four• Strained Mercies

What I had yet to learn is that the consequences of suicide are simply too risky—you never know what’s in your future that you might miss.

But Divine Providence must have intervened that day as I stood tottering on the toilet by the window, grieving the loss of my mother, my dignity, my will to live. All that was left in me was a determination not to swallow my father’s castor oil. Through the bolted bathroom door I could hear a neighbor, no doubt alerted by my screams, talking my father down from his rage. By the sound of the muffled tenor, I suspected it was kindly Mr. Toney, also a refugee from Monroe: his son Robert would, decades later, become a rear admiral in the navy and president of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce.

I waited to emerge until I was sure my father’s maelstrom had subsided. Sullenly he put away his belt and the castor oil and reverted to ignoring me. After that clash, we ceased all conversation and he rarely came home at night. I could not possibly understand the impotence he must have felt as a black man in the 1940s, just as he could not fathom the deep recesses of my adolescent anguish.

But the encounter steeled my resolve to find an escape hatch—a way out of this apartment bursting with the menace of men. My hopes soared when my Aunt Pearline and Uncle Ezra, who had finally received that elusive two-thousand-dollar settlement check from his lawsuit, asked whether I could take a streetcar ride with them to Berkeley to look at a house for sale. We disembarked from the Grove Street line and strolled a few blocks down Ashby Avenue, bracketed with cheery single-story wood-framed homes surrounded by small green lawns and brightly colored roses.

“Look how many are vacant,” my aunt murmured, looking up and down the street.

“It’s a shame what’s happened to those people,” my uncle replied, putting his hand on her back to hurry her along. They knew that the vacancies were the result of the U.S. government forcing Japanese families to relocate to internment camps for the duration of World War II. Soon the former homes of families with names such as Ito and Kobayashi were up for grabs, and cheap. Who could blame my aunt and uncle for lunging at the chance to own their own home for the first time in their lives? And who could fault me for presuming that they had brought me along because they intended for me to join them in this bargain paradise—a two-bedroom home with a living room, dining room, and cozy back yard?

But my aspirations came crashing back to earth when I overheard my uncle explain to the real estate agent that this house would be perfect because they were adopting a teenage relative’s baby. The significance of my presence was suddenly crystal clear: I wasn’t to live in this house with them, I was present merely to help them read and decipher the real estate documents.

I tried not to dampen my aunt and uncle’s celebration when they signed the papers; but that night, as I climbed the steps back to our apartment in the projects on Poplar Street, I felt as though the air were hissing out of my spirits, leaving nothing behind but deflated emptiness.

Not long after my thirteenth birthday, I received word through an intermediary that my mother was safe and wanted to rendezvous with me in downtown Oakland. This time I stamped out any embers of hope that she would reclaim me. When I went to meet my mother, I told myself to expect nothing so I couldn’t be disappointed.

She was subdued, although she did say she was sorry for leaving without telling me good-bye. “I just wanted to be sure you’re getting along all right,” she said.

She explained that she was sharing her own place with a man named Nathaniel, who also worked for the Southern Pacific and was a dining car waiter on trains that ran from Oakland to Chicago. Rather obviously she had no intention of taking me with her—after all, the apartment they had taken near Oakland’s deFremery Park was a tiny studio. But when she didn’t offer, I asked. Not that I disclosed the details of what I had suffered in her absence, but perhaps she sensed that I had to get out. In any event, I was a complication she would have to deal with.

During the time I was staying in that Sixteenth Street studio with my mother and Nathaniel, I experienced my first real brush with death—and ironically, it was unintentional. We used the small gas kitchen stove to heat the apartment. One afternoon when I was home alone and the air was chilly, I knelt down, struck a match, and opened the oven door. It blew off its hinges as a blast of heat knocked me back against the cabinet, the door still in my hand. My face was scorching while I frantically slapped at the sparks coming from my blouse. I don’t remember crying out, and I barely remember a neighbor bursting into the apartment and wrapping my head in a towel to cover my singed and smoldering hair.

The skin on my face peeled off in sheets for days, but miraculously, the accident would leave no permanent damage. My wounds, however, took weeks to heal. And they led me to an oasis shimmering in the midst of my desolation: while recuperating, alone and bored out of my mind, I wandered over to the deFremery Park Recreation Center.

Chances are no one who grew up in my corner of West Oakland in the 1940s and ’50s could ever forget the deFremery Center. An enormous Victorian mansion with its own swimming pool and basketball courts, it had been a banker’s estate and USO headquarters before it reverted to the city in 1946. For the first time ever, city officials hired a black woman to run its youth programs.

Dorothy Seels had earned a master’s degree in French from Howard University, and she was thrilled by the prospect of instilling culture and a love of learning in the neighborhood’s boys and girls. Shortly after she was hired, she scoped out her charges by slipping into a local concert featuring the popular Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers. Miss Seels didn’t like what she observed: the room was too dark; the dancing was far too intimate; the girls displayed atrocious posture; and the boys would leave them stranded on the dance floor as soon as the music stopped—not to mention their improper penchant for slipping their hands under their dates’ coats. deFremery’s new recreation director was mortified, and she left the concert determined to teach social graces.

She tried to gauge the neighborhood’s interest in a charm-school class— and got an emphatic “no!” So she repositioned the idea as a class in modeling. “The word,” she would later recall, “was like magic. Now, they really wanted a modeling class.”

But that was merely the beginning. The rec center began hosting dances (with appropriate lighting and “proper” dance steps), talent shows, synchronized swimming exhibitions, museum field trips, moonlight picnics, hayrides, service clubs, job fairs, piano lessons, and dozens of other activities designed to educate and enrich the youth of West Oakland. It must have worked—from 1947 to 1955, the juvenile delinquency rate in West Oakland plummeted. Many of my neighbors who later became luminaries would credit the deFremery influence: Ron Dellums, who later became Berkeley city councilman, congressman, and Oakland mayor; Ruth and Anita Pointer, whose Pointer Sisters act would throw more than a dozen songs up to the Top 20 on the Billboard chart; and Bill Russell, from my hometown of Monroe, who ultimately became a five-time winner of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award as center for the Boston Celtics. Russell later extolled deFremery’s staff for teaching him life’s most valuable lessons. “For example,” he said, “they were the first ones to inform me that ‘mother’ was a word by itself.”

As another beneficiary-to-be of the deFremery magic, I arrived wearing sunglasses and a scarf designed to conceal my healing burn scars. I was so self-conscious as I made my way across the deFremery Park lawn and up the steps of the mansion that I almost turned back. Every room in the rambling structure buzzed with energy. But when I crossed the creaky threshold, I knew I had found a home away from home. Immediately to the right of the front entrance was a cozy reading room filled with books. Upstairs, young people were engrossed in a dominoes tournament. Downstairs, they were playing ping-pong and pool.

Soon Rose Mary and I joined the deFremery SUBDEBS—a club for girls too young to be debutantes. We would promenade around the neighborhood in SUBDEB club jackets, which looked like letterman jackets with hearts on them.

Spending as much time as possible at the rec center, I volunteered to help Miss Seels prepare for craft classes. By now I had my formula down to a science: Make yourself useful, Belva, I would tell myself. That way some adult might actually want you around. Who knows, maybe they’ll even learn to love you.

I deployed the same strategy trying to endear myself to my mother. I wrote checks for her, paid her bills, and ran her errands, particularly if it enabled her to avoid encounters with intimidating sales clerks. One day she dispatched me to Woolworth’s.

“I’d like to buy some blues records...,” I began to explain to the snooty white salesgirl.

“I don’t understand you,” she said, giving me a blank stare.

“I’m looking for blues...,” I began again.

“Do you mean blue dye?” she interrupted, addressing me as though I were six years old. “Blue clothes? Blue what?”

Given that we were conversing over the record counter, my purpose was hardly a mystery. I walked out—and by the time I walked home, I was fuming. My mother just chuckled: “Well, lucky I’ve got you to do the talking to those clerks for me.”

Meanwhile my father had gotten wind of the fact that Nathaniel was living with my mother and me, and the family warned us that trouble was brewing. For reasons that still elude me, the three of us descended upon my Aunt Pearline and Uncle Ezra and their new daughter.

So I wound up living in the Ashby Avenue house in Berkeley after all, sleeping on the dining room floor.

Months passed. And then one Sunday morning, my father showed up on the front porch—with a fully loaded gun—threatening to kill my mother and Nathaniel. Perhaps he knew what I didn’t know: my mother was pregnant with Nathaniel’s child. As fate would have it, Nathaniel wasn’t even there.

Uncle Ezra tried to calm my father down and disarm him, which seemed only to make him more livid. My Aunt Pearline pleaded with him to put away the gun.

My mother hid in a closet.

And as none of the adults seemed to be producing a solution, I took matters into my own hands and called the police.

When the squad car rolled up, my father looked frantically for a place to hide the gun, ended up stashing it in his pocket, and then cranked his charm up to its full wattage. The gravity of the situation was starting to sink in, both to my father and to me.

“We received a report of a man with a gun. Who made the call?” the officer asked. We all froze in silence. “Who made that call?” he repeated in a louder voice.

I stepped from behind the screen door. “I called,” I said. “I was scared someone was going to get hurt so I made the call.”

The policeman zeroed his interrogation in on me. “So who has the gun?” he demanded.

I couldn’t look up. With my eyes focused on the planks of the porch floor, I raised my arm and pointed in the direction of my father.

“Officer, this was nothing—just a little family quarrel, but it’s all fine now.”

The police weren’t having it. They searched him, found the gun, secured him with handcuffs, and transported him to jail.

I went to the backyard and sat on the steps the rest of the day. No one came to scold me, or comfort me. I had no idea when I would see my father again, but I had no doubt there would be hell to pay for what I had done.

Across the country, seventeen states maintained segregated public schools in 1948. California was not one of those, so I enrolled at Berkeley High as one of about three hundred blacks among its three thousand students. Because the town had a single public high school, teenagers from posh hills and the hardscrabble flatlands shared the same classes. But it was academically rigorous and progressive, sitting only a few blocks from the edge of the famed University of California campus. The teachers were nurturing and caring; and I tried to soak up everything I could. Of course I missed Rose Mary, who remained in our old neighborhood and attended Oakland Tech High School. I made new friends at Berkeley High, but I refused to hang out at the Smoke Shack with the fast black girls who streaked their hair and gathered at lunchtime to kiss the air with smoke rings. Most of the girls who were regulars had deep ties to South Berkeley—their families owned their own homes, and their parents held good, middle-class jobs. My mother and I enjoyed neither.

As a newcomer to Berkeley High, I had a hard time finding my place. I soon was adopted by a group of white girls, opening a window for me to glimpse what it was really like to be middle class in white America. The world these girls lived in included theater, opera, museums, private dance lessons after school, tennis with their dads on the weekends. I had known about these things only from movies—now I was befriended by people who actually lived that way.

Never had I been treated so equal to white students. Some of my classmates invited me to their houses to study for algebra and calculus exams, and the color-blind casting of the theater department permitted me to appear in several roles on stage. My star turn as Portia in The Merchant of Venice was a de facto illustration that our drama teacher did not strain the quality of mercy: suffice it to say my thespian skills left a lot to be desired. But I studied Shakespeare along with business communication, because I felt the need to improve my English skills and had a lot of catching up to do.

Even Berkeley was no utopia of racial harmony, however. I occasionally walked with my white friends to their social dancing classes and clubs, but then we parted ways. We all tacitly understood that our friendship did not extend to my dancing with white boys or breaking the color restrictions at their whites-only private clubs.

For a brief interlude, I tried playing basketball. I hadn’t considered that a girl who wore eyeglasses and stood barely five feet tall might not be a natural at the game. But then I joined the bowling team; and although I had never bowled before, I set out to conquer the art of bowling strikes. Scraping together enough money for the bowling shoes and lane rental required for team practices was hard, but my job dusting and stocking shelves at the South Berkeley Five and Dime paid off. One Saturday I decided to splurge on a private session so I could improve my approach to the starting line and practice a smooth release of the ball.

The bowling alley was quiet that afternoon as I excitedly approached the check-in desk for a lane assignment. No one else was at the counter while I waited, money in hand, for someone to help me. I tried to catch the attention of the alley employees, but they ignored me. Minutes ticked by. Finally a man strode over.

“You have to go,” he declared. “We don’t let Negroes bowl here.”

What he said made no sense. I told him I had the money. He merely stared at me.

“I bowl here every week with the Berkeley High Bowling Club,” I explained.

“I don’t care,” the man retorted. “You can’t bowl here now, so just move along.”

Words failed me. I didn’t know what to say or how to fight back. I looked around to see if anyone else heard him. After all, this was Berkeley, not Monroe, Louisiana. But there were no apparent witnesses, or at least no one willing to back me up. Crushed and confused, I turned around and walked out the door.

As always, I told no one. I didn’t know whom to tell anyway. Instead I focused on my original intent, which was to better my game. If I couldn’t bowl in an alley, our driveway would have to do. I chalked an outline of a bowling lane on our concrete driveway, lined up cans of Del Monte green beans and creamed corn as substitute pins, and began to practice every day after school. One afternoon when I was deep in perfecting my back swing, I heard a voice ask, “What are you doing?”

It was our bowling club sponsor, Miss Entz. She had been driving by in the stop-and-go Ashby Avenue traffic and saw me at work.

Startled, I stammered out that I was practicing.

“I’m just curious as to why you are bowling on concrete.”

I took a deep breath, and then all the pent-up hurt over my ejection from the bowling alley poured out of me.

She was quiet for a moment, pursing her lips. “Well,” she said, “we shall see about that.”

At our regular bowling alley team practice a few days afterward, Miss Entz pulled me aside. “You can practice here anytime you want. And let me know if you are ever turned away at a public place in town, ever. From now on, your bowling is on me, because you are so good at the game.”

Unbeknownst to me, she had talked to the school principal and they had agreed that all Berkeley High activities would be pulled from the bowling alley unless the management agreed to welcome all students at all times. Faced with a potential boycott, the management backed down.

I was speechless. Nobody had ever stuck up for me before. I was struck by the power of one woman to confront bigotry head-on and defeat it. She had just given me one of the most critical lessons of my life.

Typically, mothers worry about their teenage daughters accidentally getting pregnant. My own family legacy was sufficient to keep me away from any boy who wanted to “go too far.” Instead, I worried about my mother’s pregnancies. By the time I entered twelfth grade, she had given birth to two babies by Nathaniel, only eleven months apart. Then he up and left.

I admired how she carried on. Without complaint she took care of her children during the day and worked the graveyard shift cleaning dining cars at the Southern Pacific rail yard. I was responsible for the babies after she left for work at eleven at night. Aunt Pearline supervised the children from the time I left for school every morning until my mother returned home. I honestly have no idea when my mother slept.

In the spring of 1951, I became the first person in my immediate family to graduate from high school. My aunt came to my graduation. I wasn’t surprised that my mother was too busy or exhausted to attend—I understood her burdens.

At Berkeley High, I completed what was called a double major; mine was both a business track and a college prep track. All my friends were planning to go off to college, and I was overjoyed when I received my admissions letter to San Francisco State University. I wanted to become a junior high school teacher, not only to kindle a love of knowledge in students, but also to give them the extra emotional support that I had sorely lacked. I was pursuing college on my own, however, without the involvement of family or counselors. My naïveté was about to cost me dearly. I had missed the deadlines for scholarship applications, and I suddenly was confronted with an urgent need for three hundred dollars to pay for registration fees and books. In our cramped household on Ashby Avenue, requesting that money would have been like asking for a million bucks.

I was earning money myself—both at the Five and Dime and by assisting Mrs. Davis, our next-door neighbor, who ran the hatcheck operation at Sweets Ballroom and also waited on guests at elaborate soirees in the hills. She was a nice woman, but she regarded my family as vaguely disreputable and didn’t quite approve of me or the amount of time I had begun to spend with her oldest son, Frank. But she needed a hard worker, and I knew how to make myself useful. My job was to retrieve dirty plates and empty the ashtrays.

But some of the money I made was channeled into helping pay for utilities and food on Ashby Avenue. None of us were maintaining a savings account. So, before long I had extinguished every other possible option for college financing. And then, with the greatest reluctance, I called my father.

We had barely spoken since my earlier phone call had sent him to jail. He was locked away for a few months, was released, and eventually ended up working as a carpenter. He was making a comfortable living for himself and for the woman who would become his new wife—he could take one look at a space and build a cabinet that would fit it perfectly.

I told him I had gotten myself into college and explained that unless he would lend me a few hundred dollars, I could not go. There was an awkward pause.

“I don’t have it,” he said. “If I were you, I’d get a real job. Plan ahead. You’ve got the brains.”

And in an instant, my dream of college evaporated.

That summer, as Rose Mary and my Berkeley High friends prepared for college, I passed the civil service exam and was assigned to a GS-2 typist position at the Naval Supply Center. My mother and Aunt Pearline were flabbergasted that I wasn’t as overjoyed as they were by my good fortune.

So when Mrs. Davis’s son Frank dropped out of college, joined the air force, and asked me to marry him, I agreed. While my friends were pledging sororities and studying for midterms, I clocked in and out at my typist station, and I spent my weekends shopping for wedding and bridesmaids’ dresses.

We set the date for New Year’s Day 1952.

I was eighteen years old; and except for my future husband, I had kissed only one boy. Rose Mary and my other friends threw a bachelorette party on the eve of the wedding, and they were utterly mystified that I sobbed all night long. All I remember saying is, “I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to get married...”