When my father first saw Eunice, she was sitting on a bench in the park in downtown Washington, holding a baby and crying. It was 8 in the morning and she`d been up all night.
My mother said my father came home with the baby, trailed by the tall black woman, and told her, ”This is Eunice and her son, Gabriel. They`re going to be living with us.” Mother was speechless. Eunice stayed 14 years.
We were living in a three-story house in those days. We rented out the two upper stories because we needed the money. There were bills from my father`s four years of medical school and two children and another about to make her debut.
My mother refers to that house as her ”menagerie.” There was assuredly a murder on the second floor, she remains convinced, but police found insufficient evidence.
There was the night of the attempted rape when my father ran out into the yard in his boxer shorts, swinging his stethoscope as a weapon in a vain attempt to catch the culprit. There was the morning the FBI nabbed a tenant from the third floor for having a part in the failed assassination attempt on President Truman.
Whenever Eunice spoke of this co-conspirator she always said, ”He seemed like such a nice Anglo-Saxon boy,” and she`d shake her head in disbelief.
The crumbling house and the sometimes dangerous neighborhood ceased to be worth it and, unpaid debts and all, my parents decided to return home to Michigan. They asked Eunice if she wanted to go. She barely paused before declaring herself ready.
Black women in the earliest years of the `50s had sorry few options to sort through; it may be that she feared a return to whatever made her sit on that bench all night. In any case, she decided that a new city on the shores of the Great Lakes and a white family of shaky means but bright promise was a better card to play.
Foreign territory
Eunice was the only child of a widowed mother who worked for a prosperous family and lived in the proverbial servants` quarters. Eunice never went to school but, like her mother before her, she learned to read and write and to make use of the opportunities presented to her. She was a woman of
intelligence and grace. She had a kind of ultimate faith in manners and the usefulness of self-discipline. ”Stand up straight,” she`d tell me. ”It`s good to be able to stand up straight.”
On my first day of school I learned that Eunice and Gabe were with us by design rather than by ties of blood. Eunice walked with me, telling me the wonders of school. There were other children heading down the quiet streets;
many were with their mothers. None were with a tall black woman.
When we left the parameters of our own neighborhood and entered foreign territory, we were stared at. I looked up at Eunice, but she only squared her shoulders and gripped my hand even tighter. We walked into the school yard and people turned and watched us. I heard the word ”nigger.”
The teacher snubbed Eunice. I was afraid and wanted to leave with her, but she kissed my forehead and left. When school ended she was outside, near the curb, away from the knot of mothers there to fetch their children.
That night, I went to her room and sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed the toes of my saddle shoes together and managed the courage to ask her about the word I`d heard.
I have a clear memory of her in that room: Seated calmly in her rose-print chair, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded in her lap, gabardine suit from the `40s with neither a wrinkle nor a smudge, seed-pearl brooch at the base of her throat, dark hair looped into a chignon on the back of her head.
She said, ” `Nigger` is a word used by people who have no manners. It means African.”
I took it in stride, knowing already that the world was full of people who had no manners. I worried about Gabe. I asked, ”If people are mean to Africans, maybe Gabe shouldn`t go to school. Maybe he can stay home.”
”Gabe will go to school, but not the one you go to.”
”What school? The one by Grandma`s?”
”No, honey, a school for African children. Downtown.”
”But how will he get there? Will Daddy take him on the way to the hospital?”
”No, Gabe will live downtown during the week and come home on Saturday mornings.”
I couldn`t believe what she was saying. Would they send me away, too?
”But,” I said, ”Daddy and Mom won`t let any of us live somewhere else, will they?”
”Gabe isn`t one of your Daddy and Mom`s children. Gabe is my baby.”
”But isn`t Gabe one of us kids?”
”No, we just live here.”
”But I told everyone at school that you were one of my mothers and that Daddy had you and Mom for his wives.”
”When you get to school tomorrow, you tell them you made a mistake. You tell them I`m the housekeeper.”
”I can`t. They`ll say I lied.”
”You do as I tell you to.”
”What`s a housekeeper?”
”Go to bed. We`ll talk tomorrow.”
”Eunice, I love you to the end of the Milky Way.”
”That`s how much I love you, too. Now go to bed.”
Lessons in manners
I woke in the night thinking that Gabe might already be gone. I went to the room that he and my brother shared and found their beds empty. I ran to my parents` room and saw Johnny and Gabe asleep across the foot of the bed. I climbed up next to them and pulled the corner of the bedspread over Gabe`s shoulder.
I lay still, pretending to sleep, knowing that if my father woke he might send us back to our rooms. He turned and whispered to my mother, ”Jesus loves the little children; I wish I could say the same for myself.” My mother laughed and said, ”Stop that; they might think you mean it.”
When Gabe was old enough to start school, Eunice sent him to live with some friends of hers downtown so that he could go to a school with other black children. My sister kept saying, ”Where`s Gabe?”
He came to like his life downtown and stopped coming home. Today I doubt I would know his face.
Eunice and my mother were friends. They sat up late talking. They went for walks. They went shopping and ate lunch in restaurants. They went downtown because it was easier for Eunice than going to the closer suburban malls.
One time Eunice did go to a neighborhood store. We wore uniforms to school and they had to be picked up on an appointed day. My mother couldn`t go. We stood at the crowded counter, waiting our turn. Someone said, ”Look at this, a nigger in Crowley`s Department Store.”
My brother swung around and, catching the eye of one woman, yelled, ”The only niggers in here are you sons of b . . . s!” My sister shrieked a hateful ”Gargoyle!” and stamped her foot. I knew better; I froze.
And Eunice? She grabbed the two of them and demanded they apologize.
”Say it,” she hissed. They mumbled that they were sorry. ”You`ll have to forgive these children,” she told the silent, staring group. ”They`ve forgotten their manners.”
Late that night I heard my father roar, ”Gargoyles! By God, I`m proud of these kids.”
There was one positively electrified afternoon. I saw my father talking to an agitated Eunice and then he stomped out to the back fence where the neighbors were tending their roses. My father shook his fist and yelled,
”There aren`t any niggers here.” He was holding a cup of coffee and I loved him for what he did: He flung the coffee on the roses.
The family collapses
On my 12th birthday, Eunice told me I was a woman. I found the notion intoxicating and vowed to manicure my nails every night. No, she said, there are other matters connected with womanhood of more importance-taking responsibility for what you do and for what your actions mean to others. I played Monopoly that night and forgot about my nails.
Eunice knew that certain things were symbols of one`s character. These were passed to me in bits of advice. Don`t wear too much jewelry; it makes you look like a Bathsheba, don`t forget. Don`t fidget, don`t forget. Don`t let a day go by without learning something, don`t forget. The list of things I wasn`t to forget was long and tortuous and really very wise.
On winter days when we`d get home from school, there was always a pot of cocoa on the stove. Eunice would let me sit on her lap and she`d put an arm around me while I drank my cocoa and warmed up. At night, I`d visit her in her room and sit on the edge of the bed and we`d have our talks.
She left when I was 15. The reasons were the all-too-common ones: the general collapse of a family. I cried and screamed that I would follow her. The house was too large, too quiet. I had my youngest sister to look after. Eunice visited and said she had an apartment and a good job. She and my mother sat in the kitchen and talked. I saw her give my mother money.
I was 25 when I began looking for Eunice. I asked my mother for details that might turn into clues. That`s when I learned that Eunice had never gone to school, that her husband had met an unfortunate end. My mother thought Eunice might be found through the churches. When all the obvious things failed, I sat in my car on Sunday mornings in front of churches.
I drove through the mammoth housing projects. I`d stop my car and scan the groups of women waiting at bus stops. I left notes saying ”Eunice call Cynthia” on bulletin boards in laundromats and convenience stores.
My mother admitted that Eunice`s ”good” job was that of hotel maid. I yelled at my mother at the unfairness of it all.
She yelled back, ”You think your father should have left her in the park?” I kept looking.
I walked through the noisy, hopeless waiting rooms of welfare offices. I enlisted in President Johnson`s War on Poverty and between battles, when no one was watching, I read through lists of names. I went to nearly every rummage sale at every church and social center in the downtown area. I watched the old black women watching me and felt ashamed.
I got the bright idea that she`d returned to Washington. I envisioned her sitting on a bench, holding no baby, but maybe crying. I wondered if she`d be wearing one of the gabardine suits, if the seed pearl brooch would be fastened to her blouse at the base of her throat. I guessed that her hair was probably white.
I went to the park. She wasn`t there. I had planned to run up to her and say, ”Look Eunice, I`m grown up. Aren`t you amazed? I didn`t forget. I don`t wear too much jewelry. I don`t fidget. I stand up straight. You`d be proud, if only you knew me now.”
But most of all I`d tell her that I loved her and missed her still, after all the years. And I`d offer her, if she wanted, only if she wanted, the side bedroom, the one with the big bay window and the fireplace. I`d say that it was my turn to make the cocoa and cook the Sunday dinner and pay the bills. And I`d tell her that surely somewhere there had to be a rose-print chair.
I looked all over town, in the parts where only those without true choice travel and where the medium of exchange is likely to be food stamps. In the ladies` lounges of the large department stores, old women take refuge and sit and visit with one another. I spent some time in those places.
In one, I stood at the window and smoked a cigarette and looked at the street below. Empty, littered lots. Broken windows. An ancient black woman shuffled by carrying what looked to be a box of Wheaties.
I had lunch in the dining room of one of those stores. A white girl bent sideways and slid her handbag under the table when two black women took the table next to hers.
An old woman picked up a newspaper from the steps of a building. She folded it and tucked it into a worn needlepoint bag. Later I saw her in the ladies lounge, reading the paper with the aid of a magnifying glass, legs properly crossed at the ankles.
Early Saturday morning at the Salvation Army resale store, women kick boxes along the floor, use their hands to grab things before someone else does. They toss the things into the box and make their final selections later. For sale is the debris of closets and cupboards of people who apparently exercise little judgment. Things that cost an hour or two of work at the minimum-wage level, but, I can see, are better than nothing. Eunice wasn`t there.
A woman beds down for the night in the doorway of a store that sells plastic jewelry and lace hosiery. She lays one coat on the cement, wears one, and uses a third as a blanket. Her embarrassment is palpable; people watch anyway. I shut my eyes and pray the typical female prayer: that Eunice lives in a pretty house with a kind and loving husband.
A quiet army of old women moves along the streets, arthritic hands, clothing mended again, too little money, a hesitation away from falling through someone`s fictive safety nets.
One night while I was walking near the bus depot a cab pulled to the curb and the driver shouted, ”You lost?” No, I told him. He rolled his eyes and said, ”Then you lost your mind; get in and I`ll drive you home.”
He had kinky white hair and talked nonstop in a melodic Southern lilt. I considered asking if he`d ever met a woman named Eunice. I thought of my brother, me and Gabe playing in the wading pool in the back yard.
I saw my mother and Eunice lying on the grass under the weeping willow, my baby sister asleep on a yellow blanket between the two of them. I thought of my father shaking his fist and yelling, ”There aren`t any niggers here.” I wanted a cup of cocoa and a warm arm to hold me while I lost the lonely, frosted feeling of the night. It was time to leave. I couldn`t find her.
Eunice, I love you to the end of the Milky Way. Don`t forget.
