by Donna Britt
The next day dawned as hot and dry as toast. Gayle did my makeup, Kevin’s sister Leisa cracked jokes, Mireille and Retha adjusted the gardenias in my hairdo, secured with enough hairpins to set off every airport alarm between Washington and Greece, our honeymoon destination. Malcah and Mary Jo buttoned and smoothed my lace dress. With its full Scarlett O’Hara skirt, it was exactly what Darrell, eight, had demanded after nixing a photo of the slim, sophisticated sheath I’d thought perfect for a second wedding. “You can’t wear that,” he said. “You’re supposed to look like a fairy princess!”
During the ceremony Darrell and Mani, resplendent in tuxedos, joined Kevin and me on the mansion porch. After lighting four individual candles, we together lit a larger one that symbolized our new family. The gesture, the look on Kevin’s face, the commitment we were celebrating—all were profoundly moving.
Most days, life itself was close to ideal. After years of being courted by the Post, Kevin had accepted a job covering Congress. I felt I was in heaven in “Style,” writing serious features as well as profiles of celebs such as warm but wary Denzel Washington (who had turned down the interview until I sent him a searing piece I’d written about my brother Darrell) and Will Smith, twenty-two, the rapper-turned-star of the new TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Mani and Darrell idolized Smith, so I arranged to bring them to the interview. The boyish star grabbed the plastic sword Darrell had with him and playfully chased assistants with it around his publicist’s office.
Yet as satisfying as my work and home life were, there was always a nagging thought: Remember, you felt safe and contented before Darrell died. You let yourself relax into happiness. Stay armed. Be ready for whatever awful thing could visit your boys, Kevin, you. Meditating and reading spiritual books banished such Darrell-related musings, but never for long. Primed for tragedy in the midst of joy, I was haunted by the dearest of ghosts.
How could I have avoided it? Working for a newspaper made it impossible to ignore the awfulness that stalked the world, claiming both the unwitting and the prepared. But Darrell’s death hadn’t just devastated me; it had deepened me, sharpened my vision and my voice. Although I enjoyed writing features, I wondered: Should I be doing more? Would challenging myself somehow appease the specter that was never far from consciousness? That’s when Post “Metro” editor Milton Coleman blew me out of my size eights by offering me my own column. Asked what I could write about, Coleman said, “Anything you want.”
Anything I want? What reporter doesn’t dream of hearing those words? A column would allow me to shed my objectivity, to explore whatever struck me. I’d written many first-person pieces in my career and several well-received essays at the Post, including the Pulitzer-nominated piece I’d used to persuade Denzel Washington that described what Darrell’s death suggested about the value of black lives.
I’d arrived at the Post in January 1989 and found myself writing for a paper that drily reported the murders of fifty people in that one month, most of them black men killed in the drug wars that were decimating U.S. cities. Hardly anyone—at the newspaper, the grocery store, bustling down the street—seemed perturbed.
Darrell had made turning away from such carnage impossible. The men who were dying were real: flesh-and-blood fathers, sons, and brothers. How could I make them real for readers?
By making Darrell real for them. By putting flesh on my ghost, making the man I, too, would have dismissed as another nameless “Gary Man Shot by Police” real for them. I could describe his wit, his warmth, the quiet radiance that made him my hero. Excavating everything I’d buried, I reopened healed-over wounds, coaxed memories from the corners where I’d hidden them. My fourth article for the Post, the essay was the first substantive thing I’d written about the man slain twelve years earlier whose name I still couldn’t say outside my family. Writing it rebroke my heart.
It was worth it. A deluge of calls and letters from readers suggested that I—that Darrell—had made them see the dying underneath their noses. Their responses gave me a sense of journalism’s tremendous power. They also got Coleman’s attention. So did my popular “Valentine for Black Men” (who else would I write one for?) on Valentine’s Day 1990. Praising brothers’ undervalued grace, impact, and import to the world and to me, the essay won the National Association of Black Journalists’ commentary prize and inspired more than three hundred grateful phone calls, as well as roses from the president of a historically black men’s college three years running. One call was from an executive who’d read it in his glass-walled office. He said his employees were pretending not to see the tears streaming down his face.
All my essays evoked powerful reader reactions. So why did Coleman’s offer astonish me? Because I’d never expected them—the Post’s predominantly white power structure—to see my value, let alone reward it. The trust the offer represented humbled me.
Yet I was terrified I would fail. Like many African-Americans and more than a few women, I was more comfortable railing against the limits that racism and sexism had placed on others than acknowledging the beating my own spirit had taken from them. In America, sexism and racism are inescapable, as if nature excreted them into our water and air. No one is immune. Millions of women are secret sexists, harboring questions about women’s ability to lead corporations, local municipalities, the U.S. government. Countless black folks decry white racism without acknowledging how totally they’ve absorbed it, how instinctively they suspect and demean their own people. Who among us rushes to admit how well we’ve learned to question our own worth?
And who rushes to be vilified? I knew that writing a column would inspire some readers to say nasty things, to send letters scrawled with personal beratings and racist slaps. Anonymity grants people a pseudo-courage that frees them to spew verbal assaults far more rank than anything they’d actually say. It would be “Be Dirty to Donna” all over again—multiplied by several hundred.
But even that prospect paled next to my most deep-seated fear, the real reason for hesitating: What if I just wasn’t good enough?
I couldn’t do it. Deciding to tell Coleman “no, thanks,” I listed my reasons for Kevin. Looking at me as if I were crazy, he said, “But, Brittski, you were born to write a column!”
I accepted the offer.
Next I chose an editor, Jo-Ann Armao, feisty enough to ensure that I took Coleman at his word. Indeed, I wrote about everything: Black women’s outsized booties. The dangerous meaning of the word “fine” when snapped by a fed-up female. My conviction that testosterone should be designated a controlled substance. Though I celebrated black culture, I also expressed the many ways it frustrated me. I was baffled by some sisters’ tendency to defend seemingly any black man accused of a crime—think O. J. Simpson or Marion Barry—or of just being weird (Clarence Thomas’s Coke can accusation by Anita Hill). It is the justice system’s imperative to presume innocence until guilt is proved. But why was it so many sisters’ imperative to assume that brothers—even those like Simpson, who had no interest in them—couldn’t be culpable?
I wasn’t surprised that my new column generated mail. What stunned me was the type of mail: warm, effusive, grateful. Yes, there were attacks, some blistering. But many readers appreciated my efforts to bring a new openness to the paper. In 1994, my column won several honors, including the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) Distinguished Writing Award.
Basking in this approbation, I loved knowing it honored work that was often a tribute, a paean, a kiss blown to my brother. After that first, harrowing essay, I’d again tucked my most intimate memories of Darrell safely away. But I now had a twice-weekly opportunity to reveal to people—particularly to white people, some wielding power as policemen, politicians, and employers—black folks’ humanity. What purpose was more sacred, since I felt certain that two such men’s lack of understanding led to Darrell’s death?
Fifteen years after he left me, I could still give to my brother.
In 1993, I became
the reluctant owner of several pre–World War II treasures: a dainty lace cocktail glove, a pastel-tinted photo of a couple in 1930s dress, a gold watch with chains as delicate as new grass—all inherited from Mom-Mommy after her April 13 death.
I’d gotten the late-night phone call from my mother… on my birthday. Mom-Mommy, eighty-eight, had suffered a stroke. Mom had the flu, so I’d be representing us both when I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Media to be at my grandmother’s side. A few years earlier, I’d gotten a similar call. Rushing to Media, I’d found Mom-Mommy laughing with nurses, the latest victims of her relentless charm, who tempted her with the hospital kitchen’s delicacies.
This time was different. The woman who’d always seemed invincible lay still, eyes closed, her hair flat against her head. Most alarming was a pool of moisture in the corner of Mom-Mommy’s mouth. If the most glamorous person I’d ever met could have spittle on her face, nothing in the world was solid.
The athletic teenager who’d hidden her forbidden pregnancy had become an award-winning saleswoman, society doyenne, and church pillar. Still sexy at sixty, Mom-Mommy in the next decade seamlessly morphed from hottie into adorable grandmother. The fact that she was personally protected by God was proved each time I got into her car. Driving with impunity in the wrong direction down Media’s one-way streets, Mom-Mommy was unfazed by motorists’ blaring horns. “Don’t worry, darling,” she’d cluck. “I always do this.”
Dabbing her mouth in the hospital, I asked silent, desperate questions.
Why would you, the grandmother who’d always had special gifts for me, have a stroke on my birthday? Is my gift the privilege of reading spiritual texts to you as you doze? Sitting within whispering, hand-clasping distance as you heal? Learning that even wiping up spit can feel like a blessing? Or is it seeing what I never noticed before—how despite my penchant for giving, I’ve never given myself over so completely to love?
Mom-Mommy’s stroke gave me a sliver of time between taking-for-granted and loss, a moment in which a love I’d thought pure was distilled into unimaginable clarity. I’d never realized how dangerous Darrell’s death had made love seem to me. I hadn’t stopped feeling love, but I had unknowingly constricted its expression, even with this beloved soul who’d never shown me anything but devotion. I feared telling any adults how much I loved them. What if it sparked revulsion, or caused my beloved to be snatched away?
Now, fearless and unashamed, I told Mom-Mommy, “I love you so much. Come back. Let us care for you as you’ve cared for us. I love you. Come back.” The more I pleaded, the more she reacted, stirring, shifting, tightening her grip, until a nurse marveled, “Look at how she responds to you. I really think she’s going to wake up.” I prayed she would—yet at some point, my love overwhelmed my fear, filling me with a certainty that however Mom-Mommy left this sacred space, she’d be fine. Six days after the stroke, I was smoothing her hair when her breathing slowed. Feeling the tender throbbing in her neck go still, I whispered good-bye for my mother, my children, and my brothers, murmuring it was okay if she had to go. And I knew her gift to me: the honor of being with her at her parting. This time, I knew I wouldn’t feel haunted.
The hardest thing would be telling the boys, who were as captivated by their great-grandmother as I had been at their age. Sitting my sons on the couch, I held their hands and said, “Guys, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that Mom-Mommy died. The good news is she’s in heaven, and that we were blessed to have had her so long.” Mani just sat, blinking tears. Darrell, ever his opposite, burst into wails, screaming, “It isn’t good, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t right!” I couldn’t argue with him.
Besides, arguing with Darrell was useless. I’d learned that a year earlier when I put him and Mani on a plane to visit Greg and his parents. I’d looked forward to their annual St. Louis visit. My sons would be lovingly cared for; I’d get a needed break. Yet part of me hated seeing them go.
Driving to the airport, I cheerfully described the adventures and spoiling ahead of them. Darrell sat stone-faced. “I’m not leaving,” he said, frightening in his calmness. At the airport, he announced his intention to strangers at the ticket counter. At the gate, he started crying; by boarding time, I had to carry him, bawling and struggling, onto the plane. Strapping in his thin body as he wriggled and sobbed, I felt my heart rip. I’d never been so needed, or so frightened by my own need.
So it’s no wonder I was horrified by the approach of Mani’s twelfth birthday in 1994. My son was nearly a black teenage male, a fact beside which all else—his affability, academic excellence, citizenship awards, and capacious knowledge of all things cinematic—was meaningless. Before he could open his mouth, people would condemn him. My slain brother had made it only too clear that Mani could be targeted by police, who detain, harass, assault, and “justifiably” kill black males—some culpable, many not. Any black man can tell you what mild-mannered Jeff, who’s a slight five six, once said: “I’ve been stopped by the police at least a dozen times. And I have never committed a crime.” Mani could also become a target of other kids, youngsters who pull a knife or a gun on another teen for an imagined slight, or for nothing at all.
Kids of every color feel their mothers’ wary eyes on them as they hurtle toward their teens. Few black boys realize how regretfully their mothers track that trajectory. Staring at my eldest curled in sleep, I marveled, “Look at the space you take up!” while despising my terror of his lengthening form. I recalled the stranger who’d sat next to him several years earlier on his first solo plane trip. She’d phoned me at work to say, “Your son is so smart and self-possessed. I had to let you know.” Awash in love, I thought, If people could know you, they could never hurt you. But women’s children are hurt every day.
Like millions of black mothers haunted by their own ghosts, I made sure Mani knew the rules every African-American boy should know: Never be brash or make any fast moves with a cop. Never fight if you can walk away. Know that your manhood isn’t defined by what’s in your pants or on your back, but by the responsibility and self-respect in your heart.
Never do anything that could make someone take you away from me.
At some point, perhaps, I grew tired of worrying only about boys. Or maybe my need for an infusion of estrogen in our testosterone-soaked home got the best of me. I certainly believed that Kevin, a wonderful stepfather, deserved a child of his own, one that carried on his family’s genes and traditions. Whatever my reasons, I became more and more certain my new husband and I would soon be expecting a daughter. It didn’t entirely make sense: Marrying Kevin had ended the wearying mental and financial marathon of single motherhood. I could have chilled for a while, enjoyed our family.
But now that I was in a loving, supportive marriage, I wanted another child. By early 1994, I was pregnant, and certain I was carrying a girl. Exhibiting none of the exhaustion, yeasty scent, and constant nausea typical of my boy-producing pregnancies, I decided male fetuses were like occupying forces whose nine-month encampment caused upheaval in women’s bodies. With this pregnancy, I felt energized. My stomach stayed settled. I smelled like me, as a woman carrying a female child should. I was so sure a girl was on the way that I bought a girly dress-up frock for her in shimmering navy, babylike and elegant all at once.
In my tenth week, I kissed Kevin good-bye as he drove off to play in a three-on-three hoops tournament in Richmond. Two hours later, I felt a twinge. And another. Cramps. An hour later I was curled on my bed in fetal position, praying, weeping, trying to meditate away my uterus’s insistent clenching and my growing certainty that my daughter was arriving—and departing—too soon. “Don’t leave,” I pleaded, rubbing my belly. “Please, stay here with me.” Two hours later she emerged, so perfect in her minuteness that I stared at her, bewitched. Why didn’t you let me be your mother?
Driving myself to the hospital, I was examined by a kindly nurse who said there was no reason not to get pregnant again soon. She’d borne six child
ren, she confided, yet had never forgotten one long-ago miscarriage. “No one knows why these things happen,” she said, before adding, “We’d like to examine the fetus.” I balked. “We want to make sure there’s nothing that might cause this to happen again,” she explained. Hesitantly, I handed over my daughter, whose tiny form I’d hurriedly placed in a sandwich bag. Instantly I regretted it. I should have buried her in some hallowed place. Not relinquished her to a stranger for having abandoned me.
But she was gone. Another ghost, another specter whose reason for leaving would be forever hidden from me. My daughter’s first, last secret.
Women who miscarry are beset by apparitions. They’re haunted by phantom moments that will never take place, cuddles forever unshared, the never-formed faces of the babies they’ve lost. Had I miscarried because my daughter had grave physical problems? Had I somehow repelled her? I recalled my friend Geri’s comforting words after my abortion: Every baby chooses its parents, even the abusive, drug-addicted or tundra-souled mommies and daddies no child would seem to want. A flawed parent might be the perfect one to teach a soul its most needed lessons. A fetus might learn enough in three months to happily take its leave of the mother who rejects it. Was that my daughter’s secret? That though my nostrils grieved at never tingling with her scent and my fingers at never braiding her hair, she’d gotten all she needed from me?
For weeks after the miscarriage, I felt demolished. Trying to forget, I did everything I’d done before in a daze—wrote columns, chased our dog, Silverado, fixed peanut butter and jelly lunches for Darrell five days a week. Puzzling over a charge on the cable bill for a movie titled Booty on the House, I was about to alert Comcast when, on a hunch, I showed the bill to Hamani.