by Donna Britt
I know I should explore the questions raised by Skye’s game and my revelation about my brother. I’m just as certain I have little desire to probe tender, bruised places I’ve hidden for good reason. I’m wary of examining how the woman I’ve become intersects with her past, her men, her forgotten selves. But how else can I learn why I give so much and am so confused by the giving?
Traveling through time—Skye, you do know your mommy—I could examine when the girl whose life was all about her books, her brothers, and herself became so much about everyone else. Was my transformation the result of Darrell’s death? Or were other factors—including growing up as a woman, my blackness and the vulnerability it bequeathed—as important?
Prying open doors sealed shut a quarter of a century ago would be excruciating. But I had to try.
Even without superpowers.
Darrell, Disappeared
Clockwise from the top: Steve, Darrell, Bruce, and Donna Britt, 1962.
Over and over after he left, I asked myself: Are the dead really dead? Could those who’ve “passed on” move so freely, speak so clearly, occupy so much pulsing space within us if they were indeed gone? Magnified to its subatomic essence, the pebble I unthinkingly kick away becomes a seething universe. Maybe all of life is a matter of level—the level on which any being or object vibrates. If a stone can whisper its truth, what might the dead be saying to us? What does my life, as rote as the kick that sends the pebble flying, tell the lingering departed?
If he’s dead, why am I still trying so hard to save him?
Nothing in the world is more elusive than memory.
As someone who misremembers details of conversations I had yesterday, I harbored few illusions about precisely recalling the distant past about anything. Why trust memory when I’m unsure why certain events linger and others drop away until a phrase or a snatch of song rivets me in a moment long lost to me?
To this day, I have no idea why I lost my stalagmites.
I was about four when I noticed that whenever I closed my eyes for more than a few seconds, God gave me a gift: a mesmerizing and uplifting light show.
On my eyelids.
Sliding into bed, I’d shut my eyes and there they’d be: massive, free-floating forms in shades of smoke, tar, and midnight. Like jagged mountaintops that had broken free from some new-formed earth, they were humongous, yet floated weightlessly in slow motion across my mind. Night after night, I felt comforted by the constellations’ presence, dazzled by their gleaming, prismed surfaces.
Sometimes I wondered: Do other people see such things? Suspecting they didn’t, I told no one—not even Darrell—about my private panorama. If no one else had such visions, if watching these nightly sojourns made me weird, I didn’t want to know. It was too wonderful, feeling like a small satellite to their immenseness, being the spaciousness through which they drifted.
It wasn’t until third grade that I read about stalagmites and stalactites. Formations that occur in limestone caves, they’re created when acidic water dissolves the limestone, dripping tiny fragments toward the cave’s floor. When the water evaporates, the limestone solidifies, forming an icicle-like stalactite. Continued dripping creates a second structure—a stalagmite—beneath the original. As decades pass, the floor-bound and the suspended sections draw closer together. Decade after decade, each half reaches for the other—until finally, they meet, forming a column.
Something about the pale green shapes in my textbook felt instantly familiar. Their spikiness, slow growth, and presence in sheltering havens were like my nightly visitors’. The color was off and they were much too thin, yet I knew: my free-floating formations were stalagmites and stalactites, searching for their other halves.
Of course, I’d already found mine. The one who was separate, but part of me. Who always reached for me, to whom I unfailingly reached back.
When someone you love shifts from the firmness of flesh to the squishiness of memory, even powerful remembrances may be lost to you. Yet some stuff you never lose—like the memory of staring at a newspaper headline viewed a dozen times before, and feeling like you’re seeing it for the first time:
Gary Man Shot by Police.
I was twenty-three. Sitting at the table in my mother’s kitchen, I’d been called home to Gary, Indiana, from grad school by an event that could not have happened. The headline in the Gary Post-Tribune was supposed to make it real, so I read it over and over, repeating the words in my mind. Gary Man Shot by Police. I’d read them too often in my hometown newspaper not to know what they signified: a no-thought headline announcing the shooting of an anonymous thug. Such a headline couldn’t possibly refer to my brother Darrell. Important people’s violent passing warranted outrage, regret, astonishment—and nobody in the world was more important than the brother who loved me. Gary Man Shot by Police? It hit me: To most of the world, my life’s most shattering event was no big deal. Because Darrell had been mistaken for ordinary.
Not the average Joe–ordinary that nearly every white guy is assumed to be. Even in Gary, the former murder capital of the United States, the shooting of the most undistinguished white man usually warranted more than a newsprint shrug. But Darrell was black ordinary, which meant his life didn’t matter much: Not to the police who shot him. Not to the reporter who wrote the terse, six-paragraph report of yet another brother getting himself killed. Certainly not to the copy editor who took all of three seconds to compose “Gary Man Shot by Police.”
Ordinary.
Well, in some ways he was. Darrell wasn’t short and he wasn’t tall; he was neither linebacker-thick nor tap-dancer wiry. His eyes were warm and dark and kind—but no more so than millions of other young men’s eyes. At five ten he was exactly the average height for an American male. He was quietly good-looking, as tender, volatile, and doomed young men often are.
He was just Darrell. And all that he was not—striking, brilliant, wildly successful—hardly mattered to those who couldn’t imagine life without him. A regular man, he was, like regular men everywhere, loved by his little sister with unremarkable completeness. My parents produced four smart, lively children—but only Darrell seemed likely to lead a typical and uneventful life, productive in the usual, unexciting ways: a stable marriage, a couple of kids, a decent job with a modest pension.
Is it surprising that he died what increasingly has become a typical black-guy’s death?
Growing up, I hadn’t the slightest sense that black males—my brothers, my schoolmates, my father—were more vulnerable than other boys or men. Daddy had been too formidable to be afraid for; the most dangerous thing I envisioned my brothers facing was a schoolyard beat-down.
Staring at the headline in Mom’s kitchen, I examined the “facts”—Mom’s torrential tears, the ashen corpse at a local funeral parlor, a familiar phone number now belonging to no one—of what surely had to be fiction. Darrell was dead. Like the headline, two Gary cops had mistaken him for something he’d never been. They’d received a call that a black man was trying to steal a truck in his lakeside neighborhood. Investigating, they’d found Darrell crouched in a ditch. They claimed he’d attacked them. That they had to shoot him. Darrell? Whom I’d never known to steal anything? Who was among the kindest people I knew?
If such an absurd mistake could be made about him, it could be made about any black man. The policemen’s claims and my brother’s dead body proved that the value and the safety of the people I loved most were in question. I wasn’t sure I could live with that.
Perhaps it was then, as I sat dumbfounded at Mom’s dinette, staring blankly at her kitchen’s cheery yellow walls, that I began pushing Darrell into my mind’s dimmest corner. I did it so well that today it’s easier to remember what my favorite brother wasn’t than what he was. He wasn’t, like my sibling Steven, older than me by five years, so taken with his own giftedness that he couldn’t see my drawing, hear my singing, ponder my opinions as if they mattered. He wasn’t four years younger like Bruce, whose age def
icit meant I could take his admiration for granted. Sandwiched with me between them, Darrell didn’t stroke or scream at people like Steve did to get his way, or seem malleable while doing exactly as he pleased like Bruce. He was something else entirely.
Remembering what he was means stepping into a bleak, little-used room inside me. Flipping the light switch, I squint and discover that my eyes don’t quite focus. Feeling my way around, I bump into unresolved emotions, slip on scattered memories, prick myself on sharp-edged regrets.
I don’t go in there often. As the years have passed, the light inside has grown dimmer and dimmer.
Most of my memories of Darrell take place in my childhood home, a streamlined redbrick ranch built in 1963 by my mason father. A Michelangelo when it came to laying stone and brick, Daddy designed our house’s curved driveway and the balcony that hovered over my brothers’ favorite hangout: the cement patio and basketball court.
The Gary, Indiana, in which we lived was strikingly different from the impoverished city whose disintegrating buildings and weed-covered vacant lots recently caused my visiting husband to marvel, “This is the bleakest city I’ve ever seen.” When I was a kid, Gary—founded on Lake Michigan in 1906 as the site of a massive new steel production facility—was a vibrant city of 135,000 souls so connected to Big Steel that the question “Where does your dad work?” almost always elicited the same answer: “The mill.”
Daddy’s work was seasonal and mill-related, so the family income ebbed and flowed with the mills’ fortunes. Yet we kids never felt hungry or lacking. Our parents griped about money, but if they were deeply worried, we never saw it. Daddy and Mommy, an insurance saleswoman, worked hard. Yet every once in a while, they got dolled up to go out with friends: millworkers, carpenters, and teachers transformed into glamorous sophisticates in tailored suits and peplumed dresses.
Such dazzle was on display the first time I noticed—and felt betrayed by—my giving. I was six the Saturday that my mother enlisted us kids into dusting and vacuuming for a party she and Daddy were hosting. Transforming our messy living room into the swank site of a grown-up gathering was thrilling, even before Mommy made up her face and poured herself into a slim sheath she called a “cot-tail” dress. Her metamorphosis from mom to sexpot matched Daddy’s, whose sharkskin jacket made her bricklayer husband look like a guy who’d left the Rat Pack because Sinatra was insufficiently cool to hang with him. Who knew my parents were so beautiful? Proud of them and our magically transformed home, I could barely breathe.
Banished to the back of the house, Steve, Darrell, Bruce, and I put on our pajamas, whispering so we could hear clinking glasses and Dinah Washington warbling from the room where we often fought with plastic swords and watched Candid Camera. By the party’s end, I’d figured out how I could be helpful to my parents while inserting myself into the hipster action: bringing guests their coats. The plan worked; I reveled in guests’ hugs and effusive thank-yous as I retrieved their wraps. Then I made the mistake of handing a fedora to an uncle who, unbeknownst to me, had recently made a big deal out of swearing off hats. When the grown-ups cracked up, I felt exposed: a silly kid in pj’s who had no business at a classy cot-tail party. Retreating into a closet, I pressed my face into a coat as my throat caught fire.
Darrell found me. Soothed me. Told me I’d done nothing wrong. “Go to bed,” he said. “We’ll play Life in the morning.” I went to bed. Grateful he was always there, making things better.
My awareness that I liked doing things for others evolved around the time I became aware of something else that brought both pleasure and pain: I was a “Negro.” It was the early 1960s. Gary, I realized, was unashamedly segregated, and all my friends, my family’s friends, and most of our community’s doctors, teachers, and service providers were “colored.” Some might think our lack of white neighbors, colleagues, and pals lessened our lives. In fact, life couldn’t have felt fuller.
My parents’ generation of working-and middle-class blackfolk was determined to live the exemplary lives of which white people thought them incapable. Having done all they could to escape the oppression that had tormented their ancestors, few looked back. None of the families in our orbit suffered in any obvious way from the ills assumed inevitable in black America: harsh poverty, criminality, imprisonment, drug abuse, unmarried parenthood (folks hid it or got married). Before the civil rights movement, I rarely heard adults bristle at their lot. Life was too bursting-at-the-seams full for folks to stop living it long enough to complain—at least around us kids.
So my early years don’t qualify me to write one of those anguished black narratives whose narrators had sex as preteens, were raped by family members, or were forced to join gangs. I wasn’t beaten by my boyfriends or encouraged to use or sell drugs. The only liquor I ingested was the rare cupful of Boone’s Farm apple wine–spiked punch at a blue-lights-in-the-basement party.
For years, I didn’t even resent the white people whose lives somehow mattered more than ours. I knew none to resent. I had exactly one white teacher; my family’s encounters with white people consisted of exchanges with downtown salesclerks and workers fixing appliances or delivering milk. As for housing, Negroes in Gary respected the invisible boundaries that determined where whites lived and blacks knew better than to look.
Yet my family “knew” hundreds of white people, thanks to TV, books, and other media. White folks’ habits, culture, and slang; their lives—or the lives they presented for public consumption—were familiar to us. Certainly, they were more familiar than our lives were to them. Our parents and grandparents had been intimate with whites in up-close-and-personal ways; many had worked in white people’s homes, seen them unguarded. We kids breathed in white lives long-distance.
Sometimes, we got closer. On special Saturdays, my parents, brothers, and I piled into Daddy’s coral and cream Plymouth, drove to a nearby suburb like Miller or Merrillville, and gawked at sprawling homes with precision-clipped grounds. We rarely saw white people. These homeowners eschewed the strolling, porch sitting, and car washing typical in our neighborhood. As Daddy drove slowly enough for us to see each manse, the kid who first noted a particularly cool house screamed, “I got that one!” adding the home to his or her imaginary portfolio. Spectacular homes inspired fierce squabbles over who’d hollered first.
Fighting over these houses gave us some purchase on their mysterious owners. What were they up to behind their drawn curtains? Were their homes so gorgeous inside they felt no need to venture out? Who were these unseen, distant-though-close strangers?
The best way to learn was through TV, which we loved despite no one on it looking like us. Our lone twelve-inch black and white had the power to gather entire families for annual events: Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Martin “flying” via visible cables as Peter Pan, Lesley Ann Warren’s saucer-eyed Cinderella. Black folks were so rarely on the magic box that neighbors threw open their doors and rushed onto their porches to shout the news when “colored” stars appeared. “Hey, Sammy Davis Jr.’s on Ed Sullivan!” The streets emptied.
By 1965, Darrell, fourteen—the official family clown, with Bruce running a close second—was quietly toying with the notion of a show business career. That September, NBC debuted an adventure-comedy show named I Spy, starring an urbane, handsome, clever, and—this part we barely believed—black comic. His name: Bill Cosby.
Cosby, swear to God, looked like a grown-up Darrell.
Cosby the spy was debonair and smart. Cosby the comic convulsed us with his tales of how complex life was for kids. The man was perfect. That the hippest black entertainer alive resembled my sidesplitting brother was a portent of Darrell’s amazing future. We idolized Cosby, never imagining that decades later, the entertainer’s only son, Ennis—mistaken by a racist ne’er-do-well as just another expendable brother—would be shot dead for no good reason.
Just like Darrell.
Once upon a time, such an occurrence was unthinkable. Darrell’s
presence was as warm and assured as the sun’s. My family’s love and constancy provided a sense of safety so deep and unthinking, I seldom questioned it. Darrell was like Mommy and Daddy and Steve and Bruce and my dolls and my friends and my welcoming bed, whose sheets were always cool and whose offer of a safe slumber was certain. At seven, you know these necessities will always be there. You know.
I don’t remember when my stalagmites disappeared. As I grew older, images of life outside my eyelids—friends, boys, TV and movie stars—crowded the spaciousness they’d floated through.
By the time I lost Darrell, they were gone, too.
Girlstuff
Donna (left) and Shawn giggling at a house party in Gary, 1972.
Few would question a working-class black girl always having her face in a book. But these books? Printed in the 1930s with detailed illustrations, my favorite was written by a nineteenth-century New England spinster and handed down to me by my mother. By the time I was eight, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was my bible, and its Civil War–era heroines cherished kin: stubborn Jo, selfless Meg, calculating Amy, and saintly Beth, whose death from a fever-weakened heart devastated me each time I read it. A few years later, my undisputed favorite was Gone With the Wind, that love poem to the Confederacy whose servile black characters—Prissy, Big Sam, Mammy—mortified me. My earliest literary influences ignored me, were contemptuous of me, or had no clue that black girls like me even existed. And still I gave myself over completely to them.
In some ways, girlhood for me was a long, slow period of falling out of love with myself. Three things helped mightily in the process: beauty, buddies, and my blackness.
Beauty first. At age seven, I felt good about the girl in the mirror. I liked my looks, found school exciting, and was a talented-enough artist for kids to fight over my drawings. Life was so agreeable, I thought anything I worked at—my appearance, my studies, my artwork—would pay off. Wedded to perfection, I was ripe for a lesson in the impossibility of maintaining it. My teacher: Easter shoes.
