Louise Meriwether, an author and activist who helped propel a renaissance of Black female writing in the 1970s with her searing novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” a coming-of-age story set in Depression-era Harlem, died Oct. 10 at a rehabilitation and nursing center in Manhattan. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed by filmmaker Cheryl Hill, who cared for her in recent years and said Meriwether’s health had declined after she contracted COVID-19 in 2020.
A stylish, evocative writer with an ear for dialogue, Meriwether was 46 when she published her debut novel, “Daddy Was a Number Runner” (1970). The book recounted a year in the life of 12-year-old Francie Coffin, who grows up in a Harlem streetscape where women seem consigned to domestic work or prostitution and where hustlers, gangsters and child molesters stalk the avenues. Its story was inspired by Meriwether’s own childhood in the 1930s, when she helped her father run numbers – carrying money and betting slips as part of an illegal gambling racket – after he struggled to find work as a janitor.
Much of the novel was unsparingly bleak. One of Francie’s brothers joins a gang and is sent to jail; the other drops out of school and gets a job with an undertaker, convinced that racism will prevent him from ever building a career as a chemist. Her father chooses to leave the family.
Yet the book also features moments of transcendent beauty, as when Francie looks across the street on a chilly Saturday morning and spies a group of boys in front of the pharmacy:
“They was acting the fool as usual, their knickers hanging loose, their caps on backward, whistling at the girls and falling out at their own jokes. As I watched them they didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden, just full of fun, and I didn’t want them to fall off the roof or cut each other or be hauled off to jail but just to stay there, safe and sound forever, laughing in front of the drugstore.”
“I wanted to hug them all,” she adds. “We belonged to each other somehow. … I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.”
Published the same year as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and a year after Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Meriwether’s novel joined a wave of books that highlighted the experience of Black girls and women, whose stories had long been marginalized or ignored in the pages of American literature. Novelist Paule Marshall, who helped lay the groundwork for that movement, wrote in a New York Times review that Meriwether belonged to a select group of Black writers who wrote about Harlem while revealing “the life behind the statistics – its substance, texture and style.”
“The life she reveals to us,” Marshall added, “is truly a mixture of what Ralph Ellison once called the marvelous and the terrible.”
Meriwether had a host of champions. In New York, she was part of a literary circle that included Angelou and Rosa Guy, whom she befriended through the Harlem Writers Guild. She also was close to expatriate novelist James Baldwin, who had decamped to Paris but agreed to write a foreword to her novel, in which he declared that Meriwether “has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country.”
Yet, after a flurry of initial acclaim, Meriwether “was confined to obscurity” for years, author Ishmael Reed said in a phone interview.
“There was a problem of misogyny,” Reed continued, “where the rites of passage of a boy, a Black boy, during that period were more acceptable than the rites of passage of a girl.” It didn’t help that the book ventured “into risky territory,” he said, by addressing issues including sexual abuse and police brutality, which were “probably considered explosive at the time.”
After falling out of circulation, the novel was reissued by the Feminist Press in 2002. It has since been cited as a key influence on younger generations of writers, including Bridgett M. Davis and Jacqueline Woodson.
While attention came and went, Meriwether continued to write, helping introduce young readers to Black historical figures through books about heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, civil rights activist Rosa Parks and Civil War hero Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery, commandeered a Confederate ship, sailed it into Union waters and was later elected to Congress. She wanted to correct “the deliberate omission of Blacks from American history,” she said, and felt a kinship with Smalls because her grandfather had been born into slavery and also had been a sailor.
Meriwether said she spent 20 years writing a Civil War novel inspired by Smalls, “Fragments of the Ark” (1994). She later returned to Harlem for the setting of a romance novel, “Shadow Dancing” (2000).
“We write out of our own experience and our own pain,” she said at a book-signing event marking the novel’s publication. “You’ve got to first test it with yourself, and then you can branch on out and you can call it fiction.”
Louise Marion Jenkins was born in Haverstraw, New York, on May 8, 1923, as the third of five children. Her parents came north during the Great Migration, fleeing poverty and discrimination in South Carolina, and later moved the family to Brooklyn and then Harlem. Meriwether commuted to Central Commercial High School in Midtown, where she was one of only a few Black students in her class.
After working in Washington for three years as a Navy Department typist, she enrolled at New York University, receiving her bachelor’s degree in English in 1949. Around that time, she married Angelo Meriwether, a schoolteacher.
They moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel, an influential Black newspaper; wrote book reviews for the Los Angeles Times; and studied journalism at UCLA, receiving a master’s degree in 1965. That year, she decided to change careers and work in Hollywood, where she reportedly became the first Black story analyst at Universal Pictures, giving feedback on screenplays.
“They had no Black writers,” Meriwether later said. “There was no opportunity to do what I wanted to do, which would have been to write screenplays. They let the door open that far, and that was it.”
Meriwether left the studio after a few years and was working with the Watts Writers Workshop in south Los Angeles when she began drafting “Daddy Was a Number Runner.” Still, she remained active in Hollywood: When a film adaptation of William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” was announced, she organized a campaign opposing the production, arguing that Styron promoted racial stereotypes and “defamed all Black people” while telling the story of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. The film ultimately was called off.
As Meriwether told it, activism was central to her life. She recalled being pelted with rotten eggs while marching in May Day parades in New York, being arrested in a Los Angeles sit-in against the right-wing John Birch Society (she said she was sentenced to five years’ probation), campaigning against the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana while working with the Congress of Racial Equality, and being arrested in Washington in 2002, the year she turned 79, while protesting the economic policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
After she returned to New York in 1969, she started an anti-apartheid group called the Committee of Concerned Blacks, which drew supporters including poet Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones. She also taught creative writing, including at Sarah Lawrence College in nearby Yonkers.
Her marriage to Meriwether ended in divorce, as did her second marriage, to Earle Howe. She leaves no immediate survivors.
Asked by the New York Times whether she had any advice for younger writers, Meriwether demurred, noting that her own career seemed to follow no established trajectory.
“You have to find your own way,” she said in 2021. “Advice doesn’t help anybody. You stumble, you make mistakes, you get knocked down and get back up. There is no formula.”
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