Black Girl Unlimited Page 2
I wish I had a shell right now to protect me from all this smoke. It keeps pouring in and is getting thicker. I know if my mother doesn’t get up soon, it will fill the entire apartment. I waddle back to the living room, where my brothers are still crying. I have an overwhelming urge to save them. I can’t figure out what to do. I look around the room for help. The lights are off. The TV is on. The glare disturbs me. The people on the TV are not helping. Neither is the sad-looking man with brown hair and blue eyes hanging in a picture frame on the wall. I reach toward him and the people on the TV, trying to grab them and show them we need help, but my arms are too short. I’m wearing a long T-shirt and my hair is in braids like Ms. Celie’s from The Color Purple. I’m trying not to cry, but the tears fall from my eyes and I start to panic. I wonder where my stepfather is. Maybe he can come and save us from the smoke. I listen for his keys jingling at the door. I pray for the sound but hear only the TV.
* * *
The men can build shells, too, but they are not wizards. I never see them make miracles. I only see them make chaos. My father is not my biological father—he’s my stepfather, but my brothers’ biological father. I still call him father and not stepfather because he’s raising me. My mother said my real father is a “lyin’-ass, conniving-ass, no-good-ass mothafucka wit’ thirteen kids”—all girls—“by different womens, and he don’t take care a’ none of ’em.” My mother tells me to forget about him, but I still wonder where he is and what he looks like and if he drinks like my stepfather, who is drunk all the time. My brothers and I love it when my stepfather gets drunk. He comes to life, gleefully bouncing us on his knees and telling us stories about what a great man he is. He tells us he’s a member of the T-Man Trivilization. We don’t know what it means because they never teach us about the T-Man Trivilization in school. We later learn that trivilization is not a real word and that he actually means civilization. He’s been out of the South for almost twenty years, but his Alabama accent is so thick, he sounds like he has a mouthful of cotton when he talks. He stretches out his words and talks slow, like molasses running down a maple tree, except when he cusses, which is the only time he ever talks fast. He loves to cuss and often forms entire sentences with just cuss words. I once heard him say “Goddammit, hell naw, shit, hell naw, shit, goddammit, hell naw!”
My brothers and I enjoy my father’s drunken antics, but we know they won’t last long. Eventually, after the glow of the alcohol has worn off, there will be a fight. There is always a fight. My father will begin making his fast cuss-word sentences, directing them at my mother, shooting them into her like bullets. My mother will raise her shell, and the chaos will begin. She will spin around the apartment like a tornado, destroying everything in her path. I don’t understand how she can make so many miracles and yet cause so much chaos. How she can be so dazzling and destructive at the same time.
LESSON 2
Making Something Out of Nothing
I am always astonished by my mother’s spectacular miracles. Even though she can’t do it right now because she’s lying facedown on the bathroom floor, I see her make miracles all the time. Like making something out of nothing, which is the second lesson of wizard training. I don’t understand how she does it, how she is able to make things appear out of thin air. My mother is truly gifted at this.
One day, when we are much older, my brothers and I sit at the kitchen table, starving. We have each already eaten a bowl of dry cornflakes (we refuse to add water and there is no milk). We have also eaten Miracle Whip and cheese sandwiches on white bread, but we are still hungry. We don’t dare say we are hungry. By now, we also have shells and hide behind them like we have been taught. We sit quietly at the table poking and prodding one another. We are never quiet unless we are hungry or at one of my mother’s Saturday-night grown folks’ spades parties. We don’t make a peep as we glance out of the corner of our eyes at our mother, waiting for the miracle. She stands, hunched over the sink, smoking a cigarette, pretending like she doesn’t see, but we know she does. We can feel the electricity of the approaching miracle coursing through her body. And then, from her hunched position, she rises and calls out my name, “Ecka, watch yo brothas, I’ma be right back. Don’t let nobody in, you heah?” I nod faithfully. We quietly watch her leave.
As soon as she’s gone, we run to Ms. Patty’s apartment in the front of the building. Ms. Patty is sixty-eight years old, lives alone, has lived in the apartment building since before we were born, and has a lot of health problems. Her voice is very hollow and scratchy because she had throat cancer many years ago and they had to remove one of her vocal cords. She sounds like Marge Simpson’s sister from The Simpsons. Her back is also hunched over because she has sciatica. She’s always drinking from a plastic purple Kool-Aid cup. No matter what time of day you knock on her door, she has that purple cup in her hand. Ms. Patty feeds us constantly. She tells us she knows our mother “been goin’ thru some thangs,” so she has to make sure we don’t start looking like “dem little po’, big-belly babies in Africa we always see on the late-night TV commercials.” She makes us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or gives us big hulking slices of lemon pound cake that she makes from scratch.
Our apartment is behind Ms. Patty’s in the back of the building on the top floor and doesn’t face the street, so we can’t see what happens on the sidewalks, which is why we always run to her apartment when one of our parents leaves, to see in which direction they go.
“Ms. Patty! Ms. Patty!” we yell while banging on her door. “Let us come sit on da porch wit’ you!”
Ms. Patty pulls open the door and says, “Lawd, if y’all ain’t the loudest chi’runs in dis buildin’! Go on, but don’t touch nothin’. Nothin’! You hear me?!”
We nod our heads yes and then run through her apartment touching everything we can on the way to the porch while giggling uproariously.
Ms. Patty hit the lottery many years ago, but no one knows how much she won for. She has the nicest apartment in the building, and it’s full of strange fancy items like painted glass vases; a cabinet with white porcelain dishes on display; the biggest TV we’ve ever seen in our lives; and, taking up an entire wall, framed paintings of black people picking cotton and getting whipped in various positions. My brothers and I wonder why anyone would want pictures like that all around their apartment. Ms. Patty says it’s to honor the struggles of the ancestors so that she never forgets where she came from.
“But you don’t come from no cotton field, Ms. Patty. You come from Philadelphia,” Rone says when she tells us about the paintings.
“Aww hush, boy! I swear y’all have da fas’est and freshest lil mouths, jus’ like dem damn Bébé’s kids!”
She’s right. At this age, we are like Bébé’s kids—the characters in a popular animated movie that run around making a ruckus. Nobody can stop Bébé’s kids from wreaking havoc and destruction wherever they go. Bébé’s kids would have broken all the nice things in Ms. Patty’s apartment, but we don’t break anything on our sprint to the porch. We just run our hands over as many surfaces as possible, including her glass vases and the china cabinet. Later Ms. Patty will tell our mother, “Dey cain’t neva come back to my apartment ’cause dey leave greasy handprints all ova my shit.” But she always lets us back in.
When we finally arrive on the porch, we see our mother drive off in a red Buick with a man we don’t know. A few minutes later, Ms. Patty emerges with her purple cup and tells us to “sit down somewhere until ya mama get back.” I wonder if she knows my mother is a wizard and that she is going to perform one of her miracles. I search Ms. Patty’s eyes for a glimmer of knowing, but I don’t see any flashes of insight. My brothers and I sit on plastic chairs on the left side of the porch and stare up and down the street. This porch is the epicenter of social life for the apartment building in the summer. My parents, Ms. Patty, and their friends sit there for hours on warm summer days, talking about everything: politics, the old days, the future, and the people on
the sidewalk. Ms. Patty is notorious for making comments about people passing by, whether she knows them or not. My mother says, “Ms. Patty talks about er’body. She jus’ cain’t hep huhself. She got ta be observin’ and commentin’ on ev’rythang.”
Shortly after Ms. Patty joins us on the porch, she begins her observations: “Ooooh, look at huh. Got all dem damn kids dat she cain’t take care of. Ooooh, what’s happenin’ to da young folks today, Lawd? Wearin’ all dese tight dresses and thangs.” Ms. Patty suddenly turns to us and tells us, “Cova up y’all’s eyes,” so we won’t see what Danielle, the woman across the street, is wearing. We’ve already seen, but we still cover our eyes. We peek through our fingers and watch Danielle, who lives down the street and has five kids, saunter up the sidewalk. All the men parked in vans on the side of the street yell out to her, “You lookin’ mighty fine today, Ms. Danielle. When you gon’ let one a’ us have a piece of dat?”
After Ms. Patty has done all her secret observing, she yells down in a syrupy-sweet but fake voice, “All right, Ms. Danielle, how you doin’ today? I like dat outfit. You lookin’ mighty good, gurl! And how dem kids?”
Danielle hollers back, “Er’body doin’ good, by da grace of God.”
Ms. Patty responds, “I know that’s right. All we got is grace. Well, I’m glad you doin’ good. Have a blessed day, now.”
As Danielle walks away, we uncover our eyes and Ms. Patty continues her commenting.
“Ooooh, dat girl jus’ ain’t done nothin’ wit’ her life ’cept single-handedly repopulate da whole damn earf. Ooooh, Lawd keep her high in yo favor, ’cause she shole gon’ need as much grace as you can give. If dat ain’t da truf, I don’t know what is.” Ms. Patty takes a sip out of her purple cup while chuckling to herself.
My brothers, Jerone and Teandre—Rone and Dre, and I sit for the next hour on Ms. Patty’s porch while she drinks and talks about everybody who walks by. She must be taking the smallest sips known to man because she never seems to run out of liquid. When we finally see the red Buick back on the street and turning into the driveway, we run down the hall to our apartment and sit quietly at the table, putting our shells back up.
Our mother bursts through the door with McDonald’s, our favorite, and two bags of groceries. We are astonished. How did she do it? With no money. With no job. She has turned air into food. Amazed, we sit at the kitchen table feasting upon her miracle. We gobble the cheeseburgers and fries, and gulp down the sodas. She stands, leaning against the sink, smoking a cigarette, watching us. Her eyes are dead. Her clothes and hair are disheveled. She doesn’t say anything. She is cold and detached. Behind her shell again. I ask, “Momma, do you want some?” Suddenly, the shell breaks and tears begin pouring out of her eyes. We stop eating. We are shocked. We are disturbed. We don’t understand. Why is she crying after she has produced such a marvelous miracle? “No, baby,” she says. “I’m awright.”
She’s not “awright” now, though. She’s lying on the bathroom floor, not moving. And the house is burning. I don’t know that the house is burning. I am only six and don’t know what smoke means, but I know something is wrong. I see several birds chirping frantically outside the open window. As soon as I notice them, everything starts to move in slow motion. The people on the TV talk much slower. The black clouds of smoke roll in slower and slower. The birds seem to know something is wrong. They fly in circles right outside the window. I want to tell them to fly far, far away before the smoke swallows them, too, but before I can, I hear muffled voices shouting, “Is there anyone inside? Is there anyone up there?” I hear sirens blaring, right outside the apartment. I don’t have many words yet. So I start crying. I stand in the middle of the room and cry as loud as I can. I try to push all the energy of my body into my voice. I amplify myself, attempt to become just sound. A sound so big it can reach the voices outside.
It works! I hear someone coming up the stairs. I hear Ms. Patty’s voice. I hear my father’s voice. I hear other voices. I hear pounding. I hear keys jingling at the door. Suddenly, my father bursts into the apartment and in one fell swoop grabs us all—my mother, Rone, Dre, and me—in his big, drunken arms. He is not cussing now. He is quiet and focused. More quiet and focused than he’s ever been in his entire life. He transforms himself into a nest and carries us all away from the smoke. It is the only miracle I have ever seen him make. Our tiny hands grip the back of his neck as he gallops forward, unstoppable, until he emerges outside into the crisp, stinging air. I rest my head on his shoulder and watch as the birds fly away north into the night sky.
* * *
When I am older, I ask my mother what she was dreaming about when she was lying on the floor while our apartment building was on fire. She said she wasn’t dreaming, she was praying. She was in a crack cocaine–induced coma that almost took her life. She could hear me nearby and wanted desperately to help, but she couldn’t activate her body. Instead she lay there and prayed the whole time. She said she had no choice but to surrender to the beyond. It was out of her hands. So when she was lying there, in a puddle of her own vomit, with pants down and her body paralyzed, she prayed, “Dear God, please let my chi’run be diff’rnt. Please, God. This ain’t no kind of life. It might be too late fo me, but it ain’t too late fo dem. Make a way, God. Make a way out of no way.”
She spiraled those prayers so far and deep into the universe, she felt like she left her body altogether and traveled to the in-between: the quantum field of infinite possibility where miracles originate, where the ancestors live, and which exists between this world and the beyond. In that place, outside the limitations of time and space, she begged for mercy, for another way, and the whole quantum field vibrated from the impact of her desire. In fact, the universe began to reimagine the trajectory of what was possible. Unforeseen realities for me and my brothers began to take shape. My mother is no ordinary wizard. She is a quantum wizard with the power to disrupt the future by spiraling her prayers far beyond the man-made barriers of this world.
LESSON 3
Reaching the In-Between
I wonder if I came from the in-between, if that’s where I was before I was born. My mother said that’s where she went on the night of the fire and that’s where all the dead people are. I wonder if that’s where all the born people are as well, before they are born. Nobody will answer my questions about the in-between—where it is, who lives there, how to get there—so I make up my own stories. It’s at the top of the sky, way above, where the blue part ends. And aliens, not ancestors, live there. I stare up at the sky with my notebook, trying to see where it is. I squint my eyes, which causes the sides of my mouth to pull up, like I’m smiling, but I’m not. I bend my head all the way back until it feels like it’s going to fall off. I still don’t see anything but clouds and sun rays. God has hidden it well, I think.
I ask my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Samuels, if she has ever seen the in-between at the top of the sky where the aliens live and where we spiral our prayers. She cranes her head confusedly to the side and says there’s no such thing as the in-between. “There’s nothing but empty space, other planets, and the sun above the sky.”
I stare at her doubtfully. “But my mother went there,” I say definitively. “So it has to be hidden somewhere we can’t see.”
“Sweetie, I don’t know what you’re asking me. No one knows what’s above all of that, but I very much like your curiosity.”
On the first day of school, Mrs. Samuels gives us all notebooks and tells us we have to be scientists in our own lives, curious about our surroundings. Like scientists, we should write down our observations about the world around us. She doesn’t need to tell me that, however, because I’m already very curious about everything. In addition to my curiosities about the in-between, I am also curious about my parents and the other adults in my neighborhood. I observe them carefully and take notes about my findings in the small notebook. I figure out that the adults are very strange, and not like us children. For example, they seem to be
angry all the time, even at little things like when we forget to close the screen door, or when we come running up the stairs in excitement. And when there is food in the house, my mother gets very angry when we don’t eat every single bite on our plates. Sometimes, I get so stuffed, I feel like my belly will explode. I feel like the white Pillsbury Doughboy who’s always on TV. I don’t want to eat another bite, but there is still so much food on my plate. I try to sneak the plate past my mother, who is talking on the phone, but she sees me and tells me to “sit right on down and scrape dat plate. You thank food grows on trees?! Well, some of it do … But dat ain’t da point. Ain’t gon’ be nothin’ wasted in dis house!” I sit for another hour taking small bites until all my food is finally gone.
I tell my brothers we have to observe our parents like they are specimens in the laboratory to figure out why they are so strange. My brothers hate school, but they love observing. The only time I ever see them focus all the attention in their brains is when we are secretly observing the adults. I have tried to convince them of how important school is, even setting up a pretend school on the weekends to teach them everything Mrs. Samuels has taught me, but they wiggle and squirm and eventually run around the living room screaming, “Noooo!” They sit as quiet and still as rocks when we are observing, however, like they are about to learn the most important lesson in the world.
Our favorite place to secretly observe adults is at the Saturday-night spades game. My parents dress up and invite all their rowdy friends over. Spades is a popular card game for black people in America that involves lots of trash-talking, like “Who taught you how to play spades, nigga, Stevie Wonder?” At first, my brothers and I think the adults will begin fighting when they start their trash-talking, but two minutes later they are laughing and joking, slapping the table in glee, and patting one another on the shoulder. The trash-talking seems to be how they bond and build community during the game. My brothers and I practice trash-talking after the party by hurling insults we hear during the game at each other. We know we are not supposed to say cuss words, so we cover our mouths and giggle while mocking the strange adults.