three• Truth Isn’t What You Want to See

I shared my journey with row upon row of uniformed soldiers. They filled each segregated car as the Southern Pacific train chugged across one state line after another. We all were bound for a common destination—a place on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay whose oak-studded hills had prompted settlers to christen it Oakland. By the 1940s, Oakland was a thriving metropolis and a western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. As we arrived, stretched our stiff limbs, and climbed onto stationary soil, I felt a curious combination of bone-weary exhaustion and antsy anticipation.

“End of the line!” announced the Southern Pacific Railroad conductor. Nope, I thought to myself, the beginning.

As I clutched my small, battered suitcase and struggled to follow my father bobbing through the crowd, I couldn’t help but be struck by the sheer number of white faces. In Monroe, whites were outnumbered about ten to one by blacks, and they never ventured into colored neighborhoods. But Oakland was overwhelmingly dominated by Portuguese, German, Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants and their children. Blacks were barely more than 2 percent of the city population.

My family had fled from a tattered and fraying Deep South culture, the racist remnants of plantation slavery—but strands of bigotry also were woven into the fabric of Oakland. Only fifteen years before my arrival, the stately Oakland Auditorium had hosted a conclave of nearly ten thousand Ku Klux Klansmen and their women from across the country, cheering the induction of five hundred new members into the national order. A year later, the local citizenry had elected Klansmen to powerful posts, including county sheriff—in fact, a burgeoning Klan patronage apparatus was dis mantled only after it had become the focus of a graft and corruption inquiry. The zealous Alameda County district attorney who prosecuted that case would years later deliver the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation: His name was Earl Warren.

Blacks began to trickle into Oakland via the railroads, which offered them a variety of jobs. The relatively fortunate were the Pullman porters who served as butlers to the most luxurious travelers. George Pullman hired only black porters, not only because they worked cheaper than whites, but also because he considered them better at “keeping a social distance between passengers and servants”—and it was common practice for passengers to address every Pullman porter as “George” without any thought to the man’s real name.

Soon a colony of Pullman porters settled into West Oakland. And as more blacks worked the railroads, they recruited relatives up and down the line, promising them that California afforded more opportunities than Jim Crow ever would.

Some of the men of my family, fleeing the threat of a Monroe tar and feathering, had landed jobs working for Southern Pacific in Oakland in 1941.

East Bay locals had been growing nervous about an influx of job seekers. That year the Richmond Independent issued an editorial warning: “The man who thinks he will get a job building ships because he built a woodshed somewhere is doomed to disappointment.” Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the headlines screamed WAR! and a torrent of migrant workers began to flood into California to work the shipyards and railways to aid the war effort. My father, a carpentry wizard, was one of the first people hired to work at the Oakland Naval Supply Depot—his job was building pallets and other containers for holding cargo—and eventually he saved enough money to retrieve his children from Arkansas.

And so I became a tiny part of the so-called Second Great Migration west during World War II. Nearly one-third of those who moved to Oakland in the early 1940s, and two-thirds of those who were black, came from only four Southern states: Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. By the time the war ended a few years later, Oakland’s population had increased by a third and its black population more than tripled, so that one in five Oaklanders was black. Locals occasionally railed against how the “Okies and Darkies” would undermine their job base and quality of life.

I, of course, knew none of this. I scarcely noticed the disapproving glances aimed at a little black girl in pigtails trekking across West Oakland to her new refuge.

The topography of Oakland has always been a vivid illustration of its stratification. The wealthy claimed the desirable hills with the scenic vistas of San Francisco Bay. The middle class populated the foothills. To the working class were left the flatlands that stretch to the railroad tracks, the industrial port, and the bay. West Oakland was flatland, and when I arrived it was a multiethnic neighborhood where blacks congregated. Black-owned businesses flourished along the Seventh Street corridor, which was an amalgam of respectable businesses and “black and tan” jazz and blues clubs where people of all races were welcomed.

My father, brother, and I journeyed one block off to Eighth Street, following it into a mixed residential neighborhood. Our house itself was stunning to my eyes—a rambling Victorian on Eighth Street near Peralta, surrounded by other colorfully past-their-prime “Painted Ladies.” The few that recently had been painted were coated in navy surplus paint, rendering them battleship gray. Still, all were far roomier and more inviting than the tiny shotgun house on D Soloman’s Alley. My dream seemed to have come true. I admit that I privately had dared to fantasize about an idyllic family home, where my mother and father would welcome my brother and me. I would have an actual bed—perhaps even a room—all my own.

I should have known better.

My new home proved to be the Victorian’s unfinished basement. Its walls were dirt, giving rise to a musty, earthy odor that permeated the entire place, which consisted of two rooms plus a bathroom. When my eyes adjusted from the bright outdoors to the shadowy dimness of the basement, I could make out a makeshift kitchen that had been thrown up in one corner. Old but freshly scrubbed sheets and cheap chenille bedspreads dangled from wooden clothespins spaced across the clotheslines that criss-crossed the ceiling—a desperate attempt to create zones of privacy for the eleven relatives who would share this space.

Yet again, I would have to “make do” with a cold, hard floor as my bed.

The adults had to sleep in shifts.

We had no yard in which to play in the front or back. The adults advised my brother and me to avoid sitting on the front steps in search of a shard of sunshine, because after all, our family didn’t own the steps or the house. The owners, our landlords, were a Portuguese family—nice enough people, but they preferred not to mix with us.

I remember feeling excitement and trepidation the day my mother walked me over to nearby Prescott Elementary to register for school. My writing was rudimentary but still better than my mother’s, so I carefully penciled both of our names on the enrollment forms. My third grade teacher was unimpressed. “Your mother’s name was obviously meant to be Florence, not Florene,” she intoned. “There’s no such name as Florene.” She shot my mother a look of slightly veiled exasperation. And in that fateful instant, my poor shy mother—unable to cite a reason to justify her own name to this stranger—became Florence for the rest of her life.

I wasn’t so easily coerced. “Obviously your parents didn’t know how to spell your name,” my new teacher continued. “If your name is Belvagene, then the proper spelling is Belva Jean—j-e-a-n,” she said impatiently, punctuating her sigh with a roll of her eyes. “Gene is the masculine form. Jean is the feminine.” But no matter what she said, I refused to change my name. I knew I was named after my grandfather Eugene, and I continued to proudly write “Belvagene Melton” at the top of all my schoolwork.

Like many of my fellow pupils, I confronted a double-barreled prejudice as a black and a Southerner. Teachers continually corrected our Southern speech and admonished us to shed our accents quickly if we wanted to advance. They were annoyed even by our Southern custom of referring to them as ma’am. “I’m not your ma’am,” they would snap, “I’m Miss Jones!” Or, “I’m Mrs. Smith!” Some days, the retribution for our polite Southern habit was our being ordered to clean the chalkboards during recess.

I was an atrocious speller but sharp at math, and I relished history. At Prescott Elementary I established a pattern that held at every other school I attended: I remained a diligent, good student. Diligence is the solace you have when you don’t know what else to do.

My Uncle Ezra and Aunt Pearline lifted the spirits of everyone in the basement when they announced that they had secured housing in Alameda. A small island town across the estuary from Oakland, Alameda featured green parks, a nice beach, an architectural treasure trove of well-tended Victorians, and inhabitants who were—almost without exception—white. The town was about to get its first black residents, and they would be living in the projects.

Government housing projects were a novel concept—no one in my family had ever lived in one—but we regarded them as a classy step up from the cramped conditions we were accustomed to. Uncle Ezra was walking with a cane, could sit in a chair only with back pillows, and had yet to collect his two-thousand-dollar judgment against the Monroe meatpacking plant. Because of his disability, he and Aunt Pearline were among the first to be granted subsidized housing. What most interested me was the news that they would have two bedrooms—that meant a spare. I hinted, then lobbied, and finally wheedled an invitation to move in with them. My parents had no reservations about losing me once more, and I had no hesitation about leaving them. So, the next semester I transferred to Lincoln Elementary in Alameda.

The white students at Lincoln had little use for black kids from the projects. At best, they treated us with cool indifference. At worst, they were on the lookout for any opportunity to harass us into retreating. How I dreaded my walk home from school, when gangs of little white boys hung out on the street corners taunting me, chasing me, yanking the long braided rope of my hair, or simply hollering that I didn’t belong in Alameda. But they couldn’t possibly understand my resolve. I had a bed. I had my own room. I was learning to read, and the library offered a seemingly limitless supply of books. This was the closest I had been to nirvana. I had no intention whatsoever of leaving.

Unfortunately, the choice wasn’t mine to make. Uncle Ezra’s older brother Alex sent word that he had left Louisiana headed for California and would need a place to stay. When he arrived with his wife and six children—including a daughter who was about to have a baby—it was clear that I had to go.

Once again I felt like a plant ripped out by my tender roots and stuck in yet another parched patch of ground. In this case I was sent back to Oakland, to a second-story, two-bedroom apartment in a barracks-style housing project on Twenty-Fourth and Poplar. Both my parents now were living there, along with an assortment of other relatives. The only vacant spot for me was on the kitchen floor.

I wasn’t particularly happy to be reunited with my parents, who had never come the few miles to visit me in Alameda. I suppose it’s an understatement to say we didn’t have a normal parent-child relationship—I’m quite sure I didn’t even know what that was. Life just seemed to keep them in a state of constant turmoil. New Louisiana relatives and friends seemed to be forever crawling out of the woodwork. They would write my dad to seek his help, and he would send some money to get them to California and squeeze them into our place for a while; despite his bluster, he was known as a soft touch whose greatest attribute was his willingness to share what he had with his family. Sometimes they would get homesick for the Delta and ask him for the money to go back. He would swear and kick the walls and, often as not, give them the money for their return fare.

Perhaps our way of life wasn’t that unusual for people from the South. Your luck was in, then out; and you would keep on keeping on and trying to help the rest of your relatives when you could. When I think of how we had to live—practically on top of one another like crabs in a barrel—it amazes me that any of us made it to the top.

To make matters worse, Oakland’s housing supply fell far short of demand during and after the war. Residential vacancies were an already low 2 percent in the spring of 1941. By the fall of 1942, vacancies had plummeted to a preposterous 0.06 percent. Still, people kept coming. From 1940 to 1945, the population density of West Oakland had increased fourfold. Within a few years, all West Oakland was designated a “blighted” district. When organized labor and the NAACP persuaded the city council to authorize construction of three thousand units of federally subsidized housing, property owners and the Oakland Real Estate Board blasted it as “socialistic,” beat it back, and pushed every councilman who supported it out of office.

The day I enrolled at Oakland’s Hoover Junior High School was the day I met the girl who would become my dearest lifelong friend. Rose Mary Prince and I spotted each other across the chaos and felt an instantaneous connection. We both were black girls with our hair styled into three tight braids; but what really distinguished us was that we both wore thick glasses. Rose Mary’s mother, whom I would forever call Miss Anna, eyed me, smiled, and gave her daughter a nudge.

“Look here, Rose Mary, there’s another little girl with glasses. See, it’s not so bad.”

We were assigned to the same homeroom and soon became more inseparable than sisters.

Rose Mary and I shared a love of books. Usually we perused the school library and checked out proper literature. I was captivated by a book titled Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a melancholy drama about a mixed-race orphan girl raised by a relative who loves her son but not Ramona. I would tuck it under my covers and read by the diffused yellow glow of my flashlight, submerging myself in her world and her struggles. I must confess that on occasion Rose Mary and I would wander over to a downtown department store that rented romances for a nickel. These paperbacks were slightly racy—meaning they might feature a torrid kiss or two—and we thrilled to the illicit savoring of the romances and then stashed the books under our bedcovers.

We also loved picture shows. I would save up milk-bottle tops, which on summertime Wednesdays could gain me free admission to the small, rundown Rex Theater on Broadway that usually showed Westerns. My favorites were swashbuckler movies, elaborate musicals, and anything starring Alan Ladd or Margaret O’Brien.

As I grew older, my favorite place to be was at Rose Mary’s house, which she shared with her mother. She was an only child, having lost her father when she was but a baby. I surreptitiously studied the interplay between Rose Mary and Miss Anna and marveled—theirs was the first intimate mother-daughter relationship I had witnessed. I couldn’t be jealous, because I was grateful to be able to soak up the extra love in the house. Miss Anna was the only adult who had ever sat down and really conversed with me. She sought my opinion, and in her diplomatically oblique fashion, tried to give me the motherly guidance I needed. “You know, honey,” she would say, “I don’t know if I’d do that if I were you.”

My home was overstuffed with people but lacking in affection. And it was about to get worse.

I returned home from school one day to find that my mother had simply vanished. Her belongings also were gone. My father was livid, suspecting, correctly as it turned out, that she had taken a boyfriend. That was rather out of character for her—usually my father was the one who did the philander ing. She’d left no note, no explanation—only an anxious pall that descended upon our apartment.

I was utterly devastated, and I felt alone.

If ever I doubted our family hierarchy, it was etched in my mind the afternoon that my father arrived home with John Jr., who then strutted around the apartment in a suit my father had paid a tailor to make for him. The rich fabric was soft yellow with black stripes on a cream-colored base, and it cost a ridiculously extravagant sixty-four dollars. I had to content myself with frugal basics. I had long recognized that my brother was whip smart and cute as could be, but now I had irrefutable evidence that my father loved him far more than me. I was so jealous, but all I could do was sit on the stairs, hug my book tightly to my chest, and blink back the burning tears.

I don’t think it ever occurred to my mother that she was leaving her young daughter to be the sole female in an apartment full of men. The reality of my situation crept upon me one awful night like a fog hugging the bay... silently. The first finger was almost imperceptible, its caress hardly noticed. Then fear—but along with fear, something new. I could only wait to see if it would hurt; and by the time I sensed danger in the mist, it was too late: I was engulfed in its seduction and its unbearable guilt.

That was the beginning of my journey down the road of exploitation and into a private hell, as though I had been captured by a devil who moved only in the shadows. As a child, I didn’t know this devil’s name; but the silent hands that invaded my body at night knew everything. My lips were sealed in guilty confusion as I lay on my pallet on the kitchen floor of the projects, afraid to sleep and afraid to remain awake. Night after night, throughout each molestation, I kept my eyes tightly shut. I didn’t want to know which man in the house was taking pleasure with me. It might be someone I loved and trusted in the light of day, and then what?

I told no one, not even Rose Mary. As close as we were—all those afternoons when I would walk her home and then she would walk me home and we would keep going back and forth until it became suppertime or dark—I could never speak of the hell being visited upon me at night. In truth, I barely talked to her about how much I missed my mother. Withholding the details of my life was my survival technique. I told myself that nobody likes a victim: They may feel sorry for you, Belvagene, but they won’t respect you. Nor would I risk disclosing anything that might jeopardize my lifeline to Rose Mary, or to Miss Anna.

But I prayed to God for deliverance, and finally my prayer was answered. A new batch of relatives moved in, with two newcomers assigned to floor space next to the kitchen. My unknown molester was not bold enough to tempt discovery. At long last, the physical torture ceased.

The mental torture, however, continued unabated. Deep inside I felt damaged, destroyed, deserving of death.

But I had no idea how to actually kill myself. I searched the library for methods that might be relatively painless. Ultimately I found nothing that I had the courage to carry out. I contemplated throwing myself in front of the A Train that ran in front of our apartment, but the train moved too slowly to do fatal damage.

All my father’s coiled frustration and my bottled-up emotion were about to burst into one histrionic crescendo. The impetus was hardly more than the common cold. I contracted a bad one, and my father decided what I needed was a dose of castor oil. I had been made to take castor oil once before and nearly gagged: to those who have never swallowed the stuff, I can only describe it as akin to rancid melted Crisco.

I said “No.”

He said “Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

My father unstrapped his belt and lunged in my direction. I bolted into the bathroom of our barracks-like apartment in the projects and locked the door. His fists pounded on the door as my heart pounded in my chest. I scurried up onto the toilet seat and tugged at the window screen.

“Belvagene,” he thundered, “open this goddamn door!”

“No,” I yelled back. “I’m not gonna take it, do you hear me? I’m not going to take it!”

I had no courage at that moment—just the opposite. All those years of being bullied and ignored smacked against my psyche. I no longer had any way to deny the truth: surely the people who were supposed to really care about me didn’t care enough. I had raised myself, tried to protect myself from harm, and I had failed miserably at it. I had spent my life desperately trying to please anyone who paid me any attention, and I was exhausted by the futility of it all. I just wanted to be dead.

I felt the force as he threw his body against the door: “Open. This. Door. Now!”

I looked out the window at the concrete sidewalk below and envisioned myself jumping and surviving, spending the rest of my life maimed and miserable. My one thought was Please God please, don’t let me jump and not die.