Daddy Was a Number Runner Read online

  DADDY WAS A

  NUMBER RUNNER

  Louise Meriwether

  Foreword by James Baldwin

  Afterword by Nellie Y. McKay

  Published in 2002 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 1986

  Originally published in 1970 by Prentice Hall

  © 1970 by Louise Meriwether

  Afterword © 1986 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Brief portions of this work appeared, in different form, in The Antioch Review and Negro Digest.

  “Trouble in Mind,” words and music by Richard M. Jones, © 1926, 1937 by MCA Music, a division of MCA, Inc., New York. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  (“What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” Harry Brooks, Andy Razaf, and Thomas Waller, © 1929 by Mills Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meriwether, Louise.

  Daddy was a number runner / Louise Meriwether ; foreword by James Baldwin ; afterword by Nellie Y. McKay.

  p. ; cm. — (Contemporary classics by women series)

  I. TitleII. Series

  PS3563.E738D3 2002 813'.54 86-9019

  eISBN 9781558617087

  This novel was written with the assistance of a grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation

  CONTENTS

  1.Front Cover

  2.Title page

  3.Copyright page

  4.Dedication

  5.Foreword by James Baldwin

  6.Part 1, Daddy was a Number Runner

  7.Chapter 1

  8.Chapter 2

  9.Chapter 3

  10.Chapter 4

  11.Chapter 5

  12.Chapter 6

  13.Chapter 7

  14.Part 2, Yoruba’s Children

  15.Chapter 8

  16.Chapter 9

  17.Chapter 10

  18.Chapter 11

  19.Chapter 12

  20.Chapter 13

  21.Afterword

  22.About the Author

  23.About the Feminist Press

  24.Also Available from the Feminist Press

  No man is an island and so I pay my dues to the many people who have encouraged me, one way or another, during the evolution of this book. Thank you Catherine C. Hiatt, George Griffin, James Baldwin, Professor Joseph A. Brandt, The Watts Writers’ Workshop, its founder Budd Schulberg and president Harry Dolan, the Altadena Writers’ Workshop, Venia Martin, Junita Jackson

  and

  first, last and forever, my mother and my swinging family who have always loved me.

  In memory of my father

  Marion Lloyd Jenkins

  Foreword by James Baldwin

  I received a questionnaire the other day—democracy prides itself on its questionnaires, just as it is endlessly confirmed and misled by its public opinion polls—and the first question was, Why do you continue to write? Writers do not like this question, which they hear as Why do you continue to breathe? but sometimes one can almost answer it by pointing to the work of another writer. There! one says, triumphantly. Look! That’s what it’s about—to make one see—to lead us back to reality again.

  The streets, tenements, fire-escapes, the elders, and the urgent concerns of childhood—or, rather, the helpless intensity of anguish with which one watches one’s childhood disappear—are rendered very vividly indeed by Louise Meriwether, in her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner. We have seen this life from the point of view of a black boy growing into a menaced and probably brief manhood; I don’t know that we have ever seen it from the point of view of a black girl on the edge of a terrifying womanhood. And the metaphor for this growing apprehension of the iron and insurmountable rigors of one’s life are here conveyed by that game known in Harlem as the numbers, the game which contains the possibility of making a “hit”—the American dream in black-face, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing! Compare the heroine of this book—to say nothing of the landscape—with the heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and you will see to what extent poverty wears a color—and also, as we put it in Harlem, arrives at an attitude. By this time, the heroine of Tree (whose name was also Francie, if I remember correctly) is among those troubled Americans, that silent (!) majority which wonders what black Francie wants, and why she’s so unreliable as a maid.

  Shit, says Francie, sitting on the stoop as the book ends, looking outward at the land of the free, and trying, with one thin bony black hand to stem the blood which is beginning to rush from a nearly mortal wound. That mono-syllable resounds all over this country, all over the world: it is a judgment on this civilization rendered the more implacable by being delivered by a child. The mortal wound is not physical, the book, so far from being a melodrama, is very brilliantly understated. The wound is the wound made upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being, and, further, in the case of this particular black girl, upon the recognition that the men, one’s only hope, have also been cut down and cannot save you. Louise Meriwether wisely ends her book before confronting us with what it means to jump the broomstick!—to have a black man and a black woman jump over a broomstick is the way slave-masters laughingly married their slaves to each other, those same white people who now complain that black people have no morals. At the heart of this book, which gives it its force, is a child’s growing sense of being one of the victims of a collective rape—for history, and especially and emphatically in the black-white arena, is not the past, it is the present. The great, vast, public, historical violation is also the present, private, unendurable insult, and the mighty force of these unnoticed violations spells doom for any civilization which pretends that the violations are not occurring or that they do not matter or that tomorrow is a lovely day. People cannot be, and, finally, will not be treated in this way. This book should be sent to the White House, and to our earnest Attorney General, and to everyone in this country able to read—which may, however, alas, be a most despairing statement. We love—the white Americans, I mean—the notion of the little woman behind the great man: perhaps one day, Louise Meriwether will give us her version of What Every Woman Knows.

  Until that hoped for hour, because she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy. It is a considerable achievement, and I hope she simply keeps on keeping on.

  PART I

  DADDY WAS A NUMBER RUNNER

  ONE

  “I dreamed about fish last night, Francie,” Mrs. Mackey said, sliding back the chain and opening the door to admit me. “What number does Madame Zora’s dream book give for fish?”

  “I dreamed about fish last night, too,” I said, excited. Maybe that number was gonna play today. “I dreamed a big catfish jumped off the plate and bit me. Madame Zora gives five fourteen for fish.”

  I smiled happily at Mrs. Mackey, ignoring the fact that if I stood here exchanging dreams with her, I’d be late getti
ng back to school and Mrs. Oliver would keep me in again.

  “What more hunch could a body want,” Mrs. Mackey grinned, “us both dreaming about fish. Last night I dreamed I was going under the Bridge to buy some porgies and it started to rain. Not raindrops, Francie, but fish. Porgies. So I just opened up my shopping bag and caught me a bagful. Ain’t that some dream?”

  She laughed, her cheeks puffing up like black plums, and I laughed with her. You had to laugh with Mrs. Mackey, she was that jolly and fat. She waddled to the dining-room table and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her bouncing, big behind. When she passed by in the street, the boys would holler, “Must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake,” and she would laugh with them. They were right. Her behind was a quivering, shivering delight and I hoped when I grew up I would have enough meat on my skinny butt to shimmy like that.

  Mrs. Mackey sat at the dining-room table and began writing her number slip.

  “Mrs. Mackey,” I said timidly, “my father asks would you please have your numbers ready when I get here so I won’t have to wait. I’m always late getting back to school.”

  “They’s ready, lil darlin’. I just wanna add five fourteen to my slip. I’m gonna play it for a quarter straight and sixty cents combination. How is your daddy and your mama, too?”

  “They’re both fine.”

  She handed me her number slip and two dollar bills which I slipped into my middy blouse pocket.

  “Them’s my last two dollars, Francie, so you bring me back a hit tonight, you hear? I didn’t mean to spend so much but I couldn’t play our fishy dreams cheap, right?”

  We both giggled and I left. I raced down the stairs, holding my breath. Lord, but this hallway was funky, all of those Harlem smells bumping together. Garbage rotting in the dumbwaiter mingled with the smell of frying fish. Some drunk had vomited wine in one corner and peed in another, and a foulness oozing up from the basement meant a dead rat was down there somewhere.

  The air outside wasn’t much better. It was a hot, stifling day, June 2, 1934. The curbs were lined with garbage cans overflowing into the gutters, and a droopy horse pulling a vegetable wagon down the avenue had just deposited a steaming pile of manure in the middle of the street.

  The sudden heat had emptied the tenements. Kids too young for school played on the sidewalks while their mamas leaned out of their windows searching for a cool breeze or sat for a moment on the fire escapes.

  Knots of men, doping out their numbers, sat on the stoops or stood wide-legged in front of the storefronts, their black ribs shining through shirts limp with sweat. They spent most of their time playing the single action—betting on each number as it came out—and they stayed in the street all day until the last figure was out. I was glad Daddy was a number runner and not just hanging around the corners like these men. People were always asking me if I knew what number was out, like I was somebody special, and I guess I was. Everybody liked an honest runner like Daddy who paid off promptly the same night of the hit. A number runner is something like Santa Claus and any day you hit the number is Christmas.

  I turned the corner and raced down forbidden 118th Street because I was late and didn’t have time to go around the block. Daddy didn’t want me in this street because of the prostitutes, but I knew all about them anyway. Sukie had told me and she ought to know. Her sister, China Doll, was a whore on this very same street. Anyway, it was too early for them to be out hustling, so Daddy didn’t have to worry that I might see something I shouldn’t.

  A half-dozen boys standing in front of the drugstore were acting the fool, as usual, pretending they were razor fighting, their knickers hanging loose below their knees to look like long pants. Three of them were Ebony Earls, for sure, I thought. I tried to squeak past them but they saw me.

  “Hey, skinny mama,” one of them yelled. “When you put a little pork chops on those spareribs I’m gonna make love to you.”

  The other boys folded up laughing and I scooted past, ignoring them. I always hated to pass a crowd of boys because they felt called upon to make some remark, usually nasty, especially now that I was almost twelve. So I was skinny and black and bad looking with my short hair and long neck and all that naked space in between. I looked just like a plucked chicken.

  “Hey, there goes that yellow bastard,” one of the boys yelled. They turned their attention away from me to a skinny light kid who took off like the Seventh Avenue Express when he saw them. With a wild whoop the gang lit out after him, running over everybody who didn’t move out of their way.

  “Damn tramps,” a woman muttered, nursing her foot that had been trampled on.

  I held my breath, hoping the light kid would escape. The howling boys rounded Lenox Avenue and their yells died down.

  I ran down the street and turned the corner of Fifth Avenue, but ducked back when I saw Sukie playing hopscotch by herself in front of my house, not caring whether she was late for school or not. That Sukie. She was a year older than me, but much bigger. I waited until her back was turned to me, then with a burst of energy I ran toward my stoop. But she saw me and her moriney face turned pinker and she took out after me like a red witch. I was galloping around the first landing when I heard her below me in the vestibule.

  “Ya gotta come downstairs sometime, ya bastard, and the first time I catch ya I’m gonna beat the shit out of ya.”

  That Sukie. We were best friends but she picked a fight whenever she felt evil, which was often, and if she said she was going to beat the shit out of me, that’s just what she would do.

  I kept on running until I reached the top floor and then I collapsed on the last step, leaning my head against the rusty iron railing. I heard someone on the stairs leading up to the roof and my heart began that crazy tap dancing it does when I get scared.

  Somebody whispered: “Hey, little girl.”

  I tiptoed around the railing and peaked up into the face of that white man who had followed me to the movies last Monday. He had tried to feel my legs and I changed my seat. He found me and sat next to me again, giving me a dime. His hands fumbled under my skirt and when he got to the elastic in my bloomers, I moved again. It was the same man, all right, short and bald with a fringe of fuzzy hair around the back of his head. He was standing in the roof doorway.

  “Come on up for a minute, little girl,” he whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve got a dime for you.”

  “Throw it down.”

  “Come and get it. I won’t hurt you. I just want you to touch this.”

  He fumbled with the front of his pants and took out his pee-pee. It certainly was ugly, purple and wet looking. Sukie said that everybody did it. Fucked. That’s how babies were made, she said. I believed the whores did it but not my own mother and father. But Sukie insisted everybody did it, and she was usually right.

  “Come on up, little girl. I won’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t wanna.”

  “I’ll give you a dime.”

  “Throw it down.”

  “Come on up and get it.”

  “I’m gonna tell my Daddy.”

  He threw the dime down. I picked it up and the man disappeared through the roof door. I went back around the railing and leaned on our door and the lock sprang open. Daddy was always promising to fix that lock but he never did.

  Our apartment was a railroad flat, each small room set flush in front of the other. The door opened into the dining room, so junky with heavy furniture that the room seemed tinier than it was. In the middle of the room a heavy, round mahogany table squatted on dragon-head legs. Against the wall was a long matching buffet with dragon heads on the sideboards. Scattered about were four straight-back chairs with the slats falling out, their tall backs also carved with ugly dragons. The furniture, scratched with scars, was a gift from the Jewish plumber downstairs, and was one year older than God.

  “Mother,” I yelled. “I’m home.”

  “Stop screaming, Francie,” Mother said from the kitchen, �
��and put the numbers up.”

  I took the drawer out of the buffet, and reaching to the ledge on the side, pulled out an envelope filled with number slips. I put in Mrs. Mackey’s numbers and the money, replaced the envelope on the ledge, and slid the drawer back on its runners. It stuck. I took it out again and shoved the envelope farther to the side. Now the drawer closed smoothly.

  “Did you push that envelope way back so the drawer closes good?” Mother asked as I went into the kitchen.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  I sat down at the chipped porcelain table, tilting crazily on uneven legs. Absentmindedly I knocked a scurrying roach off the table top to the floor and crunched it under my sneaker.

  “If you don’t stop racing up those stairs like that, one of these days you gonna drop dead.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  I wanted to tell her that Sukie had promised to beat me up again, but Mother would only repeat that Sukie would stop bullying me when I stopped running away from her.

  Mother was short and dumpy, her long breasts and wide hips all sort of running together. Her best feature was her skin, a smooth light brown, with a cluster of freckles over her nose. Her hair was short and thin, and she had rotting yellow teeth, what was left of them. In truth, she had more empty spaces in her mouth than she had teeth, but you would never know she was sensitive about it except for the fact that she seldom smiled. It was hard to know what Mother was sensitive about. Daddy shouted and cursed when he was mad, and danced around and hugged you when he was feeling good. But you just couldn’t tell about Mother. She didn’t curse you but she didn’t kiss you either.

  She placed a sandwich before me, potted meat stretched from here to yonder with mayonnaise, which I eyed with suspicion.

  “I don’t like potted meat.”

  “You don’t like nothing. That’s why you’re so skinny. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it. There ain’t nothing else.”

  She gave me a weak cup of tea.