The Color of Water (23 page)

In 1942, a few months after my mother died, I told Dennis, “I want to accept Jesus Christ into my life and join the church.” Dennis said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Ruth? You know what this means?” I told him, “I'm sure.” I was totally sure
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A few Sundays later we were at Metropolitan and they were singing “I Must Tell Jesus,” and the spirit filled me and when Rev. Abner Brown asked if anyone wanted to join Metropolitan in Christian fellowship I stepped into the aisle and walked to the front of the church. Rev. Brown shook my hand and all the deacons shook my hand and I have never turned back since. I accepted Jesus that day and He has never let me down from that day to this. I later got on as the church secretary, typing out letters for Rev. Brown, and sometimes witnessing weddings which he held in his office, because I'd be the only one around and you needed two witnesses for a wedding. Watching all these weddings made me long for my own. Here I was a church secretary and Dennis was a stout deacon and we weren't even married. That was a scandal I couldn't live with. I told Dennis one night, “We have to get married,” but he was hesitant. He said, “I grew up in the South and I can be killed down there for marrying a woman of the other race.” I said, “This isn't the South. This is New York, and I'm a new Christian before God and I'm not living in sin anymore.” I told him I was leaving if we didn't get
married. That tied him up. He hemmed and hawed so long I actually went out and put a deposit on a room, and when I did that he said, “You don't have to do that, Ruth. I love you and I'd like you to marry me if you would.” What a man he was. I loved him. He was the kindest man I've ever known. All his friends from North Carolina who lived in Harlem would come see him. They'd holler up to our window. “Dennis…Dennis!” and he'd invite them in and give them our last food or the shirt off his back if they asked. He came from a home where kindness was a way of life. I wanted to be in this kind of family. I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me
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We had to meet at city hall to get our marriage license on a Saturday because we both worked during the week. Dennis had to work that Saturday morning also. He had quit my Aunt Mary's by then and was working for the McCoy Publishing Company, a mail order business that supplied emblems, aprons, and books to the Masonic Order. We arranged to meet in front of city hall at two o'clock. I was there at two on the dot and I waited about an hour. Just as I started to walk away thinking, “I thought so,” he appeared. “You won't get rid of me that easy,” he said
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There were a lot of stares and whispering and pointing and silly questions when we went to the marriage bureau to get our license. The clerks were very nasty and no one wanted to write up our paperwork, but we didn't let those fools ruin our marriage. We got the license and Rev. Brown married us in his private office at the church. I had told him the truth about me and Dennis not really being married and he said, “Don't worry. I'll marry you and be quiet about it.” It wasn't till later I discovered several church members had lived together for years as husband
and wife and had never gotten married. Some even had grown kids. And Rev. Brown had married them all after the fact, so this was nothing new to him. The church janitor and another helper of the church were our witnesses. Afterwards we had our reception over on 103rd and Third at our friends' apartment, Sam and Trafinna “Ruth” Wilson. They decorated the apartment with pink and white tissue streamers and laid out beautiful trays of delicate sandwiches, entres, cake, and coffee, and Rev. Brown stopped over to join us. It was a lovely reception, just the five of us. I didn't need a million roses and a marching band. My husband loved me and I loved him, that's all I needed. We were sitting in Ruth's house having coffee at our reception and my husband (oh, I was proud to say it too—“my husband”) said to me, “We have to be strong. You know what people will say about us, Ruth. They'll try to break us up.” I said, “I know. I'll be strong,” and over the years we were tested, but we never split up or even spent a night apart except when he took the kids to North Carolina to see his parents. I never could go south with him because of the danger. The first time I went south with him was the last time, when I took his body down there to bury him
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After we had our first baby in 1943, we moved across the street to a one-room kitchenette that cost six dollars a week. We had a sink, bed, dresser, stove, and a little icebox that the guy came around and put ice in once a week. All our furniture was stuff we'd found or we bought from Woolworth and could be folded: folding chairs, folding tables. Our window faced an alley and the brick wall of the next building and it was so close to the adjoining building you couldn't tell whether it was
raining or snowing outside. You had to stick your head out the window to see what the weather was. The bathroom was in the hallway and used by all the tenants and there were roaches everywhere. No matter how many you killed, they kept coming back. I kept my church hat on a shelf in a hatbox, and every Sunday when I'd pick it up to take my hat out, roaches would crawl out. We had four kids in that one room. We used the dresser drawers as cribs and the kids slept with us or on fold-out cots. We lived in that one room for nine
years,
and those nine years were the happiest years of my life
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I met an interesting white woman during that time, my friend Lily. I saw her in the park on 127th one day while I had my kids out and she had her two kids with her. She was white and her children looked like mine, so we started talking. She was Jewish, from Florida. Her family was rich and she was very refined—Lily was into books and opera—and we had black husbands, so we had that in common. Lily's husband was West Indian, and they were members of the Communist Youth Movement. Back then that was like
—boom!—
trouble, maybe the government was looking out on them or something. Me and Dennis weren't for communism. We were for Jesus Christ. Lily and I were friends for a long time till she moved away to California. Her husband left her for a younger woman—she was too good for him anyway. He chased around anything in a skirt, in fact chased me around when she wasn't looking but I wouldn't have it. She became a Hare Krishna or one of those wild religions and later she got married again, this time to a white man. I was supposed to go visit her back in the seventies, but just before I did she wrote me a nasty letter saying don't come, and a lot of other mean
,
insulting things, so I called my trip off and never heard from her again. I don't know why she did that. I think she might have had some problems with her children. That might have been at the bottom of it, because over the years we wrote and I always talked about mine. But her kids had some problems
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Our family grew so fast, before I knew it me and Dennis and four kids were cramped in that one room. So we applied to get an apartment in the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn. They put us on a long waiting list and said, “Don't expect much,” because to get in there was a political thing, but God made a way for us and we got in there in 1950. They gave us a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of 795 Hicks Street
with a bathroom.
That was the greatest part about it. To have your own bathroom. The floors and walls were pure cement. The kids would get scuffs and big bruises from falling on it, and the glasses and plates had to be replaced with plastic ones because once you dropped them they smashed. But Red Hook was beautiful in those days. It was integrated—Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and blacks. There was grass on the center mall, and a playground with slides and monkey bars. It was a real American life, the life I'd always dreamed of. I'd kiss Dennis in the mornings when he left for work, and when he came home in the evening I'd stand by the window and watch him turn the corner and walk down the center mall. I remember him clearly—his walk, his white shirt, his shoes. The kids would run down to meet him and wrap around his legs like puppies. He would bring groceries from the A&P and a surprise for the kids—a cupcake from his lunch or chewing gum
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I loved that man. I never missed home or my family after I got married. My soul was full
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We went to Metropolitan for a couple of years after moving to Red Hook, but Rev. Brown had died of a sudden heart attack and it became too much to ride the subway all the way up to Harlem every Sunday with all the kids. Plus Dennis had gotten the calling to preach and said he wanted to start a church. He quit drinking beer and enrolled at the Shelton Bible College and got his divinity degree from there in 1953. Then we went out and invited our neighbors from Red Hook to come to prayer meeting at our house on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Mrs. Ingram, and your godparents the McNairs, the Floods, the Taylors, they were the first ones to come. I'd clear off the table and put a white tablecloth on it and that would be Dennis's pulpit. After that got going good he said he needed to find a church. I said, “How can we afford a church?” With his little salary, we could barely afford to feed our kids—we had gone from four kids to five to six to seven. I mean, after a while they just dropped like eggs and we loved having them, but I couldn't see how we could afford a church with all these kids. Your sister Helen, I didn't have one prenatal visit to a clinic or anything when I had her. I just walked into the hospital and dropped her like an egg and went home. How we fed them, well, it was meal to meal. I shopped at Goodwill for their clothes and for their Christmas gifts, and I'd walk them around and let them play outside. I'd keep two in a stroller and two next to me, and the rest, I just kept them close. God just provided somehow
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Dennis kept poking around till he found an empty building that was cheap near Red Hook. The white man who owned it didn't want to rent
it to blacks so I went over there and signed the lease by myself and when the man saw me and your father and your godfather walking in there the next day carrying paint cans and tools to fix it up with he wanted his building back, but it was too late. We named it New Brown Memorial, after Rev. Brown. The new members kept it going strong, and after we got about sixty people together regularly we moved to a building at 195 Richards Street that had heat, because Dennis was constantly toting heaters around in that other building, which was freezing. Our church survived real well until early 1957, when Dennis came home from work with a bad cold. He was so hoarse I made him lie down and rest. He was hoarse in bed about three weeks
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He smoked cigarettes, filterless Lucky Strikes, and he got hoarse from time to time from preaching and the church not having good heat, and plus it was January and cold outside, so I thought nothing of it. But he got so he couldn't get up out of bed and wouldn't eat and ran a fever, so I took him to St. Peter's Hospital. There were a lot of stares in the hospital when we went in there, stares and questions from the doctors and nurses and such, asking, “Who's that?” and, “Are you his wife?” and all this, but I ignored them. I just wanted Dennis to get out and come home because the kids and I missed him. Our entire world revolved around him. The kids would sit and meditate just like him, then brag to each other how they would show him their meditation when he got home. Your sister Rosetta wouldn't let anyone sit in his chair while he was in the hospital, not even me. No one was allowed to
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He seemed to get seriously ill very quickly. One day he was walking around, the next he was hoarse and laid up in the hospital. The doctors
didn't know what was wrong with him. Something in his lungs, this one said. Something in his pancreas, the other one said. They put me off when I'd ask. They'd talk about him in a general way to me, then they'd go in the hallway and point at me with their chins and make remarks about me and Dennis which they thought I couldn't hear. I could hear them but I ignored them. I was focused on my husband. Every day when I'd walk home from the hospital, my friend Lillian would stick her head out her window in the projects and ask, “How's Reverend McBride?” I'd say, “He didn't eat today.” She'd say, “Well, he's got to get worse before he gets better.” Then one day when I passed by her window I was smiling and happy to tell Lillian, “He ate a grapefruit today,” and she said, “See, I told you. He's got to get worse before he gets better.” But he didn't get better. He got worse and worse, and during this time I missed my period. I had seven kids, and I had no time to think about my period. I thought it was stress because Dennis was in the hospital longer than I wanted him to be, but when I told him about it, he said, “If it's a boy, we'll call him James after my Uncle Jim.” And that's how you got named. See, I didn't think he was going to die. I had no idea, but he knew, because he named you, and he'd make remarks like, “I know the Lord Jesus Christ will take care y'all should anything happen to me. Don't worry, Ruth. Just trust in God.” I wouldn't hear of such talk and would make him stop it
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Sometimes in the hospital I would go into the hallway and cry so Dennis wouldn't see me, and one night I was standing out there crying and these two white doctors came by and said, “Who are you?” because it was past normal visiting hours. I pointed to Dennis's room and said
,
“My husband is in there,” and they just got so cold and disgusted. They talked about me right in front of my face and walked away
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One afternoon after Dennis had been in there a few weeks, I went to see him and he was getting thin now from not eating, and he said, “Why don't you bring the kids by to see me?” I said, “We shouldn't do that,” because they had school, plus they didn't let kids come inside the hospital and I couldn't drag seven kids up there. I really didn't want them to see him ill like that—the oldest of them was thirteen—but they really wanted to see him too, so I said, “Okay. I'll bring them by the window and you can come see them from the window.” He was on the second floor. So I went home and got all the kids and brought them down to the hospital and they stood on the street and yelled up for him, “Daddy! Daddy!” and Dennis came to the window in his bathrobe and looked down at them and waved to them, and from the expression on his face, him standing there waving at the children, who were so excited to see him, I got a horrible feeling in my heart. I told myself, “Lord, he won't die, will he? He's my husband. He's my dream. He won't die now, will he, Lord?” I had no idea what to do. It just seemed like it wasn't going to happen. I went home and prayed to the Lord not to take my husband
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