Everything became clear to me when I woke up that Saturday morning, August 22. The smells of cakes and pies being baked, greens being cooked, and chickens being fried settled like a cloud over the whole neighborhood. The Petworth Parents’ Club, headed by Mrs. Florence Billops, was holding one of its four-times-per-year dinners and bake sales. The money raised from these events paid for annual community trips for parents and kids to places like the New York World’s Fair, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and stuff like that.
So every mother in the neighborhood had started early in the morning, making her specialty. This meant me and my friends would have to hang around all day in case our mothers needed something from one of the corner stores, which they always did. Then we’d get the money and take off running through the alleys, pop over fences, shout at the friends who got to play kickball, and run in sweating to Mr. G’s or Chuck & Danny’s midnight delicatessen. Mr. G was this old—I don’t know, eighty years old maybe—heavyset bald-headed Jewish man, his fingers thick and curled up. He spoke with an accent I never figured out, maybe German, and all he ever did was grunt when we slid the money on the ounter or if we told him, “My mother said she’ll pay you on Monday…” Then we’d take off again, racing three blocks to see who’d make it back to the front porch first.
Mom made peas and rice, cornbread, potato salad, greens, curry chicken, and fried chicken. We’d start taking the food to Mrs. Billops’s by 10 o’clock, and people would be coming into the neighborhood and double-parking all afternoon. In the evening, all my father’s buddies would start arriving for their weekly dominos games. Every week it was at a different house—this week it was ours. My father and his friends also worked “serving parties” in rich white households or embassies; you could tell when they had one of those jobs cause when they came over, everyone’s arms would be filled with trays of hors d’oeuvres and bottles of scotch, rum, ginger ale, beer, and all kinds of expensive-looking stuff.
Mr. Christian, Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Palmer, Daddy Shaw, and my father would go to the basement to play “cards,” as they called dominos. Upstairs in the kitchen, my sisters, cousins Ivy and June, my mom, and whoever else dropped by would heat up hot combs and turn the radio to WOL while they pressed each others’ hair. The air in the house filled with the smells of “My Knight” hair pomade and curry chicken, and with laughter from the kitchen, the booming voices from downstairs, and Martha Reeves singing “Jimmy Mack.”
I was in the living room watching Saturday night movies on TV when the screen door to the house swung open. It was Doris, who lived in the front room upstairs with her common-law husband Tommy, and you could tell she was drunk. Everybody in the kitchen went quiet.
“Hello, Miz Wizzdom, I’ma, I’ma…You fixin’ Valda’s hair? You shoulda waited for me, I’ll do it. Hey, suga…” She was getting ready to squeeze my little sister’s cheeks.
“Doris, gwan upstairs and sleep,” my mother coaxed.
“Ah, Miz Wizzdom, y’all think I’m drunk, but I ain’t been drinkin’. Where Tommy? He come back in yet?” She was slurring and thoughts were running from her mind to her mouth, getting her in deeper shit with the women in the kitchen. I was peeking out from my chair in the living room.
“Come here, Bobby, take this upstairs for me, will ya, hon?”
“No.” Mom didn’t allow any of the tenants to tell us what to do. “No, you take your things upstairs yourself. Bobby, gwan back to your TV.”
“Shit. Y’all bein’ like that, thinkin’ y’all something special. Y’all ain’t nuthin’ but some black nigger Jamaicans.”
Mom’s hand was on cousin Ivy’s arm. She was ready to jump.
“That’s enough, Doris.” The name was spoken in a way that said this was the last bit of politeness coming. “You don’t cuss me in front of me children. If you want food, there’s food—”
“I ain’t hungry.” She was trailing a shirt or something on the floor behind her.
Doris was a big-boned woman, maybe in her thirties, from South Carolina. Black-skinned and thick. She wore red lipstick and nail polish and loved to party. She already had false teeth and sometimes pushed the bridge out when she talked. She was always smoothing her beehive—“I got good hair,” she would say.
But tonight you could feel everybody was tight-jawed. From downstairs came the rumble of men’s voices; they couldn’t hear what was going on since the door to the basement was closed. Mom had always felt sorry for Doris and tried to help pull her life together. Mom had to put her out once already, then Doris came back and promised that she on a good track. But this was the second weekend she had come in drunk. By now, everybody knew that when she had been drinking, it meant she and Tommy were gonna fight.
“Tommy, you up there…?!” she shouted to nobody.
I walked around to the dining room and saw my mother staring at Doris with that red-hot comb in her hands. “Don’t you dare talk fresh in my house!”
That was it. Even drunk Doris knew better than to push this woman.
“You tek yourself upsteers and don’t bother comin’ back down ’ere”—each word slow and quiet, with no fear. Doris went upstairs and we heard her door slam.
“She gon’ have to go, Miss Inie, cause she nuttin’ but trouble. You can’t keep feelin’ sorry for sumtin’ like dat…”
Doris stayed up in her room, but the mood in the kitchen changed. Everybody spoke in hushes. “Lawd have mercy,” was my mother. “I know, I know,” was cousin Ivy. “You should tell Daddy…” from my sisters. “No…” from both older women.
This went on for half an hour until Ivy took June home. The game was breaking up downstairs, and we were pulling out the bed to get ready for sleep, then Slam!
Booming footsteps rolled across the ceiling above us, furniture was pushed, a body shoved…voices muffled, a man and a woman…My sisters and I looked wide-eyed at the ceiling and the swinging chandelier. The glass pieces were tinkling, catching some light from the streetlamps outside and making strange dancing patterns across the ceiling and walls.
BOOM Two bodies fell together, like Bruno San Martino and Bobo Brazil, and it was as if we were watching from underwater.
Then the door upstairs opened and sound came rushing out.
“I’MA KILL YOU, MUTHAFUCKA !!” Doris banshee-screamed.
My father was up from the basement and in the hallway shouting. Tommy pushed past him, muttering, “She crazy, Mr. Wisdom, crazy and drunk. I’m through—”
Doris was running down the steps. “I’ma get you! You ain’t no good, I know you been seein’ that bitch!”
Tommy was out the door.
“Doris—” my father started to say.
“I ain’t talkin’ to you, you on his side. Where he at?!” Doris screamed.
My mother huddled us into a corner. “Unna just stay pon the floor…Elly, come back in, let that fool ’oman go.”
Blam!
“Omigodalmighty!” My mother was on top of us. I was on the bottom, holding my little sister but wanting to look out of the window that we were now under.
Blam! Blam!
I could hear Tommy far off, shouting, “Woman, you crazy, you done shot that man!”
For a tornado of minutes there was more shouting, crying. I was straining to look out the window. My mother was yelling at me to get down, then yanked me away.
“What’d I do?” I demanded. “I didn’t do nuthin’…Doris shot him!!”
“Don’t say nuthin’! Just shut you mouth…” She was crying.
I could see that Miss Lucy, the other American tenant, had made it to the middle of the stairs and was humming and mumbling to herself: “…You let me see, hmmhuhp, those people are trouble, you know…”
My father was out front. “Ya nah come back in my ’ouse.”
My mother: “Elly, don’t let har back in.”
By now, all the neighbors were out and we could hear police sirens coming down Georgia Avenue and around 9th Street. Doris was out front crying, “I
’m sorry, I’msosorry, I’msorry…Tell Tommy don’t leave me…”
My mother and older sister moved out to the door.
“Miz Wizdom, don’t let the po-lice take me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
To get my little sister to stop crying, we started jumping up and down on the bed, trying to reach the chandelier. Trying to make it start swinging again.
A little while later, I was falling asleep while the police stood in the hall talking to my mother and father. Miss Lucy was sitting on the steps picking at her feet and minding everybody’s business. My sisters and I were in a heap on the bed. I heard Tommy come in to get some things. “Say goodbye to the kids for me.”
A fresh breeze blew across my face. I opened my eyes to find that the sun was up. My mother came in to wake us at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 23.
“Mom, is Doris in jail?” was the first thing I thought to say. I wanted to know if that room would be empty. If I could finally move up there and have my own room. It was the dead-center of the mid-Atlantic summer. Already the air was wet and heavy. The cool night breeze was all but gone and we would slowly drown the rest of the day in the sweltering summer heat. My older sister went upstairs to the bathroom. My little sister rolled up in her pillow for the last few minutes she could steal. I sat in the window. The street was quiet. I saw Reverend Gilmore come onto his front porch with his Bible under his arm and head to his car with his wife.
“Is everything all right over there, Mr. Wisdom?”
“Everyting is juss fine.”
My father said good morning to someone else on the street. He must have been sitting out there on the porch all through the night. I just sat looking out, hearing the quiet, thinking how I wanted to go on up to Rock Creek Park and get lost in the woods. I glanced over and my mom was standing there silently. She eased my little sister’s head off the pillow and sat her up. Then went into the kitchen to fix breakfast. I could hear her crying.
By 9 o’clock we were in the morning service. My mother, who taught Sunday school, always brought us early. My father only came to church for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. We were sitting in the middle section and the wooden chairs threatened to tip over with the big bodies. The junior choir had everybody on their feet and a fan cooled the sweating bodies. I was in my iridescent blue suit, white shirt, and tie. I just looked around at everyone and the smooth wooden floors and the feet walking by, carrying this one big woman after she got the spirit. The choir master was leaning back, mouth open, and the people were singing and clapping, but I couldn’t hear a sound. I ran the toe of my shoe through a smooth groove in the floor-board. Blam! Blam! the only sound in my head. Everything else around me was a blizzard of empty details. Details that would be packed away inside me without being looked at, without letting them touch me. Blam! My hands were sweating into my little sister’s—the only touch I let myself feel.
Fast forward: My stories don’t really come all crafted into a nice tale. There are a whole bunch of things that come up as I tell this, and these are part of the story now. These little memories like bees in my mind’s eye, threatening, buzzing around my head. Dangling threads that invariably lead to something deeper and darker…the innocence of learning to slow-drag with a girl on the dance floor and how the next day she was attacked and raped by a much older man. But nobody ever really talked about it. My friend was way different after that and nobody ever danced with her again. These are now just memories from the comfort zone of my current life, away from police sirens, getting jumped after school, and having to fight regularly just to get home. Long bus rides across D.C. to Spring Valley, to a world where there were no gangs, knives, anger, violence, roaches, and threats—at least, not in the streets where you had to look at it all the time.
You see, the cats I grew up with didn’t hold on to our stories, we kept pure emotion hidden, cause we were the kids of the city. You had to be a quick study to survive. If you showed any feelings, much less reflection, you got your ass kicked over and over. Those kids who moved up from North Carolina and came into our neighborhood with their accents and their openness were laughed at till they conformed. If your parents cared, they fought to create some conditions so that you could value your life, your experiences—but on the street your story didn’t have any value. Top dog/dirty dog. Only material things were valued on the street…One day I’ma get me a [insert Cadillac, $50 shoes, etc].
When I started going to an exclusive private school, I became convinced my stories didn’t have value. So it was better to appropriate their stories—be like them, at least on the outside—because what could my stories contribute to the lives of these princes.
In college, there was an unspoken message to let go of the past, of my story, to move forward. When I came home for holidays and caught up with Green Jeans, Brock, or Black Joe, they told me stories, all the stories of who got locked up, broke down, shot, or OD’d. These stories were snuffed out and then forgotten, never to be recounted. College brought me pan-Africanism, the Nation of Islam, and other progressive movements meant to shape the black identity, to give us “real” stories. As these movements required new names, clothes, identity, I started feeling a strong pull back toward my own stories, though I still didn’t have the will to tell them.
An anchor dropped in high school kept me connected with the life stories I owned. My track coach, Brooks Johnson, drilled into me the importance of character and pride. His mantra took root in my life and became magnified through the men and women around me: my father and mother, my father’s best friend Mr. Christian, other coaches, and my Episcopalian headmaster Canon Martin. These were fiery and gentle people whose lives seemed guided by their stories. The light and the dark.
I had to find ways to avoid being consumed by the myriad of dark impulses that came into my life. I had to figure how o live before I could recount, before I could truly own my story. It is very long and it continues. The stories I began but couldn’t finish can now be looked at and coaxed back…I can take the gloves off, stop fighting life and instead hold it.
I left my neighborhood in the 1970s. Even though the razor-sharp edge of living in Petworth has dulled, I now hoard the memories. I find myself looking back, repeatedly—at street corners, empty stretches of Kansas Avenue, Sherman Circle—and these quiet scenes are arranged in my mind into strange, chaotic stacks, as if waiting for the day they will reveal themselves as the hidden alphabet that somehow spells out my life’s meaning.
The potency is in the stacking. Laying them down in a brushed-steel coffin was too cold, I needed to heat them up with my experiences since that time and bring the life back to them. They needed to be honored. The characters and events struggled for a place in my soul. This is the richness I’m now willing to talk about.
A.R.M. AND THE WOMAN
BY LAURA LIPPMAN
Chevy Chase, N.W.
Sally Holt was seldom the prettiest woman in the room, but for three decades now she had consistently been one of the most sought-after for one simple fact: She was a wonderful listener. Whether it was her eight-year-old son or her eighty-year-old neighbor or some male in-between, Sally rested her chin in her palm and leaned forward, expression rapt, soft laugh at the ready—but not o ready, which gave the speaker a feeling of power when the shy, sweet sound finally bubbled forth, almost in spite of itself. In the Northwest quadrant of Washington, where overtly decorative women were seen as suspect if not out-and-out tacky, a charm like Sally’s was much prized. It had served her well, too, helping her glide into the perfect marriage to her college sweetheart, a dermatologist, then allowing her to become one of Northwest Washington’s best hostesses, albeit in the amateur division. Sally and her husband, Peter, did not move in and did not aspire to the more rarefied social whirl, the one dominated by embassy parties and pink-faced journalists who competed to shout pithy things over one another on cable television shows. They lived in a quieter, in some ways more exclusive world, a charming, old-fashioned neighborhood comprising
middle-class houses that now required upper-class incomes to own and maintain.
And if, on occasion, in a dark corner at one of the endless parties Sally and Peter hosted and attended, her unwavering attention was mistaken for affection, she managed to deflect the ensuing pass with a graceful shake of her auburn curls. “You wouldn’t want me,” she told the briefly smitten men. “I’m just another soccer mom.” The husbands backed away, sheepish and relieved, confiding in each other what a lucky son of a bitch Peter Holt was. Sally Holt had kept her figure, hadn’t allowed herself to thicken into that androgynous khaki-trousered—let’s be honest, downright dykish—mom so common in the area, which did have a lot of former field hockey players gone to seed. Plus, she was so great to talk to, interested in the world, not forever prattling about her children and their school.
Sally’s secret was that she didn’t actually hear a word that her admirers said, just nodded and laughed at the right moments, cued by their inflections as to how to react. Meanwhile, deep inside her head, she was mapping out the logistics of her next day. Just a soccer mom, indeed. To be a stay-at-home mother in Northwest D.C. was to be nothing less than a general, the Patton of the car pool, the Eisenhower of the HOV lane. Sally spent most of her afternoons behind the wheel of a Porsche SUV, moving her children and other people’s children from school to lessons, from lessons to games, from games to home. She was ruthlessly efficient with her time and motion, her radio always tuned to WTOP to catch the traffic on the eights, her brain filled with alternative routes and illegal shortcuts, her gaze at the ready to thaw the nastiest traffic cop. She could envision her section of the city in a three-dimensional grid in her head, her house on Morrison and the Dutton School off Nebraska the two fixed stars in her universe. Given all she had to do, you really couldn’t blame her for not listening to the men who bent her ear, a figure of speech that struck her as particularly apt. If she allowed all those words into her head, her ears would be bent—as crimped, tattered, and chewed-up looking as the old tom cat she had owned as a child, a cat who could not avoid brawls even after he was neutered.
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