Tateh looked at me like I was crazy. “They’re too big,” he said.
“This is how they’re supposed to fit,” I said. I was afraid he would change his mind. And the clerk, he wanted to sell those things and make his money, so he babbled out, “Oh, they’re perfect, Reverend Shilsky, they’re perfect.”
Tateh grumbled about it, but he paid for them.
The moccasins were so big my feet squeaked and squished in them, like they’d been plunged in a bucket of water. I went squishing down the hallway in school and the kids laughed at them, so I took them off.
None of the boys in school would even bother with me. So after a while I had me my own friend, and he didn’t care that I wore secondhand clothes or was Jewish. He never judged me. That’s the first thing I liked about him, in fact that’s what I liked about black folks all my life: They never judged me. My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, “Come as you are.” Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting. I don’t care what they show on TV, these stupid boys with guns and these murderers they show on the news. Those aren’t the majority. Most blacks are peaceful and trusting. That’s why they’re made a fool of so easily.
My boyfriend’s name was Peter, and he lived in one of the houses on the road behind the store. He was a tall, handsome young man, dark-skinned with beautiful teeth and a beautiful smile. He’d come into the store and buy Coca-Colas, crackers, gum, or other small items. I didn’t notice him at first because I was always busy when he came in the store. There was plenty of work to do, not just behind the counter but elsewhere; like the wholesalers used to sell margarine without the yellow in it, so I’d have to go in the back and add the yellow dye to it, stir it around in a big barrel, or go into the ice freezer and pull out big blocks of meat and ice to chop up and lay out, just any number of things. But he’d come and find me in the store alone somehow and he’d linger, chatting or teasing me and trying to get me to smile in some way. He had a sense of humor that made me laugh all the time, and I began to look forward to his coming by. He’d always make sure Tateh and Mameh weren’t around, which was difficult because Tateh kept a close eye on his daughters, but Peter would find his moments. One day he saw me outside pumping kerosene out of the tank and he came around and asked me to go for a walk and I said yes. He was a bold guy because from that moment on he was risking his life. God knows what I was thinking about. The only thing I told him was, “If my father sees us, we’re in trouble.” Tateh with his loaded pistol would’ve shot him certainly, and probably me, too, but it didn’t matter to me. I was naive and young and before you know it I fell in love with him.
I loved that boy to death and he loved me. At least, I thought he did. Who cared that he was black? He was the first man other than my grandfather who ever showed me any kindness in my life, and he did it at the risk of his own because they would’ve strung him up faster than you can blink if they’d have found out. Not just the Ku Klux Klan but the regular white folks in town would’ve killed him. Half of them were probably the Klan anyway, so it was all the same. You know death was always around Suffolk, always around. It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets. A lot of those secrets ended up floating down the Nansemond River just down the road from us. Folks would go down to the wharf and throw out nets for crabs and turtles and haul in human bodies. I remember one of our customers, Mrs. Mayfield, they found her son out there, he wasn’t more than seventeen or so. He’d been killed and tied to a wagon wheel and tossed into the water until he drowned or the crabs ate him. You know a crab will eat anything. You have never seen me eat a crab to this day and you never will.
Well, Peter and I were having our regular little secret rendezvous, carefully arranged. We’d meet in the yard or the passage behind the store, or he’d write a note and slip it to me secretly. If the store was closed he’d slide the note under the front door. On the Sabbath, Friday nights, it was a thrill for me to pretend I was going downstairs to the kitchen and then creep into the store to pick up the torrid love notes he slipped under the door. He would pledge his love for me no matter what and write out the plan for our secret meeting. At the appointed time he’d come by and pick me up in a car and I’d get into the back seat and lie flat so I wouldn’t be seen. He had friends that lived out in the country in isolated areas, and that’s where we would be together.
You know, my whole life changed after I fell in love. It was like the sun started shining on me for the first time, and for the first time in my life I began to smile. I was loved, I was loved, and I didn’t care what anyone thought. I wasn’t worried about getting caught, but I did notice that Peter’s friends were terrified of me; they stayed clear anytime I came near them. They’d walk away from me if they saw me walking down the road coming toward them, and if they came into the store, they wouldn’t even look at me. That started to worry me a little but I didn’t worry much. Then after a while, my period was late. By a week.
Then another two weeks.
Then it never came.
Well, the whole thing just started to unravel on me then. I was pregnant and couldn’t tell a soul. The white folks would have killed him and my father would have killed him. I had maybe just turned fifteen then. There wasn’t a person I could tell. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, just sit straight up in bed in a sweat, and go outside to the back balcony to hide my tears from my sister. I did consider telling Frances, but that was too much to ask. This was 1936. I mean, what I did was way, way out as far as white folks were concerned. It was trouble. I couldn’t bring Frances into that. There was no one to tell. I’d just sit there on the balcony at night while everyone slept and cry and watch the moon. I never thought to kill myself, never that. But I’d cry for a while and after I was finished crying I’d look out over the black section of town for my boyfriend. Can you believe that? I was in it thick, up to my neck, and I’m still looking for my boyfriend. I thought he had all the answers.
If there was moonlight, you could see out there, down the back roads behind our store where the black folks lived, and from the balcony I’d look for him. I knew how he walked and moved and dressed and everything. I could recognize him at a distance from his walk; I’d look to see if he was safe at home, because I’d always heard the Klan comes at night to get you, and after they found that Mayfield boy floating in the wharf tied to that wagon wheel I worried about him. I’d sit up half the night expecting the Klan to come riding past the store in those tin lizzie Model A cars and what would I do if they did? I had no idea. The law wasn’t for the black man in Virginia in those days, it was against him.
You know, the thing was, I was supposed to be white and “number one,” too. That was a big thing in the South. You’re white, and even if you’re a Jew, since you’re white you’re better than a so-called colored. Well, I didn’t feel number one with nobody but him, and I didn’t give a hoot that he was black. He was kind! And good! I knew that! And I wanted to tell folks that, I wanted to shout out, “Hey y’all, it really doesn’t matter!” I actually believed folks would accept that, that they’d see what a good person he was and maybe accept us, and I went through a few days of thinking this, after which I told him one night, “Let’s run off to the country and get married,” and he said, “No way. I don’t know where that’s been done before, white and black marrying in Virginia. They will surely hang me.”
I grew really frightened then. Because he’d never talked that way before, and I could see he was afraid. He said, “If white folks find out you’re pregnant by me, I will surely hang.”
The truth hit me hard then, when I realized he didn’t have any solutions, and I began to panic. What a fool I was to believe we could get away with it! I’d sit on the balcony chastising mys
elf a million times for what I’d done and waiting for the Klan to come kill him and for my father to kill both of us, but the days passed and nothing happened. I said to myself, “We are lucky no white folks know about us.” I was sure none knew. Some black folks knew, some of Peter’s friends, but none of the white folks knew.
None except for one.
There was one white person who did know.
Peter and I used to meet in an alley behind the store, and one night we were back there arguing about what to do and I dropped my bracelet on the ground. It was a cheap little dime store bracelet but I bought it with my own money and I liked it. It was pitch-black there and we couldn’t find it without a match or a light, so we left it. When I went out there to find it the next day, it was gone.
Mameh came up to me in the store a couple of days later while I was standing behind the counter and placed the bracelet on the counter. Real quiet. Just placed it on the counter and limped back to her little chair by the door where she always sat in her apron, sorting and stacking vegetables.
“Why don’t you go to New York this summer to see your grandmother?” she said.
12.
Daddy
At some point in my consciousness, it occured to me that I had a father. It happened around the time my younger brother Hunter was born. I was five years ahead of Hunter, and while the arrival of a new baby in the house didn’t seem to shake anyone—Hunter was the eleventh child—it was the first time that an elderly, slow-moving man in a brown hat, vest sweater, suspenders, and wool pants seemed to float into my consciousness. He picked up Hunter and held him in the air with such delight it made me happy to watch him. His name was Hunter Jordan, Sr., and he raised me as his own son.
As a small boy, I was never quite aware of the concept of “father.” My real father, Andrew McBride, died before I was born. I was lorded over by Mommy, my older siblings, friends of Ma’s, and relatives on my father’s and stepfather’s sides whom, years later, I would recognize as guiding forces in my life. Out of this haze of relatives and authority figures loomed a dominating presence that would come and go. My stepfather worked as a furnace fireman for the New York City Housing Authority, fixing and maintaining the huge boilers that heated the Red Hook Housing Projects where we lived then. He and Mommy met a few months after my biological father died; Ma was selling church dinners in the plaza in front of our building at 811 Hicks Street when my stepfather came by and bought a rib dinner. The next week he came back and bought another, then another and another. He must have been getting sick eating all those ribs. Finally one afternoon he came by where she was selling the church dinners and asked Ma, “Do you go to the movies?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I got eight kids and they go to the movies too.”
“You got enough for a baseball team,” he said.
He married her and made the baseball team his own, adding four more kids to make it an even twelve. He made no separation between the McBride and Jordan children, and my siblings and I never thought of or referred to each other as half brothers and sisters; for the powerless Little Kids, myself included, he was “Daddy.” For the midlevel executives, he was sometimes “Daddy,” sometimes “Mr. Hunter.” To the powerful elder statesmen who remembered their biological father well, he was always “Mr. Hunter.” The older ones liked to make fun of “Mr. Hunter,” the slow way he moved, the southern accent. “Hrrrrffff! Hrrrrfffff!” they’d say when he was out of earshot. But they loved and appreciated him.
When I was about six or seven, he came to our apartment in the projects, piled us into his car, and drove us out to St. Albans, Queens, parking in front of a large, pink stucco, four-bedroom house and disappearing inside while we played on the big front lawn, tearing out the grass and rolling around in the leaves. It was fall, and leaves were everywhere. After a while he came outside and sat on the stoop and watched us play. We tore the grass to shreds, crushed the neatly manicured bushes, stomped the flowers, and cracked one of the house’s windows with a rock. After ravaging the lawn for about an hour, one of us had the presence of mind to ask him, “Whose house is this?” He laughed. I never saw him laugh so hard. He had just spent his life’s savings to buy the place.
He was a gruff man with a good sense of humor, quiet, and stuck in his ways. He liked neatness, which meant our St. Albans house was out of bounds for him. However much he loved us, he couldn’t live with the madness in our Queens home, preferring to keep his old digs at 478 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He came home only on weekends, striding into the living room with bags of groceries, Entenmann’s cakes, a pocketful of dough, and a real live automobile parked outside, in which he often piled in as many of us as would fit to take us back to his brownstone for the weekend. We loved staying in his house in Brooklyn. It was old and dark and filled with antique furniture, cookies, and Nat King Cole records.
His father was a black man, a railroad brakeman, and his mother a Native American, so he had a lot of Indian in his face: brown skin, slanted brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a weather-beaten outdoor look about him, a very handsome dude. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and raised on a farm in Henrico County, near Richmond, Virginia, and his family, the Jordans, were easygoing folks. Beneath their cool exterior, however, was a rugged breed of black man you did not want to cross—tough, grizzled men whose strong brown hands gripped hammers tightly and whose eyes met you dead on. Those hands could fix anything that cranked, moved, pumped heat, moved water, or had valves, vacuums, or wires.
He fled Virginia around 1927 or so, with Jim Crow hot on his tail, so to speak. A white sheriff had locked him up for peeking under the tent of a traveling circus without paying, and when the sheriff went to lunch and inadvertently left the cell door open, Daddy eased out of the jailhouse and caught the first thing smokin’; he never returned to Virginia for good until he died. He met up with his brother Walter in Chicago, where he was fleeced and pickpocketed from the time he hit town till the time he left. He worked in slaughterhouses there, moved up to Detroit, where he shined shoes with his brother in a barbershop near the Ford plant—he shined one of Henry Ford’s shoes while Walter shined the other—and on to Brooklyn, New York, in the Roaring Twenties, where the brothers made a living selling illegal booze for a while. He was out of his apartment one day when one of his liquor-making stills broke and spilled so much liquor onto the floor that it leaked downstairs into the apartment below; the guy living downstairs held his glass under his light fixture and got dead drunk, wandering into the street while my stepfather tried to reel him in, but the cat was out of the bag and not long after that he was raided. He jumped out his back window holding two five-gallon jugs of hooch, right into the arms of waiting federal agents. He did time for that, something neither he nor Mommy ever told us about, though I always wondered how a guy who seemed so unsophisticated could be so clever at checkers. I never could beat him.
Altogether there were four brothers—he, Henry, Walter, and Garland—and they epitomized old-time cool: suave, handsome black men who worked hard, drank hard, dressed well, liked fine women and new money. Daddy’s favorite was Walter, the most fun-loving and gregarious of his brothers. He’d often take us to Walter’s house in Fort Greene just blocks from his house, where my siblings and I would play with our cousin Little Mommy while Uncle Walter, Daddy, and their other brothers partied, drinking and listening to Nat King Cole, Gene Krupa, and Charlie Parker records. Mommy would never drink at these occasions. She did not like us to socialize too much with the partying side of Daddy’s family. She never drank or smoked. In fact, drinking was number one on her don’t list, and if my stepfather drank too much, she’d scream at him on the way home. He’d drive twenty miles an hour all the way to Queens from Brooklyn, nosing his big sedan through traffic till he found a city bus, which he would get behind and follow all the way home. “You can never get a speeding ticket if you follow one of them,” he declared. Car after car of angry motorists would fly by us, yelling, “GET OFF THE DA
MN ROAD!” He’d ignore them. We’d be in the back seat, shrinking low, laughing, hoping none of our friends would happen to see us.
Every summer he would take a bunch of us down south to Richmond to his cousin Clemy’s house, where we ate watermelon from Clemy’s yard, rode her pony, and watched our other “down south” relatives do wild tricks, like taking their teeth out. We had a cousin who would sit on the couch, drink a beer, and take her teeth out, making them go chomp! chomp! and causing us to run from the room. Uncle Henry was a real character. He was a mechanic and a decorated World War II vet who had a gold tooth in his mouth that flashed and sparkled when he smiled, which was often. His stomach had been ruined after he was stabbed in a knife fight, though I couldn’t imagine him angry. We loved him. When he laughed, he sounded like a car trying to start, “Heeerrrrrrr! Heerrrrrrrr!” We used to make fun of his laugh, which amused him greatly, touching off another round of “Heeerrrrrr! Heerrrrrrr!” from him, prompting further outraged giggles from us.
The Color of Water Page 9
