Sycorax's Daughters

by Kinitra Brooks, PhD

  I didn’t know we could rap. Well, I knew we could but I didn’t know we were allowed to. All the voices barking through the speakers of my brother’s Magnavox were loud, cocky. And male.

  Pretty soon, my friends and I started rapping on our daily trips up the block. We knew we were emcees; we just needed a name to make it official. We lived on Cherry Street, although there wasn’t a fruit-bearing tree anywhere on our block. Naturally, we called ourselves the Cherry Street Crew.

  By the spring of 1982, we weren’t some wack girls reciting lame lyrics. We were really good. So good our neighbor, Miss Iris, stopped us on our way home from school and asked us to perform at the block party she was organizing at the end of August. We were thrilled. Someone was requesting us to perform. Vee-Money said she could see us onstage one day. The first female rappers.

  This was way before the Real Roxanne, before Jazzy Joyce, before MC Lyte and Salt-n-Pepa ever blessed a mic.

  She came a few months later. A hot June afternoon that wilted my curls and slammed crickets into silence. I never saw her approach. I just looked up and she was standing there at the lip of the underpass. The other girls stopped dancing and turned to see what had my attention, taking in the stranger with her old-timey clothes.

  Vee-Money, the unofficial leader of our group, lowered the volume on the boombox and addressed the stranger. “What you want?”

  Our visitor didn’t respond. Instead, she fingered the collar of her dress. Her black-laced shoes made circles in the gravel.

  D tried a different tack. “Who is you?” she said, her voice echoing off the walls.

  “Kim,” came the reply.

  It seemed as if the wind carried that one syllable across centuries to our ears. Although Kim didn’t look much older than us, her voice held none of the marrow of youth. She seemed shy, but it was the shyness of perverts who ask young girls for directions from the window of their van.

  “What you want?” Vee-Money repeated. She moved out of the shadows to get a closer look at the stranger. The sun glinted off the silver dog tag chain she always wore.

  The girl looked up as we approached and I noticed her eyes. They were the same blue as her dress. Bottomless, the way I imagined manholes to be when you slid away the cover. You descended that airless playground of shadows and knew when you emerged – if you emerged – you’d never be the same.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just wanted to watch.” “Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” I said.

  Vee-Money touched my arm. “Cool out, Crystal,” she said. She looked the white girl up and down. Deciding. Finally, she said, “You can watch, but you can’t get on the mic.”

  Vee-Money returned to our makeshift studio. Kim settled outside on a nearby rock.

  We should have ran her off then but we didn’t. My friends thought Kim was harmless. I knew she wasn’t. Long before the carnage at the underpass, I sensed it, some malevolence in the off- beat tapping of her feet, in the curve of her empty hands.

  #

  As summer wore on, Kim became a familiar fixture at the bridge. Because I couldn’t dance and often hung back while my friends practiced their moves, I wound up standing near her.

  During those times, Kim would try to coax me into conversation. “Why are you unable to dance as well as the others?” she asked.

  “Not every black person has rhythm, you know.” “Ah, but you could if you tried.”

  “Who says I haven’t?” I said, growing annoyed. “Dance, Crystal.”

  Who is this white girl talking to? I faced her, ready to roll my eyes, and found myself staring into her bottomless blue ones.

  Heard the slow clatter as the manhole cover was dragged away, a clanging invitation to the shadowland beneath.

  (Dance, little one)

  Had she given that command or was I hearing things? From this distance, I got a better look at the pale teen who infiltrated my crew. Scalp gleamed through her brown hair. Deep lines were

  etched beneath her eyes and in her forehead, furrows that belonged on the face of a much older woman.

  “What you sweatin’ for, Crystal?” Vee-Money appeared at my side. I felt relieved at the bigger girl’s presence. “Ain’t like you was over there jammin’ with us.”

  “What is jamming?” Kim asked.

  I caught Vee-Money’s glance. Shot her a warning look. Don’t let her in, Vee.

  But Vee-Money was amused at the strange girl’s proper speech. “Jamming is dancin’.” She showed off a quick move. “You know, gettin’ down.”

  Kim smiled then, the first smile I noticed since she appeared more than a month ago. “Crystal was about to practice ‘jamming’ with you.’’

  “Quit lying.” My hand itched to slap her.

  The next thing I knew, D and Trina were standing beside me. I doubt they heard the heat in my voice over the blaring boombox, so they must have sensed the tension.

  The white girl stood up, wiping dust from her dress. “I’ll show you,” she said.

  “I don’t need lessons,” I said. “Especially not from you.” “Are you afraid, Crystal, that I can jam better than you?”

  Kim’s soft smile mocked my insecurity.

  D whistled at the taunt and Trina craned her neck at me.

  My friends expected me to put the white girl in her place or even initiate some b-girl battle. But I didn’t want to battle Kim.

  I didn’t know how to swing my hips on beat or move my feet in a complex choreographed rhythm. Hell, I had even gotten kicked off the junior choir because I didn’t know how to sway.

  Vee-Money returned to the boombox and rewound the Afrika Bambaataa instrumental they’d been dancing to. As I watched my friends make room for the stranger in the darkness of the underpass, in our spot, my face burned with some emotion I couldn’t name. It seared my throat and settled like coal in my stomach.

  Even though she wore clunky shoes, Kim moved with grace. She swayed to the music. On beat. Her shoes kicked gravel as she danced with a perverse familiarity the steps I struggled to learn all summer. My girls stared as she undulated with some ancient rhythm, both eerie and divine.

  As my friends cheered her on, I tasted heat in my throat, and at once understood the nameless emotion churning in my gut.

  It was envy.

  #

  A rift grew between me and my girls but I didn’t know how to mend it. Most afternoons, I found myself sitting on the rock, sullen, as my friends danced with Kim. They were so easily impressed by the white girl. It felt like a violation to hear them joke with her about ashy legs or their “kitchen,” which swelled in the summer heat. She didn’t earn the right to laugh with us.

  The more I resented the white girl, the more she blossomed.

  Kim no longer wore the old-timey gingham dress she had on when I first spotted her. She and Trina were around the same size, so Trina gave her a trash bag full of old clothes. Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and oversized tops. It felt as if their roles had switched. Kim was the needy Mennonite girl and they were the benevolent black kids on a mission to save her.

  #

  The final rupture in my circle wasn’t caused by the weird white chick. It came from Vee-Money. She knocked on my door one day to borrow cherry Kool-Aid to dye her hair.

  “We don’t have any red.” I stood behind the screen door, trying to decide if I should let her in.

  “What flavor y’all got?” she asked. “Purple, I think.”

  “That’ll work.” When I didn’t move, Vee-Money stared at me through the screen. “What’s wrong with you, Crystal? Oh, I can’t come in now?”

  With a sigh, I opened the door.

  She followed me to the kitchen. My mom was at work, and my brother was out shooting hoops with his buddies. I rummaged through the drawer next to the stove until I found a packet of the powdered drink. As I turned to hand the makeshift hair dye to my friend, I almost dropped it in shock.

  Vee-Money was going bald.

  On most days, her red-stained tresses were
nicely pressed, hanging down to her shoulders in a mushroom or swooped back in a trendy feathered style. Now swathes of scalp gleamed through her normally thick mane.

  I clenched the packet. “I don’t think you should use this stuff anymore, Vee.”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “It’s breaking your hair off.”

  “Girl, ain’t nothing wrong with my head.”

  She reached for the package but I tossed it in the trash.

  “You been actin’ real shady lately, Crystal.” Vee-Money threw up her hand in a dismissive wave.

  “I’m not the shady one,” I said. “Why don’t you go borrow some Kool-Aid from Kim since she loves your naps so much?”

  I knew I had hurled the ultimate insult. Back then, talking about somebody’s “naps” was akin to calling them “black.”

  Vee-Money glared at me, then stormed out of the kitchen.

  She paused at the screen door, her back to me. “You just got dismissed from the Cherry Street Crew,” she said.

  I froze a few inches from her. “You’re kicking me out? I’m the best emcee in the group.”

  “You wish.”

  I touched Vee-Money’s arm. “Don’t be like this, Vee.” I hated the whine that crept into my voice. “We’re going to be the first female rappers.”

  “We still are.”

  “But what about me?”

  Vee-Money turned to me with a smirk. “Work on your moves, Crystal. You a lightweight. You let a white girl show you up.”

  I dropped my hand, hurt. Vee-Money opened the door and headed out into the street.

  #

  I stopped hanging out at the bridge and started writing lyrics in my bedroom. It’s one thing for a teen girl to choose to be a loner, to cherish the solitude of her room among her books and DeBarge posters. It’s another thing entirely to feel isolated.

  That’s what happened after my blowup with Vee-Money. My friends stopped accepting my calls, stopped yelling through my screen door to see if I wanted to walk to the pizza joint for a slice.

  More than the isolation, I feared something sinister was happening to my girls. Although Vee-Money could be bossy, she had never been deliberately cruel before. It was as if she had lost her compassion along with her hair. I would soon learn that Vee- Money’s sudden baldness was a small thing compared to what befell Trina.

  I missed Trina’s friendship the most. She was soft-spoken and introverted like me, so she understood the struggle of trying to fit in. Trina was also the one who started rapping first, who showed me that girls could rock the mic. I needed to talk to her.

  Trina lived exactly ten houses away but I didn’t want to knock on her front door. I walked down the back alley to avoid the stares of the neighborhood kids who had probably heard about the dissolution of the Cherry Street Crew.

  Trina stood in her yard, her back to me, wearing a brim hat as she swept the narrow driveway. I paused as I approached, puzzled by the pants and long-sleeved shirt she wore, clothes that were much too hot for the summer day.

  “Hey, Trina.”

  She looked around quickly, as if she’d been caught doing something obscene. My hand, raised in greeting, hesitated mid-air.

  Trina’s skin was turning white.

  Even with the straw hat shielding her face, the gruesome transformation was hard to hide. Her normally smooth dark skin, which had not suffered the curse of teen pimples like mine, was riddled with large pale blotches.

  Trina turned away, sweeping harder.

  “Are you okay?” I walked around to face her. Concerned. “What happened to your skin?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look sick.”

  She raised her head, challenging me with a look. Her eyes were as lifeless as the broom in her hand.

  “Your face didn’t look like that a few weeks ago. Maybe you should go –”

  “No, maybe you should go, Crystal.” She lifted her broom, as if to strike.

  I wasn’t scared. Just sad and confused. Trina had never raised her voice or anything else at me.

  I backed out of the driveway, haunted by her sneer and fading skin.

  #

  I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my fears.

  Summer, once sweet and full of harmony, dragged on like some wounded animal too ornery to die. I rode my Huffy up and down the streets, looking for a distraction. What I found one afternoon as I cruised past the basketball court stunned me.

  It was a rinky-dink court on Arch Street in the “rough” part of town, as if the entire town of Wing wasn’t rough, wasn’t scalloped by slanting rowhouses and shabby storefronts. In spite of its location, the basketball court was the informal community center. Sweaty boys in nylon shorts flexed on the macadam, showing off their jump shot. Girls in miniskirts and jelly shoes stood around talking to their friends, trying not to be impressed.

  As I rode past the court, I saw something that almost knocked me off my Huffy.

  Kim rested against the chain-link fence that enclosed the basketball court. She was talking to Manuel and Luther, two brothers who we considered the finest boys on the block, with dark skin and hazel eyes.

  I slowed my bike to get a better look. I was so used to seeing the white girl beneath the bridge, it was as if she lived there.

  The sight of her out in the open, in my community, unnerved me. She lounged confidently against the fence as she flirted with the neighborhood boys. Her slim hips were encased in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. A halter and Filas completed the look. Trina’s cast-offs. Kim’s once brittle brown hair was thick and curled into a sleek mushroom style. Not the look worn on Charlie’s Angels, but the style a neighborhood girl would rock, with asymmetrical angels. But for her pale skin, Kim could have been one of us.

  Anger flooded my chest. As if sensing my disgust, Kim looked up, locking eyes with me. She was no longer a mousy Mennonite girl who had wandered into our lives. She was alluring.

  She gave me a knowing look, tinged with cockiness and something darker. Assurance, maybe. I glared at her as I tried to swallow the rancor burning my throat. It was then that I noticed something shimmering around her neck.

  It was Vee-Money’s dog tag.

  #

  Miss Iris was hanging wash on the clothesline in her yard when I walked my bike down the back alley that led to my house. I felt hot and defeated.

  “Afternoon, Crystal,” Miss Iris called when she spotted me. Several wooden clothespins were clipped to her blouse. “How you enjoying summer vacation?”

  “Fine.”

  Noticing my glum look, she said, “School ain’t starting tomorrow. You got a few more weeks yet.”

  I liked Miss Iris. Although she was in her mid-forties, she had a youthful laugh. Her long ponytail hung to the middle of her back, fastened with a purple ribbon. Miss Iris didn’t socialize with the other ladies on the block. She was a loner in her own right, quilting on the front stoop or tending the flowers she grew in her backyard.

  Miss Iris glanced around. “Where are your girlfriends?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Y’all ain’t had a falling out, have you? The block party is right around the corner.”

  “I won’t be there. I got kicked out of the Cherry Street Crew,” I said.

  Miss Iris slung a pair of jeans on the line and pinned them. Then she sat on a bench near her garden and patted the spot next to her. I joined her.

  “Sorry to hear that, Crystal,” she said. “You got talent. That’s why I asked you to rap at the block party.”

  Her words made me smile, in spite of my weariness. But then I remembered the source of my sorrow.

  “My friends are changing, Miss Iris.”

  “They’re at that age, sweetie. It’s called growing up.” “No, this feels wrong.”

  I told her everything, about the pale girl named Kim who appeared at the beginning of summer like some strange bird who carried corruption beneath her wing.

  Miss Iris no
dded as I began my tale. Then the color drained from her face when I described Vee-Money’s thinning hair and Trina’s palsied skin. She stared into the distance when I finished, toying with her long braid. When Miss Iris finally spoke again, her voice was just above a whisper.

  “She came back.”

  I tilted my head. Puzzled at the fear that suddenly gripped my older neighbor. “Who came back?”

  “Kim. But she wasn’t calling herself that in 1952, when I was your age. Back then, her name was Madeleine.”

  “Madeleine? How old was she?” I asked, skeptical. “She looked to be about fifteen. Same age I was.”

  I did some quick calculations in my head. “If Kim – Madeleine – was fifteen in 1952, she’d be forty-five now,” I said. “No disrespect, Miss Iris, but the girl I know doesn’t look like an old woman.”

  “That’s because she’s not an old woman. She’s not a woman at all. Or a girl.”

  “What is she?”

  Miss Iris gazed at me, trying to decide if I could handle the weight of her next words. “A leech. A soul gobbler,” she said. “Long before that bridge was built on Johnson Highway, it was a clearing. We used to hang out there when we was kids. Back then, it was a quiet place in the woods where we could go to dance and sing. Be free.”

  My neighbor closed her eyes in remembrance. “Our parents were real strict. We couldn’t go to parties. At least not the girls. We went to a Mennonite camp every summer, learning how to quilt, make preserves. Be good wives.”

  I thought of the blue gingham dress Kim wore when she first appeared, the black laced shoes. The costume of holiness.

  “In ’52, they showed kids dancing on TV for the first time. A program called Bandstand,” Miss Iris said. “Bandstand was a bunch of white kids doing the jitterbug. The Lindy. They didn’t let black kids in the audience. They was playing our music and dancing to our songs, but they wouldn’t let us on TV. Some white kids even asked black kids to teach them new steps. Then, when they got the moves down, they would go right back and tape that show and act like they came up with those dances.”

  “What does that have to do with Kim – Madeleine?” I didn’t want to interrupt the older woman, but her rambling made me wonder if she had a screw loose.