скачать книгу бесплатно
Which is infinite
For lives I can’t remember
Yet can’t forget
Soul upon soul
Stretching back in time
Stacked like a totem
Is my mother line
I am theirs
As they are mine
Within their trace
My life entwines
This mother load
Supports internally
Rooted deep in my heart
At the soul of me
I feel their pain
They laugh, now free
But in the mirror
There is only me
2 CULTURED PEARLS (#ulink_5991128b-8c38-5698-aabc-2a0da673e88b)
To be coloured in 1946 was to be economically confined and socially isolated. Segregation laws did not exist everywhere, but the fact that they were upheld in many states reminded everybody who was boss.
Something positive still managed to grow over on the ‘coloured’ side of the tracks, where I spent my early childhood. A culture developed.
These social isolation bases in America where large numbers of Melangians reside are referred to as ghettos, a word that evokes only negative imagery. They weren’t merely hellholes: they were cultural arenas. I’d like to call them reservations; as the dictionary says, ‘reservation’ can mean:
a limiting condition, or
an area of land reserved for occupation by a tribe, or
an area set aside as a secure breeding place.
In our section of the city, fear, poverty and restricted education were maintained by the promise that our patience and subservience would be rewarded by opportunities available to other Americans … maybe, eventually, somehow. While we were waiting, we made do with things as they were. Like some European working classes, in spite of poverty, we had a certain quality of life.
We had our own class system, language, religion and art forms. What we ate, how we dressed, and our manner of doing things were derived from the American culture which we imitated but could never have emulated.
America was a big beef-eating nation but on the reservation pork and chicken were favoured, because they were cheaper. No part of the pig was considered waste. This policy may have been a leftover from plantation days. Pig ears and feet, the lining of its stomach (called hog maws), the intestines (called chitlins), the hocks and the ribs were all gratefully received at the table. Chunks of pig fat called fat back were used to flavour the cooking. Most things were boiled or fried. Fried chicken was a mainstay (nobody had heard of Kentucky Fried). All kinds of beans were staples, along with rice and potatoes. Yams and sweet potatoes were favourites, although they weren’t available throughout the year. Cabbage and greens such as collards, turnips, mustard and kale were boiled and then simmered, with a piece of fat back thrown in if times were good.
In 1985 on my grandmother’s birthday, 27 March, I was home in London with my daughter Karis and spotted collard greens at my local greengrocer’s. I don’t rememer seeing this variety of green anywhere in England before. To commemorate my grandmother, I thought I’d cook some for Karis, who had never eaten them and only has a vague memory of Edna; I knew that the dreadful smell alone of the collards cooking would be nostalgic.
My grandmother would have cleaned them by soaking them first in her huge roasting pan that could hold our 30-pound Thanksgiving turkey. I plopped them into water in the kitchen sink. They were clogged with dirt and it took hours to get the damned things clean: I understood why my grandmother soaked them in such a big pot all day.
I decided to steam them rather than boil them to keep the vitamins in. I threw them in the Chinese bamboo steamers and slung a few strips of bacon in with them in place of fat back. The result was most unusual but I assumed they were cooked – they go a sort of mustard colour.
When I’d dished them out, Karis looked at them on her plate and then up at me. She didn’t see me catching her sneak that last sly glance. She can be as English as they come: the accent, the manner, the attitude and even her sensibilities are so British that it just kills me. You’d hardly know she’s mine sometimes.
She used her knife and fork to eat the collards, pressing them onto the back of her fork with her knife. I could hear some grit crunching on her braces when she tried to chew. I kept my eyes on my plate, so that I wouldn’t have to interrupt this solemn commemoration with an apology that the collards were most likely undercooked.
When my grandmother did them, they melted in the mouth. It was often a pretty testy time at our place when collards got cooked, because my mother hated the smell. They do have an unfortunate odour when they’ve been simmering for hours.
Sunday on the reservation was a day for culinary extravagance when it could be afforded. Edna made biscuits with flour, milk and lard (like scones without the sugar and currants). There might even be some bread made from cornmeal, but this was usually her Friday-night treat, served with fried mackerel which had been dipped in a mixture of flour and cornmeal before it sizzled in the big iron skillet full of smoking lard.
Hominy grits were generally reserved for breakfast, although you ate them at any time if you were hungry enough. Hominy is kernels of maize. Grits – ground hominy – were boiled in salted water to a porridge consistency and topped with butter or margarine. We also ate something called scrapple at breakfast which was scraps of meat and meal ground together and fried. The occasional dinner of hot dogs and baked beans was apologized for but indicated that we were Americans to the heart.
The socially sophisticated Melangian, more integrated into American society, wouldn’t eat like this today.
The American tradition of a free choice of worship found a zealous outlook on the reservation where store fronts, living rooms and any place big enough for a gathering of souls could serve as a place of worship. Faith kept people going and gave them hope. Evangelist, Holy Roller, Sanctified, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Children of God, Jehovah’s Witness and many other denominations had committed followers just like larger denominations such as Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Catholic. I missed church culture on the reservation, because we were baptized Catholic with the intention of getting the advantage of a parochial school education. But the evidence and effect of the religious element in the community reached me on many levels.
Seeing a congregation socializing outside their church after a meeting was to see reservation fashion. All manner of hats were worn by men and women alike. The ladies’ were usually adorned with a bit of netting, maybe artificial flowers or fruit like grapes or cherries, ribbons of silk or velvet. Maybe the lot. Hat, shoes, bag and outfit did not have to coordinate. Bright colours predominated.
When I was young, there was a Holy Roller church a few doors from our house. Holy Rollers are very devout and put great stock in their own translation of the Bible. The corner building wasn’t a church by design, just the biggest house on the block owned and lived in by our landlady, Mrs White. Mrs White was ebony, and on meeting days she always wore a white dress and white hat indicating that she was an elder of the church, which was almost like being a minister. She was probably in her late sixties and she usually seemed disgruntled. I couldn’t call her attractive. (‘Yurgly’ is how my grandmother described her. Edna could hardly sing out the word before she’d start rolling about laughing till the tears streamed from her eyes.) Mrs White had a scrunched-up face with not enough chin to offset her very big mouth. Her pea-sized eyes were hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses. She was heavy set and wore an upper and lower plate which she never had in her mouth if we dropped by unexpectedly to pay the rent.
Nothing was more exciting than to sneak over to Elder White’s on a warm summer’s night when we suspected there would be a meeting; it was usually a Thursday. A couple of us would creep along her side yard and right up to the window of her big front room where with a bit of luck we’d find the curtain cracked. If we were too early, we’d only get to see the twenty or so chairs of mixed description lined up in rows and waiting for a warm behind. There was often a partial drum kit and a saxophone near the piano which was next to the pulpit, a raised stage at one corner of the room furthest from the window looking onto our street. The pulpit was probably the carpentry work of one of the members, which doesn’t imply that it was crude handiwork; every part of this place of worship was an extension of the members’ lives. Some of the chairs were the same ones you might be offered to sit on if you came to the elder’s for dinner.
Giving a testimony or bearing witness in the Holy Roller church was often a highly emotional and impassioned revelation that required a lot of energy. The testifier usually got so caught up with the spirit and in the spirit that not only would his or her testimony be sparked by jumping and shouting, but others might ‘feel’ the spirit of the testimony too. To ‘jump and shout’ was a religious experience which found its way into the blues, then into rhythm and blues, before it transcended into rock and roll.
‘Feeling the spirit’ and ‘getting happy’ must be experiences second to none, because perfectly healthy people would faint and have to be carried out in the midst of these revelations. Peeking through the crack in the curtains, we longed to see the sweaty heights of this excitement, but I usually got called home before the long meetings reached these emotional crescendos.
A good minister or preacher was not only versed in the Bible, he was able to stir his parishioners to a revelry that evoked their testimonies. ‘Preachin” was an art and a good preacher was a star in the community. While most religious services have some element of theatre about them, not many can claim the standard of performance exchanged between the minister and his congregation in some of the reservation churches. In addition, some of these churches boasted excellent choirs. A couple of the more renowned ones were broadcast on our local Sunday radio station. Long before I was considered old enough to plug the radio in, my brother and I used to sneak away to listen to these church services. We weren’t allowed to, because my mother thought we were making fun of them, but it was just a way to get a dose of good music.
Music was a survival tonic, and free. To hear my grandmother singing ‘Wade In The Water’ was sometimes a sign that she was mad as hell about something, like being left alone to wash the dishes, but she made music just the same.
You could sing your way out of the reservation just as you could box your way out. While this was not the ideal of Melangians like my family, who had aspirations to become the doctors and lawyers of the community, musical talent was a passport to another America. And the church was as good a place as any to get your musical experience. Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green and Billy Preston are among the singers who started in the church.
The best reservation music to my ears was the a capella singing of groups of boys on the street who would practise popular songs of the day and do their own special renditions, which they’d decorate with rhythmic little jabs of harmony thrown in here and there. These were casual groups of boys who happened to be socializing on the same street corner or sitting on the same stoop at the same time. Singing was an escape and a pastime, like playing a game of baseball in the middle of the street, especially for teenage boys who were too big to play marbles but not yet old enough to spend their time drinking in a beer garden, which was the grandiose name for a bar.
The boys who roamed the streets were usually pretty rough and rowdy, and while I thought it was divine to hear a few of them working out the harmonies for a song, they weren’t a very savoury-looking bunch. They wore brimmed hats or peaked caps that were cocked to one side or perched some weird way or even worn back to front. The effect was not too becoming, but they were trying to look tough.
A lot of them had a special way of walking, too. I can’t think what this particular habit grew out of. Most of them looked as if they had incorporated a simplified dance step with a stride which required a certain amount of rhythm and effort to look smooth. This was called ‘bopping’. My grandmother hated it. She said they ‘looked like overgrown simpletons loping up and down the street dragging one leg like a cripple’.
I didn’t mind the crazy way they walked, but I did mind them taunting my mother or aunt with catcalls and whistles when we had to pass a bunch of them occupying nearly the whole street corner. We couldn’t avoid them even by crossing over to the other side. If the catcalls and the whistles were only a temporary interruption to some song they were working out, it didn’t stop me loving their music when they went back to making it. I loved to hear them singing in an alley that had an echo.
My family disapproved of the language that was spoken on the reservation, because it wasn’t what the rest of the nation considered good English. To be fair, it was a dialect and should have been treated with a certain respect as Europeans treat their dialects. Instead, a lot of stigma was attached to it. How the children who had only ever heard and spoken this reservation dialect coped when they got to school is beyond me. Fun with Dick and Jane, which was the first primer, should have had a translation and a glossary.
Of all the versions of English I’ve learned to speak, Melangian is the most expressive and emotional. Maybe this is why it is the language of popular music today. Whether by Hall and Oates, the Stones or Michael McDonald, a lot of hits are written and recorded by non-Melangians in our dialect. It certainly says what it has to say and takes the most direct route. It has a flatness to its tone which is basically guttural and combines this with rhythm and a Southern American lilt.
When Charles Dickens wrote his American travelogue in 1846 after an extensive trip around the States, he said that the English that he heard spoken by women in the Southern states showed the influence of the mammies that raised them. So the Southern accent was affected by Melangian and vice versa. We picked up English how and when we could, as it was never formally taught us.
To hear it spoken, Melangian is like upper-class county English in that it’s full of diphthongs and open vowel sounds. Consonants at the end of words are often dropped, as in the Scots accent, and when they are sounded, they’re softened. This is probably why Melangian is so useful for modern singing. It lets the mouth hold open sounds for words like ‘don’t, ‘last’ and ‘morning’, to name but three.
Melangian was the language I relied upon to express myself on the reservation when my mother wasn’t within hearing distance. We weren’t allowed to speak it at home. I still enjoy using it when I get a chance. When an issue gets bogged down with unnecessary words, if I think in Melangian, I can keep a clearer picture of what’s really going on. Of all the English dialects, Melangian is the one that best expresses joy and ebullience.
The class system on the reservation was more like a caste system, related to physical appearance. I guess it evolved out of the plantation politics, when how you looked may have determined whether you worked in the house or the field. Skin colour, hair texture and facial features affected your social status. Hair that grew wavy and long, light-coloured eyes and skin, afforded you more opportunity.
In the 1940s, educational opportunity was too limited for Melangians to see education as an available route to a better life, although we had our own doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals, most of whom were educated in small Melangian colleges in the South. There weren’t many of these graduates. My father’s chance to go to Harvard was not one to be taken lightly or interfered with. It compared with a boy from the Gorbals getting a scholarship to go to Christ Church College, Oxford. His academic achievements linked my family to the professional class even though we were struggling to eat, like everybody around us. Our mother worked especially hard to have us live up to our assumed identity and went to great pains to make sure that we spoke English as well as anyone else and that our education and ambitions weren’t stinted in any way. For this she was often accused of acting white and treating us as if we were. On the reservation, no accusation was more damning. She turned a deaf ear.
It would be misleading to paint only a glowing picture of the reservation. If you saw a photograph of one without a caption, you might mistake it for a war zone. Young men prepared for combat, patrolling and armed and waiting; a rubbled landscape; an atmosphere of torment, confusion or resignation on the faces of both young and old, highlighted by a queer sense of abandonment.
The work that was available wasn’t likely to improve your future status and crime seemed to pay.
3 THE FRONT LINE (#ulink_4030f04e-9b0f-57a6-8683-2933a97c858c)
Pearl Bailey’s mother lived across the road from us, but 23rd Street was on the fringe of what was later to be known as the Crime Belt. I grew perversely proud of this distinction, but in reality I doubt it was much worse than any other section of North Philly. It was like boot camp, and I was happy there even though every passageway seemed like an obstacle course. Whether it was the hallway to the communal toilet, or the staircase, or the few feet of pavement that led to dinky local stores, you might encourage something dangerous.
I wasn’t really allowed out much alone, so one of my favourite pastimes was to observe the world below by hanging my head a bit further than was allowed outside our third-floor window which overlooked the street.
Once, I happened to be looking out when I saw a thief riding off on my tricycle. It caught me off guard. ‘That son of a bitch is stealing my bicycle!’ is all I managed to squeal before my grandmother’s big yellow hand had whipped me out of the window to drag me to the kitchen sink where my mouth was washed out with soap and water. Resisting this punishment was worse than the punishment itself. Thankfully a few tears came to evoke my grandmother’s sympathy.
I could think bad words and no one would stop me, but whenever one would slip out before I could catch it and be overheard by my mother, aunt or grandmother, I’d get my mouth washed out. I cursed a lot although nobody knew it. I was only repeating what I heard, but since ‘Do as I say and not as I do’ was one of the house rules, cursing was considered to be very bad behaviour and what my grandmother termed ‘streety’.
With the six of us living in two rooms, nerves got frayed, and among the adults a lot of swearing and shouting went on, although they pretended after the dust settled that nothing unladylike had been said. None of them swore in front of anybody outside the family other than the ice man, whom Edna cursed if his great big chunks of ice dripped across her clean kitchen floor before he could lodge it in the refrigerator or before she could put some newspaper down.
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, because my mother and aunt were at work all day at the Signal Corps and my brother and sister were at school. Edna let me do things like go down to Max Bender’s small food store and buy loose potato chips. Max scooped them from a big silver can into a brown paper bag. (They were cheaper if they were stale.) Max also sold margarine from a covered bowl. As part of your purchase, you’d get a little red capsule to stir into it to turn it yellow. Being allowed to stir was a reward for being good, and I tried to follow all the rules.
Once I’d started school, my mother told me to work hard, mind my own business and act like a lady, but I assumed ‘take no shit’ still applied. Easier said than done. As I was only five, combining those efforts required a political skill that I didn’t have. My mother expected me to talk my way out of trouble, but on the front line, talk can get you into a lot of trouble.
To survive our tough little neighbourhood, you had to be alert at all times. Even though I was little, I was mentally prepared to react and defend myself. Just as you’d imagine a real war zone, even the youngest must learn to anticipate danger, to think and react at the same time, and to let fear serve as a natural alarm to warn you of danger, fuel you with the adrenalin that may be your only protection.
When I started kindergarten at St Elizabeth’s Catholic School, I was worldly. I’d seen so many people in the streets with scars that I’d learned to distinguish how a wound had been inflicted: a jagged scar came from a knife cut and a smooth, thin, slightly raised scar came from a razor-blade slash. I was fully aware that people were getting beaten up, knifed, scalded and had lye thrown on them. Maybe what I heard was magnified in my mind and what I imagined was worse than what was going on for real.
A constant worry was that there seemed to be a vigilante street-level policy about what behaviour was bad and deserved punishment. Vanity was punishable and it wasn’t unusual to hear that somebody could be threatened with a beating for ‘thinking they were cute’. Appearing to ally yourself in any way to the other Americans, the white ones, was also taken as a serious offence and referred to as ‘acting white’ or ‘thinking you were white’. Trying to be too dignified or too genteel could be construed as part of this offence. Between my mother’s rules for my behaviour and the undeclared street laws, I sensed there was some discrepancy.
For me, the news of what was happening in Korea where my uncle Henry was at war hardly matched up to the gossip about frequent scuffles outside the beer garden where never a flower grew.
Growing up in this environment was not a tragic scenario for my childhood. I knew nothing else in those days before television and therefore couldn’t make comparisons. I was very content, and feel that I had a wonderful childhood.
I was never hungry even though there was no cupboard always stacked with food. Max Bender’s was open till six o’clock. My brother and sister and I were cherished by our three ‘mothers’, who bought us dolls and games for Christmas. There was always a cake on a birthday and the fairy godmother left a quarter when a tooth fell out. We were kept warm in winter even if it meant somebody had to throw their coat over us in our cots to supplement the available blankets. I can honestly say that I never wanted for anything and my heart had enough. My mother would play us a game of jacks or read me a story and if my brother and sister got their homework done, the three of us could always argue over a game of old maid or something.
You couldn’t call us spoiled, but I’d say we had everything, though it may have seemed to others like little. That everything included roaches in our apartment didn’t bother me a bit, and I even liked the mice and felt we saw too little of them. The hoo-ha that went on if a mouse was caught scuttling across the kitchen floor was an entertainment not to be believed. My mother and aunt would always jump on the kitchen table screeching and hollering the place down while my brother tried to swat the poor bitty thing with a broom before it would get away under the stove, which it always did.
The only misery in my life was a picture of my uncle Henry in his uniform. This photograph of him posed with a rifle was propped up in front of the only big mirror we owned, which was attached to the dressing table in the bedroom. I needed to use this mirror when I practised singing ‘If I Were a King (I’d be but a slave to you)’ or any song that I would make up. To see, I had to stand on the four-legged leather-seated stool that fitted neatly within this dresser, which was part of a mahogany bedroom suite left over from Edna’s better days. Unfortunately, my uncle’s picture scared me so much that I’d have to turn it face down on the lace doily, which was draped across the glass top, so I wouldn’t have to look at it while I was looking at myself. There was nothing scary about this picture except the rifle. It was more that my brother Dennis regularly used it to torment me or to make me do something I didn’t want to do. He always threatened that if I didn’t, Henry would come in the night and shoot me. This made me scream and cry until help came, which never took much time since we had only two rooms.
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 (#ulink_c348de7f-b23d-543c-ae04-97d8fcb4b1ae)
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.
