The girls—Tata, Tomeeka, Cece, and Little Cee—had all come to live with me a few months before Duck and I split up. My cousin Tata was the first to move in. She was Aunt Vanessa’s thirteen-year-old daughter. I’d stopped by their house one day and found Tata sitting on the floor, braiding her little sister’s hair. I didn’t know Tata could do hair. But she was doing a real nice job. Her little sister had a head full of braids and beads, looking like a tiny Rick James.
“Y’all want to come spend the night?” I asked my cousin. I figured we could watch TV while Tata braided Ashley’s hair and saved me a trip to the salon. “Family Matters is on.”
Of course Tata said yes. Not just because I had a big-screen TV but also because Aunt Vanessa’s place was like all seven circles of hell. There were more than a dozen people staying in her little shit box of a house, including Aunt Vanessa’s eight kids and four grandkids, her boyfriend Louie, and my uncle Peewee. The place stank like stale cigarette smoke, spilled Schlitz Malt Liquor, and weed.
Tata packed some clothes in a plastic shopping bag and we bounced. Weeks went by and never once did Tata ask me to take her back to her mama’s house. Aunt Vanessa never asked me to bring her daughter home, either. That’s how my cousin started living with me.
The other three girls came not long after. Little Cee was nine, Cece ten, and Tomeeka eleven. They were Derrick’s sister Darleen’s kids. But sometimes Darleen got distracted from her parenting by her love of smoking crack. I went over to her place late one night looking for Derrick and found the three kids home alone, sitting in front of the TV.
“Where’s your mama at?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” Tomeeka said with a shrug, her eyes still glued to the flickering set.
“Y’all had something to eat?”
“Nah.”
I took them out to Lilly’s Soul Food, then back to my place. That first night they slept on blankets I spread on Ashley’s bedroom floor. After a few days, I realized their mama wasn’t asking me to bring them back, either. So I bought two sets of bunk beds, and the girls settled in.
With six kids living with me, my place felt like a group home. In the morning I’d get the kids breakfast and make sure all the girls’ hair was combed. There were clothes and hair clips, tennis shoes and Pop-Tarts wrappers all over the place. Then I’d drive the babies to day care and drop the older girls at school. In the afternoon they’d meet me on Ashby Grove. They’d hang out on their friends’ porches, listening to music and making up dance routines, while I served my customers. When it got late, we’d all pile into my Cadillac and go home.
One night, the girls announced they’d decided to form a professional dance crew, the Ashby Grove Girls. They pushed back the furniture, got in formation, and showed me the choreography they’d been working on; a perfectly synchronized routine featuring the Roger Rabbit, the Wop, and the Cabbage Patch, with Little Cee dropping into splits as a grand finale. I was so impressed, the next day I went to the mall and bought four matching extra-large neon orange and black T-shirts, with coordinating sunglasses and orange hair scrunchies. Those girls could dance to anything, but their best routine was to Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” which they played fifty times a night.
At thirteen, Tata and Tomeeka were only three years younger than me, but I was the one holding us down. I kept everybody fed and bought them all new clothes. I made sure they went to school, did their homework, and got their hair did every weekend. When CeeCee decided her personal style would be enhanced by a gold tooth, I was the one who took her to the dentist and picked up the hundred and fifty dollar tab.
It was a lot of work taking care of six kids. I’d holler and complain and tell them they were trying my last nerve, but really I loved every second of it. Having all that noise and commotion in the house gave me a family feeling. Sometimes I’d lie in bed listening to them giggling in the other room and think about how we were having the kind of good times I’d only ever seen on TV. Like on the Brady Bunch when all the kids enter a talent show. Only my girls really were talented. And instead of Alice cooking up a pot roast in the kitchen, it was me sitting at the kitchen table chopping up an ounce of crack.
It was summertime when I first asked the girls to hold my packages. I figured they were already out on Ashby Grove anyway, listening to the radio and practicing the Running Man. It only made sense that they should help me out.
“Put these in your drawers,” I said one morning, handing each girl a packet filled with a hundred dime sacks. At first they didn’t know what I meant. “Put them inside your panties,” I explained. “And hold them for me until I tell you.” Then it just became part of our morning routine. Sometimes Tata or Cece would hold down a corner, serving any customers who came through. All they had to do was reach into their underpants to make a quick sale.
Once in a while I got a nagging feeling that maybe I was doing something wrong. Before they’d come to live with me, none of those girls knew a thing about selling dope. They were good girls. They went to school; they didn’t talk back or mess with boys. Now here I was, practically their mama, bringing them into the game. It nagged me like a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but mostly I tried not to think about it. I was teaching the girls to survive, just like my mama taught me.
I stopped dealing with suppliers like Mello and the Mexican when I started running my own trap on Ashby Grove. Instead I found myself a new connect, Lamont, who wasn’t anything like other dealers I knew. He’d graduated from college, and during the week he worked in a fancy office building downtown. He said for him selling dope was “strictly supplemental income,” which he was due on account of the bullshit he endured as a black man in corporate America. “Money-wise, we got to level the playing field,” he said.
Lamont wore khaki Dockers, Hush Puppies shoes, and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He read the front section of the newspaper and was one of the only people I’d ever met who actually voted.
Lamont also had a special gift for making me think about things like no one ever did before. One time he asked me how come I had two black eyes. I told him Derrick punched me in the face. Everybody else in my life—Stephanie, Duck, Miss June, even Mama before she’d passed—always said the same thing about Derrick: “He’s no damn good.” But Lamont shook his head and asked, “Don’t you think you deserve better than this?” For weeks I couldn’t get that question out of my head.
Lamont wasn’t just good at conversation. He also had the added bonus of running his crack distribution business by delivery. I didn’t have to go to some abandoned strip mall with a loaded gun to get my product. Instead, every Saturday Lamont would come by my place with a package and collect his money.
I was sound asleep one morning when I heard him knocking. I jumped out of bed, rinsed my mouth, and rushed to the front door to let him in. I was more excited to see Lamont than usual. I wanted to show him: my brand-new dinette set.
I’d bought it at Wolfman Furniture Warehouse. It had a glass top and a fake cherrywood frame with matching claw-foot chairs. On top of the table I’d carefully placed a blue glass centerpiece bowl and filled it with plastic fruit, just like they did in the display model in the store.
“How you like my decorations?” I asked, waving my hand in front of the set. “It’s nice, right?”
Lamont ran his hand along the top of a chair and picked a fake green apple out of the bowl. He palmed it in his hand like a baseball. For a minute I thought he was going to throw it at me. But instead, he put it back in the bowl and sat down. “You like this table, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why, you think something’s wrong with it?”
Lamont leaned back in his chair and glanced around my living room. I watched his eyeballs move from my cream-colored lacquer entertainment console with the big-ass speakers, to my white imitation leather sofa with the lime-green throw pillows, and the floor lamp that bent over the sofa like a rainbow.
Lined up neatly against the baseboard were dozens of pairs of sneakers
in practically every size for the six kids in the house. And on the wall, I’d hung a framed poster of a muscular black man embracing a black woman dressed in a flowing white gown. Lamont might not like the dinette set, but at least the rest of the place looked good.
“You want my honest opinion?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong with this table,” he continued, not waiting for a response. “But every clown with a little dope money and a layaway plan has a set exactly like this one. It’s nothing special. It’s nice, but it’s just ghetto nice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, my face getting hot.
“The thing about money is it gives you choices,” he answered, leaning back in his chair. “You can spend it on bullshit or you can invest in quality. Hood niggas are good for dropping bookoo dollars on bullshit, flashy shit that shines bright but doesn’t last. That’s the ghetto mind-set. You see where I’m coming from?”
I stared at him hard because no, I did not see where he was coming from. All I could see was that he was in my house insulting my dinette set.
I’d been doing business with Lamont for months, but he’d never talked to me like this before. Usually, he’d just ask me questions about why I had so many kids in the apartment and how come I didn’t have anybody helping me take care of them. One time I told him about living in Granddaddy’s liquor house, and the way Mama would fire her pistol in my direction whenever she got mad. “Man,” said Lamont, whistling through his teeth. “That’s some deep-ass shit. Like multigenerational deep-ass shit.”
Usually I felt pretty good talking to Lamont. But I didn’t appreciate this particular lecture. I crossed my arms and glared at him. He looked at me with raised eyebrows, then threw his head back and laughed.
“C’mon now, don’t start tripping,” he said. “I’m just trying to school you. As matter of fact, go get dressed and put something nice on. We’re going window-shopping. I’m gonna show you exactly what I’m talking about.”
I don’t know where I was expecting Lamont to take me, but it certainly wasn’t where we ended up: a high-end strip mall on Peachtree Road. Lamont pulled into the parking lot, opened the passenger door for me, and led me toward the big glass doors of a store called Haverty Furniture. At first I thought it was some kind of joke. I didn’t know anybody who shopped on this side of town. But when I stepped inside the showroom, I almost gasped. It was filled with the most beautiful home decor I’d ever seen. There were five-piece bedroom suites that cost more than a thousand dollars, and dining tables made of chocolate-colored wood. We walked through displays of leather sectionals and tested out the furniture, sinking into a pair of deep armchairs. “This is what I’m talking about,” said Lamont, leaning back and putting his feet up on a matching leather footrest. “This is quality. Remember that.”
Lamont started taking me on all kinds of field trips. We drove through beautiful Buckhead, along quiet streets lined with Hollywood-style mansions and manicured lawns. We went to luxury car dealerships and test-drove Mercedes. One day Lamont drove north on the I-75, out to a newly built subdivision in Peachtree City, where we toured a model home.
“See that?” Lamont asked, pointing to the kitchen’s granite countertops. “That’s some high-end shit.” He showed me “quality” walk-in closets with built-in shelves, and “quality” crown molding in all the rooms. As Lamont guided me around the place, I noticed a white lady gripping the arm of her husband and pointing our way. She had on a cream-colored pantsuit. I was wearing a black off-the-shoulder T-shirt with a neon-green lightning bolt. I stepped to her and opened my mouth to ask, “The fuck you looking at?” but Lamont pulled me away.
One night we went to dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse and Lamont showed me how to use a pepper mill. I sometimes got the feeling that Lamont was treating me like he was Mr. Miyagi and I was the Karate Kid. Only instead of showing me how to do a crane kick, he was on a mission to teach me about life outside the hood. I asked him about it once, when he dropped me back home: “Why you taking me all these places?”
“Each one teach one,” he said, as though that explained everything.
I didn’t understand Lamont taking me out and showing me the high life any more than I knew why Miss Troup cleaned my clothes and did my hair, or why Duck had put up with my shit for so long. All I know is that Lamont opened my eyes to a different way of living. “You gotta look outside the ghetto if you want to get ahead,” he said. “The hood is nothing but a trap.”
Maybe I did feel a little bad about teaching the girls to hustle, because after Lamont started introducing me to his bougie ways, I made it my mission to show the girls everything I learned. I took them to Red Lobster and Myrtle Beach. We sampled all the food at the buffet at Golden Corral and feasted on prime rib at the Sizzler.
One Sunday afternoon, we took a special trip out to Peachtree City so I could show the girls a model home. We wandered from room to room, the kids oohing and ahhhing at the sunken living room with wall-to-wall carpeting and the master bathroom that was big enough to roller-skate in. Afterward, we all piled back into my Cadillac. Before I turned on the ignition, I told the girls to listen up because I had something important to say.
“You see that house with all that beautiful shit?”
“There wasn’t no food in the fridge,” said Nikia.
I ignored him and kept talking: “One day all of you can live in a house just like that, with a big-ass bathroom and carpets everywhere.” They were silent, like maybe they thought I was talking shit. “I’m for real,” I said. “You can do anything and be anything you want in this life. All you have to do is dream.”
I was sixteen years old and I happier than I’d ever been. I had a family, money coming in, a nice car, and someone in my life who cared enough about me to teach me the difference between bullshit and quality. After all those years of going to school hungry and smelling like dirty Goodwill clothes, finally everything was going good.
All I needed was for Derrick to settle down and stop fucking every girl he met, and my life would be 100 percent perfect. Driving away from the model home in my pearl-white Cadillac, bumping Bell Biv DeVoe on my Panasonic sound system with my babies falling asleep in the seat beside me. Tata, Tomeeka, and Cece singing in the back, I couldn’t imagine a better time.
That’s how stupid I was back then. It didn’t even occur to me that if you do illegal shit all day every day, sooner or later you’re gonna get caught.
Chapter 19
Locked Up
Everybody knew Officer Harris was out to get me. Blond haired, blue eyed, and a total asshole, he was the beat cop who worked on Ashby Grove. His signature move was slowing down his patrol car and leaning out the window with his fingers curled like hooks, pointing at his eyeballs and then at me. “I got my eyes on you,” he’d say. Like that was supposed to scare me.
He’d do this corny-ass move so much that at home the girls and I would point to our eyeballs and back at each other, like, “Gimme the remote. I got my eyes on you.” Or “These your dirty tennis shoes on the sofa? I got my eyes on you.” Officer Harris was a joke. At least that’s what I thought, until the day he decided to take me down.
It was June, a few weeks before school let out for the summer. I was getting the babies ready to drive them to day care and the older girls were heading out to school. Except Tata. “There’s no school today,” she announced. “I don’t have to go.”
I rolled my eyes. Tata was going through a stage where she was trying all kinds of bullshit just to see if she could get away with it. “For real,” she insisted. “It’s a school holiday.”
“I guess it’s Tata Day,” Ashley muttered to herself as she passed me on her way out to the car. Ashley was only four years old, but even she knew Tata was full of shit. I didn’t have the energy to argue so I told Tata, “If you not going to school, you coming to Ashby Grove with me.”
I didn’t drive my Cadillac that morning. I took my new car, a dark-green station wagon that I’d bought at the car
auction a few weeks before. It wasn’t flashy like my Caddy, but it had more room for the kids. It was my Big Mama car.
I dropped Nikia and Ashley at day care, then drove to Ashby Grove and parked at my usual spot in front of the laundromat. “Get out the car,” I told Tata, instructing her to take care of any customers who came by while I walked over to Lilly’s Soul Food around the corner to get us something to eat.
I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes. I was headed back, carrying a take-out container of biscuits and gravy, when Jerome, one of my regulars, pulled over in his beat-up white Corolla and flagged me down, waving frantically out his car window. “Rabbit, get in the car!” he yelled. “Get in the car!” Jerome was always jittery, but now he was hollering like some body had been shot. “Girl, you better hurry up!”
“What’s going on?” I asked, leaning into his car.
“I was just over by your spot and I seen Officer Harris hiding in some bushes.”
“What you mean ‘hiding’?”
“Rabbit, him and his partner got binoculars like they’re doing surveillance. Girl, they watching your trap like they finna bust your ass!”
All week long I’d felt like eyeballs were watching my every move. Now I knew why. Officer Harris was a sneaky-ass muthafucka. He was just the type to lurk in the bushes. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he did on his day off, just for fun.
I opened the car door, slid into the passenger seat, and told Jerome to drive up the road and pull over at the top of Ashby Grove. The street was on a hill and I knew I could get a clear view of what Officer Harris was up to from the top of the block. While Harris was watching my trap, I’d be watching him.
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