“I feel like that nigga Eddie Murphy,” Jerome said as we pulled up to the curb.
“Huh?” I asked, not taking my eyes from the road.
“Beverly Hills Cop! You know, like we on a stakeout.”
I ignored Jerome and slid low in my seat. Through the dusty front window I could see down the block to the mailbox where I used to stash my dope, the bushes where Harris and his partner were hiding, and my green station wagon parked outside the laundromat.
I’d bought that car because it had more room for the kids, but lately I’d been catching Tata with her boyfriend in the back with the seats laid down, and the two of them hugged up side by side, their faces pressed together.
“You better be using protection,” I told her at least once a day.
“Nah, we just kissing,” she always said.
Tata was fourteen, the same age I was when I had Ashley. I knew more than anyone how a boy can whisper in your ear and take you places you don’t want to go and the next thing you know you got two kids and no way to take care of them. Sitting in Jerome’s car, staring down at the street, I made a note to myself that maybe it was time for me to give Tata a “you better not get pregnant” talk. When I was younger, all I had was Sweetie telling me I owed it to Derrick to give him some ass. But Tata was lucky, she had me. I could give her the kind of sex talk I wish I’d had before I met Derrick. I started making a mental list of everything I wanted to tell her.
One: Respect yourself
Two: God does not want you to be no ho.
Three: I will beat the stone cold shit out of you if you turn up pregnant.
Just in case, I decided I’d also bring her to the Free Clinic and get her some birth control. After all, I couldn’t be with her every second of the day telling her to keep her legs shut.
“Hey,” whispered Jerome. “Ain’t that him? He’s moving!”
I’d been so focused on the talk I was gonna give Tata, I’d taken my eyes off the bushes where Officer Harris had been hiding. Jerome was right. Harris and his partner had left their hiding spot and were running down the block, crouched down low, their hands on their holsters. My heart jumped into my throat. The two of them were running right toward my station wagon. Only, Tata wasn’t on the sidewalk where I’d left her. She was inside the car.
Harris and his partner must have had it all planned out, because they moved down the block like it was choreographed. Harris took out his baton and rapped on the rear window. In one swift motion, he pulled open the car’s back door and he and his partner dragged Tata and her boyfriend out by their legs. I watched my cousin get pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Then Harris crawled into the back of my station wagon and started tearing up the place, searching for drugs.
At the other end of the block, a patrol car pulled up, with its siren blaring. A female cop stepped out. She had a word with Harris’s partner, then walked over to Tata, yanked her to standing, and did a pat-down, running her hands up Tata’s pant legs, across her back, and over her arms. The officer reached into the front of Tata’s jeans and pulled out the baggie filled with fifty rocks I’d given Tata to hold that morning.
“Gotdamn,” said Jerome under his breath. “Caught red-handed.”
The two of us watched in silence as Officer Harris shoved Tata into the back of his patrol car and drove away.
Tata got popped a few days after my seventeenth birthday. A week later, Officer Harris busted me, too.
I had a good lawyer, the one all the dealers used. I paid him twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and he got me off with one year probation. But I was so hardheaded, I refused to check in with my probation officer after the first meeting. I didn’t like her attitude and the way she talked down to me like I was some kind of idiot. I didn’t tell my P.O. I wasn’t going to make my next appointment; I just didn’t show up. When the cops picked me up a few months later for violating my probation, I got sentenced to a year at Fulton County Jail.
It’s funny how fast things can change when you don’t even see it coming. One minute I was on top of the world, admiring a model home with marble countertops and crown molding in every room, thinking, I’m gonna live in a place like this. The next I’m behind bars, eating food that tasted like shit-covered cardboard, and thinking about all the ways I’d fucked up my life.
That was the worst thing about jail. There was nothing to do but think.
I couldn’t stop worrying about Tata. She got sent to juvenile detention for a year, but as soon as she got there she found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to her baby boy behind bars, and it was all my fault.
Mostly I stressed about my kids. I’d asked Derrick’s friend Slim and his wife Mary, who had three children of their own, to keep my babies while I was away. They were decent folks and I thought my kids would be okay. Nikia sounded fine when Slim put him on the phone. But every time I called the house to speak to Ashley, I could barely get her to talk. “You okay, baby?” I’d ask.
“Yes, ma’am,” is all she’d ever say. Her voice was so quiet, it sounded like she was talking to me from the bottom of a well.
Fulton County Jail was noisy and hotter than fish grease. We wore orange jumpsuits and shower slippers with our hair sticking up every which way from perm withdrawal. A lot of the inmates were mothers like me who did some dirt—like turning tricks, or holding dope for their boyfriends— to get money to take care of their kids. One girl was coming down off heroin. She spent two weeks puking her guts out. Another girl looked like a walking skeleton, covered in purple sores. “She got the AIDS,” my upstairs bunkee, Eva, whispered to me. “It’s like they just keeping her here to watch her die.”
It was depressing as hell. To make things worse, all anybody did was argue. I once spent an entire day listening to a girl named Jamilah arguing with her cellmate about whether some other chick named Rhonda deserved a beatdown for stealing the Jumbo Honey Bun Jamilah got at the commissary. I didn’t have time for petty bullshit and triflin’ hos. Instead I found the only two girls at Fulton County Jail who had something positive to talk about. Brenda and Eva became my only jailhouse friends.
Eva slept on the bunk above mine, but I knew her before, from Ashby Grove. She was eighteen, like me, but also a full-time crack addict and part-time prostitute. That’s how she got popped: trying to sell an undercover cop a five-dollar blow job. As much as I hated being locked up, to me it looked like jail had done Eva good. As my customer, she’d been skinny and twitchy. Without crack in her system, she had bright eyes, good skin, and a little meat on her bones.
“I gotta be real with you, Rabbit,” she said. “I feel like I got a new lease on life.” At night we’d lay in our bunks and Eva would sing to me until I fell asleep, Mariah, Janet, Whitney, whatever I requested. She had a beautiful voice. I thought for sure she could have been a professional backup singer if the crack hadn’t turned her into a ho instead.
Our friend Brenda was thirty-four, old enough to be our mama. But she wasn’t like any mama I’d ever seen; she was classy and educated. When I asked her how she got locked up, she waved her hand like she was shooing away a mosquito and said, “white collar.” I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean. But Eva asked around and found out Brenda had been running a check-forging scam, using fake IDs and stolen checks to buy luxury items all over Atlanta. “She’s a baaaad bitch,” Eva said, impressed.
A lot of girls thought Brenda was uppity. But I liked the way she carried herself, with her head held high, like she didn’t belong behind bars with the rest of us. It was as if Dominique Deveraux from Dynasty had come to jail. Brenda had pretty hair she pulled up in a twist, long fingernails, and fake breasts that filled out her orange jumpsuit like two firm grapefruits.
I was so dazzled by Brenda’s bougie ways that I followed her around like a lost puppy. The only thing I hated was how she talked like a white girl. Not a regular white girl who works at McDonald’s, either. More fancy, like the ones who dress in all black and spray perfume in the co
smetic department at Macy’s. When she wanted me to repeat something, Brenda would say, “Pardon me?” It took a while before I figured out that pardon isn’t just when somebody lets you out of prison. It also means “huh?”
Brenda, Eva, and I spent all our time together, making each other laugh, complaining about the shitty food and talking about how much we missed our kids. The day I hit rock bottom, they were the ones who pulled me back up.
I worried about Nikia while I was locked up, but he was only three years old. As long as he had his collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I knew he’d be straight. It was Ashley who kept me up at night. She’d always been quiet, and she had the worst case of nerves I’d ever seen in a little kid. Before I got locked up, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and find her standing in my bedroom clutching her nightgown, telling me she had a dream that the two of us were standing on Ashby Grove and somebody blew my head off. The only way to get her to go back to sleep was to let her crawl into bed beside me.
The summer before I got put in jail, I’d been planning for Ashley’s first day at kindergarten. I’d picked out the perfect outfit at the mall: a white collared Polo shirt with matching Polo jeans and a little kid Falcons starter jacket. When I got sentenced, I told Derrick to make sure to bring the clothes, which were folded up neatly on the top shelf of my closet, over to Slim’s place. I knew from experience that next to jail the place with the highest concentration of trifling bitches was elementary school. Ashley was so timid, I was worried the girls at her new school would sense her weakness and make fun of her the way kids had teased me. That’s why she needed to look fresh. Nobody makes fun of the best-dressed girl in the class.
On Ashley’s first day of kindergarten, I was so nervous I asked my friend Melodie, who lived near the school to do a drive-by and check on how Ashley looked. I leaned my head against the cinder block wall of the jail’s dayroom and dialed Melodie’s number. “Girl,” I said, when I heard her voice. “You gotta tell me the truth.”
I could hear Melodie take a breath and slowly exhale. She’d seen Ashley in the schoolyard, she said. But instead of the good-looking outfit I’d picked out, Slim and his wife had let my baby leave the house in high-water jeans, scuffed tennis shoes, and uncombed hair. “Real talk,” said Melodie. “Your little girl looked raggedy as hell.”
That night I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t get the pitiful image of Ashley looking like nobody gave a damn out of my head. Knowing that my baby was out in the world without me felt like a knife through my heart. I felt so guilty I could hardly breathe. I pulled my blanket over my head and cried my eyeballs out.
The next morning wasn’t any better. I ate my breakfast, shuffled past the girls watching The Price Is Right in the dayroom, then went back to my cell and crawled into my bunk. Ever since I started hustling, I was able to fix all my problems with dope money or stolen electronics. But this was different; I felt helpless. It was the lowest I’d ever been. After days of me barely talking, Eva and Brenda decided I needed an intervention.
“Girlfriend, you gotta pull yourself together,” said Eva, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips.
“She’s right,” added Brenda, who was sitting on the edge of my bunk. “You can’t let this incarceration drag you down. You’ve got to rise above. What I find helpful is creative visualization. It’s a very powerful tool. Are you familiar with Shakti Gawain? Life changing.”
Eva and I shot each other a look. Brenda was cool, but sometimes we didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Shakti Gawain? That shit didn’t even sound like English.
“Yeah, I don’t know about all that,” said Eva. “But I do know what you need is a little Whitney in your life!” She closed her eyes, threw her head back, snapped her fingers to keep time, and started to blow, “I believe the children are our future . . .”
“That’s right!” exclaimed Brenda, jumping up and pulling me off my bunk. She threw her arm across my shoulder. “Teach them well and let them lead the way!”
I thought nothing could lift my mood. But when I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me, for a moment, I forgot how shitty I felt. Eva, Brenda, and the power of Whitney Houston reminded me that I needed to stay positive because children are the future and learning to love myself is . . . the greatest love of alllllllll.
The three of us belted out Whitney at the top of our lungs until a guard came by and told us all to shut the fuck up.
Chapter 20
Hood Wisdom
Getting locked up is good for two things, having same-sex relations in the shower room and making Life Goals. Only one of those things interested me.
At Fulton County Jail, Brenda, Eva, and I spent a lot of time sitting in my cell planning for the better lives we were gonna have once we got out. Eva was going to make amends with her family and try to get back some of the stuff she stole from them when she was getting high. Brenda was going to marry her rich white boyfriend, who was old as hell and probably gonna die soon, leaving Brenda all his money. Those girls had ambition. Hanging out with them, I started to dream big, too.
The plan was for me to get my GED. Brenda put the idea in my head. She said, “If you want a real job, you need an education.” I wanted to ask her how come with her two college degrees she didn’t have a real job, but I didn’t want to interrupt the pep talk she was giving me.
“You’re a smart cookie, Rabbit,” said Brenda. “And you obviously have a head for business. All you need is focus and determination. After you get your GED you can apply to technical college, or maybe even business school.”
“Nah,” I said, laughing at the thought. “That’s not for me.”
“Why not? Most of the guys I date went to business school. Trust me. Those places are filled with nothing but fools!” She looked at me. “Nothing personal, sis. I’m just saying, don’t sell yourself short.”
I’d never thought of getting a GED before. But Brenda said I should set an example for my kids: “If you want them to graduate, show them you can do it, too.”
“She’s right,” added Eva. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree. You never heard that saying before? You the tree; your kids is the apples. You don’t want them rolling away, willy-nilly, ending up in some gutter somewhere, do you? Nah, you want them to look up to you and say, ‘One day I’ma be a tree like my mama.’”
“You stupid,” I said, laughing.
“Be a tree, girl! Reach for the sky!”
“You could manage a store,” suggested Brenda. “Do bookkeeping, become an executive assistant . . .” She ticked off job possibilities on her fingers like a grocery list. “Work in a doctor’s office . . .”
“Be salesperson,” added Eva.
“Definitely pharmaceuticals,” said Brenda.
The more we talked, the more my vision came into focus, until I could actually picture myself, clear as day, dressed for work in a neatly pressed blouse with a little metal name tag pinned to the front. I was gonna get my shit right.
Other than planning my Life Goals in jail, I only had two other activities to fill my days, worrying about my kids, and lying in my bunk thinking about Derrick. Except for Nikia and Ashley, he was the only person I really missed. In my heart, I knew it didn’t make sense. The days of Derrick making me feel good had long gone. Mostly, all he did was take my money, beat my ass, cheat on me, and tell me I was ugly. One time he stomped me in front of Ashley so bad she ran to the phone and called 911 screaming, “Daddy killing Mama!” But as bad as he treated me, Derrick had a hold on me. It was like he had me brainwashed. When he told me nobody else would ever love me, I believed him.
In jail I only I remembered the good times. Like before I got pregnant, when he took me roller-skating and held my hand; or the time we took the kids to the drive-in to see Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers; or the day we all went to Six Flags and Nikia rode the kiddie roller coaster and threw up cotton candy while Derrick and I laughed our asses off. I played the scenes
over and over in my head until all I could recall of life with Derrick was nonstop laughs.
I was released from Fulton County jail on a cold day in January 1992. I’d served eight months and gotten out early because of overcrowding. Derrick came to get me. The first thing I wanted was for him to drive me to Slim’s house so I could pick up the kids. As we headed down Marietta Boulevard, I told him things were going to be different. I was turning my life around, I said. “You know, I was thinking like maybe I could get my GED and get some kind of job.”
When he heard this, Derrick swiveled his head and looked at me like I’d just sprouted wings and told him I was flying to the moon. Then he bust out laughing. “A job?” he said. “Girl, you ain’t getting no job! You can’t do nothing but hustle. Besides,” he added, “you got the kids to take care of. What you need to do is get your ass back on the block and start making that money.”
I took a deep breath and stared out the window. I thought about Brenda’s list of employment opportunities: secretary, home health-care aide, paralegal, dental hygienist . . . She said I could do anything I set my mind to. But Derrick was talking to me like I was a fool. “G fuckin’ E D my ass!” he laughed. “Who you think you is, Claire Huxtable? Ha!”
Suddenly, I felt so stupid. What was I thinking letting Brenda and Eva fill my head with crazy ideas? Dreaming big was fine when I was locked up. But it didn’t make any sense in the real world. Derrick was right, I had kids to feed and rent to pay. That’s the power he had over me. He could make me doubt myself and change my mind like nobody else.
The next week, I borrowed a thousand dollars from Duck, bought myself some product, and within the week I was right back where I started, hustling on Ashby Grove.
The block looked exactly the same. The only difference was the laundromat had a new sign out front. Painted on the glass window, it said hood wash & dry. I thought it was messed up that somebody had labeled the place “hood.”
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