Daddy Was a Number Runner (18 page)

“Bastards,” Robert said. “They got you in jail where you can't run and still they have to whip you. Know what they did to a friend of mine in Chicago? Put this electric wire on
his balls and when that shock hit him he said he woulda confessed to killin' Jesus Christ if they had asked him to.”

“You don' think …”

“No, they wouldn't do nothin' like that in New York. Not to kids anyway.”

“You think they killed that man?”

Robert took his time answering, then finally said: “I think so, Mr. Coffin. I think so.”

They talked a little longer but I wasn't listening. Robert had to be wrong. If James Junior couldn't kill anybody then neither could Vallejo. Sure, he might mug some old white man in a hallway but he wouldn't kill him. Why didn't they stop beating those boys down there in the Tombs long enough to discover it was an accident? I was just about to cry when a thought stopped me. I could never tell Maude and Rebecca what I had just heard. It would be too terrible on top of everything else for them to know that the cops had beaten the shit out of their brother.

Before long Daddy and Junior were staying out late again just like before. Daddy was playing poker most of the night and Junior fell right back in with the Ebony Earls like he'd never been away, beating Daddy home every night by an eyelash.

All winter long we kept up with Vallie's case in the papers. The
News
didn't mention it again after the first week but the big papers Daddy liked to read did, and I took to reading them sometimes, which would have made Daddy happy if he'd been home to see me. There wasn't much news about Negroes in the big papers and what was written was usually bad. And the colored paper,
The Amsterdam News,
mostly told about lynchings down south and niggers killing each other up north. It was kind of depressing.

I
WAS
in trouble at school. If I didn't get a book full of recipes for the cooking class and finish my dress for the sewing class, I was gonna flunk both those courses for the midterm. I hated cooking and always sneaked out. They gave you a thimble full of this and half an eyedropper of that and you was supposed to copy down the recipe from the blackboard and follow it and cook the crap they gave you. The only time I stayed in cooking class for the full time we made shepherd's pie. Now I wouldn't have minded learning how to cook mustard greens or pig tails, but they didn't teach us stuff like that, so I just stopped going, and naturally I didn't have no notebook full of recipes.

Sewing was just as bad. You was supposed to make a dress by hand by midterm and get graded on it. The class had to do everything together, sew up the seams, start on the sleeves, hemstitch. I used to get through quicker than anybody else and my teacher, Mrs. Abowitz, would make me wait for the rest of the class before I could go to the next step. She did say that if I worked my backstitch more neatly I wouldn't get through so fast, but I got tired waiting around so I took to cutting sewing, too. When I ditched classes like that I would go into the toilet and sit there and read my library book or some smutty stories, if I had any.

That's what I was doing now while pondering the trouble I was in, sitting on the toilet seat reading some smutty comic books. I had three of them, Mutt and Jeff screwing two girls at the same time, Jiggs doing it to Maggie, and Little Orphan Annie almost swallowed up under Daddy Warbucks. The books were in color just like the Sunday comics but was more exciting.

Then I got the idea where I could get my recipes from. Most of my friends were as bad off as me, they might have
some of the recipes but not all, but Joan, the only white girl in my class, she always went to cooking.

I felt sorry for Joan because she didn't have any friends. That was her fault mostly 'cause she stuck to herself all the time and was very snotty. But I guess it wasn't any fun to still be living on 119th Street after all the other white folks had moved away and you had to go to school with niggers and Puerto Ricans. Me and Maude had tried to make friends with her, but said to hell with it when she stuck her freckled nose up in the air and ignored us. But in algebra today when we were trading our smutty books, I noticed Joan looking kinda wistfully at my collection.

I rushed back to my homeroom and cornered her just as class was being dismissed. “Hi, Joan,” I said, like I hadn't been seeing her all day. “How you been?”

She nodded her head slowly, “Fine, thank you.”

“I was wondering, Joan, if maybe you'd like to borrow my comic books this afternoon.”

“You mean the …”

“Yeah, those are the ones I mean.”

“Well, gee, Francie, that would be nice of you.” She sort of half smiled at me.

“And in the meantime, can I borrow your recipe book? There's one or two I missed.”

Her half smile was dying.

“I just wanna copy a few recipes, Joan. That ain't gonna hurt nobody.”

“Well, I don't know …”

“And anytime I get any more of these dirty books I'll save them for you.”

“You will?”

“Honest.”

“Well, okay, but I don't have my notebook with me.”

“I'll stop by your house and pick it up on my way home and give it back to you in the morning. You live on 119th Street, don't you? What's the address?”

“One twenty-two.”

“Okay, I'll be there in a few minutes and bring the books with me,” and before she could change her mind I turned away.

I gave Joan five minutes' head start, then I went by her house. She lived with her mother in a three-story brown-stone, on the street level, and they had a separate entrance on the side. I went to the door which had an iron gate in front of it and rang the bell. Joan's white face peaked around a curtain, then she cracked the door open.

“Just a minute,” she said, “I'll get my cookbook.”

She was gone for about five minutes and I was just about to ring the bell again when she came back, and unchaining the iron gate, came outside.

“What took you so long?”

“My mother was asking me who you were.”

“Oh.”

She handed me the book and I gave her the smutty stories. She turned, and the iron gate clanged shut behind her. I went home, feeling a little evil 'cause she had made me wait outside instead of inviting me in and introducing me to her mother.

At home as I copied the recipes, I thought, screw Joan, but she did have a nice, neat handwriting.

I turned in my cookbook the next day. Mrs. McCarthy, the teacher, looked at me like I was a stranger, which I almost was, but there were so many kids in her class that she didn't know them all anyway so she couldn't be sure whether I was there most of the time or not. She went through the notebook very suspiciously, I thought, but I
smiled sweetly at her when she looked up at me, and she mumbled, “Very good,” and gave me A minus.

I don't think I quite fooled Mrs. Abowitz, my sewing teacher. Maude's dress was a mess and fitted her like a sack, but at least it was done and I had only one side of mine together and couldn't possibly finish it now. So after Maude got graded on her dress, I talked her into letting me borrow it.

“I don't remember seeing you in class very often, Francie,” Mrs. Abowitz said, as she peered at Maude's sloppy seams through her double-lens glasses.

“I been here,” I mumbled.

“If you would take more time with your backstitch, Francie, you might make a good seamstress one day. That's a very good living, you know.”

“I don't think I'd like it, Mrs. Abowitz. I want to be a secretary when I grow up.”

“Well, Francie, we have to be practical. There aren't very many jobs for Negroes in that field. And while you're going to school you should learn those things which will stand you in good stead when you have to work.”

“I like shorthand and typing, Mrs. Abowitz,” I said, suddenly stubborn, “and I'm gonna be a secretary.”

She sighed. “I don't know why they teach courses like that to frustrate you people.”

I'm almost sure Mrs. Abowitz knew that dress wasn't mine, but for some reason, while she had only given Maude a C on it, she gave me a B plus.

To celebrate passing my midterms, I talked Mother into giving me some money to buy some new shoes and to let me go and get them by myself. Well, Mother did ask Rebecca to go with me and make sure I got a good buy, but it was practically like shopping by myself, which was good, 'cause
I usually had a terrible time with Mother. She was always trying to put some baby-looking flat shoes on my big feet. Now I was gonna buy a pair with a little heel.

First, though, me and Becky went to Kress's on 125th Street to mosey around. It was always fun going into the Five and Ten even if you didn't have the money to buy anything with. We looked at the pretty flowers for a dime, with a comb in them to stick in your hair, and the silk stockings for thirty-nine cents, which cost ten cents less under the Bridge. Then we casually walked over to the cookie counter and when the salesgirl turned to ring up a sale we both swiped a chocolate cookie and hurried outside.

We ate it while walking the half block to the shoe store and looked at the shoes in the window. “That's the kind I want,” I told Becky, pointing to a black patent leather with a nice, neat heel.

We went inside the crowded store and found a seat. For some reason Miles Shoe Store and National's, too, right next door, were always crowded.

“These shoes ain't nothing but cardboard,” a lady next to us said. “If they last a month they'll be doing good.”

“So,” the white salesman replied, “for a dollar ninety-eight you want leather?”

Me and Becky grinned. “I want to see number seven oh four,” I told the salesman. I would play that number tomorrow. “Size seven.”

The salesman got the shoe and crammed my right foot into it.

“That shoe's too tight for you,” Becky said, as I stood up and limped to the mirror.

“No, it's not,” I said quickly. If it killed me I wasn't gonna get a bigger size. My foot was larger than everybody else's already.

“Your mother told me to see that you got the right size,” Becky said, acting grown-up and tough. She turned to the salesman. “You got this a half size larger?”

“I tell you, Becky, it fits just fine.” The shoes were shiny and pretty with a ribbon bow and a round toe which was pinching me but they were gonna stretch for christsakes.

“They gonna stretch and be too big,” I told the salesman when he fitted me with the larger size.

“Stand up,” he said.

I got up and walked to the mirror. These were more comfortable, but seven and a halfs! When was my feet gonna stop growing?

“They feel better?” Becky asked.

“They're too big.”

“We'll take them,” Becky said, sounding just like my mother.

I opened my mouth to protest but a lady ran screaming into the store and I shut up to listen to her.

“They killed him. They drug the poor child down to the basement and shot him dead.”

“What you talking about, lady?” somebody asked, as a crowd gathered around her. “Who killed who?”

“The police. Shot a little colored boy at Kress's. Said he was stealing a pocket knife and they took him down to the basement to make him confess and they killed him. Over a little old knife.”

A low rumble started in the store. We paid for the shoes and went outside where the news was spreading all up and down 125th Street.

“Did you hear about it? Little Puerto Rican kid beaten to death at the Five and Ten. Swiped some candy and the cops hit him too hard and he died. Goddamn bullies. He was only a kid, I hear, eleven or twelve.”

“I never did like Woolworth's,” a fat lady said to us. “None of these stores hire colored, but the help at Woolworth's are the hinctiest, and now they done gone and killed that child.”

“It happened at Kress's,” I told the lady. “Least that's what somebody told us. And me and my friend Becky was just in Kress's not more than half an hour ago. They was probably beating that boy while we …” My voice trailed off. I looked at Becky and she nodded. She understood what I had started to say—while we was in there swiping cookies. Lord, it coulda been us the cops got, for sure as the devil had a tail we swiped cookies every time we went to the Five and Ten. It could have been us, dead now in the basement of Kress's. Or was it Woolworth's?

We walked home, listening to the outraged protests of the people. Yeah, it was a shame. God knew it was a lowdown, dirty shame.

When Mother came home that night I rushed to tell her the news.

“Mother, me and Becky was in Kress's and …”

“Did you get your shoes?”

“Yes, Mother, but let me tell you …”

“Try them on for me. I want to make sure they're the right size.”

“They fit okay, Mother. In fact, they're too big. Becky and me were …”