Like Water Slipping Through My Fingers

By Phyllistine Goode Poole

“No use living if you can’t be happy,” says the main character, Delores. Her words are prophetic. In the meantime, free-spirited Delores works hard at having fun and brings the author, her teenage babysitter, Phyllis, along for the ride. Delores is not the kind of woman Phyllis' protective father and grandfather, a preacher with an eye for the ladies, approve of. That is, she is not a sweet little demure housewife. When her father-in-law complains that she is not acting like a lady, Delores counters, “To hell with ladies!” The author takes the reader on an initial joyful and unconventional journey and along divergent paths of family relationships, Jim Crowism, tragedy, loss, and love. The author says this book is payment for the debt she owes to Delores for her caring sisterhood when she was a young girl suffering a great loss and for the good times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669871859

Book preview

1972

The Call: Oh My God!

On a cold, gray afternoon in late December in Greensboro, North Carolina, I had just set my luggage down on my bedroom floor when Mama called me to the den and handed me the telephone receiver. She looked puzzled. It’s Ray, she said. He sounds strange.

Uncle Ray’s voice rushed at me. Phyllis, she did it! She did it, Phyllis! I knew he meant Delores.

I had returned from visiting relatives in Brooklyn over the Christmas holidays. I had gone to New York specially to see Delores. Twelve hours earlier, Uncle Ray had seen me off when I boarded a bus at the Port Authority bus terminal, but he wasn’t calling to see if I’d made it home safely. I was still stunned by what I had discovered about Delores when a greater shock came through the telephone line.

I don’t remember what I said or how I reacted when he told me what had happened, but whatever I said or did startled Mama. She had gone into the kitchen and rushed back into the den. What happened? she asked and took the receiver from me.

Ray, what’s going on? What happened? Oh, God! Oh my God!

Delores had climbed, with twenty-three-month-old Patricia in her arms, to the roof of the eight-story apartment building where she lived and threw the baby off. Then she jumped. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, Lola, had followed her to the roof and saw it all. It happened at three o’clock this afternoon, Uncle Ray said. They couldn’t move the bodies for an hour. They had to find Jimmy. He was out on his (postal) route.

Lord, have mercy! We had tiptoed around Delores, and I hadn’t even thought to pray.

Delores’s husband, my cousin Jimmy, now retired from the post office, and the four surviving children, now grown, have moved from Brooklyn—Lola, James, Diane, and Gerald to North Carolina. I see Jimmy, Diane, and Gerald from time to time; but we don’t talk about Delores. I can’t, but I want the children and grandchildren to know about the old Delores I knew.

Why had Delores taken her life and also her baby’s life? If they don’t know why, maybe her husband, children, and grandchildren can find some answers in these pages. This is her story—and some of mine.

1963

Pop Said She Wasn’t All She Should Be: That Sounded Good to Me

This story began on an eavesdropping spring night in Lowell, North Carolina, in 1963. After we children had gone to bed and they thought we were asleep, Mama and Daddy were in the kitchen discussing something they didn’t want us to hear as they sometimes did. As I sometimes did, I lay awake listening in the semidarkness on the bottom bunk in the bedroom I shared with my sister Jean. A thin stream of light and their words filtered in through the cracked door.

Daddy was telling Mama why he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to go to New York. My cousin Jimmy had come from Brooklyn for his annual visit to his father and stepmother and asked Daddy if I could go back with him to babysit for him and his wife, Delores, for the summer.

Pop said she wasn’t all she should be, my protective Daddy explained to Mama. Pop was my paternal grandfather. Delores’s great transgression, according to Pop, was that she was seen in a nightclub—and without Jimmy—as reported by one of Daddy’s brothers who frequented joints like that.

Women in Their Place

In small Southern communities like ours, decent married women didn’t patronize nightclubs alone or even with their men after they married. I hadn’t given much thought to going to Brooklyn to babysit for Jimmy and Delores before, but after hearing what Pop said about Delores, I knew I wanted to go. Meeting this woman, I thought, would be a good thing. Here was somebody different from most of the women I knew, most likely a refreshingly free and lively spirit, which most men I knew didn’t think was proper for their wives, daughters, and mothers to have or be.

Most of the women I knew were good workaday, self-sacrificing women who lived within the prescribed and restrictive boundaries of Southern womanhood, which didn’t allow for very much freedom of expression or movement. These wives and mothers didn’t dare step foot in a nightclub. Most of the women I knew were where they should be according to custom and what they should be, which wasn’t all that much fun.

It was common that after long workdays as cafeteria or domestic workers, nurses, nurse aides, or beauticians, most of these women returned home, cooked, cleaned, and went to bed usually before ten. On Saturdays, they shopped for groceries, cleaned house, washed and ironed clothes, and washed and straightened their and their daughters’ hair in preparation for church on Sunday. To get all this done, they stayed up later than usual, at least until ten o’clock. I remember my mother on Saturday night cooking Sunday dinner and mopping the kitchen floor after we children had gone to bed. For women like my mother, Sunday was a day of rest they took seriously. Whew! They needed it!

Something in Me Said Yes

I wanted to go to Brooklyn because I thought Delores and I had something in common. I, too, wasn’t all I should be: I felt I should have a little more of a free-spirited life, too. Even though Daddy said no, something in me said yes. Maybe, however, that desire was the first of my premonitions of a tragedy to come that would change the course of my family’s life.

Pop and Mighty Mae (Grandma)

Evidently, Pop paid no attention to the biblical admonition Judge not, that ye be not judged (Matthew 7:1, KJV) when it came to Delores. There were a few things about himself, too, that he might not want to be judged by.

Grandma saw him down the road talking with a woman in her yard. On the spot, she suspected he was up to no good chatting with her because she sold liquor when he didn’t drink. Unfortunately, that was not true for four of his five sons.

Grandma, according to Eddie, who lived with our grandparents, kept calling him to come home; but he ignored her and took his own good time getting there. When he finally did get home, Grandma was waiting for him behind the door and whacked him on the head with a broom handle and broke it on his head. Mae! he called out. Her name was Mamie. He hollered, You coulda killed me! Once reminiscing about Grandma’s feistiness, Jimmy told me that Grandma wouldn’t have even backed down from a bear.

As the saying goes, You can’t tell a book by the cover. Mae was petite, cute, and sweet-looking. That was her cover, but her looks as well as her maiden name were deceptive. She came from a family whose surname was Meeks. But it was said they were some mean people—and they were in a mean world, too, which didn’t help any. Maybe that’s why her brothers disappeared.

Family Mystery: Where Did Grandma’s Brothers Escape To?

Many years ago, three of Grandma’s brothers, I was told, were walking down a sidewalk in South Carolina when a white man slapped one of them for not stepping off the sidewalk when he saw the man coming. I heard that black people back then in the South were supposed to step off the sidewalk when white people approached. The brothers beat the white man to death, fled town, and never communicated with their family again. It is still a mystery, more than a century later, where they went.

More About Pop

Grandma and Aunt Gertie, a daughter who, with her son Eddie, had moved in with her and Pop after she split with her husband, frequently kept Pop in line and chastised him for his behavior. Huh, huh, Pop said as if being hard of hearing when asked to do a chore, but his hearing was perfect at mealtime when he was called to eat. My mother, with misplaced sympathy for her father-in-law, commented on the situation, Poor ol’ Mister Henry—Pop’s name was Henry—They just treat him any ol’ kinda way. No need for Mama to worry. Pop knew how to take care of himself in any situation, like when Grandma tried to leave him many years before. According to Grandma, she loaded up a wagon to leave with their belongings and the children. All the while, Pop sat on the porch watching, until the wagon took off. Then he ran and jumped on it. They stayed hitched for sixty-plus years until he died.

Like most, Pop had his good side, too. At Pop’s funeral, there were glowing testimonials. The mayor and other town officials spoke and said he would be greatly missed. For many years, Pop had regularly walked through the town of Lowell, stopping to talk with black and white alike. Some were customers for whom he made cane-bottom chairs. When he died at eighty-nine, he had been walking through the town just the day before.

Bound for Brooklyn: Escaping Sorrow

In June of 1963, a tragedy in our family drew Jimmy back down south to North Carolina. My father had been killed in an automobile accident. A few days after the funeral, Jimmy was in our living room again asking his Aunt Emma, my Mama, if I could go to Brooklyn to babysit for him and his wife. Mama looked at me, a daddy’s girl who had lost her daddy, and said quietly, If she wants to go. I did.

Because Jimmy had to return to his job at the post office earlier, I rode to Brooklyn with Aunt Shirley and daddy’s baby brother, Uncle Ray, who had also come for the funeral and stayed longer. They left their preschoolers, Beverly and JT, at Aunt Shirley’s mother’s for the summer. I sat in the backseat of their car with a Tupperware container full of big, juicy, dark-red nursery plums from the bucket of plums Mr. Ike, a middle-aged bachelor neighbor, had given my family to express his condolence. This was significant because Mr. Ike shared few words and never plums with anyone that I knew of. His plum trees were sheltered behind high wood fences, and he was notorious for guarding them like they were his personal Fort Knox. Not only did Mr. Ike show his compassion following my father’s death but others also in my small close-knit community where everybody knew everybody. They came with homemade covered dishes and sat in our living room visiting with the family to pay their respects. Even a couple of white women came.

Riding to New York, I was happy with the thought of starting on a grand adventure though my excitement was tempered by the recent passing of my father. As the scenery whizzed by us on Interstate 85 North, as usual, Uncle Ray and Aunt Shirley were sparring in loud voices. Ray, slow down. You’re going too fast! Aunt Shirley warned. Aw, Shirley, I know what I’m doing, Uncle Ray countered. Aunt Shirley also countered, That’s what you said on the way down here. The next thing I knew, we were off the road, out in a field up against some farmer’s damn barbed-wire fence.

Your daddy and Ray were the best-looking ones (of their siblings), Aunt Shirley told me. Now ______, a sibling who was not exactly pretty, if you cut his head off, you couldn’t tell what he was.

Though Aunt Shirley thought it was good to have good looks, her mother didn’t think it was necessarily so. I heard that Aunt Shirley’s mother didn’t want her to marry Uncle Ray because she thought he was too good-looking to make her a good husband. He was a smooth, even English-walnut brown with a boyishly handsome face, as they say. He was a little on the short side for a man, around 5’7’’, but had a trim, compact, and well-proportioned manly build. Opposites attract, as they say. This was visually true for Uncle Ray and Aunt Shirley. She was tall, around 5’10", and statuesque with a light gold complexion.

Ever mindful, Aunt Shirley said to me, as we rode along, Phyllis, let’s not go to sleep at the same time. One of us has to be awake to watch Ray. Memory takes me to years before when I was a little girl. Uncle Ray and his pretty new bride, both young, bright, and beautiful with expectation, stopped by our house to say their goodbyes before going from their home in North Carolina to New York, the Promised Land, where there were good things like living-wage jobs and indoor toilets. Aunt Shirley brought gifts for my sister and me, cute stuffed toy kittens.

Like everybody I had seen going to New York, Aunt Shirley was happy, almost ecstatic; but after having been in New York for almost a decade, Aunt Shirley recalled, in her tell-it-like-it-is way, I was so happy you would’ve thought the streets was paved with gold. If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so happy.

A few years after Aunt Shirley and Uncle Ray’s departure, Jimmy, and then his younger brother Bruce, also in search of the good life away from the grip of Jim Crow, had followed our young Uncle to the Big Apple. They were more like little brothers to Uncle Ray than nephews since they were not so far apart in age—Uncle Ray was five years older than Jimmy and eleven years older than Bruce.