I lunged at Sweetie, my arms swinging like windmills, trying to slap the shit out of her. The policemen reached out to pull me off, but Michael grabbed me first. “It’s okay,” he said, pressing my face to his chest. “It’s okay.”
He leaned down, held his mouth close to my ear, and whispered to me, “They’re not your kids. You’ve got to let them go.”
In the weeks after the girls went to live with their mother, they called a few times to tell me they were hungry and there was no food in the house. I brought them groceries and took them to get their hair done. But after a while, the phone stopped ringing.
Maybe I should have fought harder to get them back. But it felt like nobody was on my side. Dre, Sweetie, Miss Campbell, even Michael kept telling me the girls needed to be with their mama. I’d done everything I could to raise my nieces the right way, but once their real mama popped up, it was like I didn’t even matter. Fine, I thought. And I gave up the fight.
That June, Ashley graduated from Riverdale High School. Michael and I sat in the bleachers on the school’s football field, sweating through our good clothes in the noonday heat. This was the moment I’d been dreaming of since the day Ashley was born. No one in my family had graduated high school. Not me, not Mama, not Sweetie, not Aunt Vanessa or Uncle Skeet, or Dre or Andre or Jeffro or Granddaddy. My baby girl was the very first one.
I did it, I whispered to myself as Ashley walked across the stage in her cap and gown. I looked around at the other families seated beside me in the stands. There were daddies cheering their children’s names, and mamas smiling and dabbing their eyes with neatly folded tissues. I was the only one sobbing uncontrollably, tears and mascara running down my face.
In the car driving home later that afternoon I turned to Michael. “I keep thinking about Sweetie’s girls,” I said. I had big plans for my nieces. They were all going to graduate high school and make something of themselves. When Sweetie took her daughters back, I’d bawled my eyes out for weeks. It was like someone had snatched my own children away. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them now.”
LaDontay had been halfway through her final year of high school when she went back to her mother’s house. She was the only one of Sweetie’s girls to graduate. The next year, she was pregnant. Soon after, Destiny had a baby, too. When Jonelle, Sweetie’s youngest, turned up pregnant at thirteen, Sweetie sent baby-shower invitations to Jonelle’s entire seventh-grade class.
Chapter 26
Angels
It’s funny how you can spend your whole life chasing a dream only to find out when you get it that it’s just not enough. When I was living in Granddaddy’s liquor house, I’d fantasize about the kind of life I saw on TV. I wanted checkerboard curtains in the kitchen and a man who came home every night. I dreamed of a clean home, a fridge full of food, and children who hugged and kissed me and told me I was loved. Living in Riverdale with Michael and our kids, I finally had everything I’d hoped for.
Michael and I cheered on Nikia at football and helped Junebug learn to read. We got Ashley off to college and tried to get Michaela to play baseball, even though all she just wanted to do was dig in the dirt and complain about it being hot. Even after Sweetie took her girls, life was better than I’d ever imagined. But still, something wasn’t right.
It’s hard to put into words the feelings I had back then. All I can say is it reminded me of how I felt those days when I missed Free Breakfast at school and had to wait for hours for the lunch bell to ring. I had a hunger that gnawed at me like an empty belly. I knew I should be happy. For the first time in sixteen years I wasn’t taking care of other people’s kids, ripping and running, hustling to get by. But at night I’d lie in bed feeling the hunger taking over. Even Michael noticed something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” he asked, standing in the kitchen one evening, watching me wash the same dish over and over like I was in a daze.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I wasn’t sure what I needed to fill me up. I didn’t even know what I was craving. It wasn’t until months after Sweetie’s girls moved out that I finally found what I was missing.
I don’t know what the hell told me put my name on the sign-up sheet for the open-mic comedy show at a little neighborhood bar that night. My caseworker, Miss Campbell, had told me I should be a comedian all those years ago. Maybe part of me was curious to find out if she was right. Or maybe I just wanted the attention. All I know is once my nieces were gone, and the house got real quiet, I found something pulling me to the stage.
I only had one joke. Technically, it wasn’t even a joke. It was just me talking about my brother Dre breaking into folks’ houses. “So, my brother is a cat burglar,” I began, gripping the mic. “So he’s a cat burglar, but he’s fat as hell. He’s a muthafuckin’ fat cat burglar.” There was no setup, no punch line. It was just me talking about Dre until my five minutes were up. Standing at the front of the room, with the noise and laughter and all those folks listening to my story and smiling back at me, I finally felt full.
I remember my mama was on TV once. It was back in 1980, a few months before Curtis walked out on us. We were still living in the shotgun house on Oliver Street. I was eight years old and should have been at school, but instead I was home that day with Mama, the two of us glued to the set watching The Young and the Restless, when we heard a knock at the door.
Mama told me to go answer. When I flung open the front door, I was shocked to find Miss Monica Kaufman from Action News standing on the porch. Miss Kaufman was famous. She was the only black woman I’d ever seen on TV reading the nightly news and the only reason Mama tuned in.
“Hello,” Miss Kaufman said, leaning down to talk to me. I marveled at her perfect teeth and her baby-blue pantsuit. “What’s your name?”
“Rabbit.”
“Well, hello, Rabbit! It’s a pleasure to meet you, sweetie. Do you think you can go get your mother for me?”
“Yes, ma’am!” I ran to get Mama, then followed her back to the door so I could listen in on the conversation. Mama was dressed in a housecoat and head scarf, and kept reaching her hand up to brush her face, as if to smooth away a stray hair. I guess she didn’t realize she wasn’t wearing her good wig.
Miss Kaufman was asking Mama if she knew about the child murders happening around the city. Of course Mama knew. Everybody did. All those little black boys and girls who’d left their homes to go to the corner store or the movies, only to turn up dead, dumped in ditches or in the woods. The Atlanta child murders had been in the news for more than a year. There were seventeen missing children, and fourteen had already been found dead. It was so bad that, the week before Miss Kauffman showed up at our door, the mayor had announced a curfew. Everybody under the age of fifteen had to be inside by 7 p.m.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mama said, nodding her head. “Some devil out here killing our babies. It’s a terrible thing.”
Miss Kaufman looked down at a slim white notepad she held in her hands. “Miss Williams, it’s my understanding that two of your children broke curfew last night. Is that correct?”
I could feel my eyes grow wide. It was true! Sweetie and Dre had come home the night before in the back of a police cruiser, with a couple of stolen bicycles sticking out of the trunk. I thought for sure they’d been arrested for stealing, but when the cop carried the bikes up to the porch, all he said to Mama was “You need to keep the children inside. It’s for their own safety.” Mama told the officer, “Thank you.” But the minute he drove away, she beat Sweetie and Dre from the rooty to the tooty for bringing the gotdamn police to her door.
On the porch, Miss Kaufman was telling Mama that her kids were the first ones in the whole city to break curfew, and would Mama be willing to talk about it for the evening news. She smiled at Mama, reached over, and touched her arm. “It must be so very challenging to raise children during this difficult time,” she said. “I’d like to hear your story.”
Behind Miss Kaufman, leaning up against a
white van with the Action News logo painted on the side, was a heavyset man with a TV camera on his shoulder. Mama’s eyes shot to the cameraman, then back to Miss Kaufman.
“Just give me a minute to freshen up,” Mama said, gently closing the door. “I’ll be right back.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mama move so fast. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed her fake teeth off the counter, then ran to the bedroom to put on her curly wig. She pulled her multicolored woolen shawl with the fringes from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders. “How I look?” she asked, standing before me.
“Real good!” I told her.
Mama pushed open the door and stepped into the sunlight to tell her story to the world.
“To tell you the truth, Miss Kaufman,” Mama said, looking directly into the camera, “I had sent my two children to the store. I told them, ‘Y’all make sure you come home by curfew. There’s a killer on the loose!’” She turned to Miss Kaufman. “I take good care of my babies. But you know how kids be, wanting to be out in the world like they grown. I’m just tryna do my best.”
When the interview was over, Mama ran back inside and straight to the black rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall. She dialed Aunt Vanessa’s number. “Girl,” she said breathlessly, “I’m gonna be on TV!”
I used to wonder why Mama was so excited for folks to see she lost track of her own damn kids. But I came to think that it didn’t matter what Miss Kaufman was asking. All that mattered was that somebody was paying attention. As long as she lived, nobody except caseworkers and police had ever asked Mama about her life. Nobody gave a damn. But Miss Kaufman leaned in close and really listened to Mama. For a moment, my mother was important.
When most folks think about the problems of growing up in the hood, they think about what it must feel like to be poor, or hungry, or to have your lights cut off. The struggle nobody talks about is what it feels like to be invisible, or to know in your heart that nobody cares. Mama didn’t want to be famous; she wanted to be seen. All those years I thought we were so different, but when I stepped onstage and saw all those facing smiling back at me, I realized Mama and I craved the same thing.
I took the stage name “Ms. Pat,” which is what my kids’ friends called me, and started hitting open mics around Atlanta. I didn’t plan my material; I would just get up onstage and run my mouth. If something got a laugh, I’d use it again.
A local comic, Double D, saw me perform and asked me if I would drive him to his gigs out of town. In exchange, I’d get ten minutes of stage time. Double D was working the Chitlin’ Circuit, which basically means everybody in the place—from the comics and the audience to the doormen—is black. Usually, these are one-night shows at a mainstream comedy club, a hotel lounge, or in a bar. Some folks call them “black night,” or the “urban show.” But I’ve heard it called other things, too.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my people, but those rooms are not easy. You gotta come out of the gate swinging. If you don’t hit the crowd with a joke in the first thirty seconds, they’ll boo your ass right off stage. I once saw a doorman damn near choke out a comic for not being funny. One club I played gave the audience Nerf balls to throw at the stage if the jokes weren’t good. I got hit right in the middle of my forehead.
To avoid the humiliation, I quickly figured out that if I strung together a bunch of one-liners, mostly about sex, I could get some good laughs. “I told my husband I’d suck his dick” is how I started one joke. “But I told him, ‘You gotta dip that shit in some blue-cheese dressing first.’”
Michael didn’t know I was making jokes about our sex life. While I was out at the clubs, he was at home watching CNN. He thought comedy was a phase I was going through. That’s because I didn’t tell him about my plan to make comedy my career. I reasoned if Sinbad could earn a living telling jokes, why couldn’t I? Never mind that Sinbad was selling out arenas and I was telling dick jokes to a room full of people who would throw their car keys at me if I didn’t make them laugh.
They say it takes at least ten years to really “find your voice” as a comic. The first time I heard that expression I was confused as hell. I thought it meant my actual voice. “My neighbor says I sound like Moms Mabley,” I told Double D. But he explained that “voice” is the thing that makes a comic different from everybody else. “You know,” he said. “Your point of view.”
I didn’t find my voice in Atlanta, or while I was working the Chitlin’ Circuit. It wasn’t until 2006, when the General Motors plant in Atlanta closed. Michael’s job got relocated, and we had to pick up and move to Plainfield, Indiana, a little town outside Indianapolis. That’s when I finally figured it out.
I’d never been to a place as white as Plainfield. I was used to city living and black folks. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who looked like the first thing they did when they rolled out of bed in the morning was go milk a cow. I was worried about how my kids would fit in at schools where they would be the only black kids in the class. It turned out Junebug was fine. He got himself some little white friends named Ethan and Conner who didn’t seem to notice the color of his skin. Nikia, a high school senior, got called “nigger” his first week of school and had to kick a white boy’s ass to straighten him out. Michaela was eight years old when we moved. She was sensitive and would lay in the cut, watching and listening, cataloging a list of insults and offenses that she’d hold against those kids until the day she graduated from high school.
Out of everybody in the family, the person who had to make the biggest adjustment to white suburban life was me. I’d never told anyone, not even Michael, about the number-one lesson Mama taught me about white folks. “They better than you,” she said one afternoon when we were home watching The Price Is Right. I was ten years old. “Remember what I’m telling you, girl. White folks is better than you. Make sure you never look them in the eye.”
It wasn’t the first time Mama had given me this particular piece of slavery-times advice. And it stuck with me, growing into a fear I carried all the way to Plainfield. Even though we moved into a nice house in the suburbs with ducks swimming in a little pond outside our front door, I felt uncomfortable every time I left home. Everywhere I looked was a white face smiling back at me. I was so intimidated it was hard for me to speak. A big redheaded guy once stopped me in a grocery store and mentioned that he thought our boys were on the same football team. I could barely fix my mouth to tell him yes. All I could think of was how stupid I must sound. It was all I could do to nod and look away.
That’s why it took every ounce of courage I had for me to walk into Morty’s Comedy Joint, on the north side of town. Morty’s wasn’t like the urban rooms I was used to playing where comics had to fight for attention with the TV blasting full volume behind the bar. At Morty’s, the audience came ready to listen. And they were patient, even with comics who liked to take their time. Like, let’s say you wanted to tell a joke about going to the drugstore. At Morty’s you could walk the audience up and down the drugstore aisles, riffing about Dulcolax, stupid-ass greeting cards, and how come they don’t make size “extra small” condoms, before you dropped the punch line. At an urban club, a comic would hit the stage and yell, “I told my girl, ‘If you bleeding you better call 911 because I ain’t buying no muthafuckin’ tampons!’” and that was the whole damn joke.
At Morty’s I’d hang out by the bar watching other comics’ sets and wait for a chance to go up. Sometimes Avery, the manager, would be there. He looked just like one of the Three Stooges, with a round face and bald head. Pretty soon, we got to talking. I told him how I got pregnant at thirteen, got paid selling crack, and dropped five thousand dollars on a custom paint job for my Cadillac. One night Avery said, “Why are you back here telling me all this? You need to put these stories onstage.”
I didn’t think a bunch of middle-class white folks would relate to my life, but Avery kept insisting. One night I finally decided to give it a shot.
“Hi, y’all,�
�� I said, looking out into the audience. “I’m a mom. How many of y’all are parents? I had my kids early. Any of you guys had your kids early, too? Like fifth or sixth grade?” I told jokes about being a teenage mother and struggling to survive. I talked about Mama’s baptism hustle and the way she’d fire her pistol in the house. “I wish I was lying,” I said, “but this shit is true.”
I couldn’t believe it. Not only did I get some good laughs; the more personal I was, the more folks connected. One night after a show a blond lady carrying a Louis Vuitton purse and wearing big-ass diamond earrings came up to me and leaned in close. “I’ve been through what you went though,” she whispered.
“Your mama made you pickpocket from drunks?” I asked.
“No. I got pregnant when I was thirteen,” she said. “Those child-molesting assholes are everywhere.”
All those times Mama told me white folks were better than me had me thinking white people all lived the easy life. But that woman isn’t the only one who’s come up to me after a show to tell me about her shitty childhood or her drug-addicted parents. I was a grown woman before I found out black folks aren’t the only ones who have hard times. Everybody’s got a struggle. Nobody gets through this life easy.
It turns out comedy and selling drugs have a lot in common. You need to be quick, work hard, and give people what they want. But to make it in comedy, you also need a break. Back in the day, a comic could go on The Tonight Show and their career would take off overnight. But the industry changed. By the 2010s, it was all about podcasts. Every comic had one, and everyone wanted to be a guest. Except me. I didn’t know shit about podcasting, until the summer of 2014 when comedian Eddie Ifft was looking for a guest and a friend of his, a comic from Indianapolis, recommended me. Eddie and I spent an hour talking shit about cops and drugs and black people. I guess word got out that I had some good stories to tell, because I started getting invites from all over: comics Ari Shaffir, Bert Kreischer, Joey “Coco” Diaz, Tom Segura, and Christina Pazsitzky all had me on their podcasts. Even Joe Rogan, who is famous for keeping guests on for three hours talking about outer space and hallucinogenic drugs, invited me on his show. Sometimes I felt like these white boys were using me as a ghetto tour guide so they could learn about a place they’d be too scared to visit in real life. But other times, it felt like I was opening their eyes to a reality they needed to see.
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