The Color of Water (15 page)

“How Mr. Charlie got his name,” Chicken Man explained one day, “is from when you're drunk. You call on him like this: ‘Chaaaarrrllllieeee.”' He feigned throwing up. “But when you're real, real drunk you call him Chuck, like this: ‘Chuuuuccckckckkkkk!”' He feigned severe throwing up.

“What about Ralph?” I asked, knowing full well that when a dude threw up, we called it ralphing; at least in New York we did.

“Forget Ralph. He don't count. Mr. Charlie counts. Now buy me a beer.”

The men on the Corner seemed to pay no attention to Mr. Charlie. The closest they came to him was when the police rode by, sometimes stopping to ask if anyone had seen this or that person. They were met with stony silence, or sometimes even jokes and laughter. The men did not seem to be afraid of the police, nor did they dislike them. Their lives just seemed complete without the white man. I liked that. Their world was insular, away from the real world that I was running from. They called me “New York,” and let me sit out there all day, practicing my flute and smoking all the weed I wanted. I turned fifteen on the Corner but could act like I was twenty-five, and no one cared. I could hide. No one knew me. No one knew my past, my white mother, my dead father, nothing. It was perfect. My problems seemed far, far away.

One of Big Richard's good friends was a guy named Pike, who had dark skin, a moustache, and an easygoing manner. I stole a few car batteries with Pike until somebody saw us in their driveway at night, flicked the porch light on, and took a potshot at us. “You don't need to be doing this no way,” Pike said, panting for breath when we were in the
clear. He wouldn't let me run with him anymore after that. Like most dudes on the Corner, he looked out for me. When I protested, saying I needed money, he said, “Don't worry. I'm gonna get you a job in a turd factory, making all the money you want.”

“What's a turd factory?” I asked.

“It's a factory where they make turds.” He explained this to me one afternoon while he, Big Richard, and I were cruising around in his car. Big Richard was riding shotgun, chomping on his cigarette, and staring out the window to keep from laughing.

“I want the job,” I said. “What do I do?”

“You sit in a big chair and the turds float down this long stream of water, and you separate the big turds from the little turds.”

“How do you do that?”

“They got a tool you use. Or you can use your hand. Whatever. It don't matter. It's good money, man! You want the job or not?”

“I want it, man! I want the job! Take me there!”

I finally did get a real job pumping gas at a station about a mile from the Corner. The man who ran it was named Herman, a big, burly black man with a wide chest who was mean as the day was long. My first day on the job, the mechanic at the station, a young light-skinned black guy, told me, “Don't cross Herman. He put two men down already.”
I didn't ask any questions about those two cats, just made sure I wasn't the third, because Herman was a big, mean, irritated, angry, butt-kicking dude. Every night just before closing time he'd hand me a bucket full of gas and a mop and say, “Mop this goddam floor and don't smoke while you doin' it neither.” Then he'd stand right outside the door and smoke and watch me mop the entire floor of the auto shop. Nobody ever robbed Herman's station while I was there, nor did any customers ever fool with him.

My job was to pump gas, change tires, fix flats, and generally keep out of Herman's way, which I more or less did, but I got into a fistfight with one of his friends, a scar-faced, scratch-a-match-in-the-palm-of-his-hand homosexual who was harassing me. Who knows, maybe it was my girly face and New York accent, but he got funky with me one afternoon and I punched him in the face a few times before he went under his car seat for his pistol and chased me around the station. The ruckus caused a big stir and Herman fired me on the spot. I retreated to the Corner, plotting revenge and seeking wisdom from my main man, Chicken Man. A sober Chicken Man had two words of advice. “Forget it,” he said.

“I can't forget it. I should've gotten a gun and shot him,” I said.

Chicken Man chuckled. “You don't know shit from Shinola,” he said. “Is that how you want to end up, goin'
to jail for him? Because that's where you'll end up, doing time and hanging on this corner when you get out. Is that what you want for yourself? ‘Cause if you do, you can have it. Go on.”

“I'm a smart guy,” I said. “I don't have to take that kind of shit. Nobody knows how smart I really am, Chicken Man, but I'm smart.”

“And nobody'll give a damn neither!” Chicken Man snapped. “Everybody on this corner is smart. You ain't no smarter than anybody here. If you so smart, why you got to come on this corner every summer? ‘Cause you flunkin' school! You think if you drop out of school somebody's gonna beg you to go back? Hell no! They won't beg your black ass to go back. What makes you so special that they'll beg you! Who are you? You ain't nobody! If you want to drop out of school and shoot people and hang on this corner all your life, go ahead. It's your life!”

I had never heard Chicken Man talk so severely and what he said didn't really hit me, not right away. I said to myself, “He's just a drunk,” and continued my adventures. Not long after, however, a guy named Mike, an easygoing, humorous six-foot-eight guy who had always encouraged me to get off the street, had an argument on the Corner with his girlfriend Mustang, a fine, lithe black woman with a large black ass and a foxy wiggle. As the argument progressed, Mike began slapping Mustang around so hard I wanted to jump in, but
Chicken Man stopped me. “Leave that alone, New York!” he hissed. “That's between him and his woman. Don't never get between a man and his woman.” Mustang left the corner in her car, burning rubber, promising to bring her new boyfriend back to kill Mike. The Corner quickly emptied—there was nothing like the threat of a gunfight to make everyone go home. The next day Big Richard gave me explicit instructions to “stay off the Corner,” but I snuck over there anyway and watched as Mike came by that afternoon, rumbling up in his big Buick, playing Marvin Gaye on his eight-track player. He cut the engine and got out whistling, totally cooled out, like it was another day at the office. He walked to the back of his car, opened the trunk, and calmly pulled out a lawn chair, a towel, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun with both barrels taped together. He set the lawn chair in front of the store and sat down on it. He put a bottle of J&B scotch on the ground on one side of him, a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine on the other side, placed the shotgun on his lap, and put the towel over it. “I'm gonna set here and drink and rock and I'll wait for him,” he said coolly. He sat there for two days, rocking, drinking, while the men tiptoed around him, keeping one eye on the road and one eye on Mike. Mustang's new boyfriend never showed.

The next week, Mike and Mustang showed up on the Corner arm in arm, kissing and hugging.

“That's why I don't have no arguments with no woman,” Chicken Man said. “It don't do nothing but fool you around.” But not long after, he did get into an argument with a woman. They argued in the morning and he went off and forgot about it, and later that day she came into the liquor store and stabbed him as he was waiting in line to buy a beer. He coughed a few times, then lay down on the floor and died.

After my abortion I wrote to Tateh and said I didn't want to come back to Suffolk. I enrolled in Girls Commercial High School on Bergen Street in 1936. It was just down the street from Bubeh's, but the schoolwork was hard and I struggled my entire junior year, sleeping on Bubeh's couch and wrestling with algebra every night. Girls High was way ahead of Suffolk High and I never would've graduated on time, so after the school year ended I returned to Virginia to finish high school. When I came back to Suffolk, the first thing I said to Peter was, “We can't see each other anymore. Don't come by.”

He said, “I've been waiting for you. I still love you,” and I was swayed, because I still felt a deep love for him
.

Not long after that, I was in the store behind the counter and two young black women came in. I overheard them talking about Peter, and
one of them says, “Oh yeah, he's getting married soon …” I almost fell over. Tateh was standing right next to me, so I grabbed a rag and started wiping the counter, edging close to them, eavesdropping. I was practically falling over the counter trying to hear them. “Oh yeah,” says the other. “He got such and such pregnant…” She named a black girl who lived behind us in the neighborhood
.

I went right out and found him. The heck with who knew about us then. I was so mad I marched right down the road to his house in daylight and got him out. “Tell me the truth,” I said. He confessed it. “They're making me marry her,” he said. “My folks are making me.”

“
Did you get her pregnant
?”

“
Yeah
.”

Oh, that messed me up. I told him I didn't want to see him anymore and walked back through the black neighborhood, into the store, and went upstairs and cried my heart out, because I still loved him. I went through this entire ordeal and here he was getting busy with somebody else. The fact that he was black and the girl he was marrying was black—well, that hurt me even more. If the world were fair, I suppose I would have married him, but there was no way that could happen in Virginia. Not in 1937
.

I made up my mind then that I was going to leave Suffolk for good. I was seventeen, in my last year of high school, and for the first time in my life I was starting to have opinions of my own. There was no life for me there. I was planning to leave for New York. But see, I had Mameh. I was her eyes and ears in America. She couldn't speak English and I translated for her and looked out for her, because Tateh didn't care
for her at all. Her stomach was starting to bother her and she was starting to have these fainting spells, you know, she'd just black out in the middle of the day. Tateh couldn't have cared less. He hired a black woman to look after Mameh and that woman cared for Mameh more than he did. She'd stay late and look after Mameh even if he didn't pay her, and he paid her so little as it was. He thought money he spent to take care of his wife would do it, you know, substitute for the fact that he didn't love her. But a wife wants love. She was a good Jewish wife to him, but their marriage was starting to crumble because he didn't care about her. That's why I knew I was leaving home. I wasn't going to have an arranged marriage like my parents did. I'd rather die first, which I did do in a way, because I lost my mother and sister when I left home
.

Well, the kids in my high school were excited and giggling about the prom and graduation and making plans, but I'd been to New York and seen the big time and didn't plan on going to either. No one asked me to the prom anyway, but Frances kept saying, “Please go to graduation, Ruth. We'll walk together on graduation day.” I never told Frances about any of that business I was going through. None of that stuff about Peter and my abortion in New York. She knew my home life wasn't perfect, but Frances wasn't the type to question you. She was just a giving, kind person. So I decided to go to the graduation ceremony for her, because Frances was my best friend and I would do anything for her
.

Suffolk High had this graduation ceremony where the seniors lined up in their caps and gowns outside the high school and marched onto Main Street double file to the Protestant church for a ceremony. They called it a pre-graduation ceremony or baccalaureate or some such thing
.
I had to ask Tateh for money for the cap and gown, and the minute he heard about me marching into a Protestant church, he said, “No. Forget it. You're not marching into any gentile church.” He was dead set against it. You know my parents were so old-fashioned European in their ways it wasn't funny. Like if you took a social worker into my house and he talked to my parents, it would be like talking to that wall over there. They were stuck in their ways. There was no way they could change. He was still my father, and I was still a teenager living in his house, and he could still pull off his belt and beat the mess out of me when he wanted, so what could I do? He wasn't worried about my graduation. What bothered him more was that I had no marriage prospects, and he began to take me on his business jaunts to Portsmouth and Norfolk, around to the stores and wholesale supply houses, and he'd introduce me to the merchants and their sons if they had any. It was like he was saying, “Here's my daughter on display! What do you think?” Sometimes he'd send me on jaunts by myself, driving the car and pulling the trailer, me and Dee-Dee. We'd load up the trailer full of goods from the warehouses and drive though the Dismal Swamp around Portsmouth and Norfolk. Folks would tell us, “Watch out for the red-light district in Norfolk,” and we'd go around Norfolk avoiding red traffic lights
.

Well, I was upset with Tateh about graduation and we weren't speaking for a while, but he'd reached a point where he really needed me to help him run the store, because Sam was gone and Mameh wasn't feeling well. Her stomach was starting to really bother her, to the point where she'd be doubled over in pain. We'd take her to the town doctor and he'd say this or that. He mentioned an operation of some sort, but
he didn't know. He was a nasty old man. I went to him once and he was as fresh as he could be, touching me in places that were not necessary and saying obscene things, so I never went back to him. Of course I couldn't tell anybody about it. But he looked at Mameh and said he didn't know what was wrong with her
.

Well, Tateh and I argued about the cap and gown for a long time, and at one point I got so mad I revealed my plans to go to New York after graduation. “I'm going back to New York,” I told him. “I'm leaving.” He stalked out the room, cursing and swearing. A few minutes later, Mameh followed him out and spoke to him—they were rarely speaking by then—and the next day he came over and gave me the money for my cap and gown. “You can participate in the march,” he said, “but don't go into that church. It's forbidden.”