by Donna Britt
But as natural as it felt putting aside the biggest burger for Darrell or surprising Bruce with a pack of Green Hornet bubble gum cards, it was tougher to give to Steve. I just didn’t know what to make of him.
I remember an afternoon when I was twelve, stretched out on my bed blissfully rereading Gone With the Wind. So engrossed was I in Scarlett and Rhett’s chaste lust that I barely heard Steve murmuring across the hall.
Until he purred, “Yeah, baby, we’re gonna fuck all night.”
I gasped aloud. Praying Steve hadn’t heard me—that I hadn’t really heard him—I pressed my face in the pillow. And heard more: “It’s gonna be so good,” Steve cooed, his voice low but not low enough. “We’re gonna keep fucking and fucking…”
Stunned tears wet my pillow. Even Steve had to know sex was special, an act shared by husbands and wives. He was only seventeen; he and his girlfriend weren’t even engaged! I’d met her several times and thought she was great; any high school girl thoughtful enough to ask about my books, Darrell’s albums, and Bruce’s comics was too classy to listen to my clearly-gone-mad brother’s ranting.
Yet there was no indication that she was vomiting on the other line.
My mind was spinning. If Steve was bold enough to say “fuck” to such a sweet girl, maybe he could actually do it. Maybe she could do it! Or was another girl on the line, some skank Steve was sneaking around with? Would he break his girlfriend’s heart?
Could a boy one day similarly mesmerize me?
My afternoon was ruined. Gone with the wind.
Steve wasn’t just trying to corrupt an innocent and violate the men-must-earn-sex rule prescribed by Doris Day movies. He was betraying the race. We lived in a black neighborhood, but white people took up plenty of real estate in our minds. Mom was determined that her kids would be nice Negroes who showed whites that they had nothing to fear from us while setting an example for less-dignified colored folk.
Like millions of black kids in the mid-1960s, we Britt kids knew what was expected of us: Neatly straightened or naturally curly hair—no crazy styles or excess grease. Quiet, grammatical sentences. Decorous movements in public—no running or strutting. No evidence of bodily functions: oily skin, sweating, noisy nose blowing.
“Baby, we’re gonna fuck all night” warranted instant ejection from Negrodom. No wonder Steve sneeringly called me “the princess.”
I was the dutiful good girl, Steve the born rebel. I flaunted my straight As; Steve skipped class, forging “adult-sounding” excuses like the one Mom found—signed with her name—in his pocket:
“Please excuse Steven Britt from class Thursday because an uncanny situation occurred.”
By his teens, Steve was a talented-enough artist to paint a perfect replica of the family car’s license plate when our father temporarily lacked the cash to replace the real one. The cardboard fake looked so authentic, Daddy used it for weeks. But mostly, Steve used his powers for evil: stealing from Mom’s purse, creeping home late smelling of Boone’s Farm wine, and trying on rings at stores where he’d ask salesclerks, “Can I look at this in the light?” Taking their wares outside, he’d dash off with them. He wore coke-spoon necklaces and hid rolling papers in his drawer. He had sex.
I made Gidget look depraved.
Years later, Steve would tell me that from boyhood, he had a powerful sense that he was born to royalty. “I felt I was a king—of what or who I didn’t know.” Maybe that explains why he was the first person I knew whose giving was directed entirely toward himself. He was like a monarch. Other people’s desires hardly existed for him. Asked to explain the trait, he describes the boyhood day he asked Mom if Santa Claus, not she or Dad, brought his toys. Mom said, “Santa.” When he learned the truth, Steve told her God must be fake, too. “But God is real!” Mom insisted. Too late. Unafraid of Divine punishment, Steve began doing whatever he pleased, including pushing everybody’s buttons, especially his family’s.
Like the memorable day when Bruce, fifteen, was downstairs in Darrell’s black-lit, poster-plastered bedroom listening to music with his brothers and their friends. Everyone was smoking marijuana except Bruce, who had no use for drugs.
Steve had a brilliant idea: to introduce aspiring-rocker Bruce to reefer. It was the 1970s; weed could be smelled at every party and concert. Initiating Bruce would be a rite of passage.
Tittering, Steve tried to coax Bruce into taking a hit from the joint being passed around. Bruce declined. Steve pressed him, “Try it.” Bruce resisted, increasingly uncomfortable. When Steve said, “It ain’t gonna hurt you to take a hit,” Darrell, his voice icy, warned him, “Back off.” Undeterred, Steve wheedled, “C’mon, just try it.”
Bad move. Face contorted, Darrell shouted, “Stop it, dammit!” Steve instantly shut up. “It’s bad enough we’re into this shit!” Darrell hollered. “Let him alone!” No one spoke.
Few had seen Darrell’s rage, the ferocity of which witnesses never forgot. Like the day Darrell, furious with our parents for repeatedly putting off teaching him to drive, leapt into the car, revved the engine—and slammed into the garage door. Or the time he saved up to buy the new O’Jays album and found that the record was defective. Roaring, he’d hurled it at a wall, shattering it.
This time, an uncomfortable silence filled the basement. The party broke up. Steve never offered drugs to Bruce again.
Bruce appreciated Darrell’s intervention, but the devil himself—whom I sometimes suspected Steve was—couldn’t have coaxed him to smoke that joint. Bruce, too, was stubborn and independent, despite having all the empathy Steve lacked. When our big brothers left for college, Bruce drew closer to Mom and me, listening to our stories, feeling our guy-related pain so acutely that years later it was impossible for him to listen to friends’ seduction stories. Each conquest was someone’s daughter or sister. Sometimes Daddy worried about Mom’s and my influence on him. Bruce still squirms at the memory of Daddy taking him to a 4-H-type club recruitment to forge a father-son bond. Bruce couldn’t conquer his fear of him.
Daddy never tried engaging in Bruce’s real passions: Hot Wheels cars, Marvel comics, and unabashed silliness. One day I heard shouts from the kitchen. Rushing there, I found Bruce chastising our dog Taffy beside a pile of dog poop. I sighed; Taffy sometimes relieved herself indoors if we didn’t let her out. Bruce bent over, picked up the poop—and popped it in his mouth.
Screaming, “BRUCE!” I grabbed my deranged brother. Grinning, he pulled a box of Space Food Sticks—chocolate Tootsie Roll–like treats—from the cabinet and arranged another on the floor so it, too, resembled dog crap.
By sixth grade, Bruce was being terrorized by Pyle’s thug contingent, kids whose idea of “black power” meant peppering their shakedowns with populist jargon. Approaching a mark, they’d ask, “Got any money, my brother?” before rifling his pockets. These punks listened to black-unity songs—“We’re a Winner,” “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”—while robbing fellow blacks, making their music seem as hypocritical to Bruce as being called “brother” during a mugging. Darrell’s beloved rock music was rebellious, too, but these mini-hoods knew nothing about Jimi Hendrix or Traffic. Untainted, rock became Bruce’s music of choice. By the time Mom gave him a Stradolin guitar, he wanted to be a rock star.
Like Darrell, Bruce confided his private musings to me, detailing his crushes and schooling me on the secret-identity lives of Spider-Man’s Peter Parker and Daredevil’s Matt Murdock. With two brothers so open about their feelings, I started to believe sharing came naturally to boys. Any guy seeking to connect with me, I assumed, would gladly reveal his innermost stuff.
The behavior of my family members exacerbated my giving. Daddy’s cool, exacting nature made him hard to please, so I worked harder to satisfy him. Mom’s need for attention made me search for ways to make her feel loved. Steve I avoided at all costs, yet I praised his artwork, acted impressed by his exploits, did all I could to minimize his tormenting. Bruce was independent, but he was still mi
ne; like a mom, I sought to protect him.
Only Darrell required nothing from me. After school, I awaited his arrival, primed to tell him tales of my friends, problems, crushes. He never seemed bored. I felt no need to change anything, fix anything, be more of this or less of that to please him.
Giving to Darrell was as effortless as loving him.
Steve’s crude attempt at phone seduction did nothing to curb my curiosity about sex. By junior high, I was discussing the subject constantly with my friends, whose emerging womanliness my big brothers couldn’t help noticing. My friends noticed my brothers right back. Though five years his junior, gorgeous Gayle developed a confounding crush on my outlaw brother, Steve. Boy-crazy Sharon took one look at Darrell and, using the Spanish we were studying, archly said, “Tu hermano es muy guapo.” (“Your brother is very handsome.”) When I responded, “Mi hermano habla español,” my light-skinned friend turned scarlet. A third-year Spanish student, Darrell had understood every poorly pronounced word.
One day, my friends and I knew, boys would expect more than the gift of just looking at us. The prospect of sex was intriguing—and horrifying.
I’d read everything I could about the subject in the remotest corners of Gary’s immense new library. I’d started devouring sex manuals the day after my fourth-grade teacher banished the class’s boys to inform us girls we’d soon have “monthly periods.” This flow of blood between our legs meant we could have babies. The bleeding didn’t hurt, she assured, though some girls might have “cramps.”
What? Mute, the girls pondered their fate: spouting blood, wearing “napkins,” and getting cramps to boot. Enduring childbirth wasn’t bad enough. We got to bleed for the privilege.
Suddenly I was certain: God, being male, had given boys the better deal. My smuggled books suggested sex was no picnic for females, either. A woman lay naked in bed as a man’s thing got big and hard. When it was really stiff, he’d stuff it inside an area so tiny I hadn’t known it existed. In one of Mom’s books, the author counseled male readers, “Don’t begin your marriage with a rape.”
As if a sane woman would volunteer for such craziness.
I’d been watching TV’s Bewitched in the den when Darrell walked in after showering. Towel around his waist, he’d plopped beside me on the couch. “Look,” I said, demonstrating for him how much I’d progressed in my ongoing attempt to twitch my nose like Samantha’s. I grinned when he assured me, “You’re getting better.” Pushing himself up, Darrell had no way of knowing that his towel had hiked up in back, giving me an unwelcome rear view of his privates. He strolled away. I froze, midtwitch.
I’d recently read a puzzling fact in one of Mom’s hidden sex manuals: all women suffered from “penis envy.” Now, frozen on the sofa, I searched myself for a whiff of jealousy. All I found was embarrassment—and gratitude that girls’ stuff was neatly tucked away. Who’d envy “privates” that dangle out for all to see?
Only a man, I realized, could have come up with that.
It was bad enough knowing that someday a man’s rock-hard thing would be pushed inside me. Now I’d gotten an up-close glimpse of the offending apparatus. Then it hit me. This was Darrell. “Envy” was a stretch, but if he had a penis, how terrible could it be? Nothing about him could bother me for long.
It was the same with boys. Nothing they did was a permanent turnoff. That’s why sex was so confusing.
The little I knew about it had been gleaned from friends’ whispers, graffiti (“PUSSY IS GOOD”), chaste movies, Mom’s cache of sex manuals, and hastily perused library books. Few of these sources suggested women actually liked sex. Even Playmates in Daddy’s girlie magazines were more jazzed by walks on the beach than by intercourse. Men wanted sex and would seemingly do anything to get it. The whole enterprise was so unbalanced, I wondered why females who didn’t want babies even participated. Sex, I decided, was a gift born of love, a sacrifice women made to men they adored.
By ninth grade, I was questioning that one-sidedness. On weekends, Sharon and I explored the subject during long walks, after which we’d repair to Sharon’s room, stack favorite 45s on the record player, and melt onto her twin beds as Smokey Robinson warbled, “Here I go again, walking into love,” and Eddie Kendricks swore to “try something new” to win us, not skinny Diana Ross, his duet partner. When we weren’t limp from love to come, we conjured situations that might justify us having sex:
Sharon: How old do you think you’ll be when you do it?
Donna: I don’t know. Old—like twenty. You know it’ll hurt.
Sharon: I know. But what if you were stranded on a desert island… with Jermaine Jackson? You wouldn’t give it up?
Donna: Jermaine? And there’s nobody else there but us?
Sharon: Just you and him. And he says he loves you. And he starts singing “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” just like on the Third Album!”
Donna: (after a long pause) How long have we been stranded?
Sharon: Six months. And nobody’s coming to rescue you.
Donna: I guess I would have to… DROP MY DRAWERS!
By eleventh grade, boy-crazy Sharon had developed a Sophia Loren–esque beauty that lured guys of every type. One, a cute sophomore named Gary Sewell, was so likable, I comforted him when she inevitably moved on. But Gary kept calling; I found myself searching for him at school. I was a goner even before the night he confessed that his brother had called him a “chump” for displaying a photo of me on his dresser. “I don’t care,” Gary told him. “I love her.”
I had stumbled upon a prince.
Does anyone forget first love’s shell-shocked sweetness? I can still see myself in our darkened kitchen, perched on a stool with the wall phone’s receiver pressed into my temple. I hear—no, feel—Gary’s voice, deep inside my ear, saying, “I love you.” The words filled me like helium. Only the cabinet bolted to the wall above me kept me from floating away.
I’d had crushes since kindergarten, but this was different. I’d never felt such a need to give to a boy other than my brothers. Now I picked out cool clothes for Gary on his birthday and introduced him to new music and movies—The Great White Hope, Love Story—whose plots and cinematography he surprised himself by discussing. Neither of us had a driver’s license, so I begged Mom or Steve to pick him up from his home so we could visit. Once Gary joined me at a party hosted by my art teacher. Hanging out with “creative types,” he later said, connected him to his artistic, spiritual side, making him confident the thug life that beckoned nearly every young black man wasn’t for him. His openness in expressing such things, and knowing that I’d inspired him, were enchanting. Did I mention he was the world’s best kisser?
As the months passed, Gary and I both craved more than kisses. Stealing into empty rooms at my house or vacant corridors after school, we pressed against each other, exploring his hardness, my softness. I felt every melting thing I’d dreamed of while lying on Sharon’s twin bed. Yet desire couldn’t subdue my sense that I wasn’t ready for sex. More daunting was the thought of Mom’s devastation if I got pregnant. Two years earlier, a girl named Cheryl, the smartest, prettiest sophomore at Emerson, had gotten pregnant. The news had exploded through the school like a nuclear blast. Leaving school briefly, she’d returned… a mother.
Not me. Finally, there was something I wouldn’t—couldn’t—give to a man I cherished. My “gift of love” would have to wait. When I finally told Gary, “I can’t,” we slowly, inexorably drifted apart. Dazed, I tried to understand it. True love—the fairy-tale event I’d awaited since childhood, the reason I’d worked to make myself attractive and desirable—had arrived. Now it was leaving, apparently because I refused to do what no fairy princess would even consider. As horrible as I felt, I was comforted by a thought: a boy who couldn’t wait for something so precious couldn’t be “the one.” I’d passed an important test.
I would keep waiting.
I may have been incapable of changing my views about sex, but I’d known si
nce ninth grade that my country was in upheaval. Without warning, “Negro” had turned to “black”—and by 1968, black wasn’t just proud, it was dangerous. April had brought a shoot-out between the Black Panthers and police, leaving Bobby Hutton—seventeen, Darrell’s age!—dead. And just two days earlier, fate had finally caught up with the outspoken Atlanta preacher whose aliveness in the face of hatred had astounded me. Mom made us put on our church clothes to watch Dr. King’s funeral on TV. No one complained.
The world was becoming more threatening to black men just as my favorite brother was preparing to leave our home’s safety for college. But Darrell wasn’t an activist, a radical, or a criminal. He was nice. That, I told myself, would keep him safe.
Meanwhile, I spent as much time with him as possible. One summer night, he, Bruce, and I attended a house party. I was dancing downstairs when I heard arguing outside and learned that a boy had accused Darrell of hitting a girl. Darrell had denied it, but he wasn’t backing down. Dashing upstairs, I found a tense group gathered around the two; someone whispered the other guy had a knife. But Darrell never hits people! I thought as I heard Bruce implore Darrell, “Let’s get out of here!” I don’t remember what defused things, but both guys eventually backed off. What I never forgot was my terror—or Darrell’s refusal to retreat.
Suddenly I remembered how in fifth grade, a “mean girl” had inexplicably followed me home after school, taunting and shoving me. I’d considered telling Darrell, who would surely have found my tormentor and terrified her. But I couldn’t do it. What if she had a vengeful brother? I couldn’t put Darrell at risk.
