Daddy Was a Number Runner (30 page)

Daddy Was a Number Runner
is a well-crafted work of art that captures the essence of a historical time and place in the experiences of black people, but especially of the extent to which black women suffer, face failures not of their own making, take responsibility for themselves
and their families, and sometimes transcend the difficulties of their lives even when their men fail them. Told in the voice of the adolescent narrator, through Francie's eyes, readers have a front-seat view, devoid of moralizing or sensationalism, of how a young girl felt in that place and in that time. Faithful to the idea of the complex nature of experience, Meriwether does not blame the men for their inability to secure work, nor does she castigate them (Adam Coffin, for instance) for their inability to remain stoically with their families through the worst times. Her sympathetic portrayal of the ways in which circumstances beyond their control undermine their pride in themselves is skillfully handled. At the same time, because Meriwether respects the men's humanity, her treatment of them is never condescending and she makes no apologies for them. In the final analysis, she leaves them responsible for their actions without passing moral judgments on their failures.

Finally, this book is largely a tribute to poor, uneducated, black women, who, through centuries of watching their men being ground down by poverty and racism continue to live each day with the assurance that conditions will improve. Expecting little for themselves, not from lack of self-worth, but because they understand the politics of race, gender, economics, and power, they scrub floors, wash windows, and absorb racist and sexist insults, so that their children can have better lives than their own. In the contrast in the portraits of Henrietta Coffin and the other mothers with Aunt Hazel, Meriwether demonstrates how even the family oppresses women. Aunt Hazel escapes the worst aspects of the depression because she has no husband or children, and is free to take advantage of a live-in job, and so to meet her own financial needs. Still, Aunt Hazel's life leaves much to be desired, as stories of live-in domestics attest. (See, for example, Paule Marshall's “Reena” in
Reena and Other Stories,
1983.) However, in this work, Aunt Hazel's willingness to help her sister and niece and nephews further confirms the existence and importance of the community of women. It is this community that provides the core of strength that sustains the women in this novel: from the willingness to lend a slice of bread or a cup of sugar, to accompanying a distraught mother on a visit to her incarcerated son.

Meriwether affirms this community through the voice of Francie Coffin, who we are sure will go to college so that Henrietta Coffin's hope for her children will not have been in vain.

Louise Jenkins Meriwether, the third of five children, was born in Haverstraw, New York, of parents who had moved from South Carolina to New York, by way of Philadelphia, early in this century. They too were members of the twentieth-century black pilgrimage in search of a better life. Like Francie in her novel, Meriwether spent her adolescence in Harlem, and her father, Lloyd Jenkins, a bricklayer by trade, became a number runner when he was unable to find other work during the depression. In spite of the misfortunes of the family, Meriwether graduated from New York University before she married and moved to the Midwest, and later to Los Angeles, with her husband, who was a teacher. However, the marriage did not last, and her second attempt at matrimony shared a similar fate. Although Meriwether earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1965, and worked as a reporter for the
Los Angeles Sentinel,
her main concern had always been with establishing herself as a writer. Her first articles appeared in
Negro Digest
and other black journals from the mid to late 1960s; her favorite topic was black men and women who had achieved in spite of difficult circumstances. In the late 1960s she joined the Watts Writers Workshop and contributed to the
Antioch Review
when the group was invited to do so. “Daddy Was a Number Runner” first appeared as a short story in that journal in 1967, and in the following year, another story, “A Happening in Barbados,” was also published there.

While working on her novel, Meriwether became involved with a group that opposed Twentieth Century Fox in its effort to produce a film based on William Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner,
which many believed presented an inaccurate and distorted view of Turner. Her efforts came to the attention of Martin Luther King, Jr., among other notable civil rights activists of the time. Much to her gratification, the movie was never produced. In the summer of 1965 she was associated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Bogalusa,
Louisiana, as a “gun toter” for a radical group, the Deacons, who were protecting blacks from harrassment by the Ku Klux Klan. Her experiences here provided the basis for her story “The Girl from Creektown” (1972). Since then she has also been vocal against apartheid in South Africa.

Daddy Was a Number Runner,
the first novel to come out of the Watts Writing Workshop, was five years in the writing and underwent extensive revisions before its publication in 1970. In its first life it went through twelve printings, with hardcover sales of close to 20,000 copies and paperback sales exceeding 400,000 copies. Favorable critical attention came from many quarters including the
Saturday Review
and black writers Paule Marshall and James Baldwin. With its current publication by The Feminist Press it joins the ranks of feminist classics that will speak to generations to come.

Louise Meriwether returned to New York in the 1970s. Since then she has written three biographies of famous blacks for elementary school children.
The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls
(1971) is an account of a South Carolina slave who hijacked a Confederate gunboat and reached the Union fleet in safety in 1892. After the emancipation he served five terms as a representative to Congress from his home town of Beaufort, South Carolina.
The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams
(1972) deals with the struggles and successes of the famous nineteenth-century black heart surgeon. Dr. Williams is credited with opening the first hospital (in Chicago in 1891) in which black nurses were trained, and which admitted patients of more than one race. For all of his success, including having been the first person in America to perform heart surgery, he was never allowed to join white professional societies. In 1973 Meriwether published
Don't Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Park Story
, a tribute to the middle-aged black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked the boycott that had enormous repercussions in mobilizing the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Louise Meriwether now lives in New York City and teaches writing courses at Sarah Lawrence College. She belongs to the Harlem
Writers Guild and has taught a fiction workshop at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center for a number of years. She continues to write and is working on a historical novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has always had, she says, a special interest in and love for history.

Nellie McKay

University of Wisconsin—Madison

C
ONTEMPORARY
C
LASSICS BY
W
OMEN

Allegra Maud Goldman

Edith Konecky

This Child's Gonna Live

Sarah E. Wright

The Parish and the Hill

Mary Doyle Curran

Daddy Was a Number Runner

Louise Meriwether

Paper Fish

Tina De Rosa

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Louise Meriwether is a native New Yorker and author of several books, including
Fragments of the Ark
. A former reporter and story analyst, she has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and published short fiction and articles in several literary publications.

The Feminist Press
is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women's studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.

See our complete list of books at
feministpress.org
, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS

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Dorothy West

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The Wedding
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“[A] powerful work.”

—
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The Living Is Easy
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—
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“The important thing about the book is its abundance and special woman's energy and beat. The beat is a deep one, and it often makes a man's seem puny.”

—Seymour Krim,
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“[Dorothy West] is a brisk storyteller with an eye for ironical detail . . . [and] a deft stylist and writer of social satire.”

—Ms.

“An American masterpiece.”

—Cynthia Davis, professor of English, University of Maryland

ISBN: 9781558611474

This Child's Gonna Live

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Originally published in 1969 to broad critical acclaim,
This Child's Gonna Live
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herself, is passionate and compassionate, at times funny and resolutely resilient to fatalism. Often compared to Zora Neale Hurston for her lyrical and sure-handed use of local dialect, Wright, like Hurston, powerfully depicts the predicament of poor African American women, who confront the multiple oppressions of class, race, and gender.

“This novel changed forever the way I saw the world in which I had grown up. In that sense it changed the way I thought and the way I wrote.”

—Adrienne Rich

“In every respect, an impressive achievement. The canon of American folk-epic is enriched by this small masterpiece.”

—
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“Saturated in harsh beauty, this book has been and still is for me one of the most important and indispensable books published in my lifetime. We have nothing else quite like it…. This is a touchstone book against which to test the lives of those who cannot speak for themselves.”

—Tillie Olsen

“Sarah Wright's searing yet lyrical rendition of a Southern black woman's life . . . is as compelling as her protagonist's insistence that
This Child's Gonna Live
. Wright's language is so true to the spoken word, her rhythms so authentic, readers may feel they are hearing her characters rather than meeting them on the printed page.”