The Richer, the Poorer Read online

  When my mother was big enough, eleven or so, she found little jobs before and after school to help out. For one, she carried covered dishes between two widowed sisters who sent each other daily delights from their tables each with the hope of enticing the other to come and live where the eating was best. For another, she helped a crusty old cook with the supper chores that kept her on her hurting arches past the shouting point of pain. She lent her young shoulder to the feeble hand of an old sir on his nightly walk with his old dog who knew no better than to expect an old habit to continue forever. She made beds, and got fired for falling asleep in one of them. She only meant to see how a feather bed felt, and the next thing she knew she was being shaken awake.

  The most she earned for any job was twenty-five cents a week. But if she was lucky enough to have a job before school and one after, that was fifty cents a week to drop in Mama’s lap for Mama to make do the work of a great big dollar.

  Those noseybodies who had always predicted that my mother’s beauty would bring proud Mama sorrow and shame saw my mother bud into her teens and sat back to watch and wait.

  They were disappointed. On the day the first admiring male crossed my mother’s path she was so unglued by this innocent encounter that she ran and hid for hours.

  She was fourteen or fifteen, homebound on a windy day that was whipping the color high in her cheeks. Her oldest brother, Bubber, was coming toward her walking with a young black man whom she’d never seen before. When they drew abreast, she said, “Hey, Bubber,” and kept on walking, not wanting to embarrass him by making him stop to talk to somebody who was nobody but a sister.

  As she sailed past she heard the stranger let out a hoot like he’d seen a sight he couldn’t believe, then say to her brother on a burst of crazy laughter, “My God, Bubber, what a beauty.”

  Nobody that grown had ever made such braying fun of her. She burst into tears and broke into a run. She who never cried couldn’t stop crying. She who never ran from anything didn’t stop running until she reached home.

  She tiptoed in and felt along the high shelf for Papa’s looking glass that had to be kept out of reach of careless hands. She took it down and tiptoed out.

  Still unnoticed, she flew across the yard and found a hiding place in the comforting clutter of the barn. When she could bear to look, she lifted the looking glass and stared at her face.

  Just as she knew it would, a gold-colored face stared back, and she remembered all the times she had had to fight darker kids for calling her yaller punkins, as if yaller was the ugliest color in the world.

  And just as she dreaded, on top of all that yaller was all that pink, which my mother’s family called “high color.” She supposed those two bright colors together made her look like a painted circus clown for Bubber’s ole fool friends to laugh at.

  She put down the glass, doubled her fists, and beat her face in a fury of self-hatred. For the first time in her life she was conscious of her looks, and the feeling was too new and enormous to control.

  Nobody in my mother’s family had ever told her that she was beautiful. Families never do. If they’ve got any sense they tell you to mind your manners, watch your temper, tell the truth, don’t sass back, share with your sisters, comb your hair, keep yourself clean, and serve God. They figure that beauty is only skin deep anyway. And the Christian virtues come first.

  My mother took her hurt feelings to her teacher. There was nobody else. Mama would only have told her she was making a mountain out of a molehill, and if she couldn’t take teasing, she was going to have a sorry life.

  As she poured her embellished tale into Miss Tewksbury’s sympathizing ear, my mother gradually became alarmed at Miss Tewksbury’s clucks and sighs. She soon had the feeling that Mama’s molehill might have been a better bargain. Miss Tewksbury was imagining my mother in flight from a full-scale assault.

  Even more distressing was Miss Tewksbury’s obscure answer to her burning question about her looks. Miss Tewksbury said that looks were not important. It was character that gave people grace. She hoped that my mother would always run from any man who called her beautiful. Such a man was not looking for character. He was looking for something else. Her brother’s presence in the woods may have saved her from only heaven knew what. There were too many woods in the sultry South.

  That’s how it was that my mother came North. Miss Tewksbury arranged it. When her teaching assignment was over, her conscience would not let her leave without advising Mama about my mother’s brush with danger. Beauty was a mixed blessing.

  Mama had heard it all before from noseybodies and turned a deaf ear. But Miss Tewksbury was an educated woman with a face full of kindness and concern. Mama had to listen with respectful silence and say “yes” to whatever she was expected to say “yes” to because to say otherwise would have made her sound like she didn’t care what became of my mother.

  So it was that my sixteen-year-old mother stood with Mama alongside the tracks where the Jim Crow train would stop, Mama letting her go to see if the world would let her in, my mother dressed in her homemade best, wearing her first real hat, one hand holding the neatly tied bundle of her belongings, and the ticket that Miss Tewksbury had sent her, the other holding her napkin-covered basket of vittles that was going to have to last her until she got where she was going two days away.

  My mother saw the train coming down the track, heard its mournful whistle—some I take, and some I leave—and felt Mama ease her basket from her and take her freed hand. Mama began to sing soft and low, just for the two of them to hear, long-meter singing, as close to crying as singing can come. In a moment my mother joined in. May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from another…. Their town was only a whistle stop. The train took my mother and left her childhood to be remembered forever.

  My mother never saw Mama alive again. It was common occurrence in those days of black migration. It takes money to go home. If you have enough money to go home, you mail it home to help out.

  Those six five-dollar gold pieces in that blue brocaded purse that slipped unnoticed from my vain arm somewhere between the trolley stop and back was money that was needed down home to help somebody who needed help.

  When money is hard to come by, and money down home is hard to come by, a child with a father who lets her throw money away had better listen to her mother, who knows how much it costs to be poor, and how much thirty gold dollars would help defray that cost.

  THE SUN PARLOR

  This is a tale with a moral. I will try not to tax your attention too long. But I have to go way back to begin because it begins with my childhood. It is about houses and children, and which came first.

  There were four of us children, well-schooled in good manners, well-behaved almost all of the time, and obedient to the commands of grown-ups, the power people who could make or break us.

  We lived in a beautiful house. The reason I knew that is because all my mother’s friends said so, and brought their other friends to see it. On the day appointed for the tour, which included inspection of every room on every floor, my mother would gather us around her and say in her gentlest voice, “I’m sorry, children, but Mrs. So-and-so is coming today and bringing a friend to see our house. You children keep clean and play quietly while they’re here. It’s not a real visit. They won’t stay long. It’ll be over before you can say Jack Robinson.”

  Most often a first-time caller, having lavished praise on everything she saw, including us, proceeded out without any further remarks. But there were others who, when they saw four children good as gold, did not see beyond their size, and asked my mother in outspoken horror, “How can you bear to let children loose in a lovely house like this?”

  Every time it happened we were terrified. What would happen to us if my mother decided her house was too good for us and she hated the sight of us? What would we do, where would we go, would we starve?

  My mother looked at our stricken faces, and her own face softened and her
eyes filled with love. Then she would say to her inquisitor, though she did not say it rudely, “The children don’t belong to the house. The house belongs to the children. No room says, Do not enter.”

  I did not know I could ever forget those sentiments. But once, to my lasting regret, I did. With the passage of years I took my place with grown-ups, and there was another generation, among them the little girl, Sis, who was my mother’s treasure. The summer she was eight was the one time I forgot that a child is not subordinate to a house.

  We had a cottage in the Highlands of Oak Bluffs of unimpressive size and appearance. My mother loved it for its easy care. It couldn’t even stand in the shade of our city house, and there certainly were no special rules for children. No one had ever looked aghast at a child on its premises.

  Except me, the summer I painted the sun parlor. I am not a painter, but I am a perfectionist. I threw my whole soul into the project, and worked with such diligence and painstaking care that when the uncounted hours ended I felt that I had painted the Sistine Chapel.

  School vacation began, and Sis arrived for the long holiday, the car pulling up at the edge of the brick walk, and Sis streaking into the house for a round of hugs, then turning to tear upstairs to take off her travel clothes and put on her play clothes, and suddenly her flying feet braking to a stop in front of the sun parlor, its open door inviting inspection.

  She who was always in motion, she who never took time for a second look at anything, or cared whether her bed was smooth or crumpled, or noticed what was on her plate as long as it was something to eat—she, in the awakening that came when she was eight, in her first awareness of something outside herself, stood in the doorway of the sun parlor, her face filled with the joy of her discovery, and said in a voice on the edge of tears, “It’s the most beautiful room I ever saw in my whole life.”

  I did not hear her. I did not really hear her. I did not recognize the magnitude of that moment. I let it sink to some low level of my subconscious. All I saw was that her foot was poised to cross the threshold of my chapel.

  I let out a little cry of pain. “Sis,” I said, “please don’t go in the sun parlor. There’s nothing in there to interest a child. It’s not a place for children to play in. It’s a place for grown-ups to sit in. Go and change. Summer is outside waiting for you to come and play wherever you please.”

  In a little while the sounds of Sis’s soaring laughter were mingling with the happy sounds of other vacationing children. They kept any doubt I might have had from surfacing. Sis was surely more herself running free than squirming on a chair in the sun parlor.

  All the same I monitored that room, looking for smudges and streaks, scanning the floor for signs of scuffing. The room bore no scars, and Sis showed no trace of frustration.

  The summer flowed. My friends admired the room, though they did it without superlatives. To them it was a room I had talked about redoing for a long time. Now I had done it. So much for that.

  The summer waned, and Sis went home for school’s reopening, as did the other summer children, taking so much life and laughter with them that the ensuing days recovered slowly.

  Then my mother’s sister, my favorite aunt, arrived from New York for her usual stay at summer’s end. She looked ten years younger than her actual years. She seemed to bounce with energy, as if she had gone through some process of rejuvenation. We asked her for the secret.

  There was no way for us to know in the brimful days that followed that there really was a secret she was keeping from us. She had had a heart attack some months before, and she had been ordered to follow a strict set of rules: plenty of rest during the day, early to bed at night, take her medicine faithfully, carefully watch her diet.

  She was my mother’s younger sister. My mother had been her babysitter. She didn’t want my mother to know that she was back to being a baby again, needing to be watched over, having to be put down for a nap, having to be spoon-fed pap. She kept herself busy around the clock, walking, lifting, sitting up late, eating her favorite foods and forgetting her medicine.

  And then one day standing over the stove involved in the making of a meal that a master chef might envy, she collapsed, and the doctor was called, and the doctor called the ambulance.

  She was in the hospital ten days. When she was ready to come home to convalesce, we turned the sun parlor into a sickroom, for the stairs to the upper story were forbidden to her. At night we who, when she slept upstairs, would talk family talk back and forth from our beds far into the night, without her we were now quiet, not wanting our voices to wake her if she was asleep, knowing her recovery depended on rest and quiet.

  But at night she slept fitfully. The sleeping house and separation from the flock were unbearable. She was afraid of the sun parlor, seeing it as an abnormal offshoot from the main part of the house, its seven long windows giving access to so many imagined terrors. She did not know if we would hear her if she called. She did not know if she would ever get well.

  She did not get well. She went back to the hospital, and for our sakes was brave in her last days, comforting us more than we comforted her.

  When it was over, we took the sickbed away and restored the sun parlor to its natural look. But it did not look natural. The sadness resisted the sun’s cajoling. It had settled in every corner. The seven long windows streaming light did not help. I closed the door and locked it.

  My mother saw the closed door and the key in my hand. She said as a simple statement of fact, “A little girl wanted to love that room, and you wouldn’t let her. We learn so many lessons as we go through life.”

  “I know that now,” I said. “I wish I had known it then.”

  Another summer came, and with it Sis. The sun parlor door was open again, the room full of light with the sadness trying to hide itself whenever she passed. I did not know how to say to her, “You can go in the sun parlor if you want to.” I did not know whether she knew it had been a sickroom, and might say, “Take your sun parlor and you-know-what,” though in less succinct phrasing. I did not know if she yet knew that nothing can be the same once it has been different.

  Other summers passed, older family members died, and mine became the oldest generation. I was living on the Island year-round in the winterized cottage. The sun parlor was just another everyday room, its seven long windows reduced to three of standard size, most of the furniture replaced for sturdier sitting.

  Sis was married, a mother, coming to visit when she could—coming, I think, to look for bits and pieces of my mother in me, wanting to see her ways, hear her words through me.

  It was a year ago that I asked her the question that had been on my mind, it seems, forever. A dozen times I had bitten it off my tongue because I did not know what she might answer.

  “Sis,” I said, “do you remember the summer I painted the sun parlor and acted as if I thought more of it than I thought of you? I’m not asking you to forgive me. All I want to know is if sometimes my mother said to you when I went out, ‘She’s gone.’” My mother always referred to me as “she” when she was annoyed with me. “‘She said she’d be gone awhile. You go play in that sun parlor if you want to. There’s nothing in there you can hurt. Nothing in that room is worth as much as a child.’”

  I saw her lips beginning to part. And I felt my heart trembling.

  “I don’t want to know the answer. Please don’t tell me the answer. I had to ask the question. It’s enough for me that you listened.”

  She smiled.

  REMEMBRANCE

  When I was a child of four or five, listening to the conversation of my mother and her sisters, I would sometimes intrude on their territory with a solemnly stated opinion that would jerk their heads in my direction, then send them into roars of uncontrollable laughter. I do not now remember anything I said. But the first adult who caught her breath would speak for them all and say, “That’s no child. That’s a little sawed-off woman.”

  That was to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I have shrunk in size, a natural concomitant of my advanced years. That my enthusiasm for life and for people of all races and nations has not diminished is sufficient consolation.

  In the year that I was five, perhaps because of my precocity, my mother took me to see the greatest evangelist of his time, Billy Sunday. My mother was not really a churchgoer, she did not assume a mantle of righteousness, and knowing that, her sisters made their faces severe and tried to dissuade her from taking so small a child to a large auditorium that was bound to be crowded beyond its capacity. But my mother stubbornly said that she wanted me to have that experience. She wanted me to remember that I had seen the great Billy Sunday.

  I have never forgotten. We went early so that we could have a seat down front, and I could see everything. An earlier service was still in progress. We stood just a few feet away from a large side door that led directly to the front rows. People began to pile up behind us, more people piled up behind them, then more and more people until there was a restless army—and probably none as small as me—packed together like sardines.

  Suddenly the side door began to open, not inward but outward. Presumably other doors in other sections of the building had people inside and out trying to exit and enter at the same time. For there was now madness. And presently ambulances came clanging. There were cries of pain. And I heard my mother say to a man whose back was toward her, “Mister, for God’s sake, pick up my child before she gets crushed.” In a sorrowing voice, because he heard the anguish in my mother’s, he said, “Lady, I can’t. I’m squeezed in so tight I can’t even turn around.” Perhaps at that time I went into shock. Because all I remember after that is quietly sitting in the auditorium beside my mother, seeming to show no sign of distress, and looking at and listening to Billy Sunday with my mind a perfect blank.