Rabbit

by Patricia Williams

  At the hospital they gave Mama a fake leg and told her she could walk again. But she never got the hang of it. The most I ever saw her take was a couple of shaky steps, clinging to the wall. “Look at me go!” she said one day when I stopped by her place for a visit.

  “That’s real good,” I said. “Keep it up and you’ll be doing the robot down the Soul Train line in no time.”

  After she lost that leg, Mama’s only transportation was her wheelchair. Lucky for her, Al, her drinking partner, was homeless. He would roll her all over town in exchange for a place to lay his head.

  “Hey, Rabbit!” she called again, waving at me as she made her way down the block.

  “Hey, Mama, how you been?”

  Al pushed her wheelchair to a stop, the two of them grinning at me like we were having a social visit, even though we all knew why they were there. “Baby,” Mama began, looking up at me with her hand in front of her face to block the sun from her eyes. “You think you can gimme a little somethin’? I ain’t ate nothin’ all day. Not one damn thing.”

  “Mama, you gotta eat everyday.”

  “Who you tellin’! Just gimme enough for one chicken leg and a biscuit from Church’s. And a little extra,” she added. “For a couple of bags of reefer, two quarts of beer, and my cigarettes. And somethin’ for Al. That’s all I need and we’ll be straight.”

  I couldn’t believe how things had changed. It was only a few years before that Mama showed me how to diaper my baby with a T-shirt. Now she was coming to me for help. I paid to get her gas turned back on, I helped her with her rent, I made sure she always had enough to eat. I didn’t mind giving Mama money. In fact, I liked seeing how it cheered her up. For as long as I could remember, all my mother had to look forward to in life was the thrill she got when she guessed the exact retail price of a dinette set on The Price Is Right. But once I started paying her bills, she smiled more and stopped calling me nasty names. That money was like a ray of sunshine in her fucked-up life.

  Of course, she still had her moods. One afternoon I went by her place and needed to make a phone call. Mama had one of the welfare phones that President Ronald Reagan gave to extra poor folks. I picked it up, dialed Derrick’s number, and Mama hit the roof. “Get the fuck off!” she hollered. “It’s my muthafucking phone. It’s for emergencies!”

  She was making such a racket, I told Derrick to hold on, then I lifted her out of her wheelchair and laid her down on the bathroom floor. “I’m talking to my baby daddy,” I said. “You making too much noise.” A few minutes later, I felt a bullet fly right past my head. Mama had crawled out of the bathroom on her stomach, military style, and was shooting her .22 in my direction. But other than that one time, I had to admit Mama had gotten a whole lot easier to be around.

  Standing on Baldwin, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a knot of bills. “Those new tennis shoes you got on?” Mama asked as I counted out my money. “They sharp to the bone! And you got your hair done?” she continued. “Look at you lookin’ just like that singer El DeBarge!”

  Al looked up, confused. “DeBarge?” he repeated. “You talkin’ about that light-skinned nigga?”

  “Yeah!” Mama said. “He got pretty-ass hair. Don’t Rabbit look just like him?”

  “Y’all crazy,” I said. But I couldn’t help smiling. Coming from Mama, this was like telling me I looked like Miss America. She was always good for a compliment when I had a fist full of money. I peeled off a hundred dollars and passed it to her.

  “Thank you, baby!” she said with a smile. “You a good girl.”

  Al took the handles of Mama’s wheelchair and started pushing her back up Baldwin. They’d only gone a few feet when Al stopped in his tracks and tilted his head in the direction of a noise coming from down the street. I heard it too: the ice cream truck was pulling up to the curb at the other end of the block. Next to alcohol, weed, and cigarettes, Mama and Al loved them some ice cream.

  “Ma!” I called out. “Y’all want something?”

  “Ooooooh!” she said. “That sounds good to me!”

  It had to be ninety degrees out and there wasn’t a lick of shade on the block. I could already taste the icy goodness of a Bomb Pop melting in my mouth. I glanced toward the truck. Little kids, grandmamas, and junkies were already heading that way.

  “What y’all want?” I asked Mama, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. She was opening her mouth to answer when suddenly the back of the ice cream truck flew open and half a dozen men, dressed head to toe in black military gear and bulletproof vests, poured onto the street. I froze. This wasn’t a real ice cream truck. This was a drug bust, and I was holding fifty rocks in a baggie in the front pocket of my jeans.

  “Get down!” the cops shouted, pointing their guns at the crowd. “Police! Get on the muthafucking ground, NOW!”

  I took a step back toward Mama and Al, keeping one eye trained on the police. They were shoving their knees into folks’ backs and pushing their faces to the ground. These weren’t regular cops, either; they were the Red Dogs, a special anti-drug unit of the Atlanta Police Department. They’d been raiding traps all over the city for months.

  “Red Dog” was supposed to stand for Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia. But on the block we called them the jump-out boys because their favorite tactic was jumping out of undercover vehicles. Their second-favorite tactic was beating the shit out of black folks. From where I stood, I could see a lone Red Dog had broken away from the pack and was coming up the block headed right for us.

  “Baby!” Mama whispered. She leaned forward in her wheelchair. “Gimme your dope.” I looked down and noticed she’d lifted up the pant leg of her bell-bottoms. Without taking my eyes off the cop, I reached over and slid her my baggie. Mama dropped it inside her fake leg and quickly pulled her pants back down.

  “Hey!” the Red Dog yelled as he ran up the street toward us. “Get your muthafucking hands in the air!”

  Al and I threw up our hands. The officer headed right to Mama. “What the hell are you doing out here?” he yelled in her face.

  “I ain’t doing nothin’,” she said.

  “Are you attempting to purchase narcotics?” he demanded.

  Mama let out a gasp and stared at him in exaggerated shock. “Ma’am,” the cop continued, “this is an area of known narcotics trafficking. Is that what you’re doing out here, buying drugs?”

  “Drugs?” Mama said, clutching her hand to her chest. “Officer, I don’t know anything about no drugs. I don’t touch that shit. I’m just out here visiting my baby girl.”

  The officer turned to eyeball me, then looked back at Mama, frail and thin in her wheelchair. Then back to me. “What are you doing here?” he asked, waving his gun in my direction.

  “I’m with my mama,” I said. “We visiting.”

  “Visiting who?”

  “Visiting each other. She’s visiting me. I’m visiting her.”

  “Is that right?” the officer said, sounding skeptical.

  He looked around and his gaze landed on a car parked by the side of the road. “Whose vehicle is that?” he asked, pointing to a souped-up ’82 Cadillac Fleetwood. It was sitting on big-ass twenty-two-inch Trues and Vogues tires with spoke rims, and painted pearl white with gold flecks that sparkled in the sunlight.

  The car was mine. I’d bought it a few months earlier, right after I turned sixteen and got my license. It cost eight hundred dollars at auction. I dropped five thousand for the paint job and another G for the tires, rims, and custom-fitted Panasonic sound system with a pop-out radio and state-of-the-art CD player with a floor-mounted joystick to control the volume. Nikia’s baby-blue diaper bag was on the front passenger seat. Inside the diaper bag was another half ounce of dope, wrapped in a Ziploc. Also in the bag was Derrick’s .38 pistol, which he told me to hold on to for protection.

  “I never seen that car before,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as best as I could with my hands in the air.

  When Duc
k first saw my tricked-out Caddy, he was heated. “What the hell you doing?” he asked. “Tryna blast the news to every police in Atlanta that you selling dope? Why don’t you just put up a gotdamn billboard?” At the time I thought he was overreacting—after all, Duck had taken his drug money and bought himself a double-wide pickup truck, so obviously we had different tastes in automotives—but looking at my flashy ride with fresh eyes, I had to admit, it did kinda scream, “DRUG DEALER!”

  The officer leaned over and peered inside the car window. This is it, I thought, my heart racing. If he sees the gun in my diaper bag, or takes a look inside Mama’s fake leg, I’m busted for sure. I held my breath and prayed to God to get me out of this mess. Please, God, I begged silently. Please please please . . .

  Just then, there was a ripple of commotion at the other end of the block. The Red Dogs were loading half a dozen handcuffed men into the back of a police van. I recognized some of them as regular customers, along with a couple of small-time corner boys. They probably didn’t have more than thirty rocks between them.

  “You niggers are going down!” one of the cops yelled triumphantly. Then he took his baton and smacked one of the handcuffed boys across the back of his knees, knocking him to the ground. “Gotdamn lowlife!” the cop yelled, kicking the kid in the back. “Piece of shit.”

  The officer who was standing with me and Mama looked up and grinned at the display of excellent police work happening down the block. Then he turned back to us. “All right,” he said. “Y’all get out of here. Go on home.”

  “I told you, my baby’s a good girl,” Mama called to the cop as he jogged down the block to join the rest of his unit. “You don’t never need to worry about her!” She turned to me and flashed the biggest smile I’d ever seen. If she’d had some teeth, it would have been perfect. “See,” she whispered. “I got you, girl!”

  Mama saved my ass from the Red Dogs that hot summer afternoon. She was thirty-nine years old; it was the last time I’d ever see her alive.

  Dre was the one who found her. He went by her place and discovered she’d died in her sleep. Then he came over to my place and told me the news with tears in his eyes. I drove to the hospital to identify her body, and called the funeral home to pick her up. Afterward, I went back to my apartment, sat on my white sofa, and tried to make myself cry.

  Mama’s dead, I thought. Dead. Dead and gone. Dead as a doorknob . . .

  I blinked hard. But my eyes stayed dry, which made me feel even worse. What kind of child doesn’t cry for their own dead mama? I thought maybe some music might help me get into my emotions, so I put Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” on repeat, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

  “Didn’t we almost have it ALLLLLLLLL!” I sang, getting swept up by the beauty of Whitney’s voice. Then I caught myself. This ain’t a damn sing-along, I thought. You need to get to grieving.

  I tried picturing Mama’s face. But the only image that popped into my brain was of Mama throwing her head back and gulping down her gin, which didn’t bring tears to my eyes, either.

  A memory came to me. I was back in third grade, in Miss Thompson’s class, and we were getting ready for the school’s annual Black History Month show. Every kid in the show had to dress up like a famous black person we admired. My enemy Mercedes was going as Diana Ross; her homegirl, Porsha, was Aretha. Those two bitches thought they had the best parts, but I knew I was really someone special: I was Corretta Scott King; my granddaddy would have been proud. I made a costume out of Mama’s winter coat with the fake fur collar, and a big black pocketbook that Dre stole from the Goodwill. Miss Troup helped me write a speech. “My name is Missus Corretta Scott King,” it began. “I am the loving wife of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior.” I practiced my lines every afternoon with Miss Troup for a week and then, the day before the show, I stood in the living room and begged Mama to come.

  “There’s a Black History show at my school,” I said, handing her the flyer.

  Mama was sitting on her dirty sofa, which was also where she sometimes slept, a tangle of bed sheets beside her. On TV, my favorite McDonald’s commercial was playing, the one with the black girls double Dutching and rhyming about Big Macs and Fillet-O-fish. “Shuckin’ and jivin’,” Mama said, nodding at the set. “You see the way these crackers got our babies dancing for them?”

  I glanced at the TV and back at Mama. “So can you come to my show?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

  The next afternoon I sat on the makeshift stage in the school cafeteria with the rest of my class, sweating under the weight of Mama’s ratty coat, my heart pounding from nerves. The place was packed with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and the little kids. When a skinny boy named Jovan hit the stage, dressed as James Brown in his mamma’s church wig, his daddy jumped to his feet, hollering, “That’s MY boy!” When Porsha tried to sing “Respect,” her mama and all her aunties held up little cameras, flashing away, not even caring that Porsha messed up, singing “R-E-S-C-P-T.” Everybody at Black History had family come out to see them. Everybody except me. Mama never showed.

  It occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t my fault I wasn’t crying for my dead mama. Maybe I wasn’t full of grief because Mama hadn’t given me the kind of Special Memories I needed to feel sad about her passing. All she ever gave me was a feeling of being cheated out of love. And she did try to shoot me.

  My mind flashed on my own children. When I die, those two better bawl their muthafuckin’ eyeballs out like they supposed to, I thought. Just in case, I made a mental note that as soon as Mama’s funeral was over I’d take Nikia and Ashley out for a day of fun—maybe we’d all go to McDonald’s and the movies—so they’d have something good to cry about when I was dead and gone.

  The phone rang. I was so relieved to get a break from the grieving process that I sprinted to the kitchen and picked up after the first ring.

  “Hello?” I said.

  It was the man from the funeral parlor. “I’m calling to find out when you plan to drop off some clothing for your mother,” he said.

  “What you mean?”

  “A special dress or favorite outfit would be perfectly fine.”

  “But what she need clothes for?” I was still confused.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You putting her in a coffin, right? She don’t need clothes for that.”

  “Miss—” He paused and cleared his throat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Miss, we don’t bury people in, uh . . . the nude.”

  I was only sixteen and had never been to a funeral before, so I didn’t want to argue. But this made no sense. Why would anyone dress a dead body in a perfectly good outfit just to put it in the ground? I told the funeral man I’d bring something over and hung up the phone. Then I pulled on my sneakers and headed to the mall.

  I didn’t know what the hell I should get Mama to wear. I’d never seen her in anything fancy when she was alive. All she ever wore was jeans and loud-colored shirts that were fifteen years out of style. I stood at the bottom of the escalator at Macy’s, scanning the store directory, wondering which floor might have fashions from the early seventies. Then it hit me: Mama was going to sleep forever. I should get her a nice set of pajamas.

  I took the escalator to the sleepwear department on the third floor and stepped into a sea of pastel-colored flannel. I walked past racks of furry slippers, oversized nightshirts printed with cartoon characters, and big fluffy robes. Mama usually slept in a man’s T-shirt stained with beer, so a matching top-and-bottom pajamas set would be a big step up for her. That’s what I was searching for when my eyes landed on the most beautiful outfit I’d ever seen. I reached out my hand to touch the fabric and it felt as silky as a pig’s ear. I guess you really do get what you pay for, because the price tag said $195.

  “Is this for someone special?” asked the saleslady as she folded my purchase in layers of tissue paper.

  “For my mama,” I said
proudly. “She dead.”

  That Saturday, Mama lay in her coffin with a full face of heavy makeup, her Jheri curls glistening with activator. The funeral director had dressed her carefully in the outfit I’d provided. She had on a thigh-high peach-colored satin nightie with a matching floor-length robe trimmed in white lace. The set had come with a matching garter, which I could see had been placed neatly on Mama’s thigh, right above her fake leg. I was pleased with my selection. It looked exactly like something Katherine Chancellor would wear on The Young and the Restless. Mama always used to say, “I wish I had that bitch’s money.” Seeing her dressed up in fancy lingerie, I couldn’t help but think it looked like Mama finally made it.

  As I stood by the casket, Dre stepped up beside me. For a few minutes the two of us stood there in silence, our heads bowed over Mama’s lifeless body. Then I heard Dre whisper my name. “Rabbit,” he said, “why Mama wearing these ho clothes? She look like she on her way to sell pussy in hell.”

  The funeral was small. Andre and Jeffro couldn’t be there because they were locked up, but Sweetie came with her daughter, LaDontay, and her new baby, Diamond. Uncle Sugar Ray was there too, with Aunt Vanessa and some of her eight kids. Even Mr. John showed up. As the cemetery workers lowered Mama’s casket into the ground, Mr. John sobbed like he’d lost his very best friend. He was the only one who shed a tear.

  I went back home after the service and changed out of my black funeral jeans and flats, and into blue jeans and Air Jordans. I threw Derrick’s gun and a Ziploc baggie filled with ten-dollar rocks into Nikia’s baby-blue diaper bag, put the kids in the backseat of my pearl-white Cadillac that sparkled in the sun, and headed back to the trap.