Rabbit

by Patricia Williams

  “Wait . . .” I said. “Are you leaving?”

  “What does it look like?” he said, walking past me and heading for the door.

  “Wait!” I called after him. “You asking me to choose between you and those babies? Is that what you want?”

  “I’m not asking you to choose,” he said without turning around. “I’m just telling you this is too much.”

  I followed Michael down the front walk and out to his Nissan. He opened the door and got inside. Without thinking, I ran in front of his car with my hands in the air.

  “Don’t go!” I yelled.

  “Move out the way, Pat.”

  “You can’t leave!”

  Michael started his car.

  “Don’t make me choose!” I yelled again. I could see him behind the wheel, stony faced and staring straight ahead. I realized at that moment I would do anything to make him stay.

  Michael and I had been living together almost a year and I’d come to count on him being there like the sun in the sky. No matter what happened on Ashby Grove—if it was a slow night, or I just didn’t feel like going, or even the time I dozed off at my friend Tanisha’s house and got robbed by her crackhead brother who stuck his hand down my bosom and stole fifteen hundred dollars in cash—Michael held us down. He made sure the bills were paid on time and there was always food in the fridge. It was his idea for us to eat dinner together every night and read stories to the kids before they fell asleep. Michael was solid and stable, and with him everything was better. There was no way I was gonna let him go.

  I stepped one foot onto the front bumper, then heaved myself onto the hood of his car. “Please don’t go,” I cried, banging my fists on his front window. “PLEEEEEASE!”

  Michael was ex-military, but I guess even combat training didn’t prepare him for the sight of me spread eagle on top of his car. He turned off his ignition and stepped onto the curb. “Golly,” he said. “You keep making all that racket, the neighbors gonna call the police. You need to get off that car and get back inside before you get arrested for causing a disturbance.”

  “I’m not going unless you come with me,” I said, not moving. Michael grabbed onto the belt loops of my Levi’s and started sliding me off the hood of his car.

  “Nooo!” I wailed, clinging to his wipers. “Say you’ll come inside.”

  “All right,” he said, finally. “But I’m only staying one day. I’m leaving tomorrow, Pat. I mean it. One day.”

  It took me and Cece hours to get the children clean. We scrubbed their bodies, cleaned their ears, cut their nails, and washed all their hair. While we were busy in the bathroom, Michael went to the corner store for diapers. When he came home, he made a big pot of spaghetti. We fed the kids dinner, put the older three girls to sleep on blankets on the floor in Ashley’s room, and took Jonelle into bed with us, wrapped in one of Michael’s T-shirts.

  In the dark, Michael said again we couldn’t keep the kids. He said the same thing the next day when he came home from work. He said he didn’t want all the responsibility, and there was no way they could stay.

  But later that night, I put Jonelle in his arms and he rocked her to sleep. He read the girls a bedtime story. He helped me rub ointment on their ringworm and grease their scalp.

  A week after they arrived, Michael came home from work with a shopping bag from Kmart. Inside were four Little House on the Prairie–style dresses, covered in ruffles and bows. I didn’t tell him they were the most ugly-ass dresses I’d ever seen. Instead I just threw my arms around his neck and kissed his face. “I knew you’d come around,” I whispered.

  “Seriously, Pat, we really need to talk about this.”

  “They’re not going to be here long,” I promised.

  Ten years later, the girls were still with us.

  Chapter 23

  Letting Go

  Not long after Sweetie’s girls came to live with us, her caseworker gave us a Section Eight voucher to help with the rent. That changed everything. It meant we could move all the kids into a bigger place. Michael and I spent almost two weeks driving through Atlanta, Decatur, and Marietta looking for a house to fit six kids. One place out by the federal prison was so run down—with holes in the drywall and electrical tape holding together broken windowpanes—that Michael took one step inside and turned right back around. Another place was clean enough, but I noticed a couple of dope boys slinging rock on the corner and told Michael, “We ain’t bringing the kids into this mess.”

  Every place we saw was worse than the last. Then we found it: a clean, four-bedroom house on a quiet block in Riverdale, a middle-class suburb about half an hour outside Atlanta. We signed the lease and moved right in. On our first night, Michael and I lay in bed listening to the crickets outside our window. “This is going to be nice for us,” he said. “It’s like we’re getting a brand-new start.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s good out here.”

  Michael was quiet for a while. But just when I thought he’d fallen asleep, he said, “Now that we out here, maybe it’s time you started thinking about getting yourself a real job.”

  “I got a job,” I reminded him. “I’m an entrepreneur.”

  “No. I mean something legal.” That’s how I found out that when Michael said we were “getting a brand-new start” he meant a new start for me.

  I thought we had an understanding. I understood that he went to work every day at the mattress factory and paid the rent. And he understood that I sold crack and bought us nice shit. I knew Michael wasn’t crazy about me being a drug dealer, so when I’d come home with a brand-new big-screen TV it was pretty much a don’t-ask-don’t-tell-type situation. He didn’t ask where the set came from and I didn’t tell him about my hustling. That was our arrangement. But now Michael wanted me to get off the streets and straighten up my life.

  He started bugging me about it all the time. “Is this how you want to live?” he’d ask. Or “Just put in an application anywhere, get your foot in the door.” Sometimes he’d even try to scare me: “What if you get busted? None of these kids have my last name. If you get locked up, DFACS is gonna take all six of them. Is that what you want?” Michael wouldn’t let up, and I wouldn’t back down. Every time he complained about how I was making money, I’d storm out of the house and go shopping. Pretty soon we had all brand-new furniture.

  As much as I hated Michael telling me what to do, I had to admit he had a point. Selling dope wasn’t a good fit for our new lifestyle. One minute I’d be taking Nikia to Little League practice, dressed in a button-down blouse and leather flats; the next I’d be rocking jeans and Jordans and running out to the hood. I was living a double life. But it was more than that. Living in Riverdale forced me to finally face the truth. I couldn’t keep telling myself that selling dope wasn’t hurting anybody.

  All I had to do was look around. Our new neighborhood wasn’t filled with crackheads, hookers, and dealers. Riverdale was home to everyday folks who got up, went to work, came home, and played with their kids. It got me thinking about the time, before crack came to town, when Ashby Grove and Baldwin Place were filled with these same types of people. When I first started hustling, I used to tell myself that crack was just another high. But after six years serving addicts, it was obvious; crack ruined everything it touched.

  Sweetie had her babies taken away behind that shit, and she wasn’t the only one whose life was ruined. Sometimes I’d lie in bed and think about all the folks I saw lose everything after they got hooked.

  I thought about this one lady who used to come by Ashby Grove looking for her daughter. She showed me a picture of a round-faced girl about my age. “She was a history major at Spelman,” the mama said. “Have you seen her?” I glanced at the photo and told the lady, “No, ma’am.” But later it hit me: the girl in the picture was Butterfly.

  Only somebody who’s never hustled before would think you can go from slinging crack to becoming a law-abiding citizen overnight. But that’s not how turning yo
ur life around works. It’s a process. It takes time. Especially if you’re going from making easy money to minimum wage. Michael wanted me to give up hustling and get a regular job, but quitting cold turkey would be a shock to my system. I had a better idea. I figured I should ease out of selling drugs and into something less risky. Lying on the sofa one afternoon watching The Young and the Restless while the kids were at school, it came to me in a flash: I could run a scheme like Brenda, my idol from Fulton County Jail. Instead of selling drugs in the hood, I could write phony checks at the mall. Except for Brenda, I’d never heard of anybody getting busted for check fraud. It was the perfect scheme, upscale and low risk.

  I gave the rest of my dope to my niece Cece so she could make herself some spending money, and settled up my debt with my dealer Lamont. “I’m proud of you, girl,” he said when I told him I was quitting the game. “I always knew you were better than this.”

  I was turning my life around, giving up slinging rock to start my classy new enterprise, writing bad checks. I thought for sure Michael would be happy about me taking my hustle in a new direction. But if anything, he was madder than before. “You can’t keep doing this,” he said one evening when I walked through the front door after a hard day of work scheming at the mall. I was carrying five overflowing shopping bags from Macy’s, Foot Locker, and Gymboree, all paid for with forged checks.

  “But it’s school clothes for the kids!” I insisted.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” he said. Then he walked into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

  I couldn’t believe Michael was giving me a hard time when he should have been thanking me. Running bad checks took a lot of planning and coordination. Every week I needed to get my hands on a fresh set of stolen checks, which I bought from a girl I knew who worked at the post office. She would intercept boxes of checkbooks that the bank had mailed to its customers then sell them to me for two-hundred-dollar Macy gift cards. I also needed fake picture IDs to match the name on the checks. I got the ID from a brother who made them in the back of his poster store in a janky-ass strip mall out in Decatur. Then I had to look the part, dressing in dark slacks, a conservative blouse, and leather flats, strolling the mall with confidence like I really did have a bank account full of money.

  Every time I made a purchase and paid for it with a fake check, I felt invincible, like I could do anything. I especially loved spending my fake money at stores where the salespeople used to follow me around and give me the side eye when I came in dressed in Jordans and jeans. It was a real eye-opener. I didn’t realize how prejudiced the salesladies at Macy’s were against drug-dealer money until I started doing white-collar crime.

  I put a lot of work into my operation, but Michael didn’t seem to appreciate any of it. “It’s not right,” he kept telling me. “You’re stealing from folks.”

  I tried to win him over with footwear. I bought him Timberland boots, some Grant Hill high tops, a pair of black Charles Barkley Air Max with a red Nike swoosh, and a luxurious pair of blue snakeskin cowboy boots. I came home from the mall and laid them all out on the coffee table in front of him. All he said was “What I’m gonna do with all this? I only got two feet.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you aren’t even trying to get real job,” he said a few nights later when we were lying in bed having another version of the same conversation we’d been having for months. “You’re a people person. You could do all kinds of things. Like, I could see you working at a car dealership. With your personality, you could sell the heck out of a car. Isn’t there anything you want to do besides collecting a welfare check and running schemes?”

  I was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know what else I can do,” I said, finally. “What if hustling is the only thing I’m good at?” But Michael was already sound asleep.

  It felt like hours that I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Maybe Michael was right. Maybe I wasn’t trying to do better. Michael wanted me to turn my life around—not just for myself, but for him and the kids, too—and I was busy chasing the rush I got every time I flashed some fake ID and walked out of a store with hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise. I was getting high off the thrill. As much as I blamed Sweetie for choosing drugs over her babies, I wasn’t any better. The only difference was that when they were with her the kids had ringworm, with me they were covered in stolen clothes.

  I didn’t tell Michael I decided to stop hustling. I just started going to the mall less and less often. Then one day, I threw my stolen checks away.

  Later that evening, Michael found them in the kitchen trash. He pulled out the checkbook and brushed off a strand of spaghetti. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Those are mine. I’m not doing that shit no more.”

  He peered at the check in his hand, then up at me. “This is who you’ve been pretending to be?”

  “Yeah.”

  He let out a long whistle. “You are damn lucky you didn’t get caught.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Pat, you’re a lot of things. But I can tell you one thing for sure, you definitely don’t look like no ‘Mrs. Bella Bernstein.’”

  Chapter 24

  Job Readiness

  Stocking shelves at Target during the overnight shift was the first job I got fired from. But it wasn’t my fault. My shift started at midnight and during my lunch break I went to sit in my car. Of course I fell asleep. It could have happened to anybody, twice.

  After that I got a job as a cashier at a Texaco station. The manager fired me when he caught me on video surveillance using my kids to help stock the cooler with soft drinks. That wasn’t my fault either. How was I supposed to know there’s a company rule that says only actual “employees” are allowed to do the work? Then I got a gig as a cashier at Walmart. My supervisor asked me to stay late and cover for another employee who’d called in sick. I thought she had a lot of nerve, so I told her to kiss my ass. She let me go, too.

  That’s when it really began to sink in that there aren’t a lot of job opportunities available to a twenty-three-year-old never-went-to-high-school former drug dealer. I was running out of options, so one afternoon I drove to the next town over, where nobody I knew would see me, and applied for a job at what had to be the slowest McDonald’s in all of Georgia. The manager hired me on the spot.

  Except for the before-work morning rush and the high school kids who came by after school, we hardly ever had any customers. The only thing that kept me from dying of boredom was Cindi, the little white girl who worked the counter beside me. Cindi had more problems with her love life then the entire cast of The Young and the Restless put together.

  One afternoon a few weeks after I got hired, Cindi was deep into one of her stories—“So I told Travis, ‘Go ahead and take your skanky ex to prom.’ He’s such a dumb-ass he don’t even know they don’t make maternity prom dresses . . .”—when I glanced up and noticed a white man dressed in a crisp dark suit had stepped inside. He looked around the dining area, peered into the restroom, then leaned forward and talked into a little microphone pinned to his lapel: “All clear!” Two more white men walked in behind him. One hung back by the door, the other stepped to my register. He looked familiar.

  “What can I get for you?” I asked.

  “I’ll have a cheeseburger, a cup of water, and a side salad.”

  He was an older dude with gray hair and a friendly smile. He looked a little like Bob Barker from The Price Is Right. I was sure I’d seen him on TV. I thought maybe he was on one of those white shows Michael was always watching, like Seinfeld or 60 Minutes.

  I couldn’t place his face, but I was pretty sure the man waiting for his burger was some kind of famous. The curiosity was killing me, so I pointed my finger at his chest: “Nigga, where do I know you from?”

  Beside me I heard Cindi gasp. “Pat!” she whispered, loud enough for everybody to hear. “Girl, that ain’t no nigga. That’s Jimmy Carter. He used to be the president!”

/>   I turned to Cindi, whose eyes were bugging out of her head, then back to Jimmy Carter, who looked almost as shocked. I couldn’t help myself, I bust out laughing. “I knew I recognized your ass!” I said. “I’ma give you your cheeseburger for free!”

  A few weeks later, after my manager told me to wipe down some tables that were already clean, and I told her she must be out of her damn mind, I got fired from McDonald’s, too.

  In less than a year, I’d had five jobs and lost all of them. It was getting hard to stay positive. Sometimes, I got to thinking that maybe it was me. Maybe I just wasn’t built for legal employment. Michael tried to make me feel better. Whenever I got fired—or, as I explained it to him, “I quit”—he always gave me the same pep talk: “Nobody in your family ever had a regular job. You just gotta get used to the lifestyle!” Even so, I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be able to hold it down.

  It seems like every time I’m at my lowest, somebody comes along to pull me back up. Miss Troup, Brenda and Eva, Hubert Hood, all of them were like my personal cheerleading squad telling me to keep up the fight when I thought I was losing the game. In 1997 Miss Campbell came into my life like a star cheerleader doing back flips down the field. She was a caseworker for the city of Riverdale’s Positive Employment and Community Help. The program, called PEACH for short, was part of President Bill Clinton’s Welfare-to-Work plan, which was supposed to get folks off welfare. The way Miss Campbell described it made it sound like a prize.

  “What are you interested in, Patricia?” Miss Campbell asked at our first meeting. She had a warm smile and was full of enthusiasm. Whatever I wanted to do, she said, there was job training to get me there. She riffled through a stack of papers on her desk: “Are you interested in training to become an office administrator? Or perhaps a cosmetologist? Or how about this . . .” She pulled out a folder and flipped it open. “A medical assistant? It says here you’d be qualified to work in a doctor’s office, health clinic, or hospital.”