She was maybe fifteen or sixteen or seventeen. It was maybe 1903 or 1904 or 1905. There are no records for this—as is common for the violence against women even now.
The man waited until she was alone, walked down the path to the smaller house, and shoved his way in the door. Did he want to break the rules? Had he seen her before? Was he drunk and angry? Was it a joke to him? Was he a total stranger? Was he doing what so many men say—“teaching her a lesson?”
It doesn’t matter.
Did she keep her gun in a different place, before that? Near the fireplace? Near the door? Near the bed? Had she already been attacked, and kept the pistol on her body?
She shot him in the forehead.
Now there was a dead white man on the floor. The reason didn’t matter, in 1905. (It rarely matters today.) Jennie would hang. She ran up the path to the bigger house, to the white woman who ran the brothel, and told her what had happened. Everyone else must have been gone. For whatever reason, whether the woman didn’t like this man, or liked Jennie, whether they were good financial partners or whether she felt pity for someone so young, the white woman went back with Jennie and together they dragged the man’s body up to the front house. Then she called an official in local law enforcement with whom she was very close. Often. She told the official that the man had tried to attack and rob her, and she’d been forced to shoot him. The official arrived and disposed of the body.
Jennie Stevenson, Tulsa, Oklahoma, undated
Jennie didn’t hang.
She eventually married a man named Robert Stevenson. They ran house parties and clubs in the black neighborhood of Tulsa known as Greenwood. House parties with alcohol, gambling, and dancing. Hush-hush, they were called, and Jennie Stevenson collected the money, and danced with her pistol in the bosom of her dress. She wears a fur collar in a photograph taken around this time. She has inherited her mother Fine’s lovely features, but her face is more brown, more velvet over the high cheekbones. Her gaze is imperious, interrogative, incapable of fear. She is a badass. She has been on her own in the world since she was about fourteen. Just like her mother, she had to survive, but she married a man who should have known better than to ever become violent. That kind of man—Fine’s second husband, Zach Rollins—was the reason Jennie ran away and had to work in a brothel. As far as family knowledge, Jennie never gave birth herself. Or perhaps she did, but no one ever knew. Maybe she couldn’t, after all the things that had happened to her body in her young life. Maybe there would have been a child, and she made that never happen. But she became the fiery heart of her family, decades later.
I heard the story of the little house outside Tulsa that night in the driveway, when I was about twenty. Jennie’s granddaughters told me, and my imagination moved slowly past the wooden house, the man on the floor with blood on his face, his mouth and teeth, and the darkness of the path upon which Jennie ran, the trees and the night birds.
13
Fruitful
My mother told me once about Lake Ontario, near Oshawa, Canada, a vast sea of ice in winter. When she was fifteen and walked there, an older woman, an Eastern European refugee from World War II, told her that babies were suspended in the ice, drowned by mothers whose young daughters had become pregnant on the journey to Canada. All my mother’s stories were scary, but the idea that women had thrown their own grandchildren into the water was the worst.
In the 1960s and ’70s, every story I heard about babies was terrifying, and many of them were about rape or coercion. Then she had to marry him. Because of the baby. Her life was over.
I expected nothing but danger and death for girls. Babies and betrayal. Because I was so small and didn’t run quickly, I imagined guns.
When we were twelve and thirteen, men pulled alongside us in cars, the doors open like batwings, their four fingers scooping the air a few feet from us: Come on, get in, you don’t have to walk. We were always walking—to school, to practice, to the store, to football games.
When I was twelve, and my brother Jeff was nine, hiking in the foothills near our house looking for gold, a teenaged stranger came toward me and said what he was going to do to me. My brother threw rocks angrily and accurately at him, and we ran.
When I was thirteen, a teenaged girl from Canada came to babysit us while my parents went on vacation; she lay in their big bed, crying. Something was very wrong. She asked me for sanitary pads. She was bleeding, a terrifying amount. She cried and cried, her face slick and swollen. She’d been sent to California to have a baby, and it had been taken away. Her grief was immense and went inside me, while I stood beside the bed breathing in her sobs.
When we were fourteen and fifteen, several of my friends were raped, some by strangers, some by boys we knew and thought might love us.
I remember this: Women who had been raped were never referred to as “innocent victims,” like women who had been murdered by strangers or bears or dogs. The girls and women I knew were constantly gauging danger.
These were the boys and men who attacked us: The ones who gave us rides. The ones who asked us to dance, to study, to come and look at a poster, to come and look at a rug, a couch, a movie, a dog. The ones we married. The ones we might still call on the phone. The ones who sat beside us in junior high and college. The ones who chanced upon us at a party where there were too many empty cars or empty corners.
I had been forced into cars, shoved into elevators, and caught on stairways, but I had not been raped. I had fought and run; I had acquiesced to the driver until I could open a car door and leave. (It was astonishing how much of my young life revolved around car doors, my hand on the handle, the heated metal, the door locks like flattened silver mushrooms, the heavy wide swing so different from car doors now.)
Once, when a friend got into the back seat of a car driven by two older men, and I followed her because I didn’t want her to go alone, I thought the whole time about Sula. She and Nel were walking home and expecting confrontation by older boys; Sula had in preparation brought a knife, and cut off the tip of her own finger to show the boys what she was willing to do to herself, so they could imagine what she would do to them. I began to speak toward the window as if I were insane, talking about my dad the sheriff, the shotgun, the consequences if they continued to drive us toward the river, the inevitability of death for all of us. They circled around and dropped us off near the convenience store where they’d found us. My crazy had worked, and my dependence on story was only intensified.
When I was sixteen, and got my first job at the Fox Theater, the required uniform was a striped minidress; when we ran out of popcorn, which happened frequently, the manager sent me around the corner to the Pussycat Theater, which never sold out of popcorn because it was the X-rated cinema. I stood in the lobby hating my life, while men made me wait for the five-foot-long bag of stale popcorn, enjoying my discomfort while they checked me out. At my dinner break, I had to walk past the Greyhound bus station and the Circus Bar to get food, while pimps and drunks tried to recruit me for work or marriage.
I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing: We were certain we’d be raped at some point, and we didn’t want to have babies because of that. We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists.
But I was a girlfriend by then. My boyfriend was a large man. No one who knew us would bother me. I was also endlessly distracted by story and curiosity, and would talk to anyone, at the movie theater, at basketball games, at parties. Our senior year, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1977, in a house near the foothills, more than a hundred of us drinking and dancing inside and outside, I saw a young man maybe twenty-five stagger across the lawn, his shirt unbuttoned, his long black hair in Bee Gee waves around his face, holding a bleeding hand in front of him.
I took him inside, to the bathroom, before anyone els
e noticed. I went to the sink, ran water, and grabbed tissues to clean his palm, cut deeply. He locked the door and attacked me. He smeared blood from both hands onto my breasts, in my new white sweater with gold stripes, and the first thing I thought was, Shit, I paid $17 for this sweater! (It was the most expensive piece of clothing I’d ever owned.)
I saw myself in the vanity mirror—a beautiful bathroom in a beautiful house. The red handprints. Then he broke a perfume bottle on the counter and stood there holding jagged glass, between me at the sink, and him at the door. He said, “I’m gonna kill you.”
Talking didn’t help this time. I have no idea what I said. I had just turned seventeen. There was loud music in all the rooms around us, and through the small bathroom window outside. But then fists were pounding on the bathroom door, and guys were shouting, “Who locked the door? I gotta drain the lizard. I gotta pee! Open the fuckin’ door! If it’s girls in there, stop doin’ your hair and open the fuckin’ door!”
Baseball players. If they hadn’t been so drunk, they wouldn’t have shoved the door open with their shoulders. They did. They saw me, their eyes went straight to the bloody handprints on my breasts in the white sweater. They rushed in and knocked the guy down. The police were called, and he was taken away. Dwayne was angrier than I’d ever seen him. He yelled at me for always trying to help someone, for being naïve. Someone put a letterman jacket around my shoulders to cover the blood.
All I could think about the next day was that I could have gotten pregnant, by a violent stranger, on a bathroom floor, if I hadn’t gone to Planned Parenthood.
In college, a male acquaintance, an athlete who weighed 220 pounds, said one night, “I could just rape you right now.” I weighed 110 pounds. I agreed that I was clearly incapable of preventing anything, but added that in the morning my cousin would drive in from Riverside and the acquaintance could choose which testicle he’d like to keep and which my cousin would shoot off with his Uzi. The casual forearm was lifted from my throat. I walked shakily down the dark stairwell of the building and ran home.
I ran so many times.
And until writing these pages, I never realized why I was so good at floating into another world. Even as the bad things happened, I noticed that the boys and men concentrated intently and didn’t appear to be capable of abstract thought; I was the opposite, paying no attention to what was happening while completely absent and in a fictional world. This was because of my weeks in the hospital, when strangers came all hours of the day and night into my room—men and women, nurses and doctors and other people—and observed my body as a thing that had to work according to what they wanted. If I squirmed in pain, I was restrained with straps, and tape was torn quickly from my legs, if my attendant was the older nurse with the accent like my grandmother’s. She was terrifying. She inserted instruments into many parts of my body. She seemed interested in what happened when I had pain but no painkillers. Physical therapy hurt. My bones hurt. My broken leg bled onto the sheets. My other leg twisted itself flat after weeks, and people twisted up the right foot roughly and told me to hold it that way. Eventually someone put blocks there. (But my foot naturally falls to the side even now, when I lie down. Walking, I am duck-footed to the point of hilarity.)
I was alone then.
So I always made myself alone until I could leave. I pictured scenes from novels and stories, in vivid detail, down to the color of the leaves and the movement of the grass.
14
The Toast
Riverside, California, 1983
Jennie Stevenson sent for the girls first, back in 1940. Her half-sister Callie’s children, back in Tulsa, were starving, and so Jennie took them into her home in Los Angeles: Minerva Kathryn Sims (known to us as Aint Sister), and Loretta Sims, the baby, who was only two when she came to California. These two impressive women watched me in June 1983, at the wedding of General III, where I endured a puffy organza bridesmaid dress and Dwayne wore a creamy groomsman tux.
That night, Dwayne said, “We should just get married, too.”
I said, “Okay.” We had six weeks until I had to go to graduate school.
When she heard this, Aunt Loretta summoned me to her house. She looked like Lena Horne. In a portrait taken of Loretta in the 1950s, she has bright golden skin, long hair pulled into a ponytail, confident smile tossed over a soft bare shoulder. But because of the circumstances of her life, Loretta, granddaughter of Fine, was regal but hard. She loved to cuss. She held the formal tribunal at her immaculate stucco bungalow two blocks from Alberta’s house. (It’s funny that I sort of had to ask the women for Dwayne’s hand.)
I’d met her many times, but Loretta was guarded, her eyes sharp and assessing. In the driveway or at the park, she always looked as if she’d just stopped by on her way to a much more gracious event: her long hair styled in curls or a high bun, and in her later years, a shimmering wig that looked so perfectly glamorous and suitable on her head that my daughters never knew this was not her hair. Her forehead was soft and clear, her vivid mobile mouth lipsticked and full, and her cheekbones the same imperious ledges of bone as seen on Fine and Jennie and Callie.
She and Aint Sister wanted to talk to the white girl Dwayne thought he was going to marry. Other cousins were there watching. In the elegant chairs sat Sister, quiet, tall, and a legendary cook. Dwayne and I sat on an ornate couch, and I was afraid to look at Loretta, movie star haughty.
“What we want to know is can you cook?” I’ll never forget Loretta’s voice rising. “White people think putting salt and pepper on a hamburger is spicy. Sister and I are worried about our nephew. We ain’t never had a white person in the family. We just want to make sure you can cook. We don’t want him starvin’ away.”
I have no idea what I said. I was scared. I couldn’t get up and head to the kitchen. This house didn’t work like that. All the women stared at me. Dwayne saved me. He said I made the best chocolate chip cookies he’d ever tasted, and that Alberta loved them. “Well, shit, y’all can’t live on no damn cookies!” Loretta said. “She better learn to fry some chicken.” Then she laughed and laughed.
Alberta taught me to season and flour and fry chicken in her kitchen, and then she gave me a cast-iron pan already broken in by years of use. I still have it today in my kitchen. But Dwayne had more patience with chicken than I did, so I made enchiladas and pork chops and thousands of cookies.
My mother had taught me to make the best chocolate chip cookies. She did not summon me for a lecture about the wedding, because I lived with her that summer. She told me we should just go to Vegas because she hated weddings. She took me to a sandwich place and said, “When you get married, you give away fifty percent of your life.” My mom, a bank teller by then. Always with the numbers. I said, “What about the other half?” My mother said, “When you have a baby, you give away the other half.” She ate her coleslaw.
So much bitter math.
Our August wedding day reached 108 degrees, so when we walked out of Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, everyone in their suits and dresses started sweating. Our reception was a block away, at the Riverside Women’s Club, the oldest women’s organization in the city. We were tired as hell. Dwayne and his brothers had been up until 2:00 a.m. setting out chairs and tables for 225 people. My maid of honor, Laureen Morita, my college roommate, and I had been up until 2:00 a.m. making huge pans of lasagna, and carving watermelon bowls for fruit salad.
Dwayne’s groomsmen were his three brothers, General III, Carnell, and Derrick, my two brothers, Jeffrey and John, and Penguin, our childhood friend. I was sad that day to have no sisters—but my sister-in-law Lisa was beside me, and Laureen, who was my college sister, and four childhood friends. Our wedding portrait is like an ad for required diversity—African-American, Japanese-American, Irish- and German- and Oklahoma-American, Swiss.
My Swiss grandparents, Paul and Rosa Leu, and my aunt Stini Leu were there, so short that Dwayne’s family stared and I heard like elves from one
of the Sims cousins.
In the kitchen of the women’s club, Aint Sister fried twenty chickens, and General Sims II’s friend Principal, a short dark man from Tennessee who had been a navy cook, who always wore a porkpie hat and talked to me of horse racing, made hams and meat loaves that he set beside the lasagna. As people pinned dollar bills onto my lace-edged dress for the dollar dance, I saw my father, Richard, and stepmother, Ruth Catherine, leaving. I was in the middle of dancing with my father-in-law; I didn’t see my father again for fourteen years, until the death of my stepmother, but never knew why until last year.
Apparently my mother and stepmother got into a territorial fight in the kitchen, watched by Sister and Principal. My stepmother is said to have entered the kitchen to tell people that the food was not sufficient, and my mother, who had been called white trash too many times to take this from a woman who had also been called white trash too many times, lit into her. These two women had never in their lives breathed the same air in an enclosed space.
But Dwayne and I noticed none of this. We were dancing. General II was dancing, and General IV, who was two years old and our ring bearer, was dancing, and then General III, the best man, hollered for everyone to gather around, lifted his champagne glass, and gave his toast, which was brief: “Like the Bible says, be fruitful and multiply, y’all.”
In the Country of Women Page 11