One of the most moving subplots within this novel deals with the way in which crime was beginning to affect black families in Harlem in the 1930s. In fact, the events delineated here demand that the reader attempt to understand the disastrous impact of race and class prejudice on human behavior, and to recognize how unmeasurable is the waste and suffering these cause, not only to blacks, but also to whites. The West Indian Caldwells, the family severely affected, are immigrants in search of a better life for their children. Far from being irresponsible parents, Mr. Caldwell, we are told, “was awfully strict with them, but he loved his boys.” Mrs. Caldwell does her best to establish a compromise between a demanding father and his strong-willed sons, and to keep them from following undesirable paths. Both parents and children, however, find their lives tragically entangled with urban crime, and Mr. Caldwell dies of pneumonia. The pathos in the portrayal of the fate of the two sons raises many disquieting questions for us. How, for instance, do we react to Mrs. Caldwell’s heartrending cry when she learns of her younger son’s conviction for murder: “It took me sixteen years to raise that boy. . . . How could a handful of people decide in two hours that he ain’t fit to live” (155)?
When these lines accost our “priviledged” eyes, what do we actually hear in the words of the poor-but-law-abiding widow and welfare mother, who even before this final catastrophe was hard pressed to cope with the reality of one son for whom jail was already a “second home‘? Do we question the existence of a relationship between Mr. Cladwell’s death and his two sons taking “to the streets like wild animals?” Do we consider the possibility that the father may have died because he forced his physical strength beyong its boundary in a determined effort to overcome his economic deprivation? West Indians, we know, have been wont to believe that black Americans would be socially and economically better off if they only worked harder. Is it possible that the Caldwell sons rebelled against that ethic because they perceived only futility in their father’s life of work, no matter how hard he willed it otherwise? Mrs. Caldwell mourns because, in spite of everything she had done to raise her sons “right,” she has failed. Do we question the justice that sets a mobster boss free because he is able to “[pay] off the jury,” but which then sends poor young black boys to die even though everyone, including the judge who sentenced them, knows that their “confessions” were beaten out of them?
How do we understand the pain of the black mother and still find sympathy for the survivors of the crime, the young white widow and her two little girls? To them, the murdered man was the husband and father they loved, the stable provider in their well-ordered family. They know only that he was brutally and senselessly killed. They do not know of the hidden side of his respectable life: his offences of child molestation in dark movie houses and on Harlem rooftops, and his penchant for regularly visiting a black prostitute. But are these actions sufficient for us to justify or even pardon the taking of his life? If not, do we concur with the jury (not of their peers) that the three young convicted men-boys are shiftless, irresponsible animals, deserving of the “nothing” they have received from life, even though they live in a world in which everyone, even the losers, know that “a man’s got to have something . . . so he knows he’s a man” (65)? Or do we see them as victims of a society in which the cards are so stacked against them that their tragic end is inevitable?
There are no tidy answers to the questions raised by the particular events in this book. Neither the myth of Horatio Alger, which categorically condemns those who fail for their lack of initiative, nor the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, which exonerates failure on the basis of human impotence against the forces of the environment, applies here. If we respond honestly to this text we know that a combination of forces are at work, and that the social realities of class, race, and gender oppression, which are intricately woven into the fabric of this story, make it impossible to impute blame or withhold sympathy through simplistic analysis of the circumstances. If the boys must be held responsible for their actions (and I think they must be), then so should Dutch Schultz, the shoe salesman, and the white men and women who use their privileged status to take advantage of those for whom that privilege is never possible.
One of the strengths of this book is the balance that Meriwether creates in showing positive and negative aspects in the lives of her characters. In spite of the depression, the rise of crime, and the ways in which race, class, and gender impinge on the humanity of black people, there are evidences of another side of the experience. Francie reads fairy tales until she discovers books by and about black people: books like Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928). Her sense of self is heightened when she discovers that someone has written about the same “raggedy streets” she traverses and the “clowns” on Fifth Avenue who often annoy her. She finds this literature from life “very funny and kind of sad,” but it gives her ammunition to use in her own development. Other aspects of Harlem life are also positive. For fifteen cents, we learn, it is possible to have a hearty meal of golden brown chicken, bread, and vegetables at Father Divine’s headquarters. A decade after Marcus Garvey had stirred the racial pride of millions of black Americans, his name and his philosophy are still heard on the corners where street speakers hold forth. Henrietta Coffin, born a Methodist, regularly attends Abyssinia Baptist Church, along with thousands of other black people, to hear Adam Clayton Powell expound on white racism, the problems of Haile Selassie, and the terrible lynchings taking place in different parts of the country. Adam Coffin does not go to church, but he admires Powell for having been responsible for the opening of a free food kitchen that fed thousands of starving Harlemites during this difficult period. Activists mobilize sentiments to support the Scottsboro Boys, and when the “Brown Bomber” defeats the “Butcher Boy” all Harlem celebrates:
Strangers hugged me and I squeezed them back. It was good to feel their touch…. The crowd spilled off the pavement into the street, stalling cars, which honked good-naturedly and then gave up as the riders jumped out and joined us lindying down the middle of Lenox Avenue (194).
The misery of the families unable to meet their bills and breaking apart in the wake of an inhuman welfare system, has its opposite dimension in the life of Henrietta Coffin’s sister, Francie’s Aunt Hazel. Unhampered by husband or children, and holding down a steady live-in domestic job in the suburbs, Aunt Hazel’s existence appears carefree in comparison to that of people like the Coffins. On Thursdays, when she is off from work, she stays in her Harlem apartment and entertains her West Indian friend, Mr. Mulberry, a live-in handyman who also has Thursdays off. Francie likes her aunt, who has long hair that she wears in a bun on the top of her head, is always jolly, drinks gin and wine, and smells “nice, like cake baking.” She never minds the missions that take her to visit Aunt Hazel (“to borrow money I was never sent to pay back”), and not only for the food (fried-fish sandwiches, cake, and milk), which she always gets when she is there, but also because of her aunt’s genuine warmth and the order in her home. In spite of the funky hallways in Aunt Hazel’s building, just like all the other hallways in Harlem, her tiny rooms are spotless, and everything is in its place. Her space is “not junky like ours,” Francie says. Although only a minor character in the novel, Aunt Hazel’s generosity toward her almost destitute family is another indication of the presence of human kindness and family cooperation even in so bleak a landscape.
Daddy Was a Number Runner ends on notes that reinforce the idea that hope continues to live in spite of the failures that have characterized the lives of many American blacks throughout their history. As the narrative moves to its conclusion, there are moments when Francie feels, in spite of all that is wrong with her community, that it is still a place that has value. On a particular Saturday morning soon after her thirteenth birthday, as she watches a group of young boys across the street from her apartment “acting the fool as usual,” she has a strong sense of the joy of life in their loud and carefree laughter: “I wanted to hug t
hem all,” she tells us. “We belonged to each other somehow. . . . [T]he sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything but my own rusty self” (184). At other times, when dramatic changes seem impossible, she feels despondent. For instance, the suggestion of her friend Sukie that as adult women “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” (207) depresses her. Borrowing sparingly from Ann Petry’s naturalistic novel, The Street, in which a poor but ambitious young black woman is destroyed by the malignant Harlem environment, Meriwether has Francie raise the question of whether her Fifth Avenue is a trap of poverty and despair from which she and her family can never escape. From one angle, it looks this way, for in this text, race, class, and gender are powerful obstacles that constantly defy the possibilities of success. But this novel steers a clear path away from the pessimism of naturalism. Significantly, it is Henrietta Coffin, welfare mother and exploited domestic worker, deserted by her husband, with her dreams for her sons having fallen away, and with no tangible proof that her life will ever be better, who is not trapped in the “coffin” of her spirit. Her voice echoes the self-confidence of millions like herself who, in the face of dreams deferred, hold on. When her daughter inquires of her if they will ever be free to leave the street, Henrietta Coffin thinks, then responds: “One of these days, Francie, we gonna move off these mean streets” (175). Her statement is a celebration of the power of the human spirit.
Daddy Was a Number Runner is a well-crafted work of art that captures the essence of a historical time and place in the experiences of black people, but especially of the extent to which black women suffer, face failures not of their own making, take responsibility for themselves and their families, and sometimes transcend the difficulties of their lives even when their men fail them. Told in the voice of the adolescent narrator, through Francie’s eyes, readers have a front-seat view, devoid of moralizing or sensationalism, of how a young girl felt in that place and in that time. Faithful to the idea of the complex nature of experience, Meriwether does not blame the men for their inability to secure work, nor does she castigate them (Adam Coffin, for instance) for their inability to remain stoically with their families through the worst times. Her sympathetic portrayal of the ways in which circumstances beyond their control undermine their pride in themselves is skillfully handled. At the same time, because Meriwether respects the men’s humanity, her treatment of them is never condescending and she makes no apologies for them. In the final analysis, she leaves them responsible for their actions without passing moral judgments on their failures.
Finally, this book is largely a tribute to poor, uneducated, black women, who, through centuries of watching their men being ground down by poverty and racism continue to live each day with the assurance that conditions will improve. Expecting little for themselves, not from lack of self-worth, but because they understand the politics of race, gender, economics, and power, they scrub floors, wash windows, and absorb racist and sexist insults, so that their children can have better lives than their own. In the contrast in the portraits of Henrietta Coffin and the other mothers with Aunt Hazel, Meriwether demonstrates how even the family oppresses women. Aunt Hazel escapes the worst aspects of the depression because she has no husband or children, and is free to take advantage of a live-in job, and so to meet her own financial needs. Still, Aunt Hazel’s life leaves much to be desired, as stories of live-in domestics attest. (See, for example, Paule Marshall’s “Reena” in Reena and Other Stories, 1983.) However, in this work, Aunt Hazel’s willingness to help her sister and niece and nephews further confirms the existence and importance of the community of women. It is this community that provides the core of strength that sustains the women in this novel: from the willingness to lend a slice of bread or a cup of sugar, to accompanying a distraught mother on a visit to her incarcerated son.
Meriwether affirms this community through the voice of Francie Coffin, who we are sure will go to college so that Henrietta Coffin’s hope for her children will not have been in vain.
Louise Jenkins Meriwether, the third of five children, was born in Haverstraw, New York, of parents who had moved from South Carolina to New York, by way of Philadelphia, early in this century. They too were members of the twentieth-century black pilgrimage in search of a better life. Like Francie in her novel, Meriwether spent her adolescence in Harlem, and her father, Lloyd Jenkins, a bricklayer by trade, became a number runner when he was unable to find other work during the depression. In spite of the misfortunes of the family, Meriwether graduated from New York University before she married and moved to the Midwest, and later to Los Angeles, with her husband, who was a teacher. However, the marriage did not last, and her second attempt at matrimony shared a similar fate. Although Meriwether earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1965, and worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel, her main concern had always been with establishing herself as a writer. Her first articles appeared in Negro Digest and other black journals from the mid to late 1960s; her favorite topic was black men and women who had achieved in spite of difficult circumstances. In the late 1960s she joined the Watts Writers Workshop and contributed to the Antioch Review when the group was invited to do so. “Daddy Was a Number Runner” first appeared as a short story in that journal in 1967, and in the following year, another story, “A Happening in Barbados,” was also published there.
While working on her novel, Meriwether became involved with a group that opposed Twentieth Century Fox in its effort to produce a film based on William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which many believed presented an inaccurate and distorted view of Turner. Her efforts came to the attention of Martin Luther King, Jr., among other notable civil rights activists of the time. Much to her gratification, the movie was never produced. In the summer of 1965 she was associated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Bogalusa, Louisiana, as a “gun toter” for a radical group, the Deacons, who were protecting blacks from harrassment by the Ku Klux Klan. Her experiences here provided the basis for her story “The Girl from Creektown” (1972). Since then she has also been vocal against apartheid in South Africa.
Daddy Was a Number Runner, the first novel to come out of the Watts Writing Workshop, was five years in the writing and underwent extensive revisions before its publication in 1970. In its first life it went through twelve printings, with hardcover sales of close to 20,000 copies and paperback sales exceeding 400,000 copies. Favorable critical attention came from many quarters including the Saturday Review and black writers Paule Marshall and James Baldwin. With its current publication by The Feminist Press it joins the ranks of feminist classics that will speak to generations to come.
Louise Meriwether returned to New York in the 1970s. Since then she has written three biographies of famous blacks for elementary school children. The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls (1971) is an account of a South Carolina slave who hijacked a Confederate gunboat and reached the Union fleet in safety in 1892. After the emancipation he served five terms as a representative to Congress from his home town of Beaufort, South Carolina. The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1972) deals with the struggles and successes of the famous nineteenth-century black heart surgeon. Dr. Williams is credited with opening the first hospital (in Chicago in 1891) in which black nurses were trained, and which admitted patients of more than one race. For all of his success, including having been the first person in America to perform heart surgery, he was never allowed to join white professional societies. In 1973 Meriwether published Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Park Story, a tribute to the middle-aged black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked the boycott that had enormous repercussions in mobilizing the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
Louise Meriwether now lives in New York City and teaches writing courses at
Sarah Lawrence College. She belongs to the Harlem Writers Guild and has taught a fiction workshop at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center for a number of years. She continues to write and is working on a historical novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has always had, she says, a special interest in and love for history.
Nellie McKay
University of Wisconsin—Madison
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS BY WOMEN
Allegra Maud Goldman
Edith Konecky
This Child’s Gonna Live
Sarah E. Wright
The Parish and the Hill
Mary Doyle Curran
Daddy Was a Number Runner
Louise Meriwether
Paper Fish
Tina De Rosa
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louise Meriwether is a native New Yorker and author of several books, including Fragments of the Ark. A former reporter and story analyst, she has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and published short fiction and articles in several literary publications.
The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.
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