“I’ll be right outside,” she said, giving me a little pat on the shoulder before she turned to leave, the door swinging closed behind her.
Alone in the girls’ room, I let the hot water run over my hands and lathered up the soap. I washed my face and neck and under my arms, just like she told me. I brushed my teeth until my mouth felt minty fresh. Then I pulled on my brand-new clothes and stepped into the hallway where Miss Troup was waiting on me.
“Don’t you look right cute!” she exclaimed “Just like a doll,”
I smoothed my hands down the front of my T-shirt. In my whole life I’d never felt as good in an outfit as I did that day. “Thank you,” I said, giving Miss Troup a smile so wide I felt like my face was gonna crack in two.
I started washing up at school every morning after that. Sometimes Miss Troup would bring me new clothes I’d never seen before, and sometimes she’d bring back my funky-smelling Goodwill clothes, only they’d be clean and pressed, like she was running a little laundry service at night. She even did my hair, combing out all the naps and braiding four neat plaits that she finished off with plastic barrettes in colors to match my outfit.
One afternoon, Porsha and Mercedes and a bunch of their friends ran up on me and Sweetie as we were walking home. “Look at this nappy-headed ho,” said Mercedes, smacking Sweetie in the back of her head so hard it knocked my sister to the ground. “You a nasty bitch! I’ma whoop your ass for being so nasty.” There were so many of them, there was nothing I could do but watch helplessly as Mercedes kicked the shit out of Sweetie while the other girls laughed.
Porsha turned to me, taking in my outfit. “Huh,” she said, eyeballing the dark blue skirt and crisp white T-shirt Miss Troup had given me that morning. “Patricia don’t look so raggedy today. Just her raggedy-ass sister who needs to get beat.”
I don’t think Miss Troup had any idea of the ass-whoopings she saved me from, or that I loved everything about her. I loved the way she smiled and her soapy smell. I even grew to like the tap tap tap sound of her shiny red nails hitting the page while she taught me to read. Miss Troup was badass and beautiful. She was like an angel to me.
In the girls’ bathroom one morning, I studied her reflection while she fixed my hair. Her hands felt warm against my scalp as she smoothed down my edges with Blue Magic. Whenever Mama did my hair, which wasn’t often, she was rough and impatient and it hurt like hell. If I dared cry out from the pain, she’d smack me in the side of my head with her wood-handled brush.
Miss Troup looked up and caught my gaze in the mirror. She flashed me a smile, then her face turned serious. “Patricia,” she said, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want you to know I believe in you.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a bright girl with a lot of potential.”
“Potential?”
“It means if you work hard, you can do anything. If you study, and really apply yourself, you can finish school, go to college, and grow up to be anything you want: a teacher, a doctor, a nurse. Anything. You can be somebody. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. No one in my family did any of the things Miss Troup was talking about. I couldn’t name a single relative who’d finished high school. And I sure never saw any of them with a career, or even a legal job for that matter. My uncle was an expert at picking locks, and Aunt Vanessa made money selling food stamps for fifty cents on the dollar. I was pretty sure that’s not what Miss Troup was talking about when she said I had potential.
“This world is filled with possibilities,” she continued, resting her hands on my shoulders and staring into my eyes. “You can do anything you put your mind to. Anything at all. All you have to do is dream. Promise me you’ll remember that, Patricia. Promise me you’ll dream.”
Nobody had ever talked to me like this before: not Granddaddy, not any of my regular teachers, and definitely not Mama. In my family, we all moved in the same direction, hustling and scheming and getting nowhere. That was the path laid out in front of me. But now here was Miss Troup—in all her leather-boot and red-fingernail finery—telling me I could go another way. I took a deep breath and gazed at my reflection. You can do anything and be anything, I thought, trying it on for size. But I wasn’t totally convinced I had a place in Miss Troup’s world of “possibilities” and “potential.”
“Promise me you’ll dream,” she said again.
“I promise?” I said, looking up at her uncertainly.
“C’mon now, Patricia. I know you can do better than that.” She gave me a little squeeze.
“Okay,” I said, starting to giggle. “I promise!”
Chapter 5
Devil in Disguise
Mama had a lot of ideas that made sense only to her. Like the time she decided to cook dinner out in the yard. I was ten years old and we’d moved to a run-down duplex at the bottom of a hill in a shitty part of town known as The Bluff. We didn’t have any gas in the house because it got cut off from Mama not paying the bill. So she went out and bought herself a charcoal barbecue grill, which she set up on the screened-in porch, right outside our front door.
The only problem was that grill wasn’t made for frying up a skillet full of catfish, like Mama used it for. One evening while she was cooking dinner, the whole porch filled up with thick black smoke. It was so bad that Mr. Willie, who lived in the other half of the duplex, came outside and started hollering.
“Mildred!” he yelled. “Bitch, you tryna kill me?”
“Mind your gotdamn business, you high-yella muthafucka!” Mama yelled back.
They kept up hollering at each other until Mr. Willie decided there was no reasoning with Mama, and called the fire department instead.
The fire truck pulled up to the house with sirens blaring. Mama stepped out of a cloud of black smoke with a fork in her hand, and asked, real casual, “What the hell going on out here?” like her stupid ass wasn’t the reason for all the commotion. When the fireman told her she had to move her grill off the porch before she burned the whole place down, Mama threw up her hands in exasperation: “Where I’m supposed to cook then?”
“It’s up to you, ma’am,” said the fireman with a shrug. “As long as you keep the grill outside.” That’s when Mama moved her little cooking operation to the front yard. She’d be out there in her faded housedress and a plastic shower cap pulled over her Jheri curl, like she was in the privacy of her own kitchen, not out on full display. As hungry as I was, I would pray for the middle of the month when Mama would run out of food stamps and was low on food, and stop cooking in the yard. Eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner was better than getting teased all day long by kids in class who passed Mama on their way home from school. I felt like I was living in hell. Every day I wished for someone to come along and save me. That’s when Mr. John showed up.
Sweetie and I were sitting on the porch handclapping “Miss Mary Mack” the first time Mr. John offered to buy us food. He pulled up to the curb in front of Mama’s house, leaned out the window of his green El Camino, and yelled, “Hey, you girls hungry? I’m finna go to Church’s to get something to eat. Y’all want to come along?”
Mr. John was a bricklayer with a big friendly smile. He lived up the street from us, and earlier that summer he’d given my older brother Dre a job helping him mix concrete. In the afternoon, Mr. John would drop Dre back home dog tired and covered in dust. I was in the kitchen with Mama when he came inside one day to say hello.
“How you doing, Mildred?” he asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, pulling on a smoke. “Gettin’ by.”
Mr. John looked around the kitchen. I saw his eyes move from the burned-out birthday candle stubs stuck to the counter, to the ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, to the stove with nothing cooking on it. I guess he figured that “gettin’ by” meant “broke as hell,” because the next day he showed up with a couple of bags of groceries from the Supe
r Saver filled with bread, spaghetti, grits, pigs’ feet, fatback, dried beans, rice, and a package of bologna. He also brought Mama a six-pack of Schlitz Malt Liquor and a dime bag of weed. “You didn’t have to do all that,” she said, giving him a big smile. “You a good man.”
Mr. John started dropping by a lot after that. He’d sit at Mama’s kitchen table and laugh at her jokes. The attention put her in a jolly mood, which made things easier on us kids. By “easier,” I mean she stopped acting like she was gonna blow our heads off every time she got mad.
Mama always had a quick temper. But she was a tiny woman, barely one hundred pounds, and with all of us kids getting big, it was getting harder for her to whoop our asses like she used to. Instead, when she’d get mad because we left the dishes in the sink, she’d reach into the side pocket of her painter’s pants, grab her little .22 pistol, and shoot into the air. “I told you to clean the gotdamn dishes!” POP POP POP! Mama fired that pistol the way other parents raise their voice. Every time she got aggravated, we feared for our lives. I used to wonder, If we so poor, where the hell you getting all these bullets from? But after Mr. John started coming around, Mama didn’t shoot as much. The two of them would talk and laugh and drink their asses off, just like a couple of teenagers in love. Then he’d get up and go back home to his wife.
I don’t know what Mrs. John thought of the arrangement, but Mama was happy as a pig in shit. Suddenly she had everything that was missing from her life: attention, groceries, and beer. Mr. John would bring her a forty of Schlitz in the morning before he went to work, and a six pack in the evening. Thanks to him, Mama stayed buzzed, and we weren’t hungry. It felt like Mr. John coming around was the best thing to happen since we left Granddaddy’s liquor house. Then there he was one afternoon, leaning out his car window offering to take me and Sweetie to lunch.
“Y’all hungry?” he asked again.
The two of us ran over and slid into the front seat beside him, giggling about all that crispy chicken we were about to eat. Sweetie sat in the middle, I was by the window. If you’d seen us that afternoon, you would have thought, Look at that daddy taking his two little girls out for a drive!
We were a few blocks from the house when Mr. John said, “I got to make a stop real quick.” He took a left at the next corner and flipped on the radio. The sound of Marvin Gaye filled the car.
Get up, get up, get up, get up
Let’s make love tonight
Wake up, wake up, wake up
’Cause you do it right
Mr. John sang along as he drove us up the street, past Booker T. Washington High School. He had a nice voice, I remember. Deep, like Barry White.
He turned left again, onto Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, toward the low stone entrance of the Westview Cemetery. Then, without saying a word, he drove his car through the gates.
I figured Mr. John had some dead relative he needed to see. Why else would we be driving through the grounds, past the rows of tombstones that seemed to go on forever? I was about to ask him, “Who died?” when he turned off the main road and pulled to a stop under the shade of a giant willow tree.
“Why we here?” I asked.
He turned to me and smiled. “We gonna play a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“A singing game,” he said. “Rabbit, turn your head and look out the window. You gon’ sing until I tell you to stop. You do a good job and I’ll give you five dollars.”
“What I’m supposed to sing?”
“It don’t matter.”
“I don’t know any songs.”
“You know that song that was just on the radio, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“So sing that.”
I didn’t understand this stupid-ass game. But I did understand “five dollars.” So I turned my head and stared out the window. Not far from where we were parked, somebody had left a bunch of flowers tied with a white ribbon on a grave marked by a stone that said in big block letters, mother.
“Sing, Rabbit,” said Mr. John.
“Get up get up get up let’s make love tonight,” I began. Behind me I heard the sound of the driver’s-side door opening, the rustle of leaves, and Mr. John whispering to Sweetie, “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
It was hot as hell in that car. I could feel beads of sweat dripping down my back. I didn’t know the lyrics. “Ooooooh baaaaby,” I sang, off key. “La la la motion, like the ocean, magic potion baaaaaby . . . get up get up get up.” I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes.
It felt like a long time had passed before Sweetie finally walked around the front of the car and pulled open the passenger-side door. I slid over to let her in. Her mouth was shut tight, her head down. She wouldn’t look at me. Instead, she stared at the floor, twisting her fingers into knots in her lap. Mr. John said, “Okay, Sweetie. You look out the window now.” Then he turned to me.
“Lay back,” he said.
“Why?”
Suddenly his hands were on my shoulders, pushing me down. “Hey . . .” I said, struggling to sit up. But he was so strong, pulling my legs toward him, until they were dangling out the car door.
I could feel his hands tugging on my shorts. “No!” I cried, gripping my waistband and holding on. “Noooo!”
Mr. John leaned over me with his face near my ear. “Let go, Rabbit,” he said, real low. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s gonna feel nice, like kissing. That’s all I’m gonna do.”
My heart was racing and I felt trapped, pinned down by Mr. John’s words and his big hands all over me. He knelt in the grass and pulled on my shorts. I felt my bare bottom against the car’s leather seat, then his wet mouth between my legs. I grabbed at the hem of my T-shirt, trying to pull it down to cover my privates.
I looked up through the windshield at the leaves against the blue sky high above.
I pretended to fly away.
Afterward, Mr. John took us to Church’s just like he promised. And gave us each a crumpled-up five-dollar bill. “You know I help your mama out so y’all don’t go hungry,” he said, pulling up to the curb in front of our house. “If y’all tell her about this, she’ll be mad. She’ll whoop your ass real good. I won’t be able to come over and help out. Then y’all be hungry for real.” He told us this every time he took us to the cemetery, which he did for years.
Sweetie and I never talked about what Mr. John did to us in the front seat of his El Camino, but I always wondered if Mama noticed what was going on. I wondered if she ever asked herself where her boyfriend took her babies, or what he was paying for with those five-dollar bills. I know Mr. John gave Mama attention and he kept us all fed. Maybe when she looked at him that’s all she wanted to see.
Chapter 6
First Dance
Puberty hit me like a brick to the chest. By the time I was twelve, my face was a mess of acne, and my dried-out Jheri curl looked like somebody set a bowl of burned curly fries on top of my head. To make things worse, I was suddenly busting out all over the place with curves that made my T-shirts stretch tight across my chest. Compared to me, Sweetie had it easy. She had good hair, clear skin, and dimples. She wasn’t just pretty, she was grown. She wore eyeliner and lip gloss, and when she walked she switched her hips in a way that had grown men following her down the street. “Daaaamn, girl!” they’d say. She was only two years older than me, but next to her I was invisible.
As jealous as I was of her good looks, I couldn’t get away from Sweetie even if I wanted to. Mama had moved us again, this time to a one-bedroom duplex on Baldwin Street, and Sweetie and I shared a small room right off the kitchen. By “right off the kitchen,” I mean we were actually in the kitchen. At night, Mama laid a mattress on the floor and hung a thin sheet up to separate our room from the fridge and the stove. If I woke up sweaty in the middle of the night, I could roll over, open the fridge door and stick my head inside to catch a breeze. With Mr. John still messing with me, my personal AC was pretty much the only
good thing I had going on.
Back then, Sweetie couldn’t be bothered with me. She was best friend with our cousin Peaches. On Saturday nights, the two of them would smoke Newports, drink forties, and head to the teen dance at the YMCA rec center. Then they’d spend the rest of the week whispering and laughing about all the good times they were having without me. It drove me crazy. All I wanted was for them to let me tag along so I could get out of Mama’s house and have me some fun, too.
“C’mon,” I begged Sweetie one night when the two of them were getting ready to leave, filling our side of the kitchen with the smell of cheap Primo perfume they stole from Woolworths. “Why can’t I go with you?”
I expected her to say the same thing she did every other time I’d asked: “Nah, you too young,” like we weren’t practically the same age. But it turned out to be my lucky night. Sweetie’s boyfriend, Crispy, was bringing along a dude named Fresh, and he didn’t have a girl.
“You can hang out with him,” said Sweetie. “He prolly ugly as fuck anyway. So you two be a perfect match.” Peaches and Sweetie bust out laughing like a couple of hyenas. But I didn’t care, I was gonna get my dance on. I left the kitchen and went into the bathroom to practice my moves in front of the cracked vanity mirror. I could only see myself from the chest up, so I focused on getting the top half of my body right, snaking my neck from side to side, and hoped that the bottom half of my body was following along.
When the boys came by to pick us up later that night, I could see Sweetie wasn’t lying; Fresh was corny as hell. He was rocking a long-in-the-back Lionel Richie Afro and British Knights tennis shoes laced up real tight. “Wut up?” he said, giving me a shy nod.
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