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Authors: Russell Baker

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BOOK: Growing Up
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“Is Daddy coming home today?”

“Maybe we’ll bring him back with us,” she said.

It was a gentle Indian summer morning, and my grandmother told me to go out and play while she minded Doris and Audrey. I set off on one of my daily wandering expeditions, taking the road down toward the creek.

I was down there by myself. You could always find something entertaining to do around Morrisonville. Climb a fence. Take a stick and scratch pictures in the dirt. There were always cows
around, or a horse. Throw pebbles at a locust tree. I was busy at this sort of thing when I saw my cousins, Kenneth and Ruth Lee, coming down the road.

Besides Doris, Audrey, and me, they were the only other children living in Morrisonville. Kenneth, two years older than I, was our leader. He was coming down the road with Ruth Lee following as usual. I was happy to see them. We usually played in the fields and around the barns and straw ricks together. Sometimes we ripped open a burlap grain sack to build a tepee in the apple orchard, or picked through the junk pile behind Liz Virts’s house to collect enough tin cans and broken dishes to play store. I was glad now to have company.

When Kenneth walked right up to me, though, he stared at me with such a stare as I’d never seen.

“Your father’s dead,” he said.

It was like an accusation that my father had done something criminal, and I came to my father’s defense.

“He is not,” I said.

But of course they didn’t know the situation. I started to explain. He was sick. In the hospital. My mother was bringing him home right now. …

“He’s dead,” Kenneth said.

His assurance slid an icicle into my heart.

“He is not either!” I shouted.

“He is too,” Ruth Lee said. “They want you to come home right away.”

I started running up the road screaming, “He is not!”

It was a weak argument. They had the evidence and gave it to me as I hurried home crying, “He is not. … He is not. … He is not. …”

I was almost certain before I got there that he was.

And I was right. Arriving at the hospital that morning, my mother was told he had died at four
A.M
. in “acute diabetic coma.” He was thirty-three years old.

When I came running home, my mother was still not back from Frederick, but the women had descended on our house, as
women there did in such times, and were already busy with the housecleaning and cooking that were Morrisonville’s ritual response to death. With a thousand tasks to do, they had no time to handle a howling five-year-old. I was sent to the opposite end of town, to Bessie Scott’s house.

Poor Bessie Scott. All afternoon she listened patiently as a saint while I sat in her kitchen and cried myself out. For the first time I thought seriously about God. Between sobs I told Bessie that if God could do things like this to people, then God was hateful and I had no more use for Him.

Bessie told me about the peace of Heaven and the joy of being among the angels and the happiness of my father who was already there. This argument failed to quiet my rage.

“God loves us all just like His own children,” Bessie said.

“If God loves me, why did He make my father die?”

Bessie said I would understand someday, but she was only partly right. That afternoon, though I couldn’t have phrased it this way then, I decided that God was a lot less interested in people than anybody in Morrisonville was willing to admit. That day I decided that God was not entirely to be trusted.

After that I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone’s God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

While I came to grips with death in Bessie’s kitchen, its rites were being performed by other Morrisonville women in my father’s house. Our floors were being scrubbed, windows washed, furniture dusted, beds made. Visitors would be arriving by the dozen. It was a violation of the code to show them anything but a spotless house.

Prodigies of cooking were already under way in surrounding houses. Precious hams were being removed from smokehouses, eggs and butter were being beaten in cake bowls, pie crusts were being rolled, canning jars of pickles and preserved fruits were
being lifted from pantry shelves. Death was also a time for feasting.

It was growing dark when, pretty well cried out and beginning to respond to the holiday excitement in the air, I left Bessie Scott’s and walked back down the road to home. The place sparkled with cleanliness, and the women sat clustered in the kitchen, exhausted, I suppose. The men had just begun to arrive, looking uncomfortable in their good dark suits, their shirts and neckties and low shoes. I went outside and stood around with the men in the road. So late in November, the dusk came early. The men seemed unusually quiet. I did not know many of them. They stood in little groups talking quietly, almost in whispers, probably not saying anything very interesting, just feeling self-conscious in their Sunday suits with nothing to do but stand. The men standing and waiting and talking quietly with nothing to do in their good dark suits was part of the ritual too. It was important to have a powerful turnout of humanity. That showed the dead man had been well liked in the community, and it was therefore considered an important source of comfort to the widow.

It was fully dark when someone told me to move around and wait in the backyard, which I did. After a while Annie Grigsby came out and hugged me and said it was all right to come into the kitchen. “They’ve brought your daddy home,” she said.

My mother was in the kitchen, but most of the other women had left now. It was the first time I had seen her since she left for the hospital that morning. She was sitting on a chair looking very tired. Annie took a chair beside her. It was terribly quiet. I wondered where my father was. Annie finally broke the silence.

“Maybe he’d like to see his father.”

“Do you want to see your father?” my mother asked.

“I guess so,” I said.

The undertaker had come and gone while I was in the backyard, and now that most of the bustle was over and most of the people had gone home for supper, the house felt empty and still. My mother did not seem up to showing me the undertaker’s handiwork.

“I’ll take him in,” Annie said, rising in her weary fashion, taking my hand.

She led me into the adjoining living room. The blinds were drawn. A couple of kerosene lamps were burning. Annie lifted me in her arms so I could look down. For some reason there was an American flag.

“There’s your daddy, child,” Annie said. “Doesn’t he look nice?”

He was wearing his blue serge suit and a white shirt and necktie.

“Yes. He looks nice,” I told Annie, knowing that was what I was supposed to say. But it wasn’t the niceness of the way he was dressed and the way his hair was so carefully combed that impressed me. It was his stillness. I gazed at the motionless hand laid across his chest, thinking no one can lie so still for so long without moving a finger. I waited for the closed eyelids to flutter, for his chest to move in a slight sigh to capture a fresh breath of air. Nothing. His motionlessness was majestic and terrifying. I wanted to be away from that room and never see him like that again.

“Do you want to kiss your daddy?” Annie asked.

“Not now,” I said.

Then I went back to the warmth of the kitchen with Annie, born in slavery, and sat there until bedtime with my mother and Doris while the neighbors came back and stood whispering in the living room.

Everything happened quickly after that.

First the funeral and the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church outside Lovettsville packed with mourners, the congregation snuffling as the preacher led us in singing “In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet in that sweet bye and bye.” My mother had vetoed “We are going down the valley one by one.”

Then her decision to leave Morrisonville. That was reached on Sunday evening immediately after the funeral. For the first time in her life she needed charity. It was extended by one of her younger brothers, Allen, who had settled in the North, in New
Jersey. He offered to take us in. She accepted without hesitation. Her alternative, remaining in Morrisonville dependent on the kindness of Ida Rebecca and her sons, she never considered.

Her decision to give up Audrey took a little longer. That was how she always thought of it afterwards: as “giving up” Audrey. It was the only deed of her entire life for which I ever heard her express guilt. Years later in her old age, she was still saying, “Maybe I made a terrible mistake when I gave up Audrey.”

The giving up of Audrey was done in a time of shock and depression for her. When the undertaker was paid she was left with a few dollars of insurance money, a worthless Model T, several chairs, a table to eat from, a couple of mail-order beds, a crib, three small children, no way to earn a living, and no prospects for the future. The grimness of her situation touched Ida Rebecca’s sense of family duty, and she sent Uncle Irvey to intercede and try to arrange for our security. By then my mother had announced her intention to move away and live with her brother, which was fine with Ida Rebecca, who must have been tempted to say “Good riddance.” Ida Rebecca’s grandchildren were another matter. Uncle Irvey sat in our kitchen and talked about children’s need for a home and about possibilities of placing the three of us here or there among members of the family who could give us one.

My mother rejected the idea immediately. She intended us now to grow up among her people. No matter how dark things looked, she would not break up her family.

Uncle Irvey focused the talk on Audrey, a dimpled blond infant ten months old with a perpetual smile. My Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie, childless after a long marriage, wanted a baby desperately, and loved Audrey, and would happily give her a comfortable home and a good life, which was more than my mother could promise her.

My mother had to concede the point.

Tom and Goldie came to argue their own case. They were persuasive. Like my father, my mother admired Uncle Tom above all Ida Rebecca’s other sons. He was the only one the least bit like Papa, with his Essex automobile, his sparkling white Sunday
shirts, his good cigars, his fine house spotlessly clean. He didn’t drink, either. “Your Uncle Tom is a good man,” was my mother’s judgment.

She admired Aunt Goldie with reservations, possibly because Goldie had succeeded at a task that had defeated my mother. In his youth Tom had been a heavy drinker. After the marriage, Aunt Goldie turned him into a model of sobriety. This was admirable proof of Aunt Goldie’s womanly strengths, but it also mocked my mother’s failure to reform my father. Sensitive to the comparison, my mother preferred to look for shortcomings in Aunt Goldie. She laughed about Aunt Goldie’s passion for spotlessness and sometimes criticized her for playing the duchess among her poor relations in Morrisonville. “Goldie gives herself airs,” she said.

On balance, though, Aunt Goldie had to be recognized as a woman with iron in her, and my mother respected her for that. When she and Uncle Tom arrived in Morrisonville to plead for Audrey, my mother saw the handsome car and the expensive clothes. Could she deny her child a life that offered every comfort with decent, loving “parents”?

A lonely winter was coming, and she looked toward the future from a deepening melancholy. There were too many big decisions to be made. Moving numbly through the ruins of her life, she found it harder and harder to sort out anymore what was worth saving and how best to save it. Goldie helped her reach the decision, saying: “Benny sat in my kitchen just last summer and told us if anything ever happened to him he wanted Tom and me to take care of Audrey.” If God granted them the chance to raise Audrey, she promised, Audrey would always know who her real mother was, and that I was her brother and Doris her sister, and all of us would always be welcome as such in Uncle Tom’s house.

A few days later Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie arrived in Morrisonville again. My mother helped them carry out the crib and the boxes packed with baby clothes. When the car was loaded, my mother bundled Audrey into blankets, carried her outside, handed her to Aunt Goldie, and kissed her good-bye.

When their car was out of sight I went back into the house.
My mother was sitting in the straight-backed oak rocker, the fanciest piece of furniture we owned, staring at the stove.

“When’s Audrey coming back, Mama?”

She didn’t answer. Just sat staring at the stove and rocking for the longest while. I went back out into the road, but she came out right behind me and touched my shoulder.

“Do you want me to fix you a piece of jelly bread?” she asked.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

M
Y
mother brought us to Newark in January 1931. The stock market had collapsed fifteen months earlier, but though business was bad, Washington people who understood these things did not seem alarmed. President Hoover refused to use the scare word “recession” when speaking about the slump. It was merely “a depression,” he said. Nothing to panic about. Good times were just around the corner.

My mother intended to live with her brother Allen a few months until she could find work and rent a place of her own. Allen was twenty-eight, five years younger than she, and blessed with the optimism of youth. He was shocked when she arrived in Newark without Audrey and scolded her gently for breaking up her family.

“Three can starve as cheap as two,” he told her.

Uncle Allen had no intention of starving. He had left school in tenth grade after “Papa” died and had worked since he was fourteen years old, moving from job to job and always improving his income, and he was now confident he could cope with whatever lay ahead.

The daily news stories of deepening hard times did not unnerve him. For Uncle Allen the truly hard times seemed all behind him. He had been a day laborer in a Virginia sawmill crew, fished in New England waters aboard a commercial trawler, jerked sodas in a cigar store, and sold groceries over the counter in Washington. In his early twenties he had moved up to a suit-and-necktie job as a salesman in New York.

BOOK: Growing Up
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