Daddy Was a Number Runner Read online

  “We got any sugar?”

  “Borrow some from Mrs. Caldwell.”

  I got a chipped cup from the cupboard and going to the dining-room window, I knocked on our neighbor’s windowpane. The Caldwells lived in the apartment building next door and our dining rooms faced each other. They were West Indians and Maude was my best friend, next to Sukie. We were the same age, but where my legs were long, Maude’s were bowed just like an O. Maude’s father had died last year, and Pee Wee, her oldest brother, had just gone off to jail again, which was his second home. Maude came to the window.

  “Can I borrow a half cup of sugar?” I asked.

  She took the cup and disappeared, returning in a few minutes with it almost full. “Y’all got any bread?” she asked. “I need one more piece to make a sandwich.”

  “Maude wants to borrow a piece of bread,” I told Mother.

  “Give her two slices,” Mother said.

  I gave Maude two pieces of whole wheat.

  “Elizabeth’s coming back home today with her kids and Robert,” she said. “Their furniture got put out in the street.”

  Elizabeth was her oldest sister and Robert her husband. He used to be a tailor but wasn’t working now.

  “Y’all gonna be crowded,” I said.

  “Yep,” she answered, her head disappearing from the window.

  I returned to the kitchen and told Mother Elizabeth was coming home.

  “Lord, where they all gonna sleep?” she asked.

  Maude and her sister, Rebecca, sixteen, had one bedroom, their mother the other, and their brother, Vallie, slept in the front room.

  I sat down at the table and began to sip my tea, looking at the greasy walls lumpy with layers of paint over cracked plaster. Vomit-green, that’s what Daddy called its color. The ceiling was dotted with brown and yellow water stains. Daddy had patched up the big leaks but it didn’t do much good and when it rained outside it rained inside, too. The last time the landlord had been there to collect the rent Daddy told him the roof needed fixing and that if the ceiling fell down and hurt one of his kids he was going to pitch the landlord headfirst down the stairs. The landlord left in a hurry but that didn’t get our leaks fixed.

  The outside door slammed and my brother Sterling came into the kitchen and slumped down at the table. He was fourteen, brown-skinned, and lanky, his long, tight face always bunched into a frown, and today was no exception.

  “Where’s James Junior?” Mother asked.

  “I’m not his keeper,” Sterling grumbled. “I didn’t see him at recess.”

  James Junior, my oldest brother, was a year older than Sterling, and good looking like Daddy. He was nicer than Sterling, too, but slow in his studies, always getting left back, and Sterling had already passed him in school and was going to graduate this month.

  The door slammed shut again and I could tell from the heavy footsteps that it was Daddy. I jumped up and ran into the dining room hurling myself against him. He laughed and scooped me up in his arms, swinging me off the floor. Mother was always telling me that men were handsome, not beautiful, but she just didn’t understand. Handsome meant one thing and beautiful something else and I knew for sure what Daddy was. Beautiful. In the first place he was a giant of a man, wide and thick and hard. He was dark brown, black really, with thick crinkly hair and a wide laughing beautiful mouth. I loved Daddy’s mouth.

  He sat down at the dining-room table and began pulling number slips from his pocket.

  “Get the envelope for me, sugar.”

  I removed the drawer and handed him the envelope, smiling. “I dreamed a big catfish jumped off the plate and bit me, Daddy. The dream book gives five fourteen for fish. And Mrs. Mackey dreamed it was raining fish.”

  “Great God and Jim,” Daddy cried, and we grinned at each other. “My chart gives a five to lead today. I’m gonna play a dollar on five fourteen straight and sixty cents combination.”

  Daddy said that of all the family my dreams hit the most. If 514 came out today we’d be rich, which would be a good thing ’cause Mother was always grumbling that we were playing all of our commission back on the numbers.

  From force of habit I huddled close to the radiator, which was cold now. The green and red checkerboard linoleum around it was worn so thin you couldn’t even see its pattern and there was a jagged hole in the floor near the pipe almost big enough to get your foot through. Daddy was always nailing cardboard and linoleum over that hole but it kept wearing out.

  “Henrietta,” Daddy called, “where are the boys?”

  Mother came to the kitchen door. “Sterling’s here eating, but James Junior ain’t come home yet.”

  Daddy’s fist hit the table with a suddenness which made me jump. “If that boy’s stayed out of school again it’s gonna be me and his behind. Sterling,” he shouted, “where’s your brother?”

  “I ain’t seen him since this morning,” Sterling answered from the kitchen.

  Daddy turned on Mother. “If that boy gets into any trouble I’m gonna let his butt rot in jail, you hear? I’m warning you. I’ve done told him time and time again to stop hanging out with those Ebony Earls, but his head is damned hard. All of them’s gonna end up in Sing Sing, you mark my words, and ain’t no Coffin ever been to jail before. Do you know that?”

  Mother nodded. She also knew, as I did, that Daddy would be the first one downtown to see about Junior if anything happened to him.

  Junior had started hanging around with the Ebony Earls a few months ago, together with his buddies Sonny and Maude’s brother Vallejo. Sterling didn’t belong to the gang. He said gangs were stupid and boys who hung out together like that were morons.

  Daddy started adding up the amounts of his number slips and counting the money. Mother sat down at the table beside him and said nervously that she heard Slim Jim had been arrested. He was a number runner like Daddy.

  “Slim Jim is a fool,” Daddy said. “His banker thinks he can operate outside the syndicate but nobody can buck Dutch Schultz. The cops will arrest anybody his boys finger, and they did just that. Fingered Slim Jim and his banker.”

  “Maybe you’d better stop collecting numbers now before …” Mother began nervously, but Daddy cut her off.

  “For christsakes, Henrietta, let’s not go through that again. How many times I gotta tell you it ain’t much more dangerous collecting numbers than playing them. As long as the cops are paid off, which they are, they ain’t gonna bother me. Schultz even pays off that stupid ass, Dodge, we’ve got for a district attorney, so stop worrying.”

  Mother played the numbers like everyone else in Harlem but she was scared about Daddy being a number runner. Daddy started working for Jocko on commission about six months ago when he lost his house-painting job, which hadn’t been none too steady to begin with.

  Jocko’s name was really Jacques and he was a tall Creole from Haiti. He wore a blue beret cocked on the side of his head and had curly black hair and olive skin. Now, Jocko was handsome but he wasn’t beautiful. He ran a candy store on Fifth Avenue and 117th Street as a front and everybody said he was real close to Big Boy Donatelli, his banker, who was real close to Dutch Schultz. Daddy said Jocko was as big a man in the syndicate as a colored man could get since the gangsters took over the numbers. Daddy said the gangsters controlled everything in Harlem—the numbers, the whores, and the pimps who brought them their white trade.

  Mother grumbled: “I thought Mayor La Guardia say he was gonna clean up all this mess.”

  “If they really wanted to clean up this town,” Daddy said, “they would stop picking on the poor niggers trying to hit a number for a dime so they won’t starve to death. Where else a colored man gonna get six hundred dollars for one? What they need to do is snatch the gangsters banking the numbers, they’re the ones raking in the big money. But the cops ain’t about to cut off their gravy train. But you stop worrying now, Henrietta. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to me, you hear?”

  Mother nodded slowly. Then she looked
at me. “Francie, get up from there and go on back to school before you be late again. Sterling,” she yelled.

  “Okay,” he answered from the kitchen. “I’m comin’.”

  “Francie! Don’t let me have to tell you again.”

  “Okay, Mother. I’m goin’. ‘Bye, Daddy.”

  “ ’Bye, sugar.”

  When I got downstairs I peaked outside but Sukie was nowhere in sight. I ran most of the way back to school but was good and late anyhow.

  TWO

  MRS. Oliver, my homeroom teacher, didn’t even bawl me out for being late as I slid into my seat. I was disappointed. Maybe she didn’t like me anymore.

  I was in first-year junior high at P.S. 81 between St. Nicholas and Eighth Avenues, one of the worse girls’ schools in Harlem, second only to P.S. 136 uptown. A brand-new baby was found flushed down the toilet at P.S. 136 last week. Nothing like that had happened at my school, at least not yet, but everything else did.

  Everybody was excited at school today. There was a rumor that Saralee and Luisa’s gang was gonna beat up all the teachers who were failing them. That would be just about every teacher in school except Mrs. Roberts. I don’t think even Saralee, leader of the Ebonettes, would dare tangle with Mrs. Roberts. She taught us art and was the only colored teacher at our school and nobody messed with her. We didn’t even take our magazines into her room, she was that tough.

  The Ebonettes were the sister gang to the Ebony Earls, the roughest street fighters this side of Mt. Morris Park. When the Earls warred with their rivals, the Harlem Raiders from uptown, blood flowed all up and down the avenue. When they weren’t fighting each other, the gangs jumped the Jew boys who attended the synagogue on 116th Street or mugged any white man caught alone in Harlem after the sun went down. It got so bad that the insurance man from Metropolitan had to hire one of the Ebony Earls to ride around with him for protection when he made his collections. Yeah, the Earls were tough all right and the Ebonettes tried to be just as bad.

  The bell rang and we all trooped down the hall to our first course. Maude was in my class and we walked together.

  “I sure hope Saralee and them don’t beat up Mrs. Oliver,” she said. Maude had a square dark face and thick hair. If it wasn’t for her bowlegs, which made her walk pigeon-toed, she wouldn’t have been bad looking at all.

  “I hope they don’t,” I agreed. I liked Mrs. Oliver. She was white-haired and looked like somebody’s grandmother.

  Maude and I sat together in Miss Haggerty’s class. She was our arithmetic teacher and real pitiful, a pale stick of a woman, scared peeless most of the time. Now she mumbled that we would begin our lessons on page fifty-eight and to please take out our arithmetic books. Almost everybody, including me, took out our love stories and true confessions instead. We didn’t even try to hide our magazines in Miss Haggerty’s class and she was so terrified she just ignored them.

  It was a good time for me to catch up on my love stories because Daddy wouldn’t even let me bring those magazines inside the house. He said he didn’t want to catch me reading such trash.

  I usually paid attention to Miss Haggerty for the first five minutes, though, until I understood and could solve the problem. So today, when she asked for a volunteer for the blackboard, I raised my hand and stood up.

  “Sit down,” Saralee growled at me. I sat.

  Miss Haggerty ignored us both. “Do we have a volunteer?” she asked again. Nobody moved.

  “Well, then,” Miss Haggerty said, walking to the blackboard and picking up a piece of chalk, “I’ll work it out for you. Now the main thing to remember is—”

  “Talk a little softer,” Luisa said. “I can’t concentrate on my story.” The class tittered and Miss Haggerty’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  I sighed and turned my attention to my magazine. This was one problem I wasn’t going to get because I sure wasn’t going to tangle with Saralee and Luisa.

  Luisa was Puerto Rican—white Puerto Rican—and was real pretty with her hair cut in a bob with bangs just like Claudette Colbert. Her running buddy, Saralee, was a burnt-brown color, with red hair, of all things. She was extra ugly. There was a rumor that Saralee was a bull-dagger. I don’t know if that was true or not but she was certainly rough enough to be a man.

  Both of them were older than the rest of us because they got left back so often, and everybody, including the teachers, were scared of them. They fought with razors and the Ebony Earls would beat up anybody that messed with their sister gang.

  Instead of going back to our second class today, we were sent back to our homeroom and dismissed early. Before Saralee could round up her gang, the teachers they were gonna beat up were long gone.

  I was glad, too, that we got out early. Now I could sneak home and avoid Sukie. She still went to the elementary school on Madison Avenue ’cause she had been left back twice.

  Maude insisted on going down 118th Street on our way home and wouldn’t you know Daddy would catch us? We was always sneaking around there hoping to see the prostitutes do something exciting. But they never did nothin’ but sit with their dresses halfway up to their navels calling out at the men as they passed by, so we would walk along seeing whose dress was up the highest and if you could really see their thing ’cause they didn’t wear no bloomers. And Daddy was always chasing us out of 118th Street and there he was now standing on China Doll’s stoop waiting for us.

  “How many times I got to tell you girls to stay out of this street?” he asked, looking very mad. “And you, Maude, I thought I could trust you.”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Mr. Coffin, Francie wanted to—”

  I kicked her ankle as Daddy cut her off.

  “Your father told me before he died to make you mind. Both of you got a lickin’ coming if I catch you in this block again, understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Yes, Mr. Coffin.”

  We ran toward Fifth Avenue and turned the corner.

  “What you tryin’ to do,” I asked Maude, “get me a whippin’?”

  “You know your daddy ain’t gonna whip you, Francie.”

  “Well, don’t push my luck.” I left her at my stoop and went on upstairs. That white man was still up there on the roof but I wasn’t going up there by myself. If me and Sukie were still best friends I’d tell her about him and she’d know what to do to make us some safe money.

  I ignored him when he whispered to me to come on up. I leaned against our door, the lock gave, and I went inside.

  AFTER stringing some beans for dinner, I sat on the fire escape watching Sukie downstairs jumping rope with Maude and the Twins and some other kids from around the corner. The Twins looked so much alike we couldn’t tell Maybelle from Florabelle so we just called them both the Twins.

  They were playing Chase, skipping over the rope once and following the leader. I chanted with them: “Chase the white horse over the rocky mountain.” I loved to jump rope and hated to be stuck up here on the fire escape instead of downstairs playing with them. My only consolation was that Sukie beat up on the others, too, when she wasn’t picking on me.

  That Sukie. I wondered what made her so mean? She was too pretty to be so evil, the color of a ripe peach where the yellow and the red meet, and her red-brown hair hung to her shoulders in two thick braids. I envied her that pretty, long hair. Where I was flat-chested and hollow, Sukie was plump and getting plumper. But she didn’t like anybody, not even her mother and father. It was true that Papa Dan did wallow in King Kong all day long until he fell out from the stuff. But he was a nice, runty little man with bandy legs, always staggering around grinning like a fool and tipping his cap at every woman who passed by. He even grinned that time he bowed too low to Annette, a whore, and fell down the cellar steps. Everybody laughed but Sukie, who got so mad she called him a drunken sonafabitch when he crawled back up the stairs still smiling.

  Sukie cursed all the time, and I had to strain some to keep up with her. Daddy didn’t even want me to say darn.
He was always telling me: “It’s darn today, damn tomorrow, and next week it’ll be goddamn. You’re going to grow up to be a lady, Francie, and ladies don’t curse.”

  I had to curse some though to stay friends with Sukie, but I didn’t play the dozens, that mother stuff, and I was scared to take the Lord’s name in vain.

  Sukie’s mother was always going up side her head ’cause she was so sassy and telling her she was gonna be just like her sister, China Doll. Mrs. Maceo was a tall thin woman, dried up like a prune, but moriney like Sukie. She was always complaining that her drunken husband and hardheaded children were more of a cross than she could bear. It was true that Sukie was hardheaded and China Doll was a whore right around the corner. They called her China Doll because she used to be so tiny and pretty with her straight black hair and slanty eyes. She was getting pretty plump lately, but the name still stuck.

  Sukie said her mother loved her sister better than her, but I don’t know how she could say that when Mrs. Maceo wouldn’t even speak to China Doll.

  It was on account of China that Sukie beat me up the last time. All I asked her was why her sister hustled so close to home and Sukie hauled off and punched me right in the nose. I got away from her fast, and it was three weeks later before she finally cornered me outside the candy store. You wouldn’t think anyone could stay so mad for three weeks that they would bloody your nose, pull out a handful of hair, loosen one tooth, and give you a solid kick in the side, but Sukie did.

  That same day we made up, I had to speak first, since Sukie never would, and she told me just how China did it, and we sneaked around the corner and watched her hustling men in off the street. That Sukie. You never could tell what would set her off.

  This time I hadn’t said a mumbling word to her. She got mad at me on sight one day last week and asked if I was ready to fight. Naturally I wasn’t ready. That Sukie. I wonder what made her so mean? What I ought to do is go on downstairs and get my whipping over with so we could be best friends again.

  I looked over the railing. They were still jumping rope. “Chase the white horse over the rocky mountain.”