be sent somewhere: to separate relatives, suddenly, in the
middle of the night. But sometimes we were allowed to stay
home. A black girl would put us in the bath together and wash
us and put us to bed. My brother and I would play and splash
water and the black girl would wash us and smile, but she was
always tentative, never belonging there. She was always young,
there were so many, even I knew she was young, not as old as
any other big people I had ever seen, and for days on end she
would be the only one to talk to us or touch us or do anything
with us. They were nice to us but never said much and none
stayed too long because we were too poor to pay for help and
eventually we always had to be farmed out separately to one
relative or another. The house of our parents would be dank
with disease and despair, my father’s frenetic dinner served so
fast because he had to get to his second job, the only minutes
we could even see him or hear his voice, and the only one who
talked to us or was nice to us was the black girl who put us in
the bath together where we played and played, after we had
our argument about who had to sit on the end with the faucet,
and she put us to bed: and I always wanted her to stay and be
my friend or at least talk and say things I could understand
like other people did. No one stayed long enough so that I
remember her name because we were funny kinds of orphans:
mother wasn’t dead but dying; father loved us but couldn’t be
there; the relatives split us up so we were always alone in
strange houses surrounded by strange ways of doing things
and adults who weren’t as nice to us as our father was and
they thought that if they were your grandmother or aunt it
made being there less lonely: which it did not. They must have
been teenagers, so much bigger than we were that they seemed
23
like adults. They must have been poorer than even we were.
They were black and we were white: and whoever it is I remember, on your knees by the bathtub, as the blond-haired baby boy and I splashed and squealed, as you dabbed and
rubbed, whoever it is: where are you now? and why were you
there at all? and why couldn’t you stay? and while mother lay
dying, you were kind.
*
Once mother was hiring the girl herself. She must have been a
little better then, standing up in the living room, dressed in
regular clothes not sick clothes, without my father there or any
doctor. I came in and there were lots of women and my mother
talked to them one at a time but all in the same room and one
was white and the rest were black and my mother said who
would you like to have and I said hire the white one.
*
I had never seen a white one so I said hire the white one.
*
Hire the white one, I said, maybe seven years old. Hire the
white one. My dying mother hit me.
*
When we had to move from Camden because my mother
couldn’t walk steps or breathe and was frail and dying, the
neighbors on our block got sullen and banded together and
came and said don’t you sell to blacks. Our next-door neighbor
got sullen and threatening and said don’t you sell to blacks.
These are our friends, said my parents. We will do what’s
right, don’t you worry, said my father ambiguously. We sold
to Polish Catholics, blond, with heavy foreign accents. Not
Jews but not black. The best offer, my father swore. The
neighbors were chilly anyway but soon they all moved. The
blacks were coming closer. So they sold to blacks and moved
out.
*
One of the houses where I had to stay was my uncle’s: marriage, not blood. He was richer than us, a judge, a reform democratic politician even though he had friends in the Klan,
and he was vulgar, and I hated him, and the reform democrats
won and my uncle and his friends looted the city and got rich
and that’s why the blacks in Camden are so poor.
24
I would be delivered to his house and his cronies would
come and they would talk about the niggers and even when
they were the government of the city they were planning to
move out to somewhere else and they planned to steal especially from the school system, or that was the part I heard: they stole equipment from Head Start programs and looted school
equipment and cheated on school-lunch programs and left the
blacks to die and called them niggers and my uncle had a bar
where he sold the niggers liquor and ridiculed them for getting
drunk and bragged that he could sell them horseshit and they
would drink it. He had friends who were friends of Nixon and
friends who were friends of the Klan. Now Camden is a ghost
town with black ghosts on those streets where we played our
real childhood games. I had a divine childhood, even with the
woman dying, and father away day and night working, and
death coming suddenly, and my brother and me separated over
and over, orphans in different places for years at a time: I ran
in those streets and played hide-and-seek and Red Rover Red
Rover and jumped rope and played fish and washed my doll’s
hair with the other girls outside on the steps and sat behind
cars near telephone poles and on strange days played witch: it
was divine until I was torn away from it: and I walked down
Catholic streets and black streets without anyone knowing and
I loved Joe and Nat and Michaeclass="underline" then the vultures moved in
when I had gone away, but I heard their plans and I know
what they did: and the wonderful neighbors on the block where
I lived hated blacks: and I said hire the white one at seven
years old: and the vultures picked the bones of the city and left
it plundered. Oh, Nat, where are you? Did you weep or laugh
or understand?
25
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
We were very tiny, in the third grade— how small are seven-
and eight-year-olds? — the little girls from my block. We were
on a big street not too far from the school, one you had to
walk down. It was a rich street, completely different from ours.
There was no brick. There were big windows in the fronts of
the houses and each one had a different front, some rounded
or curved. There were fences around the few very nice steps up
to the door, ornamentation on the outside, around the
windows or on the facade, wide sidewalks, huge trees lining
the street so it was always shady even in the early afternoon