Daddy Was a Number Runner (3 page)

“Can I borrow a half cup of sugar?” I asked.

She took the cup and disappeared, returning in a few minutes with it almost full. “Y'all got any bread?” she asked. “I need one more piece to make a sandwich.”

“Maude wants to borrow a piece of bread,” I told Mother.

“Give her two slices,” Mother said.

I gave Maude two pieces of whole wheat.

“Elizabeth's coming back home today with her kids and Robert,” she said. “Their furniture got put out in the street.”

Elizabeth was her oldest sister and Robert her husband. He used to be a tailor but wasn't working now.

“Y'all gonna be crowded,” I said.

“Yep,” she answered, her head disappearing from the window.

I returned to the kitchen and told Mother Elizabeth was coming home.

“Lord, where they all gonna sleep?” she asked.

Maude and her sister, Rebecca, sixteen, had one bedroom, their mother the other, and their brother, Vallie, slept in the front room.

I sat down at the table and began to sip my tea, looking at the greasy walls lumpy with layers of paint over cracked plaster. Vomit-green, that's what Daddy called its color. The ceiling was dotted with brown and yellow water stains. Daddy had patched up the big leaks but it didn't do much good and when it rained outside it rained inside, too. The last time the landlord had been there to collect the rent Daddy told him the roof needed fixing and that if the ceiling
fell down and hurt one of his kids he was going to pitch the landlord headfirst down the stairs. The landlord left in a hurry but that didn't get our leaks fixed.

The outside door slammed and my brother Sterling came into the kitchen and slumped down at the table. He was fourteen, brown-skinned, and lanky, his long, tight face always bunched into a frown, and today was no exception.

“Where's James Junior?” Mother asked.

“I'm not his keeper,” Sterling grumbled. “I didn't see him at recess.”

James Junior, my oldest brother, was a year older than Sterling, and good looking like Daddy. He was nicer than Sterling, too, but slow in his studies, always getting left back, and Sterling had already passed him in school and was going to graduate this month.

The door slammed shut again and I could tell from the heavy footsteps that it was Daddy. I jumped up and ran into the dining room hurling myself against him. He laughed and scooped me up in his arms, swinging me off the floor. Mother was always telling me that men were handsome, not beautiful, but she just didn't understand. Handsome meant one thing and beautiful something else and I knew for sure what Daddy was. Beautiful. In the first place he was a giant of a man, wide and thick and hard. He was dark brown, black really, with thick crinkly hair and a wide laughing beautiful mouth. I loved Daddy's mouth.

He sat down at the dining-room table and began pulling number slips from his pocket.

“Get the envelope for me, sugar.”

I removed the drawer and handed him the envelope, smiling. “I dreamed a big catfish jumped off the plate and bit me, Daddy. The dream book gives five fourteen for fish. And Mrs. Mackey dreamed it was raining fish.”

“Great God and Jim,” Daddy cried, and we grinned at each other. “My chart gives a five to lead today. I'm gonna play a dollar on five fourteen straight and sixty cents combination.”

Daddy said that of all the family my dreams hit the most. If 514 came out today we'd be rich, which would be a good thing 'cause Mother was always grumbling that we were playing all of our commission back on the numbers.

From force of habit I huddled close to the radiator, which was cold now. The green and red checkerboard linoleum around it was worn so thin you couldn't even see its pattern and there was a jagged hole in the floor near the pipe almost big enough to get your foot through. Daddy was always nailing cardboard and linoleum over that hole but it kept wearing out.

“Henrietta,” Daddy called, “where are the boys?”

Mother came to the kitchen door. “Sterling's here eating, but James Junior ain't come home yet.”

Daddy's fist hit the table with a suddenness which made me jump. “If that boy's stayed out of school again it's gonna be me and his behind. Sterling,” he shouted, “where's your brother?”

“I ain't seen him since this morning,” Sterling answered from the kitchen.

Daddy turned on Mother. “If that boy gets into any trouble I'm gonna let his butt rot in jail, you hear? I'm warning you. I've done told him time and time again to stop hanging out with those Ebony Earls, but his head is damned hard. All of them's gonna end up in Sing Sing, you mark my words, and ain't no Coffin ever been to jail before. Do you know that?”

Mother nodded. She also knew, as I did, that Daddy
would be the first one downtown to see about Junior if anything happened to him.

Junior had started hanging around with the Ebony Earls a few months ago, together with his buddies Sonny and Maude's brother Vallejo. Sterling didn't belong to the gang. He said gangs were stupid and boys who hung out together like that were morons.

Daddy started adding up the amounts of his number slips and counting the money. Mother sat down at the table beside him and said nervously that she heard Slim Jim had been arrested. He was a number runner like Daddy.

“Slim Jim is a fool,” Daddy said. “His banker thinks he can operate outside the syndicate but nobody can buck Dutch Schultz. The cops will arrest anybody his boys finger, and they did just that. Fingered Slim Jim and his banker.”

“Maybe you'd better stop collecting numbers now before …” Mother began nervously, but Daddy cut her off.

“For christsakes, Henrietta, let's not go through that again. How many times I gotta tell you it ain't much more dangerous collecting numbers than playing them. As long as the cops are paid off, which they are, they ain't gonna bother me. Schultz even pays off that stupid ass, Dodge, we've got for a district attorney, so stop worrying.”

Mother played the numbers like everyone else in Harlem but she was scared about Daddy being a number runner. Daddy started working for Jocko on commission about six months ago when he lost his house-painting job, which hadn't been none too steady to begin with.

Jocko's name was really Jacques and he was a tall Creole from Haiti. He wore a blue beret cocked on the side of his head and had curly black hair and olive skin. Now, Jocko was handsome but he wasn't beautiful. He ran a candy store
on Fifth Avenue and 117th Street as a front and everybody said he was real close to Big Boy Donatelli, his banker, who was real close to Dutch Schultz. Daddy said Jocko was as big a man in the syndicate as a colored man could get since the gangsters took over the numbers. Daddy said the gangsters controlled everything in Harlem—the numbers, the whores, and the pimps who brought them their white trade.

Mother grumbled: “I thought Mayor La Guardia say he was gonna clean up all this mess.”

“If they really wanted to clean up this town,” Daddy said, “they would stop picking on the poor niggers trying to hit a number for a dime so they won't starve to death. Where else a colored man gonna get six hundred dollars for one? What they need to do is snatch the gangsters banking the numbers, they're the ones raking in the big money. But the cops ain't about to cut off their gravy train. But you stop worrying now, Henrietta. Ain't nothing gonna happen to me, you hear?”

Mother nodded slowly. Then she looked at me. “Francie, get up from there and go on back to school before you be late again. Sterling,” she yelled.

“Okay,” he answered from the kitchen. “I'm comin'.”

“Francie! Don't let me have to tell you again.”

“Okay, Mother. I'm goin'. ‘Bye, Daddy.”

“ 'Bye, sugar.”

When I got downstairs I peaked outside but Sukie was nowhere in sight. I ran most of the way back to school but was good and late anyhow.

TWO
      

MRS. Oliver, my homeroom teacher, didn't even bawl me out for being late as I slid into my seat. I was disappointed. Maybe she didn't like me anymore.

I was in first-year junior high at P.S. 81 between St. Nicholas and Eighth Avenues, one of the worse girls' schools in Harlem, second only to P.S. 136 uptown. A brand-new baby was found flushed down the toilet at P.S. 136 last week. Nothing like that had happened at my school, at least not yet, but everything else did.

Everybody was excited at school today. There was a rumor that Saralee and Luisa's gang was gonna beat up all the teachers who were failing them. That would be just about every teacher in school except Mrs. Roberts. I don't think even Saralee, leader of the Ebonettes, would dare tangle with Mrs. Roberts. She taught us art and was the only colored teacher at our school and nobody messed with her. We didn't even take our magazines into her room, she was that tough.

The Ebonettes were the sister gang to the Ebony Earls, the roughest street fighters this side of Mt. Morris Park.
When the Earls warred with their rivals, the Harlem Raiders from uptown, blood flowed all up and down the avenue. When they weren't fighting each other, the gangs jumped the Jew boys who attended the synagogue on 116th Street or mugged any white man caught alone in Harlem after the sun went down. It got so bad that the insurance man from Metropolitan had to hire one of the Ebony Earls to ride around with him for protection when he made his collections. Yeah, the Earls were tough all right and the Ebonettes tried to be just as bad.

The bell rang and we all trooped down the hall to our first course. Maude was in my class and we walked together.

“I sure hope Saralee and them don't beat up Mrs. Oliver,” she said. Maude had a square dark face and thick hair. If it wasn't for her bowlegs, which made her walk pigeon-toed, she wouldn't have been bad looking at all.

“I hope they don't,” I agreed. I liked Mrs. Oliver. She was white-haired and looked like somebody's grandmother.

Maude and I sat together in Miss Haggerty's class. She was our arithmetic teacher and real pitiful, a pale stick of a woman, scared peeless most of the time. Now she mumbled that we would begin our lessons on page fifty-eight and to please take out our arithmetic books. Almost everybody, including me, took out our love stories and true confessions instead. We didn't even try to hide our magazines in Miss Haggerty's class and she was so terrified she just ignored them.

It was a good time for me to catch up on my love stories because Daddy wouldn't even let me bring those magazines inside the house. He said he didn't want to catch me reading such trash.

I usually paid attention to Miss Haggerty for the first five
minutes, though, until I understood and could solve the problem. So today, when she asked for a volunteer for the blackboard, I raised my hand and stood up.

“Sit down,” Saralee growled at me. I sat.

Miss Haggerty ignored us both. “Do we have a volunteer?” she asked again. Nobody moved.

“Well, then,” Miss Haggerty said, walking to the blackboard and picking up a piece of chalk, “I'll work it out for you. Now the main thing to remember is—”

“Talk a little softer,” Luisa said. “I can't concentrate on my story.” The class tittered and Miss Haggerty's voice dropped to a whisper.