She sat behind the wheel, tapping it nervously and muttering while I settled in the front seat and held Z in my arms. We didn’t bother with seat belts. She stuck the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life. “What do you do now?” she asked.
“Put it in gear,” I said.
“Oh, I know that,” she said. She slammed the car into drive and pulled off in a cloud of burning rubber and smoke, swerving down the street, screaming hysterically—“Wooooooooo!”
“Slow down, Ma!” I said.
She ignored me. “I don’t have a license!” she shrieked as the car veered from side to side. “If I get stopped I’m going to jail!” She went about four blocks, ran a stop sign without pausing, then at the next intersection whipped a wide, arcing left turn, stabbing the accelerator pedal and sending the big sedan reeling down the wrong side of the street as oncoming traffic swerved to avoid us.
“Watch it! What are you doing, Ma! Stop the car!” I hollered.
“I need to go to the A&P! I need to go to the A&P!” she shrieked. “This is what I’m driving for, right?” We jerked along for a few blocks, no cops anywhere, and miraculously arrived at the A&P. Since she didn’t know how to parallel-park next to the curb, she pulled up next to a parked car, slammed on the brakes, put the car in park, smashed the parking brake with her foot, and got out, leaving the engine running. “Wait here,” she said. I held Z in my arms while Mommy ran inside. When she came back out she released the parking brake, threw the car into drive, and pulled away without looking over her shoulder. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason—she might have gotten the accelerator and the brake pedal mixed up—she stood on the brake pedal with all her might. The power brakes locked and I was thrown toward the windshield with little Z in my arms. The baby’s tiny head flew at the dashboard with a great whipping motion, missing it by a millimeter. Had she hit it, the force would have severely injured her. The car sat there, the motor humming softly, while Mommy gasped for breath. “That’s it,” she said. “I quit.” She drove home slowly, parked the car, and walked away from it like she had never seen it in her life. She never got inside it again. It sat there for months, leaves gathering around its tires again, snow accumulating on its hood, till she finally sold it. “I’ll never learn to drive,” she said.
The irony was that Mommy knew how to drive before she was eighteen. She drove her father’s 1936 Ford back in Suffolk, Virginia. Not only did she drive it, she drove it well enough to pull a trailer behind it full of wholesale supplies for her family’s grocery store. She drove the car and trailer on paved and dirt roads between Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and North Carolina. She could back the trailer up with the goods in it, unload it at the store, back the car into the yard, unhook the trailer, and park the car in the garage, backing in. But she had left her past so far behind that she literally did not know how to drive. Rachel Deborah Shilsky could drive a car and pull a trailer behind it, but Ruth McBride Jordan had never touched a steering wheel before that day in 1973, and you can make book on it.
17.
Lost in Harlem
When I came to New York after high school, I worked in my Aunt Mary’s leather factory and stayed with Bubeh, who had moved to the Bronx. It wasn’t a good situation. I wasn’t a child anymore. My mother’s sisters were done with me. Aunt Mary let me work in her factory, but she cut me no slack by any means. By then she was an obese woman with a very pretty face, and she ruled her whole roost with an iron fist, including Uncle Isaac, her husband. What a henpecked husband he was. He was a shoemaker who worked at an exclusive shoe factory at Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue—H. Bendel’s. They stitched shoes for some of the richest women in New York, movie stars like Janet Gaynor and Myrna Loy. I thought he had the most glorious job in the world, meeting movie stars, but I was scared of him. He was a balding man with a nervous twitch in his face and he drank heavily as soon as he walked in the house. He always hid a bottle of liquor in the kitchen cabinet and he’d take big swigs from it and lean on the counter, breathing heavily. His face would turn red and he’d become vulgar and mean.
Meanwhile his wife, Aunt Mary, was having her own party with a man named Mr. Stein. He was her best friend’s husband. What a scandal. That man was fine too, honey! Yes he was! Tall and handsome. He’d come into her factory office twice a week and they’d close the door, smooch it up, and have wine and cheese and crackers. I knew this because I was the one Aunt Mary sent to the store for their refreshments. She’d snap, “Rachel! Go get me some wine and cheese and crackers!” and sure enough, after a while up jumps ol’ Mr. Stein. He’d slip into her office so they could close the door and smooch away. After an hour or two Aunt Mary would come out with her hair and makeup all mussed up and her face all red. Of course I acted like I saw none of this. I was happy to get a job.
Shortly after I got there, around 1939, she hired a new man who had just come to New York from North Carolina named Andrew McBride. He called himself by his middle name, Dennis. That was your father. Now that was a true man there. By that I mean he was inquisitive, and funny, and easygoing and secure. Dennis was an excellent leather-maker and artisan type and he quickly became Aunt Mary’s best worker. Aunt Mary liked to boss all her workers around, and one day she told Dennis to pick up a huge roll of leather and take it to Manhattan by subway. The roll weighed nearly a hundred pounds. Dennis said, “I’m sorry, but it’s impossible for one person to carry that alone,” and he refused to do it. That was one of the first times I ever saw a man, any man, stick up to Aunt Mary. She backed down.
Dennis saw the callous way my aunt treated me, and he saw her love trysts with Mr. Stein, and he never said anything about how she acted with Mr. Stein, but he’d always offer a kind word to me, or just make a joke. What a sense of humor he had. That man could make a dog laugh. He’d sometimes bring me a cup of coffee or just do kind things for people. Not just for me, but for anyone That’s the kind of person he was. He was the kindest man I’d ever met to this day, and if I’d had any sense I would’ve snatched him up right away and married him. But I was young and trying to get away from my family and plus I discovered Harlem.
I don’t know what drew me there—maybe because I’d lived around black folks most of my life, or because I’d heard so much about it. In those days, nobody in New York City went to the Village to have fun. Harlem was the place. White and black came to Harlem to party. There weren’t heavy drugs and crime like there is now. It was different. People were flowing up to Harlem in droves, from the South, from Chicago, from everyplace. Harlem was like magic.
I’d take the number 2 subway train from Aunt Mary’s factory and jump off at 125th Street and the adventure would begin. There were theaters from Eighth Avenue down to Lenox Avenue. One block of Harlem had more movie theaters than all of Suffolk: the Loew’s, the Alhambra, the Rialto, then crossing over onto Seventh Avenue were a bunch of smaller theaters, and of course on 125th Street you had the Apollo Theater. Sometimes I’d go into the Apollo and stay all afternoon. There were four shows and if you went in at eleven A.M. you could see three shows—plus the movies. I got tired of Aunt Mary treating me so mean, so I quit her factory and started looking for a job as an usher or movie ticket clerk in Harlem. I’d always liked movies and theaters, so one afternoon I moseyed up to this movie house on Seventh Avenue and asked for the manager. He came out, looked at me, and asked, “What the heck are you doing in Harlem?”
“I’m looking for a job,” I said.
“What kind of job do you want?” he asked.
“A ticket clerk,” I said.
“What else are you looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not looking for anything else,” I said. “I want a job as a ticket clerk. Or an usher. You have an usher job?” He got mad. “We don’t do that kind of thing here,” he said. “You got to go somewhere else to do that,” he said. I never caught on to what he was saying. This man thought I was a prostitute, which I almost did become. I went to a few other places with si
milar results. Nobody would hire me. Why would a white girl hang around Harlem unless she was up to something bad? When there was so much work downtown? Impossible! And I was so naive I just kept wandering around, not knowing I was headed for trouble, which I found soon enough.
I had no luck with movie theaters, so I decided to try beauty parlors. Back in Suffolk, Tateh made me take a beauty course from a woman who had a thriving beauty parlor downtown. She employed one beautician, a blond girl who wore orange lipstick and lived out in the country and came into Suffolk every day to work. This girl taught me how to do manicures and also to work on hair: how to finger-wave, shampoo, and give permanents—but this was on white people’s hair. Well, I said, “Hair is hair,” and I went into a little place off 135th and Seventh Avenue and said, “I can give permanents,” and the woman hired me and gave me a chair. Well, I didn’t know a thing about perming black people’s hair and my first customer was a black woman and I mauled that woman’s hair. Her hair looked like chopped meat when I was done. I kept telling her, “You’ll be ready as a radio, ready as a radio.” That was a big saying back then, “ready as a radio.” I told her this while I was perming and cutting her hair, because when you’re a hairdresser you have to chat with the customers and make them feel good and act like everything is toasty. Well, I didn’t last the day before they threw me out.
I fumbled around, fumbled around, and finally I said to myself, “Well, I can manicure good.” I’d seen plenty salons and barbershops with signs posted that said, “Manicurist Wanted.” These were mostly men’s barbershops. That didn’t bother me because I heard that being a manicurist in a barbershop was easy and the tips were good. I walked up and down Seventh Avenue and finally I came to a place called the Hi Hat Barbershop. It was a block from Small’s Paradise on Seventh Avenue and 138th Street. There was a sign in the window that said “Manicurist Wanted,” so I went in and inquired about the job.
The manager, Rocky, was a heavy, well-dressed, light-skinned man with a deep voice. He was in his fifties. He hired me immediately. He put the manicuring table in the front window and he plopped me right there and I worked in the window. I went home that night and told my grandmother I had a job that paid fifteen dollars per week. Bubeh said, “What kind of job is it?”
“It’s a good job,” I told her, but I didn’t tell her what kind of job it was, and neither did I tell her where it was. There were a lot of entertainers and musicians who came through there and many times I heard them remark to the boss, “Rocky, you’re taking a chance having this underage white girl working here.” But he didn’t pay them no mind. I was nineteen and that was old enough for him. He began to hang around my manicure table all the time. One day he told me he would take me to lunch and I accepted. He had a nice car parked in front of the shop, and he was quite prosperous, so I went out with him.
I didn’t make too much of it. I wasn’t aware that he had other plans for me. He started taking me out more and more, to the Apollo and movies, and then he would drive me home to the Bronx. He had a nice car and money, so what the heck. I was impressed by that. He took me to clubs and he was well known to folks there. Sometimes he would take me into Small’s Paradise, which was frequented by musicians, entertainers, pimps, and prostitutes, and he seemed to know everyone. I told him I always wanted to be a dancer, that I wanted to try for the Rockettes at Radio City. He said, “I’ll set it up,” but I got scared and didn’t go to the audition. I was a dumb small-town girl, but I wasn’t dumb enough to go down there and make a fool of myself. What if all the other girls danced better than me? Forget it, honey.
Rocky rented me a room on 122nd near Seventh so I wouldn’t have to make that long trip to my grandmother’s house in the Bronx. He took me driving down Seventh Avenue, and up and down 125th Street. There were girls standing around in the street. He said, “I’m going to teach you about those girls soon.” Well, I knew what was happening then, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any objection to it at first.
I would stay in the little room he rented for me for a few days, then go back to Bubeh’s, then go back there to my little room again. Bubeh was getting very suspicious now, but she was very old then, she slept a lot, you know, and she had diabetes, and I got over on her the way my grandkids get over on me now. I told her anything, you know, and after a while it got so that I couldn’t see my grandmother anymore and keep doing what I was doing, hanging out in Harlem. I had to break away and not go back home to her, because Bubeh reminded me too much of what I was and where I came from. I needed to move into Harlem completely and make enough money to stay there and be cool and wear the fancy dresses and the clothes. So one day I asked Rocky, “When do I get to make money like your other girls?” I knew what I was saying. I wasn’t blind. But what was love to me? What did I know about love? And sex? I wanted to be swinging, but Rocky said, “You’re not ready to get out there yet. I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”
Well, one night I was fooling around up at Small’s Paradise or one of those clubs with Rocky, and I hadn’t been back to Bubeh’s for a couple of weeks, and for some reason I started thinking about Mameh and Dee-Dee. I was afraid to call home because of Tateh, but I knew Dennis was working for Aunt Mary, so I somehow ran him down in Harlem where he was staying. I asked him to see if he could find out how my mother and sister were doing, because it was a small factory, and he would hear my aunt talking about things. He said, “They’ve been looking for you, Ruth. How are you doing?” and I told him all about my new flat and my new friend Rocky and how nice he was, and a look crossed Dennis’s face that just made me go silent.
I was living high off the hog, you know, just trying to bury my past and get away from my father, but when I started to tell Dennis what I was doing, I felt so ashamed, because the look on his face said it all.
He said, “Ruth, your parents haven’t done nothing to you that was so bad as to make you run around with that man. That man’s a pimp. He’s a pimp and he’s leading you around by the nose.” And he sat there and he kind of fumed. He wasn’t angry. He just seemed disappointed.
I felt so ashamed then. I got up and said, “They don’t have to look for me anymore. I’m going home.” I gathered myself together and went straight back to Bubeh’s in the Bronx. She was so worried about me, but when she asked where I’d been I didn’t give her direct answers. I just told her not to answer any phone calls or give out any kind of communication about me. Rocky called and sent flowers but I never called him back. He was persistent and at one point came to Bubeh’s apartment and knocked on the door and stood in the hallway saying, “Come out, Ruth. I know you’re home. Come on out.” But I stood behind the door and didn’t open it or say a word. He kept sending flowers and trying to get me back into his clutches, but after a while he stopped calling and I never saw him again.
18.
Lost in Delaware
In June 1974, Mommy walked into the kitchen of our house in Queens and said, “We’re moving to Delaware. Pack up the house.” She had five kids at home and seven who were away at college. Some were in graduate school, some in medical school. All had scholarships or loans and were barely making it themselves, and thus could not help her financially. Our house had fallen into tremendous disrepair and Mommy couldn’t keep up with it any longer.
We packed up the house for weeks. I was ready to move. If we stayed in New York, it was almost certain I’d have to do an extra year of high school to finish. Plus I kept running into my old friends, who were getting into bigger and bigger trouble. I needed to see some new faces, a fresh start. My younger sisters, on the other hand, loved living in New York, had none of my problems, and didn’t want to leave. “Why move?” they argued. “We’re happy here.” They called a family meeting. Mommy sat down to talk it out, listened to their reasoning, pursed her lips, and nodded her head. “If you feel that way,” she said, “we’ll stay.” She got up and announced breezily, “We’re not moving,” and walked out of the room. It was as if she had pulled
out a grenade, yanked the pin, dropped it on the floor, and exited. My brothers and I looked at one another in shock. By then the house had been on the market and was being sold. There was a buyer. Contracts had been signed. Teachers had been told. Preparations had been made. We argued about it for hours. “We should move,” I said.
“Forget it,” my sisters argued.
“We have to go,” my older brothers commanded. They felt Ma couldn’t afford to live in New York any longer.
Ma was called in to reenter the debate. “Let me think about it again,” she said. She sat down on the couch and immediately dropped off to sleep, snoring away while the rest of us argued. My mother is the only individual I know who can fall asleep instantly for two minutes—deep REM sleep, complete with snoring—only to be awakened instantly by certain select noises. A hurricane won’t move her, but the sound of a crying baby or a falling pot will send her to her feet like a soldier at reveille. When she awoke, she wandered off saying nothing. Days passed. Finally she announced: “We’re staying.” Cheers from the girls. We slowly began to unpack. The very next day she barked: “We’re moving!” Cheers from the boys. We packed again. Ma went back and forth on this for weeks while the realtor pulled out his hair trying to decide if his commission was going to come through or not. The debate lasted literally up to the August morning when we rented a U-Haul truck, loaded it up with all our worldly possessions—some of us riding with the furniture in the back—and pointed it down I-95 toward Wilmington, Delaware, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies. “Why Wilmington?” we asked Ma.
The Color of Water Page 13
