It doesn’t matter how strict the French Tennis Federation makes its dress code; Serena still wins. Just like it doesn’t matter what kind of clothes I wear or how bold my mouth is; I’m still a woman. I’ve been too skinny and too fat. I don’t spend enough on my clothes, and they don’t flatter me. I should wear a belt with jeans, even though it irritates me, to make it look like I have a waist, or I should wear a dress—not too short, not too long—so everyone knows I’m a lady. But when you touch me, when you feel the care I put into my skin, all the noise about my appearance fades away. I am something you want to melt into. I am a soft thing. Everyone wants to take care of soft things.
* * *
There was a guy I hooked up with for about a year that I nicknamed The Hippie. The Hippie and I had been seeing each other for a few months, and it had become painfully obvious how difficult it was to get him to compliment me. By this point, I’d discovered the secret to opening him up was liquor. That’s how he’d loosen up enough to remember I was a human being who enjoyed occasional praise. One random summer night, I was going over to his place, so I took an extra special get-some shower: That’s a regular, thorough shower plus any necessary hair removal, but add a sugar scrub and a sweet-scented moisturizing body wash, then a complementary body butter topped with my uniquely scented body oil. (This oil is top secret, and I always buy multiple bottles at a time, in case the business closes down.) Chill for a minute to let everything absorb, then get dressed. Since it was already pretty late, I threw on a bulky sweatshirt, leggings, and tennis shoes. I didn’t even bother with gloss, just a high-sheen lip balm. When I got there, he said, “You look comfortable,” and I rolled my eyes. I guess he was expecting me to show up in a teddy or something.
He was already a few beers in and buzzing enough to tell me I smelled good and he liked my hair. When we got upstairs and all my comfortable clothes were on his floor, he rubbed a hand down my back and I heard him inhale sharply. He got behind me and kept running his hands all over my hips, ass, and back, more so than he ever had before. Finally, he lowered his face to my back and whispered, “You are always so soft”—so low I almost didn’t hear him. Then he kissed my spine.
Game. Set. Match.
My Brother the Superhero
When My Brother Was Little 1
He liked to carry sticks.
They had to be a certain length and thickness.
Only he knew the precise length and thickness.
My neighbor watched my brother have a conversation with himself
and said how freeing it must be to live in a private world.
Every Sunday I prayed God would make him normal.
When my brother was little,
he loved He-Man, Voltron, Superman, and the Incredible Hulk.
He would put together the Voltron lions
and sit the super robot creation in its own chair.
If you moved it, his cries would peel the walls down around us.
My brother pretended to be He-Man and punched holes
in those walls. He would hide this evidence of strength
behind masking tape that blended perfectly.
He was clever and sneaky like any other boy.
My brother is a grown man now.
He still loves superheroes,
especially the ones that get to break free
of their skin.
For about twenty-five years, Nashville had an amusement park called Opryland USA. It was dedicated to all things Grand Ole Opry and country music. It shut down in 1997 because it wasn’t all that easy and tourist-friendly to get to and, because Nashville does indeed get cold and snowy sometimes, it couldn’t run in the winter. People didn’t want a job that was only March to October, with no guarantee they’d be rehired for the next season, so the employee pool got smaller and smaller, until the park’s owners decided to close it for good and build out the mall and hotel that’s there now.
Opryland had the usual amusement park stuff: roller coasters and teacup rides, plus concerts. Nashville is Music City USA, after all. I’m not sure how many times I was there as a child with school or church field trips, but it was enough. I am not wild about amusement parks. They are too crowded. They’re too noisy. The food is usually terrible. Everything costs too much. It all gives me a headache.
The summer before I headed to college, my church went on a field trip to Opryland. I didn’t want to go, but my mother made me so I could be there with my brother. J is into amusement parks and water parks. I think he likes the noise and he gets to watch everyone in the crowds. He loves swimming and all things superhero, especially Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. J loves R&B, especially Faith Evans. When he finds a favorite riff or a favorite television theme song, he listens to it over and over. He’s broken so many cassette and compact disc players over the years because he wears out the PLAY/PAUSE and REWIND buttons. He’s the same way with favorite movies. The more action scenes, the louder the crashes, the better. We had to get him headphones so he could listen to his favorite moments on repeat without disturbing the entire household. When tablets became popular, I bought him one for Christmas, and I have to buy him a new one every two years to make sure he has something that still works. He runs through electronics like I go through hairstyles.
So I went to Opryland with our church to make sure J would be okay and get to experience everything he wanted. My nerves were already a mess at the thought of being in the middle of so much chaos, but I was also feeling tender because I’d be leaving for school and I wouldn’t be there to protect J anymore.
My mother never allowed us siblings to fight. She firmly believed brothers and sisters looked out for each other and should not be mean to each other in the home, when the world would bring enough of that to us on the outside. I often hear people talking about the roughhousing they did with their siblings, but we didn’t do that. And once it became clear that my brother was going to be “different,” my mother made sure I knew I had to keep watch over him. I took my job very seriously. He and I are two years apart, and we went to school together starting in day care. When he was young, he was nonverbal for a long time. I remember once at day care when he came out of the bathroom with his pants and underwear around his ankles, looking for me and screaming, his eyes running over with tears. The boys had done something to him to humiliate him, and I was the first person he came to for help. He must have been around three years old, which meant that I was five. I immediately pulled his pants up and hugged him, but I don’t remember much after that, beyond my yelling at everyone in the room. The day-care workers, probably in an attempt to control the situation and avoid any trouble, simply told my mother, “She looks out for her little brother, I tell you that.”
The summer before I left for New Orleans, my brother and I were making the rounds at Opryland when I suggested we get something to eat. It was an odd time of day to eat, I guess, because no one else was in the pizza place we stopped at. J and I placed our orders, and I told him to go find us an outside table while I got plasticware and straws from a side display. Something made me look up toward the kitchen, and I saw all the cooks—a bunch of late teen/early twenties Black guys—looking through the round window on the door. They were looking in the direction of where my brother was, so I turned. There was a white girl talking to him, trying to get his number.
I knew that girl. She had been in Upward Bound with me one summer, a program for underprivileged kids to expose them to and prepare them for college life. She was what we called a “wigger” back then—someone who affected Black mannerisms and speech in order to infiltrate a culture not her own. She had long permed hair and spoke in a blaccent and frequently talked about her Black boyfriends. I saw her chatting up my brother and my brother trying to remove himself from her, and everything went red, then black.
The boys in the kitchen had sent her out to talk to my brother in an attempt to humiliate him. They’d seen him acting differently, perhaps one of his stimming moves, or maybe they’d s
een him talking a bit to himself, and they wanted to make fun. They’d sent this white girl, starving for Black male approval, with no sense of shame or pride in herself, who couldn’t see how they were using her or how awful it was to try to humiliate someone because he was a little different. Just like they had back in preschool, my protective instincts kicked in.
When I came to myself, I was holding a plastic knife in front of her and telling her to go back into the kitchen where she belonged. She opened her mouth, but I wouldn’t let her talk.
“I know you. We were at Upward Bound. I know what you’re letting those boys in that kitchen do to you. Go back to them now before I figure out how to kill you with this piece of plastic.”
J touched my arm and said, “Come on, Nicki. Here’s our food.” He tried to pull me away. He doesn’t like tense situations, and we had taught him not to give strangers private information, so he knew what was happening wasn’t good. He was right. The boys in the kitchen ran away when I looked back at them, and the girl hurried back inside the main area of the restaurant. I threw the food away, because I couldn’t trust it, and then J and I went somewhere else to eat.
I was so angry and upset that when we made it back to the church group, I started crying. J awkwardly rubbed my back to calm me down. He is not good at touch, but he knows that people like to hug or have some kind of physical contact in moments of high emotion. When we got home, I told Mama what happened and broke down crying again. I wasn’t going to be there for J to make sure no one tried to make fun of him or tried to take advantage of him just because he navigated the world differently. I felt guilty about leaving him alone, even though the rest of our family would still be there with him. But I had always been his protector. Who was going to keep him safe now?
Mama assured me J would be fine, but I knew I was letting him down. I wrote a letter to Opryland about that girl and what she had done. I’d chaperoned one of J’s classes to Opryland before, so I knew they often had groups of people with various physical and developmental disabilities come to the park. How could they hire someone who would be so cruel and ignorant? They wrote me back and refunded me the money for my and J’s tickets. I was not expecting that at all. They also said they had let ole girl go. That’s what I’d really wanted. I hope they told her why she was being fired.
* * *
When I was young, I would say I was going to be a famous writer and get rich (ha!) so I could buy a big house for me and my brother. Mama would ask if she could live with us, and I’d tell her no. As I got older and a little more sophisticated and more into my privacy, I’d say I wanted a large piece of property so I could build him either his own wing or his own little house and then I’d build another little house for Mama.
At my lowest depressive moments, I have at times wanted to will myself to death, but now the thought of dying keeps me up at night because I worry about who would take care of J in his old age if I wasn’t there. He currently lives at home with Mama and her husband, and he has a part-time job. He’s always been very good at keeping a job—he loves the routine and structure of work. And like me, he loves having his own money. But I’ve been in a store with him when someone, usually another man, approaches him and asks why he’s staring at them. My sister and I have had to hurry over and step between J and this person and explain: “He’s special,” “He’s autistic,” “He has special needs,” whatever will be the secret code to de-escalate the situation. J is tall—over six feet—and solid. People see a big Black man making unusual eye contact or standing very still (in order to control his stimming), and they immediately became confrontational. Sometimes J can’t control his stimming, physical tics or repeated phrases that occur when he’s excited or agitated, and too often, people think the worst.
As awareness of police brutality against Black men grew, I became increasingly worried about J, especially as more cases of police killing people who were experiencing mental health crises came to light. Sometimes when J gets off work at night, he stands outside, waiting for one of us to pick him up. If he thinks he’s alone, he’ll let some of his stimming go, and I’m always concerned someone will call the police because they see a Big Black Man next to a business acting strangely, and the cops will roll up and kill him before he even has a chance to say anything. J took years of speech therapy and can communicate well, but he still stumbles over his words and pronunciations. What if the police ask him something and he can’t speak quickly or clearly enough? Are they going to kill my brother out of ignorance? Because we’ve taught him to be wary of strangers, he’ll say no and start walking away if he doesn’t understand why someone is approaching him. What if he turns his back on an impatient, trigger-happy cop? The possibilities give me anxiety attacks and nightmares. I never tell Mama because I don’t want to worry her, but someone hurting J, him dying, is a fear that tears me up regularly.
In October of 2020, Mama contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized for a week. It scared us all. She was sixty-six, with asthma, and it was the sickest she’d ever been. I was living in New York and couldn’t get to her in a timely fashion. She couldn’t have visitors. I hated the thought of my mother, known for her eye-catching outfits and gorgeous jewelry, a woman who cannot enter a room without all eyes falling on her in praise, all alone.
By the grace of God and a lot of good care, my mother left the hospital with an oxygen tank and began a slow but steady recovery. Her illness had us all thinking about caretaking plans, and it made me want to accelerate my own goals to buy a house and settle down. I don’t think I’ll go back to Nashville, but wherever I go, I know I want to have at least three bedrooms, one for J if he ever needs to move in with me.
* * *
I know I don’t talk about my brother very often. Mama once asked me if I was ashamed of him. I tried my best to shut that down. I am not ashamed of my brother. He is amazing and the sweetest guy I know. He gives the kindest compliments, making sure to tell us we look good when we get dressed up. When I come home to visit, he always asks me if I’m going to cook anything, and I make him whatever he asks for. When he tucks into his plate, he says, “Mmm! This is really good, Nicki!” and settles in to finish the rest, while my chest fills with pride. He’s also thoughtful and will do things like leave a single cookie in the pack in case anyone else wants to have the last one (even though it can be pretty frustrating to go looking for ice cream and see there is a literal spoonful left so no one can accuse him of eating all of it).
So, no, I am not embarrassed by my brother. I get worried that someone will say the wrong thing or try to make fun of him and I will have to hurt them. It scares me to think I am capable of violence, even if it is on someone else’s behalf. It makes me think of my father. Even now, I am not sure what I am capable of if no one were to pull me away. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I think my brother is the person I would kill for.
* * *
One time my junior high school friend Tanya asked what was wrong with J. We were at church, and he was on the floor, giggling and repeating random phrases to himself in a sleepy manner. I told her he was just tired, but it wasn’t until years later, as I was drifting to sleep and my brain decided to play a random memory to stir up anxiety, that I realized she wanted to know his diagnosis. For years, as a little girl, I used to pray that God would make J “normal,” but after everything, he is my normal.
Footnotes
1 I wrote this poem for my brother in my book Lilith, but Dark (Publishing Genius, 2018).
HBCUs Taught Me
Every October in my childhood, until I could finally say no in high school, there was a Saturday morning Mama made us get up early.
“Y’all need to get up and eat something so we can go!”
It was usually mid-October, and while, yes, Nashville is in the South, we do get cold weather, so my bones often wanted to stay in bed. Plus it was Saturday, when we’re supposed to stay in bed as long as possible. (Honestly, Saturday morning laziness was never an option with my mom when we w
ere younger. If she’s awake, the whole house has to be awake, too.) On these brisk mid-October Saturdays, Mama would bundle us up and we’d walk through the alley behind our house to Jefferson Street, a historic stretch of road in Nashville, but specifically Black Nashville.
We weren’t the only people making our way out of our homes too early on a weekend morning. People were decked out in reflex-blue skullies, bombers, sweatshirts, scarves, gloves, tennis shoes, boots, and everything else. Reflex blue is a rich indigo blue, the blue of Tennessee State University, and homecoming weekend is incomplete without the Saturday morning parade down Jefferson Street. It technically begins at 9 a.m., but you have to get up early to get a good spot. Generations of Black families stretch up and down the length of historic North Nashville, standing in front of Fisk University, a ball toss away from Meharry Medical College, and along the exterior streets of TSU itself, cheering and waving at the band, the homecoming court, dancers, athletes, and everyone else with the privilege of marching or riding in cars and floats. The full crowds on the sidewalks or perched in lawn chairs in parking lots never push or shove. Strangers lift your baby girl or boy up so they can see better. And there’s always a collection of hustlers selling food and trinkets, which is why Mama insisted we eat before we came out. She was not buying anything, so we knew not to ask.
For most of my childhood, I was surrounded by this kind of Black community. Even though my parents never graduated from college, we went to TSU football games. Nashville is a college town, but I honestly have no idea what Vanderbilt or Belmont or Lipscomb (the predominantly white universities) do for homecoming, if they even have such a celebration. It doesn’t even matter if no one in your family went to TSU. If you are Black and raised in Nashville, you own some TSU Tigers gear and have been to at least one event on campus.
Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be Page 8