Common Ground (36 page)

But Max had a kind of dignity. He disguised his drinking well; it never made him aggressive, only discursive. Even when the police took him away to “dry out,” he came back and reported that he’d been to see his dying mother in Maine. He wasn’t an alcoholic, Max insisted, just a man who’d fallen on hard times. Soon he became a kind of mascot on the block, ambling through the gutters or sitting out on one of the stoops, talking of the old days when there’d been seventeen rooming houses on that block alone. He adored children and they loved him. Often he could be seen in the street, trying to jump rope or play hopscotch, his arms extended like a Maine scarecrow, his black overcoat flopping behind him as he ran.

One day he fell into conversation with Josh Young, a trust officer at the State Street Bank, who lived on West Newton Street. When Max mentioned that he was sixty-two years old, Josh asked whether he was receiving social security. No, Max said, he’d never applied because he didn’t have a copy of his birth certificate. Josh wrote off to Maine, obtained the certificate, and helped Max fill out the necessary forms; after a time, back came a check for $350.

Max was delighted, but bewildered. It was more money than he’d ever seen before and he didn’t know what to do with it. Afraid to keep so much money on his person, he asked Josh to hold it for him, so the young banker deposited the check and subsequent payments of seventy dollars a month in a joint account at his bank. Every afternoon at four o’clock, when Josh came home, Max would show up on the Youngs’ stoop to pick up three dollars. Gradually, he came to regard the stoop as his home, and Josh and his wife, Holly, often found him curled up on the stairs with a bottle cradled in his arms. They grew intensely protective of him; once, during the annual South End House Tour, police tried to remove Max from the stoop but they were driven off by an enraged Holly. Max returned the loyalty, presenting the Youngs with little gifts he picked up on his wanderings.

Then one afternoon in August 1970—a few days after the Divers moved onto the block—Josh came home to find Max lying on the stoop, dead. Holly laid a sheet over her old friend. Later that afternoon, as Colin returned from work, he saw the shrouded body stretched out at the top of his neighbors’ stairs. He stopped and gaped. Here was something you would expect on the streets of Calcutta—an unsettling introduction to West Newton Street.

Once Josh had asked Max what should be done with the money in their account if anything happened to him, and Max replied, “Do something for the children.” At the time of his death, the block’s residents were already converting a vacant lot near the Divers’ house into a vest-pocket park and playground, so the Youngs contributed the remaining $280 of Max’s money to the project, which the neighbors named Max Hiscock Park. With its shade trees, sandbox, and jungle gym, the park was a protected spot to which the young professionals could bring their children, the legatees of the new South End; but for those who remembered Max, it was also a reminder of the old South End, which they were reluctantly—but relentlessly—displacing.

While the chorus massed against the tintypes of Olde New York, Dolly Gallagher Levi, in flaming plumage and red satin dress, sashayed down the bulb-lit runway, growling and rasping:

The curtain fell across the Shubert Theater stage and Rachel Twymon lurched to her feet, clapping, cheering, calling for more. Her mother shouted “Bravo!”; her friend Ola Smith called “Encore! Encore!”; her two oldest sons, Richard and George, stomped and whistled. It had been a glorious evening. The theater was always a treat for Rachel, her favorite night out. Even better was a big, brassy musical, fresh from a long run on Broadway. And best of all was a black production such as this, headlined by two stars like Cab Calloway and Pearl Bailey.

After five tumultuous curtain calls, the house lights went up and the audience filed out. Rachel—still resonating to Pearl Bailey’s portrait of a middle-aged black woman who triumphs over life’s vicissitudes—was humming her
favorite song from the show, “With the rest of them / With the best of them /I can hold my head up high.”

In front of the Shubert that icy night in January 1970 waited a line of taxis. Rachel headed for the first cab in the rank, opened the door, and said, “We’d like to go to the Orchard Park housing project.”

“Un-unh,” growled the white cabbie. “I ain’t going to Roxbury tonight.”

Rachel stiffened. One of those, she thought. Well, it was partly her fault; she shouldn’t have mentioned the project—that always scared them. Walking to the second cab, she smiled and in a carefully modulated voice said, “Hampden and Prescott streets, please.”

“Sorry, lady,” said the driver. “Try somebody else.”

The third cab turned her down. So did the fourth. And the fifth consented only after she changed her tactics, asking to be taken to Dudley Square. But that left them four blocks from Orchard Park, a long walk for Rachel along icy, snowdrifted sidewalks. By the time they reached home, chilled and tired, her sense of well-being had worn off. How could you hold your head up high when you couldn’t even get a cab to take you home? “That’s it,” she told her children. “We’re getting out of this goddamn project!”

The Twymons had lived in Orchard Park for nearly five years. Rachel had never wanted to live in public housing—she felt it was demeaning—but she hadn’t had much choice. Utterly dependent on her welfare check, she couldn’t afford a private apartment large enough for her family of seven. Yet as the years went by she had gradually become accustomed to project living. Her four-bedroom apartment was unusually spacious. She had furnished it with items provided by welfare or loaned by friends. Sunlight streamed through her windows, nourishing a forest of plants: pachysandra, wandering Jews, begonias, African violets, dieffenbachia. And she’d made some good friends in the project.

But the advantages of Orchard Park were increasingly overshadowed by the drawbacks. There were no elevators, and, with her arthritic legs, Rachel had difficulty climbing to her third-floor apartment. The buildings were thirty years old and showing their age: roofs leaked, plumbing failed, paint peeled. Then there was the location—deep in the heart of one of Roxbury’s worst neighborhoods, far from the theaters, movies, and concert halls that Rachel patronized whenever she could afford them. And, of course, like other Roxbury projects, Orchard Park had a reputation for crime which kept cabdrivers, repairmen, and delivery boys away.

The project wasn’t as dangerous as many whites imagined, but it was increasingly perilous. Some of the crime was merely annoying. Once, after the boys returned from a church-sponsored summer camp, Rachel had washed their dirty socks and underwear and hung them in the project courtyard to dry; by evening, somebody had stolen them all. Other crime was more serious. Once, when Rachel was confined to bed with a fresh outbreak of lupus, Richard and George took the family laundry to a nearby laundromat. On the way,
they were set on by drug addicts who took all their money, then beat them because they didn’t have more.

Rachel appealed to the Welfare Department, complaining that she had to send her sons on such dangerous missions because her own washing machine was broken, and the department bought her a new one. But her total dependence on welfare troubled her. She often complained to her social workers that she wasn’t receiving everything she was entitled to. When her sons’ socks and underwear were stolen, she asked for an emergency grant to buy new ones. Her social worker told her that “eighty-nine cents is excessive for a pair of children’s socks and the price could be reduced with more careful shopping.” Rachel exploded, accusing the social worker of discriminating against her. Later, she objected strenuously when the department failed to reimburse her for taxi trips to and from the hospital.

The “extreme hostility” which several of the welfare workers detected in Rachel—and about which they often complained in their reports—apparently reflected her shame and frustration. One social worker, who became friendly with Rachel, concluded that she was “anxious to become financially independent as she is very unhappy on welfare rolls.” Her doctors had warned her repeatedly that her chronic disease would not permit her to take a regular job.

For a brief period in the late sixties, Rachel had seemed on her way to self-sufficiency. By 1966, her lupus was sufficiently in remission for her to take a part-time job as a saleswoman at Lindy’s, a clothing store in the Dudley Station area. But as racial hostility built in Roxbury, the store’s owner, Hyman Levy, wanted out. He’d grown fond of Rachel and asked her if she’d like to buy the store. Rachel only laughed. “Man!” she said. “You must be crazy.” Of eighty-nine members of the Dudley Station Merchants’ Association that year, only three were black. But Levy gave her a packet of materials from the Small Business Administration’s equal opportunity program, designed to promote “minority” businesses. After weeks of hesitation, Rachel concluded that this was the chance she’d been waiting for. She applied for an SBA loan and, in August 1967, to the astonishment of her friends and family, she received a commitment for $18,000.

The agency clearly had some doubts that Rachel could make it. The loan was on a year’s “trial basis,” during which she was to take a course in retail store management at Boston University and would have two counselors from the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) to guide her. Although she could hire salesgirls and a bookkeeper, she couldn’t pay herself a salary until the store began turning a profit, which the SBA said might be as long as three years. Until then, Rachel would have to rely on continued welfare payments, which, by 1967, had reached more than $400 a month. At first, the Welfare Department was not encouraging. If she could get an $18,000 loan from the government, it asked, why did she need welfare? Only after the SBA officials explained the loan’s provisions did the department agree to maintain Rachel’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children until the store turned a profit.

Rachel’s Specialty Shop opened on November 17, 1967, at 2255 Washington Street in the heart of Roxbury’s principal shopping district. For a time it seemed to do well. As one of the area’s first black proprietors, Rachel was interviewed by newspapers and television—valuable publicity for a young venture. Her SCORE advisers—Leon Margoles and Abe Siegel—reported that she showed “business acumen” and “great dedication.” Her welfare worker, dropping by the store one day, found her “much more composed and confident.” She came through the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination with only a smashed display window. Then that summer Rachel went back into the hospital for ten weeks and the business began to languish.

Her advisers noted a strange phenomenon. White merchants in the area seemed to welcome Rachel (many of them had known her for years as Mrs. Jenkins’ granddaughter or Mrs. Walker’s daughter, the cute little girl with the hair ribbon who had run errands for the family). Some of them did everything they could to help, telling her where she could buy goods at the best discount or sending her their own customers. But for some reason, blacks were less supportive. They seemed to resent Rachel’s new status. In November 1968, Siegel and Margoles warned: “A great part of the success or failure of such a venture depends on the community’s response. One of the surprising elements in Mrs. Twymon’s case is that she has not received as much community support as expected.” The coming Christmas season, they said, would “make or break this venture.”

It broke it. By mid-March, proceeds were so meager that Rachel and her advisers reluctantly decided to close the store. Its fixtures and stock were sold at auction for $4,000, which went back to the SBA. In April, a welfare worker visiting Mrs. Twymon found her “disappointed by the failure,” with “no plans for the immediate future.”

But three months later, when the worker called again, Rachel was “deeply involved with church activities, which help satisfy her tremendous energy.” She had always found solace at her church, Union United Methodist Church in the South End. When her lupus acted up, money ran low, or her children gave her trouble, Rachel would be fortified by a few hours on the hard wooden pews at Union, listening to an uplifting sermon, chanting the responses, and singing a few selections from the
American Service Hymnal
, such as her favorite, “Pass Me Not.”

Now Rachel focused even more of her energy on Union. Every week before services she taught Sunday school for an hour. She often volunteered at
the day-care center in the church basement, and in the summers she helped out at the Vacation Bible School, taking children on field trips to the Science Museum, the Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread plants. She served on a multitude of commissions and committees. She became a board member and later chairman of the Cooper Community Center, the church-sponsored settlement house in the South End. In 1966, when Duke Ellington came to perform a concert of “sacred jazz” at Union, Rachel was assistant chairperson for the event.

It wasn’t easy for her to get from Orchard Park to Union, more than a mile away. On Sundays, devout church members who lived nearby would drive her down and back; on weekdays, one of the other women who helped at the daycare center often took her there, but she usually had to find her way home alone. With her increasingly painful legs, that could be difficult or, if she took a cab, prohibitively expensive.