13
In my first year at Hunter, there were three other Black girls in my term, although not in my class. One of them was very proper, and she avoided all The Branded with great care. The other two girls came from the same school in Queens and they hung together in self-protection.
In the middle of my freshman year, two more Black girls came to Hunter. One was sister to Yvonne Grenidge, who had dated my cousin Gerry. This brought my totally separate worlds of school and home threateningly close together. I was accustomed to thinking of them as separate planets.
The other girl was Gennie.
Gennie was the beginning of a double life for me at Hunter; actually, it was a triple life. There was The Branded, with whom I held seances and raised the ghosts of Byron and Keats. There was Maxine, my shy piano-playing Jewish friend with whom I roamed the locker rooms after curfew, and who later had a nervous breakdown because she was afraid she was dying of leprosy. And there was Gennie.
Each part of my school life was separate from the other, with no connection except through me. None of the other people involved would have anything at all to do with each other. Maxine thought The Branded were too dangerous, and Gennie too flamboyant. The Branded thought Maxine was a mama’s baby, and Gennie, a snob. Gennie thought they were all bores, and said so loudly at any provocation.
‘You surely do hang around with some funny people. They act like they think the stars are their garters.’ I laughed as she stuffed her toeshoes with lambswool and tied them around her ankles. Gennie was always either coming from or going to dance class.
I shared classes and lunchtime with The Branded, some lunches and after-school time with Maxine, and study periods, and every other chance I could get, with Gennie. She was the only one I saw on weekends.
Suddenly life became an exciting game of how much time I could spend with the people I wanted to spend it with. We learned to appreciate each other’s softness behind the lockers, calling it all different kinds of names and games – from touch tag, to how-does-that-feel, to I-can-hit-harder-than-you. Until Gennie said to me one day, ‘Is that the only way you know how to make friends?’ and right then and there I began to learn other ways.
I learned how to feel first and ask questions afterward. I learned how to cherish first the facade and then the fact of being an outlaw.
That spring term, Gennie and I did things that I thought made The Branded look like kindergarten kids. We smoked in the bathrooms and on the street. We played hookey from school and forged notes for each other in our mothers’ handwriting. We hid out at Gennie’s house and toasted marshmallows in her mother’s bed. We stole nickels from our mothers’ purses and roamed Fifth Avenue singing union songs. We played sexy games with the Latino boys up in the bluffs of granite above Morningside Park. And, we did a lot of talking. The Berlin Airlift was just beginning, and the state of Israel represented a newly born hope for human dignity. Our budding political consciousness had already soured us on Coca-Cola democracy.
Gennie had been trained in classical ballet. I never saw her dance except privately, for me. In the beginning of our junior year she left Hunter so she could have more time to dance, she said. Actually it was because she hated to do schoolwork. Our friendship, then, became less connected with school.
Gennie was the first person in my life that I was ever conscious of loving.
She was my first true friend.
The summer of 1948 was a time of powerful change all over the world. Gennie and I felt ourselves a part of it, as did most of the girls at Hunter High. We envied the girls who were Jewish, and who already were making plans to go to Israel and work on a kibbutz in the new nation. The mild-mannered skinny little man in the white sheet had prevailed, and India was finally free, but they had killed him for it. There was no longer any doubt in anybody’s mind that China would soon be Red China, and three cheers for the communists. My revolutionary fervor that had begun with a white waitress refusing to serve my family ice cream in the nation’s capital was becoming a clearer and clearer position, a lens through which to view the world.
We had huddled under schooldesks for air-raid drills, and had shaken with terror at the idea of a whole city instantly destroyed by a bomb of atoms. We had danced in the streets and listened to the horns of the fire engines and tugboats in the river the day the War was over. For us in 1948, Peace was a very real and vivid issue. Thousands of american boys had died to make the world safe for democracy, even though my family and I couldn’t be served ice cream in Washington, DC. But we were going to change all that, Gennie and I, in our full skirts and ballet slippers, the New Look.
There was a wind blowing all over the world, and we were a part of it.
Gennie lived with her mother in a one-bedroom kitchenette apartment on 119th Street between Eighth and Morningside Avenues. Gennie had the bedroom, and her mother, Louisa, slept on a wide couch in the living room.
Louisa went to work every day. I woke Gennie up whatever time I came over, cutting summer school, and we spent the next few hours deciding what she would wear, and who we were going to be for the world on that particular day. If we did not have something suitable, we stitched and pinned an assortment of wide skirts and kerchiefs into place. Since Gennie was slimmer than I, we often had to alter things on the spot to fit me, but always in such a way that it could be easily restored.
We took hours and hours attiring each other, sometimes changing entire outfits at the last minute to become two different people, complimenting each other always. We blossomed forth, finally, after hours of tacking and pinning and last-minute ironing-board decisions.
That summer all of New York, including its museums and parks and avenues, was our backyard. What we wanted and couldn’t afford, we stole money from our mothers for.
Bandits, Gypsies, Foreigners of all degree, Witches, Whores, and Mexican Princesses – there were appropriate costumes for every role, and appropriate places in the city to go to play them all out. There were always things to do to match whomever we decided to be.
When we decided to be workers, we wore loose pants and packed our shoe-dyed lunchboxes, and tied red bandannas around our throats. We rode up and down Fifth Avenue on the old open double-decker omnibuses, shouting and singing union songs at the tops of our lungs.
Solidarity foreverrrrr, the Union makes us strong!
When the unions’ inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run …
When we decided to be hussies we wore tight skirts and high heels that hurt, and followed handsome respectable-looking lawyer types down Fifth and Park Avenues, making what we thought were salacious worldly comments about their anatomies, in loud voices.
‘What a beautiful behind he has.’
‘I bet he sleeps bare-angle.’ That was a Hunter euphemism for naked.
‘He’s pretending not to hear us, foolish boy.’
‘No, he’s just too embarrassed to turn around.’
When we were African we wrapped our heads in gaily printed skirts and talked our own made-up language in the subway on our way down to the Village. When we were Mexican, we wore full skirts and peasant blouses and huaraches and ate tacos, which we bought at a little stall in front of Fred Leighton’s on MacDougal Street. Once, we exchanged the word ‘fucker’ for ‘mother’ in a whole day’s conversation, and got put off the Number 5 bus by an irate driver.
Sometimes we roamed through the Village in dirndl skirts and cinch-belts, with flowers in our hair, taking turns strumming Gennie’s guitar and singing songs which we adapted from Pablo Neruda’s early poems.
All you red yankees are sons of a shrim
Born of a bottle, a bottle of rum.
Sometimes we made up our own:
Drinking gin goddam drinking gin, drinking gin goddam drinking gin,
If you won’t drink gin with me, goddam
You’ll drink no gin with no dam man
Drinking gin goddam drinking gin …
to the most monotonous plunking beat.
In the Village, we met Gennie’s friend, Jean, who was a dancer also. She was dark and beautiful and lived around the corner from Gennie and went to the High School of Music and Art. Jean was engaged to a white boy named Alf, who had left school and gone to Mexico to paint with Diego Rivera. Sometimes I accompanied them to one of their dance classes at the New Dance Group on 59th Street.
But mostly, Gennie and I went out into the city by ourselves. By tacit agreement, we usually didn’t see each other on weekends that summer because of our families. Weekends became endlessly dull bridges between Friday and Monday. The whole summer was made up of glorious and exciting days with Genevieve, and evenings of war at home, commencing with my mother’s, ‘Where have you been all day, and why aren’t your clothes done?’ Or my room cleaned, or the kitchen floor washed, or the milk bought.
We sallied forth in the afternoon sun to launch our joint assault upon the city. On the days when we had no money for carfare downtown, we went to Central Park to watch the bears. Sometimes we just held hands and walked through the streets of Harlem around her house. They seemed so much more alive to me than the streets of Washington Heights where I lived. They reminded me of the streets around where I grew up, on 142nd Street.
We bought and ate icies which were scraped up from a block of ice and packed into a little paper cup and then liberally covered with brilliant sticky syrups kept in a rainbow of bottles lined up on either side of the ice. They were sold from rickety homemade wooden wagons with bright umbrellas shielding the ice, which was always slowly melting under an indifferently clean old turkish towel.
These chilly cups of shaved ice were the most deliciously cooling confection in the world, made more so by the vehemence with which both of our mothers had forbidden them to us. Icies were suspected by many Black mothers of spreading polio through Harlem, and they were to be shunned, along with public swimming pools. Eventually, the icie-carts were banned from the streets by Mayor La Guardia. Wherever we were, as the shadows of late afternoon began to grow long, we began to wind our way homeward. We both knew that there was only so much we could presume before our freedom would be cut off, and we tried to keep this side of that line. Sometimes we goofed and overstepped some ignored rule, and then Gennie would be decked for a few days. For me at home, punishment was always much more swift and direct and short, and many days that summer my arms and back were sore from whatever handy weapon my mother could lay her hands on to hit me with.
When Gennie was decked, I would go over to her house for the day. We sat and talked and drank coffee at the kitchen table, or lay naked on her mother’s sofa bed in the living room and listened to the radio and drank Champale, which the cornerstore man gave Gennie on credit because he thought it was for her mother. Sometimes we visited her grandmother who lived upstairs, and she would let us play her Nat King Cole records.
and do your pirouettes
in rhythm with your aching heart
Gennie’s mother had raised Genevieve alone from the time she was an infant. Her father had left Louisa before Genevieve was born. I liked Mrs Thompson. She was young, and pretty, and very reasonable, I thought, compared to my mother. She had been to college and that made her somehow even more acceptable in my eyes. She and Gennie could talk to each other in a way not possible between my mother and me. Louisa seemed very modern. Genevieve and she shared many of the same interests, and the same clothes, and I thought how exciting it must be to have a mother who wore and liked the same kinds of clothes you did.
That summer, Genevieve met her father, Phillip Thompson, for the first time. She fell completely under his charming net. He was a quick and bitter man of much wit and little love, who preyed upon whatever admiration he could find. (Genevieve was fifteen when she first met her father. She was two months short of sixteen when she died.)
Frequently, Gennie visited Phillip and Ella, the woman with whom he lived. She and Louisa began to fight more and more often over Gennie’s seeing her father. Louisa had worked fifteen years by herself to provide Gennie with a home and food and clothes and schooling. Now suddenly Phillip appeared, handsome and irresponsible, to sweep Gennie off her feet. Louisa Thompson was not a woman to bite her tongue.
By the middle of the summer, and with Phillip’s prodding, Gennie decided she wanted to go and live with him and Ella. Louisa was beside herself, and very emphatic in her ‘no’. It was then that Gennie began telling me, and anybody else who would listen, that she was going to kill herself at the end of the summer.
I both did and didn’t believe her. She wasn’t pushy about it. Gennie wouldn’t mention committing suicide for days and days at a time, and I would believe that she had forgotten about it, or changed her mind in the quick and decisive way she often did. Then on the bus she’d make a casual comment or reference to something we were planning to do in terms of the time element, or how much time there was left before she was going to die.
It gave me a very eerie feeling, and I didn’t want to think about it. Gennie spoke about killing herself as an irreversible and already finished decision, as if there were no more questions and I had only to accept it with the finality that I accepted approaching winter. A piece of me always screamed inside no, no, no, and one day coming home from Washington Square Park I said to her, ‘But Gennie, what about all of us who love you?’ meaning me and Jean and all her other friends whom I did not know but always imagined. Gennie gave her familiar arrogant toss of her two long black braids. She beetled her thick eyebrows over great dark eyes and said, in her most imperious manner:
‘Well, I guess you will all just have to take care of yourselves, now won’t you?’ And it suddenly seemed like a very foolish thing to have said, and I had no answer for her.
The day Gennie picked for dying was the last day of August. It was a damp rainy Saturday, and I lay on the couch of my family’s darkened living room hugging a pillow and praying to god not to let Genevieve die. I had not talked to god in a very long time, and did not really believe in it anymore. But I was willing to grasp at any straw. I felt powerless to do anything else.
I promised not to steal my Sunday church collection money, and to go back to confession after so many years.
It was the Saturday before Labor Day, and the summer was over. All summer long, Gennie had said she was going to cut her wrists when the summer was over.
And, that is exactly what she did.
Her grandmother found her, smoking a blood-stained cigarette in a bathtub full of warm and already reddened water.
We didn’t see each other for two weeks, but we talked daily on the phone. Gennie said she was annoyed at herself for botching the job, but satisfied at the outcome. Louisa had agreed to let her go and live with Phil and Ella.
I was just grateful she was still alive. I started going back to Mass on Sundays for a while, and found and out-of-the-way church on the East side and went to confession.
Autumn came very quickly. Gennie and I saw less of each other since we were at different schools. I told her I missed her over the phone. Life over at Phil and Ella’s was very different, I sensed, from living with Louisa, but Gennie didn’t like to talk about it much. Sometimes I’d visit her there, and we sat on the daybed in Phil and Ella’s room and drank Champale and ate marshmallows toasted on a pencil with a match. You have to keep blowing the flame around the candy.
But there was an uneasy feeling about that house for me, and Gennie always seemed different around there, probably because I heard Ella always listening outside the closed door from where she was sweeping or dusting. It seemed Ella was always cleaning house, with carpet slippers on and a rag around her head, humming the same little tune over and over and over and over under her breath.
We could never go over to my house because my parents didn’t allow visitors when they were not home. They didn’t approve of friends in general, and they did not care much for Gennie because my mother thought she was too ‘loud’. So we usually made dates to meet at Columbus Circle or in Washington Square Park, and for a while the golden leaves near each fountain hid the harshness of the confused and alien colors that were sweeping up over our paths.
Without Gennie, Hunter was another set of worlds. Mostly, that autumn, it was Maxine and her music and her acne treatments and her desperate crush on the chairwoman of the music department. It matched my own on the latest addition to the english faculty who wore suits and flats and had a most charming malocclusion. And it was our getting into constant trouble for hanging out in the lockers after school.
We never really knew what we were being accused of doing down there. We just knew that we weren’t supposed to be there, and that it was the only place where we could be totally alone, meaning without our mothers. Neither one of us ever wanted to go home to the family wars. The lockers were a private world for Maxine and me. Sometimes, when we roamed through the locker room, we crossed the private worlds of other fugitives from the warlight, whispering animatedly two by two in the aisles of lockers, as we ran by.
I played gallant swain and stepped boldly and fearlessly upon the hard swift waterbugs that seemed to ride back and forth on horseback. They were a very common sight, surrounded by frozen and screaming girls. I became the offical waterbug killer of the locker room society, and that served to make me braver. Once I even killed a sleek four-inch american cockroach. It was years before I ever admitted how terrified of them I was, also. It was too important to me to seem fearless and in charge and brave, an applauded champion killer of waterbugs.
Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.
Gennie and I had a fight over something or the other at the end of January. We didn’t talk or see each other again for two weeks. She called me on my birthday, and we saw each other a few days later, on Washington’s Birthday. We held hands in Central Park Zoo and watched the monkeys. The mandrill looked at us with great sad eyes and we agreed with him that whether we were angry or not we’d never go that long without talking again, because friendship was too important and besides, neither one of us could remember what we’d argued about.
Afterward, we went to her house. It started to snow and we lay on the couch with Gennie’s head on my tummy, and we toasted marshmallows and smoked cigarettes. That bedroom was the only private room in the house. Gennie slept on a couch in the living room, except when her uncle came, and then she slept on the floor. She said she hated not having anywhere permanent to sleep, or keep her clothes.
It was the middle of March when Gennie came to my house one night. She called and said she had to talk to me and could she come over. My mother gave a grudging permission. I said we had to study for a geometry midterm. It was almost nine o’clock when Gennie came in. No hour to be visiting on a school night, my mother observed acidly as she acknowledged Gennie’s greeting.
We went into my room and shut the door. Gennie looked terrible. There were circles under her eyes, and long ugly scratches on both sides of her face. Her usually neat long braids were disheveled and mussed. All she would tell me was that she and her father had had a fight and she didn’t have any place to sleep and she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She asked if she could spend the night at my house. I knew that was impossible. My parents would never allow it, and they would want to know why. I was torn, but I knew I had pushed them as far as I could with the visit.
‘Can’t you go stay with Louisa?’ I said. What father would scratch up his daughter like that? ‘Don’t go back there, please Gennie.’
Gennie looked at me as if I couldn’t understand anything, but her voice wasn’t as impatient as usual. She looked tired. ‘I can’t go back there, she doesn’t have room for me anymore. She’s fixed over the bedroom and everything, and besides she said I had to choose and I did. She said if I went to Phillip’s I couldn’t come back. And now Ella’s gone down south to see her mother, and my father and Uncle Leddie are drinking all the time. And when Phillip drinks he doesn’t know what …’
It looked like Gennie was going to cry and suddenly I was terribly scared. I heard my mother in the living room, warning, in a raised voice:
‘It’s nine-thirty P.M. in the night, are you children finished? You sure it’s study you studying this time of night?’
‘Gennie, why don’t you at least call your mother?’ I was pleading with her. She would have to go soon. In another minute my mother was going to come in, storming nicely.
Gennie stood up with a sudden dash of her old spirit. ‘I said no already, didn’t I? I can’t talk to my mother about Phil. He’s crazy sometimes.’ She fingered the scratches on her face. ‘All right, I’m going. Look, I’ll meet you at Hunter after your exams on Friday, okay? What time are you done?’ She was pulling on her coat.
‘Twelve o’clock. What are you going to do, Gennie?’ I was worried by the way she looked. I was also relieved that she was going. I could already anticipate the scene between my mother and me as soon as Gennie left.
‘Never mind about me. I’m going over to Jean’s house. Good luck with your midterms. I’ll see you on Friday near the 68th Street entrance at noon.’ I walked her to the front door, and we ran the gauntlet of the living room together.
‘How’d’do, Genevieve,’ my father said, sternly, and returned his eyes to his newspaper. He did not get involved in these matters unless I gave my mother a hard time.
‘Good night, dear,’ my mother said, sweetly. ‘Your father doesn’t mind you traveling by yourself so late at night?’
‘No, ma’am. I’m just taking a bus straight to my mother’s house,’ Gennie lied, smoothly, giving my mother one of her most radiant smiles.
‘Well, it’s very late.’ My mother gave the slightest of her reproachful hums. ‘You get home safely, now, and say goodnight to your mother for me.’ I saw my mother shrewdly eyeing Gennie’s scratched face, and I hurried her into the hallway.
‘Bye, Gennie. Please be careful.’
‘Don’t be silly, I don’t need to be careful, I just need some sleep.’ I locked the door behind her.
When I came back into the living room, I was surprised to find that my mother was more worried than angry.
‘What’s wrong with your friend, now?’ My mother peered at me closely from on top of her spectacles.
‘Nothing’s wrong, Mother. I needed some of her geometry notes.’
‘You have all day long to get work in school. You come home here and all of a sudden you need geometry notes this time of night? Huh!’ My mother was not convinced. ‘Come give me your bed linen if you want it to go to the wash tomorrow.’ She got up, laying her sewing aside, and followed me across to my room.
My mother’s intuitions had fastened upon something; she did not examine what. She could not question her perceptions; I could not utilize the concern in her voice. How dare she follow me into my room like a peremptory reminder that no place in this house was sacrosanct from her!
My mother smelled trouble, but her concern was misplaced; it was not I who was in danger.
She poked at my soiled clothes for a moment, abstractedly, snatching up a torn slip on one finger. ‘You don’t have anything better to put on besides this piece of rags-knit you call slip? You going to be walking the streets pretty soon one-hand-before one-hand-behind?’ She tossed the garment aside as I gathered up the rest of my laundry.
‘Listen, my darling child, let me tell you something for your own good. Don’t get mix-up with this girl and her parents’ business, you hear? What kind of jackabat woman … and to let her go off with that good-for-nothing call himself father …’ My mother had met Phil Thompson once on 125th Street when we were shopping for school clothes. Gennie had introduced him proudly, and he had been his most superficial and debonair self.
She took the laundry out of my hands. ‘Well, anyway. Look. I don’t want you hanging around till all hours of the night with that girl. Whatever she doing she buying trouble to feed it. You mark my words. I wouldn’t be a bit surprise if she bring a stomach …’ I could feel rage like a thin curtain rising over my vision.
‘Mother, there’s nothing wrong with Genevieve and she’s not like that.’ I tried to keep the outrage out of my voice. But how could she say something like that about Gennie? And she didn’t even know her. Just because we were friends.
‘Don’t let me hear that tone of voice to your mother, young woman,’ my father warned ominously from the living room.
Real or fancied insolence to my mother was the cardinal sin, and it always brought my father out of his pose of neutral observer to the war between my mother and me. My father was about to become involved, and that was the last thing I needed.
One of my sisters was typing a report. The staccato sound from the room which they shared came through the french doors which separated it from the living room. I wondered if Gennie had gotten down to Jean’s yet. If I got into a fight with them now I might have to come straight home after all my exams this week. I swallowed my fury and it lay like a rotten egg halfway between my stomach and my throat. I could taste the sour in my mouth.
‘I didn’t mean to use any tone, Daddy. I’m sorry, Mother.’ I stepped back out into the living room. ‘Goodnight.’
I kissed each one of them dutifully and retreated back into the relative safety of my room.
We did not weep for the thing that was once a child
did not weep for the thing that had been a child
did not weep for the thing that had been
nor for the deep dark silences
that ate of the so-young flesh.
But we wept at the sight of two men standing alone
flat on the sky, alone,
shoveling earth as a blanket
to keep the young blood down.
For we saw ourselves in the dark warm mother-blanket
saw ourselves deep in the earth’s breast-swelling –
no longer young –
and knew ourselves for the first time
dead and alone.
We did not weep for the thing – weep for the thing –
we did not weep for the thing that was
once a child.
May 22, 1949