8

As a child, the most horrible condition I could contemplate was being wrong and being discovered. Mistakes could mean exposure, maybe even annihilation. In my mother’s house, there was no room in which to make errors, no room to be wrong.

I grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing – copying from my mother what was in her, unfulfilled. I grew Black as Seboulisa, who I was to find in the cool mud halls of Abomey several lifetimes later – and, as alone. My mother’s words teaching me all manner of wily and diversionary defenses learned from the white man’s tongue, from out of the mouth of her father. She had had to use these defenses, and had survived by them, and had also died by them a little, at the same time. All the colors change and become each other, merge and separate, flow into rainbows and nooses.

I lie beside my sisters in the darkness, who pass me in the street unacknowledged and unadmitted. How much of this is the pretense of self-rejection that became an immovable protective mask, how much the programmed hate that we were fed to keep ourselves a part, apart?

One day (I remember I was still in the second grade) my mother was out marketing, and my sisters were talking about someone being Colored. In my six-year-old way, I jumped at this chance to find out what it was all about.

‘What does Colored mean?’ I asked. To my amazement, neither one of my sisters was quite sure.

‘Well,’ Phyllis said. ‘The nuns are white, and the Short-Neck Store-Man is white, and Father Mulvoy is white and we’re Colored.’

‘And what’s Mommy? Is she white or Colored?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Phyllis impatiently.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if anybody asks me what I am, I’m going to tell them I’m white same as Mommy.’

‘Ohhhhhhhhhh, girl, you better not do that,’ they both chorused in horror.

‘Why not?’ I asked, more confused than ever. But neither of them could tell me why.

That was the first and only time my sisters and I discussed race as a reality in my house, or at any rate as it applied to ourselves.

Our new apartment was on 152nd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway in what was called Washington Heights, and already known as a ‘changing’ neighborhood, meaning one where Black people could begin to find overpriced apartments out of the depressed and decaying core of Harlem.

The apartment house that we moved into was owned by a small landlord. We moved at the end of the summer, and I began school that year in a new catholic school which was right across the street from our house.

Two weeks after we moved into the new apartment, our landlord hanged himself in the basement. The Daily News reported that the suicide was caused by his despondency over the fact that he finally had to rent to Negroes. I was the first Black student in St Catherine’s School, and all the white kids in my sixth grade class knew about the landlord who had hanged himself in the basement because of me and my family. He had been Jewish; I was Black. That made us both fair game for the cruel curiosity of my pre-adolescent classmates.

Ann Archdeacon, red-headed darling of the nuns and of Monsignor Brady, was the first one to ask me what I knew about the landlord’s death. As usual, my parents had discussed the whole matter in patois, and I only read the comics in the daily paper.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said, standing in the schoolyard at lunchtime, twisting my front braids and looking around for some friendly face. Ann Archdeacon snickered, and the rest of the group that had gathered around us to hear roared with laughter, until Sister Blanche waddled over to see what was going on.

If the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament at St Mark’s School had been patronizing, at least their racism was couched in the terms of their mission. At St Catherine’s School, the Sisters of Charity were downright hostile. Their racism was unadorned, unexcused, and particularly painful because I was unprepared for it. I got no help at home. The children in my class made fun of my braids, so Sister Victoire, the principal, sent a note home to my mother asking her to comb my hair in a more ‘becoming’ fashion, since I was too old, she said, to wear ‘pigtails’.

All the girls wore blue gabardine uniforms that by springtime were a little musty, despite frequent drycleanings. I would come in from recess to find notes in my desk saying ‘You Stink.’ I showed them to Sister Blanche. She told me that she felt it was her christian duty to tell me that Colored people did smell different from white people, but it was cruel of the children to write nasty notes because I couldn’t help it, and if I would remain out in the yard the next day after the rest of the class came in after lunchtime, she would talk to them about being nicer to me!

The head of the parish and the school was Monsignor John J. Brady, who told my mother when she registered me that he had never expected to have to take Colored kids into his school. His favorite pastime was holding Ann Archdeacon or Ilene Crimmons on his lap, while he played with their blonde and red curls with one hand, and slid the other hand up the back of their blue gabardine uniforms. I did not care about his lechery, but I did care that he kept me in every Wednesday afternoon after school to memorize latin nouns.

The other children in my class were given a cursory quiz to test their general acquaintance with the words, and then let go early, since it was the early release day for religious instruction.

I came to loathe Wednesday afternoons, sitting by myself in the classroom trying to memorize the singular and plural of a long list of latin nouns, and their genders. Every half-hour or so, Father Brady would look in from the rectory, and ask to hear the words. If I so much as hesitated over any word or its plural, or its gender, or said it out of place on the list, he would spin on his black-robed heel and disappear for another half-hour or so. Although early dismissal was at 2:00 P.M., some Wednesdays I didn’t get home until after four o’clock. Sometimes on Wednesday nights I would dream of the white, acrid-smelling mimeograph sheet: agricola, agricolae, fem., farmer. Three years later when I began Hunter High School and had to take latin in earnest, I had built up such a block to everything about it that I failed my first two terms of it.

When I complained at home about my treatment at school, my mother would get angry with me.

‘What do you care what they say about you, anyway? Do they put bread on your plate? You go to school to learn, so learn and leave the rest alone. You don’t need friends.’ I did not see her helplessness, nor her pain.

I was the smartest girl in the class, which did nothing to contribute to my popularity. But the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had taught me well, and I was way ahead in math and mental arithmetic.

In the spring of the sixth grade, Sister Blanche announced that we were going to hold elections for two class presidents, one boy and one girl. Anyone could run, she said, and we would vote on Friday of that week. The voting should be according to merit and effort and class spirit, she added, but the most important thing would be marks.

Of course, Ann Archdeacon was nominated immediately. She was not only the most popular girl in the school, she was the prettiest. Ilene Crimmons was also nominated, her blonde curls and favored status with the Monsignor guaranteed that.

I lent Jim Moriarty ten cents, stolen from my father’s pocket at lunchtime, so Jim nominated me. A titter went through the class, but I ignored it. I was in seventh heaven. I knew I was the smartest girl in the class. I had to win.

That afternoon when my mother came home from the office, I told her about the election, and how I was going to run, and win. She was furious.

‘What in hell are you doing getting yourself involved with so much foolishness? You don’t have better sense in your head than that? What-the-france do you need with election? We send you to school to work, not to prance about with president-this election-that. Get down the rice, girl, and stop talking your foolishness.’ We started preparing the food.

‘But I just might win, Mommy. Sister Blanche said it should go to the smartest girl in the class.’ I wanted her to see how important it was to me.

‘Don’t bother me with that nonsense. I don’t want to hear any more about it. And don’t come in here on Friday with a long face, and any “I didn’t win, Mommy”, because I don’t want to hear that, either. Your father and I have enough trouble to keep among-you in school, never mind election.’

I dropped the subject.

The week was a very long and exciting one for me. The only way I could get attention from my classmates in the sixth grade was by having money, and thanks to carefully planned forays into my father’s pants pockets every night that week, I made sure I had plenty. Every day at noon, I dashed across the street, gobbled down whatever food my mother had left for my lunch, and headed for the schoolyard.

Sometimes when I came home for lunch my father was asleep in my parents’ bedroom before he returned to work. I now had my very own room, and my two sisters shared another. The day before the election, I tiptoed through the house to the closed french doors of my parents’ bedroom, and through a crack in the portières peeked in upon my sleeping father. The doors seemed to shake with his heavy snoring. I watched his mouth open and close a little with each snore, stentorian rattles erupting below his nuzzled moustache. The covers thrown partially back, to reveal his hands in sleep tucked into the top of his drawstring pajamas. He was lying on his side toward me, and the front of his pajama pants had fallen open. I could see only shadows of the vulnerable secrets shading the gap in his clothing, but I was suddenly shaken by this so-human image of him, and the idea that I could spy upon him and he not be aware of it, even in his sleep. I stepped back and closed the door quickly, embarrassed and ashamed of my own curiosity, but wishing his pajamas had gapped more so that I could finally know what exactly was the mysterious secret men carried between their legs.

When I was ten, a little boy on the rooftop had taken off my glasses, and so seeing little, all I could remember of that encounter, when I remembered it at all, was a long thin pencil-like thing that I knew couldn’t have any relationship to my father.

Before I closed the door, though, I slipped my hand around the door-curtains to where Daddy’s suit hung. I separated a dollar bill from the thin roll which he carried in his pants pocket. Then I retreated back into the kitchen, washed my plate and glass, and hurried back to school. I had electioneering to do.

I knew better than to say another word to my mother about the presidency, but that week was filled with fantasies of how I would break the news to her on Friday when she came home.

‘Oh, Mommy, by the way, can I stay later at school on Monday for a presidents’ meeting?’ Or ‘Mother, would you please sign this note saying it is all right for me to accept the presidency?’ Or maybe even, ‘Mother, could I have a little get-together here to celebrate the election?’

On Friday, I tied a ribbon around the steel barrette that held my unruly mass of hair tightly at the nape of my neck. Elections were to be held in the afternoon, and when I got home for lunch, for the first time in my life, I was too excited to eat. I buried the can of Campbell’s soup that my mother had left out for me way behind the other cans in the pantry and hoped she had not counted how many were left.

We filed out of the schoolyard and up the stairs to the sixth grade room. The walls were still lined with bits of green from the recent St Patrick’s Day decorations. Sister Blanche passed out little pieces of blank paper for our ballots.

The first rude awakening came when she announced that the boy chosen would be president, but the girl would only be vice-president. I thought this was monstrously unfair. Why not the other way around? Since we could not, as she explained, have two presidents, why not a girl president and a boy vice-president? It doesn’t really matter, I said to myself. I can live with being vice-president.

I voted for myself. The ballots were collected and passed to the front of the room and duly counted. James O’Connor won for the boys. Ann Archdeacon won for the girls. Ilene Crimmons came in second. I got four votes, one of which was mine. I was in shock. We all clapped for the winners, and Ann Archdeacon turned around in her seat and smiled her shit-eating smile at me. ‘Too bad you lost.’ I smiled back. I wanted to break her face off.

I was too much my mother’s daughter to let anyone think it mattered. But I felt I had been destroyed. How could this have happened? I was the smartest girl in the class. I had not been elected vice-president. It was as simple as that. But something was escaping me. Something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t fair.

A sweet little girl named Helen Ramsey had decided it was her christian duty to befriend me, and she had once lent me her sled during the winter. She lived next to the church, and after school, that day, she invited me to her house for a cup of cocoa. I ran away without answering, dashing across the street and into the safety of my house. I ran up the stairs, my bookbag banging against my legs. I pulled out the key pinned to my uniform pocket and unlocked the door to our apartment. The house was warm and dark and empty and quiet. I did not stop running until I got to my room at the front of the house, where I flung my books and my coat in a corner and collapsed upon my convertible couch-bed, shrieking with fury and disappointment. Finally, in the privacy of my room, I could shed the tears that had been burning my eyes for two hours, and I wept and wept.

I had wanted other things before that I had not gotten. So much so, that I had come to believe if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it. Was this what had happened with the election? Had I wanted it too much? Was this what my mother was always talking about? Why she had been so angry? Because wanting meant I would not get? But somehow this felt different. This was the first time that I had wanted something so badly, the getting of which I was sure I could control. The election was supposed to have gone to the smartest girl in the class, and I was clearly the smartest. That was something I had done, on my own, that should have guaranteed me the election. The smartest, not the most popular. That was me. But it hadn’t happened. My mother had been right. I hadn’t won the election. My mother had been right.

This thought hurt me almost as much as the loss of the election, and when I felt it fully I shrieked with renewed vigor. I luxuriated in my grief in the empty house in a way I could never have done if anyone were home.

All the way up front and buried in my tears, kneeling with my face in the cushions of my couch, I did not hear the key in the lock, nor the main door open. The first thing I knew, there was my mother standing in the doorway of my room, a frown of concern in her voice.

‘What happened, what happened? What’s wrong with you? What’s this racket going on here?’

I turned my wet face up to her from the couch. I wanted a little comfort in my pain, and getting up, I started moving toward her.

‘I lost the election, Mommy,’ I cried, forgetting her warnings. ‘I’m the smartest girl in class, Sister Blanche says so, and they chose Ann Archdeacon instead!’ The unfairness of it all flooded over me again and my voice cracked into fresh sobs.

Through my tears, I saw my mother’s face stiffen with rage. Her eyebrows drew together as her hand came up, still holding her handbag. I stopped in my tracks as her first blow caught me full on the side of my head. My mother was no weakling, and I backed away, my ears ringing. The whole world seemed to be going insane. It was only then I remembered our earlier conversations.

‘See, the bird forgets, but the trap doesn’t! I warned you! What you think you doing coming into this house wailing about election? If I told you once I have told you a hundred times, don’t chase yourself behind these people, haven’t I? What kind of ninny raise up here to think those good-for-nothing white piss-jets would pass over some little jacabat girl to elect you anything?’ Smack! ‘What did I say to you just now?’ She cuffed me again, this time on my shoulders, as I huddled to escape her rain of furious blows, and the edges of her pocketbook.

‘Sure enough, didn’t I tell you not to come in here bringing down tears over some worthless fool election?’ Smack! ‘What the hell you think we send you to school for?’ Smack! ‘Don’t run yourself behind other people’s business, you’ll do better. Dry up, now, dry up!’ Smack! She pulled me to my feet from where I had sunk back onto the couch.

‘Is cry you want to cry? I’ll give you something hard to cry on!’ And she cuffed me again, this time more lightly. ‘Now get yourself up from there and stop acting like some stupid fool, worrying yourself about these people’s business that doesn’t concern you. Get-the-france out of here and wipe up your face. Start acting like a human being!’

Pushing me ahead of her, my mother marched back through the parlor and into the kitchen. ‘I come in here tired from the street and here you, acting like the world is ending. I thought sure enough some terrible thing happened to you, come to find out it’s only election. Now help me put away this foodstuff.’

I was relieved to hear her tone mollify, as I wiped my eyes. But I still gave her heavy hands a wide berth.

‘It’s just that it’s not fair, Mother. That’s all I was crying about,’ I said, opening the brown paper bags on the table. To admit I had been hurt would somehow put me in the wrong for feeling pain. ‘It wasn’t the election I cared about so much really, just that it was all so unfair.’

‘Fair, fair, what’s fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god’s face.’ My mother was busily dropping onions into the bin. She paused, and turning around, held my puffy face up, her hand beneath my chin. Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad.

‘Child, why you worry your head so much over fair or not fair? Just do what is for you to do and let the rest take care of themselves.’ She smoothed straggles of hair back from my face, and I felt the anger gone from her fingers. ‘Look, you hair all mess-up behind from rolling around with foolishness. Go wash your face and hands and come help me dress this fish for supper.’