her bloomers. The child waits for more—for an explanation—but all she receives is an injunction to change the soiled pad every couple of hours, and “don’t let no boys mess around with you.” Francie comments: “Then she was gone, but I didn’t understand any more about the period now than I had before, and what did messing around with boys have to do with it” (80)?
The inadequate preparation for handling the development of their sexuality, in conjunction with the kind of street knowledge girls like Francie acquire at a very early age, inevitably affect their ability to bring the problems they encounter with the men to their elders. What they do, however, is to attempt to take some control of the behavior they do not welcome. Invited by the man on her roof (who also follows her into the movies, and who is later murdered by some of the members of her brother’s gang) to come up and touch his exposed penis, Francie tells him to throw down the dime he promised he would give her if she did what he asked. As soon as he does so she disappears inside her apartment without granting his wish. On another occasion Francie and Sukie, together in the park, receive a nickel each from an old white man who wants to take a look at their genitals. They succeed in granting him the merest glimpse of their private parts. “I was glad Sukie never let any of these bums touch us,” Francie comments on this occasion. “It was bad enough having the butcher and Max the Baker always sneaking a feel, but at least they were clean” (45): In the close confines of the butcher or baker shop, Francie finds it harder to avoid the “feeling up” these men do to her every chance they get, but still does what she can to escape their preying hands. Liberation from this harrassment comes for her during the summer of her thirteenth year when she takes direct action to end it. Not surprisingly, this occurs at a time when she is feeling that “Harlem was nothing but one big garbage heap” (174). In sheer frustration with the conditions she sees—the crowded streets with garbage strewn over them, the disappointments in her family, the hopelessness most people are feeling—she brings up her knee and aims it between the legs of Max the Baker as he offers her a bag of stale cookies and tries to slide his hand across her breasts. We know that she will free herself of this harrassment because she promises herself that on the morrow she will “get” the butcher in the same way. As her body begins its transformation from child to woman, in spite of the gaps in her sexual education, she will be able to protect herself from the unwanted attentions of those who had previously been able to take advantage of her innocence.
A good deal has been debated and written in recent times in regard to black/Jewish American relationships. Antagonism and mutual sympathies, differences and similarities between the two groups have been explored and questioned on a variety of levels. With two exceptions, Meriwether’s book, in which most of the whites who interact with blacks are Jewish, does not give us a positive reading of these relationships in day-to-day Harlem life during this historical period. There are no opportunities for the two groups to meet as equals, and in addition to the sexual harrassment issue and the negative teacher-student encounters, the adults of the groups meet each other only on two levels: one, in the relationship between tenants and landlords or customers and storekeepers; the other, as domestic workers and their women employers. In both cases black people appear victimized and exploited. The two white people who do not project negative attitudes toward Harlem’s black residents are Mr. Rathbone, who owns the candy store and is often kind to Francie without ever molesting her, and Mr. Lipschwitz, the plumber, who is generous to the Coffins with the furniture his family no longer needs. He also maintains his dignity with the young girls. At the same time, Mrs. Rathbone expects Francie to do much harder work than someone her age should do.
When Harlem became predominantly black, in the early part of this century, the Jewish people who had previously been the majority living there moved to the suburbs. However, as the novel illustrates, many proceeded to hold on to city real estate and became absentee landlords, while others continued to maintain their businesses within the black community. Black tenant overcrowding, joblessness, and lack of respect for the property of others, as well as the racism of white landlords wishing to make huge profits with a minimum of i
nvestment are all blamed for the animosities between the landlords and tenants. Nonresident merchants trading in Harlem with no sense of responsibility to that place charge exhorbitant prices for inferior commodities, and cause an economic drain of profits out of the community. The racism of white Jewish women is indicated in their exploitation of the misfortunes of black women who have no alternative but to seek domestic employment from them. Still, the black reactions that emanate from these situations do not in themselves constitute a universal disapproval of Jews as a group, but rather an active dislike of those with whom black Harlem comes into contact—landlords, small storekeepers, teachers who stifle ambitions, and domestic employers. Within the general context of race and class in American society, the minority ethnic and racial search for upward mobility, and the pressures of the depression, it is not surprising that the black people in this book should feel as they do toward those white people with whom they come into contact. That the majority of these are Jews reflects the historical pattern of ethnic migration to and from the city.
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