Daddy Was a Number Runner (26 page)

“Shake that thing. Lord, look at that child walk.”

“She's got a naturally educated behind.”

“Little brown baby, ain't you got some sweet lovin' for me?”

I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow. I'm getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must of caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.

That night when I went to bed I closed my eyes and heard the hoofbeats in the distance coming closer. “Here I
am,” I whispered. He rode up in the moonlight, and bending down from his horse, pulled me up onto the saddle. But it wasn't Ken Maynard. For weeks now when I put myself to sleep dreaming about my hero his features had been getting dimmer and dimmer. Now Ken Maynard was gone forever and my rider was faceless and didn't have no color at all. We rode down Fifth Avenue, past Central Park and the Empire State Building, and up into the moonlight. But no matter how hard I tried in the weeks and months to come, I couldn't fill in his features or make him either white or black.

I
T
was on the radio and when I went downstairs in the morning it was splashed all over the newspaper on Mr. Rathbone's stand. The racketeers had shot down Dutch Schultz and three of his henchmen. They was all dead or dying. I stood outside the candy store and read the story slowly, turning the page when it continued, 'cause it was more exciting than a movie. Then Mr. Rathbone came outside and said I shouldn't muss up his paper if I wasn't going to buy it, but I had finished reading it by then so I folded the newspaper back up and handed it to him with a sweet smile. He had stopped saving his day-old papers for me after Mother chewed him out that time about his fat daughter, Rachel.

When Sterling came home for lunch, I gave him a blow by blow description of how Dutch Schultz had been sitting in a tavern in New Jersey when he got his. I felt like we knew old Dutch, since he was head of the numbers and all.

“You think them gangsters gonna come and shoot up Jocko's store maybe, Sterling?”

He bit into the potted-meat sandwich I had fixed for him and looked at me darkly as if the food pained him somewhere.
“You sure sound bloody, Francie. Why'd anybody want to shoot up Jocko?”

“I didn't say anybody would, I only asked if maybe the gangsters would be fightin' over the numbers racket and …”

“You don't read the papers very good,” Sterling said, “else you'd know that a guy named Lucky something or other done took over the numbers from Dutch Schultz months ago ever since Dewey been trying to send old Dutch up the river.”

“You already read about it?” I asked. “How come you let me tell you all that crap if you've already read it?”

“Because I was too tired to tell you to shut up.”

“The undertaker let you read while you're suppose to be workin'?”

“He don't
let
me, I just do.”

“I would think you'd be so scared of all them dead bodies lying around that you wouldn't take your eyes off of them for a minute.”

“I ain't scared of nothin' living or dead and stop pesterin' me, will you?”

Somebody knocked at the door.

“Go answer it,” Sterling said.

It was the white salesman from the jewelry store, a freckle-faced big man who said he came to collect on the radio.

“My mother ain't home,” I said.

“Well, then, I'll have to repossess the radio,” he said, pushing the door open wider and coming in.

“Sterling,” I hollered.

Sterling came into the dining room. “What you want?” he asked the man.

“He said he gotta repossess the radio,” I told him.

“You're two weeks past due in your payments,” the man said, “and it's the policy of our store to—”

“You mean you think you gonna walk in here and take our radio just like that?” Sterling asked.

“Unless you pay up the arrears right now, I'll be forced—”

“You'll be forced to fall down all five flights of those stairs and break your fool neck if you take one step further,” Sterling said. “I been paying two dollars a week on that radio myself for the past three months and it ain't worth a dime more. In fact, it ain't worth half of that.”

“Your mother signed a contract agreeing to pay two dollars a week for—”

“For the rest of her life?” Sterling asked.

I had often seen Daddy threaten to throw white people down the stairs if they didn't get out of his house, like the time the electric man came to read the meter and caught the jumper in and wanted five dollars or he would rat on us, but this was the first time I had seen old Sterling in action, and he was just as good as Daddy. When he got through ranting and raving, that salesman turned beet-red and raced back down those stairs under his own steam.

Sterling shut the door and dusted off his hands. He looked at me and we both burst out laughing.

“Francie,” he said, and when he smiled like that he looked just like James Junior, “today we own us a ra-di-o.”

C
HINA
Doll was finally released. Justifiable homicide, they said. Sterling explained that meant you could protect yourself if somebody was beating you.

I went looking for Sukie to tell her the good news. Maybe we should go around the block and welcome China Doll home. I walked up and down the streets looking for Sukie
and when I got back to her stoop I found her sitting there, elbows on her knees, her head propped in her hands.

“Hey,” I yelled, “they let China Doll go.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sukie said, not looking up.

“Ain't you glad?” I asked. Then I noticed that she was crying.

“I wish they had kept her in jail forever,” she said.

My heart stopped beating. “Why?” I whispered. “Because she killed Alfred?”

“No. Who cares about that bastard? He never shoulda been born.”

“Then why, Sukie? Why?”

“Because everybody thinks I'm gonna be just like her. That's all my mother ever tells me. And I'm not gonna be like her, Francie. I ain't gonna be no whore.”

“I don't think you gonna be a whore, Sukie.”

“You ain't grown. You don't count.”

“Move over,” I said, and sat down beside her. There was nothing else to say. 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. We sat there, Sukie rubbing her nose with the back of her hand and sniffling and me getting ready to join her any minute.

Sterling walked up. “What you two dopes sitting here crying for?” he asked.

“Sukie don't wanna be no whore like China Doll and I don't like livin' around here no more. I hate it.”

“Move over,” Sterling said, and sat down between us.

The sun was sinking fast and soon a dusty blanket of darkness would settle over the avenue, hiding some of its filth, but not all. The street was filled with colored people scurrying in and out of doorways, coming and going, crowding each other off the sidewalk. It was all too depressing.
James Junior hadn't come to see Mother like he promised and I guess he didn't have a job after all, at least not an honest one. Vallie and them were going to get the electric chair and if they did get an appeal they'd be behind bars the rest of their life, so what was the difference? And Daddy didn't come home anymore.

I tried to get again that nice feeling I had for all of Harlem a few weeks ago, but I couldn't. We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that was that.

“Mother says we're gonna move off of Fifth Avenue one of these days,” I said, turning to Sterling.

He grunted something under his breath, then said it out loud.

“Shit.”

The word hung between us in the silence. Then I sighed and repeated it.

“Shit.”

Afterword

Daddy Was a Number Runner
is the single fictional account in our literature of a year in the life of a young, black, adolescent girl, growing up in Harlem in the middle of the Great Depression. This fact alone gives it major historical importance, for the time was one that left deep and lasting impressions on Afro-Americans as well as all other Americans who lived through it. Within the female tradition that this book represents, it shares similarities with and divergences from Paule Marshall's
Brown Girl, Brownstones
(1959), a novel that explores some of the experiences of another black girl coming to early woman-hood, but in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, toward the end of the same period.

While
Daddy Was a Number Runner
is not autobiographical, it speaks to conditions that the author observed when she was a child. Sociological and historical studies of Harlem and the making of the black ghetto, with their statistics on crime and deviance, and their psychological profiles of juvenile delinquents and runaway fathers, appear almost meaningless as we become intimate with the flesh-and-blood people in
Daddy Was a Number Runner.
The data such documents provide are an inadequate measure of the feelings, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, and failures of people whose laughter and tears are of equal intensity, both welling up from the very core of their beings. As readers, critics, and outsiders, we are unable to pass judgment on the people or the circumstances in this novel by separating them into categories clearly defined as good and bad or right and wrong; not even when we consider such widely divided issues as the ambiguous illegality of playing the numbers, or the moral and judicial ramifications of a mugging that results in a man's death. But we leave this book with a better understanding of the challenges presented each day to each of its main characters, and we have a greater appreciation for the victories of those who survive.

Daddy Was a Number Runner
, a growing-up story, belonging to a “skinny and black and bad looking [young girl] with . . . short hair and
[a] long neck and all that naked space in between” (14), also belongs to all of the people who make up Francie's world—all of the men and women and children who love and hate each other, who quarrel and fight among themselves, but who are also capable of expressing concern and tenderness for each other at moments when we least expect them to do so. These are people who feel deeply about everything, because for each one, life is a constant struggle against a barrage of circumstances that threaten to destroy all of their humanity. Like James Baldwin's
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1952), and Claude Brown's
Manchild in the Promised Land
(1965), this narrative is the personal side of the story of living and growing up feeling entrapped by race and class in the black urban ghetto between the two great wars. And in addition to the limitations placed on the male protagonists in Baldwin's and Brown's books, the heroine of
Daddy Was a Number Runner
must cope with the problems that her gender raises. These three works, reflecting the unquantifiable side of human experiences, are riddled with contradictions and ambiguities, and tell the stories that only poets and artists have been sufficiently gifted to manifest from the beginning of human time.

To begin, Louise Meriwether's central character develops within a context of multilayered social circumstances that often baffle her. If by the end of the novel she seems not to have completely caught up with the worldly wisdom displayed by a number of her friends and acquaintances, it is not for want of experiences toward that end. For the goal of the author is not to have her protagonist make a quantum leap from innocence to full comprehension of the nature of her world in one year, but rather to help readers better understand the complexities of the world of this book and of the metaphoric implications of its title. To achieve this goal, Meriwether has brilliantly created a character in whom we can identify at least two contrasting sides. On one hand, Francie embodies a refreshing and believable naiveté that remains with her throughout; on the other, she also has many of the instincts that we soon recognize as ghetto-survival “smarts.” This duality in the protagonist, which is never implausible, gives Francie the unself-conscious narrative ability that initiates readers into the life of depression-bound Harlem. Simultaneously, the double vision we have
of Francie reflects a similar ambiguity in the community's responses to its situation. How, we may ask, can the people in this neighborhood, who often evidence a remarkably astute political understanding of the difficulties facing them and all blacks in white America, still maintain such an implicit faith in the fantasy of individual and communal economic revitalization through the numbers? The sheer futility of this collective dream belies the internal strength and sophistication of a people who survived American slavery and beyond. On another level, the numbers game, as metaphor of this particular human situation, constantly reminds us of how tenuous the wellbeing of black American life has always been, and the extent to which the oppression of race, class, and gender influences the aspirations, hopes, and expectations of this entire group of people. It is a theme that prevades the book.