Real Life
Otherwise, Dennis and Pamala were extremely well-behaved and no doubt deserved the praise they got on their perfect report cards from school. My brother was so reliable at arithmetic that Max Bender used to pay Dennis, at the age of eight, to tally people’s bills if the store got crowded.
Dennis and Pam (or Bubby and Dixie Peach, as they were nicknamed and known) were both shy, gentle children, so I can’t say how it happened that I was the wild Indian that my mother always accused me of being. Following their example, I got pleasure out of being well-behaved and exhibiting perfect manners. When I finally got old enough to sit outside on the top step alone, I would charm the passers-by that I knew with ‘How do you do’ and ‘How are you feeling?’ and invariably go upstairs rewarded for these salutations with a fist full of nickels.
While I could understand that to be good meant to keep your voice down, to share and be helpful, I was never to be convinced that it also meant to be polite or passive in the face of aggression. Anyhow, Grandma Mary and Fannie Graham would have expected otherwise, and so would Edna.
Ikey was gradually becoming the head of the household, being our mother and the elder of the working sisters. Being Edna’s child, Ikey was wilful or what Edna called ‘headstrong’. Edna said she had ‘a head like Connie’s old ram’. I never did know what this referred to. Some of Edna’s expressions didn’t make sense but I liked them all.
To have a young mother who was smart and very pretty gave me something else to worry about, because I knew that men liked to make passes at her in the street and that she sported an attitude which people on the block called superior. As far as Ikey was concerned, she was a doctor’s wife and the reservation was just a stopover. To her mind we were merely broke, which had nothing to do with being poor, and to my dismay she dressed us to prove as much.
Dennis and Pam got to wear a uniform to school, but I had to attend nursery in oxblood brogues, high argyle socks, a silly tam and a tailored coat because Ikey considered them in good taste. As the mother superior who ran the school said, we were not like the other children. Mrs Hunt’s children did not swear and fight and cause trouble like some of the other ‘coloured’ children until …
Thump went my balled-up fist when it whammed up against the side of the boy’s ugly head. I didn’t even know his name, because I’d been so busy in the playground minding my own business that a lot of faces went unnoticed. His nose started to bleed into the dribble of snot already drying above his lip. Usually I cried at the sight of blood even if it was somebody else’s, but I was too mad for tears. That he had the nerve to kiss me when I was off my guard was a liberty that I wasn’t going to let go unpunished. So I hauled back ready to wallop him once again, but he was saved by the bell which halted my second blow. The cardinal sin of my self-defence was that I had broken a rule: no fighting in the playground. Normally, I was grateful for this regulation, because it nearly made our school yard a neutral zone in the neighbourhood. It was the only safe space where kids and air and peace mixed, unlike the sidewalk, which was designated off limits for me most of the time because of the vagrants and the bad kids. I was ashamed that I had defiled my only piece of paradise and that I wasn’t living up to Pam and Dennis’s flawless reputation, which was my mother’s greatest glory.
My assailant cried so loud that the first nun to the rescue mistook him for the innocent injured party. The indignity of being considered the offender was worse than the punishment inflicted on me by this woman draped in black. Her polished black high-tops looked like army boots peeking out from beneath her heavy hem. I had to hold out my open palms while she cracked them with her wooden ruler.
My kindergarten class only lasted half a day. When the air-raid siren blared at noon, my grandmother was always waiting for me at the gate. She was mad that afternoon when she heard why my eyes were puffy from crying. She ground her teeth when she got mad and I could hear her doing this while she carried me home. I was too big to be carried, really, but I got a ride right up to Max Bender’s where Edna got us a penny Mary Jane as she always did so that we could share it after my lunch. A Mary Jane was two little individually wrapped toffees bound by a red cellophane band which I liked to look through and which my grandmother always let me have. The fact that I got my red cellophane band that afternoon indicated that my grandmother was not annoyed with me. She said that I should’ve beaten the hell out of the son of a bitch that was kissing me and said she should have wrapped that rosary around the nun’s neck. Afterwards she added that she wasn’t scared of a son of a bitch living and wasn’t scared to die. As we were living so near the notoriously dangerous Columbia Avenue, it was just as well.
It was another war cry to help her carry on. No doubt she’d seen enough injustices in her time so that even the featherweight significance of my little scrape jostled her memory and gave her a renewed excuse to convey her exasperation. But none of this stopped Edna singing ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked A Cake’.
She sat next to her big double bed where I took my afternoon naps and stroked my temple, careful not to scratch me with her long fingernails, till I’d fallen asleep. To this day I don’t know why the stolen kiss upset me so much. Edna said that anybody with the common sense they were born with could see that ‘it was wrong to let that boy think that he could “kiss on you” and get away with it’. Her conclusion was that Sister must have lost her mind.
In spite of all my grandmother’s comforting, Sister’s reaction to the incident confused me temporarily. Did I have a right to defend myself when I felt it was necessary? Being taunted by a couple of bullies put me back on the right track soon enough. I guess you could say self-defence came naturally.
But the stolen-kiss episode was a turning point for me. I’d obviously lost my halo at St Elizabeth’s after that. I endured the ruler punishment for the second time when a priest who’d come into my classroom claimed that I switched down the aisle when I was returning to my seat. ‘Switching’ was a term used for swinging your bum from side to side when you walked – the swagger of a sassy woman. The priest gave me a chance to walk down the aisle again, and when he said that I was still doing it, I was recalled to the front and punished in front of the whole class. The whack of the ruler on my outstretched palms wasn’t nearly as torturous as the teasing I got for it in the playground.
Not long after this humiliation, Mother Superior found me with my hands in the sink when she checked the girls’ lavatory on one of her rounds. Although I tried to explain that I was only washing my hands as my mother insisted that I must, Mother Superior hit me for playing in water when I was supposed to be using the toilet.
Like a criminal with a record, suddenly I became a suspect on other counts: guilty until proven innocent, which is how kids were usually treated on the reservation. Need I say that these false accusations by the holy purveyors of Catholicism made me suspicious of them and their teaching? They already looked pretty ominous in all that black and what with the stories circulating in the playground that the nuns shaved their heads (which I had earlier been willing to discount), I became a most reluctant Catholic. I enjoyed reciting a couple of the prayers, the ‘Hail Mary’ and the ‘Hail Holy Queen’, and continued to think that the picture of Mary and the statues of her with her baby were very nice, but I stopped believing in the priests and nuns, because they couldn’t be trusted. This was one child that the Catholic faith managed to lose by the age of five.
One of the saving graces of being so young was that no emotional injuries seemed to absorb me for very long. Unfortunately they probably burrowed themselves into the deep dark crevices of my brain.
The streets imposed a greater fear than the church. My instinct to defend myself came back fortified. ‘Take no shit’ is a policy that dies hard. I couldn’t stop being Goody Two-Shoes, though, because I enjoyed the role too much. And I can’t say that I was ever tempted to get up to more devilment at this stage than to use one of my grandmother’s elastic garters as a slingshot. It never crossed my mind to talk back to my elders, engrave PUSSY or FUCK on a school lavatory door, spit, or even take advantage of somebody smaller than me, although these were among the shenanigans that went on around me. I posed fearlessly in the face of threats and attacks but still tried to act like a lady most of the time for my mother’s benefit, if not for my own.
My mother made sure that all her children could read and write before we went to school. This was handy, because there were other important things to take in during out last year on 23rd Street: the sights and sounds of people struggling to stay on top of life while there was too little of everything from hope to money and living space. I won’t say that fear and frustration bring out the best in people or make them the nicest neighbours, but there was a lot to be learned from them.
The social isolation of the reservation was broken by an electrical device introducing the world outside, the other America where my mother and aunt worked each day. This device instantly became my best friend. Like my grandmother, it was always available. Television turned our sparse kitchen into an entertainment centre.
My family always laughed a lot anyway, and television gave us one thing after another to hoot about and something like a home fire to gather around in the evening. Whenever someone clicked the big right-hand knob that turned it on, we’d end up laughing. Everybody on it was white and really quite nice. They were always smiling when they told you about Bayer aspirins or Bromo Seltzer. People talked, sang and danced, and always wore lovely outfits and costumes.
I had enjoyed occasional visits from friends of Edna’s: Miss Ossie and Miss Deet, Miss Ophelia and Miss Myrtle, whose gold front tooth gleamed when she flashed me a smile. I was usually allowed to sit and listen to them chewing the fat at the white enamelled kitchen table. Miss Ophelia was my favourite, with her steel-grey hair pulled back severely in a chignon like Edna’s. But these visitors, who turned our kitchen into a parlour, couldn’t compete with television. Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson dancing a duet, Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson in a shoot-out, Gene Autry – the Singing cowboy – Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which was my favourite puppet show, and the cat-and-mouse cartoons changed life in our kitchen.
Outside, the streets remained the same.
4 INFANT DIPLOMACY
Finally closing the door on those two rooms was not a sentimental experience for any of the family, but some of my sweetest early childhood memories will always be locked there, like the sight of my father in a soft lamplight as he showed me how to draw a ship with sails. That evening wasn’t diminished by our four barren walls. Once I looked out of our window and saw the Oscar Mayer man in his delivery van which was shaped like a hot dog. It pulled up outside Max Bender’s and parked there long enough for me to run down and get a close look at it with all the other children. For that moment, 23rd Street might have been a fantasy island. And I can still picture the store at the bad end of the street with a jukebox that played ‘The Glory Of Love’ for one nickel. For the pleasure it brought it could have been a corner of the ballroom in High Society. Still, the idea of us living in a house by ourselves made goodbye easy.
When we moved to Germantown in 1951, we only took the new television and my grandmother’s bedroom suite. My mother had hoped that she was leaving everything else behind – the cussing and swearing, the thugs on the street corners. She was even letting us off the harsh discipline of Catholic School.
Germantown is a district of Philadelphia that was originally settled 300 years ago by thirteen Quaker and Mennonite families from Krefeld, Germany. In those days it was 5700 acres of land to the northeast of Philadelphia. It was divided by an Indian trail which remains its main thoroughfare, Germantown Avenue. Who knows what happened to the amiable Indians? Like fallen leaves, they disappeared without mention or trace.
The Krefelders and their leader, Francis Daniel Pastorious, an aristocrat and scholar, were part of William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’. These Krefelders made the first public protest against slavery in 1688 when they declared that all human beings had the right to live as free men. At the time, this was considered too radical to be readily accepted by the Quakers.
For generations the community remained German. Both the Bible and a newspaper were printed there in German. The district didn’t begin to attract the English until 1750, when William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, built his country seat there, Mount Airy. As more English followed him, English architecture merged with German into a specific style called Anglo-German. The district was considered a German township until about 1830, when the English became dominant, setting up their own press and linking Germantown to Philadelphia by train. For the next hundred or so years, right up to the Second World War, Germantown was one of the more fashionable districts of Philadelphia.
By the time my family moved in, there were too many Melangians in the district for it to be considered fashionable any more. It wasn’t unusual in the summer months to hear the watermelon man hawking his wares in the street, selling watermelons for 25 cents or five cantaloupes for a dollar from his open-back pick-up truck. But some of the early historic residences and the Market Square with its Civil War monument were still standing, maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. They made impressions on me as permanent as 23rd Street. Germantown still had a decidedly German and English feeling about it. I didn’t know to what extent at the time.
Our small seven-room terraced house with a front and back garden made an immense difference to our lives.
To help my grandmother plant our first garden was to discover with great pride that she knew the names of the flowers and trees and how to tend the earth and things that grew from it. Marigolds and dahlias, hollyhocks and morning glories sprouted, and I checked their growth each day with awe and anticipation. She planted some seeds for me that would grow into cobs of corn for popping, so the packet said. I can’t remember if they did. She even bought the almanac to study planting times, but I discovered to my horror that her interest in what the moon and stars were doing was mostly astrological.
With her garden and her new sewing machine, Edna was nearly too busy for bad talk.
Our neighbours two doors away kept full-grown chickens in their back yard. Fluffy, our new cat, was often foolhardy enough to slip into their yard in the hope of a kill. He invariably returned pecked and injured, but he wouldn’t learn. Once he arrived home so much the worse for one of these chicken attacks that he succumbed to letting me bandage him and put him in my doll carriage to cart him about for an entire weekend.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but recently when I looked at a street map of Philadelphia, I noticed that North Philly couldn’t have been more than a twenty-minute trolley ride away from us, yet I don’t remember any one of us making the effort to go back.
There were a few odd characters in the neighbourhood, like Jet, the local hobo. He had a layer of grey whiskers covering his dark-brown skin, and his dishevelled clothes were various tones of grey, ill-fitting and dirty. He always wore a jacket and a brimmed hat as a formality, even in the hottest weather. He looked a mess. Some afternoons I’d see him shuffle along the street dragging his feet (the way Edna told us not to walk). His mangy-looking, nameless old dog was never far behind. They always moved at a deadly slow pace down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. He had a reputation for being regularly drunk, but I was afraid to get close enough to smell liquor on him. I used to run up to the porch and stand near the front door if I saw him coming up the street, more afraid of catching his dog’s mange than I was of Jet.
For me, the new thrill was to be allowed to play regularly with other children on the block. On 23rd Street, my mother had to be so particular about our playmates that we nearly only had each other. With Pam and Dennis at school all day, Edna was my best friend, even though I could tell when they came home that Pam was her favourite. I like to believe that it was because Pam was the first grandchild, but I suspected that it was also because Pam was beautiful with jet-black wavy hair and slanted chestnut-brown eyes. She was quiet and read most of the time, but I could never tell whether her passion for books was her own or her way of satisfying my mother’s ambition for us to excel at school.
Despite being Melangian, Ikey was the perfect Jewish mother. She didn’t feed us matzos but she was clannish, ambitious, competitive, guilt-provoking, adored her children and believed that a Ph.D. was the be-all and end-all of life.
I didn’t find this too hard to live with and was under less pressure than Pam to succeed, as she was the eldest. The four years’ difference in our ages meant that we never managed to be at the same school at the same time after St Elizabeth’s. She’d always graduated or moved on before I started a school, leaving a dazzling record behind her. When trouble started for her at school in Germantown, I wasn’t around to give her either help or moral support. The streets were littered with enough ammunition for me to have helped her stave off an attack even if I was too little to be of much use otherwise. I am ashamed to say that I considered sticks and stones and bricks fair play if the odds were stacked against me. It was my mother who taught us this line of defence in spite of all her talk about being dignified and ladylike.
In the early fifties, Germantown wasn’t generally rough like North Philly but it had its bad elements, who decided to make my sister their object of torment and agitation because she was pretty. At ten she wasn’t expected to defend herself against a gang of rowdy girls and had to be escorted back and forth to school until finally the police were called in.
I’d like to think that we Melangians have stopped persecuting our own for looking too African or not African enough. Appearance even had the potential to divide family loyalties.
It pains me to think of how often Pam suffered for being too pretty and too brainy. Her years on the reservation and certainly in Germantown were harsher than mine and, no doubt, if she gave you her version of our family’s life, it would be quite a different picture. Pam neither bothered anybody nor had that early lust for the mirror or physical praise which would have given her airs to make other girls dislike her. Maybe the fact that she got the answers right all the time provoked them. I couldn’t think why else they wanted to hurt her.
I don’t know if anybody realized how much her victimization troubled me, but I kept my worry to myself and daydreamed that I was Wonder Woman and Supergirl rolled into one, on hand to swoop down from the tallest building to destroy all the ruffians when they taunted her. Of course, I also needed to plan what to do if they attacked me.
At six, I was not at all pretty. I doubt that every time my mother looked at me, she wanted to send me back, but I was not the least bit exceptional-looking. I had a big space between my two front teeth, and eyes so dark that they merely reflected the light bulb when I was asked to hold them up to the light to have their colour checked. My hair was so unfortunately thick that my mother had to divide it into three sections which she then braided. The braid on top was wound into a bun and pinned down to keep it from dangling in my face. The hairpins usually felt as if they were sticking right into my brain, and I yearned for thin hair and only two braids, although this was not the sort of vanity that I would have been allowed to express.
Soon after we moved in, two of my new friends and I were playing at dressing up on a rainy afternoon. They were wearing high heels; I only put on some rouge and pinned my two loose braids up with the one on top so that it looked like an upsweep. As soon as the rain stopped, we paraded ourselves to the corner store to buy some penny candy. The air was scented with that delicious city smell of wet tarmac blending with the sweet smell of wet grass after a summer shower. We passed an old man sitting on a low porch, rocking slowly, his hat pulled down so that his face hardly showed. A woman was standing at the screen door and I heard him say to her how nice we looked and add that the one with the braids on top of her head looked just like Doris Day.
I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge strange men, so I kept walking and acted as though I hadn’t heard him. Doris Day. One of the other girls repeated what he’d said when we were out of earshot. Trying to be nonchalant, I cocked my head to the side and looked straight ahead of me. Doris Day. I would have preferred it if he’d said Jane Russell, but Doris Day would do. I wasn’t sure I’d look so much like her without the rouge.
Nobody could have conceived that my face would sneak its way onto a magazine cover. Anyhow, at that time Melangian girls didn’t appear on any covers but Ebony and Jet, the Melangian magazines. If I’d heard my mother say it once, I’d heard her repeat a thousand times that ‘looks will get you nowhere’. This seemed to contradict what little of life I’d observed, but maybe it was her way of making me feel less inadequate and it supported her conviction that college was our only hope of a good career. One thing was obvious, if being pretty attracted troublemakers, it was a quality hardly worth having and dangerous to flaunt if you did (as well as cheap, which was Edna’s final verdict on the subject). ‘Pretty is as pretty does,’ she stated.
I was about to lose Edna’s daily dose of homilies because as soon as I attended school for a full day, she got a job working for an Italian family who operated the local bakery. She probably got the job to help pay for the new fittings and furniture in every room. I knew better than to ask how we afforded it all, because it would have been considered none of my business and rude to enquire.
John Wister Elementary School was a three-storey brick building on Bringhurst Street not far from Germantown Avenue. It was a hundred years old and a big fuss was made over its wooden floors because they were the originals. John Wister was one of the early German settlers, and I was a very lucky girl, the principal told my mother before she carted me off to Miss Courtney’s class, to start first grade at a school that was so steeped in history. I was given my very own desk which had a sunken ink well, although we could only write in pencil. The desks were in rows with each attached to the bench in front and held together and supported by elaborate ironmongery. The writing surface was the hinged lid of an oblong wooden box so that you could lift it up and put your things inside. I was seated near Miss Courtney in the front of the room and though I dared not turn round to stare, I could have sworn that all the other children were white. Thank God I’d been watching a lot of television and knew how to act.
Television carted me off to places I had never dreamed existed. It took for granted that I was ready to share experiences quite foreign to my own. Mainly, it exposed those other Americans to me, the ones who didn’t live on the reservations. In 1952 the only ways that Melangians had of becoming familiar with white behaviour was by working with or for whites and by seeing movies and watching TV.
To me, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Fred and Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, Ralph, Alice, Trixie and Ed on The Honeymooners or George Burns and Gracie Allen were like neighbours I visited once a week. I saw what they did at breakfast or sat in their living room and overheard their conversations. Where else and how else could this have happened? While Max Bender and other white shopkeepers might have been genuinely cordial and exchanged a few niceties with a regular customer, I knew nothing about how people like Max lived or what he’d say to his wife. Radio and motion pictures didn’t give us a regular enough dose of exposure to create the familiarity, the insider’s view, that television gave us.