I had the funeral in 1998. The ground was soft, the dirt was warm.
In some ways, Breezy is always going to be there for me. She’s there when Brenda really can’t handle it. But she’s gone. Gone, gone. Keith has never seen her.
Even though I had held the funeral for Breezy and had written to everyone who had hurt me, I still had a way to go. I hadn’t spoken to any of my family about Ma’Dea and me. The first time I said something, it was Thanksgiving. We were fixing the table, and I pointed to some old scar. I said something to the effect of “Ma’Dea gave that to me.” Aunt Josie’s look changed. And clearly, sometimes when you are trying to heal and you think maybe you can share things with some people, they may not be ready. This is what I do know. No matter what was going on with Ma’Dea, she was the glue of this family. And my aunts and uncles loved their momma. They loved Ma’Dea to death. And they remembered the best times with her.
Back in the day, on the weekends, Charlie and Dennis would come over or my aunt Suzie’s kids, Renee and Gwen. Ma’Dea would get all the grandkids together, and we would go to the liquor store, and she would get her bottle and we would get our chips, or we would go to the restaurant and get our french fries, and she would bring all her grandbabies back to the house with her, and then we would go to the front room and we would get blankets and quilts, make pallets and tents and shit like that. Just mess up the living room and she would let us. We would have free-for-alls in the middle of the floor. She would be encouraging us, “Gone get her. Don’t be crying. We don’t like no crybabies.” Because you had to be tough around her. Then we would all cool out and watch Creature Features on TV. Sometimes she would disappear, and then reappear in the window like she was an old monster: “Ahhhh!” We would start hollering. That would tickle her so. She would fall on the floor and just laugh at us. She would make me pee on myself, I was laughing so hard. She thought it was funny scaring the shit out the kids. And then the TV would go off, and she’d light a cigarette and she would tell us a story. And we would all sit around and listen to it because it would be so interesting. She had a way of telling stories.
So my family remembered the good times, but I felt like I was the only one who wanted to remember that Aunt Josie was the one who took me in because I had all those extension cord marks on my back. I’m thinking she would know better than anybody. I realized that was not something she wanted to talk about. You know how people want to talk about people in the past, “Yeah, Ma’Dea was this…”? Or talk about the wonderful things that they did, but never about things they have stuffed down?
Aunt Josie has two sons that are total assholes. And before I left, she put me in that category with them. She said, “You, Charles, and Dennis have to learn to stop living in the past and not to be bitter. Y’all got to stop that.” I was surprised she put me in that category with them, because I didn’t think that I was anywhere close to them. I’ve never said a cross or a disrespectful word to my aunt. I’ve never said a disrespectful word about my grandmother either. And we laughed about the stuff she did—how she had all these different ways and didn’t take no shit. But I also experienced other stuff. I remember my cousin Dennis, we were all there and we were talking about that, and he said, “She never put her hands on me.” Ma’Dea loved her boys. But they weren’t there all the time; I was there. I was there to get on her nerves; I was there to do the little shit that Jeremy does to me now. And I get it, but I didn’t get it before. Even Dennis once said, “Yeah, well, she used to beat the brakes up off you. She never beat us like that.” So when Aunt Josie told me to stop living in the past, it hurt me so bad.
On my way back from her place, I said something about Ma’Dea that Peaches didn’t agree with, because Ma’Dea was different with her. I think the same is true with Aunt Josie. Sometimes I feel like Aunt Josie is closer to my girls than she is to me. When I got home, I stayed in the bed for three days. I was so messed up. Crying. And for a while I didn’t talk to my aunt Josie because it was clear I could not really talk to her.
Talking about my past abuse was hard to do with my family, but making sure I didn’t turn into my grandmother as I raised my son was harder. Jeremy was a handful, and I was dealing with issues with that boy. My brother Jethro and his girlfriend, Melanie, were doing drugs together, and they had already had three kids. Jeremy was the fourth and the youngest. The other children were already in custody with my stepmom. But she couldn’t take any more kids. She had custody of her daughter’s kids and now she had Jethro’s kids. There were a lot of kids.
When Melanie was pregnant with Jeremy, I talked her into going into treatment. I used to tease her, “If it’s a girl, name her after me, and if it’s a boy, name him after me.” She had the baby clean, so they gave her the baby. I used to go by, to encourage her to stay in treatment, get her hair done, and all that. Jeremy was so adorable, the little stinker. I loved him. I would go and get him, bring him out to the house, and then I would bring him back to her. But then I started getting calls—she was using again. Some days nobody knew where she and Jeremy were. Melanie was on the streets. Once, I saw her. She saw me, too. She walked up to me and asked if I would give her two dollars, so she could get a can of ravioli so she could feed the baby.
“Where is the baby?”
“Oh, he over there in the car.” She had put Jeremy, who was a couple months old, in an abandoned car. “He hasn’t eaten today.”
“The baby hasn’t eaten all day? Give me the damn baby, Melanie.” So I took him back home with me. I bought him clothes and food. I put everything in a box and take it all back with him to Melanie’s. Back and forth, back and forth.
Months later family services called. “We have baby Jeremy and we hear you love him enough to come and get him. That’s what the mother says.” I asked them, if I didn’t come and get him, what would happen? And they told me they would put him in the system somewhere.
“Somewhere?”
I talked to my husband, and we agreed we had to go and get him and keep him. Jeremy was sixteen months old. We had to do different stuff to become foster parents. I had to get letters of recommendation because I had a background. When we got him, we realized he was delayed in a lot of ways. He didn’t talk, he was malnourished. I had to get help from Easterseals. In the beginning, Jeremy had real separation issues. I couldn’t get out the car and walk around to take him out of the car seat without him thinking I was leaving him if I did that. He would start crying. I had to stay in his vision so he would know that I was just walking around to get him out of the car, too. “I’m right here, Jeremy.”
He didn’t know how to say he was hungry, so finally I went and got him a little cartoon plate—the Toy Story movie—and when he wanted to eat, he would put the plate on my lap. Finally, he picked up weight and was running around and laughing like a little baby. He was my little stinker. He was five years old when we adopted him. We waited that long because I thought Melanie would get her act together. But she never did. After we took him, Melanie never visited. Never. Even on special birthdays and stuff like that, I couldn’t get her. She was busy in the streets. I would go and find her because Jeremy wanted to see his mother. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes he would holler out her name in the middle of the night. And as he got older, he got more complicated and harder to deal with. I would struggle with that. One time Keith said to me, “I never knew your grandmother, but I do know her.”
“How do you know her?”
“I watch you. Sometimes I see you be her. Cracking on Jeremy for no good reason. And you don’t have to be.”
I didn’t know how to take that. I had to work through that. I had to work through realizing you don’t always make the best choices or do the right thing all the time with children because you can become so caught up in a situation. I saw mistakes I made that Ma’Dea could have made. Being angry. Being mad. And then she would start hitting on me because she was a fighter. With me, I would tell Jeremy, “I don’t fuck around like that, little boy. Let me let you kn
ow that.” So I started seeing being in her position. And I said, Please forgive me. More than once she said to me, “Brenda Jean, what goes around comes around. And one day you are going to have to reap what you sow.” Now, as a young kid, I got none of that. Reap what you sow? Go around, come around? You are going to have to answer for the things that you do?
Since I have been raising my son, I realize Ma’Dea has not lied to me yet.
I know of the things that Jeremy has done to me, and I can remember the times when I was like that with her. Lying. Disobedient and not even knowing why. I know mine came from anger and hurt and pain. But it also had a lot to do with my environment.
Now how’s Jeremy’s environment making him act the way he does? I needed to check myself and check the surroundings. I started to do that. And I started to feel that not only did Jeremy need some help, I needed some help, too. I was in a better place than Ma’Dea. I had Stephanie in my life. And Keith. And mentors. And sponsors. Ma’Dea just had Ma’Dea. And her bottle, when things got too rough. And things were too rough a lot.
I finally learned she did the best she could do with me with what she had. She wasn’t the reason for my abuse, she wasn’t at fault for my sexual abuse, my molestation. She was verbally abusive, but she didn’t know how to be anybody else. She didn’t know how else to handle herself without being raw. She just knew how to say what she had to say, and sometimes that was soul-shaking. It would just shake your core. She would say stuff to me like, “I’m too old of a cat to be fucked by a kitten.” That’s some hard-core shit to tell a youngster, because it sounds dirty. But what she was saying to me was that I had to get older in order to understand that the shit I was doing, she’d already done. I couldn’t just tell her anything and fool her. She been through it already, little kitten. Now I’m looking at life, and things are coming at me like that, and I’m looking at my little kid Jeremy, and, “Boy, I see you coming.”
I started healing when I saw how bad Jeremy would hurt me through his behavior. I was amazed at how hurt I was from it and how personal I took it. And he was only a kid. Same thing with Ma’Dea. I was only a kid, but that shit was so shattering.
I think she would be so proud of me now. Of what I’m doing. I think, at the end of the road, she would have said job well done. There’s some tough-titty shit that happened with me, and I think that before my grandmother passed away, she had an idea that she wasn’t going to be here to help me through it. How do I prepare Brenda for what’s coming? Because she knew about the rain. She knew about the storm. How do I prepare this kid for this shit, because I’m not going to be here to fight for her? And if I’m here, I’ll be too old to do anything about it. I feel sometimes that what I went through stressed Ma’Dea out. And the only way I can forgive myself for that is that, as I was going through all this, I didn’t know how to tell Ma’Dea about it. If I had known better, I would have done better. I wish I had been a better child. I wish I could have saved her through being a better child. Maybe growing up and being better, I would have been able to take her out of those ghetto-ass apartments. I could have taken care of her, the way she took care of me all my life. I do wish that. I wish I could have taken care of my grandmomma.
In 2007, we started the Dreamcatcher Foundation. Stephanie had been thinking about a nonprofit that we could do together for a while. Ten years. Stephanie thought up the name. She wanted a name that inspired and said reach for the stars. Google was her friend, and she thought about dreams: carrying the dreams, reach for your dreams, and then she saw “dream catcher” and looked it up and said, “That’s it.” And that’s how we came up with the tagline at the time: “Do you have any dreams you want to catch?” But it didn’t tell people what we did. So then we came up with the tagline: “Specializing in human trafficking.” Because people kept saying, “Dreamcatcher—what is that? What y’all do?” Stephanie didn’t know about the story of the Native American dream catcher until I told her about it. How they put it over the bed, and it catches your nightmares.
Meanwhile, I had been working, and Stephanie was walking her journey. She met Michael Wilson. I remember when I first met him. Stephanie told me he was wonderful. She had told me about wonderful men before. But when I left her house, I felt that he was a wonderful man, too. I didn’t know how wonderful, but I knew for some reason, she got somebody to take care of her heart. That’s how he made me feel. Stephanie had a real man to take care of her now. I was so glad. I sat there in my car for a minute before I pulled off, thinking about that.
Stephanie had been in a meeting, and this man, who looked like a god, very handsome, was standing there. Cool. Very well dressed. And he said, “I’m Michael and I’m an addict.”
She was sitting with a woman named Daphne, and Stephanie turned to her and said, “Bitch, who is that?”
She said to Stephanie, “Bitch, that’s Mike. You know him.”
“Bitch, I don’t know him. Who is he?” And he went on to say how he had fourteen years, and he was in the program. And woo, woo, woo. Now, the rules of the program were that you were not supposed to mess with a newcomer. Okay? Stephanie, with her low self-esteem and insecurity, said, “I can forget it. I ain’t got no clean time and I heard what that man just said. He’s sober, he’s in the program.” She put her head down and walked away. But you never know. Pam, Stephanie’s sponsor, was good friends with Michael. She had made the introductions. He had gotten out of a marriage six years ago. He was a bachelor. Stephanie was doing her giggling thing. He knew she had no clean time, but he liked her. They went out to eat a couple of times, spent the weekend over his house. And that was it. They met in February, moved in in April. He proposed in June, and they got married in October. And that lasted sixteen years until he left the world. Liver cancer.
Throughout all that, Stephanie was going to get her master’s degree in social work. She was working for a social service agency called ACCESS Community Health Network and knew other people who had social service agencies. Predominately with the AIDS thing. Stephanie just knew that together we could provide something important for the community. That in a real way, we weren’t living up to our full potential. That’s when she told me, “I will not sit here for the rest of my life in this going-nowhere job, and the only way I see my way out of this is for me and my friend to start our own shit.” Stephanie was married to Michael when I met Keith. I was working as a bill collector. And in the process of that happening, I was getting stressed out with the bill-collector job. I’m volunteering at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and then hassling people to pay up from nine to five. I was living two different lives.
While I’m at Coalition, people started doing articles on me. The Chicago Tribune did a piece on me. And then the Coalition got a call from the Washington Post. They wanted to know who I was and how was I doing all this. How is this prostitute doing all this stuff and putting herself out there like that and speaking to these politicians? And what they were saying—“she speaks so well, so articulate”—oh, I know what that’s code for. I was on the front page of the Washington Post. It was crazy. Everything got really big, really fast. This producer from the Judge Hatchett show called his friend at the Washington Post, and they were talking and my name came up. They wanted to do a show with me. They’ve got twin boys from California who want to be pimps. These little white girls were giving them their lunch money and started to think they’re hos. They wanted me to come on the Judge Hatchett show and talk to these boys. I ended up taking Homer, a former pimp friend of mine, because I think these boys needed to hear from a real pimp. I listened to them and thought, Womp, womp. Then I told them about the West Side of Chicago and how this shit really goes. They can’t believe it. I introduced them to a real pimp, and then they get really scared.
Kids. Girls. I did two more Judge Hatchett shows. But then one day a producer from the Judge Hatchett show kicks it with a producer from the Maury show. So I do the Maury show and met D. West, who was like a regular on the program. He would go on
the show and scare everybody. I would go on the show and think to myself, He needs to stop hollering at these girls. There’s another way to do this. But I never got a chance to do it the ways it should be done, because what they want is the hollering and carrying-on. It was one of the reasons why I backed out and didn’t want to do any more shows. They wanted a dog and pony show. They only person who wasn’t an idiot onstage is Maury. Everyone else is paid to act the fool. But you know what? I started getting letters from the girls who had been on the show: Dear Miz Brenda, I saw myself and I didn’t like what I saw. Thank you for talking to me.
The thing is, I would talk to those girls after the show and ask them to make sure they watched themselves on TV when the show aired. “Tell me if you like what you see. And then think to yourself, all your friends are gone see you, too.” So that’s how that went. And meanwhile, I’m still holding down the bill-collector job. I was driving myself crazy. Driving Keith crazy, too. Till finally, Keith said, let them fire you and you can draw your unemployment. “I’ll take care of you.” I was off for about six months or so, and Stephanie said, “Come on down here and work where I’m at.”
She got me a job where she was working, ACCESS Community Health Network. It was a medical center that dealt with a lot of inner-city issues. Mainly African American women who had HIV and AIDS were their clients. Stephanie was a case manager who dealt with infectious diseases. She helped get people’s lives in line, get their medication in line. She was their counselor. She wasn’t too far from her master’s when she got that job. She and Michael were living their dream, and I started working there. It was a good job for me. I liked it. They gave me a lot of education. They were always sending their employees on trainings and just prepping you to deal with this transient population. That’s where I learned about counseling, mentoring, and dealing with young girls.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 25
