by Donna Hill
I just called her crazy in my head ’cause had I said it out loud Mama would have smacked the black off of me.
I heard Mama whisper to a friend of hers, after Black Power left the store, that the state had taken Black Power’s babies away from her because she didn’t allow them to eat no meat, cheese or drink milk.
I heard Mama say she was a vegan, and back then I imagined that meant she was a bad mother, ’cause I hadn’t ever heard that word before.
I could have asked Mama exactly what it meant, ’cause she’d spent two whole semesters at Howard University, before she met my daddy and dropped out, but I didn’t bother to ask because she would have got on me about eavesdropping on grown folks’ business.
One day I was sitting out in front the bookstore on a chair that Mama had brought just for me, licking on my cherry ice pop. It was nearly three in the afternoon and the sun was shining real high and bright in the sky.
People had been in and out the bookstore all day long and for some reason—a reason I would understand later on in life—their Afros looked bigger than the sun to me on that day and the men wore two black-fisted Afro picks in their heads instead of the usual one.
People came in dashikis and wearing their Black Is Beautiful T-shirts. Some came with lit candles and others came with pans of food. Their faces were mad, sad, and some even walked in and straight out began to weep. Well, curiosity got the best of me and I snuck back into the store because I wanted to know who died, ’cause it sure did look like a repast to me. And I was about to ask, when someone slammed his head down on the counter and shouted, “We gotta kill them sons of bitches!”
Mama sent me out of the store then.
So there I was, back in my little chair, licking on my cherry ice pop when a whole lot of racket started making its way down the street. Sounded to me like forty people coming, but when I looked up it was just Black Power.
She was beating on a drum, and strapped to her chest was a cassette player blaring someone yelling in a language I ain’t never heard before. It was hot as sin that day and Black Power was dressed in her usual fatigues and the sweat was just pouring down her face.
Mama came running out of the store, and I saw from the corner of my eye that she had something small and silver in her hand that she hurriedly shoved behind her back when she saw me looking.
“Go on in the store, little girl,” she said, and I did.
“What you doing, B?” Mama called over to Black Power. She never called her Black Power, just B.
Black Power got to the front of the store and stopped beating her drum, but the man on the cassette player was still yelling and Black Power was saying something but Mama couldn’t hear her and said, “Turn that mess down, B. I can’t hear you.”
Black Power turned it down and then tilted her head over her shoulder a bit. Mama walked around behind her, put her hands on her hips and nodded her head, and then she did something I ain’t never seen her do before. She touched Black Power, put her hand right on her shoulder and squeezed it, and then said, “Carry on, sister, carry on.”
Black Power turned her cassette player up, began banging on her drum again and started down the block. As I watched from behind the window, I saw that the back of Black Power’s jacket was missing and her bare skin was exposed, and written there in red letters were the words: Free Nelson Mandela.
That was June 12, 1964.
But what I would learn years later, after Black Power was dead, was that those letters on her back weren’t written on—they’d been branded on.
“You mourning someone, B?” Mama asked her one day as she locked the store up.
Black Power looked at her and I swear there were tears in her eyes as she said, “I had a premonition.”
“Oh yeah? What about?”
“I saw,” Black Power said, and spread her fingers out before her face, “a great prophet standing on an altar, a halo over his head, his robes that of the common man.”
Mama’s chest heaved and she kind of smirked.
“And then the air around him came together and turned into a bolt of lightning that pierced his heart and he disintegrated into dust.”
Mama just stared at her for moment before saying, “I’m gonna make me a red velvet cake tonight. Make sure you come by tomorrow and get yourself a piece.”
Three days later, Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
Mama cried something terrible and Black Power chained herself to the light pole, banging her drum and talking in tongues until someone finally called the cops and then the cops called Bellevue.
“Our people, our people,” Mama repeated over and over again in 1974 as she stood behind the glass pane window of the bookstore, watching the white men install the roll-down metal gates. The bookstore had been broken into and vandalized three times in three months. The intruders had defecated on the books and spray painted cuss words across the pictures on the walls.
Mama said the neighborhood was under siege and all of the conscious people were fleeing, getting city jobs and moving out to the suburbs, out to Queens.
My generation was hooked on heroin and attacking the elderly on the first of the month when the postman delivered their social security checks.
All around us, black metal gates were being installed over windows, the beautiful wooden double doors with the elongated glass panels that welcomed the sunshine into an otherwise dark brownstone were being replaced with dark gray steel ones that blocked out the sunshine altogether.
“Our people, our people,” Mama said, and then I thought the world stopped reading, because no one came in to buy books anymore and Mama had to finally give up the bookstore. She couldn’t get a job at the post office even though she’d passed that test with flying colors. Hell, she’d taken it a few times over the years for other people, just to make a little change on the side, so when the results came in and said that she had failed, Mama balled up that paper and threw it across the room and yelled out, “Goddamn FBI file!”
Black Power had been locked away for most of the seventies. When she was finally let out, she came back to the only place she ever knew, the only place she’d ever called home—Bed-Stuy.
Her little apartment was gone. In fact, the entire house was gone and so Black Power made her home on a bench in Fulton Park.
The bookstore had gone from a numbers hole/candy store to a beauty salon to just an empty storefront.
There were still a few people left in the neighborhood who remembered the old days, the consciousness and Black Power, and they would hold on to their empty soda cans and beer bottles, saving them for the time they would see Black Power and her shopping cart shuffling down Fulton Street mumbling to herself.
“C’mon by,” they’d say when they came upon her. “Got two bags for you, gotta be worth a good five dollars.”
Black Power never even acknowledged them, just kept shuffling along. But she would eventually show up and collect on the offer.
Mama and I stayed, even when the neighborhood crumbled around us and people started referring to it as Bed-Stuy live and die. We stayed, found a way and made a home.
I never did go to college the way Mama dreamed I would, but I did get a job at the post office and in the mid-eighties, the city of New York practically started giving away Bed-Stuy’s brownstones.
By then I was married to a good man who worked for sanitation and, together, we bought a four-story brownstone on Macon Street. Mama didn’t want to, but we convinced her to take the apartment on the ground floor.
Two years after that, a For Rent sign went up in the space where the bookstore used to be and we refinanced the brownstone and took out ten thousand dollars to rent and renovate the place.
This is where I write to you from today.
The place where I grew, listened and learned is once again a place of enlightenment and consciousness.
The neighborhood is vibrant again. A little bit lighter than it was when I
grew up, but that’s okay. This generation has greater demons to fight than my mama did in the sixties and seventies, and it’s going to take people of all colors and from all backgrounds to defeat this beast.
But what I wanted you and your listeners to know is that, yes, Black Power died some years ago—walked right into my store, sat down on the bench, smiled at my little girl, closed her eyes and fell right out of this life.
We had a service for her here at the bookstore, a going home like you wouldn’t believe, with food and music and stories that no one had told in years, and before we knew it, we were walking down Lewis Avenue, beating a drum and yelling, “Power to the People!”
Because know it or not, that’s what she’d been to the people in this neighborhood—power. She gave it power when we couldn’t find it for ourselves; she kept us conscious even when we didn’t want to be.
And so while Black Power is laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, I make a pilgrimage there every twelfth of the month, clean off her grave site and place fresh flowers on her headstone. And this reminds me Black Power may be gone, maybe invisible to the eye, may not be marching up and down the sidewalk and screaming, “We shall overcome,” but she no longer has to. Her job is done. She is embedded in me, in everyone who ever came in contact with her, and her memory lives on in the stories we tell and so she lives on. She lives on.
I drop the letter on my lap. I want to laugh, to make a mockery of the writer as I always do, but somehow I can’t. What the writer said hits me somewhere deep inside, resurrects something inside of me that I thought was dead. Like I said before, I live well. But reading this letter makes me think of how all that has been made possible and it damned sure isn’t only because of anything I’ve done, but the work and struggles of folks like this chick’s mother.
Instead of feeling uplifted, a wave of sadness sweeps through me. She was proud of her mama. I know I can’t say the same. My mother! Most days she couldn’t even remember my name. Yeah, that’s a part of my life that no one other than Macy knows about. This whole life I’m living now is far removed from how I grew up. I didn’t only change my life, I changed my name and pulled myself up out of the depths of drugs, violence and unwanted sex.
There are some mornings when I wake up terrified that it’s all a dream and that this life I’m living is simply a product of my vivid imagination. I gotta be on top, gotta stay on top, ’cause if I don’t, I may just fall all the way back down into that pit of ugliness that I came from.
I fold the letter, but instead of putting it back in the bag, I put it in the drawer in my nightstand. Maybe on those mornings when I wake up terrified I’ll read it again. I reach for the light and turn it off, then flip onto my side and squeeze my eyes shut. If I try really hard I’ll sleep through the night and the demons of my past will stay in the shadows. If I try really hard.
CHAPTER 10
It’s about nine in the morning. When I don’t get a sex workout to put me to sleep I generally only need a few hours’ sleep to get through my day. Coffee, juice, a slice of toast and a cup of yogurt. That is my everyday breakfast. I don’t get much of a chance to go to a gym, so I do attempt to watch what I eat. After all, I have to make sure I can get into my very expensive designer clothes. Holla!
The letters I read the night before still run around in the back of my head. Most of the time they don’t get to me. It’s all just a job, know what I mean. But every now and then some of them get under my skin, disturb all the dirt I’ve dumped over my own issues. Sometimes I think that’s the reason I do what I do—make light of other folks’ messes so that I don’t have to deal with my own. Hey, this is too much introspecting for this time of the morning.
I walk into the living room and turn on the stereo. The Steve Harvey Morning Show is on. I love that show. Truth be told, I never listen to WHOT unless it’s a rerun of my own show! Sipping on my cup of coffee I crack up listening to Steve and Tommy do Country News. That skit is always a howl.
I’m feeling better already. One of these days I’m gonna call in and tell them what a good job they’re doing and how they get me through my mornings—anonymously, of course.
Humming to Robin Thicke’s latest song, I saunter into my office to get down to work. Like I said in the beginning, I get tons of letters, more letters than I can ever read and certainly more than will ever get on the air. The ones that don’t go live on the show I often post on my Web site and let my listeners post their comments. And trust me, the Web site is almost as wild and crazed as the show.
I sit down behind my desk and assume the position then take the first letter on the top out. I slit the envelope open with my gold-embossed letter opener. Funny, the opener came in the mail one day and I almost freaked. I just knew it was from some crazed listener sending me some kind of weird message. But it was only a thank-you gift for some advice I’d given that actually worked out. Oh yeah, I do get threats every now and again. Someone pissed off or a protester who thinks I should be banned, but I don’t pay those folks much attention. The reason I’m so popular is because I’m wild and say the most outrageous things. So my motto is, if you don’t like it, change the station! Simple, right?
Anyway, I open the letter from a woman who titles her letter, Between the Lines.
Dear Joy,
I hope you don’t mind my calling you Joy. I was listening to your program day before yesterday, and that character…I mean the man on your show had me doing a slow burn. He’s entitled to his stupidity, but he doesn’t have the right to force it on innocent listeners. Imagine a man who speaks so fine and cultured like he does saying he doesn’t believe there’s anything a person can’t control. He said there are no such things as impulses, fate, addiction, none of that. He doesn’t believe anything he can’t see, not much that he hears and very little that he touches. His words, Joy, not mine. You should’ve kicked him off the show. I wish I’d been there. If he had the burden my best friend’s carrying, he wouldn’t be so damned arrogant. Let me tell you about Dorothy Faye and what she told me.
Dorothy Faye Hodge lived high on the hog, thanks to her success as a voice teacher and the eagerness of black kids to get rich singing hip-hop and rap. She knew her BMW coupe looked out of place in Frederick, Maryland’s lower middle-class black neighborhood, where the average person parked a five-year-old Hyundai in front of the house, but she didn’t care. The girl had already seen her thirty-fourth birthday, but she told her friends she was twenty-eight and, to prove it, she was careful to wiggle when she walked…with the aid of her four-inch heels, that is.
That Saturday morning, Dorothy Faye wiggled out of the South Street Mall, found her way to the precious BMW that she’d parked in the underground garage, and had began to pull off the offending high-heeled shoes when she looked up and nearly fainted. She stared into the piercing blue eyes of an ash-blond woman she hadn’t heard approach—and on that concrete she should have heard her.
“Who…who are you?” she asked the woman as shivers streaked through her.
“Why do you ask? You know who I am, because you’re one of us, Dorothy Faye.”
In that warm spring weather, perspiration dripped from Dorothy Faye’s forehead. Her teeth began to chatter, and she leaned back against her BMW for support. She glanced around for a means of escape or, at least, for the comfort of another person’s presence, a stranger, anybody. Seeing no one, she turned back to the blue-eyed blonde but saw not even a shadow. Dorothy Faye stood in the vast underground garage completely alone.
Dorothy Faye had always refused to examine the strangeness about herself, blocking out her premonitions, forcing herself to forget the things she “saw” that later came to pass, as well as the things she “saw” that were so unreal she was ashamed to mention them to anyone.
“I wonder what that sister meant? I’m sure not blond, and my eyes are dark brown like my face.”
She remembered that she hadn’t bought stockings, put her purchases in the car’s trunk, locked it and went back inside
the mall to buy some panty hose. “Wonder how come I feel so light, like I just lost thirty pounds. Humph, it’s like somebody took a weight off my shoulders,” she said aloud. Her gaze took in a tall, slim man. From a distance, she saw that his eyes were fawn-like, his lips sensuous, his skin the color of a fine camel-hair coat. She licked her lips and began to salivate.
Revelation hit her and, when the man reached her, she stopped him. “Hello, Jonathan,” she said to the complete stranger. “I’m Dorothy Faye. Come with me.”
“I’m…I can’t. I’m getting married next Saturday, and I’m on my way right now to get fitted for my tuxedo.”
Dorothy showed no concern for the man’s reticence. She knew now that she was one of them—whoever they were—and that with her piercing gaze and newfound abilities, she could get him to do whatever she wanted, and she wanted him to make love with her. With her special powers, she had discerned that he was a gifted stud, and she intended to enjoy him for as long as she wanted him.
She extended her hand and waited until, at last, he took it. “Come with me,” she said.
“What do you want with me? And who are you, anyhow?” he asked, as if he recognized the hand of fate.
“You’ve got everything I always wanted and never had,” she told him as she led him to her car. “Are you hungry? I mean, did you eat a big breakfast? No, you didn’t, did you? Don’t worry. I’ll feed you.”
She unlocked the front passenger’s seat, and he got in. She’d never liked docile men, and she knew that this one wasn’t, that he had no will at the moment other than her will. She hadn’t hypnotized him, but had merely robbed him of his will until such time as she decided to return it to him. She stopped at a gourmet delicatessen and bought pastrami sandwiches, a loaf of Italian bread, deviled eggs, oyster chowder, a lobster salad, a pound of baked ham and a dozen and a half buttermilk biscuits.