When I Was Your Age, Volume One Read online

  Everyone turned and stared. “I’m supposed to be Dorothy,” I said, a bit anxiously. Couldn’t they see I was born to be Dorothy? Besides, I knew all the words. I was getting more agitated. Couldn’t they understand? No one could sing those songs with more feeling.

  Lizzie was the first one to speak up. “No,” she said. “And stop jumping up and down. Patty Jean will be Dorothy. She has the right hair.”

  It wasn’t fair. Patty Jean was an only child. Her mother had nothing better to do than brush and braid her long blonde hair. No one ever brushed my short brown hair but me, and I usually forgot.

  “You have to be pretty to be Dorothy.” Lizzie continued. Patty Jean began to priss up her mouth at that. “Besides —” and this was the worst blow of all — “besides,” Lizzie said, “Patty Jean can sing.”

  I was crushed. I could imagine one of the other kids saying something that mean, but my very own sister? She and Sonny could laugh at me in our room, but right in front of everybody? I was working so hard at not crying that before I knew it, all the good parts were gone.

  “You’re small for your age,” Lizzie was saying. “You can be a Munchkin.”

  “Lizard,” I muttered under my breath. “Lizard. Lizard. Lizard.” Lizzie pretended not to hear me.

  I wanted to complain to Momma when we went back to our room that afternoon, but Sonny was visiting, playing with the little girls so Momma could write Daddy a letter. Even with Sonny staying in the big boys’ dormitory, our room was so crowded with beds that you could hardly walk around them.

  Sitting on her bed writing, Momma looked worried. She always looked worried in those days, especially when she was writing to Daddy. Would he be hurt out there where the war was going on? Would he be killed? Would we ever see him again?

  If my mother was worried, I was terrified. What would I do without my wise father? I was terribly homesick for him. I wrote letters to him whenever I could. We were never sure he would get our letters, but we sent them anyway.

  “I’m going to write a letter to Daddy,” I announced, as soon as I realized that no one was in a mood to listen to me whine. I slid across the bed on my knees to look over Momma’s shoulder. I liked to copy the grown-up way my mother wrote. “Lovingly, Mary.” That’s the way she signed her letters.

  “Look at this!” Lizzie yelled when I proudly showed her the letter I had written. She made her way between the beds to show it to Sonny. Sonny snorted. They both laughed.

  “Give it to me,” I said, trying to grab back my letter. But they passed it back and forth over my head.

  Momma tried to get them to calm down. “But, Momma,” Lizzie said. “Look how she signed it!”

  “I signed it just like Momma does.”

  “No you didn’t. You said ‘Lovely Katherine.’ Lovely Katherine,” she repeated, her voice ending in a squeak. Then she and Sonny doubled over in hysterical laughter. Even Momma was trying hard not to smile.

  For a while, Lizzie and Sonny called me “Lovely Katherine” instead of “Spook Baby.” I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it. It was mean of them. I knew that no one thought I was lovely. Momma was lovely. Lizzie was lovely. Even prissy Patty Jean was lovely. I was a Munchkin.

  I was, as it turned out, the only Munchkin. I did my best. I sang “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” through my nose as loud as I could, hoping that Susan or Margaret (I’d given up on Lizzie) would take note of my superior acting ability and promote me to a better role. It didn’t work. Not only did I not get a promotion, I didn’t even get a solo. After a few bars, the older girls decided that it was stupid to have just one Munchkin singing. I would be the Munchkin, but everyone would have to help with singing “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.”

  So they all sang with me, but when Patty Jean, with her stuffed bear that played Toto, and Susan and Margaret and Billy left Munchkinland, my career as Munchkin was over.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I asked, ever hopeful.

  “Sit down and be the audience,” said Margaret. I looked to Lizzie, but she had forgotten me. She was having a wonderful time. She was the Wicked Witch. She even had a costume. She’d tied Momma’s purple shawl around her shoulders like a cape. There were no trees in the middle of the quadrangle to hide behind, but Lizzie didn’t need trees. She huddled on the ground, completely hidden by her witch cape. She lay still for a long time, waiting until the others were in the middle of a song or deep in conversation about the wonders of Oz and then POOF! she leaped right into their path, cackling away. Everyone would jump and scream each time as though it had never happened before.

  That gave me an idea. Wouldn’t it be great — just when the four friends plus stuffed bear were most downhearted — wouldn’t it be great to have a friendly Munchkin poof into the action? Surely the magical appearance of a Munchkin would cheer them up and send them on down the yellow brick road with renewed courage.

  “Don’t forget!” I cried, bursting into a nasal song. “You’re off to see the wizard — the wonderful —” The Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man dragged me out of their path back to the audience spot (I was also the entire audience) and sat me down. Lizzie just stood there and watched without saying a word. I could see the smirk on Patty Jean’s face, which proved how unworthy she was to play Dorothy. Judy Garland would never smirk at a humiliated Munchkin.

  I didn’t cry. Only babies cried, and babies weren’t allowed to play with the big kids. If I dared cry, I would be sent to play with the little ones.

  I can’t remember how many weeks our chief entertainment was The Wizard of Oz, but eventually Lizzie and the others tired of it. Besides, the big boys of our families had started a new game.

  During the day, workmen were digging a trench across the wide green quadrangle to install new pipes. When we left the school dining room after supper, it was not quite dusk. Sonny and some of his friends invented a game called “Snake in the Gutter.” One of the twelve-year-olds, the bigger the better, would be the snake. Everyone else would have to jump across the ditch while the snake ran up and down trying to grab you. If the snake touched you, you were dead.

  I had thought anything would be better than being a Munchkin, but I was wrong. At least there was music and imagination and longing in that game. In Snake in the Gutter, there was only twilight terror and certain death. Patty Jean’s mother took one look and refused to let her darling play. I sneered at that. The ditch was only two feet deep and about that wide. And it wasn’t really dark. But without Patty Jean in the game, I was the youngest, the slowest player. Every night, I was always the first to be caught and killed.

  One day that spring, Lizzie and I came back to our dorm room after school to find a lady we didn’t know visiting with Momma. There was no room for chairs, of course, so the women were each sitting on the edge of a bed. As usual, Momma had the two little ones falling off her lap onto the bed beside her. She introduced Lizzie and me to her visitor as her two older daughters. I hardly had time to be proud that I was one of the older ones when the woman started looking us up and down as though she was shopping for a piece of furniture.

  Finally, she smiled at Lizzie. “Isn’t she lovely,” she said. “What charming freckles.” Then she turned and stared at me again. “Now, Mary,” she said, “you can’t tell me this one belongs to you. She doesn’t look a bit like the rest of the family.” She laughed as though she had said something funny. “Where on earth did you pick up this little stranger?”

  My mother was sputtering in protest. She reached out and put an arm around me, but it didn’t help. I had heard the visitor’s pronouncement, not my mother’s denial. So that was it. My parents had adopted me, but my mother was too kind to tell me that I wasn’t really theirs. It seemed to explain everything — why my mother hardly had time even to brush my hair, why Lizzie wouldn’t take up for me in front of the others, why I wasn’t beautiful like my mother or clever like my father . . .

  That night, after the snake bit me, I just started to walk away. It wasn’t w
orth the fight. I wasn’t thinking about what lay in the gathering darkness outside the walls of the school — war, crime, beggar children with their dirty hands stretched out — that was all forgotten. I was leaving.

  I got to the edge of the quadrangle, nearly to the gate, when suddenly I realized that Lizzie had left the game and was chasing after me. When she caught up, she was panting from running so hard.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, holding her side while she tried to catch her breath.

  “I’m running away,” I said. I felt perfectly calm. I hadn’t considered for a moment that when you run away, you need some place to run to. I was just walking out.

  “What do you mean, ‘running away’?” She grabbed my arm. She was clearly angry. “It’s nearly dark out there.”

  “I know,” I said, shaking off her hand. “I don’t care.” I started walking again.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  “I’m not stupid,” I said calmly. “But it’s no use staying here. Nobody likes me, and I know I’m adopted, but Momma’s too nice to tell me.”

  Lizzie really grabbed me now. She whirled me around, and although it was nearly night, I could see fire in her eyes. “You can’t run away. I won’t let you. And if you even try, I will never speak to you again as long as you live.”

  Since that night, many people have told me that they loved me, but perhaps never quite so effectively. I thought about running away off and on for several years after that, but I would immediately discard the notion. After all, I couldn’t run away. Lizzie wouldn’t let me. It was a very comforting thought.

  “When I tried to think of a story to tell for this collection, I was nearly stumped. I could remember plenty of anecdotes from my past, but a real story with a beginning, middle, and end seemed hard to come by. The story I have told seemed closest to having a plot, but there was a problem: It was as much my older sister’s story as my own — what if she hated it?

  With fear and trembling, I sent Elizabeth (we now call her Liz, not Lizzie) a copy of what I’d written. She wrote me back a postcard. ‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘I liked it.’ Whew! But if you’ve read the story, you already know what a great person Lizzie is and aren’t the least bit surprised that she’s still helping her little sister through frightening situations.

  Although I loved to read and often fantasized about growing up to be powerful and famous, it never occurred to me as a child that someday I would be a writer. In the sixth grade I did achieve a measure of fame as a dramatist. I wrote plays that my friends and I practiced during recess and were occasionally allowed to act out for the class. Creative writing wasn’t a part of ‘real schoolwork’ in those days. Writing meant penmanship — dipping your pen into the inkwell and inscribing loops and slants on the page. Since I nearly always dropped a large blob of indelible ink on the paper, my grades in writing tended to be poor.

  It wasn’t until I was in college that my professors suggested that I might have some writing talent. I didn’t take the idea seriously until after I was married and had the first of our four children.”

  When I was a kid in the late forties, I thought the whole world was like Harlem, full of life and colors and music that spilled out onto the streets for all the people to enjoy. Life was a constant adventure, although some moments were a lot more adventuresome than others. Take, for example, the fight between the kids on our block and Reverend Abbott, our visiting minister. We didn’t have anything against Reverend Abbott because he was white, and I don’t think he had anything against us because we weren’t. In fact, he was probably a good man, and I’m sure he didn’t deserve to have so much trouble during his first summer serving the Lord.

  Reverend Robinson, our regular minister, was away for the summer trying to raise money for the church’s upstate camp, Rabbit Hollow. That left Reverend Abbott just about in charge, or at least he thought he was.

  Actually, if Reverend Abbott hadn’t tried so hard to help us, things might have been different. Take the time he tried to protect us from Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest fighter in the world. We used to play a game called Skullies. You drew numbered boxes in the middle of the street and you shot bottle caps or checkers from one number to the other until you became a “killer,” and then you knocked out all the other bottle caps. One day, about four of us were really involved in a game of Skullies and didn’t notice the long, almost pink Cadillac cruising down the street. The driver of the Caddy was Sugar Ray Robinson, welterweight champion of the world. In those days, a lot of athletes either lived in or hung out in Harlem. Sugar Ray would often come around and play with the kids, the same way that Willie Mays, the baseball all-star, did when he came to New York.

  OK, so Sugar Ray yelled at us, asking why we were blocking his car. Then he got out and challenged us to a fight. Now, we knew that Sugar Ray Robinson was the welterweight champion and would not hurt any of us, but Reverend Abbott didn’t know anything of the sort. All he saw was a man getting out of his car and challenging the kids. He came out yelling at Sugar Ray and telling him that he had better get back into his car. Sugar Ray took one look at the tall, thin man in front of him, shook his head, and got back into his Caddy.

  We tried to explain to Reverend Abbott that you didn’t jump up into the face of Sugar Ray, but he didn’t seem to get it. He just kept insisting that fighting was wrong and that we should learn to turn the other cheek. It was clear to us that the good reverend was trying to mess things up for us.

  Being a kid in Harlem wasn’t the easiest way to live. We didn’t have much of a crime problem in those days, but we did have to worry about the Window Watchers and the Root Ladies. We certainly didn’t need anybody else to look out for.

  The Window Watchers were the biggest pain because there were more of them. They were the women who used to bring their pillows to the windows and watch what was happening on the block. Sometimes they would talk to each other from the windows, or order up collard greens from the vegetable man who brought his truck around in the afternoons. But mostly, they would watch what was going on and report to your mother if you did anything they considered wrong.

  I remember one time Johnny Lightbourne threw a candy wrapper on the sidewalk in front of the church. A Window Watcher spotted him from the fourth floor and called down to another Watcher on the first floor. Johnny’s mother knew about it before he got home.

  This was bad, but the Root Ladies were worse. The thing was, you didn’t mess with Root Ladies. Not that you actually believed that they could do anything with their roots and candles and mumbo jumbo, but there was no use taking chances. When you went over to La Marketa, you saw them sitting with rows of colored candles and twisted little roots that Fat Butch said looked like dried-up shrunken people, and you saw that they looked a little strange, and you crossed the street. No big deal — unless somebody threw a snowball at one of them and they looked at you with the evil eye. All you had to do if a Root Lady gave you the evil eye was to hold up a mirror and shine it back at her. You had to know how to protect yourself when you were a kid. In a cigar box in my closet, I kept a small mirror for Root Ladies, a crucifix for vampires, and a ground-up peach pit to throw on dogs with purple tongues.

  You also had to know some of the rules. You didn’t play handball against a Root Lady’s house, walk in her shadow, or bring a broom near her. If you followed the rules, you didn’t have to worry — even if she could make her eyes glow and send them out at night to get you just when you were about ready to fall asleep.

  What the Watchers and the Root Ladies did like was that all of the kids in the neighborhood went to church. In fact, most of our lives were centered around the church. I started Sunday school at about four and received my first book, Stories for Every Day of the Year, as a prize in the Tots Parade when I was five. In the summers, we went to Bible school, which was more like a summer camp than a religious school. Every kid in the neighborhood had made a wallet in Bible school.

  We also learned
to play basketball in the church gym. The ceiling in the gym was low and you could tell who played ball in our church because they had flat jump shots. The church also had dances for teenagers, and that really seemed to upset Reverend Abbott.

  The dances had chaperones who carried fans advertising local funeral parlors. The chaperones would go through the crowd and put the fans between the couples dancing and tell them to “make room for the Holy Ghost.”

  When Reverend Abbott saw his first dance and the thirteen-and-up crowd doing their thing, he was upset. There was no room for such goings-on in the Presbyterian church. So he made an announcement that there would be no more dances while he was in charge. What he wanted to do was to substitute relay races and Bible quizzes for the dances. We didn’t have MTV in those days, or video game arcades, and the dances were about our only social event. Somebody suggested a compromise: We would have relay races and square dancing. Reverend Abbott was pleased.

  The next Friday was the first square dance. The chaperones stayed on the small stage and looked on approvingly. Then Reverend Abbott went to his study, and somebody put on a mambo record. It was hard to tell exactly who had put on the mambo record because it went on a second after the lights went out. The chaperones, mostly mothers and big sisters, immediately started for the light switches. They weren’t that upset. But when Reverend Abbott opened the door and saw a host of healthy young bodies swinging to a frantic Latin beat in the eerie dimness of the red emergency lights, he was beside himself. The names of all the teenagers present were taken and their parents were notified the next morning by a committee of church ladies.

  OK, so Reverend Abbott wanted a fight. We decided to give him one.

  We had had young ministers like Reverend Abbott before. They would work for a few months in the church, then go on to another area or, if they were lucky, to their own church. We found out that Reverend Abbott was scheduled to give his first sermon on the second Sunday after breaking up our dance.