The Color of Water (12 page)

You know, my whole life changed after I fell in love. It was like the sun started shining on me for the first time, and for the first time in my life I began to smile. I was loved, I was loved, and I didn't care what anyone thought. I wasn't worried about getting caught, but I did notice that Peter's friends were terrified of me; they stayed clear anytime I came near them. They'd walk away from me if they saw me walking down the road coming toward them, and if they came into the store, they wouldn't even look at me. That started to worry me a little but I didn't worry much. Then after a while, my period was late. By a week
.

Then another two weeks
.

Then it never came
.

Well, the whole thing just started to unravel on me then. I was pregnant and couldn't tell a soul. The white folks would have killed him and my father would have killed him. I had maybe just turned fifteen then. There wasn't a person I could tell. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, just sit straight up in bed in a sweat, and go outside to the back balcony to hide my tears from my sister. I did consider telling Frances, but that was too much to ask. This was 1936. I mean, what I did was way
, way
out as far as white folks were concerned. It was
trouble. I couldn't bring Frances into that. There was no one to tell. I'd just sit there on the balcony at night while everyone slept and cry and watch the moon. I never thought to kill myself, never that. But I'd cry for a while and after I was finished crying I'd look out over the black section of town for my boyfriend. Can you believe that? I was in it thick, up to my neck, and I'm still looking for my boyfriend. I thought he had all the answers
.

If there was moonlight, you could see out there, down the back roads behind our store where the black folks lived, and from the balcony I'd look for him. I knew how he walked and moved and dressed and everything. I could recognize him at a distance from his walk; I'd look to see if he was safe at home, because I'd always heard the Klan comes at night to get you, and after they found that Mayfield boy floating in the wharf tied to that wagon wheel I worried about him. I'd sit up half the night expecting the Klan to come riding past the store in those tin lizzie Model A cars and what would I do if they did? I had no idea. The law wasn't for the black man in Virginia in those days, it was against him
.

You know, the thing was, I was supposed to be white and “number one,” too. That was a big thing in the South. You're white, and even if you're a Jew, since you're white you're better than a so-called colored. Well, I didn't feel number one with nobody but him, and I didn't give a hoot that he was black. He was kind! And good! I knew that! And I wanted to tell folks that, I wanted to shout out, “Hey y'all, it really doesn't matter!” I actually believed folks would accept that, that they'd see what a good person he was and maybe accept us, and I went through a few days of thinking this, after which I told him one night, “Let's run
off to the country and get married,” and he said, “No way. I don't know where that's been done before, white and black marrying in Virginia. They will surely hang me.”

I grew really frightened then. Because he'd never talked that way before, and I could see he was afraid. He said, “If white folks find out you're pregnant by me, I will surely hang.”

The truth hit me hard then, when I realized he didn't have any solutions, and I began to panic. What a fool I was to believe we could get away with it! I'd sit on the balcony chastising myself a million times for what I'd done and waiting for the Klan to come kill him and for my father to kill both of us, but the days passed and nothing happened. I said to myself, “We are lucky no white folks know about us.” I was sure none knew. Some black folks knew, some of Peter's friends, but none of the white folks knew
.

None except for one
.

There was one white person who did know
.

Peter and I used to meet in an alley behind the store, and one night we were back there arguing about what to do and I dropped my bracelet on the ground. It was a cheap little dime store bracelet but I bought it with my own money and I liked it. It was pitch-black there and we couldn't find it without a match or a light, so we left it. When I went out there to find it the next day, it was gone
.

Mameh came up to me in the store a couple of days later while I was standing behind the counter and placed the bracelet on the counter. Real quiet. Just placed it on the counter and limped back to her little chair
by the door where she always sat in her apron, sorting and stacking vegetables
.

“Why don't you go to New York this summer to see your grandmother?” she said
.

At some point in my consciousness, it occured to me that I had a father. It happened around the time my younger brother Hunter was born. I was five years ahead of Hunter, and while the arrival of a new baby in the house didn't seem to shake anyone—Hunter was the eleventh child—it was the first time that an elderly, slow-moving man in a brown hat, vest sweater, suspenders, and wool pants seemed to float into my consciousness. He picked up Hunter and held him in the air with such delight it made me happy to watch him. His name was Hunter Jordan, Sr., and he raised me as his own son.

As a small boy, I was never quite aware of the concept of “father.” My real father, Andrew McBride, died before I
was born. I was lorded over by Mommy, my older siblings, friends of Ma's, and relatives on my father's and stepfather's sides whom, years later, I would recognize as guiding forces in my life. Out of this haze of relatives and authority figures loomed a dominating presence that would come and go. My stepfather worked as a furnace fireman for the New York City Housing Authority, fixing and maintaining the huge boilers that heated the Red Hook Housing Projects where we lived then. He and Mommy met a few months after my biological father died; Ma was selling church dinners in the plaza in front of our building at 811 Hicks Street when my stepfather came by and bought a rib dinner. The next week he came back and bought another, then another and another. He must have been getting sick eating all those ribs. Finally one afternoon he came by where she was selling the church dinners and asked Ma, “Do you go to the movies?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But I got eight kids and they go to the movies too.”

“You got enough for a baseball team,” he said.

He married her and made the baseball team his own, adding four more kids to make it an even twelve. He made no separation between the McBride and Jordan children, and my siblings and I never thought of or referred to each other as half brothers and sisters; for the powerless Little Kids, myself included, he was “Daddy.” For the midlevel executives, he was sometimes “Daddy,” sometimes “Mr. Hunter.”
To the powerful elder statesmen who remembered their biological father well, he was always “Mr. Hunter.” The older ones liked to make fun of “Mr. Hunter,” the slow way he moved, the southern accent. “Hrrrrffff! Hrrrrfffff!” they'd say when he was out of earshot. But they loved and appreciated him.

When I was about six or seven, he came to our apartment in the projects, piled us into his car, and drove us out to St. Albans, Queens, parking in front of a large, pink stucco, four-bedroom house and disappearing inside while we played on the big front lawn, tearing out the grass and rolling around in the leaves. It was fall, and leaves were everywhere. After a while he came outside and sat on the stoop and watched us play. We tore the grass to shreds, crushed the neatly manicured bushes, stomped the flowers, and cracked one of the house's windows with a rock. After ravaging the lawn for about an hour, one of us had the presence of mind to ask him, “Whose house is this?” He laughed. I never saw him laugh so hard. He had just spent his life's savings to buy the place.

He was a gruff man with a good sense of humor, quiet, and stuck in his ways. He liked neatness, which meant our St. Albans house was out of bounds for him. However much he loved us, he couldn't live with the madness in our Queens home, preferring to keep his old digs at 478 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He came home only on weekends,
striding into the living room with bags of groceries, Entenmann's cakes, a pocketful of dough, and a real live automobile parked outside, in which he often piled in as many of us as would fit to take us back to his brownstone for the weekend. We loved staying in his house in Brooklyn. It was old and dark and filled with antique furniture, cookies, and Nat King Cole records.

His father was a black man, a railroad brakeman, and his mother a Native American, so he had a lot of Indian in his face: brown skin, slanted brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a weather-beaten outdoor look about him, a very handsome dude. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and raised on a farm in Henrico County, near Richmond, Virginia, and his family, the Jordans, were easygoing folks. Beneath their cool exterior, however, was a rugged breed of black man you did not want to cross—tough, grizzled men whose strong brown hands gripped hammers tightly and whose eyes met you dead on. Those hands could fix anything that cranked, moved, pumped heat, moved water, or had valves, vacuums, or wires.

He fled Virginia around 1927 or so, with Jim Crow hot on his tail, so to speak. A white sheriff had locked him up for peeking under the tent of a traveling circus without paying, and when the sheriff went to lunch and inadvertently left the cell door open, Daddy eased out of the jailhouse and caught the first thing smokin'; he never returned to Virginia
for good until he died. He met up with his brother Walter in Chicago, where he was fleeced and pickpocketed from the time he hit town till the time he left. He worked in slaughterhouses there, moved up to Detroit, where he shined shoes with his brother in a barbershop near the Ford plant—he shined one of Henry Ford's shoes while Walter shined the other—and on to Brooklyn, New York, in the Roaring Twenties, where the brothers made a living selling illegal booze for a while. He was out of his apartment one day when one of his liquor-making stills broke and spilled so much liquor onto the floor that it leaked downstairs into the apartment below; the guy living downstairs held his glass under his light fixture and got dead drunk, wandering into the street while my stepfather tried to reel him in, but the cat was out of the bag and not long after that he was raided. He jumped out his back window holding two five-gallon jugs of hooch, right into the arms of waiting federal agents. He did time for that, something neither he nor Mommy ever told us about, though I always wondered how a guy who seemed so unsophisticated could be so clever at checkers. I never could beat him.

Altogether there were four brothers—he, Henry, Walter, and Garland—and they epitomized old-time cool: suave, handsome black men who worked hard, drank hard, dressed well, liked fine women and new money. Daddy's favorite was Walter, the most fun-loving and gregarious of his brothers.
He'd often take us to Walter's house in Fort Greene just blocks from his house, where my siblings and I would play with our cousin Little Mommy while Uncle Walter, Daddy, and their other brothers partied, drinking and listening to Nat King Cole, Gene Krupa, and Charlie Parker records. Mommy would never drink at these occasions. She did not like us to socialize too much with the partying side of Daddy's family. She never drank or smoked. In fact, drinking was number one on her don't list, and if my stepfather drank too much, she'd scream at him on the way home. He'd drive twenty miles an hour all the way to Queens from Brooklyn, nosing his big sedan through traffic till he found a city bus, which he would get behind and follow all the way home. “You can never get a speeding ticket if you follow one of them,” he declared. Car after car of angry motorists would fly by us, yelling, “GET OFF THE DAMN ROAD!” He'd ignore them. We'd be in the back seat, shrinking low, laughing, hoping none of our friends would happen to see us.

Every summer he would take a bunch of us down south to Richmond to his cousin Clemy's house, where we ate watermelon from Clemy's yard, rode her pony, and watched our other “down south” relatives do wild tricks, like taking their teeth out. We had a cousin who would sit on the couch, drink a beer, and take her teeth out, making them go
chomp! chomp
! and causing us to run from the room. Uncle Henry was a real character. He was a mechanic and a decorated
World War II vet who had a gold tooth in his mouth that flashed and sparkled when he smiled, which was often. His stomach had been ruined after he was stabbed in a knife fight, though I couldn't imagine him angry. We loved him. When he laughed, he sounded like a car trying to start, “Heeerrrrrrr! Heerrrrrrrr!” We used to make fun of his laugh, which amused him greatly, touching off another round of “Heeerrrrrr! Heerrrrrrr!” from him, prompting further outraged giggles from us.

There were so many of us, we'd travel south in two cars, some of us riding with Daddy and Mommy in Daddy's car, some with Walter and Henry in a second car. One night as we began one of our migrations back to New York from Richmond, Uncle Henry got drunk and was driving at a hundred miles an hour in his Oldsmobile with me, my sister Judy, and my Uncle Walter inside. “This baby's a powerhouse!” he roared, stomping the accelerator and flying up Interstate 95 as I watched Daddy's headlights through the back windshield grow dimmer and dimmer, then disappear altogether. As he barreled up the road laughing, Uncle Walter screamed at him, “Henry, slow down, dammit!” Uncle Henry ignored him for a few more harrowing minutes, finally pulling over at a rest stop. Minutes later Daddy's car, full of Mommy and the rest of the kids, screeched up behind us. Daddy jumped out of his car so fast his hat flew off.

“Goddammit, Henry!” Walter had to restrain Daddy,
and Henry, the boldest of the brothers, backed off and apologized. Daddy was the most respected of the brothers, and anger was a rarity with him. He had a peaceful, strong manner that did not provoke anger or invite fights. We drove back to New York packed in Daddy's car, while Henry slept peacefully in the back of his own car with Walter driving. Walter offered to take a couple of us with him but Daddy refused. “I had enough of y'all,” he said. Walter shrugged.