Daddy Was a Number Runner (24 page)

The crowd tittered. A few men close up nodded their heads in agreement, but most of the others just looked off, only half listening.

We
didn't
have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, I thought, so who could believe what Robert was saying? I never read anything in school about black kings and junk like that. The only people who ever said such
things was Daddy and street speakers like Robert. And suppose what they said was true? How could it help us now anyway?

Me and Sukie walked on down to 112th Street and stared at the clothes and stuff in Woolworth's window. If the store had been opened we could have gone inside and swiped a cookie, but everything was dead on Sunday, so we just stood there and listened to the Puerto Ricans passing by talking to each other in Spanish.

Suddenly I wished I could speak Spanish, or anything, and if I had to be black, why couldn't I at least have been Puerto Rican?

A couple of days later I was sitting on my stoop doing nothing when Rachel called me from the candy store.

“Francie, will you go to the drugstore for me?”

“Sure, Rachel, what you want?”

“Come inside a minute.”

As I entered the store I noticed a poster in the window advertising the Joe Louis-Max Baer fight at Madison Square Garden next month. I hoped Joe would beat him blind.

Rachel took a quarter from the cash register and handed it to me. “Here, I'll write down what I want.”

“I can remember.”

“I know, but just in case there are people around you hand the note to the druggist, see?”

I didn't see, but I took the note and the money to the druggist and he gave me a square box already wrapped. I knew what was in it. Kotex. I was still using rags but Rebecca had given me one of her Kotex pads once and she took it out of a box just like this with the wrapping paper
still on it. I pushed open the candy store door and handed the box to Rachel.

“Take what you want,” she said, indicating the row of two-cent candies.

When I went to the store for her father or mother they always let me choose from the five-cent candy. I noticed now that Rachel wasn't as pretty as she used to be 'cause she was getting too fat. Too chalky white with a round rouge spot on each cheek and too fat. I picked out a peanut bar.

“Francie, I was wondering if you would like to clean for us tomorrow. No heavy work, just a little dusting and washing dishes and things like that for maybe five hours and make yourself a dollar.”

“Yeah, Rachel, I think I can do it.” I didn't like to wash dishes, but for a dollar I would pretend.

I raced upstairs. “Mother, Mother, I got a job.”

She grunted and didn't seem too impressed.

After breakfast the next morning, which was Saturday, I started out, very excited. I walked down to 110th Street and found the address right across the street from Central Park. It was a nice white stone building. The hallway was clean and had a different smell than the ones in Harlem, strong cooking odors, but not the same as ours. I took the elevator up to the tenth floor. Rachel and her mother were home. The apartment was bright with big rooms and the funny smell was stronger inside. I found out what it was—gefilte fish.

“In the kitchen, that's where we start, Francie,” Mrs. Rathbone said, leading me down the hall. She was very short and white-haired with a thick accent. “Dirty dishes we got plenty,” she said cheerfully.

She wasn't foolin'. It looked like they had been cooking for months, there were that many dishes and pots in the sink. It took me over two hours to get them all washed and put away. Then Rachel brought me a pan of soapy water and a brush and I scrubbed the kitchen floor.

“Don't miss that spot under the sink, Francie,” she said.

Mrs. Rathbone handed me a carpet sweeper and I did the rugs in the living and dining rooms and in the hallway. Rachel was waiting for me with another bucket of water by the front-room window. She held out a rag and pointed to the window. I had seen my mother cleaning the outside of a window by sitting on the sill, half of her inside and half of her outside. That was what Rachel was telling me to do now.

I opened the window and felt a blast of cool air but that wasn't what bothered me. I looked down ten stories.

“I'm scared to sit outside that window, Rachel,” I told her.

“Francie, don't worry, I'll hold you,” she said.

She stuck the rag in my hand and I sat on the sill. Rachel pulled the window down to my lap. Holding on to the bottom of the window with one hand, with the other I dabbed at the pane with the rag, almost crying. Rachel was holding me all right. She was pinching a tiny piece of my dress between her thumb and forefinger like it was dirt. I did both front windows, then dusted the furniture in the bedroom. I had been there seven and a half hours. Rachel gave me a dollar and asked if I could come back next Saturday. I didn't even answer her. I ran out of the house and went home.

When Mother came in from work I gave her the dollar.

“Was it hard, Francie?” she asked smiling. “It couldn't
have been easy seeing as how I can't get you to do a thing around here.”

“It was all right,” I said, “except washing the windows. I told Rachel I was scared to sit on the outside and she said she'd hold me, but Mother, she just held on to a little piece of my dress.”

“Rachel had you washing windows?”

“Yes, Mother. That's what I said.”

“You come with me.”

Mother ran down the whole five flights of stairs and burst into the candy store. Nobody was there but Mr. Rathbone. Mother marched right behind the counter.

“Damn you,” she said as Mr. Rathbone backed his plump behind up into the soda fountain. It was the first time I'd ever heard her curse. “You tryin' to kill my child? She don't have to wash no windows for you, you hear? That's man's work. You outta your head making my child wash windows?”

“Mrs. Coffin, please. I don't know what …”

“You tell your wife and that fat daughter of yours that it's a good thing I can't get my hands on them right now. A good thing, you hear?”

For a minute I thought Mother might bust Mr. Rathbone in the nose in place of his fat daughter, but she turned away and we went back upstairs.

“You don't have to do no domestic work for nobody, Francie.” We was in the kitchen fixing dinner. “You don't be no fool, you hear? You finish school and go on to college. Long as I live you don't have to scrub no white folks' floors or wash their filthy windows. What they think I'm spending my life on my knees in their kitchens for? So you can follow in my footsteps? You finish school and go on to
college. Somebody in this family got to finish school. You hear what I say?”

“Yes, Mother, I hear.”

Her face was red and sweating as she banged the pots around, grumbling under her breath. I was surprised at her anger which made me feel kinda sad, not because I had caused all this commotion, that made me feel important, but because she was my mother and I loved her but I suddenly realized I almost didn't know her at all.

L
ABOR
Day couldn't come soon enough with school a week behind. I was tired of summer with nothing to do but read on the fire escape or go to the movies when I could hustle up a dime or wander up and down the streets with Sukie. Although I brought up Vincent's name several times, she ignored me and I finally stopped thinking about it altogether because her keeping it a secret from her very best friend hurt me.

Then it was autumn and the trees in the park had golden leaves sailing to the ground, but the weather was still hot and sticky like it didn't know any better.

One morning when me and Maude were walking to school she started crying, making no effort to wipe away the tears like she didn't care who saw them.

“They gonna kill them,” she said. “They gonna keep messin' around but in the end they gonna kill them.”

I knew what she was talking about. We heard it through the grapevine first, like we heard most everything else, and then it was in the papers. Governor Lehman said he wasn't about to change the death sentence for boys under twenty-one. He said he couldn't see no difference between the guilt of a man and a boy, so that petition the white folks sent to him wasn't gonna save a soul. There was ten boys waiting in
the death house in Sing Sing, counting Vallie and the Washington brothers, and now they wouldn't have long to wait.

“What did Robert say?” I asked Maude.

“Said we was still appealing 'cause they beat Vallie and them to make them confess.” She swallowed a sniffle. “That's against the law, you know, beating them in jail like that.”

“I know,” I said.

“But they don't care.” She rocked from side to side on her bowlegs which was the way she walked. I used to be glad her legs were bowed, 'cause mine was so skinny and long and hers were worse looking. But now I was sorry I ever had such a nasty thought and I wished her legs were straight and pretty like Sukie's even if mine stayed ugly like they was surely apt to do.

“I know they gonna do it,” she said. “They gonna electrocute my brother.”

“Don't say that, Maude,” I said. “You gotta have faith.” That's what Mother had told Mrs. Caldwell so I said it again, as much to keep me from crying as to help Maude 'cause deep down I felt just like she did.

D
AMN
if he didn't do it. He beat the Butcher Boy. Everybody poured out of their houses to celebrate like it had been planned that way, me and Sterling among them. We'd listened to the fight with Mother in her bedroom on a radio she had bought a few months ago for two dollars down and a dollar a week which meant whenever the collection man from the store on 125th Street could catch her.

Yelling over the roar of the crowd, the referee had just declared Joe Louis the winner. Sterling jumped up and headed for the door with me at his heels.

“Don't let your sister out of your sight,” Mother hollered
as we galloped down the stairs. I thought I heard Sterling mutter something under his breath, but I wasn't sure.

By the time we reached Lenox Avenue the streets were jammed.

“We did it,” a brown boy shouted, flinging his cap up in the air and grabbing me around the waist. We did a two-step in the gutter. Sterling and a girl with a mouthful of buck teeth joined hands with us and we went round and round yelling and laughing until we collapsed in a dizzy heap on top of one another.

“We beat the shit out of that white boy, didn't we?” a tall yellow man demanded, and the crowd roared back:

“We beat him. We beat him. Joe Louis naturally whipped his razzamatazz. Whipped him so his mammy wouldn't know him.”

Strangers hugged me and I squeezed them back. It was good to feel their touch. Good to yell at the top of my voice: “Long live the Brown Bomber.”

The crowd spilled off the pavement into the street, stalling cars, which honked good-naturedly and then gave up as the riders jumped out and joined us lindying down the middle of Lenox Avenue.

Then I saw Junior and yelled at him. He ran forward to meet us. His arms reached out and I stumbled into them as he swung me off my feet and hugged me tight.

“James Junior, James Junior, where you been?” I kissed him, trying to see if he looked all right. He seemed to have growed some and looked nice in his new suit.

“Francie, little sister. Ain't this a glorious night?” He turned to Sterling and they hugged each other. “Man, did you hear how Joe Louis knocked that cat out? With a one-two and a right cross.” Junior aimed his fist at Sterling's
chin. Sterling ducked and came up inside Junior's arms, punching him lightly in the stomach.

“No, man,” Sterling said, “this is the way he did it. First in the breadbasket, then the right cross.” His fist landed on the side of Junior's head.

“If you say so,” Junior said, rubbing his chin. They fell out laughing. “How's Mother—and Daddy, too?”

“They's both fine, James Junior,” I answered, “but how come you never come home? You know Mother worries about you. How come you don't come home sometime like you said you would?”

He looked away from me. “Tell Mother I'm comin' to see her one day next week and bring her some money. You tell her that for me, Francie, okay?”

“Okay, Junior, but you know she don't care about no money.”

“I know, little sister,” he said softly, “but I care.”

“Where'd you get your new suit?” Sterling asked.

“Somebody gave it to me. Sharp, ain't it?” He whirled around and I nodded.

Sonny had come up while we was talking. “You ready, man?” he asked Junior. “We're late.”

“Yeah,” Junior said, “let's go.”

“Where you goin',” I asked, hopin' maybe he'd let me come, too.

“We got a job to do,” Sonny said, clearly trying to get James Junior away from us.

“What kind of job you talkin' about, man?” Sterling asked.