“Central Falls! Central Falls! Brave Courageous and Bold! Long live our name and long live our glory and long may our story be told.”
—MOTTO OF CENTRAL FALLS HIGH SCHOOL
Two months after I was born, my parents moved to Central Falls, taking their three youngest kids, Anita, Deloris, and me, and leaving their two oldest, Dianne and John, with my mother’s parents. Dianne and John were raised by my grandparents for years until my mom could no longer stand to hear the stories of them being beaten in school. My parents sent for them to come to Central Falls.
Central Falls, Rhode Island, was a square-mile town with a single claim to fame—one of the most densely populated cities per square mile in the United States. Central Falls also had more bars and churches in its borders than any other city. Central Falls, by 1985, was named the cocaine capital because one of the largest drug stings of all time happened in its streets.
The sweet story, the idyllic story, was that it was once called Chocolateville because of the number of chocolate factories in town. To the naked eye, Central Falls seemed bucolic. There were several parks in Central Falls, but our favorite playground was at Jenks Park because of Cogswell Tower, the site where Native American scouts witnessed the approach of Captain Michael Pierce. This episode was a key part of King Phillip’s war, an armed battle from 1675 to 1678 between the Native Americans of New England and New England colonists.
We moved there because two of the biggest racetracks in the country were in Rhode Island. There was the Lincoln Downs in Lincoln, and the Narragansett Racetrack in Narragansett, affectionally called Gansett.
Mom-and-pop shops lined the streets of Central Falls. Sarah’s Restaurant had big wooden bench booths with high backs that fascinated me. Sarah’s had homemade rice pudding, corn muffins fried with heaps of butter, and the best hamburgers in town. Saint Vincent de Paul (also known as the Salvation Army) located on Washington Street had used clothes, shoes, toys, knickknacks, and furniture. It was our favorite playground of affordable leftovers.
Across the street from St. Vincent de Paul’s was Gabe’s Store, or, as we called it, Antar’s. We have plenty of loving memories at that store, but complicated ones as well. Loving because the owner, Gabe Antar, who was Syrian, was very kind to our family. It was a wonderful grocery store, stocked with everything you could possibly need. Whenever we were really hurting, he would give us a line of credit so that we could buy food. It was complicated, though, because oftentimes, MaMama and MaDaddy would ask Gabe for monetary loans.
Gabe kept a notebook under the cash register with a tally of what various neighborhood families owed him. Some of my most embarrassing memories are going to the store with a piece of paper, on which my mother had written how much money she needed. Sometimes, the embarrassment was so great that my sister Deloris and I would tear up the paper and refuse to hand him the charity request. Instead, we would just tell my mom that Gabe denied the loan. And sometimes when we asked Gabe, he would, in frustration, throw money at us because my parents had not paid their outstanding debts. This nice man would fly into a rage and scream, “Get out!” We would pick the money off the floor, humiliated, and walk out completely defeated.
When we were really hungry, though, Gabe’s was the easiest store to steal food from. Much later in life, I found out that Gabe had lost his son in Vietnam. It probably explained the frustration and sadness in his eyes. It might have also accounted for how kind he was to us as kids, and why he helped us when he saw our need. Our relationship with him was filled with love and appreciation mixed with the shame of having to cling so desperately to his willing kindness, which was all too often a lifesaver. When you’re clutching to live, morals go out the window.
We were “po.” That’s a level lower than poor. I’ve heard some of my friends say, “We were poor, too, but I just didn’t know it until I got older.” We were poor and we knew it. There was absolutely no disputing it. It was
reflected in the apartments we lived in, where we shopped for clothes and furniture—the St. Vincent de Paul—the food stamps that were never enough to fully feed us, and the welfare checks. We were “po.” We almost never had a phone. Often, we had no hot water or gas. We had to use a hot plate, which increased the electric bill. The plumbing was shoddy, so the toilets never flushed. Actually, I don’t ever remember toilets working in our apartments. I became very skilled at filling up a bucket and pouring it into the toilet to flush it. And with our gas constantly being cut off because of nonpayment, we would either go unwashed or would just wipe ourselves down with cold water. And even the wiping down was a chore because we were often without towels, soap, shampoo. . . . I damn sure didn’t know the difference between a washcloth and a bath towel.
One of our first apartments was 128 Washington Street. My sisters and I ominously refer to it as “128.” “128” is code for “Hell”! When we first moved in, it was a normal apartment. I was five years old at the time. There was a tailor on the ground level. And on the third floor where we lived was a nice little porch. The building was old, probably built in the ’20s or ’30s, but it had been kept in fairly good condition. But then the tailor moved out, and very quickly the building became condemned.
The tailor’s business was boarded up. Without attention, the wiring became dangerously unstable. There were several fires, and the building soon became infested with rats. In fact, the rats were so bad, they ate the faces off my dolls.
I never, ever went into the kitchen. Rats had taken over the cabinets and the counter. The plaster was constantly falling off the wall, revealing the wooden boards holding the house together.
We had to go to the laundromat to wash clothes. But having no money, five kids, and freezing cold weather meant that most of the time laundry would go unwashed for weeks. That, compounded with the bed-wetting, made for a home with a horrific smell. Closets and space underneath the beds would be stuffed with shoes, dust, miscellaneous items. We were afraid of even cleaning for fear rats would be lurking underneath all the “rubbish.” On the first day of the month food stamps would come and we would make a huge grocery run at BIG G market. In less than two weeks, the food would be gone.
A short time after we moved in, I remember Mayor Bessette came to the apartment and made a big speech in our living room, saying he was giving
us the apartment for free. We didn’t have to pay any rent. That was because the building was condemned. In a year, the city planned to tear it down to build a school. Mayor Bessette sent someone to the apartment who knocked a hole through one of the walls that led to the apartment next door, creating a makeshift doorway. That apartment next door never had any heat or electricity. Never. Even in the short spans that our apartment had heat and electricity, the one next door never did. But we had that space.
We used it for bedrooms, running extension cords from the apartment that had electricity. Months later, I went to Mayor Bessette’s house to sing Christmas carols. It was on the other side of town, the part where the rich folk lived, or the people who had a little bit of money. His house seemed to have forty-foot ceilings, a fireplace, a huge staircase, and a Christmas tree that was the largest I’d ever seen in my life. The heat from the house just whooshed out at us, we who were shivering in the freezing cold.
“128” might as well be the code name for “the dungeon” for my sisters and me, although our time there was also speckled with good memories. My oldest sister, Dianne, had remained in South Carolina with my grandparents. She was growing up in segregated schools where the education was substandard, and dark-skinned students were frequently beaten with switches until they were bloody simply for refusing to be born “high yellow” or “Red Bone.”
Two years after we moved to Central Falls, my mom and dad finally said, “We got to raise our own kids,” and saved enough money to move my sister Dianne and my brother, John, to Central Falls with us. Dianne was nine when she entered Broadstreet School, the same school where I was in kindergarten. It went from kindergarten to sixth grade. MaMama took her to enroll in fourth grade.
After testing, her reading and math skills were marked so substandard she couldn’t be placed in the fourth grade. Mr. Fortin, the fourth-grade teacher, who always wore a nice suit and black-rimmed glasses and slicked back his hair, said the school would keep her in the third grade. Dianne remembers saying to Mr. Fortin, “If you work with me every day after school, I promise I’ll show you I can be in fourth grade.”
Mr. Fortin said, “I’ll do it.” And he kept his word. Every day after school she stayed, and he would sit right there with her. Dianne told us, “Because I’m the oldest, everything that I learn, I’ll teach you guys when I get home so you’ll be ahead.”
We bought a secondhand school desk from the St. Vincent de Paul. The chair was attached to the desk and had little beams on it. They really bought it for me. I would sit in it while Dianne taught us what she learned in school. I was mischievous in the crappiest way in school because I was bored. I’d say, “I already know this. My sister Dianne already taught me the multiplication tables.” Bored, I wanted to have a conversation, I wanted to play. “I already know how to write in cursive. My sister Dianne taught me.” Dianne had another gift. She was a fantastic storyteller, like our dad, and could transport you to another reality simply with the power of her words. We would all sit down and clap, “Dianne. Tell us a story. Tell us a story.” She would stand in front of us and captivate us. A lot of her stories were anecdotes about her life down south, what that was like. Others were fables she made up, similar to ones told down south, fables of haints,
witches, and old folklore. We totally believed.
The story I remember her telling us the most was, “One night, we heard something in the woods behind ma granmama’s house,” Dianne started. We all were sitting on the floor in the kitchen at 128. She would always stand. “I could hear it in the trees. I went out there to see what it was because everyone was scared. It was so dark, you couldn’t see your hands in front of your face. I didn’t even know what was in the woods.” That part always scared me.
“I heard a knocking and looked up, down and saw drops of blood everywhere! I went farther and saw Uncle Arnold.” Uncle Arnold was our closest uncle. “His legs were way over there! His arms were even farther away. His body was in the middle and his head was not even attached to his neck. I was in shock! I started screaming and then put my hands on my hips and looked at his head and I said, ‘Arnold! Pull yourself together!’” When we heard the punch line, we would fall out laughing our asses off. I would always scream, “Again, Dianne! Tell it again!”
When I met Dianne for the first time, it was a rare occasion when we had hot water. I was maybe five years old. Dianne was nine when she walked into our lives in Central Falls. I remember her so clearly: she wore a nice coat; she had money; she smelled nice. I was taking a bath and allegedly fussing about getting dressed when I heard Dianne say, “Where’s my baby sister?”
She came into the bathroom. I looked at her and she stared at me. It was love. In my child brain, part of the love was her offer to buy me candy from
Gabe’s store. As an adult, though, I recognize there was something more important that made me love her.
She looked around at the disheveled apartment. “Viola, you don’t want to live like this when you get older, do you?” she asked in a whisper. She didn’t want my mom to hear.
“No, Dianne.”
“You need to have a really clear idea of how you’re going to make it out if you don’t want to be poor for the rest of your life. You have to decide what you want to be. Then you have to work really hard,” she whispered.
I remember thinking, I just want candy. I couldn’t understand the abstract. I was too young. But something I didn’t have the words for, yet could feel, shifted inside me. “What do I want to be?” The first seed had been planted.
Was there a way out?
Achieving, becoming “somebody,” became my idea of being alive. I felt that achievement could detox the bad shit. It would detox the poverty. It would detox the fact that I felt less-than, being the only Black family in Central Falls. I could be reborn a successful person. I wanted to achieve more than what my mother had.
From age five, because of Dianne, re-creation and reinvention and redefinition became my mission, although I could not have articulated it. She simply was my supernatural ally. Much later, after college, Juilliard, Broadway stages; after first being nominated for awards—Emmy, Oscar, Tony—I could finally actually articulate what that big moment was, prompted by my sister that day. It was the catalyst or agent that provoked a larger question: “Aren’t I somebody NOW?” What do I have to do to be worthy? That moment, that revelation, was the true beginning to my call to adventure.
