“Come here, sonny,” my grandmother said.
“I’ll meet you at the house, old girl.” Joe was holding the man up with one hand.
“Let that man go.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with him.” Joe turned to the man he was holding. “Tell her ain’t nothing wrong with you.”
That man was shaking in his boots. “Naw, ma’am. Ain’t nothing wrong with me.”
* * *
My uncle Joe was something else. This was the sixties, and these were our communities. Back then, everybody watched out for everybody. Didn’t nobody want to mess with Joe. They didn’t want to be up under his wrong side, and they figured out the way to get out from under him was to call my grandmomma to come and get him.
I remember my grandmother saying, “Alright, sonny, fuck with him again, why don’t you?” When they both got home, my grandmother turned to him with her fists up and said, “That’s right, I got you now.”
My uncle started laughing and trying to hold her. He told her, “Ah, come here and give me a hug.”
She started laughing. “Gone now. Get somewhere.” My uncle Joe knew if he didn’t make her laugh, she was gonna whoop his ass. She loved her boys more than any momma I ever knew. Sure, she whooped them over the head, but she kissed the hurt right after. I think that was because she knew the police wanted to kill my uncle Joe.
One time they told her, “No, ma’am, we don’t want to take your son to jail, we wanna kill your son.” That was the Fillmore Police Station, Chicago. They had a lotta nasty cops there. Lotta old stories came out that precinct. Up there on Pulaski and Fillmore. I guess it was the right kind of policing for the community, cause there was some tough brothers. My uncle was one of them. I mean, one time he knocked a cop out. After that, they really wanted to do him in. Every time he went to the penitentiary, they made him box. And my uncle was the star boxer. He brought trophies home. The institution crazy, ain’t it? Fighting brothers against each other. My uncle was good with his hands; he was real, real good with his fists. He could have been another Sonny Liston or another Cassius Clay, but he was such a little stinker. He was a criminal. I missed him when he was in jail, but I had the rest of my family to love.
There was five of them: my aunt Josie; my mother, Ernestine; my uncle Joe; my aunt Suzie; and my uncle Lee. Lee was the baby. My grandmother said he sucked a bottle till he was five years old. He would go to the refrigerator and fix his own bottle. Can you imagine this big-ass kid going to the fridge and pouring his own bottle? We all laughed about that.
All my uncles and aunts were young—my mother was only fifteen when she had me—but they weren’t like brothers and sisters to me; they were my uncles and aunts. I was the only kid in the house. My five half brothers—Jethro, Jerome, Wiley, Terry, and Todd—all lived with my daddy and his wife.
Ma’Dea didn’t care for my daddy, so I rarely saw him. My grandmother kept me close. My uncles and aunts kept me closer. I was their dead sister’s kid.
Every time we went over to one of our relatives’ on the weekends, we did a fish fry and everybody got together and played spades. I danced and danced to a whole lot of Sam Cooke, and everybody told me stories about my mother, who died before I could walk, before I even had crawling down good. “Your momma was built like a Coke bottle, Fat Mommy. She was Ma’Dea’s favorite child. Did you know that?” I did. I did know. Ma’Dea told me stories about my mother almost every day. In those stories my mother was beautiful, and she had men down the block wanting to court her. “Who you waiting on today, Ernestine?” And my mother would shrug her beautiful brown shoulders. Once, some man had given her the biggest engagement ring anyone had ever seen, but my mother just looked at it and said she’d think about it. Those were the stories my grandmother and uncles and aunts told me. And when we went to their houses, we would be having so much fun, there’d be so much laughing and Sam Cooke and dancing, but when I heard the voices start to elevate, I always knew my grandmother was in it. My grandmother and her liquor didn’t go together. Every time she drank, she wanted to fight somebody about something that happened before anybody was born, or just because. I pretended I was asleep so she would leave me behind, but she never did. She’d come and wake me up. I could hear people saying, “Don’t wake her up! Let her stay here!”
She’d turn on them and say, “This motherfucker here is going with me. She’s my responsibility, not yours!” As if I were her property. “Get your motherfucking ass up and let’s go!” I was nervous. Shaking all over. When I talk to my family about some of this now, they say, “I don’t remember that.” And I’m thinking, Naw, you don’t want to remember it, but it happened. I don’t want to remember Woody, but I do. I remember it all. The drinking and beatings. You think I’m gone to sit up here and make this up? Y’all act like you don’t remember, but do you remember when you came and got me? You came and got me cause I got so many extension cord marks on my back. Do you remember that?
I remember Aunt Josie taking me into the bathroom and lifting up my blouse and saying, “Oh my God,” and her face looked like she was about to cry, and she didn’t let me go back to Ma’Dea’s house that night. “You just stay here, Fat Mommy.” Oh, but now she don’t remember none of that? My grandmother is gone now, and know I loved my grandmother more than anybody, but I knew who she was. And I’m talking about me now. I’m talking about how intimidated I was. There’s this wonderful picture of her I have. She was drunk in the photo. Could anybody else tell? Let me tell you: when she wasn’t drunk, she was the smoothest, coolest lady on the planet. She cooked fried pies; cooked anything you could ask for. In the mornings, she’d sit up and read me the funny papers. She was so together. Sometimes in the early evening, especially if it was nice outside, she would look at me and say, “Come on, get the dog. Let’s take a walk.” And we would go for a walk. We lived maybe three, four blocks before our community cut off into the white folks’ neighborhood, called K-Town. And we would walk down to the white folks’ neighborhood—maybe they were Italian or Polish, but I was so young I didn’t know; white was white at that time—and look at the yards and how pretty they were because ours didn’t look like that. Around Christmastime, we would stop and look at the lights. We went on our evening walks, and Ma’Dea would stop and get “a taste”—that’s what she called it.
You know what I really hated? When those assholes came through during the week with their brown bags and got her drunk. Cause not only did she stay up all night with the drinking; I stayed up all night with the drinking. When she got drunk, she would call me up out of my bed. “Come here and sang for Ma’Dea.”
Their nasty asses used to sit back and say, “Nah, you ain’t got to make her do that.”
And my grandma said, “She gone do what I tell her to do. Wake up!”
They knew I was intimidated. They used that. Especially when they brought the little drinks around. They knew what kind of state they were going to get her in. They wanted that, so Ma’Dea would be so drunk she wouldn’t notice them messing with me. She drank vodka, Smirnoff. And my grandma, my Ma’Dea, who was a good-looking woman even when she wore a housecoat, changed and turned ugly. Fight. Fight, fight, fight. Every weekend I tried to hide in the closet. Every weekend she was nursing a black eye. She was a pro at nursing black eyes. She did her share, too. She didn’t get whooped all the time. They might have got a lick in, but she was the winner. When you did my grandmother wrong, she was not nice. Once, when my granddaddy Ike came home from work at the carwash, she scalded him with a pot of beans. She wasn’t kidding. If you came to her house, you knew that. This was how she talked to me: “Motherfucker come in here with some bullshit? You better watch me. I’ll get up and light me a cigarette, and you think that’s all I’m doing, but I’m gone light that cigarette off the stove and I’m heating my water up.”
She kept what could be weapons in the house. White women came to the front door, and she had a hammer and hatchet under the couch cushion if they acted up. She kept things a
round that she could get to if you messed with her. And she loved to start it. “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll start it.” That’s what she told people instead of hello. As sweet as she was, my grandmother had a mean streak in her, and I bore the brunt of it. My grandmother told me I was scary; I was a punk. Maybe I was. I found out later on, I am also a marshmallow. It took a few years and a world of hurt to realize even marshmallows can get tough. Even the sweetest child can become bitter.
Chapter 2
Where’s My Shine?
Girls like me weren’t born out on the streets. You’ve got to realize we were raised, just like everybody else. My grandmother raised me. Took care of me as best she could. I turned nine years old, and in the middle of all that laughing, singing, drinking, hitting, I realized something crazy: all five of my grandma’s kids left home early. They all left home at fourteen, fifteen years old. Nobody stayed in that house past that. My uncles came back to live with us from time to time, but my aunties were outta there. With babies. Josie, Suzie, my momma—all of them. My grandmomma did the best she could with what she had, but when she had a drink … I had to stay there with her, night and day, and be in that house with her, by myself, a young girl, listening to my grandma’s angry alcoholic self. Listen to her sorrowful alcoholic self, when she was making her plans to die, talking about people from the past, making me validate my love for her. You know how drunk people are: “I love you; you don’t love me like I love you. How much you love me? You love me, Brenda Jean?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I told her.
“How much?”
“A sugar and a peck and a hug around the neck.” And then I gave her a hug around the neck.
There were always other people around, other drunks. I was sitting on the couch, and all I wanted to do was shrink and get away. I could smell the liquor. I’m a kid, and I’m watching these people do what grown folks do. There was nothing interesting in this for me. I was watching them, and they just being inappropriate with each other. Even at nine years old, I knew they shouldn’t be doing this stuff in front of a kid.
When I was young, the insurance man used to come over our house. Ma’Dea had bought some insurance from him. I didn’t know this, but they had made some arrangement for him to come back later and have some drinks, and he came by with another guy with him. Ma’Dea set the drinks up. You know, looking back, I was kind of invisible to them. I can’t remember how old Ma’Dea was at that time, but she was a good-looking woman. You know she wore those stretch pants with the stirrups from the sixties and those pretty little knit tops and they matched, and she had a neat shape and she had that red hair and a pretty smile. Brothers liked her. I remember I felt so uncomfortable. They were slow dancing, and I remember thinking this wasn’t going to end well. My grandmomma had this boyfriend, Ike, but I never knew if they were on or off, on or off. I was sitting there thinking about Ike because I didn’t like the way the insurance man was dancing with my grandmomma.
I had this ugly look on my face. They were dancing slow and nasty. Ma’Dea was drinking, and in order to keep me quiet, she done gave me the driest bag of potato chips I ever had. She told me go somewhere and sit down, and I obeyed her. I knew how to be invisible. I disappeared right there on the couch. Poof, I was gone. I was taught to never get in grown folks’ conversation. I knew not to answer the door. “Bet not answer that door. What you doing at that door?” And if I said something, I got, “Don’t you hear me talking? You gone get knocked into the middle of next week.” I remember sitting around and having to use the bathroom, and I was scared to ask cause I know can’t interrupt what’s going on, and so I’m just holding it. Ma’Dea looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I gotta go pee.”
She got mad and said, “What’s wrong with you? Gone and pee!”
Everyone who was in the house would tell her, “That’s right. You got her trained. She know better.” And I was trained. Trained to be a ho, before I even knew what that was. I was living a ho’s life: I knew what I was supposed to do and what I wasn’t supposed to do. But I was still a kid. Not that I didn’t get into trouble, but I was still a kid.
I remember one time, Ma’Dea was sleeping on the couch and I saw some spirits. I don’t think it was my childhood imagination, I think it was some real spirits. They weren’t unfriendly, but they just came and looked at me. It might have been my mom. Where we were then, the living room was in the front and you had to walk all the way down the hall, past the bedrooms, past the bathroom to get all the way to the kitchen. The kitchen was way in the back and didn’t nobody have lights on, cause like folks say, “Don’t be running up no light bill.” You couldn’t keep the refrigerator open too long when I was growing up. That was a light bill. Please answer me why this refrigerator light is running up the light bill, boo-boo? Anyway, I remember Ma’Dea saying, “Go get me a cold glass of water.” But I wasn’t really feeling me going back there in the dark. I didn’t want go back there by myself, but Ma’Dea saw my face and said, “Girl, if you don’t go back there and get me some water.” So I went sliding down the hallway against the wall, and I got in there and I was trying to feel for the light. But I couldn’t find it, so I opened the refrigerator and the fridge light came on. Standing behind the refrigerator door was a person in a long gown or a robe or something. I dropped the glass and ran back front, and I told Ma’Dea, “Something back there; I seen something back there.”
“Girl, quit lying.” But she went back there with me, and she cut the light on and she didn’t see it, but I saw them. I’m a grown woman right now; I was not confused. Something was there and it was looking over me. I didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, but it was a spirit. When I was down or scared or lonely, I would think it was my momma.
My imagination wasn’t just for conjuring ghosts. When Ma’Dea was asleep and I was bored, I found little-kid trouble. Ma’dea had these doilies all around, and I had a pair of scissors, and I decided to redesign all the doilies. I had nothing to do. I had already cut my doll’s hair and that was not enough. I cut those doilies and then pieced them back together. I thought I had got away with it, but Ma’Dea was cleaning up one day and she picked them up and they started falling apart and she said, “What the hell is this? Brenda Jean, what is this?”
“I don’t know.” My eyes were as big as saucers. I didn’t know if she knew I was lying or not, but I was so nervous when she was fussing about them damn doilies. I was about four years old. But my boredom ended soon enough. I went to kindergarten right across the street, Sumner Elementary School, and my teacher’s name was Ms. Law and I thought she was the real law. She was tall, a big presence. I was a good student; I was a good kid. I could come out my front door and go right to school. It was real cool. There was a little store. And there was a cleaners. Learner’s Cleaners, and it was a factory and everybody worked there, even Ma’Dea. Uncle Joe worked there for a minute, but he was always feeling on girls’ titties so they fired him. He was a Casanova, especially with older women. He was always somewhere with his wang in somebody. And the husbands didn’t do anything with him cause my uncle was a killer. Plus, these older women were hanging out with my grandmother. My grandmother cussed Uncle Joe out, “Leave them women alone; don’t do this, these men gone shoot you.”
But Uncle Joe was like, “Aw, I ain’t scared of these boys. These dudes ain’t gone do nothing to me.” Uncle Joe was very frivolous; he was always doing something with some woman. Once, we had a house party, but we weren’t supposed to, so Uncle Joe gave me a candy so I didn’t say anything. And I never did, cause it was Uncle Joe and that was my partner. He went across the street and got twenty-five cents’ worth of bologna and a loaf of bread, and me and him up sat up and ate bologna sandwiches together. Or he would get up in the morning and cook a can of biscuits and get some syrup and we would have that. The kids now want so much, but back then that’s what we did and I loved it. Getting a fried bologna sandwich meant somebody loved you. We loved that bologna and that
was the best bologna, too. Not this meat in plastic they got now. Back then was the good stuff. I was always talking to him, all day, every day, and he never told me to cut it out. One time he was in the bathroom, probably stinking it up, but I was standing right by the door and I was like, “Blah, blah, yippy hay, hay.” He answered me every now and again. And I was like, “Blah, blah, middy, yippy, yeah, yeah.”
My grandmother came by the door. “That’s a damn shame. He can’t take a shit by himself.” I just followed him around and he let me. I loved my uncle Joe.
There was a lounge on Lake and Hamlin, and the lounge had some really good hamburgers, and a lady named Lea ran the place, and she ran into Uncle Joe and lost her mind about him. And next thing I know Uncle Joe was running it. He took money from the cash register and he was pouring drinks. It was his place now. I’m like, Can I get a job? And they gave me a job! To make the hamburgers.
When you walked in, they had a little grill area, and that was the area I had to stay in; I couldn’t go near the bar part. I had to stay in the area and make the hamburgers and then go to the tables and give the customers the hamburgers, get my little tip, and then come back. Everybody thought that was cute. “Look at that little girl working the hamburgers and the French fries.” I drank so much pop, they told me they weren’t gone pay me. My grandmomma came down to get a little taste, and she asked around, “How she do today?” And they all said good. I was busy. I was washing dishes and flipping hamburgers. I was so proud cause I’m nine years old and I’m working, making my own little money at the liquor store/burger joint. I worked down there for a good month or so. I think I lost interest or something. It was no big deal, but for a minute I had a few dollars, and I could go up on Madison Street and go to the five-and-dime and get me some stuff.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 3