Read Online Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether - Free Book Online

graduation?”
    Daddy took his time answering. Finally he said: “Of course, I’m goin’.” He turned to me. “Francie, when you gonna get your hair combed, it looks a mess. We don’t want to be late waiting on you.”
    It was a good day after that. Sterling won a medal for high grades and Daddy was so proud he swelled up to twice his size and he was big enough already. Junior came to the graduation, too. He was late, but he got there.
    That night the Caldwells and Mrs. Maceo came over to see Sterling’s medal and Daddy played the piano and we sang the old songs and had a good time.
    I was in bed almost asleep when I heard Daddy get up in the middle of the night. A few minutes later, half-dressed, he came to the front door with the suit he’d bought from the pawnbroker stuffed into a paper bag, one sleeve dangling from it.
    â€œWhere you goin’, Daddy,” I asked. “What you gonna do with that suit?”
    â€œTake it down to the basement and burn it,” he said, and closed the door gently behind him.

FIVE       

    IT was after ten o’clock but too hot to sleep so we were up on the roof searching for a cool breeze. My mother and Mrs. Caldwell were sitting on the divider between their two roofs talking to Sonny’s grandmother, Mrs. Taylor. Mrs. Caldwell was holding Elizabeth’s baby, a boy, while Lil Robert, five, and David, three, played at her feet.
    Maude and her sister Rebecca and me were lying on the rise of the roof looking over the edge and chewing tar, which was supposed to keep your teeth white.
    Rebecca was pretty, with those flashing West Indian eyes and a mouth always laughing. She was my good friend, too, although Daddy didn’t like me hanging out with her too much because he said she was too old for me. She was sixteen. Daddy was afraid she might tell me something about boys, but she never did, nobody did except Sukie and that wasn’t much. Sometimes I thought I must be the dumbest girl in Harlem.
    I saw Sonny downstairs crossing the street and got the shivers. He was sixteen, too, strange and unsmiling, and every time I saw him now I remembered how he hadthrown his grandma’s cat over the roof. I wondered if Mrs. Taylor had whipped his behind for doing that.
    â€œRebecca, you think Mrs. Taylor whipped Sonny for throwing her cat off the roof?”
    â€œYou kiddin’?” Rebecca turned her bright eyes on me. “That boy never gets a lickin’ and it’s a shame because he could be so good lookin’ if some of that evil was knocked out of him.”
    Rebecca got along good with boys, jiving and laughing with them all the time in an easy way I envied. I don’t think boys liked me much, but I didn’t care since I didn’t like them either and they was mostly going to end up in Sing Sing anyhow like Daddy was always saying, especially that Sonny, I thought. His grandmother, Mrs. Taylor, was nice, though, dumpy and wide like most mothers, but with snow-white hair.
    â€œI got on relief last month,” she was saying, “because I just can’t do housework no more. My rheumatism, you know.”
    My mother sighed. “Lord knows I’d like to get on but my husband just won’t hear of it.”
    â€œThem men,” Mrs. Caldwell said, shifting the baby to her other hip. “Mr. Caldwell was the same way, God rest him. Rather see these kids starve than ask somebody for a dime. Robert’s like that, too.”
    Mother grunted. I don’t think she liked the way Robert moved in with Mrs. Caldwell and then acted so snotty all the time, even complaining that his mother-in-law and her three daughters was gonna spoil his sons, and him not working, mind you, while his wife was breaking her back in that laundry.
    Mother had told Daddy just last night: “If Robert don’t like living there, why don’t he move?”
    â€œBecause he’s got to help Mrs.