Читать книгу Real Life - Marsha Hunt - Страница 9

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.