Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (2 page)

“Vonne, you know that woman that runs the record store?”

“That short white woman with the crooked smile?” Her voice was small and keen and the sound had to force itself past white, even teeth.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She offered me a job.”

“Doing what?” I knew I could count on her cynicism.

“Salesgirl.”

“Why?”

“That's what I've been trying to figure out. Why? And why me?”

Ivonne sat very still, thinking. She possessed a great beauty which she carried nonchalantly. Her cupid's-bow lips pursed, and when she raised her head her face was flushed pink and cream from the racing blood.

“Is she funny that way?”

We both knew that was the only logical explanation.

“No. I'm sure that she's not.”

Ivonne bent her head again. She raised it and looked at me.

“Did you ask her?”

“No.”

“I mean did you ask her for the job?”

“No. She offered it.” I added just a little indignation to my answer.

Ivonne said, “You know white people are strange. I don't even know if they know why they do things.” Ivonne had grown up in a small Mississippi town, and I, in a smaller town in Arkansas. Whites were as constant in our history as the seasons and as unfamiliar as affluence.

“Maybe she's trying to prove something.” She waited. “What kind of pay she offering?”

“Enough so I can quit both jobs and bring the baby home.”

“Well, take it.”

“I'll have to order records and take inventories and all that.” The odor of an improvement in my life had barely touched my nostrils and it made me jittery.

“Come on, Maya” (she called me by the family name). “If you could run a hook shop, you can run a record shop.”

Once when I was eighteen in San Diego I had managed a house of prostitution, where two qualified workers entertained and I, as financial backer, took a percentage. I had since layered that experience over and over in my mind with forgiveness and a conscious affectation of innocence. But it was true, I did have a certain talent for administration.

“Tell her you'll take the job and then watch her like a hawk. You know white women. They pull off their drawers, lay down first, then scream rape. If you're not careful, she'll get weak and faint on you, then before you know it you'll be washing windows, and scrubbing the floor.” We cackled like two old crones, remembering a secret past. The laughter was sour and not really directed at white women. It was
a traditional ruse that was used to shield the Black vulnerability; we laughed to keep from crying.

I took the job, but kept Louise under constant surveillance. None of her actions went unheeded, no conversation unrecorded. The question was not if she would divulge her racism but when and how the revelation would occur. For a few months I was a character in a living thriller plot. I listened to her intonations and trailed her glances.

On Sundays, when the older people came in after church services to listen to the Reverend Joe May's sermons on 78 rpm records, I trembled with the chase's excitement. Large, corseted women gathered around the record players, their bosoms bloated with religious fervor, while their dark-suited husbands leaned into the music, faces blank in surrender to the spirit, their black and brown fingers restive on clutched Bibles.

Louise offered folding chairs to the ladies and moved back behind the counter to her books. I waited for one smirk, one roll of her eyes to the besieged heavens and I would have my evidence that she thought her whiteness was a superior quality which she and God had contrived for their own convenience.

After two months, vigilance had exhausted me and I had found no thread of prejudice. I began to relax and enjoy the wealth of a world of music. Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charles Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoon
and the singers' lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude.

I ordered stock and played records on request, emptied ashtrays and dusted the windows' cardboard displays. Louise and her partner, David Rosenbaum, showed their pleasure by giving me a raise, and although I was grateful to them for the job and my first introduction to an amiable black-white relationship, I could exhibit my feelings only by being punctual in coming to the shop and being efficient at work and coolly, grayly respectful.

At home, however, life shimmered with beautiful colors. I picked up my son from the baby-sitter's every evening. He was five years old and so beautiful his smile could break the back of a brute.

For two years we had spun like water spiders in a relentless eddy. I had to be free to work for our support, but the baby-sitters were so expensive I had to have two jobs to pay their fees and my own rent. I boarded him out six days and five nights a week.

On the eve of my day off, I would go to the baby-sitter's house. First he'd grab the hem of my dress, then wrap his arms around my legs and hold on screaming as I paid the weekly bill. I would pry his arms loose, then pick him up and walk down the street. For blocks, as I walked, he would scream. When we were far enough away, he'd relax his strangle hold on my neck and I could put him down. We'd spend the evening in my room. He followed my every turn and didn't trust me to go the bathroom and return. After dinner, cooked in the communal kitchen, I would read to him and allow him to try to read to me.

The next day was always spent at the park, the zoo, the San Francisco Museum of Art, a cartoon movie house or
any cheap or free place of entertainment. Then, on our second evening he would fight sleep like an old person fighting death. By morning, not quite awake, he would jerk and make hurtful noises like a wounded animal. I would still my heart and wake him. When he was dressed, we headed back to the sitter's house. He would begin to cry a few blocks from our destination. My own tears stayed in check until his screams stabbed from behind the closed doors and stuck like spearheads in my heart.

The regularity of misery did nothing to lessen it. I examined alternatives. If I were married, “my husband” (the words sounded as unreal as “my bank account”) would set me up in a fine house, which my good taste would develop into a home. My son and I could spend whole days together and then I could have two more children who would be named Deirdre and Craig, and I would grow roses and beautiful zinnias. I would wear too-large gardening gloves so that when I removed them my hands would look dainty and my manicure fresh. We would all play chess and Chinese checkers and twenty questions and whist. We would be a large, loving, hilarious family like the people in
Cheaper by the Dozen
.

Or I could go on welfare.

There wasn't a shadow of a husband-caliber man on my horizon. Indeed, no men at all seemed attracted to me. Possibly my façade of cool control turned them away or just possibly my need, which I thought well disguised, was so obvious that it frightened them. No, husbands were rarer than common garden variety unicorns.

And welfare was absolutely forbidden. My pride had been starched by a family who assumed unlimited authority in its own affairs. A grandmother, who raised me, my
brother and her own two sons, owned a general merchandise store. She had begun her business in the early 1900s in Stamps, Arkansas, by selling meat pies to saw men in a lumber mill, then racing across town in time to feed workers in a cotton-gin mill four miles away.

My brother, Bailey, who was a year older than I and seven inches shorter, had drummed in my youthful years: “You are as intelligent as I am”—we both agreed that he was a genius—“and beautiful. And you can do anything.”

My beautiful mother, who ran businesses and men with autocratic power, taught me to row my own boat, paddle my own canoe, hoist my own sail. She warned, in fact, “If you want something done, do it yourself.”

I hadn't asked them for help (I couldn't risk their refusal) and they loved me. There was no motive on earth which would bring me, bowed, to beg for aid from an institution which scorned me and a government which ignored me. It had seemed that I would be locked in the two jobs and the weekly baby-sitter terror until my life was done. Now with a good salary, my son and I could move back into my mother's house.

A smile struck her face like lightning when I told her I had retrieved my son and we were ready to come home. There was a glaze over her eyes. It was unnerving. My mother was anything, everything, but sentimental. I admired how quickly she pulled her old self back in charge. Typically she asked only direct questions.

“How long will you all stay this time?”

“Until I can get a house for us.”

“That sounds good. Your room is pretty much as you left it and Clyde can have the little room in back.”

I decided that a little bragging was in order. “I've been
working at the record shop on Fillmore and the people down there gave me a raise. I'll pay rent to you and help with the food.”

“How much are they paying you?”

When I told her, she quickly worked out a percentage. “O.K. You pay me that amount and buy a portion of food every week.”

I handed her some cash. She counted it carefully. “All right, this is a month's rent. I'll remember.”

She handed the money back to me. “Take this downtown and buy yourself some clothes.”

I hesitated.

“This is a gift, not a loan. You should know I don't do business slipshod.”

To Vivian Baxter business was business, and I was her daughter; one thing did not influence the other.

“You know that I'm no baby-sitter, but Poppa Ford is still with me looking after the house. He can keep an eye on Clyde. Of course you ought to give him a little something every week. Not as much as you pay the baby-sitters, but something. Remember, you may not always get what you pay for, but you will definitely pay for what you get.”

“Yes, Mother.” I was home.

For months life was a pleasure ring and we walked safely inside its perimeter. My son was in school, reading very well, and encouraged by me, drifting into a love affair with books. He was healthy. The old fears that I would leave him were dissolving. I read Thorne Smith to him and recited Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems in a thick Black Southern accent.

On an evening walk along Fillmore, Clyde and I heard
loud shouting and saw a group of people crowded around a man on the corner across the street. We stopped where we were to listen.

“Lord, we your children. We come to you just like newborn babies. Silver and gold have we none. But O Lord!”

Clyde grabbed my hand and started to pull me in the opposite direction.

“Come on, Mom. Come on.”

I bent down to him. “Why?”

“That man is crazy.” Distaste wrinkled his little face.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he's shouting in the street like that.”

I stooped to my son giving no attention to the passers-by. “That's one of the ways people praise God. Some praise in church, some in the streets and some in their hearts.”

“But Mom, is there really a God? And what does He do all the time?”

The question deserved a better answer than I could think of in the middle of the street. I said, “We'll talk about that later, but now let's go over and listen. Think of the sermon as a poem and the singing as great music.”

He came along and I worked my way through the crowd so he could have a clear view. The antics of the preacher and the crowd's responses embarrassed him. I was stunned. I had grown up in a Christian Methodist Episcopal Church where my uncle was superintendent of Sunday School, and my grandmother was Mother of the Church. Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for California, each Sunday I spent a minimum of six hours in church. Monday evenings Momma took me to Usher Board Meeting; Tuesdays the Mothers of the Church met; Wednesday
was for prayer meeting; Thurs day, the Deacons congregated; Fridays and Saturdays were spent in preparation for Sunday. And my son asked me if there was a God. To whom had I been praying all my life?

That night I taught him “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”

My life was an assemblage of strivings and my energies were directed toward acquiring more than the basic needs. I was as much a part of the acquisitive, security-conscious fifties as the quiet young white girls who lived their pastel Peter Pan-collared days in clean, middle-class neighborhoods. In the Black communities, girls, whose clothes struck with gay colors and whose laughter crinkled the air, flashed street-wise smirks and longed for one picket fence. We startled with our overt flirtations and dreamed of being “one man's woman.” We found ourselves too often unmarried, bearing lonely pregnancies and wishing for two and a half children each who would gurgle happily behind that picket fence while we drove our men to work in our friendly-looking station wagons.

I had loved one man and dramatized my losing him with all the exaggerated wailing of a wronged seventeen-year-old. I had wanted others in a ferocious desperation, believing that marriage would give me a world free from danger, disease and want.

In the record store, I lived fantasy lives through the maudlin melodies of the forties and fifties.

Whoever you were.

Anyone—that is, anyone taller than I and who wanted to get married. To me. Billy Eckstine sang,

That was my house and it was vacant. If Mr. Right would come along right now, soon we could move in and truly begin to live.

Louise Cox and her mother were practicing Christian Scientists. I accepted an invitation to visit their church. The interior's severity, the mass of quiet, well-dressed whites and the lack of emotion unsettled me. I took particular notice of the few Blacks in the congregation. They appeared as soberly affluent and emotionally reserved as their fellow white parishioners. I had known churches to be temples where one made “a joyful noise unto the Lord” and quite a lot of it.