Crumbs From the Table of Joy

“Brooklyn…everything you’d ever need not more than a few blocks away. Streets of jagged slate, pennies stuck in the crevices, I collected over ten cents one day. Still, it wasn’t any place to live […] until I sat in the cinema, The Fox, right smack between two white gals. Oh yes! […] Practically touching shoulders. And we all wept. Wept unabashedly.”

Having moved from Florida, which was part of the Jim Crow South in 1950 and was segregated, Brooklyn is like a foreign country to Ernestine. Although there is certainly racism in New York, sitting in a desegregated theater is Ernestine’s first recognition of what real change might feel like. Sitting so close to white girls that they are almost touching, she discovers that they all weep and feel the same feelings together, as if they aren’t separated by racial difference when the lights were on.

“We sit and listen to all the white laughter. Seems to us only white folks can laugh on Sunday.”

In the evenings, even in Brooklyn, Godfrey’s grief becomes too much, and he breaks down in tears. The radio is not just forbidden on Sundays by Father Divine; it is a remnant of their mother as it’s a prize she won in a guessing contest. Godfrey refuses to let them listen to it on Sunday nights and laugh, and Ernestine sees this as one more thing that is senselessly forbidden to Black people but allowed for white people.

“Ernie, wouldn’t know these was old, would ya? Would ya now? Hey, hey the boys at the job can’t help eyeing them, smart shoes like these make ’em think you more important than you is.”

Godfrey is polishing his shoes, which he has had for so long that Lily even recognizes them after years of estrangement. They are a remnant of the past that he clings to and cares for lovingly. His speech here emphasizes the gap between appearances and reality, using his shoes as a