‘Daddy Was a Number Runner’ author, activist Meriwether, at 100

NEW YORK (AP) – Louise Meriwether, the author and activist whose coming-ofage novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner” is widely regarded as a groundbreaking and vital portrait of race, gender and class, has died. She was 100.

Meriwether died Tuesday at the Amsterdam Nursing Home in Manhattan, according to Cheryl Hill, a filmmaker who said she is part of the author’s “extended family.” The cause was old age, Hill said. “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” published in 1970, tells of a poor Black community in Harlem during the 1930s as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Francie Coffin. The narrative is a grim panorama of gangs, gambling, confrontations with the police and endless worrying about money. But it is also a testament to the human spirit, whether Francie’s growing consciousness of her sexuality or the tenuous bond she feels as she looks out on the street life of Harlem.

“I wanted to hug them all,” Francie thinks to herself. “We belonged to each other somehow. I’m getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must have caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.”

Meriwether’s debut novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies and, along with such contemporaneous works as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” helped mark a rise of Black women’s voices in literature. James Baldwin, who contributed a foreword, praised Meriwether for telling “everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country.” National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson was among many who would later credit the novel with helping inspire them to become authors.

In 2016 the Feminist Press and TAYO Literary Magazine launched the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize for “debut women/nonbinary writers of color.” The same year she received a lifetime achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation for her contributions to multicultural literature.