by train. For the next hundred or so years, right up to the Second World War, Germantown was one of the more fashionable districts of Philadelphia.
By the time my family moved in, there were too many Melangians in the district for it to be considered fashionable any more. It wasn’t unusual in the summer months to hear the watermelon man hawking his wares in the street, selling watermelons for 25 cents or five cantaloupes for a dollar from his open-back pick-up truck. But some of the early historic residences and the Market Square with its Civil War monument were still standing, maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. They made impressions on me as permanent as 23rd Street. Germantown still had a decidedly German and English feeling about it. I didn’t know to what extent at the time.
Our small seven-room terraced house with a front and back garden made an immense difference to our lives.
To help my grandmother plant our first garden was to discover with great pride that she knew the names of the flowers and trees and how to tend the earth and things that grew from it. Marigolds and dahlias, hollyhocks and morning glories sprouted, and I checked their growth each day with awe and anticipation. She planted some seeds for me that would grow into cobs of corn for popping, so the packet said. I can’t remember if they did. She even bought the almanac to study planting times, but I discovered to my horror that her interest in what the moon and stars were doing was mostly astrological.
With her garden and her new sewing machine, Edna was nearly too busy for bad talk.
Our neighbours two doors away kept full-grown chickens in their back yard. Fluffy, our new cat, was often foolhardy enough to slip into their yard in the hope of a kill. He invariably returned pecked and injured, but he wouldn’t learn. Once he arrived home so much the worse for one of these chicken attacks that he succumbed to letting me bandage him and put him in my doll carriage to cart him about for an entire weekend.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but recently when I looked at a street map of Philadelphia, I noticed that North Philly couldn’t have been more than a twenty-minute trolley ride away from us, yet I don’t remember any one of us making the effort to go back.
There were a few odd characters in the neighbourhood, like Jet, the local hobo. He had a layer of grey whiskers covering his dark-brown skin, and his dishevelled clothes were various tones of grey, ill-fitting and dirty. He always wore a jacket and a brimmed hat as a formality, even in the hottest weather. He looked a mess. Some afternoons I’d see him shuffle along the street dragging his feet (the way Edna told us not to walk). His mangy-looking, nameless old dog was never far behind. They always moved at a deadly slow pace down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. He had a reputation for being regularly drunk, but I was afraid to get close enough to smell liquor on him. I used to run up to the porch and stand near the front door if I saw him coming up the street, more afraid of catching his dog’s mange than I was of Jet.
For me, the new thrill was to be allowed to play regularly with other children on the block. On 23rd Street, my mother had to be so particular about our playmates that we nearly only had each other. With Pam and Dennis at school all day, Edna was my best friend, even though I could tell when they came home that Pam was her favourite. I like to believe that it was because Pam was the first grandchild, but I suspected that it was also because Pam was beautiful with jet-black wavy hair and slanted chestnut-brown eyes. She was quiet and read most of the time, but I could never tell whether her passion for books was her own or her way of satisfying my mother’s ambition for us to excel at school.
Despite being Melangian, Ikey was the perfect Jewish mother. She didn’t feed us matzos but she was clannish, ambitious, competitive, guilt-provoking, adored her children and believed that a Ph.D. was the be-all and end-all of life.
I didn’t find this too hard to live with and was under less pressure than Pam to succeed, as she was the eldest. The four years’ difference in our ages meant that we never managed to be at the same school at the same time after St Elizabeth’s. She’d always graduated or moved on before I started a school, leaving a dazzling record behind her. When trouble started for her at school in Germantown, I wasn’t around to give her either help or moral support. The streets were littered with enough ammunition for me to have helped her stave off an attack even if I was too little to be of much use otherwise. I am ashamed to say that I considered sticks and stones and bricks fair play if the odds were stacked against me. It was my mother who taught us this line of defence in spite of all her talk about being dignified and ladylike.
In the early fifties, Germantown wasn’t generally rough like North Philly but it had its bad elements, who decided to make my sister their object of torment and agitation because she was pretty. At ten she wasn’t expected to defend herself against a gang of rowdy girls and had to be escorted back and forth to school until finally the police were called in.
I’d like to think that we Melangians have stopped persecuting our own for looking too African or not African enough. Appearance even had the potential to divide family loyalties.
It pains me to think of how often Pam suffered for being too pretty and too brainy. Her years on the reservation and certainly in Germantown were harsher than mine and, no doubt, if she gave you her version of our family’s life, it would be quite a different picture. Pam neither bothered anybody nor had that early lust for the mirror or physical praise which would have given her airs to make other girls dislike her. Maybe the fact that she got the answers right all the time provoked them. I couldn’t think why else they wanted to hurt her.
I don’t know if anybody realized how much her victimization troubled me, but I kept my worry to myself and daydreamed that I was Wonder Woman and Supergirl rolled into one, on hand to swoop down from the tallest building to destroy all the ruffians when they taunted her. Of course, I also needed to plan what to do if they attacked me.
At six, I was not at all pretty. I doubt that every time my mother looked at me, she wanted to send me back, but I was not the least bit exceptional-looking. I had a big space between my two front teeth, and eyes so dark that they merely reflected the light bulb when I was asked to hold them up to the light to have their colour checked. My hair was so unfortunately thick that my mother had to divide it into three sections which she then braided. The braid on top was wound into a bun and pinned down to keep it from dangling in my face. The hairpins usually felt as if they were sticking right into my brain, and I yearned for thin hair and only two braids, although this was not the sort of vanity that I would have been allowed to express.
Soon after we moved in, two of my new friends and I were playing at dressing up on a rainy afternoon. They were wearing high heels; I only put on some rouge and pinned my two loose braids up with the one on top so that it looked like an upsweep. As soon as the rain stopped, we paraded ourselves to the corner store to buy some penny candy. The air was scented with that delicious city smell of wet tarmac blending with the sweet smell of wet grass after a summer shower. We passed an old man sitting on a low porch, rocking slowly, his hat pulled down so that his face hardly showed. A woman was standing at the screen door and I heard him say to her how nice we looked and add that the one with the braids on top of her head looked just like Doris Day.
I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge strange men, so I kept walking and acted as though I hadn’t heard him. Doris Day. One of the other girls repeated what he’d said when we were out of earshot. Trying to be nonchalant, I cocked my head to the side and looked straight ahead of me. Doris Day. I would have preferred it if he’d said Jane Russell, but Doris Day would do. I wasn’t sure I’d look so much like her without the rouge.
Nobody could have conceived that my face would sneak its way onto a magazine cover. Anyhow, at that time Melangian girls didn’t appear on any covers but Ebony and Jet, the Melangian magazines. If I’d heard my mother say it once, I’d heard her repeat a thousand times that ‘looks will get you nowhere’. This seemed to contradict what little of
