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
