Daddy Was a Number Runner

D
ADDY
W
AS A
N
UMBER
R
UNNER

Louise Meriwether

Foreword by James Baldwin

Afterword by Nellie Y. McKay

Published in 2002 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 1986

Originally published in 1970 by Prentice Hall

© 1970 by Louise Meriwether

Afterword © 1986 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Brief portions of this work appeared, in different form, in
The Antioch Review
and
Negro Digest
.

“Trouble in Mind,” words and music by Richard M. Jones, © 1926, 1937 by MCA Music, a division of MCA, Inc., New York. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

(“What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” Harry Brooks, Andy Razaf, and Thomas Waller, © 1929 by Mills Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meriwether, Louise.

 
Daddy was a number runner / Louise Meriwether ; foreword by James Baldwin ; afterword by Nellie Y. McKay.

 
p. ; cm. — (Contemporary classics by women series)

 
I. Title
  
II. Series

PS3563.E738D3 2002 813'.54 86-9019

eISBN 9781558617087

This novel was written with the assistance of a grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation

CONTENTS

1.
  
Front Cover

2.
  
Title page

3.
  
Copyright page

4.
  
Dedication

5.
  
Foreword by James Baldwin

6.
  
Part 1, Daddy was a Number Runner

7.
  
Chapter 1

8.
  
Chapter 2

9.
  
Chapter 3

10.
  
Chapter 4

11.
  
Chapter 5

12.
  
Chapter 6

13.
  
Chapter 7

14.
  
Part 2, Yoruba's Children

15.
  
Chapter 8

16.
  
Chapter 9

17.
  
Chapter 10

18.
  
Chapter 11

19.
  
Chapter 12

20.
  
Chapter 13

21.
  
Afterword

22.
  
About the Author

23.
  
About the Feminist Press

24.
  
Also Available from the Feminist Press

No man is an island and so I pay my dues to the many people who have encouraged me, one way or another, during the evolution of this book. Thank you Catherine C. Hiatt, George Griffin, James Baldwin, Professor Joseph A. Brandt, The Watts Writers' Workshop, its founder Budd Schulberg and president Harry Dolan, the Altadena Writers' Workshop, Venia Martin, Junita Jackson

and

first, last and forever, my mother and my swinging family who have always loved me.

In memory of my father

Marion Lloyd Jenkins

Foreword by James Baldwin

I received a questionnaire the other day—democracy prides itself on its questionnaires, just as it is endlessly confirmed and misled by its public opinion polls—and the first question was,
Why do you continue to write?
Writers do not like this question, which they hear as
Why do you continue to breathe?
but sometimes one can almost answer it by pointing to the work of another writer. There! one says, triumphantly. Look!
That's
what it's about—to make one see—to lead us back to reality again.

The streets, tenements, fire-escapes, the elders, and the urgent concerns of childhood—or, rather, the helpless intensity of anguish with which one watches one's childhood disappear—are rendered very vividly indeed by Louise Meriwether, in her first novel,
Daddy Was a Number Runner.
We have seen this life from the point of view of a black boy growing into a menaced and probably brief manhood; I don't know that we have ever seen it from the point of view of a black girl on the edge of a terrifying womanhood. And the metaphor for this growing apprehension of the iron and insurmountable rigors of one's life are here conveyed by that game known in Harlem as the numbers, the game which contains the possibility of making a “hit”—the American dream in black-face, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing! Compare the heroine of this book—to say nothing of the landscape—with the heroine of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and you will see to what extent poverty wears a color—and also, as we put it in Harlem, arrives at an
attitude.
By this time, the heroine of
Tree
(whose name was also Francie, if I remember
correctly) is among those troubled Americans, that silent (!) majority which wonders what black Francie wants, and why she's so unreliable as a maid.

Shit,
says Francie, sitting on the stoop as the book ends, looking outward at the land of the free, and trying, with one thin bony black hand to stem the blood which is beginning to rush from a nearly mortal wound. That mono-syllable resounds all over this country, all over the world: it is a judgment on this civilization rendered the more implacable by being delivered by a child. The mortal wound is not physical, the book, so far from being a melodrama, is very brilliantly understated. The wound is the wound made upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being, and, further, in the case of this particular black girl, upon the recognition that the men, one's only hope, have also been cut down and cannot save you. Louise Meriwether wisely ends her book before confronting us with what it means to
jump the broomstick!
—to have a black man and a black woman jump over a broomstick is the way slave-masters laughingly married their slaves to each other, those same white people who now complain that black people have no morals. At the heart of this book, which gives it its force, is a child's growing sense of being one of the victims of a collective rape—for history, and especially and emphatically in the black-white arena, is not the past, it is the present. The great, vast, public, historical violation is also the present, private, unendurable insult, and the mighty force of these unnoticed violations spells doom for any civilization which pretends that the violations are not occurring or that they do not matter or that tomorrow is a lovely day. People cannot be, and, finally, will not be treated in this way. This book should be sent to the White House, and to our earnest Attorney General, and to everyone
in this country able to read—which may, however, alas, be a most despairing statement. We love—the white Americans, I mean—the notion of the little woman behind the great man: perhaps one day, Louise Meriwether will give us
her
version of
What Every Woman Knows.