“I know this isn’t what you had in mind, but I think you should just try it on,” she said.
I don’t consider myself the girliest of women—I stopped straightening my hair years earlier in part because I hated the beauty salon, and I preferred my Ecco slip-ons with menswear socks to Jimmy Choo heels any day—but damn if I didn’t gasp at the sight of myself in the mirror in that gown. And when she brought out the matching tiara . . . I was done for.
Robert was nervous as he began to dress that morning. Just when he had begun to start wearing short-sleeved shirts again, he had his lopsided belly to contend with. His abdominal muscles had been cut twice within an eight-day period. They refused to snap back to their former shape, leaving the location of his new kidney apparent. But he began to feel a little less nervous as he admired himself in the mirror. OK, I look good in this, he thought—and headed happily to the wedding site.
Dunsmuir House and Gardens sits on fifty acres of the hills of Oakland, California. According to the website, the main house was built in neoclassical revival style (which sounds a lot better than the plain old Southern plantation big house that it looked like to me) in 1899 by Alexander Dunsmuir as a wedding present for his beloved fiancée, Josephine. Sadly, they never lived in the home together—he died on their honeymoon. The estate was purchased by the City of Oakland in the early 1960s and eventually was designated as a National Historic Site. The Dunsmuir staff said our wedding would be held outside on the expansive meadow, which, again, I suppose sounds more elegant than how I might have put it—the wedding ceremony near the pond, the group picture on the front steps, and reception in the front yard.
We planned the wedding of our dreams, inviting about 150 family members and friends, keeping only the traditions we wanted and adding those from other faiths that spoke to us. The wedding program would include a Donate Life plastic bracelet and information on how to become an organ donor. A quartet would play classical pieces by Bach and Beethoven through the wedding and a DJ would spin Beyoncé, Montell Jordan, and other R&B artists during the reception. There would definitely be no Electric Slide. And our first dance would be a choreographed foxtrot routine to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.” We chose a friend to read one of the sacred Hindu Upanishads, we would light the Unity Candle, and Melanie, who at that point would take the credit for bringing us together, would read a piece explaining the Black American “jumping the broom” tradition before we did it. We chose to not have a wedding party so Robert didn’t have to suffer through having to decide on a best man and I didn’t have to try to find a bridesmaid dress that looked good on every body shape and skin tone and had as much of a chance of being worn again as did my gown. Five-year-old Avery would walk me down the aisle, so we made the reception a kid-friendly affair. We hired babysitters for the little ones while a clown and a centipede-shaped bounce house entertained kids Avery’s age. I didn’t see the point of getting a limousine to use for a few hours, so I rented a minivan for the week while my family from North Carolina visited. I proudly drove that minivan up to the site with my parents, my sister Regina, niece Aisha, and Avery in tow.
Robert had hired a coordinator for the day and arrived at the wedding site three and a half hours early because he didn’t trust her to make sure everything was in place and that nothing would go wrong.
But, of course, many things went wrong.
What began as a beautiful rendition of Henry Purcell’s “Trumpet Tune and Air” heralding my arrival fell apart as Avery escorted me to the altar. Notes that were meant to be bold began to drizzle out as if the trumpeter had simply forgotten how to hold his lips against the mouthpiece. I tried not to register the disappointment on my face as the violinist touched the trumpeter’s knee, her signal for Just stop. Instead I shifted my eyes to Robert’s face. There I found a calm smile and a quick wink of his right eye that said C’mon, girl, let’s do this. I’ve got you. My authentic self and my ego leaned back together and exhaled a smile of satisfaction that all was well.
So fixated I was on Robert’s face that it wasn’t until I reached the altar that I realized the minister was looking at me, trying to establish eye contact. His face was drawn in with concern, as if to say Are you sure you’re ready to do this? I felt my face flush with embarrassment, then nodded a reassuring smile and gave him the look he was waiting for—Yes, I’m ready.
Reverend Noel stood tall and slender in his black robe. He had been Robert’s mother’s minister at her Presbyterian church for years. Ginger respected him and he her. He was no fire-and-brimstone preacher, but rather dignified in his tone, always drawing a modern-day conclusion from Bible verses in his sermons. But we soon learned that he could also preach! The difference between delivering a sermon and preaching! is akin to the difference between being able to sing and being able to sang. A person can sing if he can carry a tune, but if his voice moves people to tears—now that’s sanging. Similarly, to deliver a sermon is to speak the Word of God authoritatively and knowledgeably. To preach! is to move souls to the point that people can’t help but call out All right now! and Amen!
The preaching began sometime after the photographer slipped and fell into the pond when our mothers stood to light the side candles of the Unity Candle. Robert and I planned to each draw from the candles our mothers lit to light the center candle together, symbolizing the joining of two families into a new union—until we discovered that the wedding coordinator forgot to set up the Unity Candle by the altar. She sat in the front row smiling when Reverend Noel, Robert, and I all turned to look at her. She startled as if she suddenly remembered that she was actually there to work when the preacher took over.
“No matter,” he began. “We don’t need a Unity Candle to symbolize this union! The candle has already been lit!” He went on to preach about the extraordinarily special bond that Robert and I shared in the form of two healthy kidneys between us in a way that we hadn’t thought to ask of him, but could not have planned better. Amen!
It was a wonderful day.
Given where we started, no one would have thought that Robert and I would ever meet in the first place, much less that our paths would merge so inextricably. My hometown of Spring Lake, North Carolina, was a 2,852-mile drive from Richmond, California, where Robert grew up—and most people never strayed very far away from either of these places.
The first harbinger that our paths would come together was probably my fixed delusion. I believed I had been switched at birth and that I was really supposed to be in California. I’m not sure at what age or how this belief came about—I didn’t know anyone who lived in California and I had never even been to California. It wasn’t as if I could suggest it was some type of coping mechanism for a horrible existence. While I did have to pluck my own switch from the peach tree in the backyard for the occasional whooping, I felt generally happy until my somber teen years. And though free school lunches and Kmart “blue light special” clothes were the norm, I never wanted for anything I truly needed. That said, I did often feel out of place, like I didn’t belong where I was since well before my teens. I didn’t even think I looked like anyone in my family until I saw pictures of myself standing next to my mother at my first wedding. Our heads were tilted the same and I could see the shape of my nose was the same as hers.
Nevertheless, I readily admit, embrace even, that I’m just a country girl from outside city limits, where distances are measured in fields because there’s no such thing as a block. The road in front of my house was dirt until I was six or seven years old and it didn’t have a name that I had heard of or become a part of our address until many years later. My address growing up was Route 1, Box 3581/2. The 1/2 was because my father bought about a third of the neighbor’s plot. Box 359 was my aunt’s house across the road. Box 360 was our other neighbor’s house a field away.
Spring Lake and its neighboring towns were the kinds of places where teenagers hoped to spend their summers picking tobacco because it paid twice as m
uch as working in fast food. Where most planned to get married right after graduation and work at the Food Lion. Or at the tire factory. Or join the Army. Where the SATs were just a day of coloring in bubbles with a sharp number-two pencil and where the closest thing representing an Ivy League school on College Day was Fayetteville Technical Community College.
It was the summer after my junior year in high school when I discovered a path to something different. That spring, Ms. Davis called me into her office. She wasn’t my guidance counselor, so I didn’t know why she wanted to see me. I was nervous. Maybe Ms. Gilchrist, the Advanced Placement English teacher, had told her how she had walked in on my accurate albeit unflattering impersonation of Ms. Davis in front of all my classmates—deep, drawn-out growl, looking down her nose at us through the bifocal part of her glasses, exaggerating her already bulging eyes.
“I think you’d better take your seat now, Vanessa,” Ms. Gilchrist said as she walked past me at the podium.
Yes, I was about to get a talking-to.
When I walked into her office, I found Ms. Davis, fat and deep roast coffee–colored, sitting at her brown wooden desk. She looked over her glasses at me. Papers were piled neatly in three stacks, but she held one paper toward me.
“You need to go to this summer program. Have your mother sign this paper today and bring it back to me tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day to apply.”
“Summer program? What happens there?” I had never heard of a summer program. The last summer I spent many a Saturday morning—before the morning sun rose too high and hot—bent at the waist over row after row of dew-covered leaves in our field-size garden, black soil pushing between bare toes, while I plucked the ripe butter beans and green beans from their stalks. Deddy (how we pronounced Daddy) would take some of the harvest to the machine bean sheller, while Mama and I sat snapping the long pods for green beans as we watched “the stories” on TV. We pinched off the tapered ends and tossed them in the scrap bucket as we watched the shenanigans of All My Children’s Erica Kane. Other days, while Mama worked the press at the dry cleaner and Deddy the mop at the veterans hospital, I cleaned the house and hung the freshly washed laundry out on the clothesline to dry, knowing it had better all be done by the time they got home.
“You spend six weeks at a college learning science and math,” Ms. Davis said.
“But I was plannin’ to work this summer.” Fast food because I didn’t have a tobacco connection.
“Now, Vanessa,” she rumbled. “You have your whole life to work. You need to go to this program.”
Even though I liked school and had only once in my life, in the seventh grade, faked being sick to get out of it (I had to see Michael Jackson being interviewed on Good Morning America—the morning after his moonwalk debut but before we had a VCR), the thought of spending my summer in school did not seem ideal. Yet, I did as I was told because that’s how I was raised, and I sensed that this woman pushing me to do this even though I wasn’t her responsibility meant it was important.
I don’t remember any details of the science and math taught that summer at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg. But what I do remember is that my roommate went to a school where the students were taught to prepare for the SATs. And people from universities like Dartmouth and Yale set up booths on the program’s College Day. I felt uneasy in this big world newly brought to my attention, but suddenly Spring Lake felt too small.
Still, the thought of becoming a doctor didn’t even enter my mind until my oldest brother, Milton, suggested it just before I was to start my senior year. I didn’t come from doctors, didn’t know any doctors, and rarely saw a doctor. No need to see one when Robitussin, calamine lotion, and Vicks VapoRub cured all that ailed.
I was sixteen. He was thirty-two and, since he left home to join the Army before I was out of diapers, a relative stranger to me compared to the other four siblings between us. He was stationed in Germany but had come home for one of his rare brief visits.
“What are you planning to do after you finish high school?” he asked.
“I’m going to be a medical technologist,” I said proudly. Exactly what that meant I wasn’t sure. But it sounded good and no one I knew was trying to be one. My plan was the grandest goal within reach that came to my mind.
“You should go all the way and be a doctor,” Milton said. “You can.”
My eyes stretched wide. “Really?”
He nodded with a sincere raised brow and pulled-in lower lip as he turned his eyes away. Saying something of significance straight on, face-to-face in my family was akin to hugging hello or saying I love you. Just didn’t happen. So for anyone in my family to say out loud that I was capable of such a thing was a first. It wouldn’t be until I was a mother myself that my mother told me, “I always knew you were smart . . . I never had to tell you how to do something twice.”
Until that brief interaction with Milton, the message had been to never think too much of myself. Twice in my teenage years uncles confessed to me, “You a pretty gal,” like it hurt them to admit it. But a quick “Don’t let that shit go to your head” seemed to ease their pain. Thank you? Still, Milton’s words were all the motivation I needed to redirect my plans from becoming a medical technologist to becoming the first doctor in my family.
This was about the same time that Robert, a self-acknowledged knucklehead from Richmond, California, was deeply engaged in knucklehead behavior, though he started out innocently enough. Both his parents worked, sometimes two and three jobs each, so he spent a lot of time with his mother’s parents—Grandpa and Big Mama, because she didn’t want to be Grandma—until he was eight or nine years old.
Grandpa and Big Mama were a staple in the community, married more than sixty years. He was president of the church deacon board and the Richmond chapter of the NAACP and helped establish affordable housing. She sang in the church choir and ran the household, preparing a hot breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her husband every day. They attended church together every Sunday.
They went to the horse racetrack every week too. But little Robbie wasn’t supposed to tell his parents that part. McDonald’s cheeseburgers kept him quiet.
“C’mon, Seven!” Big Mama would shout.
Little Robbie, who looked like a short male version of his mother when he was young, with a twig of a frame and long wavy hair, would hop up and down and shout too. Because Big Mama’s win meant payday for him too. And twenty dollars would buy a lot of bubble gum, Now and Later candy, and Orange Julius drinks—all of which Grandpa had introduced him to.
Grandpa was one of Robert’s favorite people. He wasn’t the only person Robert had met who went to college, but he was the first educated man he knew and the one everybody in the family looked to for help. Robert admired how he could watch TV, read the paper, and listen to the radio at the same time and seemingly pay attention to them all. He was also a dapper man. He wore slacks and a button-down shirt every day, even when he was gardening. Robert wanted to be like him.
But after Grandpa died and as Robert got older, Grandpa’s influence was replaced with the lure of fast girls and bad boys.
“Most of us were not good boys. Even the good boys did bad things,” he admitted. “We might not hurt you, but we did what we had to. We knew how to protect ourselves if we got caught.”
The first time Robert was asked to sell drugs he was in junior high school. He said no, but by high school he started cutting classes regularly yet still maintained a B average. School was easy for him. He just followed the syllabus and turned in the homework—and forged his mother’s signature so his absences would be excused. Please excuse Robbie from school on this day because he had a dentist’s appointment. Please excuse Robbie from school on this day because he had a doctor’s appointment. His multiple prior legitimate absences for chicken pox and allergy testing allowed his forged notes to pass without raising flags with the school. Baseball and football practices allowed him to be out late without raising flags with his
parents.
The desire to have money and be like his friends eventually led him to give in to the repeated offers to start his own hustle. He began selling what the kids at school wanted—crank to the White boys, weed to everybody else—until one evening when he was standing around on the block with a dozen or so other young men and boys that everything became very serious, very quickly.
“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” police shouted, guns drawn. Police cars swarmed in and sealed off the block.
The boys were rounded up and pushed against a wall in a line, hands over their heads and legs crossed at the ankles so they couldn’t run. It was like a scene out of a movie shot in South Central Los Angeles. Robert was embarrassed. He was aware of what they said about boys like him. He was embarrassed that he had become that statistic.
Though he knew he was in trouble, he wasn’t so much scared of what might happen next because he had no drugs on his person. He would be detained for intent to distribute, but not possession. Each boy was questioned, then pushed into a van. Those sixteen and older were taken to county jail, those under sixteen to the juvenile holding facility. Robert was fifteen.
Other boys in the holding facility were talking. “Man, they sending sixteen-year-olds to jail now for hustling. My man just got sentenced,” one said, shaking his head as he stared wide-eyed at nothing on the floor.
Robert was nervous. Fifteen is close to sixteen and, in the days of the crack epidemic and the War on Drugs, the courts were up-charging, rounding ages up for juveniles.
But then he remembered his mother mentioning that she needed to take care of filing his birth certificate—which had never been filed with the City and County of San Francisco, the city where he was born. An opportunity had presented itself. Who could he call on to help him?
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