Daddy Was a Number Runner (7 page)

FOUR
      

I pushed open the Caldwells' door which was seldom locked. “Hey, Maude,” I yelled, “you home?”

“You got to shout like that?” Robert asked, coming out of the bedroom. “Ain't nobody deaf around here. Maude's in the front room.”

“I'm sorry, Robert.” I walked past him. He sure was one evil black West Indian, and especially so since he lost his precious car. I know that nearly killed him, having to give that car up. When he used to visit Fifth Avenue with Elizabeth before they got dispossessed and had to move in with her mother, he would holler at us kids something awful just 'cause we touched his old shiny chrome.

“Y'all keep your greasy hands off my car,” he would command, and pay one of the boys a nickel to see that we didn't touch it. He was evil all right, but good looking, with broad shoulders and thick arms and legs.

I went into the front room. Vallie, dressed in a polka-dot dress, was poking about the sofa, looking under the cushions. With his round baby face he looked almost like a girl except for the greasy stocking cap on his head.

“Hello, Vallie.”

“Hi, Francie. Hey, Maude,” he called. “You know where Ma hid my pants?”

“The last place you'd be expected to look for them,” Maude said from the fire escape. “In the clothes closet.”

Vallie went into the bedroom and came back with his pants. He slipped them under the dress which he then whipped off over his head. His mother came into the room. I loved Mrs. Caldwell, she was that jolly and nice and fat and warm with her West Indian accent.

“So, my son, you've found your pants, huh?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“You going to come back upstairs tonight at a decent hour?”

“Yes, Ma.”

Mrs. Caldwell sighed. “I don't know why your father upped and died like he did leaving me with all these problems.”

“You making more problems, Ma, than you have to,” Vallie said. “What you tryin' to do, make a sissy out of me or something, making me wear Rebecca's clothes?”

“Better a live sissy than a dead little boy,” she said, going to Vallie and straightening his shirt collar. “Ain't that right, Francie?”

“I guess so, Mrs. Caldwell.”

Vallie stayed out in the street so much that when he did come home his mother hid his pants and made him wear his sister's clothes knowing he wouldn't sneak downstairs dressed like a girl.

“When you come back upstairs,” Mrs. Caldwell told Vallie, “bring me two penny licorice sticks.”

“Okay,” Vallie said, holding out his hand. His mother dropped two cents into it. She dearly loved licorice sticks.

“Francie's here,” Mrs. Caldwell told Maude. “Come off of that fire escape and talk to her.”

Maude grumbled something but didn't make a move, so when Sonny hollered down from the roof for Vallie to hurry on up there, I followed him. Sukie was there, too.

“Hey, man,” Sonny said to Vallie. “What took you so long? I called you three times.”

“I had to find my pants.”

“Francie,” Sonny said, looking at me from under his sleepy eyes, “you sure are getting tall for a girl and
skin-nay!
”

“Hello, Sonny.” I couldn't think of anything else to say, as usual, so I turned to Sukie. “Hi. Where you been all day?”

“Playing jacks with you up till ten minutes ago. What's the matter, you losin' your mind or something?”

I could have killed her. She always did that, showed me up in front of the boys.

“Come on,” Sonny said, running toward the back of the roof. “Let's jump over the alley.” He stopped short at the end of the roof and bowed. “Ladies first.”

I trailed behind them, deciding that no matter how bad they teased me I wasn't gonna jump. Everybody almost had jumped over that old alley at some time or another except me. Anytime I saw a crowd in the street looking down at something near the alley, I thought that James Junior or Sterling had finally missed and fell while jumping over it, and no amount of teasing could make me do it.

Vallie always teased the most. Now he was saying: “A long-legged gal like you ought to be able to stretch from one side of that alley to the other.”

“Ain't it the truth,” Sukie agreed, and showing off she backed up and with a flying leap jumped to the other roof.
Then just to show how easy it was, she jumped back to our side again.

“Go ahead, Francie,” Vallie urged. “Sukie's legs ain't even as long as yours.”

“Leave me alone, pretty brown girl,” I said, knowing that would make him mad. Any hint about him wearing Rebecca's clothes did.

Vallie stopped smiling and leaped at me. In ducking away from him I bumped into Sonny who grabbed my arm.

“Should I throw her over the roof for you, Vallie?” he asked.

Sonny was big for his age and square as a box, and as he held me I thought for a moment that he might not be kidding. Vallie didn't answer.

“Throw her over,” Sukie said calmly.

“Y'all stop playing like that with me,” I said, nervous now. “I'm gonna tell Junior.”

“You can't tell nobody nothing if you're dead, dead, dead,” Sonny said, his eyes half-closed.

“Aw, leave her alone,” Vallie said.

Sonny released me, crossed the divider to the next roof and ran to the door. “Y'all wait here a minute,” he said, “I'll be right back.” He disappeared inside and a moment later came back out holding a black cat by the nape of its neck. A rope dangled from its head and apparently Sonny had tied the cat to the banister earlier.

“Whatcha gonna do with your grandma's cat?” Sukie asked.

“Wait and see.” Sonny walked to the side of the roof and dangled the cat over the edge. Suddenly his fingers sprung open and the cat fell.

I screamed.

“You sonofabitch,” Vallie yelled. “Whatcha do that for?”

“Come on,” Sonny said, running toward the door.

Vallie followed him and I trailed behind, not wanting to go. I turned around to see if Sukie was coming and saw that she was quietly vomiting up her lunch.

I raced down the stairs behind the boys to the basement and out into the yard where the cat lay in a tangled mess of broken bones and black fur slimy with blood.

Sonny bent over the cat and then straightened up. “The bastard is dead.”

“What the hell did you expect?” Vallie asked. “For him to jump up and kiss you?”

“I expected him to have nine lives like they always say a cat has,” Sonny said. He turned away in disgust. “They lied.”

I started to whimper.

“It's all right, Francie,” Vallie said, pulling me up the basement steps. “Sonny is just a crazy nigger. I hope his grandma whips his ass for killing her cat like that.”

A
FTER
breakfast on Sunday Mother and I went to Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear Adam. Mother was a born Methodist but she had been going to Abyssinian ever since we lived in Brooklyn. The Old Man was preaching then, Adam's father, and I used to think that he looked just like God, with his long white hair and all.

We never could get Daddy to go to church with us, although he did admit that Adam had done a lot of good in Harlem, particularly last year when he opened a free food kitchen and fed a thousand people a week. Adam was also a leader in the rent strikes. Daddy said that was good, otherwise more people would have been set out on the street.
But on the whole, Daddy would have nothing to do with churches and preachers.

“King James of England wrote the Bible,” he was always telling Mother, “and he made you niggers happy hewers of wood and told you to serve your masters faithfully and you'd get your reward in heaven. You all believe that shit and been worshiping a white Jesus ever since. How in the hell could God take the black earth and make himself a white man out of it? Answer me that?”

But Mother never tried to answer. She just hauled me off with her to church and sometimes sent me to Mt. Olivet Sunday school on 120th Street and Lenox Avenue. Daddy didn't care whether we went to Sunday school or not, so naturally James Junior and Sterling never went.

Church was packed this morning. It was a hot day and the sweat rolled down the congregation's faces as they joined the choir in singing:

What are they doing in heaven today?

Where sin and sorrow are all washed away,

Where peace abides like a river they say,

What are they doing there now?

That song always made me think of the dead, and I was wondering what Mr. Caldwell was doing in heaven today when the lady next to me started screaming:

“Praise his Holy name. Do, Jesus. Do.”

I inched away from her so nobody would think we were together. She threw her fat self around like a top, and I felt like disappearing under the floorboards. Why did they have to shout and holler like that? Adam stood up to preach. He was a handsome, large man, so white he could have passed. Even before he opened his mouth, the lady next to me shouted again:

“Preach His Holy word, Adam. Thank Thee, Father, for Adam Powell, Jr.” Still shouting, she threw her arms out wide, almost knocking me sideways, then stiffened and leaped up. A nurse in white came running and grabbed the woman's hands and eased her back into her seat. The nurse began fanning her and I turned to Mother. She smiled at me and I smiled back, moving closer to her.

First Adam talked about Haile Selassie asking the League of Nations for protection from Mussolini and how they was ignoring him. Then he almost wept about that terrible lynching in Florida I had read about in
The Amsterdam News.
His sermon was about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and how the Negro today was in worse bondage and had to free himself.

I liked Adam. He talked about things that were happening today and preached such a powerful sermon that the sisters shouting “Hallelujah” and “Amen” kept me from dozing off. By the time he finished preaching they were swooning and jumping up and down all over the church. As I followed Mother out, I was glad that while she loved Adam dearly, she wasn't the shouting kind.

The next day after school I banged on Sukie's door and when she didn't answer I went looking for her in the street but she was nowhere to be found. I went up to her roof, which was two houses down from mine, and climbed down the fire escape to her apartment which was on the top floor, too. There she was looking out the window.

“Come on in, Francie.”

“I knocked a little while back but you didn't answer,” I said.

“I didn't hear you. I was lookin' out the window.”

“What you wanna do today?” I asked. “If we had some money we could go to the show.”

“I got fifteen cents,” she said. “What you got?”

“Nothin'. But maybe I can get a dime from my father if I can find him.”

“Okay, let's go.” She didn't have to ask anybody if she could go to the show because there was nobody to ask. Papa Dan was drunk in some hallway somewhere, and Mrs. Maceo was a cook for a private family and didn't come home until around nine o'clock at night.

I found my father in Jocko's candy store. No, we don't have no homework, I told him, and he gave me a dime and me and Sukie walked on down to 116th Street.

We couldn't decide whether to go to the Jewel or Regun Theatre and was arguing about it. There was a cowboy picture I wanted to see at the Jewel with Ken Maynard, my favorite. Sukie wanted to see “Zombies from Haiti” at the Regun. I don't know why I wasted my time arguing with her 'cause we walked right past the Jewel and headed for the Regun farther down the street and I knew that picture was gonna scare me so much I wouldn't be able to sleep.

That white bald-headed man who used to try and get me to come up on the roof and now followed me to the show every chance he got was standing outside the Jewel. I stuck my tongue out at him as I passed. He only bothered me when I was alone so I knew he wasn't gonna follow us.