Since the men went to war, there was never
enough of anything for Judy and her mother, Margaret, which is how they came
to be free Negro women relegated to one of the dozens of so-called slave
markets for domestic workers in New York City. For about two years now, her
husband, Herbert, had been overseas. He was one half of a twin, her best friend
from high school, and her first and only love, if you could call it that.
Judy had moved with her parents from the
overcrowded Harlem tenements to the South Bronx midway through her sophomore
year of high school. She was an only child. Her father, James, doted on her in
part because he and Margaret had tried and tried when they were back home in
the South for a baby, but Judy was the only one who made it, stayed alive. He
treasured her, called her a miracle. Margaret would cut her eyes at him,
complain that he was making her soft.
The warmth Judy felt at home was in stark
contrast to the way she felt at school, where she often sat alone during lunch.
When they were called upon in classes to work in groups of two or three, she
excused herself and asked for the wooden bathroom pass, so that she often worked
alone instead of facing the humiliation of not being chosen.
She had not grown up with friends nor had
Margaret, so it almost felt normal to live mostly inside herself this way.
There were girls from the block who looked at her with what she read as pity.
“Nice skirt,” one would say, almost reluctantly.
“Thanks,” she’d say, a little shy to be
noticed. “Mother made it.”
Small talk was more painful than silence.
How had the other Negro girls managed to move with such ease here, after living
almost exclusively with other Negroes down in Harlem? Someone up here was as
likely to have a brogue accent as a Spanish one. She didn’t mind the mingling
of the races, it was just new: a shock to the system, both in the streets she
walked to go to school and to the market but also in the halls of Morris High
School.
Judy had been eating an apple, her back
pressed against the cafeteria wall when she saw Herbert. He was long faced with
a square jaw and round, black W.E.B. Du Bois glasses.
“That’s all you’re having for lunch, it’s
no wonder you’re so slim,” he said, like he was continuing a conversation they
had been having for a while. Rich coming from him, with his lanky gait, his
knobby knees pressing against his slacks.
A pile of assorted foods rose from his blue
tray, tantalizing her. A sandwich thick with meat and cheese and lettuce,
potato chips off to the side, a sweating bottle of Coke beside that. For years,
they had all lived so lean that it had become a shock to suddenly see some
people making up for lost time with their food. Judy finished chewing her apple
and gathered her skirt closer to her. “You offering to share your lunch with
me?”
Herbert gave her a slight smile. “Surely
you didn’t think all this was for me?”
They were fast friends after that. It was
easy for her to make room for a man who looked at her without pity. There had
always been room in her life for someone like him: one who saw, who comforted,
who provided. Her father, James, grumbled disapproval when Herbert asked to
court, but Herbert came with sunflowers and his father’s moonshine.
“What kind of man do you take me for?”
James asked, eyeing Herbert’s neat, slim tie and sniffing sharply to inhale
the obnoxious musk of too much aftershave.
“A man who wants his daughter to be loved
completely,” Herbert said. “The way that I love her.”
Their courting began. Judy had no other
offers and didn’t want any. That they had James’s blessing before he died from
a heart attack and just as they were getting ready to graduate from high school
only softened the blow of his loss a little. As demure and to herself as she
usually was, burying her father turned Judy more inward than Herbert expected.
In his death, she seemed to retreat into herself the way that she had been when
he approached her that lunch hour. To draw her out, to bring her back, he
proposed marriage.
She balked. “Can I belong to someone else?”
Judy asked Margaret, telling her that Herbert asked for her hand. “I hardly
feel like I belong to myself.”
“This is what women do,” Margaret said immediately.
The ceremony was small, with a reception
that hummed with nosy neighbors stopping over to bring slim envelopes of money
to gift to the bride and her mother. The older Negro women in the neighborhood,
who wore the same faded floral housedresses as Margaret except for today, when
she put one of her two special dresses—a radiant sky blue that made her amber
eyes look surrounded in gold light—visited her without much to say, just dollar
bills folded in their pockets, slipped into her grateful hands. They were not
exactly her friends; she worked too much to allow herself leisure. But some of
them were widows, too. Like her, they had survived much to stand proudly on
special days like this.
They settled into the plans they made for
their life together. He joined the reserves and, in the meantime, became a Pullman
porter. Judy began work as a seamstress at the local dry cleaner. Whatever
money they didn’t have, they could make up with rent parties until the babies
came.
Now all of that was on hold, her life
suspended by the announcement at the movies that the US was now at war. The
news was hard enough to process, but Herbert’s status in the reserves meant
that this was his time to exit. She braced herself when he stood up to leave
the theater and report for duty, kissing her goodbye with a rushed press of his
mouth to her forehead.
Judy and Margaret had been left to fend for
themselves. There had been some money from Herbert in the first year, but then
his letters—and the money—slowed to a halt. Judy and Margaret received some
relief from the city, but Judy thought it an ironic word to use, since a few
dollars to stretch and apply to food and rent was not anything like a relief.
It meant she was always on edge, doing what needed doing to keep them from
freezing to death or joining the tent cities down along the river.
Her hours at the dry cleaner were cut, so
she and Margaret reluctantly joined what an article in The Crisis described
as the “paper bag brigade” at the Bronx Slave Market. The market was made up of
Negro women, faces heavy for want of sleep. They made their way to the corners
and storefronts before dawn, rain or shine, carrying thick brown paper bags
filled with gloves, assorted used work clothes to change into, rolled over
themselves and softened with age in their hands. A few of them were lucky
enough to have a roll with butter, in the unlikely event of a lunch break.
Judy and Margaret stood for hours if the
boxes or milk crates were occupied, while they waited for cars to approach.
White women drivers looked them over and called out to their demands: wash my
windows and linens and curtains. Clean my kitchen. A dollar for the day, maybe
two, plus carfare.
The lists were always longer than the day.
The rate was always offensively low. Margaret had been on the market for
longer than Judy; she knew how to negotiate. Judy did not want to barter her
time. She resented being an object for sale.
“You can’t start too low, even when you’re
new,” Margaret warned Judy when her daughter joined her at Simpson Avenue and
170th Street. “Aim higher first. They’ll get you to some low amount anyhow. But
it’s always going to be more than what you’re offered.”
Everything about the Bronx Slave Market,
this congregation of Negro women looking for low-paying cleaning work, was a
futile negotiation. An open-air free-for-all, where white women in gleaming
Buicks and Fords felt just fine offering pennies on the hour for several hours
of hard labor. Sometimes the work was so much, the women ended up spending the
night, only to wake up in the morning and be asked to do more work—this time
for free.
Judy and Margaret could not afford to work
for free. Six days a week, in biting winter cold that made their knees numb or
sweltering heat rising from the pavement baking the arches of their feet, they
wandered to the same spot. After these painful experiences, day after day all
week, Judy and Margaret gathered at the kitchen table on Sundays after church
to count up the change that could cover some of the gas and a little of the
rent. It was due in two days, and they were two dollars short. Unless they
could make a dollar each, they would not make rent.
Rent was sometimes hard to come up with,
even when James was alive, but when he died, their income became even more
unreliable. They didn’t even have money enough for a decent funeral. He was
buried in a pine box in the Hart Island potter’s field. James was the only
love of Margaret’s life, and still, when he was gone, all she said to Judy was,
“There’s still so much to do.”
Judy’s deepest wish for Margaret was for
her to rest and enjoy a few small pleasures. What she overheard between her
parents as a child were snippets and pieces of painful memories. Negroes
lynched over rumors. Girls taken by men to do whatever they wanted. “We don’t
need a lot,” she heard Margaret say once, “just enough to leave this place and
start over.”
Margaret’s family, like James’s, had only
known the South. Some had survived the end of slavery by some miracle, but the
Reconstruction era was a different kind of terror. Margaret was the eldest of
five children, James was the middle child of eight. A younger sibling left for
Harlem first, and sent letters glowing about how free she felt in the north.
So, even once Margaret convinced James they needed to take Judy someplace like
that, it felt to Judy that she always had her family in the South and the way
they had to work to survive on her mind.
Judy fantasized about rest for herself and
for her mother. How nice it would be to plan a day centered around tea, folding
their own napkins, ironing a treasured store-bought dress for a night out. A
day when she could stand up straight, like a flower basking in the sun, instead
of hunched over work.
Other people noticed that they worked
harder and more than they should as women, as human beings. Judy thought
Margaret maybe didn’t realize another way to be was possible. So she tried to
talk about the Bronx Slave Market article in The Crisis with her mother.
Margaret refused to read a word or even hear about it. “No need reading about
my life in no papers,” she said.
Refusing to know how they were being
exploited didn’t keep it from being a problem. But once Judy knew, she couldn’t
keep herself from wanting more. Maybe that was why Margaret didn’t want to hear
it. She didn’t want to want more than what was in front of her.
Herbert’s companionship had fed her this
kind of ambition and hope. His warm laughter, the way she could depend on him
to talk her into hooky once in a while, to crash a rowdy rent party and dance
until the sun came up, even if it got her grounded and lectured, was—especially
when James died—the only escape hatch she could find from the box her mother
was determined to fit her future inside. So, when Herbert surprised her at a
little traveling show in Saint Mary’s Park, down on one knee with his
grandmother’s plain wedding band, she only hesitated inside when she said yes.
It wasn’t the time to try and explain that there was something in her yawning
open, looking for something else, but maybe she could find that something with
Herbert. Her mother told her to stop wasting her time dreaming and to settle
down.
At least marrying her high school buddy
meant she could move on from under Margaret’s constant, disapproving gaze. They
had been saving up for new digs when Herbert was drafted—but now that was all
put on hold.
The dream had been delicious while it felt
like it was coming true. Judy and Herbert were both outsiders, insiders within
their universe of two. Herbert was the only rule follower in a bustling house
full of lawbreaking men and boys; Judy, the only child of a shocked widow who
found her purpose in bone-tiring work. Poverty pressed in on them from every
corner of the Bronx, and neither Judy nor Herbert felt they belonged there. But
they did belong to each other, and that wasn’t nothing.
Excerpted from Women of the Post
by Joshunda Sanders, Copyright © 2023 by Joshunda Sanders. Published by Park
Row Books.
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