Mom & Me & Mom Read online

  Mother said to the general company, “Liquor has been escaping from my closet and only Papa Ford and Maya have keys, other than the two that I and Daddy Clidell have.”

  She looked at me and said, “So, baby, have you been drinking the whiskey?” And I said, “No, I have not.”

  She said, “All right.” Then she went on talking casually. But when I started to get up she said, “Okay, all right, darling, go on. I believe you. You said you didn’t know anything about the whiskey.”

  I said, “Wait, I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about it, I said I had not been drinking it.”

  She said, “Oh, sit down.” So I sat down. She said, “So what about it?”

  I said, “I have been taking some of it to the New Fillmore Theater movie house on Sundays.”

  She said, “What do you mean?”

  I said, “I pour some of the liquor into a mason jar and take it to the movie house on Sundays.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  I said, “I give it to the kids. I want them to like me.”

  “You’ve been taking my liquor out of my house and taking it to the movie house and giving it to underage children? Do you realize how stupid that is? Do you realize how much money that costs me and do you realize I can go to jail for all that?”

  She was embarrassing me in front of the women.

  I said, “Please, Lady, don’t make such a big thing out of it. There are only sixteen shots in a bottle and they only cost a dollar twenty-five a shot.”

  She reached across the table and tried to slap me but her arm was too short. Had she succeeded it would have been one of three times in my life that she hit me. I stood up. I couldn’t believe that she would slap me in front of those women.

  “You, do you realize how stupid that is?”

  I mumbled and walked upstairs to my room. I sat on the bed and thought, What am I to do now? I was wrong. I had stolen her whiskey and had been embarrassed in front of people only a little older than I. I waited for my mother to come upstairs but she didn’t come.

  When Bailey came home, I called him into my room and told him what I had said and what I had done. Bailey, my boon, my brother, my heart, my Kingdom Come, said, “You are stupid.” That brought me to tears. He said, “Do you realize it’s against the law, and it’s costing our mother all this money, and she can go to jail for you bringing liquor to underage kids? That is really stupid.” He walked out.

  So this time I really cried. When I calmed down, I decided it was my time to apologize to Vivian Baxter.

  I collected myself and waited to hear when all the other people had gone. I knocked at her bedroom door. She said, “Come in.”

  I went in and said, “I want to speak to you.” She was as cold as an iceberg.

  She said, “Yes?”

  I said, “I was wrong and I beg your pardon, and I will never do anything like that again. I didn’t think first, and I beg your pardon.” She softened as an ice cube would in a pan over a blazing fire.

  She said, “I accept your apology.”

  She embraced me, and I don’t think we ever mentioned the matter again. I had almost forgotten it, but I wanted to share it here because there are times when no one is right, and sometimes among family and children, no one can admit that there is no right, and that maybe at the same time there is no wrong. But in this case I was wrong and I appreciate Vivian Baxter for being big enough to accept my apology.

  9

  Neither my brother nor I had any idea of what our father was like, but Mother thought that at least he should get to know his children. She arranged for us to visit him separately in San Diego. Bailey Jr. was the first to go. He went down the second summer after we returned to California. When he came back, he made a nice face when Mother asked how much he had enjoyed the visit.

  He said, “The house was clean and Daddy Bailey cooks well. He and his wife like classical music. They play Bach and Beethoven loudly on their very big music machine.”

  When we were alone he said to me, “Well, I’ve done that. I don’t have to do it again.”

  I had to be next to visit my father for three weeks. He had lied to his young wife about me and about my age. He had lied about Bailey’s age as well, but at least Bailey was short and so charming that he captivated her.

  She and I had arranged that we would recognize each other by the red carnations we would wear. Loretta met me at the train station.

  I saw her first and when I did, I wanted to shrink and I wished I hadn’t come. She was small like Mother but half her age. She wore a brown and white seersucker suit with brown and white spectator pumps. She carried a matching purse. She saw me and looked twice at my carnation. Her face registered utter disbelief. I walked over to her so she had to admit that her eyes were not playing tricks. I was indeed Bailey Johnson’s daughter and by association, despite my size and plainness, I was hers as well.

  I said, “Hello, Mrs. Johnson. I am Maya, your husband’s daughter. Bailey Johnson is my father. What shall I call you?” I was twice her size and my voice sounded adult.

  His name brought her out of the shock, which had her mostly immobilized. I could hear the locks slam shut in her mind. She would never accept me as anyone close to her.

  My stepmother drove me to a pretty little bungalow. She did not initiate any conversation during the ride. She answered each question I asked with a single yes or no.

  Inside the house, Bailey Sr. filled the small living room. His wife sat on the sofa, still wrapped in silence.

  My father said to me, “So you’re Marguerite. You look like my mother. You got here all right? Look at you; you’re nearly tall as I am.” His wife looked up at him but didn’t speak. I was not being complimented. His statement about my height made me think he wanted me to apologize for it.

  During the next three summer weeks in National City, California, relations did not improve in the Bailey Johnson Sr. household.

  My father and Loretta left for work at the same time each morning. They had little to say to me. I found the nearest library and since I had recently discovered Thomas Wolfe, I read You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel.

  I was careful with the money Mother had given me for vacation. The San Diego Zoo was cheap, and the movie matinee prices were just fine.

  I learned very little about my stepmother. She had graduated from Prairie View A&M University, a highly respected black university. Its graduates are known to be extremely proud of its history. My father was a dietitian at the naval base. He brought home large packages of thinly sliced ham and turkey and bologna. The meats looked like those bought in the supermarket but they weren’t wrapped in supermarket paper. I hated to think my father was stealing food from his job, but it seemed so.

  I telephoned my mother twice and told her all was well. She didn’t know my telephone voice well enough to question what I said.

  The long, hot, hateful San Diego summer was almost over. I was eager to leave my father’s stiff, unfriendly house. I wanted to be back home with my mother and her rooms filled with laughter and loud jazz.

  On my last week in Southern California, my father announced that he was going to take me to Mexico. Loretta and I were in agreement: She didn’t want him to take me and I did not want to go.

  My father drove us to a small village about thirty miles beyond Tijuana. We stopped at a cantina. I knew he spoke Spanish, but I was surprised that he was so fluent. After studying Spanish for two years, I was a little jealous that he spoke so much better than I. He went into the cantina, leaving me in the car. I decided to go into the cantina and ask him to take me home, but before I could move, he came back with a woman who had two tots, who looked like me and my brother. They smiled and greeted me in Spanish. My father picked up the children and cuddled them.

  He asked me to join him and the Mexican family in the cantina. He sat in a booth and talked to the woman and drank until he was sloppy drunk. It was getting dark and I was becoming very uncomfortable.
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  The mother of the children had sent them away and I asked her to help me put my father in the car. I opened the back door and we pushed him into the backseat. He stumbled in and fell asleep immediately.

  I got into the driver’s seat and thanked the woman. I had never even taken a driving lesson but I had watched people work the manual transmissions. I put my foot on the clutch and shifted gears, and the car jumped and bumped and carried on. I learned that I shouldn’t take my foot off the clutch right away, but rather ease it off. I drove.

  Sometimes the car would almost stall and I would wait, then quickly put my foot on the clutch and slowly put the other foot on the gas and raise the clutch easily, easily. The road wound around a mountain. I didn’t know what I would do if another car came toward me. But not one did and I finally got down off the mountain and back to the border.

  One of the border guards, who had seen me and my father pass through before, came over whistling and flirting. He looked in and asked me in Spanish, “He’s drunk, huh?” I didn’t know the word for drunk but I could tell from the way he grinned that he knew.

  I said, “Sí, como always.”

  I drove from the border straight to my father’s house and got out of the car. His wife was angry.

  My father woke up enough to lurch into the house, right past her and on into the bedroom.

  She directed her anger at him my way. “You have made your father drunk. You are so stupid. You are both so stupid.”

  Then she added, “You are such a nasty thing.”

  She was rude, I said, and, “Well, I’ll be going back to my mother tomorrow.”

  She flared up further: “You can go to her right now. She’s a whore.”

  I lunged at her. “You can’t call my mother that!” She had her sewing scissors in her hand and cut me.

  She gave me a towel to put around my waist, and then woke up my father. Hungover, stinking and fumbling, he took me to a friend’s house, where they put Band-Aids over the cut.

  My father left me there and after a little stiff conversation his friend went to sleep. I stayed awake all night. The next morning my father came to see about me. His friend had gone to work. All he said was “Don’t worry about a thing. I won’t let Loretta cut you again.” He was smiling as if the incident were negligible, and I also didn’t like the way he hugged me and said, “You don’t have to go home. I will take care of you.” He left but I found no comfort in his words. I knew he didn’t want to take care of me the way I needed to be taken care of.

  I made myself a big sandwich and left. I still had the keys to my father’s house. I knew he and his wife were at work. I went into the house and gathered a few clothes and put them into an overnight suitcase. I wasn’t careful in selecting the clothes because I wanted to be out of their house as quickly as possible.

  I left their keys on the hall table and slammed the door after myself. I went to the bus terminal and put my bag into a locker, then went walking into the sunlit streets of San Diego. I was excited and totally unafraid, which proved that I was too young to understand the predicament I was in.

  I walked the streets until I found an old junkyard. After prowling through it I found a neat and clean wreck that I thought would be a good place to sleep. I had a little of the money left that Mother had given me and I went to a matinee.

  When it began to get dark, I went back to the junkyard. This time I discovered a nicer and cleaner car. No sooner had I fallen asleep in it than noise awakened me. I sat up and looked out the windows; about fifteen kids circled the car. They asked, “Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing, and why are you here?”

  I rolled down the windows and told them that I had no home and I was going to sleep in the car.

  They said, “We all sleep here.” There were white kids, black kids, and Spanish-speaking kids. For varying reasons, they had no place to sleep, either. They allowed me to join them.

  I made a friend of a girl named Bea, my first white friend. She was just like me, only at seventeen a little older and a lot wiser. The kids all worked together. Girls had to find Coca-Cola, 7-Up, and RC Cola bottles to turn in for the deposit. The fellows worked at mowing lawns and running errands for people. There was a bakery where a black janitor gave us tote bags full of broken cookies and stale rolls. We bought milk from the supermarket. Then we would all eat and enjoy ourselves. I thought it was a wonderful way to live. I retrieved my bag from the bus station locker and washed my clothes in a Laundromat along with the other girls. I wanted to stay there until my wound had healed, because if my mother saw that I had been cut, she would make someone pay.

  When I was healed I called her and said I was ready to come home. I told her if she would send a ticket to the train station, I would pick it up and take the train home. She did so and I headed back to San Francisco, putting an end to that awful and peculiar summer.

  10

  When I finally arrived in San Francisco, my mother said, “You know you are late for school, but you are already a semester and a half ahead of yourself. If you don’t want to go to school this semester, you don’t have to, but you have to get a job.”

  I said, “I’ll get a job.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  I said, “I want to be a conductorette on a streetcar.” I had seen women on the streetcars with their little moneychanging belts and with bibs on their caps and well-fitted uniforms. I hadn’t considered that all the women were white. I simply told my mother I wanted to become a conductorette.

  She said, “Then go down and apply for the job.”

  I went to the company office, but no one would even give me an application. Back home, I told Mother. She asked me, “Why not? Do you know why they wouldn’t?”

  I said, “Yes, it is because I am a Negro.”

  She asked me, “But do you still want the job?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  She said, “Go get it. You know how to order good food in a restaurant. I will give you money for that. You go to the office before the secretaries arrive. When they enter, you go in and sit down. Take one of your big thick Russian books.” I was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

  “Now when they go to lunch, you go to lunch, but you let them leave first. You give yourself a good quick lunch, go back, and be there before the secretaries return.”

  I did just that.

  That was among the most hateful, awful, awkward experiences I can remember. I knew some of the girls from George Washington High School, and I had helped a few of them with their homework. They graduated and got jobs in the office where I was sitting. They would pass me laughing, making faces and pooching out their lips, laughing at my features and my hair. They whispered terrible words, racial pejoratives.

  The third day I wanted to stay home, but I couldn’t face Vivian Baxter. I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t as strong as she thought I was.

  I stuck it out for two weeks until a man I had not seen before invited me to come into his office. He asked, “Why do you want a job with the railway company?”

  I said, “Because I like the uniforms, and I like people.”

  He said, “What experience do you have?”

  I had to lie, “I was a chaufferette for Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas.” My grandmother had hardly ever been in a car, let alone had a chauffeur to drive it for her.

  But I got the job, and the newspapers wrote, “Maya Johnson is the first American Negro to work on the railway.”

  Unfortunately, a man later went down to the newspaper office and said that I was not the first black person to work there, that he had been working there for twenty years. He had been passing for white. He was fired. The company explained it was because he had lied on his initial application.

  I got the job and a punishing split shift. I was to work from 4 A.M. to 8 A.M. and then 1 P.M. to 5 P.M. I knew the streetcar barn was out near the beach and I had to find a way to get there by 4 A.M.

  My mother said, “Don’t worry about it.
I’ll take you.”

  The first day, when my uniform arrived and it fit me well, I felt like a woman. My mother, who had run a bath for me, awakened me and complimented me on my uniform. We got into her car and she drove to the beach. When I thanked her and said, “Go home and take care of yourself,” she said, “I mean to take care of the both of us.” For the first time I saw the pistol on the seat. She said she would follow the car until first light, when she would honk her horn and blow me a kiss, turn away, and drive home.

  For the months that I worked on the streetcar, my mother’s routine never changed. I left the job when it was time to return to school.

  My mother asked me to have a cup of coffee with her in the kitchen.

  She said, “So, you got the job and I also got the job. You were conductorette and I was your security every day until dawn. What did you learn from this experience?”

  I said, “I learned that you were probably the best protection I will ever have.”

  She asked, “What did you learn about yourself?”

  I said, “I learned I am not afraid to work, and that’s about all.”

  She said, “No, you learned that you have power—power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.”

  11

  At fifteen, I was allowed to stay out until eleven at night only if Bailey was along. Mother knew he would not only tell me what to do, he would tell others what they could and could not do, with me and around me.

  The teenagers in the Booker T. Washington Center were restless. One night the directors refused to allow us to have a dance because one had been held the night before and we were allowed only one dance per week.

  A shout lifted above our heads. “Let’s go to the Mission District and eat tamales!”

  Another person yelled, “Let’s go to the Mission District and liberate a few dozen tacos and tamales!” There was a loud roar of agreement and I was swept along. We were on the outskirts of the Fillmore District before I realized Bailey was missing. He had not come with me to the center that evening.