CHAPTER 1

Not aSparrow Falls

Leigh Blackwell

MY MOTHER WAS born Lydia Bernice Rhodes and was raisedto be pampered. She was lovely. Her hair was long like mine, butblonde instead of dark, and her eyes were a gentle blue. I'm namedfor her, by the way; my name is actually Lydia Leigh. (I'm gladshe didn't saddle me with "Bernice.") She was trained in classicalpiano and took to it naturally. I gather that she could have played inconcert halls. But instead she married my father, Philip Blackwell.It's from him that I get my dark eyes and hair and who knowswhat else. I have no idea how they met or what he did for a living;all I know is that her family in Pittsburgh was so displeased withher choice that they severed all ties with her and my father. Theyprobably never even knew that I exist. My parents and I lived in anapartment on the second floor of a nondescript building between6th and 7th Avenues, near what New Yorkers call the "GarmentDistrict." Not the best neighborhood but safe, I guess, compared tomany. When I was eight years old, my father packed up and left. Icame home from school to find my mother sobbing. I have to sayI don't remember much about him, and at this point my memoriesof him are probably based more on their wedding picture thananything else.

Once I realized that my father was never coming back (I think Iunderstood this before my mother did), I figured I'd better get a job.My mother hadn't been raised with the idea of working and she justcouldn't accept what had happened. We had no friends or family inNew York, and I felt responsible for the two of us. Now don't supposethat I resented this responsibility; I accepted my mother's role as a ladyand wanted more than anything to let her stay that way. What wasdisturbing, though, was how she started to slip away from the presentas the fact of my father's permanent absence became inescapable. Shespent her days at the piano. I not only needed a job; I had to preparemeals and do whatever household chores were required.

My first job was piecework for some of the garment shops a fewblocks south. The woman in the apartment across the hall helped getme started. I sewed artificial flowers—violets, forget-me-nots, andother small varieties—for women's hats. Child labor was still legalthen, but just to be safe I told the shop owners that my mother wasunable to leave the apartment because of her health (which technicallywasn't a lie) and that I was just picking up the work and dropping itoff for her. I got paid a little extra for delivering the finished goodsfrom the seamstresses in our building; usually the shops hired boysto do that. At two cents a bunch, you have to sew a lot of flowersto make any money at all, so I gave up school. Thankfully, therewere no visits from truant officers. I met Tommy on my front stepsa few months after I started working (he tells that story better thanI do), and later he even helped a little with the sewing. He wouldn'tbe proud to have you know that, but it's true and I was grateful forhis help. My fingers got pretty sore, doing that all day. No matter; Ibecame skilled enough that I was "promoted" from flowers to ladies'gloves, which paid a little better. I did this, all told, for almost threeyears, though I had to fill in with odd jobs, like cleaning up after thehorse-drawn trolleys. All of this probably wouldn't have sustainedus for even that long, except that Tommy, who was working as anewsboy by then, generously shared his earnings with me, and thatmy father at least had had the heart to leave some money behind. Ormaybe he'd forgotten it was there.

Expert at "running the numbers" even then, Tommy figuredout that the sewing wouldn't make enough to pay bills and feed mymother and me, even if I were able to do it twenty-four hours a day.I had to find another job. I had a good friend from the neighborhood,Karen, who had recently been more or less forced into prostitutionby her parents; she was pretty and they were poor, and such thingsweren't all that uncommon, I'm sorry to say. I would still see heroccasionally and she tried to persuade me that her new life wasn'tso bad, but I couldn't imagine that God would use that as the wayto take care of me. There weren't many options, though. An ideafinally occurred to me. Once in a while on a Saturday, Tommy andI would take the train down to Coney Island and (while he madesome extra money picking pockets, as if I didn't know) I'd sneakinto the horse races at the Sheepshead Bay track. I loved watchingthose magnificent animals—a different species, almost, from thespiritless creatures that pulled carts, wagons, trolleys all across thecity. I wondered if perhaps I could get a job at the stables. The name Iremembered seeing most often at the track was McLaren. I bought anold but serviceable bicycle, found myself a pair of trousers at a churchrummage sale, and set out for the McLaren stables in Brooklyn.You won't get if you don't ask, I reasoned; but you'd better believeI prayed about it, too.

I know that God made it possible for me to get that job. Ofall the people I could have first spoken to when I showed up atMcLaren's Thoroughbreds, old Sam McFee, the stable foreman,was the only one who wouldn't have shut the door on me. Yearslater he told me I reminded him of his granddaughter. Good thing!Anyway, he told me that working in the stables was very hard. Itold him I was willing to work as hard as he needed me to. He saidthat I would have to work as hard as the boys, and that my workwould be judged more critically because I was a girl. I told him Iunderstood, and I would be grateful if he gave me a chance. In theend, he took me on.

Who would have guessed that I would love being there? Muckingout stalls and hauling hay, feed, and water is truly demanding, butbeing with the horses was worth the labor. I loved their big browneyes, the smooth gloss of their coats after I'd brushed them, theirvaried personalities, even their earthy smell (somehow it was hard toconnect it with the unpleasant, often acrid odors I'd always knownon our streets). I hadn't been there long when Mr. McLaren gotwind of it. My first impression of him was pretty terrifying. RoreyMcLaren was known as "the Roaring Scotsman" because he alwaysyelled first and (maybe) listened afterward. And he was just furiousthat Sam had hired me. "I'll nae be ha'in' girlie-girls in m' stables!"he thundered as I did my best not to cower. Sam interceded, assuringMr. McLaren that I was proving to be an excellent stable hand, evenbetter than some of the boys. Still, I think that if Mr. McLaren hadn'thad a lot of respect for Sam, I'd have been out of a job. He let mestay on, provided I didn't turn out to be a girlie-girl after all. Andso I was a lowly stable boy for quite a few years; eventually I wasentrusted with the added responsibilities of grooming and saddlingthe horses. Sam even had me exercising them and walking themto cool down after a hard run. I mended tack as a regular duty, ofcourse, but I was grateful that Sam didn't have me do more than myshare of that task.

Most employers paid female employees less than males, supposedlybased on the premise that males were permanent members of theworkforce and primary breadwinners to boot. It's too bad thatlandlords and coal merchants didn't honor this premise by chargingwomen one-third less. Unfair or not, that's just how it was. So youcan see why I felt especially blessed to work for Sam; as soon as hesaw that I worked as hard and as diligently as the boys, he paid methe...