Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van
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to safeguard her in ways that caused these other problems. Like the Gregory School. Had they really sent Althea there to educate her, or had they sent her there to keep her safe?
Hmmm…
No, it was true. They had sent her there to keep her safe.
And Columbia? Living at home?
They had kept her there to keep her safe.
Safe from it?
Yes, safe from getting sick like her father.
Sam Wyatt was the youngest of six children. His father had been an “army man,” which sounded a good deal better than “a cook.” Private Wyatt and his family moved from camp to camp in the United States, living in the colored housing where all the other indentured servants in the guise of privates had lived in the late 1930s and early ‘40s.
Sam was seven when his father went off on a drunken spree from which he never returned. They had been living in Texas then, at a camp that was frantically processing young men for shipment to the South Pacific. The army lost the trail of AWOL Private Wyatt in Nogales, Mexico, where he had apparently taken up with a barmaid named Juanita. Penniless, Sam’s mother Clowie had no choice but to parcel her children out to her siblings. Sam landed in Philadelphia at his aunt Jessima’s.
Aunt Jessima had the fear of God in her and she did her best to instill it in Sam. Sam’s childhood and teenage years seemed like one long prayer meeting, with Aunt Jessima’s particular friend, Reverend Hope, officiating. Sam behaved, he did as he was told, and vowed that when he grew up he would never enter a church again.
By the time Sam enlisted in the army in 1956 the Wyatt family was sadly depleted. His mother had died of pneumonia in Milwaukee; his brother John had died in a car crash in Arizona; his brother Matthew, in the army, had shot himself through the mouth in Germany; and Sam’s sister Bernice, only two years older than he, had been stabbed to death by her boyfriend in Los Angeles. His eldest sister, Ruth, had not been heard from in years; and his brother Isiah was preaching the gospel somewhere in the Everglades of Florida.
Sam spent four years in the army, was honorably discharged as a sergeant and went to Howard University on the GI Bill. He was smart, he was cocky and he was known for his way with women and having a good time. With his business degree in hand, he landed in New York City in 1965 and was hired in the personnel department of Electronika International. He was very well paid to assist a Mr. Pratt in all phases of personnel operations, and since Mr. Pratt did nothing Sam assisted him in all phases of nothing and enjoyed a pretty footloose and fancy-free time of it.
And then he met Penn graduate Harriet Morris, another Philadelphia expatriate, who was working as a secretary in the publicity department of Turner Lyman Publishers. Harriet was the first woman Sam had ever felt inclined to be faithful to. She was very pretty and very smart, and was the product of a middle-class Methodist family that was so happy it used to make Sam sick. In fact, if it had been anyone but Harriet, Sam wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of a person like her. Harriet was a devout churchgoer. Harriet read the Bible every night before going to sleep (she still did). Harriet didn’t drink. Harriet was forever saying things like, “Look on the bright side.” And Harriet was very critical, very hard on anyone she didn’t think was living up to his potential—namely, Sam.
On their fifth date Harriet ventured to tell Sam that he was a fool to be in personnel. Sam, drinking a martini, dressed in a very expensive suit, asked her how much she made at Turner Lyman and, when she told him, he pointed out that he made five times what she did. So what the hell did she know?
“Did you major in personnel at Howard?” Harriet asked him, smiling over her Coke.
Of course he hadn’t.
“Did you interview with Electronika to work in personnel?” she asked.
No. He had interviewed for their training program.
“And they offered you more money to go into personnel, didn’t they?”
Well, yes, they had.
“And you never wondered why?” she asked him.
“Well—”
“Sam,” she said, tapping a swizzle stick against her lower lip, “show me in the Wall Street Journal where it announces power changes in personnel.”
“What?”
“They’re putting you in the ghetto,” she said.
Now just what the hell was she—
“The government says, ‘Hire blacks.’ Okay, they say, we will. And where is the safest place to put them? Think, Sam. Where can they pay a good salary, call blacks executives, and never ever have to worry about them getting any power?”
Well, needless to say, had Harriet not been quite as attractive as she had been that night, had she not followed her criticism of Sam’s career by an utterly disarming seduction of him emotionally, he never would have seen her again.
Instead, six months later, he married her. Right after he took a pay cut to move into the marketing department at Electronika.
Sam worked like a demon—mostly because he loved his work and loved what he was learning (including that he was very good at it), and partly because he wanted to leave the sea of white faces around him back in the wash. He was under enormous pressure—real and self-induced—and a twelve-hour day was nothing unusual for him. When Harriet got pregnant in 1967, he worked even harder—pushing, pushing, pushing himself—and by the time Althea was born (the day after Martin Luther King was shot), Sam was supervising a department of ten in the new-product division.
Although Harriet did not drink at all, Sam customarily had two scotches before dinner and a beer with. In the few years following Althea’s birth Sam and Harriet joined a group of other black professional couples who met once a week for dinner. It was more of an encounter group on the state of black America than it was a social event, and they usually talked into the wee hours of the morning, sitting around on the living-room floor, with Sam and a few of the others drinking throughout. Something happened to the group after a while—around 1972—and the dynamics of it began to shift. The wives grew reluctant to come; Sam and two other men were drinking more and more and once even a fistfight broke out. The women stopped participating altogether and the talk of the men started to change, and suddenly it was no longer about “them,” the white establishment, but about “them,” the wives and children who chained them to jobs they hated and to a lifestyle that was smothering them.
The men moved to bars and Sam went with them. And then it was just Sam in the bars, with whoever was around. And then there were terrible fights between Sam and Harriet, always around the issue of his drinking. And then there were terrible fights over Sam’s drinking and Sam’s women.
Harriet went to work in the publicity department of Gardiner & Grayson at the end of 1972. In 1973 she started warning Sam that if he did not do something about his drinking she was going to leave him. And then, in November, Sam passed out in his chair and his lighted cigarette started a small fire. Harriet told him he was on his last chance. The very next night Sam did not come home at all, and Harriet took Althea and moved in with her aunt in Harlem.
Sam cried and pleaded and did everything he could to get Harriet back—except stop drinking. Then he said to hell with her and started hitting the bars straight after work, finding sympathetic women to tell his sad story to, to buy drinks for, and to sleep with that night. It was amazing how much he was still able to function at work in those days—particularly since he had taken to martinis at lunchtime—but word began to get around the office about the caution needed to make sure Wyatt was in the right “mood” when he made a decision.
By 1975 it was anyone’s guess whom Sam might wake up with in the morning. His blackouts were unpredictable, coming anywhere after two to ten drinks. At his company physical, he was told his liver was enlarged, his blood pressure was far too high and that he was running the risk of becoming diabetic. As for Harriet, she was so sick of Sam’s middle-of-the-night assaults on her aunt’s apartment (that