There were chickens on Granny Smythe’s farm, and a couple of dogs, and almost always a couple of pigs, and the whole place had seemed a much nicer place to live than in a row house in North Philadelphia.
He had asked several times why they had to live in Philadelphia, and Daddy had told him that he didn’t expect him to understand, but that Philadelphia was a place where you could better yourself, get a good education, and make something of yourself.
Bailey remembered being dropped off with Charles David at the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church by Mamma Dear, wearing a crisp white maid’s uniform, so he and Charles David could be cared for, and she could work and make some money and realize her and Daddy’s dream of buying a house that would be theirs, instead of paying rent.
He remembered the beating Daddy had given him with a leather belt when he was in the fifth grade at the Dunbar Elementary School and the teacher had come by the house they were then renting and reported that he had not only been cutting school, but giving her talk-back in class, and running around with the wrong crowd.
Charles David, who was now a welder at the Navy Shipyard, still told that story, said that he got through high school because he had been there when Daddy had taken a strap to Woodrow for cutting school and sassing the teacher at Dunbar, and he was smart enough to learn by vicarious experience.
Woodrow had graduated from Dunbar Elementary School and gone on to graduate from William Penn High School. By then, Daddy had gone from shining shoes inside the Market Street Station to shining them in a barbershop on South Ninth Street, and finally to shining them in the gents’ room of the Rittenhouse Club on Rittenhouse Square. He was on salary then, paid to be in the gents’ room from just before lunch until maybe nine o’clock at night, shining anybody who climbed up on the chair’s shoes for free. It was part of what you got being a member of the Rittenhouse Club, getting your shoes shined for free.
The members weren’t supposed to pay the shoe-shine boy, but, Daddy had told him, maybe about one in four would hand him a quarter or fifty cents anyway, and at Christmas, about three or four of the members whose shoes he had shined all year would wish him “Merry Christmas” and slip him some folding money. Usually it was ten or twenty dollars, but sometimes more. The first one-hundred-dollar bill Woodrow had ever seen in his life one of the Rittenhouse gentlemen had given to his father at Christmas.
That hundred dollars, and just about everything else Daddy and Mamma Dear could scrape together (what was left, in other words, after they’d given the Good Lord’s Tithe to the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, and after they’d put money away to go home to Hartsville at Christmas and maybe to go home for a funeral or a wedding or something like that), had gone into coming up with the money for the down payment on the house, and then paying the house off.
The house was another reason Woodrow really hated Philadelphia. Daddy and Mamma Dear had worked their hearts out, done without, to pay for the thing, and they had just about paid it off when the neighborhood had started to go to hell.
Woodrow did not like to curse, but hell was the only word that fit, and he knew the Good Lord would not think he was being blasphemous.
Trash moved in. Black trash and white trash. Drinkers and adulterers and blasphemers, people who took no pride in the neighborhood or themselves.
It had been bad when Woodrow had finished William Penn High School and was looking for work, it was worse when, at twenty-two, he’d applied for a job on the cops, and it had grown worse ever since. He spent his first two years in the Twenty-second District, learning how to be a cop, and then they had transferred him-they’d asked him first how he would feel about it, to give the devil his due-to the Thirty-ninth District which was then about thirty percent black (they said “Negro” in those days, but it meant the same thing as ‘nigger’ and everybody knew it) and getting blacker.
“You live there, Woodrow,” Lieutenant Grogarty, a red-faced Irishman, had asked him. “How would you feel about working there, with your people?”
At the time, truth to tell, Woodrow had thought it would be a pretty good idea. He had still thought then-he was only two years out of the Academy and didn’t know better-that a police officer could be a force for good, that a good Christian man could help people.
He thought that one of the problems was that most cops were white men, and colored folks naturally resented that. He thought that maybe it would be different if a colored police officer were handling things.
He’d been wrong about that. His being colored hadn’t made a bit of difference. The people he had to deal with didn’t care if he was black or yellow or green. He was The Man. He was the badge. He was the guy who was going to put them in jail. They hated him. Worse, he hadn’t been able to help anyone that he could tell. Unless arresting some punk after he’d hit some old lady in the back of her head, and stolen her groceries and rent money and spent it on loose women, whiskey, or worse could be considered helping.
He had been bitter when he’d finally faced the truth about this, even considered quitting the cops, finding some other job. He didn’t know what other kind of job he could get-all he’d ever done after high school before he came on the cops was work unskilled labor jobs-but he thought there had to be something.
He had had a long talk about it with the Pastor Emeritus of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Joshua Steele-that fine old gentleman and servant of the Good Lord was still alive then, eat up with cancer but not willing to quit-and Dr. Steele had told him that all the Bible said was that if you prayed, the Good Lord would point out a Christian man’s path to him. Nothing was said about that path being easy.
“You ask the Good Lord, Woodrow, if He has other plans for you, and if so, what. If He wants you to do something else, Woodrow, He’ll let you know. You’ll know, boy. In your heart, you’ll know.”
Woodrow, after prayerful consideration, had decided that if the Good Lord wanted him to do something else, he would have let him know. And since he didn’t get a sign or anything, it was logical to conclude that the Lord was perfectly happy having him do what he was doing.
Which wasn’t so strange, he came to decide. While he wasn’t able to change things much, or help a lot of people, every once in a while he was able to do something for somebody.
And maybe locking up punks who were beating up and robbing old people was really helping. If they were in jail, they at least weren’t robbing and beating up on people.
Three months later, Woodrow met Joellen, who had come up from Georgia right after she finished high school. He never told her-she might have laughed at him-but he took meeting her as a sign from the Good Lord that he had done the right thing. Joellen was like a present from the Good Lord. And so was Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Jr., when he come along twenty months later.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Woodrow didn’t know if he could have handled Mamma Dear and Daddy being taken into heaven within four months of each other if it hadn’t been for Joellen, and with her already starting to show what the Good Lord was giving them: Woodrow Wilson, Junior.
That meant two more trips back home to Hartsville. Mamma Dear had told Daddy in the hospital that she had been paying all along for a burial policy, sixty-five cents a week for twenty years and more, that he didn’t know about, and that she wanted him to spend the money to send her back to Hartsville and bury her beside her Mamma, Granny Smythe. She didn’t want to be buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beside strangers.