Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  Worst of all was knowing that making and keeping your hair pretty (or even acceptable) required so much work that your “gift” of beautiful hair felt inauthentic, not to mention a burden. Still, black-girl hair had one advantage: versatility. We lorded it over white classmates when it came to hair styles, to our hair’s knack for being twisted, curled, and braided in countless ways.

  My hair was one more thing that gave me the sense, deep in my bones, that something was wrong with the beauty I offered the world. Like my broad nose and rounded butt, my crowning glory was deficient. My hair wasn’t all that got pressed. Day after day, doubts were squeezed into my consciousness about whether I could truly be beautiful.

  There was one more place where my blackness worked on my self-esteem: the classroom. Placed in honors courses with high-performing white students, I for the first time competed with white kids—smart white kids—academically. For years, I’d been told Negroes were inferior. Would I embarrass the race?

  I was shocked when I, along with other Pyle kids, competed ably with our new classmates. More stunning was the warmth with which I was embraced by classmates whose Greek and Polish names reflected their exotic heritages: Toula Mantakounis; the adorable Mercuri Papakaladoukas. These kids marveled at my book knowledge, giggled at my quips, admired my wardrobe.

  Why wouldn’t they? I’d made it my mission to be the most engaging seventh grader alive. What better way to disprove what I assumed white kids felt: that black students couldn’t measure up, or be as amazing as the kids they saw in the mirror? Of course, some black transfer students glared at their white classmates, shoved them if they moved too slowly to class. Still others simply ignored them, certain that white folks had nothing on them.

  My reaction, of course, was to offer myself to them, through jokes, compliments, academic assistance, patient explanations of black hairdos and fashions. My perfect black-girl act was meant to prove my worthiness to white people, make them admire me.

  It worked. So what if I wasn’t so crazy about myself?

  Looking back, what strikes me most about my adolescence isn’t my self-esteem’s inevitable slide from a kid’s self-love to a grown-up’s self-doubt. It’s the long mornings and afternoons I spent thinking about… nothing much.

  My girlhood’s languid contemplations couldn’t have been more different from my adult mind’s bustle. Minute by minute, it whirs and sags with a thousand deliberations: about household chores; family duties; the relentless minutiae of my sons’ schedules, activities, diets, health, and educations; our household budget; Mom’s needs (did I call her yesterday?); my writing; appointments; the alarming state of the world; my husband and his career, fitness, obligations.

  Yet once upon a time—the memory is as improbable as a fairy tale—my thoughts were unapologetically me-centered: my friends, my books, my crushes. Me-me-me! Me flopped on my belly on a carpet of grass, eye level with a spiky dandelion, studying it. Me flipping onto my back to observe a passing assemblage of clouds, deciding what each was shaped like. Me unworried that such time wasn’t well spent, or that it robbed anyone who might need me.

  What woman with a mate, offspring, and/or obligations doesn’t miss long mornings in bed, feeling no compunction to rise and do something? Little girls love “playing Mommy,” pretending their dolls and the duties performed for them are real.

  Can’t moms occasionally pretend they’re the unencumbered little girls they once were?

  Can’t we awaken and lie motionless as we decipher the code tapped out by rooftop raindrops? Rise slowly enough to feel the sun’s drift through the curtain, hear its splash on the floor? Can’t we spend a morning contemplating a day filled with games, friends, daydreams—with nothing much? We can. We don’t.

  But, God, do I miss nothing much.

  Opposites Detract

  Mom-Mommy, Mom, and Daddy at a Chicago nightclub, 1946.

  She’s in the basement laundry room with her back to me, hunched over the washer. Assuming she’s unobserved, the small woman allows her shoulders to shudder. Tentatively, I move toward this stranger who looks like Mommy but who—it can’t be true—is crying. Mothers can cry? The people who know everything, fix everything, run everything, do that, too? It’s like stumbling upon God weeping. She won’t say what hurt her, but I’m betting it’s a man, and I know which man. At age ten, I’ve yet to learn about my mom’s smorgasbord of past hurts. So I’m certain: no one but a daddy could make a mommy cry.

  On a lushly gorgeous April day, one of the most giving people I know—my mother—sat silently in my car’s backseat as I drove her home. After a long, gray winter, I found the afternoon’s radiance breathtaking. Mom’s uncharacteristic stillness suggested that she, too, was moved by the bright blossoms erupting around homes streaming past. Finally, Mom spoke:

  “You can buy the nicest house in the most expensive neighborhood,” she said. “And you have no guarantee that Hispanics won’t move in next door, install a concrete driveway, and park five cars in it.”

  I wanted to scream, but found myself laughing instead. The words were so harsh. So uncalled for. So Mom. Over the years, I’d heard her insult every ethnicity imaginable, and her commentary seldom stopped there. I recalled riding with her though the vast New Mexico desert, dumbstruck by mountains tottering like pebbles on the horizon. “So beautiful.” Mom sighed. “And so full of radiation from those experiments in the 1950s!” And there was the time after I turned forty-five, when I proudly told her a bartender had asked me for ID. Asked Mom: “Was he blind?”

  Mom is every bit as free with a compliment. Yet I steel myself in her presence because I’m never sure whether her bluntness will leave me feeling praised or punished. She and my very different, but equally powerful, father influenced nearly every action in my life. So no exploration of my giving would be worthwhile unless I confronted two questions every searching woman asks. The first: How much am I like my mother?

  Everyone who knows Geraldine Britt will tell you she’s smart, hip, and so youthful even her doctors doubt she’s in her eighties. I deeply admire her. Yet her unerring gift of ferreting ugliness from beauty and then commenting on it couldn’t be more different from my tendency to uncover whatever seems wonderful about a person or a situation and to point that out.

  Could I be unthinkingly trying to make up for Mom, who was born without the editing mechanism most people use to negotiate life? Though there are few ethnic groups she hasn’t denigrated, Mom’s favorite victims have always been black. Over the years, she has castigated blackfolk for their speech (too ignorant), lawn care (too inconsistent), fashion sense (too flamboyant), hair (too nappy), and more. Like millions raised in an era in which black people’s intelligence, beauty, and worth were constantly questioned, she absorbed white culture’s aggregate contempt while still managing to cherish black individuals.

  Mom is just as likely to point out her own flaws, saying, “I’m too stupid to do math,” or (God help the uninitiated listener) “I’m burned; I don’t have a nipple on one breast.” In fact, she’s certain that her imagined flaws are what made her life so disappointing.

  That’s why my first memory of her (I was three) is so surprising. She’s pregnant with my baby brother and smiling a soft, buttercream smile as she irons satiny strips of apple green ribbon. What’s surprising is that Mom—whose raucous laugh can often be heard blocks away—is so silent. So happy. So tall.

  From my toddler’s vantage point beneath the board, my mother is enormous. Yet Mom is only four eleven—or four ten, or four nine, depending on when you ask. Though she insists she’s shrinking, what never diminishes is her belief that her petiteness, which many people find charming, blighted her life. She is, she says simply, “too short”: To be powerful. To be beautiful. To be everything she is.

  Ironically, my clearest early memory of my six-foot one-inch father is quite different. Daddy seems much smaller, or at least less forbidding, than in other memories. I’m seven, clutching his hand in a kids’ clothi
ng store. Mom is nowhere in sight. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe because my usually distant Daddy has taken me into my favorite shop.

  As we approach a circular rack of dresses, a candy pink number catches my eye. “I like this one,” I tell him. Seersucker with white buttons, the bell-shaped “tent” dress cost $2.99, which today sounds laughable.

  But when Daddy replies, “I’ll get it for you,” you’d think God had dropped a diamond into my palm. My first powerful memory of Daddy is of one of the few times in my life that I recall him directly giving me something. Which raises the second vital question: How did my relationship with my father shape my view of men?

  Another memory whispers an answer. I’m standing warily beside Daddy’s chair at the kitchen table, watching his dour gaze sweep over the meal I’ve fixed while Mom works late. At age ten, I see “cooking” as boiling boxed mac-and-cheese or slipping frozen potpies in the oven—meals that feel special because they’re fixed for my daddy (for my brothers, too, but they’ll eat anything). Tonight’s offering: Kraft noodles, string beans boiled to a whimper, and a square of gristle euphemistically called “Salisbury steak.”

  Daddy gazes. Pauses. Says, “You managed to get everything I don’t like on this plate.”

  Which is saying something because you could fill a good-sized barn with stuff Daddy doesn’t like: Intimate chats. Kids who don’t leap happily from bed to tackle chores with the grim gusto he brings to every task. Wasting money on vacation spots unreachable by an all-night drive in a kid-, luggage-, pillow-stuffed car.

  Sometimes I wasn’t sure he liked me. Yet no matter how much Daddy’s coolness frustrated me, Mom—whose childhood had honed her need for warmth to needlelike sharpness—felt worse. My parents’ mutual irritation was at times so palpable, I was stunned the one time I saw them steal a kiss. I wasn’t sure what had prompted such warmth, but it froze me in my tracks. In my thirteen years, I’d seen couples in movies exchange every kind of kiss without having seen my parents share one. The peck was so flabbergasting, it again raised a question I’d long pondered: Why are these two people together?

  At least one explanation for my parents’ connection, I felt certain, was Mom’s height obsession.

  Daddy was tall.

  Moreover, he had no problem with her petiteness. Why would he, when Mom was cuter, more sophisticated, and more stylish than almost everyone else’s wife? Why would anyone, when her stature was the only small thing about her?

  I was the only girl I knew whose mom looked, well, hot in hot pants—and textured hose and lace-up boots. Boys my age would roll up behind her at the skating rink—she skated into her sixties—and snake flirtatious arms around her waist. Whispering, “Hey, baby,” they’d lean in, gaze in her eyes—and nearly fall on their faces.

  “Oh, excuse me, ma’am,” they’d mutter as Mom whirled away, grinning.

  This is the woman who as a high school senior won an oratorical contest judged by a young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall. Mom’s 1942 speech questioned why her black male classmates were heading directly from graduation to World War II, risking death for a nation that discriminated against them. I knew nothing about the speech until 2006, when I overheard Mom mention it to local high schoolers interviewing senior citizens. Forgetting the eloquence that won her the contest, Mom had praise only for the man who’d become the first black Supreme Court justice: “He was handsome.”

  Part of Mom remains cemented in childhood, waiting for things to be made right. Believing that if she had been taller—or prettier or more lovable—everything might have been different.

  She might not have been stashed for years at a boardinghouse with an abusive guardian, or set afire by the backyard blaze that scorched her chest and face, leaving scars of which my mother is exquisitely aware and which I, the daughter who views her through love’s prism, never notice. If she’d been different, she feels, her unwed mother might have loved her from the start.

  Perhaps I would be different, too. Because if my grandmother had been able to give my mother the love she needed as a child, I wouldn’t have spent decades making up for the lack.

  By the time I met Theodosia Dote Houston King—“Mom-Mommy” King to her adoring grandchildren—she was in her early fifties, though no one would have suspected it. Glamorous and bitingly funny, she christened herself “Mom-Mommy” after Steve’s birth to avoid the unthinkable: being called “Grandma.”

  Everything I knew about Mom-Mommy was cool. As a teen, she’d been offered singing lessons with Philadelphia diva Marian Anderson (she regretted being unable to afford them). During a school trip to Washington, D.C., Mom-Mommy informed a white bus driver she was not getting off the bus just because they’d entered a segregated city. Many of her white classmates supported her.

  Confident, smart, spiritual, and as warm as toast, she was the perfect grandmother, and everything I wanted to be, including devastatingly attractive to men. Even (I didn’t realize for years) the wrong men.

  A Media, Pennsylvania, high school track star, Mom-Mommy was a striking nineteen-year-old when she became pregnant with Mom in 1923. Unwed pregnancy was intolerable for churchgoing Negro girls; the identity of the man responsible made it worse. The one time I asked Mom-Mommy about Mom’s father, she was at first speechless. In all the decades I knew her, I never saw her so sad.

  Her voice low, Mom-Mommy told me that the husband of one of her relatives—a much older, respected church pillar I’d met as a child—had offered to take her berry picking. Mom-Mommy had felt uneasy, but her mother, Nana, had insisted. When the man forced her into sex, she couldn’t bring herself to tell his wife, whom she loved. Mom-Mommy soon learned she was pregnant.

  No man ever took responsibility for fathering my mother. In the 1920s, “family scandals that nobody wanted to own up to were buried,” Mom later told me. “That’s why they hid me.”

  Geraldine King was born in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in the late spring of 1924. For six weeks, Mom-Mommy cared for her newborn. Then Nana—on her half day off from her $6-a-week job as a maid and cook to a rich, white family—took the baby to Philadelphia, about fifteen miles east of Media. My infant mother clasped in her arms, Nana walked South Philly’s bustling streets, asking strangers if they knew of anyone who might care for her grandbaby. A tip led her to the Seventeenth Street row house where Mom would spend her first seven years, cared for by a chilly, uneducated woman in her sixties called Mom Stevens. For years, Mom was unaware of her parents’ identity, or even that they existed.

  By age four, my mother was sharing the upstairs floor with two younger kids named Willie and Glorie May. She vividly recalls the home’s smelly outhouse, the kitchen pump that filled the tin washtub in which she was bathed, deliveries of massive sacks of bug-infested flour, and meals of slimy oatmeal and fatback. Mom Stevens regularly “whupped” the youngsters with a heavy strap, once slapping Mom’s face with a slipper. For days, Mom could smell her split lip, which was too crusted with blood and pus for her to eat.

  Life was far from easy. But by the time Mom Stevens enrolled little Geraldine in first grade, my mother had a thrilling secret: Unlike the other boardinghouse kids, she had a mother who cared enough to visit.

  Each week for as long as she could remember, Nana had visited her, dressed in a plain starched work dress. But once a month, an attractive younger woman in stylish clothes mounted the stairs to watch her play. Once Mom overheard a snatch of conversation suggesting that despite her fashionable garb, the young woman worked “at service” like Nana, cleaning white people’s homes. Her name: Dote.

  At some point Mom realized: the young visitor was her mother, the older one her grandmother. Her pride in her pretty mother was exceeded only by her terror each time Mom-Mommy left that she’d never see her again.

  One hot August day in 1931, my seven-year-old mother watched Mom Stevens’s husband light the trash with matches in the backyard before joining the other children in a game of tag. Dashing too close to the blaze, Mom
was aghast to see her cotton dress catch fire. Bolting away, she ran shrieking as hot air fanned the flames that were engulfing her. Finally strong hands threw her down, wrapped her in a blanket, carried her upstairs. For five agonizing days, Mom sobbed in her stifling bedroom as Mom Stevens smeared cottonseed oil on third-degree burns across her entire left side. No one sent for a doctor.

  After an eternity of trying to keep her scalded skin from sticking to the bed, Mom finally saw Nana—who, like most working-class people, had no phone—walk in.

  Screaming that Mom Stevens should have found a way to tell her about the burns, Nana wept as she swept Mom up, flew downstairs, and flagged down the first car she saw.

  At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Mom was placed on a gurney. Three white men in snowy coats—“doctors,” Nana called them—bluntly told Nana, “We can’t save this child.” Nana, by now hysterical, beseeched them to try. Whisking Mom away, hospital officials for weeks limited visits from her mother and grandmother to once a week.

  Five months later, on Christmas Eve, she was released to them.

  Over the years, Mom told me many times about her horrific, hidden childhood. Each time, it broke my heart to consider her loneliness and pain. Yet it wasn’t until I became a mother that I understood how much Mom’s childhood explains her. And me.

  It explained why, as a four-year-old child of working-class parents, I had five pairs of shoes (navy, pink, white, red, and black patent). And why at Christmas, the toys under our tree far outnumbered my friends’. It explained why Mom was more vigilant about boys, sleepovers, car trips, everything, than other mothers, and why her critical eyes poked my brothers and me like insistent fingers, dissecting our speech, weights, walks, hair, and everything else they prodded.