Daddy Was a Number Runner (29 page)

The inadequate preparation for handling the development of their sexuality, in conjunction with the kind of street knowledge girls like Francie acquire at a very early age, inevitably affect their ability to bring the problems they encounter with the men to their elders. What they do, however, is to attempt to take some control of the behavior they do not welcome. Invited by the man on her roof (who also follows her into the movies, and who is later murdered by some of the members of her brother's gang) to come up and touch his exposed penis, Francie tells him to throw down the dime he promised he would give her if she did what he asked. As soon as he does so she disappears inside her apartment without granting his wish. On another occasion Francie and Sukie, together in the park, receive a nickel each from an old white man who wants to take a look at their genitals. They succeed in granting him the merest glimpse of their private parts. “I was glad Sukie never let any of these bums touch us,” Francie comments on this occasion. “It was bad enough having the butcher and Max the Baker always sneaking a feel, but at least they were clean” (45): In the close confines of the butcher or baker shop, Francie finds it harder to avoid the “feeling up” these men do to her every chance they get, but still does what she can to escape their preying hands. Liberation from this harrassment comes for her during the summer of her thirteenth year when she takes direct action to end it. Not surprisingly, this occurs at a time when she is feeling that “Harlem was nothing but one big garbage heap” (174). In sheer frustration with the conditions she sees—the crowded streets with garbage strewn over them, the disappointments in her family, the hopelessness most people
are feeling—she brings up her knee and aims it between the legs of Max the Baker as he offers her a bag of stale cookies and tries to slide his hand across her breasts. We know that she will free herself of this harrassment because she promises herself that on the morrow she will “get” the butcher in the same way. As her body begins its transformation from child to woman, in spite of the gaps in her sexual education, she will be able to protect herself from the unwanted attentions of those who had previously been able to take advantage of her innocence.

A good deal has been debated and written in recent times in regard to black/Jewish American relationships. Antagonism and mutual sympathies, differences and similarities between the two groups have been explored and questioned on a variety of levels. With two exceptions, Meriwether's book, in which most of the whites who interact with blacks are Jewish, does not give us a positive reading of these relationships in day-to-day Harlem life during this historical period. There are no opportunities for the two groups to meet as equals, and in addition to the sexual harrassment issue and the negative teacher-student encounters, the adults of the groups meet each other only on two levels: one, in the relationship between tenants and landlords or customers and storekeepers; the other, as domestic workers and their women employers. In both cases black people appear victimized and exploited. The two white people who do not project negative attitudes toward Harlem's black residents are Mr. Rathbone, who owns the candy store and is often kind to Francie without ever molesting her, and Mr. Lipschwitz, the plumber, who is generous to the Coffins with the furniture his family no longer needs. He also maintains his dignity with the young girls. At the same time, Mrs. Rathbone expects Francie to do much harder work than someone her age should do.

When Harlem became predominantly black, in the early part of this century, the Jewish people who had previously been the majority living there moved to the suburbs. However, as the novel illustrates, many proceeded to hold on to city real estate and became absentee landlords, while others continued to maintain their businesses within the black community. Black tenant overcrowding, joblessness, and lack of respect for the property of others, as well as the racism of white
landlords wishing to make huge profits with a minimum of investment are all blamed for the animosities between the landlords and tenants. Nonresident merchants trading in Harlem with no sense of responsibility to that place charge exhorbitant prices for inferior commodities, and cause an economic drain of profits out of the community. The racism of white Jewish women is indicated in their exploitation of the misfortunes of black women who have no alternative but to seek domestic employment from them. Still, the black reactions that emanate from these situations do not in themselves constitute a universal disapproval of Jews as a group, but rather an active dislike of those with whom black Harlem comes into contact—landlords, small storekeepers, teachers who stifle ambitions, and domestic employers. Within the general context of race and class in American society, the minority ethnic and racial search for upward mobility, and the pressures of the depression, it is not surprising that the black people in this book should feel as they do toward those white people with whom they come into contact. That the majority of these are Jews reflects the historical pattern of ethnic migration to and from the city.

One of the most moving subplots within this novel deals with the way in which crime was beginning to affect black families in Harlem in the 1930s. In fact, the events delineated here demand that the reader attempt to understand the disastrous impact of race and class prejudice on human behavior, and to recognize how unmeasurable is the waste and suffering these cause, not only to blacks, but also to whites. The West Indian Caldwells, the family severely affected, are immigrants in search of a better life for their children. Far from being irresponsible parents, Mr. Caldwell, we are told, “was awfully strict with them, but he loved his boys.” Mrs. Caldwell does her best to establish a compromise between a demanding father and his strong-willed sons, and to keep them from following undesirable paths. Both parents and children, however, find their lives tragically entangled with urban crime, and Mr. Caldwell dies of pneumonia. The pathos in the portrayal of the fate of the two sons raises many disquieting questions for us. How, for instance, do we react to Mrs. Caldwell's heartrending cry when she learns of her younger son's conviction for
murder: “It took me sixteen years to raise that boy. . . . How could a handful of people decide in two hours that he ain't fit to live” (155)?

When these lines accost our “priviledged” eyes, what do we actually hear in the words of the poor-but-law-abiding widow and welfare mother, who even before this final catastrophe was hard pressed to cope with the reality of one son for whom jail was already a “second home‘? Do we question the existence of a relationship between Mr. Cladwell's death and his two sons taking “to the streets like wild animals?” Do we consider the possibility that the father may have died because he forced his physical strength beyong its boundary in a determined effort to overcome his economic deprivation? West Indians, we know, have been wont to believe that black Americans would be socially and economically better off if they only worked harder. Is it possible that the Caldwell sons rebelled against that ethic because they perceived only futility in their father's life of work, no matter how hard he willed it otherwise? Mrs. Caldwell mourns because, in spite of everything she had done to raise her sons “right,” she has failed. Do we question the justice that sets a mobster boss free because he is able to “[pay] off the jury,” but which then sends poor young black boys to die even though everyone, including the judge who sentenced them, knows that their “confessions” were beaten out of them?

How do we understand the pain of the black mother and still find sympathy for the survivors of the crime, the young white widow and her two little girls? To them, the murdered man was the husband and father they loved, the stable provider in their well-ordered family. They know only that he was brutally and senselessly killed. They do not know of the hidden side of his respectable life: his offences of child molestation in dark movie houses and on Harlem rooftops, and his penchant for regularly visiting a black prostitute. But are these actions sufficient for us to justify or even pardon the taking of his life? If not, do we concur with the jury (not of their peers) that the three young convicted men-boys are shiftless, irresponsible animals, deserving of the “nothing” they have received from life, even though they live in a world in which everyone, even the losers, know that “a man's got to have something . . . so he knows he's a man” (65)? Or do we see
them as victims of a society in which the cards are so stacked against them that their tragic end is inevitable?

There are no tidy answers to the questions raised by the particular events in this book. Neither the myth of Horatio Alger, which categorically condemns those who fail for their lack of initiative, nor the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, which exonerates failure on the basis of human impotence against the forces of the environment, applies here. If we respond honestly to this text we know that a combination of forces are at work, and that the social realities of class, race, and gender oppression, which are intricately woven into the fabric of this story, make it impossible to impute blame or withhold sympathy through simplistic analysis of the circumstances. If the boys must be held responsible for their actions (and I think they must be), then so should Dutch Schultz, the shoe salesman, and the white men and women who use their privileged status to take advantage of those for whom that privilege is never possible.

One of the strengths of this book is the balance that Meriwether creates in showing positive and negative aspects in the lives of her characters. In spite of the depression, the rise of crime, and the ways in which race, class, and gender impinge on the humanity of black people, there are evidences of another side of the experience. Francie reads fairy tales until she discovers books by and about black people: books like Claude McKay's
Home to Harlem
(1928). Her sense of self is heightened when she discovers that someone has written about the same “raggedy streets” she traverses and the “clowns” on Fifth Avenue who often annoy her. She finds this literature from life “very funny and kind of sad,” but it gives her ammunition to use in her own development. Other aspects of Harlem life are also positive. For fifteen cents, we learn, it is possible to have a hearty meal of golden brown chicken, bread, and vegetables at Father Divine's headquarters. A decade after Marcus Garvey had stirred the racial pride of millions of black Americans, his name and his philosophy are still heard on the corners where street speakers hold forth. Henrietta Coffin, born a Methodist, regularly attends Abyssinia Baptist Church, along with thousands of other black people, to hear Adam Clayton Powell expound on white racism, the problems of Haile Selassie, and the terrible
lynchings taking place in different parts of the country. Adam Coffin does not go to church, but he admires Powell for having been responsible for the opening of a free food kitchen that fed thousands of starving Harlemites during this difficult period. Activists mobilize sentiments to support the Scottsboro Boys, and when the “Brown Bomber” defeats the “Butcher Boy” all Harlem celebrates:

Strangers hugged me and I squeezed them back. It was good to feel their touch…. The crowd spilled off the pavement into the street, stalling cars, which honked good-naturedly and then gave up as the riders jumped out and joined us lindying down the middle of Lenox Avenue (194).

The misery of the families unable to meet their bills and breaking apart in the wake of an inhuman welfare system, has its opposite dimension in the life of Henrietta Coffin's sister, Francie's Aunt Hazel. Unhampered by husband or children, and holding down a steady live-in domestic job in the suburbs, Aunt Hazel's existence appears carefree in comparison to that of people like the Coffins. On Thursdays, when she is off from work, she stays in her Harlem apartment and entertains her West Indian friend, Mr. Mulberry, a live-in handyman who also has Thursdays off. Francie likes her aunt, who has long hair that she wears in a bun on the top of her head, is always jolly, drinks gin and wine, and smells “nice, like cake baking.” She never minds the missions that take her to visit Aunt Hazel (“to borrow money I was never sent to pay back”), and not only for the food (fried-fish sandwiches, cake, and milk), which she always gets when she is there, but also because of her aunt's genuine warmth and the order in her home. In spite of the funky hallways in Aunt Hazel's building, just like all the other hallways in Harlem, her tiny rooms are spotless, and everything is in its place. Her space is “not junky like ours,” Francie says. Although only a minor character in the novel, Aunt Hazel's generosity toward her almost destitute family is another indication of the presence of human kindness and family cooperation even in so bleak a landscape.

Daddy Was a Number Runner
ends on notes that reinforce the idea that hope continues to live in spite of the failures that have characterized
the lives of many American blacks throughout their history. As the narrative moves to its conclusion, there are moments when Francie feels, in spite of all that is wrong with her community, that it is still a place that has value. On a particular Saturday morning soon after her thirteenth birthday, as she watches a group of young boys across the street from her apartment “acting the fool as usual,” she has a strong sense of the joy of life in their loud and carefree laughter: “I wanted to hug them all,” she tells us. “We belonged to each other somehow. . . . [T]he sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything but my own rusty self” (184). At other times, when dramatic changes seem impossible, she feels despondent. For instance, the suggestion of her friend Sukie that as adult women “either you was a whore like China Doll or you worked in a laundry or did day's work or ran poker games or had a baby every year” (207) depresses her. Borrowing sparingly from Ann Petry's naturalistic novel,
The Street,
in which a poor but ambitious young black woman is destroyed by the malignant Harlem environment, Meriwether has Francie raise the question of whether her Fifth Avenue is a trap of poverty and despair from which she and her family can never escape. From one angle, it looks this way, for in this text, race, class, and gender are powerful obstacles that constantly defy the possibilities of success. But this novel steers a clear path away from the pessimism of naturalism. Significantly, it is Henrietta Coffin, welfare mother and exploited domestic worker, deserted by her husband, with her dreams for her sons having fallen away, and with no tangible proof that her life will ever be better, who is not trapped in the “coffin” of her spirit. Her voice echoes the self-confidence of millions like herself who, in the face of dreams deferred, hold on. When her daughter inquires of her if they will ever be free to leave the street, Henrietta Coffin thinks, then responds: “One of these days, Francie, we gonna move off these mean streets” (175). Her statement is a celebration of the power of the human spirit.