Daddy Was a Number Runner (13 page)

I escaped into the store, but my luck was still bad. It wasn't Mr. Burnett, a jolly West Indian, behind the counter, but his fat yellow wife. And Yolanda, nine, light-skinned and plump like her mother, with long braids hanging down her back, was perched on a high stool next to the rice sack.

“Hello, Mrs. Burnett. Hello, Yolanda.”

They both grunted at me. “Three pounds of rice,” I read from the list, adding as Mrs. Burnett went to the five cents a pound sack, “Three pounds for ten cents.” She grunted again and scooped up the cheaper rice. “Ten cents' worth of dried herrings.”

“They's fifteen cents a pound.”

“My mother only wants ten cents' worth.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

She threw the herrings on the scale and snatched them off before I could see how much she had given me. I read the rest of the items off the list and watched as Mrs. Burnett wrote the prices on a large paper bag and added them up.

“That will be two dollars and ninety-eight cents.”

I caught my breath and held out the credit book. It seemed like forever I was holding that book out and she looking at it like she never saw it before, which was silly. She saw it almost every day.

“When do you all get your relief check?” she asked.

“The first of the month, Mrs. Burnett.” She knew it was the first. She knew it, she knew it. Finally, she took the book, grumbling under her breath, wrote the figure on it and threw it on top of the groceries. She pushed the bag toward me and I picked it up from the counter.

All of this time Yolanda's black button eyes were burning
a hole in my back. She never played with the rest of us and I don't know why me and Rebecca let her get on our nerves. After all, she was only nine, going on ten, but she sat there on that stool, silent and snotty, making me feel that it was not only her store but her world and I had no place in it.

But being in hock to the grocer wasn't enough to make our social worker, Madame Queen, happy. The next time she came to check up on us she told Daddy he had to be making some extra money somewhere 'cause we spent more on rent and food than what the relief gave us. She was right. Daddy wasn't bringing home hardly anything from his numbers, but Mother was still working three half days for Mrs. Schwartz and Sterling brought home a couple of bucks now and then from his shoeshining.

“I ain't working, Miss Peters,” Daddy told her. “How many times I have to tell you that.” He was standing up straight and tall, looking down at her sitting at our dining-room table, her papers and figures spread out before her. I hoped her glasses would pinch her nose off.

“Is anybody in this household working, Adam?”

“No.”

“I don't understand then how you can pay your rent and food and gas bill.”

“We manages, Miss Peters.”

“But where do you get the money from if no one is working?”

“We just gets it somehow.”

“Then somebody
is
bringing in extra money.”

“No, Miss Peters. We don't have one dime except what you all give us.”

They kept at it like that for ten minutes more and I could
have slapped her yellow face for pushing Daddy into a corner like that.

When she finally left, Daddy said wearily: “They don't give you enough money to live on so you have to bootleg some kind of work, then they want to deduct that from your relief check, too. I wonder how they expect you to live. Didn't I tell you I didn't want to mess with those people?” But for once he didn't shout, seeming to be more tired than angry.

I
HAD
been upstairs playing jacks with Maude and was going home now, but it was too dark to go over the roof so I was running down the stairs. I stopped short when I saw Sonny on the ground floor.

“Hello, Sonny.”

“Hello, Francie.”

I walked slowly down the last steps.

“Come on,” Sonny said, dancing around and aiming his fist at my jaw, “let's box.”

I threw up my hands to protect myself and backed up. The next thing I knew we were in the shadows behind the stairs and Sonny was leaning all over me, pulling my dress up.

“I don't wanna box no more,” I said. “I wanna go home.”

“Let me put it in you for a minute, Francie.” Then his bare flesh, hot and wet and hard, was on my thigh. “Open your legs a little, Francie.”

“No.” Suddenly, I was scared. I tried to dodge around him but he reached out with one arm and flung me back against the wall.

“It won't hurt, Francie.” He was rubbing himself up and down against me, one hand beneath the elastic leg of my
bloomers and the other at my waist trying to pull my bloomers down.

“No. I don't wanna.”

Frantic now, I held on to my bloomers with both hands, but they were slowly being forced down as Sonny poked his thing at me and tried to stick it over the top of my bloomers.

I stopped struggling for a moment to get my breath. Just as my bloomers were about to slide down over my knees, I wrenched free and hauled them back up. Sonny grabbed me again.

Then we heard somebody bouncing down the stairs singing. I held my breath and Sonny stopped his jiggling, both of us listening for the front door to slam. But instead, the singing came closer. I recognized Value's voice just before I saw him heading for the dark under the stairs. He had on one of Rebecca's cotton dresses and he was pulling up his knickers. He took the dress off and bundled it into a ball. He was whistling now, walking toward us to hide that dress under the stairs, I thought.

Sonny buttoned up his pants, his fingers stumbling in haste, and I pulled my dress down.

“Hold your hands up higher,” Sonny suddenly hollered, and went into his fighter's stance. I just stood there, scared and dumb.

“Who's that back there?” Vallie asked.

Sonny danced out into the light, shadowboxing. “Me and Francie,” he said. “I was showing her how Joe Louis delivers his powerhouse upper-right cross. Pow.” Sonny aimed one at Vallie's chin. Vallie ducked. Sonny laughed and shadowboxed himself right out into the vestibule. The door slammed shut behind him.

I walked toward Vallie, looking everywhere except at him.

“What was you doing behind the stairs with Sonny?” he asked.

“What?”

“He screw you?”

“You crazy or somethin'?”

“What was you doing back there with him?”

“We was boxing.”

“That's what they call it now, huh?”

“I wasn't doing nothing. I don't want to ever do nothing.” I started to cry.

“Aw, Francie. I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . Francie, please. Don't cry.”

He wiped my face with the dress and then he kissed me on the cheek. When I didn't move, his lips touched mine for an instant, pressing down firmly.

“You all right now?”

I nodded. “I wasn't doing nothing with Sonny. Honest I wasn't.”

“I believe you, Francie. But don't let him hem you up in no dark corner anymore. He don't mean you no good. Okay?”

“Okay, Vallie.”

We went outside, crossed over to my stoop, and he walked me upstairs to my door. I was hoping he would kiss me on the mouth again, I liked that, but he didn't. I listened to him galloping down the stairs and then I went on inside.

The next afternoon Rebecca and I went to the Apollo Theatre. We sat upstairs in the buzzard's roost 'cause it only cost a dime, although the sweet fumes from those skinny cigarettes the boys were smoking was so thick it gave me a
headache. Ralph Cooper was the master of ceremonies and him and Butterbeans and Susie made me laugh till I hurt. The picture was good, too, Janet Gaynor and Lionel Barry-more and Stepin Fetchit in “To Carolina.” Everybody laughed at Stepin Fetchit and so did I 'cause he was funny and a big movie star and making all that money, but sometimes I wished he wasn't such a shufflin', lazy nigger.

When the show was over we walked right into a riot. We had walked to Lenox Avenue and saw a crowd near 126th Street and went up there. A wooden platform was up in the street and several black and white men yelling into a microphone. There were hundreds of people milling around and a whole lot of cops swinging their billy clubs and hollering at the crowd to move on. I saw one cop rap a Negro right in the middle of his forehead and draw blood. I shuddered and turned away.

A banner over the platform said: “Welcome home Mrs. Ada Wright, Mother of Roy and Andy.” We would have gone on home then except that Rebecca suddenly yelled: “Hey, that's Robert up on that platform.”

I looked and sure enough it was. He grabbed the microphone and began hollering into it: “Do not disperse. We have a right to meet on our own streets.”

Just then a whole row of police cars drove up. As the cops jumped out they threw something into the air.

“Tear gas,” somebody yelled. “Oh, my God, they're gassing us.”

The crowd, which had been pressing up against the platform, scattered. People grabbed their throats, strangling, as the air about them turned smoky.

Just then Robert saw us and shouted at me and Rebecca to get out of there. We turned and ran with the crowd. The cops were chasing us up Lenox Avenue. People upstairs on
their fire escapes and hanging from their windows threw rotten fruit down on the police.

“Got one of the bastards,” somebody yelled, as a banana skin fell on top of a cop's cap.

“Come on,” Rebecca cried, “we'd better get out of here before they start shooting.”

A soggy tomato fell at my feet. I picked it up and threw it at the nearest cop, then Rebecca and I ran down to Fifth Avenue and went home.

I told Mother about the riot and we sat in the dining room drinking tea, waiting for the boys to come home. Sterling came in first and then around midnight James Junior showed up. Mother made me go on to bed. Hours later I woke up and went into the dining room. Mother was still sitting at the table, waiting. My eyes met hers and I saw fear in them. She was waiting for Daddy and I realized for the first time that I wasn't the only one in that house who was always afraid the worse had happened.

“Go on back to bed, Francie.”

“Yes, Mother.”

At daybreak Daddy came home and Mother finally went to bed.

The next day the front page of the papers was full of it: “5,000 Negroes and white sympathizers rioted yesterday when detectives used tear gas bombs to disperse an unauthorized meeting staged at Lenox Avenue and 126th St. to protest the Scottsboro case.”

The paper said the International Labor Defense Committee planned the meeting to welcome home Mrs. Ada Wright, mother of two of the Scottsboro boys, Roy and Andy. She had been to Alabama to see them and Harlem was welcoming her home. I stopped reading in disgust when the paper said that the police didn't use clubs or pistols
against the rioters. If that wasn't a billy club that cop used on that colored man's head then I was stone-blind.

The paper also said three people were arrested, two white men and a Negro. Thank God it wasn't Robert, but his picture was in the paper up there on that platform and on account of it he lost the job he just got as a delivery boy downtown in the garment center 'cause he hadn't gone to work that day but had taken off sick.

The next night the whole courtyard could hear Robert's argument with Elizabeth. I was lying on Mother's bed and their voices rose up plain and clear in the air shaft which our bedroom windows opened on.

“How come you let those Communists make you lose your job?” Elizabeth asked.

“The Black League for Freedom ain't Communist,” Robert said. “We just helped the defense committee set up the meeting.”

“The papers say you all a bunch of Communists.”

“Screw the papers.”

“You care more about them Scottsboro boys than you do about your own sons starving right under your nose.”

“They're not starving right under my nose. You're working, ain't you? Liz, I got to care what happens to black people in Alabama. Nine colored boys are condemned to die because two white sluts said they raped them. Ain't that a bitch? Can't you understand that what happens to them down south is part of what happens to us here in Harlem?”

“All I understand is I ain't gonna be working my butt off in no laundry while you're parading and marching up and down getting your picture in the papers. I just ain't gonna do it so you'd better stop losing jobs and messing around with those Communists.”

“How many times I got to tell you the Black League ain't—”

“I don't care what they ain't. They ain't paying you a dime, that I know, and you laying up here like a king in my mother's house and—”

“You want me to leave your mother's house? Just keep shouting and screaming like that. You want me to leave?”

There was silence. I waited and waited for Elizabeth to answer but she never did. Finally, disgusted with waiting, I got into my own bed and fought with the bedbugs and finally fell asleep.