by Saeeda Hafiz
Immediately I felt my nature rising and my heart began to race. “Where to and how much?” I asked, barely able to keep my eyes off of her face and breasts.
“You know where the football field is?” she asked, anxiously. “By the way, I hope you got at least $20?” she continued.
“Yea” I answered. As I spoke, she began fumbling through her purse. I had no idea why and frankly at the time I didn’t care. All I knew was that I was about to get my thang off and I could hardly wait.
As we pulled away from our meeting place enroute to the field, she requested that I pay her half the money up front. She had closed her purse by then, having pulled nothing from it. Still somewhat in awe of her appearance, I reached in my pocket, pulled out a ten and gave it to her.
She looked at me and said, “Can you do me a favor?”
I thought, oh no, here we go with the bullshit. She’s gonna try to finagle her way out of the business at hand. She began to direct me to turn down certain streets, and like a taxi driver unfamiliar with the city I followed her lead.
“Stop here,” she demanded anxiously. Now we were sitting on a side street about midway down just off of one of the city’s main one-way streets. She jumped out of the car and trotted toward what appeared to be an abandoned duplex apartment. “I’ll be right back baby,” she said reassuringly.
In less than five minutes she was re-saddled in my car and we were off again. I got us to the football field in about ten minutes and I was all set again to let her do her thing. I looked over at her as I began unbuckling my belt. Before I could say anything to prod her attention toward me, I was distracted by her. Again she was fumbling through her purse and I wondered what the hell she was doing. Then suddenly she looked at me and asked, “You ever smoke crack before?” “Naw,” I said curiously.
I had heard about it, but I was green to how destructive it had become for those who were using it. I was also confident that crack was no different than any other drug that I had tried, a mild mood-altering substance that I could use and stop using whenever I wanted.
Seconds later, I found out differently. Homegirl knew it would affect me unlike no other drug I had. Instantly, upon taking a deep toke of rocked-up cocaine from a rigged-up crack pipe the woman had put together using a plastic soda-pop bottle, aluminum foil, and a rubber band, I was addicted.
Now I was interested only in how I could get my hands on more of this drug. I remember fervently asking her to take me to get more of the drug. Also my desire for sex was astonishingly preempted by my need to pump more of the stuff in me. That pleased her. The woman knew that she had a new addict under her wing and handled me for the rest of the night until I was almost out of money. On our last run to buy more drugs, she sensed that I was at the end of my rope and about to go home, so she took ten of my dollars and never returned anything to me for it. Though I was a little pissed off about that, I was ignorantly grateful to her for showing me how to achieve the most splendid sensation I’d ever had. It was a feeling that I have ever since considered a “high.” Whatever it is. It became and is now, as I write, the ugliest enigma I’ve ever confronted, a feeling I wished I had never felt. It is a personal monkey that jumps on my back without warning, aiming to destroy anything that I try to do positive….
When I read the beginning details of my brother’s memoir, I almost fell off the window ledge. My mouth gaped open not believing what I had read. It had never crossed my mind that a crack addict, my brother, wasn’t looking for drugs at the time. He was looking for sex, a different kind of high, an escape from something. It was eerie, because just as I wasn’t looking for yoga to save me, he was not looking for crack to destroy him.
I stared out the window, hard. I was sad and angry. Life has so many unknowns. So much depends on luck and preparation. It just depends on what you are prepared for or are susceptible to, and in my case my family background really didn’t prepare us for success. It prepared us for ways in which we needed to not feel the pain of our situation.
* * *
A few days later, I got another collect call from my brother. We discussed his letter, his memoir, and my reaction. He talked about how our family was so messed up. We repeated my sister Rahima’s Atlanta story, her drug use and how I almost had contact with her.
Without warning, he blurted out: “You know, Rahima was raped when she worked at Zayer’s.”
“What?” I almost dropped the phone, stunned. My sister must have been nineteen then, and I was nine.
“Yep, and Dad beat her when she told them about the situation.”
I felt sick. I had been sitting on the windowsill, staring out the window, and all I wanted to do then was free fall to the floor. I felt like an unsuspecting bird that was just hit by a rock.
There was a long pause between my brother and me. Then I said, “Well, that sure does explain why she has so much pain and why doing drugs for twenty years might feel so good or numbing.”
My brother and I didn’t have much to say after that. We just hung up.
* * *
A week later, I received another chapter from my brother’s memoir, and then another phone call a few days after that. He again asked for more money. I sent some, but also had a bright idea: I would pay him a penny a word for his writing.
“You’re just like Mom. You always wanting somebody to work for it.”
That was true. I agreed with him, but he also had a great story to share and I wanted to be encouraging and show him that he had value.
He did this for about 7,500 words and then just stopped sending his letters—but he didn’t stop asking for money, and I didn’t stop sending it and accepting his expensive phone calls.
* * *
“Hello. Collect call from Rahima Hafiz at the Atlanta County Jail. Will you accept the charges?” said the operator.
“Yes.” Here we go again. First my brother; now my sister, I thought. This was the first contact I’d had with my sister since 1993, five years earlier. I believe she found my name in the phone book. I stayed listed so that my family could connect with me. I always felt between a rock and a hard place when it came to my siblings. I wanted to be available to my family even though I felt there was nothing I could do to help them. I wanted to completely disconnect from all the pain, and I wanted to save them.
My sister had been picked up on theft charges and was in a place where she could perhaps get clean. She and I had a few phone calls every week before I was able to bring up the fact that she had been raped.
“Samir told me some disturbing news. I wanted to ask you about it, if it is okay with you. If you don’t want to talk about it, I completely understand.”
I asked her if she had been raped when she worked at Zayer’s.
“Yep,” she said in a very cold, matter-of-fact way. We paused. I could feel her pain through the phone. I couldn’t help but think how resilient Rahima had been for so many years.
“What happened?”
“I was working the late-evening shift that night. I needed a ride home. Dad didn’t pick me up.” When she said that, I thought, Yep, he was out and about, and didn’t make time to pick her up. “So when another employee in the strip mall offered me a ride home, at midnight, I agreed. Then about ten minutes into the car ride, he pulled the car over and then pulled out a knife. He told me, ‘Here’s how it’s gon’ be…or I’m gonna kill you.”
“Oh, my God! Rahima. I am so sorry.” I started crying, silently. “Samir said that Dad beat you after that.”
“Yep,” she said again, but now in a defeated tone. “When I got home that night and told Mom and Dad what had happened to me, Dad started beating me.”
I was silent, painfully reminded of how some men blame the woman for being raped.
I was speechless and shattered. I had never known about these things that happened to Rahima. She had always been so well put-together, beautiful
inside and out, yet walking around with these secrets within. We talked more, but all I could do was wonder if my dad beat her the way he beat my mother—or worse? Discovering these brutal stories that were hidden from me made my throat feel as if it were stuffed with cotton. I just didn’t know how to heal us from all this brutality.
When I reviewed my family history, I always had a new reason to add to my already mile-high pile of reasons why I didn’t want to live in this family. As a matter of fact, many times I felt that I didn’t want to live in this world. I kept up my daily food and yoga diet, but I did notice that I walked around town less alive, more depressed, and many days, numb. Some days I didn’t cook at all, especially breakfast. This news made me never want to start a new day.
My father’s actions made life a perplexing place for me. He was a monster toward my mother, my sister, and his girlfriend. Yet he was the same man who used to tell my younger brother and me stories about how slave owners used brutal tactics to instill fear into the Africans, to make them easier to control. Was he like them?
When I was eleven years old and my younger brother was eight, my father told us historical stories of how slave owners would have their overseers grab a slave woman who was late in her pregnancy and make the other slaves watch as this woman’s belly was sliced open with a machete. All of them would see the baby fall out. During these stories, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was our history the reason why my dad was so brutal?
I intuitively knew that my dad was trying to empower us with these stories to make sure we could shut up white kids at school when they started talking about how inferior blacks were. My dad, representing the militant black America, wanted those kids to know that if our ancestors were inferior it was because their ancestors were barbarian devils.
My mom did the same, but in a softer way. She gave us comic books about black inventors and important figures. Benjamin Banneker designed the first clock at the White House. Garret Morgan invented the gas mask and traffic light. Madame C. J. Walker, the first black millionaire, made a fortune developing black hair-care products. Dr. George Washington Carver was a botanist who invented peanut butter and lots of practical uses for peanuts.
Both our parents had their own way of trying to elevate us. But what we read and heard were polar opposites of what we witnessed and felt on a daily basis. I wished my parents had modeled the behavior they wanted us to follow. My parents’ “Do as I say, not as I do” philosophy confused everyone and made the shame of our upbringing more damaging because we knew that they knew better.
I remember a day when my dad beat my sister because she was sleeping in too late for his taste. Out of nowhere, he took a belt and started whaling on her. I remembered thinking “That makes no sense.” Perhaps that was the morning after she was raped.
* * *
My sister and I were rebuilding our relationship through her collect calls. One day, she told me that she would be getting out in October 1998 and that she needed a place to stay.
“I will need you to be my big sister,” she said.
I felt a weight on my shoulders. I didn’t feel like I could be her big sister. I was trying to keep my own balls aloft. Besides, why couldn’t our Mom be a mom and let me be a little sister?
“Maybe Mom’s house might work. I can give her a call,” I offered. “Thanks,” my sister replied. I didn’t think my mother and sister had really been in touch. My mom worked a lot, and it was possible that she wasn’t around to get the collect calls. I called my mom.
“I don’t know what condition Rahima is going to be in,” my mom said, putting up her boundaries.
“Well, I don’t know if she can stay with me,” I responded, not wanting to take on the caretaker role for my mother or my sister.
Then my mom built her case. “You know, Rahima has been on those drugs for years. I don’t know if I can have her in my house.”
I felt my defenses go up. When was my mom going to step up and be a mother to her daughter when she needed it most? I was mad at my mom and myself for not being able to give my sister the care she needed. “I’ll call Aunt Jean. Maybe she can help.” My Aunt Jean is my mother’s younger sister, and a year younger than Rahima. She is also a recovered crack addict herself who put her life together and became a nurse.
I picked up the phone. “Aunt Jean, Rahima gets out of jail soon. She wants to come back to Pittsburgh and start over. I don’t think I can have her stay here with me, and my mom is hesitating, too. Can she stay with you?” “I don’t know, Sy. I have to think about it. Crack addiction is tough. I don’t know if I want to put myself in that kind of situation where someone has access to my stuff and can sell it at the drop of a dime, just to get high.”
“Right.”
“And, I’m not gon’ lie. I think about getting high every day. I just don’t. When I was gettin’ high, people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Jean, you still have furniture? Girl, we sold everything a long time ago.’ Sy, I don’t want to lose everything. I already lost Hawthorne (her son) behind gettin’ high.”
Hawthorne, my Aunt Jean’s son, at age ten, called CPS on his own mother the day she and some friends locked themselves in the bathroom to smoke crack.
“Let me think about it for a day or two. I’ll call you back,” she said.
The phone calls went back and forth, round and round. Everyone had a legitimate reason for not giving Rahima a place to stay. Then, finally, my Aunt Jean called me and said that Rahima could stay with her. I had to laugh when she said that if Rahima doesn’t do right by her, “It’s gon’ be on.” My aunt meant that she was willing to fight over keeping her life in recovery a success.
Aunt Jean had a finished basement and said that my sister could stay there until she got herself together with a job and could afford her own place. I assured my aunt that I would communicate her requests, especially the part about “It’s gon’ be on.” We laughed to ease the tension of the unknown.
* * *
Rahima told me the date and arrival time of the Greyhound bus she would be on. She was excited, and so was I. I told her kids about her coming and staying with Aunt Jean. We were all happy.
On a Sunday evening a few weeks later, we all met at the bus station to give my sister a warm welcome. We looked on the notice board to find the platform number unloading passengers coming from Atlanta. We all walked over to the door. A few minutes later, we heard the bus pull into the station. Our hearts beat fast with pleasant anticipation. A couple of people started to get off the bus. Our necks stretched with eagerness as each passenger descended the stairs. More people got off the bus. I could see from my peripheral vision that people were hugging and greeting their loved ones, but I kept my primary focus on the people getting off the bus. It had been over six years since I had seen my sister. The last person exited the bus—and no Rahima.
I watched every single one of us, a bouquet of balloons, swelling up with exhilaration at the thought of a mother being reunited with her children. When my sister didn’t get off the bus, I could see us all deflating, as if the air had suddenly been let out. Each of us fluttered aimlessly up and down, then ultimately flattened to the ground with disappointment. Then worry.
“Maybe she’s on the next bus,” my Aunt Jean said to the kids. “Yeah, maybe I got the date and time wrong,” I said. “Sorry, everyone. I don’t know what happened.” I knew I hadn’t made a mistake, and now I was scared of what the real story would be.
The next day, I got a call from my sister, “I didn’t take that bus. I wanted to see Khadijah and her dad before coming to Pittsburgh.” Khadijah is the youngest of my sister’s seven kids. I had never met this child and I didn’t know if that was the truth. Why didn’t she call me in advance so that we wouldn’t all be waiting at the bus stop for her? Of course, I thought that she went to go get high one more time.
Rahima finally did arrive a day or two later, without the fanfare. My
Aunt Jean still allowed her to stay in her basement, and slowly my sister started to put the pieces back together. She found a minimum wage job. She made deeper connections with her three children living in Pittsburgh. Things were looking up for a while.
* * *
My older brother had a similar tale when he returned to Pittsburgh. He called me and said, “I’m getting out of jail next month. I will be taking a bus to Pittsburgh. Can I stay with you until I get myself settled?”
“Samir, I can pay for you to stay in a hotel. I’m not comfortable with you staying with me in my small one-bedroom.”
“If I go to a hotel, I’m gonna use again.”
“Where’s a safe place for you to be, then?”
“I don’t know, but if I go to a hotel, I’m going to use.”
“Let me call around and see what I can do.”
My brother had a childhood friend named Chet who was able to help set up something for Samir in Pittsburgh. Chet was doing some ministry work that helped down-and-out men turn their lives around.
Both siblings back in Pittsburgh. Both putting the puzzle pieces back together. They were doing better. They both had jobs and were in treatment programs.
This time, the special pocket in my heart was not for grieving. It was for hope.
CHAPTER 17
Pittsburgh, Late Summer 1999
I WAS IN THE HAIR SALON when a woman called my name. I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t see who was talking to me, but I answered her, “Yes?”
It was Brenda from INROADS; we had met a few times at events. “Right. You’re the Executive Director.”
“Was. Now I’m with the YWCA, second in command. INROADS has been following you. Weren’t you in Essence magazine?’