Daddy Was a Number Runner (22 page)

“How come you didn't tell me you saw him?” Mother demanded.

“Because I was mad. Hanging around with that damn pimp and trying to be like him.”

“You don't know he's tryin' to be like Alfred,” Mother said.

“I do so know,” Daddy hollered. “Didn't I see my boy with my own eyes aping that pimp?”

But Mother wasn't about to believe it, I could see that, and she just shut it out of her mind. I couldn't believe it either.

“And then I thought,” Daddy continued quietly, “that one out of two ain't bad. Sterling was intelligent and going on to college. I would have got the money somehow, Henrietta, I swear. I would have stolen the money if need be to get Sterling in college. But if he don't wanna go, if his head is so hard he don't wanna finish school, then I'll be damned if I'm …” He broke off and stood up. “Make him give
you four dollars a week for his room and board. If he won't stay in school he'll have to pay his own way.”

Then he was gone, shaking his head and muttering that he was cursed with idiots for sons.

F
INALLY
it was summer and I was thirteen. I tried to get excited about it but it was just another ordinary day. Mother gave me a dime and I gave a nickel of it to Sukie. We did the same things we had always done, putting on our old bathing suits in the morning and walking up and down the streets looking for a johnny pump the boys had turned on. They put a wooden box over it making the water squirt up high and we'd get good and wet until a cop showed up and turned the hydrant off and then we'd wander around looking for another turned-on johnny pump. Or we would walk up to 131st Street and visit Aunt Hazel and she and Mr. Mulberry would fuss over us and feed us soda and cake till we almost popped. But nothing was too much fun anymore. I spent a lot of time reading on the fire escape, looking at the bell tower in Mt. Morris Park and then down the other way at the Empire State Building, very hazy in the distance. It seemed like Harlem was trapped in a valley between those two high points. I knew what was on the other side of the bell tower, more Harlem, but way down Fifth Avenue on the other side of the skyscrapers, that was another world, and I looked and sighed and dreamed that I was way over there instead of stuck here in my black valley.

At night I coaxed myself to sleep by imagining that Ken Maynard came charging down Fifth Avenue on his mighty white horse, and swooping me up in his arms, we rode off into that other world.

One day, though, I went to the Jewel Theatre and the
strangest thing happened. For a couple months now I had been noticing that cowboy pictures didn't send me like they used to. Not Tom Mix or Bob Steele or even Ken Maynard. This day, during the big battle when Ken was surrounded by Apaches who had set the covered wagons afire, I found myself rooting for the Indians. I didn't want them to get wiped out again, but the cavalry rode in just in the nick of time and those Indians were slaughtered like always. It made me mad. That white man who had broken the treaty with them was the real villain. He did get killed but it was too late, I was already on the wrong side and it was all spoiled.

I left the theater and walked slowly home feeling evil. I slipped on a banana peel and angrily kicked it off the curb where it found a home with a pile of garbage a storekeeper had just swept into the gutter. Seemed like Harlem was nothing but one big garbage heap. And how crowded the streets were, people practically falling off the sidewalks, kids scrambling between your legs almost knocking you down. There was something black and evil in these streets and that something was in me, too.

I was climbing the steps of my stoop when Max the Baker called me. The lights in the bakery were off.

“I was just getting ready to close,” Max said as I went past him into the shop. Really, he was too chalk-white and tiny to be real. “I got a bag of cookies that will be stale by tomorrow,” he said. “I thought you might like them.”

They're already stale, I thought. Max don't give away nothing good. He held out the bag with one hand, covered with dark hair right down to the knuckles, while his other hand grabbed my shoulder and slid down to my breast. I brought up one knee and aimed it between his legs. It
wasn't a good jab but I got part of him because he yelled, dropping the bag of cookies, and bent over double.

“Do it to your mother,” I shouted, and ran outside. And tomorrow I'd get that lousy butcher and his extra pieces of rotten meat.

I went upstairs and found Mother in her bedroom patching my skirt which was so worn it was gonna look like a patchwork quilt.

“Mother, we ever gonna move off Fifth Avenue?”

She put the skirt down and looked at me for a long time. Finally she said: “One of these days, Francie, we gonna move off of these mean streets.”

“H
E
asked me who you was,” the Twin said, “and he wanted to know how old you were.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked, excited.

The Twin looked at me like I was crazy. “I told him you was thirteen like you is. What did you expect me to tell him?”

“Then what did he say?”

“He said thirteen was kinda young, but you looked older so he still wants to meet you. He's sixteen.”

“Sixteen,” I said. “He don't look that old.”

I had seen Vincent from a distance yesterday, a light handsome boy with good hair. He was the Twin's cousin visiting them from Florida.

“Anyway, he'll be down on the stoop with the gang tonight,” the Twin said, “so come on down and meet him.”

“Well, I don't know,” I said. “I gotta lot of things to do upstairs.”

“Like what? You scared of boys or something, Francie?”

“Don't be silly, Twin. I ain't scared,” I lied.

As the Twin walked toward 118th Street, her fat butt bouncing behind her, Sukie came up.

“Hello, Sukie.”

“Hello, Francie. Let's go to the park.”

“We goin' swingin'?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“I don't wanna go then.”

“What's the matter? You don't feel good or somethin'?”

“No, I just don't wanna go where those men are anymore.”

Sukie's face turned red. “You signifying something bad about me?”

“No, Sukie, I just don't wanna—”

“You know what? I ain't whipped your ass in a long time.”

“Sukie. How come you wanna talk like that?”

“You ready to fight now?”

I sighed and backed up. “No, Sukie. I can't fight today. I ain't got time. I gotta go now.” I ran inside my hall and up the stairs. Well, I thought, I should have known she'd get around to picking a fight with me again sooner or later.

I didn't go downstairs that night to meet Vincent but stayed up on the fire escape almost falling over the railing looking down at everybody on the stoop having a good time. Maude and Rebecca were there and Sonny Taylor and Duke from 119th Street and Sukie and the Twins and a couple of other boys from Madison Avenue. They were dancing on the tile in front of Max the Baker's. It wasn't on account of Sukie that I didn't go down. She wouldn't pick a fight with me in front of all those boys, I knew, but I was scared to meet Vincent. What did you say to a handsome light boy from Florida who had straight hair when you were nappy-headed and black?

Sixteen. What a jazzy age, I thought, as I wrapped my arms about myself and imagined that it was Vincent's arms and we were dancing. We were lindying up and down on the tile, then we were in a glittering ballroom, me in a long gown, and we were waltzing to a big orchestra and everybody was watching us, we danced that good together.

We were going steady. Not right now, but next year when he came back. Of course he would come back. Nothing could keep him away from me.

“Nothing can keep me away from you, Francie, my darling,” he whispered in my ear. “I'll carry you away from here. To Florida or even California. Anywhere you want to go. I love you.”

I hugged myself again and wondered if I should go downstairs and meet him, but the thought of me stumbling all over myself kept me up on the fire escape. I looked over the railing again. He stood head and shoulders over the other boys and was lindying with Sukie now. He was a sharp dancer. The stars were very bright and low in the sky, like you could reach up and pluck one, and I sat there dreaming about me and Vincent and I hadn't been so happy since I don't know when.

For the next few days whenever Mother sent me to the store I was in agony. Suppose I met Vincent in the street or in the hallway? What would I say? I was so busy dodging Vincent that I forgot to be on the lookout for Sukie, and as I was coming back from the butcher one day, with no extra meat, there she stood with her moriney self.

“I can't fight now, Sukie, my mother's waiting for this meat.”

“I got plenty of time.”

“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “Say, I saw you dancing with Vincent the other night. You like him?”

“Naw, he thinks he's cute but he's an asshole.”

I went into my hallway. Sukie was lying. Vincent wasn't an asshole and she knew it. She was just jealous because he liked me better than he did her.

On the fifth night I couldn't bear watching them have a good time without me no more and I finally went downstairs. They were laughing and joking on the stoop and I stood there for a long time before anybody noticed me.

“Hi, Francie,” one of the Twins finally said.

Vincent didn't even look up. He was talking to Sukie, telling her a long story, too long, it seemed to me. Finally he finished and they both laughed.

“Hey, Francie,” Maude yelled, “where you been all week? Hidin'?”

I could have kicked her. “I was busy studyin',” I mumbled.

“Studying in the summertime?” Vincent asked, in a high voice.

“She's backward like that,” Sukie said, and everybody giggled.

I would have fainted if I knew how.

Vincent looked me up and down. “You sure are tall for a girl,” he said. “I bet you're almost as tall as I am.”

“Oh, no,” I said, “I look taller than I am 'cause I'm so skinny, but I ain't …”

He wasn't listening. He had turned back to Sukie and was lighting a cigarette, not that straw we all smoked, but those skinny stinking things they smoked in the Apollo balcony. He was showing off. He inhaled deeply and passed the cigarette to Sukie. She puffed on it like she knew what she was doing and handed it back to him, showing off, too.

I smiled at nobody in particular until my face grew stiff,
then mumbling that I had to go, I fled back into the safety of the dark hall. I ran upstairs and went to bed.

I ain't too tall, I thought, and screw him. He wasn't different nohow from those stupid boys on the block always jivin' around and actin' the fool and going nowhere but to Sing Sing, like Daddy said. I didn't like light boys nohow, they were too stuck up. Screw you, Vincent. Screw you.

The next morning was one of those hot heavy days that make you feel like you're being squashed to the ground with a steamroller. I was so blue I went looking for Daddy.

“Have you seen my father, Slim Jim?”

“I just left him up at Mrs. Mackey's, Francie.”

“Thanks.” I walked to 119th Street and went to Mrs. Mackey's apartment. She opened the door.

“He's inside there, Francie.”

I went into the bedroom and Daddy was laying across the bed asleep. “Daddy. Daddy.”

“Hello, sugar.” He hugged me. After we talked for a minute or two he called out to Mrs. Mackey: “Mabel, give Francie a quarter for me, will you? I'll give it back to you this afternoon.”

Mrs. Mackey gave me the quarter and I left. When Mother came home from work that afternoon I told her about it. She was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor and she almost knocked over the basin of soapy water when I said Daddy had been laying on Mrs. Mackey's bed.

“He was in her bedroom, Francie? In her bed?”

“Yes, Mother. He didn't have a quarter so he …”

Mother was crying. She was still scrubbing the floor and the tears were rolling silently down her cheek. Back and forth her hand scrubbed the same spot.

“Mother.” I was frightened. “Mother, please don't cry.”

Sterling came out of his room.

“Francie saw Daddy in Mrs. Mackey's bed,” Mother told him, raising her eyes to meet his.

Sterling took the scrub brush out of her hand and gently pulling her to her feet, he led her to her bedroom. When I tried to follow he pushed me away, his face bunched up with anger. I waited outside the door and he came out in a little while.

“Don't you have no better sense than to tell everything you know?”

“What did I do?”

“Shut up. Don't start Mother off again.” He pushed me ahead of him into the kitchen. He picked up the brush and started to scrub where Mother had left off.