by Teri Woods
“I don’t give a damn. They need to burn all this shit down. Who the fuck built this muhfucker and a black man can’t even live like a man in this fuckin’ country. It’s 1967, man. When this shit gonna stop? When they gonna stop fucking with us? They fuck over us, keep a muhfucker making a fuckin’ law to lock a nigga up and don’t nobody say shit. It’s 1967! Now that we say we not gonna take it, and try to stand up for some shit, these crackers got the National Guard coming through this bitch!” screamed Horace, some friend who was drinking C&C out in the living room with Delores’s girlfriend’s mother.
“Man, we need to go down there and fight!” said another dude.
“Man, if I go down there, I’m killing them muhfuckers, you hear me? And it’s gonna be some Huey Newton shit over this bitch, god damn. Yeah, it’s gonna be war, if I go down that muhfucker!” said Horace, sippin’ some more of that C&C, knowing what might have to be done if he had to get out that chair.
The gunfire rumbled Newark, New Jersey, and thundered through the air and Delores felt so liberated at that moment, so proud to be black. You damn right, all this fuss, all this attention, all this power to fight, all because they killed that black man. Mmm hmm, y’all gonna see about fuckin’ with us, Delores felt like shouting from the rooftops.
“Look! There go Ms. Bennett! Damn, she got a nice TV,” shouted Delores as she signaled for her girlfriend, Arnette, to take a look.
“Where’d she get that from?” asked Arnette, a little slow.
“Girl, where you think? She stole it!” Delores exclaimed as if she was a seasoned riot veteran. “We need to get us one,” added Delores.
“Girl, is you crazy? They killin’ black people out there! You know Sharon? Her brother got shot on Springfield Avenue last night and he wasn’t doin’ nothing. Her mama said he was just standing on the corner waiting for the bus. I ain’t goin’ out there,” said Arnette, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go out there?” she asked Delores right back, leaning away and folding her arms across her breasts as screams of sirens filled the room and an ambulance sped down the block. “Ain’t no telling who’s in there,” said Arnette warning Delores of what evils lurked outside.
Delores wanted to know firsthand what was goin’ on even though she feared what was on the other side of the door. She turned on her heel and grabbed her coat on her way out the bedroom door.
“Where you going?” asked Arnette nervously.
The slamming door answered her question. Delores was out the house in a flash. However, the moment she set foot on the cold street concrete, she knew she had made a mistake. For one moment, she turned around, ready to dash back into the safety of Arnette’s apartment, but deep inside something stopped her and she felt calm and her fears diminished. She headed up the block, stepping over trampled garments, bloodstained debris, and smashed and destroyed merchandise. She noticed an abandoned soldier’s helmet lying next to a smashed TV. Good for ’em! she thought as she bent over to pick it up like some trophy, but quickly pulled her hand back, realizing it was soaked in blood.
She gasped for breath as she looked up to see a woman haulin’ ass down the street toward her with an armful of frozen chickens.
“Baby, don’t go up there! Them soldiers is locking up everybody they can catch,” the woman informed her as she strained with her arms full.
“Ain’t you comin’ from there?” Delores asked, wanting to say, Why you ain’t locked up?
“They ain’t catch me, baby,” the woman said with a rebellious chuckle as she continued home with her chickens, thinkin’ about dinnertime.
Well, they ain’t catchin’ me neither, thought Delores.
As she turned the corner onto Springfield a crowd of people were gathered in a circle around a man lying on the ground. Delores walked up a little closer, maneuvering through the crowd, getting close enough to see that the man lying on the ground was clutching a bottle of Thunderbird wine. People were trying to identify him but his face was beaten badly and drenched in blood, making him unrecognizable to the community.
“Is he dead?” a small, girlish voice ventured from the crowd.
“Who is he?” asked an old woman in a housecoat looking for her son whom she hadn’t seen or heard from since the riots broke out.
“He don’t look like he’s movin’ to me,” said an old homeless man known as Willie.
“Call an ambulance,” shouted Delores to Willie.
“An ambulance! Shit, girl, you think an ambulance gonna come over here if we calling for ’em?” questioned some chick wearing a fire-red wig, fire-red high heels, and a skintight dress to match. Look at this broad, looking like Ms. Kitty from Gunsmoke, thought Delores to herself as she smiled at the woman.
“I think this nigga just drunk,” someone added.
“Or dead,” chimed Ms. Kitty.
“Or both,” said Willie, shaking his head, as the crowd burst into laughter and began to disperse in different directions, leaving Delores standing alone, still staring down at the man’s lifeless body. She had never seen a dead body, at least not in the middle of the street, and she wondered how people could find such a sight funny.
She turned away as she saw the small grocery store on the corner she knew all too well. It seemed untouched, just sitting there in the midst of all the rubble and surrounding destruction.
Sirens wailed, gunshots rang, and people could be heard shouting and cursing as they looted the streets. Yet the store sat serenely and intact by itself as if it were in another place. She made her way across the street and closer to the dark and deserted store. She saw signs plastered over the windows that read Black Owned.
No they didn’t! Delores stared in disbelief. Black Owned. How can it say that? Delores knew better. She knew all too well that the store wasn’t black owned. Everybody knew that. She knew the old white man who owned it, Mr. Reilly. She knew how he smelled when he leaned too close to her and how his yellowed teeth sickened her when he leered at her openly, like she was a piece of meat. He knew how hard her mother worked and how she always had to scrape and scramble to pay her weekly grocery bill, but still Mr. Reilly would take every opportunity to humiliate her whenever she was as much as a day late in payment.
“Do you think I run a charity, girl?” he would ask, addressing her as if she weren’t a woman.
“No, sir, Mr. Reilly. I have asked you before to address me with the same respect I address you,” her mother would reply.
Mrs. Murphy was a proud black woman. She knew that for the sake of keeping food on her table she would have to swallow a little pride now or swallow nothing later. Little did she know that Delores would have rather starved.
“You people don’t know the meaning of responsibility,” he had spat on more than one occasion.
“I am not ‘you people,’ Mr. Reilly.”
“You’re all alike, beggin’ bastards,” he could be heard mumbling as he wrapped her order.
Delores remembered it like yesterday as she trembled with a rage inside her as she read the sign again and her head began to spin. Black Owned.
Behind her, people dashed along as broken glass shattered, policemen shouted through bullhorns off in the distance, and sirens sounded, creating the backdrop for the maddening situation she felt herself in. She looked around on the ground frantically, the anger mounting by the minute until she found a large rock, so large she needed both hands to lift it. Hoisting the rock over her head with all the strength she could muster, she threw the rock through the door, shattering the bottom half of the glass just enough for her to scurry in. Looking around for something to smash, she ran for the cooler where she knew Mr. Reilly kept all the dairy products and started smashing cartons of eggs. Then she picked up a Snickers bar and bit into it, giggling like a lunatic. With candy all over her mouth and chin, it was that moment that she knew how it felt to be free.
Looking around for something to drink, her eyes landed on a bottle of charcoal fluid. She stared at the label with the picture of flaming steaks and she imagined
the store burning, in flames. She tore off the cap and doused everything with the entire bottle of fluid, forgetting about her thirst. Grabbing another bottle, she did the same, until she had emptied every bottle of charcoal fluid she could find in the store. She looked for matches, finding some behind the counter. She lit the first match, but the deep breaths she was taking blew it right out. Striking another match, she held it to a paper bag, which she used as a torch to set small fires in the store. She backed up and staggered through the hole in the door she had come through. She watched the small fires turn to dark clouds of gray smoke as the flames began to leap and dance higher and higher like happy slaves on Juneteenth.
Delores found a spot under a large shade tree and sat down with her knees pulled tightly against her chest as she watched her work. She thought of her mother. She knew she could never go back there. Her mother had raised her in a strict Christian environment. She had taught Delores respect for people and their property. She had taught her love and, most important, the moral value of turning the other cheek. But all it had gotten her mother was a maid’s job scrubbing white people’s floors. Delores decided if she ever turned the other cheek, it would be the one that the world could kiss. She was seventeen years old.
In 1971, by the time Delores was twenty-one, she had forgotten when she had lost her virginity, but she also had forgotten the last time she went hungry. She was the talk of the town and every young hustler wanted a chance to have her on his tongue. If her innocence had died in the ashes of the riot, her pride, beauty, and cunning were born like the Phoenix, the bird of prey.
Since Delores decided not to go back to her mother’s house, she did decide to go with the next best thing, her mother’s sister, Gladys, who lived on High Street. Gladys was every bit as wild as her mother was tranquil and as conniving as her mother was honest. She loved Delores with all the love reserved for her sister, who had rejected her.
Her home was an after-hours spot in Brick Towers Apartments. She sold everything from wine to weed, chicken to pussy, but never her own.
“Child, these niggas in the street don’t sell enough dope or pimp enough ass to buy out this gold mine I got,” she would say when the question came up. Not a big woman, but well proportioned and well intact for a woman in her forties, Gladys was admired as well as respected, and Delores took to her like a magnet. Gladys loved Delores and wasn’t about to shelter her from what the real world was really about. She didn’t like Delores’s decision to leave home so young. The girl still needed grooming, still needed a watchful eye, and Gladys was determined to mold Delores. She wanted her only niece to be resilient enough to survive, yet feminine enough to enjoy what God gave her. So, Gladys didn’t stop Delores from being who she wanted to be. She only warned her about who she could become.
“Dee Dee, you see her over there?” asked Gladys, calling Delores by her nickname. “Not the one in the green, the one in the blue. Yeah, her. Honey, let me tell you, child, she was Ms. It just a few months ago ’cause she used to mess with this ol’ fine ass nigga named Man. That nigga coulda’ had the world. He had so much money, it ain’t make no sense. He sold that horse up and down this block, but he went and got fucked up on his own shit. Before you know it, he robbin’, stealin’, breakin’ in motherfuckers’ shit. Even had Ms. Ol’ It shooting that mess up her arm, and before you know it, he had her out there sellin’ her ass, so he could get that monkey off his back. Then, he go and OD and leave Ms. It with nothin’ but a jones. Now, she out here trickin’ anything for chump change tryin’ to keep the shakes off.”
Just then a lady carrying a baby with two small children following close behind walked up on the house.
“Hi, Ms. Gladys,” said the girl.
“Hey, baby, how you today?” asked Ms. Gladys as she and Delores sat on the porch catching a breeze.
“I’m fine,” the girl replied, passing by.
“Now that’s Bernadette. Smart girl, just stupid. Every decision that child make, be wrong. And every sour man she mess with leave her with nothing but sweet-sounding words and a belly filled up. The girl twenty-two years old and she got five kids and Mr. Sam said he think she pregnant again.”
Delores learned everybody’s mistakes, through gossip. And even though she made a few of her own, her head was on straight. Straight enough to steer her way clear of life’s misfortunes, thanks to Gladys. Her looks and vivaciousness kept her in all the latest designs, but her mind kept her out of all the classic pitfalls.
It was the end of August at the yearly summer block party when she first met him. She saw the tall jet-black brother in the Army-green uniform and she just knew she had him all figured out. The way he watched her, he was just like all the rest of the gawkers on her long list of admirers, except his suit had him at the bottom. Besides, the last time she had seen a soldier, Newark was a war zone. So, his first impression drew scorn instead of interest.
Al Green, or Grits, as everyone who knew him jokingly called him, was booming out the DJ’s speakers. When the song ended, Mr. Army approached her, just as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” began playing.
“Hey there, mama, I say what is really going on?”
Delores looked him up and down with feigned indifference, feigned because despite his uniform, he was one fine ass black man.
“Why? You gonna arrest me or somethin’?” asked Delores with a capital A for attitude.
He flashed a perfect Colgate smile and laughed, giving her a tingle at the base of her spine from the sound of his voice.
“I might, if I can’t get the next dance,” he replied, and as if on cue the DJ played Candi Stanton’s “Victim.” It was her favorite song, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. Instead, she folded her arms across her breasts and looked away so she could lie without looking in his soft baby browns.
“I don’t like this song.”
“Come on, sugar. You expect me to believe that when your body is sayin’ something else?”
She shot him a look and let him know he was right but she resented the fact that he saw through her facade so easily.
“You know, I’ve been around the world twice, so any flavor there is, I’ve had a double dip, but ain’t nothing like you ever come ’cross my plate.”
She looked him up and down again, but the truth was he had her open, just like that, and her heart had already been softened by his satiny charm. She knew she was being gamed. She wasn’t a dummy. Yet still, she liked it. Her young ego felt appeased to know she was being judged by worldwide standards, so she couldn’t help but crack a smile at that one.
“Ahh, she smiles. So, now can I have your name?”
“No,” Delores simply stated.
“No?” he questioned her back, wondering who this chick was.
“No, but you can have this dance,” she said, looking into his eyes.
He grabbed her hand and led her to the middle of the street. Her feet never touched the ground. Song after song they moved as if they were dancing on clouds to a rhythm of one heartbeat. Delores melted, giving in to the sweet sense of security, wrapped in his strong arms. She didn’t know his name and she didn’t need to. All she knew was that she was ready and willing to abandon her security net and go full throttle into what was unknown with this man she’d only known a few moments. It wouldn’t be long after the song ended that he’d know her name and she would moan his passionately… and it all came down like a jones.
The next couple of weeks for Delores were filled with a love only the ghetto could create. A desperate intense feeling of love that made Delores wake up every morning singing and go to sleep at night humming, enveloped in the arms of her soldier. She moved into his one-room boardinghouse apartment after convincing the ever-religious, always-nosy landlady, Mrs. Tendrell, that they were married.
“I don’t know what them other folks do with they homes. They a bunch of whorehouses and gamblin’ dens, but as for me and my house, I serve the Lord up in here and I don’t want no evil do-mongers up in he
re,” she said to them the day they were moving in.
Delores and her soldier shared a secret snicker for their innocent deception, laughing and mocking Mrs. Tendrell many a time. They were constant companions, gambling at Gladys’s, drinking corn liquor until they came home staggering with laughter, then falling out on their three-legged bed, which Delores had put a paint can under to hold up the frame. They’d make wild and passionate love. His wasn’t rough, just hard, long, intense strokes, up and down and kissing, like their lips and tongues were meant to be in each other’s mouth. As he turned her over on her stomach, he gently placed himself back inside her. He humped her faster and faster, flowing through her in and out, on his knees, flat again, up and down. Then he turned her back around, legs clinging to his back as they stimulated one another into an orgasmic bliss.
Everything was perfect.
But the end came as unexpected and abruptly as the beginning. Even as she thought back to the day, in the midst of her present-day luxury and security, she longed for the cramped boardinghouse room and the love it contained. The tears moistened her cheeks and it felt like an invisible hand gripped her heart as she remembered that rainy afternoon so long ago.
“Baby, I been thinking,” was how he solemnly began. He stood by the bed looking out the one and only window in the room.
“About me?” she flirted, not yet grasping the gravity of his tone.
Her words made him force a smile.
“Always, you,” he assured her, then cleared his throat and looked back out the window, unable to face the innocent trust and devotion that represented everything she was to him.
“Baby, you okay?” she asked, beginning to worry.
He didn’t answer that question; only silence filled the room.
“If there was anything I didn’t plan on for this leave, it was to meet someone like you.”
Leave? She questioned the term, but she recognized in the word a certain prior commitment to another life.
“Leave?” she repeated, asking him for clarity.
“Leave days. My tour of duty ended, and after that you get a thirty-day leave. Most people don’t call it a leave, but I do.”
