Read an Excerpt
From Chapter One
My name is Alice Andrews. I was named after my father's mother, Alice Eliza Andrews. A fancy name for a sharecropper's wife, isn't it. She was. He wasn't. My father's parents grew up in the South, South Carolina. I didn't know them, they were dead when I was born, and even if they hadn't been, I have a feeling I probably wouldn't have known them very well. My mother's side was the dominant force in my life.
I was born to a woman who was born of a woman of prodigious will. My grandmother Viola packed up two daughters in South Carolina, leaving behind a job in some White family's kitchen and a dead husband. She would go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, without a job, an education, or a place of her own to stay.
In the 1930s Black people were leaving the South like ducks at a skeet shoot, clutching hearsay about factory jobs and northern streets that were literally paved with gold. They moved north, in Jim Crow train cars or hitching a ride in someone's old car, in the dead of night for fear of landowning Whites persuading them, at rifle point, to stay. Grandma Viola was big boned, stood about five feet eight, and had broad shoulders. Her caffè latte complexion and what the old folks used to call "good hair" gave fodder to her air of superiority. Her hair alone was something most B1ack folks were proud of in those days because it was proof that your heritage was mixed with Indian and/or White and you were therefore better than those coil-knotted Black people who were unblended, unadulterated. However, Grandma Viola's family, especially her daddy, was ashamed of the whiteness in the blood because it was evidence of the White man's violation of Black women and of the Black man's impotence to protect them.
Her hair and her stature gave her the appearance of confidence that made many rural Blacks and Whites uncomfortable. People used to say, "Viola don't take no tea for the fever," which means she didn't take any stuff from people. At the slightest provocation, she would tell someone to go to hell or to kiss her ass. People would say that she was full of herself. Actually, though, she was full of shame. Shame about the way she looked and the way her own people valued those looks, which were the result of a violation of spirit as well as body. Her daughters, my mother and Aunt Thelma, inherited her spirit and probably her shame. Some have said that they passed it on to me. I know I got the good and the bad.
The North turned out to be a harsh life, and Grandma Viola became bitter. Not only were the streets not coated with gold, some of them weren't paved at all. The only factory jobs given to Blacks were the worst of tasks, like sweeping furnaces and floors, and even those weren't easy to get. Grandma Viola took in laundry and made sure her kids hustled for odd jobs. By the time my mother got to high school, she had a full-time job doing daywork for a barely middle-class White family in Union. Her humiliation at having to wear her pink maid's uniform underneath her school clothes and her own mother's indifference to her shame was something she'd spend a lifetime trying to overcome. Grandma Viola was concerned about survival, and my mother's paycheck was part of the palliative. My mother had been a bright, athletic student, earning mostly A's in high school and a spot on the girls' track team.
"Roberta, that runnin' ain't gon' put a thing on this table," Grandma Viola would say.
Track was forgotten, but my mother kept her grades up, lugging her books with her to the White folks' house in Union, studying Hawthorne while her young charges practiced their scales, reciting Blake and Tennyson as she peeled potatoes for dinner.
She was convinced that her good grades were to be rewarded with a better life and a chance at going to college when she overheard a conversation between Grandma Viola and her sister, Aunt Estelle, during one of Estelle's visits north. Estelle had stayed in South Carolina, gone to Atlanta University, and become a teacher. She and her husband could not have children, and Aunt Estelle told Grandma Viola that she would pay for my mother to go to college if she maintained her grades. Before my mother could burst into the kitchen to thank Aunt Estelle, she heard her mother's voice.
"Roberta's gotta work, Estelle, ain't no use in you fillin' her head wit a bunch of yo' highfalutin talk. What she look like goin' to college, anyway? She ain't nothin', and all the college in the world ain't gon' change that." Standing outside the family apartment, in the hallway, my mother felt the walls closing in on her. She convulsed into tears so heavy that they soaked the front of her pink maid's uniform. For her, she would later tell me, in that moment she was forced to let go of her dreams for herself. It was as if all her ambition were frozen, put into a capsule, to be defrosted for me.
"I vowed that my daughter would want for nothing, the least of which would be a college education."
Once my mother learned to swallow her fate and realized that hat awaited her was what most girls her age had to look forward to‹a career as a domestic–her grades dropped, and by the eleventh grade she'd gotten pregnant and had to drop out of school. A shotgun wedding was held in the living room of my grandmother's apartment, and seven months later she had a stillborn child. Ten years later, my brother, Lucas, was born. Just about two years later, I came.
My mother was a scrupulous housekeeper. Everything in our house was immaculate: the folds in the lampshades, the cracks behind the radiators, me. My mother always made sure that I looked my best, that our house was the cleanest in the neighborhood. She turned a spare room in our three-story, two-family house into an ironing room, where she pressed our sheets, her bras, my father's boxer shorts. Looking back, I believe it was her therapy. She'd present a perfect picture to hide the mess that was inside. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Silver, once asked me who did my shirts. She assumed we had a maid. I didn't understand what she assumed, so I asked my mother who did our shirts. My mother rolled her eyes and didn't answer. Mrs. Silver told the other teachers that we had a maid, and they all watched what I wore to school, checking the label of my beige cashmere to see if it actually came from Lord & Taylor, and commented that we were an unusual Negro family to know about quality of this kind. My reversible corduroy jumpers were fussed over by the teachers‹primarily striving first-generation college-educated Jews from the same South Ward neighborhood. They were kind to me, pinched my cheeks, and commented about how pretty I was. Yet I was totally confused by their accolades, because I hated my clothes. I wanted to dress like the kids from the projects who wore the trendiest clothes, like wet-look jackets and gauchos from Lerner's.
We were the only family on the block that didn't have plastic covering the furniture. We had slipcovers. We had rugs, when everyone else had nothing, or else the latest wall-to-wall. We had heavy drapes that made our house feel like a cocoon in the fall and winter; others had shades or multicolored polyester curtains. My bedroom, however, was my mother's decorating tour de force. It was a replica of Gidget's, TV's reigning American princess in the 1960s. I had the white colonial bedroom furniture set-desk, dresser, chest of drawers, bookcase, and canopy bed with the floral bedspread and canopy cover. I was about eight when the Bamberger's delivery truck pulled up in front of our house, and I remember thinking that adults were very strange to get this excited about something as uninteresting as furniture. My mother was glowing. But, I guess, for a woman who never had her own bed, much less her own room, this was a very big day for her. She spent weeks hand sketching and painting little daisies on the walls and choosing just the right fussy sheer white curtains. She got on her hands and knees, applied chunks of wax, and then machine-buffed the hardwood floors till they gleamed.
"You are everything I ever wanted to be," my mother would say to me almost daily. So the piano and dance lessons that she had shuttled her former charges to and from were now provided for me. The expensive, conservative clothes worn by the wealthier White kids whom her sister, Aunt Thelma, took care of were the clothes she bought for me. The French schoolgirl's hat and matching coat, the beige cashmere with the velvet collar, the reversible green plaid jumpers, the whole Hahne's, Lord & Taylor, stock were hanging in my closet.
Copyright © 1996 by Benilde Little
