Daddy Was a Number Runner (27 page)

In the summer of 1934, Francie Coffin is twelve years old. She is old enough to know how to use the “jumper” to turn on the electric lights at night (a necessary skill, since months earlier the utility company disconnected the power to their apartment because of nonpayment of bills), and she knows how to sneak a ride on the subway to save a nickel. She is also old enough to know exactly how to hide the numbers slips on the drawer ledge of the buffet in her apartment so that they will not be discovered by the police who periodically take it into their heads to search poor blacks for these scraps (“don't need no warrant,” says one to a challenge as he and his partner go about the job of ransacking Francie's apartment). Francie's knowledge is ghetto-survival wisdom, second nature in a jungle where life must lay claim to a minimum of normalcy whether the light bill is paid or not, and where law and order and the policeman's badge (whatever his color may be) is a symbol of the white oppression of black people. Upset by the scene of her father's arrest for his involvement in the numbers racket, her loud crying brings his swift rebuke: “‘Hush,' Daddy said. ‘You're a big girl now and you know what to do'” (74). What she “knows” to do in this situation is that as soon as the police take her father away she will bring the slips downstairs to the contact person and report his arrest. The white overlords in the syndicate will tend to his release.

As far as this novel is concerned, everyone in Harlem plays the numbers,
even children like Francie, and there are enough people who make small winnings to keep the hope for a large “hit” alive in everyone's heart. Periodically, someone's number “comes in” for a few hundred dollars, and hope grows stronger. We are better able to comprehend the fragile nature of that hope when we realize that the most popular inspiration for choosing numbers to bet on each day comes from people finding clues in their dreams of the previous night. “I dreamed about fish last night,” says Mrs. Mackey, a regular Coffin customer, when Francie comes to collect her bet. “What number does Madame Zora's dream book give for fish?” she asks (13). In this case, the answer is five fourteen, and Mrs. Mackey plays it for twenty-five cents straight, and puts another sixty cents on it in combination. Francie's dreams lead her to make more hits than the other members of her family, and she is very proud of this gift of good luck. No one, including the children, is unaware of the illegality of his or her actions in playing the numbers, or of the inconsistency in the law that permits gambling at the racetrack but not in local neighborhoods. “I can't see the difference between betting at the races or in Harlem,” Francie's father complains, “Either gambling's a crime or it ain't” (128). Expectations of winning a huge amount of money by playing the numbers indeed hold the dream of hope that the entire community shares. Adam Coffin expresses the depth of that hope for himself and his neighbors when, in the face of his wife's articulations of her enormous fears of economic chaos, and her anger at him for squandering their few remaining pennies on the game, he explains: “All I'm trying to do is hit a big one again. . . . We almost had us twelve hundred dollars, baby. That's all I'm trying to do. Hit us a big one” (76). This ephemeral hope, which has to renew itself each day, is all that is left for these unemployed black city masses, although they know that like everything else in Harlem in which money plays an important role, the numbers game is controlled by strong outside forces. Their small winnings do not compare with what is being made off of them each day by the syndicate downtown. “Daddy said the gangsters controlled everything in Harlem,” Francie tells us, “the numbers, the whores, and the pimps who brought them their white trade” (22).

In the summer of 1934, Harlem, like the rest of the country, was
in the grip of the depression. As the novel shows, men, out of work, congregate in “knots” on the sweltering streets, “doping” out their numbers, always hoping to beat the odds. The women, needing more than hope to keep their families alive, take the subway to Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where at a prearranged place, on a different sidewalk, they wait for white suburban women who drive up and offer them a pittance for heavy housework. For some of the husbands, like Adam Coffin, the degree to which this action on the part of their wives represents black male failure and humiliation makes it the final blow to their sense of dignity and manhood. They cannot tolerate its symbolic meaning for black survival. And the women, with no options, realize that their efforts to keep body and soul together drive a deeper wedge of unhappiness between themselves and their men, threatening the foundations of their marriages. It is a struggle waged between proud selfhood and starvation.

In the beginning, Francie admires her father because he is different from the men who hang out on the corner all day. When the novel opens, through her eyes, we see him as a man of action, not a victim of hopelessness. Although out of work, he has not given up on life, and she loves him for the tenacity with which he holds on to his pride as a man. Over the course of the year, as the narrative progresses, there is a steady erosion of his will, and in time he struggles less against the forces seeking to overwhelm him. Toward the end of this period, with his fierce pride having been humbled, and his family disintegrating, Francie finds his leaving home to live with Mrs. Mackey less than admirable, and she turns her back on him. It is an act that symbolizes not only the changes going on inside of her, but also her growing awareness of the pitfall of absolute hero worship. “[I] turned around and watched Daddy trudging down the avenue. Somehow, he didn't seem as big as he used to,” she notes (203).

Before the breakdown in family stability, however, at home, James Adam Coffin desperately tries to calm his wife's financial anxieties, and for a long time he refuses to permit her to travel to the Bronx to seek out day work, or to agree that his family should go on welfare. Until this long stretch of unemployment, he has been a good financial provider, and his pride in himself is severely threatened by the
present circumstances. To save his pride, as conditions worsen, he views all charity with anathema. He even refuses to accept a second-hand couch from Mr. Lipschwitz, the white plumber, who over the years has periodically given the Coffin family his discarded furniture. Adam Coffin plays poker with his friends to occupy part of his time, but on many evenings he gathers his children around him and instead, plays the old piano, an earlier gift from Mr. Lipschwitz. The children know he likes to think he is a virtuoso with the talents of Fats Waller, and they enjoy reinforcing his ego. He tells them stories of his proud royal African ancestress, Yoruba, their great-great grandmother, and of his heroic grandfather, their great-great grandfather, a runaway slave who lived on wild berries in the swamps for seven years. On weekends he plays the piano for rent parties, and occasionally makes a few dollars at that, but most of the time, to his wife's consternation, there is no money with which to pay him. Still, he sees the activity in a positive light for himself. He whips his elder son with violence born out of his frutration from not knowing how to dissuade this first-born from joining a street gang. A man of strong spontaneous emotions, he “shouted and cursed when he was mad, and danced around and hugged you when he was feeling good,” Francie reports (17). As a number runner, he enjoys a good reputation for his trustworthiness. Each day he collects the bets and the small sums his neighbors squeeze out to purchase hope, and when someone makes a hit, he pays off promptly. He is like Santa Claus, his daughter surmises, and when someone's number comes in, it is like Christmas.

Against this background of strong moral fiber in the protagonist's father, far from painting a romanticized picture of the squalor of the ghetto, the physical landscape of Louise Meriwether's black Harlem presents a somber image. Francie's Fifth Avenue is, in its dissimilarity to the other, a thousand miles removed from New York City's most fashionable promenade. Roughly fifty blocks removed from the wealth and glitter of the illustrious thoroughfare, this is black Harlem, beginning at approximately 110th Street and moving northward. In the rat-and-bedbug-infested railroad flat in which Francie and her mother, Henrietta, her father, James Adam, and her two older brothers, James Adam, Jr. and Sterling live, the halls are “funky” with the smells of
stale food and vomit and urine and a dead rat somewhere down in the basement “bumping together.” In the gloom of the overcrowded buildings that stand too close to each other, one must live on the top floor to “snatch a little sunshine,” Adam Coffin insists. Outside, on the sidewalks, where most of the living takes place in the summertime, the situation is not better. Here, the foul odors from the overflowing garbage cans on the curb rise to join with those of droppings from the horse-drawn vegetable carts in the street. What saves the day for us, as readers, is the manner in which Francie takes it all in stride, and pulls us quickly along with her. Without apology, she leads us into her world where pimps periodically get killed by the prostitutes they manage, and where black nationalists, anxious parents, and naive youngsters share the same turf. Strange bonds of sympathy unite unlikely groups, and for most of the time, they live and let live.

For all of its negative aspects, Francie's black Harlem has qualities that demonstrate the power of human kindness. It is still a place where a down-and-out borrower can ungrudgingly have a slice of bread or a cup of sugar from the next-door neighbor, if that neighbor is so blessed; and where, as in other ethnic neighborhoods, funerals are rituals in which everyone participates, not only for mourning, but also for another chance to affirm each other and their shared values. “Mr. Caldwell's wake . . . had been nice, all the neighbors bringing in food and wine. The only time it was real sad was at the cemetery when Mrs. Caldwell started wailing” (138), Francie tells us. In this community, where starvation lurks at every door, we note too that there is little selfish hoarding. When Henrietta and Adam Coffin hit their numbers at the same time and come up with a sum that enables them to fend the wolf from the door for a few weeks, the neighbors join in the celebration. We are told that “Daddy had bought two quarts of vanilla and strawberry [ice cream] for us [the children] and a big crock of King Kong [bootleg liquor] for the grownups, though he didn't drink himself” (67). Nor is Meriwether's depiction of the scene devoid of the humor inherent in small details. To the children's chagrin, “most of the women were eating up our cake” (67). As Francie takes us through her world we realize that through her eyes we see more than she knows she sees, not so much because we are outside
looking in, but because she is innocently unaware of the depth of her own vision.

The most important consideration for anyone, including a twelve-year-old girl growing up in this environment, is survival, in all of its aspects. How to physically protect the self is a lesson that Francie must learn, and it will provide the model for the way in which she will come to grips with her world. Sukie, one of her best friends, a year older, more street-knowing, “much bigger” than herself, and given to frequent moods of feeling “evil,” takes perverse pleasure in often beating up the younger, smaller girl. For a long time Francie's only defense against this treatment is to avoid her friend whenever she suspects the latter is in an “evil mood.” This tactic proves ineffective, for sooner or later she always ends up with the beating she sought to avoid. Henrietta Coffin does not interfere in the conflicts between the girls, but she passes on to her daughter the weapon that provides the solution to her plight: the wisdom of knowing that running away from struggle because one is afraid will never resolve the problem. “Francie,” she tells the little girl, “you can beat anything, anybody, if you face up to it and if you're not scared” (42). The first time Francie challenges her friend to a fight, Sukie, sensing the changed demeanor in her (now) assailant, declines the opportunity to once again “show off” her superior skills in combat. Nor do the two friends ever fight again.

Another feature of survival that Meriwether stresses here is group cooperation. Individualism is a luxury no one can afford, for staying alive from one day to the next, physically and emotionally, depends on everyone's helping and being helped by others. Mothers share food they have very little of with the most indigent among them; they exchange recipes with each other in search of ways to make the “relief” food palatable for their families; they freely dispense small fragments of information that might be helpful in trying times; and they cry with each other when misfortune strikes at any one of them. If James Adam Coffin is his daughter's favorite parent when the novel opens, because he is “beautiful” and laughs a lot and never whips her, while Henrietta Coffin is “dumpy” and unattractive, and sometimes whips her, it is nevertheless from her mother and the older girls and women in
the community that Francie learns those things that are important to her growing up. And it is her mother who remains, even when the family breaks apart, and who stubbornly refuses to succumb to the despair that threatens to swallow up all of her dreams for her children.

Although the particular section of Harlem that Meriwether depicts is confined to a few square blocks, it is typical of the whole in the diverse makeup of the people who live there. In this city within a city, the cultural time is the post-Renaissance, the decade after the flowering of black art and culture in the 1920s when such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, among the writers, and a great many artists, musicians, and others with aesthetic interests held sway in that “other time when black was beautiful.” Francie was born during the Renaissance, but in Brooklyn, and not in the black community. By the time she arrives in Harlem the depression has already changed the face of black-celebration-of-self to one of black-struggle-to-survive. In the 1920s large numbers of black people migrated from rural areas to New York City, among other urban centers, in search of jobs and a better life for themselves and their families. They represented wide variations in color, class, and accent. There were the middle-class intellectuals and the many different artists, attracting each other and attempting to define the positive nature of the black heritage for black and white people; and there were the poor and unlettered rural people, unaware of the significance of their presence in that place at that time, in search of the “promised land.” In addition, West Indians and Africans with their lilting voices swelled the numbers, and for a short while, the hope they all felt intimated better times ahead. These immigrants to the cities, native and foreign born, had hoped, as generations of American immigrants before them had done, to improve their living conditions and to make the lives of their children better than their own. Instead, the depression, beginning in 1929, brought them unemployment, poverty, slum housing, crime, a poignant sense of communal powerlessness, and despair. This is Francie's world. In Brooklyn, her father had worked as the janitor in the building in which they lived, in a Jewish neighborhood, where they were the only black people on the block. A painter by trade, he moved his family to Harlem when he was offered a better job in that
trade. The hopes they carried with them across the bridge were lost to the depression.