Читать книгу I Shared the Dream - Georgia Davis Powers - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAt the age of eighteen, I knew precisely what I did not want to do with my life—clean other peoples’ houses—and I also knew what I did want to do. I wanted to become a medical doctor, a surgeon. I had cherished that dream for a long time. I was not afraid of blood and never had been squeamish about dealing with family medical crises such as broken bones or fainting. Word got around among the girls in town that I could pierce ears, and many asked me to do so. As the reputation of my medical services grew, a girl showed me a wart on her finger. It was big and ugly and she wanted it off.
“I’ll remove it for you,” I offered. Taking a sharp razor blade, I cut into the wart. It bled profusely, but I just kept on cutting until it was all gone. Then I poured on alcohol and bandaged the finger. Now, I shudder to think what a disaster it could have been. In those days, just as later when I turned my attention to other difficult pursuits, I had supreme confidence in my abilities. I simply assumed that if it could be done, I could do it.
Despite my talents, my mother’s friend and our neighbor, Edna Leavelle, who had a college degree, once said to me, “Georgia, you’re gonna be just like your mother—get married and have a houseful of children.”
Biting my lip, I didn’t say anything. But at that moment, I hated her. As I walked away, I mumbled to myself, “How do you know what I’m going to do when I don’t even know yet myself ? I do know I’m not gonna be just a housewife with a house full of kids, though!”
By then, I knew I had to do something better, but I had admitted to myself that I had no chance of becoming a doctor. Looking back, I think I could have done it if I had had some guidance and financial help. However, I had neither. To my parents, finishing high school was an accomplishment, since neither of them had. As for my college scholarship, it had been an unbelievable stroke of luck in the first place. Despite my grand ambition, a Black woman went to Municipal College to become a teacher or to find a husband. There was no counseling program to help ambitious students like me, and after my scholarship ran out, I didn’t even have the money to stay in school.
I felt angry, and once again, impatient. At the time, I was going out with a nice, but to me, boring young man. Robert Jones, with curly black hair and a ready smile, had had a job in a woodworking plant since high school and my parents liked him.
Robert asked me to marry him. I refused, at first, because I didn’t love him. He pressured me to say yes and so did my parents; I guess they thought it was time I settled down with a man who had a steady job.
However, all that mattered to me was that the fall term at Municipal was approaching and I had no money to enroll. All I could think about was getting back into school. At that point, I did something foolish. I told Robert I would marry him if he paid my tuition. He agreed. When I realized a short time later that my education would cost too high a price, I told Robert I had changed my mind. He went to my father and Pop told me that I must go through with the wedding. “A promise is a promise,” he said.
My father’s decisions had always been the law; so I thought I had to do it. I was angry and felt betrayed. “You can make me marry him, but you can’t make me stay with him!” I shouted at my father.
Juliette Williams, a girl who was almost twenty, had moved in with her brother and sister a few houses down from us. She was getting married that August. We had a double wedding at her pastor’s office. Afterwards, the four of us went out to dinner. Then Robert and I went to the room he had rented for us at the home of Mrs. Ida Tilford. She was a local seamstress who immediately took a liking to me, and she persuaded me to have a reception to celebrate the marriage. She had sewn a long, beige satin dress with high, puffed sleeves and a fitted waist for a customer who had failed to pick it up. Generously, she offered to alter the dress for me to wear.
The reception was lovely, but I soon found out that I had celebrated for nothing. When the time to enroll for college approached, I asked Robert for the tuition money.
“You’re a married woman now. You don’t need to go to school,” he said.
“You’re going back on your word!” I cried angrily. “That was our bargain. If you’re not going to live up to your end, I’m not living up to mine. I won’t stay with you!”
He wouldn’t relent, and although I didn’t leave him immediately, I became more and more bitter about his reneging on our deal. That, however, was not our only problem.
Robert’s idea of sex was to satisfy himself without giving any thought to me. There was no tenderness in our lovemaking—I felt as though I were constantly being raped. We fought a lot. One night I refused to have sex with him. Trying to end the discussion, I jumped up from the bed and went to the closet. I was reaching for my robe when Robert, furious, shoved me inside and locked the door.
Soon after that terrible night, Robert, who by this time was in the Signal Corps of the Armed Services, was sent to Lexington, and from there to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. As soon as he left, I filed for divorce and moved back to my parents’ home. When Robert received the divorce papers, he called and said he was getting an emergency leave to come home. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he pleaded.
“Believe it,” I said. “And there’s no use coming home. I won’t be changing my mind.”
Robert got his leave and came home anyway. I did not want to see him, but because he had come such a long way, I finally agreed to meet him at his parents house to talk. However, as I had told him on the phone, my mind was made up. After our meeting, I went back home. What now? I wondered. I can’t go to school and I can’t be married, at least not to a man like Robert. My life is going nowhere.
In that dejected frame of mind, I met Esther Jones, a pretty, sophisticated girl from Buffalo, New York. Esther was staying with her grandmother, who lived on Grand Avenue. Although I still kept my serious thoughts largely to myself, she and I began to spend time together chatting, as young women do, mostly about young men. She took me to a USO dance at the YMCA where soldiers from Fort Knox were brought in by bus. I was ready to have some fun, but I felt inexperienced. I didn’t dance, smoke, or drink.
At that first USO dance I stood apart from the crowd like a wallflower, but one well-built fellow with classic features and shapely lips did ask me to dance. He showed me how to do the box step and stayed with me for the rest of the evening. His name was Norman F. Davis and he was from Brooklyn, New York. Nicky, as I called him, was handsome and sophisticated. He took me out for several weeks, taught me to dance, and I had my first drink, a whiskey sour, with him.
He was different from the other young men I had known. For one thing, his family was well-off financially; his father worked on Wall Street. Nicky played tennis and attended plays and concerts—activities to which I’d had no exposure. He showed me pictures of himself as a child dressed like a little rich kid, with fur on the collars of his coats and miniature Eton suits.
When Nicky was transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, I decided to go to Buffalo with Esther. She told me her brother went to the University of Buffalo and I thought I could save money and go there, too.
First, though, I had to get the money. Since it was Derby time in Louisville, I was able to get a job rather quickly as a waitress in the English Grill at the Brown Hotel. The first time a customer ordered a beer, I put ice in a pilsner glass and poured the beer over it. My customer was kind.
“Is this your first night here?” he asked.
I nodded yes. He pulled my face down to his and whispered, “Beer is not served with ice.”
I felt stupid, but I made $127 that week and soon had the money for my trip.
In Buffalo, Esther and I stayed with her parents. I paid five dollars a week to share her room at the back of their house, which was also a funeral home. Within a week I had two job offers—one with the Buffalo Telephone Company, and the other at the Curtiss-Wright Defense Plant. Since the defense job paid more, I took it.
On the job I wore blue denim overalls. Just like the famous Rosie, I was a riveter. I worked at the Curtiss-Wright plant, which produced C-26 cargo planes. We worked in pairs: one person would drill the hole in the metal and place the rivet in it while the other held a bucking bar behind the rivet and flattened it as the riveting gun pressed on the rivet head. My partner was a red-haired girl from Erie, Pennsylvania. Her name was Virginia Wright and she became my first true, close female friend.
Even making what to me, at the time, was the enormous sum of forty-five dollars a week, it was soon clear that I couldn’t save enough money to go to the University. By the time I paid rent, bought food and clothes, and sent some money home, there wasn’t much left. My parents hadn’t asked me for money, but I knew they needed it for my siblings still at home; I sent some every week.
I was still writing to Nicky, and it was clear from his letters that he was getting serious. I knew he was going to propose, but I didn’t know what I was going to say. I wasn’t head over heels in love with him, but I liked him a lot. Maybe you only feel that strongly about your first love, I thought, remembering Duke.
Not very long afterward, Nicky proposed and I accepted. Nicky was still in Texas, and so, boarding a Greyhound bus, I headed there. After a brief stopover in Louisville to see my parents, I took another bus to Temple, Texas. Walking down the aisle, I chose an empty window seat in the middle of the bus. A Black soldier sat down next to me. Late that night, in Dixon, Tennessee, the driver stopped the bus, came back to us and said, “You niggers move on back to the back seat.”
Trying to be brave, I replied, “I’m as far back as I’m going to go.”
“Let’s move on back,” said the soldier. “We don’t need this kind of trouble.”
Turning from him, I stared out the window at the darkness and lost my courage. I could easily end up a corpse, I thought.
“Either move back or get off the bus,” the driver ordered. I wasn’t as courageous as Rosa Parks would later prove to be. We moved back. But I never forgot the incident or the outrage I felt.
Nicky met me at the station. In his uniform, with his cap “broken down” like General MacArthur’s and his spit-polished shoes, Nicky was even more handsome than I remembered. He took me to a house where he had rented a room. The next day, we were married. He gave me a white gold wedding band with five small diamonds. After the wedding, we stopped at Western Union and Nicky sent his mother a wire. “Dear Mom. Everything is swell. Happily married. Love Norman and Georgia.” That night, his lovemaking was gentle. I am happy, I thought. I’ve made the right decision.
After two weeks, when Nicky’s leave ended, I went back to Buffalo and my job at Curtiss-Wright. A few days later, my brother John Albert called and asked if it would be all right for him to come to Buffalo. At seventeen, he had been working in Louisville washing buses at the Greyhound garage. When his White supervisor had called him a “nigger,” Albert hit him over the head with the metal pole he had been using to wash a bus. He needed to get out of Louisville.
I told him he was welcome and moved from Esther’s room into two rooms over the funeral home in the same building. John Albert moved in and I helped him get a job at Curtiss-Wright.
With only my brother for company and Nicky still in Texas, there was little to do but work. Ed, Esther’s husband, was a musician at a nightclub called The Moonglow. When visiting bands came to the club, Ed would have a party for them at a hotel after they performed. One night, when Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five were playing, Ed arranged a party and invited me. When I arrived, the band members were sitting in a semi-circle, smoking marijuana. They invited me to join them. I had barely even heard of pot. When I refused to join in, they “invited” me to leave. I left and didn’t give it another thought. I have always done pretty much what I wanted to do, and I do not enjoy being pressured.
Three months after I started working at Curtiss-Wright, I was promoted from riveter to expediter. I went from one department to another, looking for missing parts. I now wore dress slacks instead of the work pants I had worn as a riveter. After that, I had more than thirty jobs ranging from airplane riveter to data processor. With many men away during World War II, women who wanted to work could easily find jobs that would not have been available during peace time.
I would take a job and learn all I could about my duties and those of others working around me. Then, if I did not get promoted, I would become restless. Three months was about as long as I would stay at a job if I didn’t get a promotion. It wasn’t always that I disliked the job or the people I worked with; it was just that if I wasn’t going to move up, I thought I might as well move on.
Sometimes my thoughts turned to my almost forgotten dreams of finishing college. It was something that meant a lot to me, but there seemed to be no way to make my heart’s wish come true. Still, I did not forget; I told myself that my dreams weren’t lost, only deferred.
Soon after my promotion at Curtiss-Wright, Nicky’s parents sent me a telegram to come to New York. They didn’t give a reason, but I later learned that they had somehow received word that Nicky would be passing through there on his way to the European war theater. I had to wire them back that I was unable to get time off from work. It was too soon after the wedding to ask for another leave.
Sadly, Nicky left for battle without my seeing him. He was in the 761st Black Panther Battalion, America’s first all-Black tank battalion. During the next six months, they battled their way across Belgium and Germany, spearheading the Allied drive and inflicting thousands of casualties on the Nazi army. In its record 183 straight days in combat, including the Battle of the Bulge, the unit suffered a heavy casualty rate. A total of 36 men were killed and 260 were wounded; 71 tanks were lost.
During Nicky’s tour of duty, flying shrapnel pierced his leg and hand. He was shipped back to Lake Placid for thirty days of recovery. Leaving Buffalo and my brother, I went to New York City to be with Nicky and his parents until he recovered and we could make some plans. His father, J. Frederic Davis, a high-spirited, slightly built man who smoked cigars continuously, met me at the airport and took me to his family’s small apartment in Brooklyn. At the apartment, Nicky’s mother, Helen, was waiting to meet me for the first time.
“Now I can die happy,” were her first words to me. “Nicky is happy.”
The Davises had adopted Nicky when he was nine months old. His natural mother was a wealthy, White woman from upstate New York. His father was the family chauffeur. Nicky’s natural grandparents forced his biological mother to take him to Spence’s Foundling Home; from there he was adopted by the Davises.
My in-laws, who doted on Nicky, accepted me graciously and I stayed in New York after Nicky returned to duty. My father-in-law explained, apologetically, that he had lost money during the Depression and wouldn’t be able to help us financially very much. Although I appreciated his thoughtfulness, I never counted on getting assistance from my in-laws.
I knew I would have to work, and took the first position I was offered. The job was at the home of an Englewood, New Jersey family who needed someone to care for their infant grandchild. The room they gave me was small and dirty. When I arrived, the grandmother just handed me the baby and left. I had never had full responsibility for a baby before. I did the best I could, but the child cried all the time. Feeling lonely, I made friends with the family’s laundress, Della Powell, a stocky, mahogany-complected woman from Athens, Georgia. Della was good-humored and she let me sit in the basement with her, while the baby napped, as she ironed and talked nonstop.
On Sunday, after I had been there a week, Della invited me to church. I asked my employer for my pay and then took a cab. As I sat through the service, tears rolled down my cheeks. I’m sure the other worshippers thought the preacher must be delivering a powerful sermon to touch me so. The truth is, I was so discouraged by the situation I was in, I couldn’t help crying.
After the service, Della invited me home for dinner. She made fried chicken, greens, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes, apple cobbler, hot rolls, and iced tea. I hadn’t tasted food like that since I had left home! We visited for the rest of the afternoon. When I started to leave, she could see how sad I was.
“Georgia, you don’t have to go back there. You can stay here with me.” Quitting my job, I accepted her offer, staying with her until I got another job in a sewing factory.
On that job I learned to use the serger, a machine that over-stitched the edges of the seams on women’s blouses and pajamas to keep them from raveling. After working my usual three months, I began searching for something that paid better. I heard that Wright Aeronautical Corporation in Paterson, New Jersey was hiring and I got a job there checking defense items as they were sent down the conveyor belt. They paid me a decent wage and I stayed until the war ended and Nicky came home.
Nicky and I were excited about being together again, but we found that we had become strangers after so much time apart. He drank more than I remembered and kept a gun by our bed; his war experiences seemed to be preying on his mind, but I didn’t know how to assess his behavior. After all, we had only spent two weeks together as husband and wife. We both worked patiently at getting to know one another again.
Nicky’s father got him a job as a messenger on Wall Street and I became a counter clerk with Chock Full O’Nuts, working at whichever of their twenty-three stores in the New York area needed me.
As a native New Yorker, Nicky knew lots of exciting places in the City; he wanted to show me all of them. To my delight, we began spending our weekends in Manhattan. We would go to the Savoy Ballroom where big-name musicians like Erskine Hawkins would play. We would jitterbug all night every Friday, stay over, and go to the Paramount Theatre on Saturdays, where they always had a good stage show. We’d often go to the Dickie Wells club for a quiet evening of drinking and dancing. Like many young people at the time, we were enjoying ourselves without giving much thought to the future. After a while working at dead-end jobs, though, our thoughts turned to more serious things.
We decided it was time to start a family. After months of trying to conceive, and still not becoming pregnant, I went with Nicky to see a doctor. He tested us both, then said that we would probably never have children. The news was a blow. Even though I hadn’t wanted a large family, I had hoped to have at least one or two children. Nicky consoled me in his gentle way. “We still have each other,” he said. Nevertheless, for many years afterward I’d felt an overwhelming sadness whenever I picked up some other woman’s baby.
Nicky was an easy-going person who enjoyed simple pleasures and liked to dress in nice clothes. At home he would wear a velvet smoking jacket or silk pajamas. When we made love, however, it was only pleasant, not passionate. More often than not, our lovemaking was at my initiation. At first, because of the rape I had suffered as a teenager and the sexual assaults of my first husband, I appreciated Nicky’s lack of interest in sex. However, as I matured and my own sexuality developed, I knew there was something lacking. Looking back, I can see that we were not sexually compatible and that this was a major factor in the failure of our marriage.
In our family, it had always been understood that we would help each other. When my brother Phillip called to ask if he could come to Englewood and live with us after he graduated high school, I said, “Sure, come on.” Phillip got a job in a bakery, starting work at 4 A.M. and sometimes walked the twenty miles to Hackensack where the bakery was located.
For a while, things seemed to be going smoothly, but then Nicky began to drink more, and his once even disposition began to change. He was unhappy with his job as a messenger on Wall Street and decided to open a small, storefront restaurant in Harlem with a friend of his who cooked. It was a bad time to go into the restaurant business; meat was hard to get and sugar was rationed. I supported his efforts as best I could. Phillip and I helped out, but after a few months, the restaurant flopped.
Later that year, Mom and Pop came to visit us in Englewood. They stayed for a week and it was a very happy time for me. We took in all the sights and went to dinner at Nicky’s parents’ house in Brooklyn. I wanted to give them their first subway ride, but I was so excited that I got us lost two or three times before we got to the 168th Street Bridge where we could catch the bus over to Jersey. Having them with us, I realized how much I had missed Mom and Pop. After they left I started talking to Nicky about moving back to Kentucky. I thought I was homesick. Looking back now, I know the longing I felt was not for home, but instead for some direction in our lives, for some goals to work toward. Homesickness is a longing for what you once had and left; I was longing for something I had not yet found.
Nicky didn’t like Kentucky, but he saw how much I had my heart set on the move, so he agreed. My brother Phillip was married by this time; he and his wife, Rose Marie, decided to go back to Louisville with us. I sold all our furniture, except a new mattress set, to our landlady for twenty-five dollars. We tied the mattresses to the top of Nicky’s Ford, put the luggage in the trunk, and the four of us, with our two cats, piled into the car and left for Louisville. After traveling for five full days, we pulled up in front of our parents house, looking like a bunch of vagabonds. They welcomed us.
Nicky went to work for International Harvester. However, the employees went on strike twice during the first year he was there. Nicky became so discouraged, he reenlisted in the Army. He was sent to Fort Knox, thirty miles from Louisville. During this period, I was hired by Enro Shirt Company as a power machine operator, setting the collars on men’s shirts. In the plant, the restrooms were segregated, as were the steps to the second floor on which I worked. The workers couldn’t even walk up the stairs together. I resented this deeply. I promised myself I would only stay there until I found something else. After three months, I found a job at Robinson Realty Company working as a secretary. I had been taking a business course at Central High’s night school, but my typing and shorthand were not very good. I explained this to Mr. Robinson and he gave me the job on a trial basis. A week after beginning my new job, I received a call from James Rosenbloom, the president of the Enro Company.
“I was considering making you a supervisor,” he said in a deep, authoritarian voice. “Will you come back if I give you a promotion?”
“I quit,” I told him, “because I detested the separate restrooms and stairs.” I paused, and when he said nothing, I continued. “I had made friends with some of the White girls and we couldn’t go to lunch together. We couldn’t even go up the same set of steps!”
“Georgia, I’d really like to have you back. I think you’d make a good supervisor.” That was all Rosenbloom said. It was like he hadn’t even heard me. He didn’t offer to do anything about the conditions that caused me to quit in the first place, so I didn’t go back.
