“My daddy really was a number runner, and as his daughter I helped him run numbers back and forth from school. It was illegal in those days, but New York state has now made it legal, so they’re in on the take. In those days it was run by gangsters.”
Guest lecturer, Louise Meriwether, an author and teacher, begins to tell a group of students in the fiction writing department of Columbia College in Chicago where she got the material for her first novel, “Daddy was a Number Runner” (The Feminist Press, $10.95), and how she grew up in Harlem during the Depression and made her way out of the neighborhood.
“We were on welfare,” she says. “In those days I think it was called home relief. I had four brothers, so someone had given us `Tom Sawyer.’ Then at one point I discovered in the library a case that had black books in it.
“They were segregated in the library, and I started reading those. I discovered a book by Claude McKay called `Home to Harlem,’ and that made a great impression because it was the first time I had read a book about ordinary, everyday colored people. And that was so exciting because I realized that if somebody was writing a book about black people, then we were important enough to write about.”
Meriwether says that writing is about trying to uncover some truth that has been stamped over and lied about.
“I’m trying to communicate something about myself to other people and then, in the process, learn something about them. So many times people come up to me-white people, Indians, anybody-and say, `The same thing happened to me when I was a child.’ There was a communication there.
“In the final analysis, we all want the same thing, and that is to be happy, to be healthy, to be whole. We all have the same color blood. There’s a lot of artificial separation between us, and in the process of writing we can eliminate a lot of that separation and come to understand that there are more things about us that are the same than there are that separate us.”
Though she has not always been able to support herself with her writing, Meriwether gave it priority and found the time.
“When I was married,” she says, “I used to get up early in the morning, before my husband got up, and I would write. And I would cook his breakfast and he would go to his job and I would go to my job. And I would take my lunch and write on my lunch period. Then I’d come home, cook my husband’s supper, and while he sat in the front room watching the football game, I would be in the kitchen drinking beer and writing. He was not unsupportive or supportive. I had to write and I never allowed anyone to stop me. I just carved out the time to write. You have to support yourself to the point where you do not let what other people say and do affect you.
“Since I wanted to write, I was always writing. You have to be very stubborn about it because you will doubt yourself. Even James Baldwin, who was a friend of mine, would doubt his ability to write. Sometimes we all think, `Who cares about this?’ But I have to tell myself that it really is important so I’ll stick to it. Everybody has a story to tell, but not everybody has the discipline to tell it.
“With `Daddy Was a Number Runner,’ one publisher I sent it to said the material seemed familiar. When I heard that, I said, `They are mistaken,’ and I continued to write. You have to be firm. That firmness turns to jelly at times, but you have to remain unshaken.”
She says her early years shaped her writing. At 12, she says, “I had grown to this magnificent height of 5 feet, 8 and I was about 90 pounds. So I was very skinny and very tall. It seemed to me that I had a big Adam’s apple and my hair wasn’t long enough and I was too dark. This is where I write from. Everything you feel gets blended into your writing. You write with your whole totality. But I’m also a private person and I’m only going to tell you what I want you to know. I’m not going to tell you the secrets in my closet.”
She describes feeling trapped as a young girl in Harlem. “I used to love to hang out on the fire escape and there was Mt. Morris Park with its bell tower on one side of my view and I could see the Empire State Building in the other direction. I felt like I was trapped between these two tall buildings. I would always ask my mother, `Will we ever get out of here?’
“But I think that most young people probably feel trapped. What’s on the other side of the mountain? What’s on the other side of the Empire State Building? Whatever your environment, you want to escalate, you want to get out of it. And if it happens to be a negative environment, where the opportunities are limited, then it makes you feel more trapped.”
Meriwether says it takes luck-not just brains, money, intelligence, or whatever else you’ve got-to be one of the ones who escape. “If you drop a net into the ocean, you will catch many fish, but some of the fish will fall off on the side and remain free. I was one of the fish that fell off on the side and remained free and was able to develop my craft. Some others I grew up with were not so lucky, and their lives were not as happy as mine.
While studying at New York University, she says, “I worked as a verbatim stenographer for a woman named Catherine C. Hiatt, at the Welfare Council, a social work agency that coordinated the work of all the other agencies. I was getting very discouraged because I was so tired. I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish school because I just couldn’t keep up with working and going to school at the same time.
“My sister-in-law had received $500 when someone died and left the money to her, and I had just finished taking some dictation and said out loud to myself, very pensively, that I wished someone would leave me $500 so I could finish school without working. Miss Hiatt said that somebody had lent her the money to finish school and she wanted to do the same for someone else and would like to lend me the $500.”
Meriwether decided to take the loan, which allowed her to finish school without working. Much later, on a book tour, she found Hiatt in Washington, D.C., and invited her to a luncheon, where she told the story of how the loan helped her finish school.
“At that time,” she says, “I still owed her some money and I paid her. She did not remember that I still owed her money after all those years.”
She summarizes her life after childhood: “I grew up, got married, went to live in Los Angeles with my husband, got divorced, got married again, got divorced again. If you want to stay married, don’t go to live in Los Angeles.”
During her 18 years there, she worked for the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black newspaper, earned a master’s degree in journalism from UCLA and then worked at Universal Studios for three years, starting in 1965, as a story analyst. “They had no black writers; there was no opportunity to do what I wanted to do, which would have been to write screenplays. They let the door open that far and that was it.”
In 1969 she returned to New York, and “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” was published in 1970. Since then Meriwether, who declines to divulge her age, has written three children’s books, several short stories, and her current novel, “Fragments of the Ark” (Pocket Books, $21), released in January.
One of the children’s books, “The Freedom Ship of Robert Small,” is the basis of “Fragments of the Ark.” This novel is about a Charleston, S.C., slave and boat pilot for the Confederates during the Civil War who hijacked a Confederate gunboat and delivered it to the Union fleet, which was blockading Charleston Harbor. The research took her 10 years, she says.
Her fascination with Small probably stems from her family being from Charleston, she says. Like Small, her grandfather was also born into slavery and was a seaman. A story retold to her when she was a child described her grandfather as an infant, during the Civil War, with his parents and others trying to escape to the Union side in a rowboat. The baby started to cry, endangering everyone’s lives.
“The (leader of the group) told the mother to throw the baby overboard,” she says, “and, instead, she frantically unleashed her blouse and put her nipple into his mouth and he stopped crying. That was fortunate for me because that baby was my grandfather.”
To women who have had to be the creators of the hearth and the family she says, “You have to carve out some time for yourself to develop your creativity. Not only for yourself, but also for your children. If you can do it, it will inspire your children to do it. Creativity gives your life some focus so you’re not bogged down with hopelessness, which can lead to alcoholism or drug addiction. The creative aspect of yourself keeps hope, that spiritual thing, alive.
“Do the thing that you want to do. You can’t let anybody tell you what you can do, and you can’t stop doing what you want to do because somebody doesn’t support it.”
