by Mac Pope
My neighbor’s wife told me that she admired African Americans for the way they had improvised and changed the world’s music paths, dress styles, sports, and social life. But then she said Britain’s West Indian immigrants couldn’t compare; that their drum-based music was unchanging, like their lifestyles, etc.
That was strange to me. Back in urban New York, Whites often praised the West Indians as more progressive, ambitious, and dependable than Blacks from Americas South. Seems ignorance is homemade and your horse is always the worst horse.
I remember being in a crowded pub listening to an older gent recalling Yanks he’d known in WWII.
He’d had a few whiskeys and with a hand on my shoulder, he called out to the bar crowd:
“A toast to the President and the good people of America!” He nudged me forward to say something after the crowd raised glasses.
I used my whiskey and my memories of an old movie to say: “Thank you for honoring our President and people and I return the toast, honoring your head of state, The Queen-Empress Elizabeth, the Second, may she always be pleased by her Court and proud of her Kingdom!”
The crowd toasted gravely and went quiet and I thought I had crossed some line, especially when my friend spoke with a senior member of the group. But then he came back and said: “If you’ll accept, I want to sponsor you for honorary membership in our unit of the British Legion.”
What an honor! No one I knew had ever made that grade. When I briefed my Chief though, he said, “Great! And we’ll kill your security clearance so you can change nationality too.”
We had been through a hectic week. I did attend some meetings as a non-voting member and ale sharer.
I was smart enough to drink brown ale and never order a Lager beer in a British bar again.
After two and a half years, we had to put an end to our life in Freeland; our walks through green paths and parks, Saturday night ‘knees-up’ dances at the Young Wives hall, Sunday night Evensong at the church and market days at the village and other great ones at Oxford and nearby Banbury.
Housing on base was offered to us and the decision to move was clear but sad. The base was a far drive from home, from Freeland. The base would provide me the opportunity to complete my University degree after duty, under contracted Oxford and US professors teaching literature, history, and geology in the perfect place to study them. My ambition was to attain Officer rank someday. All the amenities were on hand on base for the military family and the authorities felt it their mission to rescue families surviving in the wilderness of the ‘local economy’ by assigning them quarters as quickly as they became available.
When the word went round that we were leaving, people dropped all formal dignity and rushed over to see us. Not just the close neighbors and John and old Arthur—who repaired my car—but the couples who had treated us like aliens, the Pastor from the church, pub friends, everybody. They wanted to know what could be done to keep us there; who could they petition. The property owners offered to sell me the house (six months later came the British real estate ‘Gazzump,’ when most house prices suddenly went up nearly four times their old value)!
We revisited the village on sunny Sunday drives, went to Saturday market days; once we drove down a long dirt path that led to a village little changed since the fourteenth century; we overheard a village farmer ask a friend: “How be cow, Adam?” and Adam replied, “Cow be poorly, Randolph…”
“Their Ebonics,” we said.
The Twenty
Daddy had come straight home! We children, me (Marcus, the oldest), Sunny and baby Ben had all felt the tension of the Payday-Friday standoffs. Daddy didn’t go to the bar and grill this time; our father, James Alonzo Custis was a big man, gruffly voiced and clumsy but not usually explosive or hostile. We children had never seen him strike or strike out at our momma, but we had heard him rage many terrible times when she or things in general didn’t behave as they should.
Payday Friday marked his release from a week of bone chilling work on the high cranes at the Navy shipyard. Most laborers would look for warmth and whiskey in the bars outside the shipyard gates, Daddy would break one of the three twenty dollar bills he’d earned that week (good money for a laborer in 1949) and spend five bucks trading rounds with his mates. Our Mother, his wife Jackie, frustration showing beneath her fading brown looks, complained that the five dollars came out of her grocery money since rent and heat took most of the rest.
Shining in her happy victory, Mamma grabbed nine-year-old me and pushed the money and a list of things to buy into the deep front pocket of my corduroy pants.She dressed me in layers of sweaters and a heavy coat for the six city block trip to the grocery store. It was the worst of winters, icy and dark outside. She reminded me that I was bringing home hot chocolate, raisins, peanuts, smoked bacon… good things we couldn’t have when Daddy went off drinking. I went off like a soldier.
The city’s mighty snowploughs had done their work and undulating hills rose from the curb line of every street.High up on the frozen ridges, I found trails left by other children’s feet. I found that I could transit the entire route to the store along snow banks high as a man’s shoulders.Along the way, I fell on treacherous downslides, went down to my knees in soft patches of dirty snow, and even found abandoned snow forts, dug out by hand and stocked with wicked looking piles of iceballs ready for daylight combat. I regretted getting to street corners: I had to go down to Earth and cross the slushed roadway before I could mount the mountains again and continue the adventure. Once I met a late traveler my own age coming the other way and our eyes locked: King of The Mountain. The other boy was strong, but his plastic shoes were slick on the watery ice and he went over the side with a horror-movie scream that left us both grinning as we went on our separate ways. Too soon, I stomped into the store and when my hands thawed, felt in my front pocket for the money and the list and found neither of them there.
I searched. I ordered myself not to panic and searched every step I’d traveled. I consoled myself: any minute I would come upon the patch of green money and white paper and crumple down with a breathy sigh of relief. I called upon my guardian angel who had done favors chasing out dread in my bedroom; but at that instant, I felt a visceral dread of facing my father—facing all of them without groceries and without the Twenty. The Mountains were just filthy snow now shyster traps… the money had been deep in the pocket… how?
When it was hopeless, when I was nearly frozen, I trekked home and told them.
The beating was the least of it. Daddy let himself go, using the cord from the iron on me, but those burning licks were bearable—cleansing even. The rest of the family watched my punishment with the blank gaze of people at a movie. But it was the shunning that hurt. My family seemed to look through me as they talked about plans to survive the bad times.
“Listen, we are gonna be alright,” my mother said, glancing anxiously at Daddy. “I got some chicken parts and ground meat in the icebox, I got cans of Spam, three pounds of potatoes, some beans—my family will eat!” she said, glaring her message into each of our eyes. “Eat right up to the next payday…” she said shakily.
My sister’s input was heard, “So, chicken gravy and mashed one day… Spam and fried potatoes one day…”Sunny, my sister, was a planner and our mother’s helper.
“Probably Spam sandwiches for lunch every day,” Daddy said, cracking a tiny smile for the first time.
Everyone picked up on that break in the ice and the room lit up with laughter. Foolishly, I joined in until my mother’s hot glance, one that went from my feet to my face, gave me my cue; I grabbed my coat and slipped out of the house.
I couldn’t go far, it was terribly windy, but I stowed myself in the front seat of a broken down car Daddy had owned and abandoned outside the house. Warmth from the winter sun had heated the plastic covered seat and I plastered myself against it, imagining that the warmth came from my folks on either side of me, my sister in the back with her arms around my neck an
d Ben crawling over my lap. Scrunching down, not to be seen from the house my hand idly fingered the space between the seat and the back seat until my fingers brushed the rough edges of a dime. I fished it out and went back, pulling some quarters, nickels—I found over three dollars in change fallen over time from driver’s pockets. I started to run to the house with the money but a thought flashed: there were dozens of derelict autos half-buried in snow banks along nearby streets, few car doors were locked, few windows intact… Success warmed my blood as I worked a six street area, I would behave like a retarded kid until people avoided noticing me. Then I’d slip in and appear to lie on car seats as I searched for my money.
By sundown, hunkered down like a fugitive in Daddy’s old car, I counted out forty-two dollars collected in two old coffee cans. I set aside twenty dollars and buried the rest in a snow pile, marking the spot with crossed sticks.
At home, I presented the money to my mother and watched joy flicker in her wide eyes for a moment and she started to hug me. Then she seemed to shake herself into focus. She let me go.
“So, you’re bringing back what you took and hid,” she said as she snatched and counted the coins.
“Trifling child, thinking of nobody but yourself…” she muttered, “we’re lucky Daddy didn’t walk, he was so mad—go get your supper out the oven!” she said as she hurried away to find Daddy.
Later, I went thoughtfully back to my treasure. My guardian angel visited, after his long absence, and told me to lift my gloom. “Take the backup twenty three dollars in now,” he said, “let them see new clothes for Momma and Sunny, toys for Ben, Friday money for Daddy… tell them there’s more!” But another angel’s voice, this one deeper, older, more sage told me to think: loss of a twenty had cost me all the love I knew; replacing it bought me survival. Another twenty would make me the hero of the house. And the voice told me that still more twenties—still dozens of old cars yet untouched—that more twenties could give me Daddy’s place in that house…
I hid my treasure in my room; while we grew.
Our Lady
Mac S. Pope
Brooklyn, New York, Nineteen-thirty
It happened when she played; passing folk in the street would pause, enchanted, outside our Brooklyn brownstone house and gaze up, shyly and boldly, towards the lace curtained windows from which our aunt Mahala filled the street with Chopin’s piano music.
On summer afternoons, the curtains would loop easily in the breeze and snap against dark stone while Mahala’s playing, in its almost lazy precision held the people still while she, all unaware of them apparently, showered crisp, impish, tinkling chords down on them.
One flat-nosed, leather-skinned old man under a wool cap gripped a wrought iron fleur de Lys on our fence gate. House maids going to work carrying their ‘working shoes’ in shopping bags closed their eyes, transported for a time. Drunks and truants sneered contempt but still wouldn’t move on. Chopin was the crowd’s favorite as well as Mahala’s own; the melodies, spry, never stilted—teased and echoed—they charmed sometimes taking on an elegant moodiness that sent the stilled black folk into their own longings.
It seemed to some among the dark people in the street that the fine music not only suited the patrician looking rows of old houses, but also fit the newer black middle class occupants; as though they, prospering from war industry work, had captured not only the parlors of the old gentry, but also some of their class.
Most folk at large in our street at mid-day were poor and most accepted the brief musical moments beneath her windows as about as close to class and quality as they were going to get that day. They stayed until the last note fell, like a dismissal. Then, startled out of their intense postures, people moved away, avoiding one another’s faces, as though somehow guilty of something. Mahala, while their color, was in a way alien to them. She was ‘the Lady’ and a Colored Striver by local reputation… people wouldn’t want to be seen idle at her doorstep. She, in turn, would have been puzzled to find that she had been producing idylls there.
When I remember her most clearly, she is wearing her ‘good frock’; a navy blue linen dress with constellations of tiny white dots. It was the mid-nineteen-fifties then, but the dress was nineteen-thirties; the hem of it nearly reached the ankle high tops of her shiny leather shoes. At the neck, there was a lace collar closed high beneath a gilt-edged cameo pin that looked expensive.
She was only a little over five-feet tall, though she stood very straight; and she was the color of chestnuts. At about fifty-nine years of age, her face was textured but not wrinkled or sagging… her eyes were quick and practical, a deep vertical line between them seemed to wham away either nonsense or romance. The line was the result of poor glasses, intense concentration, and her tendency to be very critical. Her hair was white, silken white, and so long that she wore it pulled back and tied in an oblong bun at the back of her neck, though several strands would always hang down to frame her face. She was Mahala Ricks, a spinster, and my father’s aunt. An alumna of Hampton Institute, she was the ‘Virginia side’ of our family as my father told us often. His Virginia ancestors had been free persons a generation before the Civil War.
Free and doing well, he said, and though he had run away from home before finishing the ninth grade, most of his other family members were achievers; lawyers, preachers, teachers like Mahala. (She taught piano lessons.) Our mother’s people had all been field hands and sharecroppers in Georgia.
We lived on Woburn Street in Brooklyn then, in a noble-looking three-story brownstone. Both sides of our street were lined with the massive sandstone fronted houses the color of tobacco or freshly dug dirt. To keep the streets from appearing too much like trenches, the old builders had decorated the house fronts with chiseled cherubs, bas-relief urns and draped runners of laurel. They had also set in tall windows with deep sills for planter boxes and provided lacquered double doors with etched glass panels to allow greetings in the foyers to be bright and private. They had planted trees: majestic maples, sycamores, oaks, and willows… standing with leafy shoulders touching in front of the houses, their root systems buckling the pavements like sinewy toes… Umber tree trunks camouflaged against the brown stone while their deep green leaves sifted sunlight into golden points on the earthy stone. The houses had been built for the old Brooklyn gentry, the white Protestants, who had left them, and Brooklyn, to the newer Irish Catholics—and for some years our kind had been entering as the Irish left. Some houses were cut up into tiny flats. But some people, like my father, maintained the places as family homes for as long as they could. In fact, my father had made our house a setting for my aunt Mahala. She had lent him part of her savings of thirty years, working as a governess and later as housemistress for the Dyckman family (people Mahala said were among the last of the great Dutch families of Flatbush, once a rural farming section of Brooklyn). She helped him get a mortgage, and he, in turn, gave her the third floor rooms ‘forever’ and gave her the freedom to fix up the house to Virginia standards; better than those of the last of our Irish neighbors who still stared straight ahead when they encountered our kind in the street.
“I can match their lace curtains, their drapes, their geranium boxes, and scrubbed steps,” she told my father with open confidence, “and after they see the movers bring in our carpets and furniture, we will see who stares who down… you learn a thing or two living among the Dutch!”
Aunt Mahala had been let go by the young Dyckman heirs when her mistress, Julia Dyckman, whom she said had been young and old with her, became ill and had to be placed in the Dutch Reformed Church home. The younger Dyckmans chose to modernize the old estate for a good sale and since there was to be no pension for Mahala, who’d been with them since their childhood, it seemed fair to them to allow her to take her pick of the ‘old things’ in the attics that six generations of Dyckmans had put away as times and styles changed.
She came away with two truckloads: Turkish carpets, Sheraton tables and chairs. She took a well-t
uned piano, partial sets of Limoges and Rosenthal china, boxes of Waterford Crystal, ornate silver and plate pieces, paintings, and a tall clock. In her time, Mahala had admired many pieces as they were brought into the mansion new. She had supervised and fussed with the maid who polished them and had often arranged their placing in the house herself. When those rich things furnished most of the rooms of our Brownstone, we sort of felt out of place on thick carpets and striped silk sofas except for aunt Mahala who was completely at home.
We got along; Aunt Mahala’s way with our household was cordial. She tried for warmth, but I think there was a distance we all felt. Our momma adored everything about the senior lady though. She herself had been a fieldworker in the South before she became a day-worker housemaid in the North. She smiled and took pleasure in following instructions and taking advice from an independent woman who had ‘finished school,’ walked and spoke like Mrs. Roosevelt, and yet was content to live with us and carry our clan higher than fate ever planned. Momma was quick to attack with clean rags anything that needed dusting, polishing, de-staining—before Mahala could pass and pause, and gaze curiously at the deficiency. They understood their roles. My mother, her name was Ella, would greet Mahala’s piano students or guests in the foyer, take coats, and motion them upstairs, relishing the presence of ministers, NAACP officials, teachers and sorority sisters—educated persons—some of them white, all of them at home among the things that came with Aunt Mahala.
My sister Janie disliked our aunt, who gave us free, unwanted piano lessons and practice hours after school, corrected our posture and grammar with dry humor and brought down strange-to-us foods she had cooked; eight-grain bread loaves, sugared hominy grits, and the Dutch recipes Julia Dyckman had taught her.
“It really itches me,” Janie once said, “how she glides through here, she don’t—doesn’t care two bits about us, she only worries about how we look and sound to outside people.”
