by Donna Britt
Before Darrell’s death, I wanted to be a great writer. After he died, I knew what I wanted to write about: the agonizing wrongness of such losses, not just for me, but for thousands. So what if I’d never confronted Darrell’s killers, sued the police, or found the grace to forgive his murderers? I could do something for my dead brother that I’d never had to do when he was alive: make people know him, what he meant, if only to me.
Detroit was full of Darrells, men young and old whose blackness had obscured their humanity for my newspaper’s wary white readers. It was full of little girls who could shrivel up inside if something horrible happened to their daddies or their brothers. My words could tell people how it felt to be twelve—everyone was twelve once—coming home to Darrell after a long day of trying to ignore girls who snickered as they cataloged my inadequacies. The balm it was, knowing one person didn’t judge me for my hair, my outfit, my relative attractiveness on the sliding Negro scale. My words—powerful, Darrell-inspired words—could tell how essential it was to be adored for no good reason, to have someone see you more generously than you saw yourself, to be bathed in a golden, undeserved light.
Didn’t everyone have such a person? Someone so crucial that the mere thought of him or her would make them hesitate to kill? Someone whose image would inspire them to fire into a shoulder or a knee or some other nonlethal place when confronted by a guy armed with a chain when they had guns?
It would be a decade before I could actually write about Darrell. Just thinking about him threatened to rip off the gossamer substance with which I’d papered over my heart. So I wrote about other black men, women, children, with the sensitivity and knowingness I couldn’t yet use to describe him.
Detroit, thank God, was less than an hour’s drive from Bruce. I found a studio in a flatiron-shaped building in a neighborhood a quick bus ride from the Freep’s downtown offices. Assigned to the city desk, I found myself covering a municipality whose murder rate had placed it atop the nation’s “Most Homicides” list, and whose mayor, Coleman Young, was an annoyance to whites and a take-no-shit hero to many blacks.
Racially and economically, Detroit was surreal. A seven-mile drive down Jefferson Avenue zapped you from affluence to poverty to flat-out riches in fifteen head-spinning minutes. Beginning in the city’s then-vibrant downtown, Jefferson morphed quickly into destitution, cut through middle-class pleasantness, and ended up amid breathtaking lakeshore mansions built by auto magnates Edsel Ford and Horace Dodge. Window shades and curtains were always pulled tight in the shabby flats occupied by poor, inner-city Detroiters. But as the neighborhoods grew richer, the more curtains you could peer into. By the time you got to wealthy Grosse Pointe, nothing was veiled; passersby got unobstructed views of folks’ expensive TVs, music equipment, and artwork. Entire families could be seen reading, eating, and otherwise living their lives. The message: Look all you like. We are invulnerable.
Fascinated by the city’s contrasts, I enjoyed my job and appreciated earning a real salary. I even started dating actual grown-ups. Like the brilliant lawyer who seemed drawn to me but who never made a move. One brutally lonely night I phoned him and said, “Let’s just be physical. No strings.” After a pause, he said, “I can’t. I know we would get more involved,” as if that was the worst thought in the world. And there was the happily married TV reporter whom I interviewed and found myself laughing with for more than an hour. A dozen riotous calls later, I realized I felt more in sync with him than with anyone I’d met since my New York beau Michael. I’d never slept with a married man, but felt dangerously close the one time he visited my apartment. After a passionate kiss, he left. He never called again.
Bruce was more successful at romance, for a while. Patty, a coworker whose hippie skirts and up-to-something smile he’d admired, invited him roller-skating. Depositing Bruce on the sidelines, she spun off for some solo laps to James Taylor’s “Up on the Roof,” whirling in circles, her brown hair flying. Bruce was a goner. So was Patty—for three months. Then she cut off their sexy relationship with no explanation. Still wounded from Darrell’s death, Bruce had resisted getting close to any girl, especially a white one. Now what Bruce had seen as a passionate love match looked like Patty’s opportunity to explore the black-men-are-hot dynamic and bolt before getting in too deep. Bruce kept working with her until the day Bob Seger’s plaintive “The Famous Final Scene” played over the sound system and he discovered his face was wet. He decided to move to Detroit.
Together we found a two-bedroom apartment with gleaming hardwood floors. In the fall of 1980, Bruce began work as a Freep copy aide, a support position in which his wit and serious work ethic endeared him to the newsroom. An interview with the Canadian rock group Rush led to his writing reviews and articles for the paper’s music section. My rocker bro was a writer!
As the chasm inside me filled, I became more engrossed in my work. I adored my local New Age church, enjoyed exploring spirituality with my sweet pal Denise, and laughing about men with new buddies Geri, Jeanne, and Mireille. I loved my life.
So why was I drawn to a twenty-eight-year-old youth in adult clothing? I can’t claim I had no forewarning of Greg’s issues: he snorted cocaine the night I met him. But he was a smart, good-looking man with an exciting job. In the early 1980s, coke was still thought of as the “perfect” drug, the clean, nonaddictive source of a breezy high. Watching this boyishly attractive stranger doing the trendy, naughty-but-nice drug cemented his coolness. Besides, I was already mesmerized by his huge, thick-lashed eyes. They were like a guileless child’s, an impression heightened by Greg’s five seven frame.
A more observant woman might have noticed a theme.
I’d met him at a party at the home of an up-and-coming black GM car designer, where my buddy Jeanne promised we’d meet “lots of single guys from the auto industry.” Walking into a pretty brick Tudor vibrating to “Rock with You,” I spied Larry, an attractive businessman whom I’d dated briefly in Charlotte and who had since moved to Detroit. I introduced him to Jeanne, who in turn presented me to one of her former flames.
I was immediately smitten. Greg was a GM public relations executive who reeked worldliness, at least to a girl who’d just left a town where a tattered sport coat passed for formal wear. I can still see him studying me, his shirt a blaze of white, his head cocked as he nursed a drink. When he confided that he was about to snort some coke, I asked to watch, curious about this safe new drug. Even more fascinating was the European cut of the jacket he had draped over a chair. I said it looked too small for a well-muscled man; Greg slid it on, pivoted like a model, and asked me to Sunday brunch.
The next morning, he had smoked salmon and mimosas waiting for me at his downtown apartment, a Mies van der Rohe–designed high-rise. The floor-to-ceiling windows in Greg’s living room offered a panoramic view of the Detroit skyline. After reading the New York Times and the Freep together, we rode in his silver Cutlass Supreme—my favorite car, a sign!—to the swanky Renaissance Center mall to window-shop. Mostly we walked silently. Though I lived for penetrating conversation, I was charmed by Greg’s unembarrassed quietude. Our first kiss in a dim RenCen corner was slow, deep, unhurried. Later I called my ex-roommate Pam to tell her all about my new beau. “Oh, he’s sophisticated,” she sighed.
An only child, Greg had been raised in St. Louis’s middle-class suburbs by adoring parents who couldn’t have been prouder of him. When one of his friends told me that he had for years had almost everything done for him, I shrugged. Finally, an attractive, popular, athletic guy who wanted marriage and a family was pursuing me.
So what if he favored cool silences over searching conversation and was used to having attention lavished on him? I saw no connection between him and the quiet, distant man in my past whom he resembled. Why would I connect Daddy (a grown man if there ever was one) to a guy whose most striking feature was his boyishness? At any rate, I rarely talked to my father, and no longer yearned for acknowledgment of his love. Greg’s huge,
innocent eyes suggested he’d never hurt me. I believed them.
Before the month was out, I was in love.
For all that I didn’t know about Greg and my own motives, I was sure about one thing: I wasn’t going to mess things up by heedlessly jumping into bed with him. I’d had it with intimacy that wasn’t intimate and with “liberated” sex that mostly liberated you from getting a phone call the next night. One morning, Bruce opened my bedroom door and found me on my knees, praying that this relationship would stick.
And it was delightful, letting a real gentleman court me. For weeks, Greg took me to dinner, concerts, and movies. I courted him right back with home-cooked meals, weeknight massages, probing questions about work. I did everything for him but have sex. I told Pam that unlike most women we knew, I was determined to forge a serious relationship that precluded intimacy until I knew we were headed toward permanence. This being the 1980s, Pam asked, “Can you do that?”
I could try. Three months into our relationship, Greg said he loved me and wanted to marry me. Two months later, I was pregnant.
I hadn’t planned to get pregnant, but I hadn’t tried terribly hard not to. Greg was the one. I was twenty-seven; I’d always known I wanted marriage and a family, and Darrell’s death had made frittering away precious time criminal. Unsure of how Greg would receive such news five months after we’d met, I said I had good news and bad news. Which did he want first? When he said, “The good news,” I said, “I’m pregnant.” Greg threw up his arms in triumph. When he asked for the bad news, I said, “I’m pregnant!” laughing with the knowledge that everything was going to be okay.
My work life, too, was going swimmingly. After a stint on the city desk, I’d joined the Freep’s feature section, “The Way We Live,” as a fashion writer. What could be more fun than making use of my accumulated knowledge of clothes? Two years after Darrell’s death, I felt like I was back on course. I’d lost a brother but gained a whole new life.
Engaged and expecting a baby in six months, Greg and I told our parents the news, which was greeted happily on both sides. Mom, of course, would have preferred a taller son-in-law. But Greg’s glossy curls and deferential manners enchanted her. I found a curve-hugging gown of Alençon lace with a mermaid train and made my own rose-kissed mantilla-style veil. Pam, Gayle, Sharon, Shawn, and Melech’s cute daughter, Shcoma, were enlisted as my attendants; my brothers and several longtime buddies were Greg’s. A jovial Free Press coworker named Harry performed the wedding at a gorgeous Episcopal chapel.
It was perfect—except for the trivial fact that my groom and I hardly knew each other.
Our all-white wedding was followed by a Canadian honeymoon—Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City—that fortuitously coincided with the end of my morning sickness. I returned with my new husband to my Palmer Park apartment (Bruce had found a flat on Detroit’s East Side). Although my building prohibited kids, the manager said he’d try to overlook the newborn soon to be under his roof. “How much trouble can a little baby be?” he asked.
I had everything I wanted. But on the way to nirvana, something weird happened: Mr. and Mrs. So-in-love discovered they didn’t much like each other.
My need for openness and validation had always been met by Darrell, Bruce, and numerous friends. Greg’s need was for privacy and solitude; his natural secretiveness had been intensified by his being an only child. We admired each other’s looks, style, and ambition, but not who we were: a moody charmer who kept many of his deepest feelings to himself and a talky prober bent on coaxing people to reveal what they’d stashed. The problem crystallized one afternoon during an out-of-the-blue quarrel that began as we unwrapped wedding presents. Our words were so explosive and our viewpoints so at odds, arguing was useless. Exhausted on the sofa, we looked at each other. A chilling thought filled the room: we’d made a mistake. Frozen in an awful clarity, we knew. The illusion of our being even a decent match evaporated.
We kept unwrapping. Greg and I were married. We loved each other. We were having a baby. We would make it work.
Boys, Big and Small
Hamani, Donna, and Darrell in their Detroit apartment, 1985.
Every fairy-tale princess awaits the love that will liberate her—from a flame-spouting dragon, a jealous stepmother, or a long, dreamless sleep. Real-life princesses—who toil in offices, work as cashiers at Safeway, and rush to get the kids before day care charges extra—also look to love for liberation. Their princes, too, will save them: by reminding them of their beauty, slaying their insecurities, making weary places inside them burst into song. But in real life, as in storybooks, few princesses seek to learn why their rescuers love them. They don’t ask themselves, Do I adore this savior for who he is, or just for showing up? Grateful for True Love’s arrival, a princess may not question the wisdom of linking her life to the stranger’s whose kiss has set her free. Like her prince, she never pauses to ask:
If I’m loved for the wrong reasons, can I have a happy ending?
Five months pregnant with my first child in 1981, I told Mom-Mommy I was considering telling friends and coworkers the good news. “Lord have mercy,” Mom-Mommy said. “We just got you down the aisle.” I laughed. Greg and I had met before Christmas, wed eight months later, and become parents the week after New Year’s. My wedding photos featured a woman who strongly resembled me except for the stripper-worthy cleavage bubbling out of her white gown, courtesy of the four-month-old fetus underneath it.
For once, even Melech approved of my choices. He’d abandoned his pseudo-pimp wardrobe and manner and was now in full religious-prophet mode. Appalled by my feminism, Melech suspected that my insistence that women have the same privileges as men had doomed me to life as a childless crone. Seeing my married-and-pregnant self, he smiled beneath his turban, patted my belly, and offered the loveliest compliment he could conjure: “You’re beautiful, now that you’re no longer a barren tree.” Whatever. Once an ultrasound revealed my child’s sex, I felt certain: my little boy would grow up to be the perfect black man.
My life, I’d decided, was a do-over. Creating a flawless new family would wipe away all that had gone terribly wrong with the first. Even before he was born, my baby would be given the best I could offer him.
Yet for weeks, I had the nagging feeling Greg and I weren’t married but playing house. He looked like the husband I’d wanted—attractive, elegant, bright. I looked and sounded like a woman who’d be right for him. But I couldn’t help wondering if what we cherished most in each other was what mattered in a marriage. Greg’s silences were as vital to him as my sharing, yet I resented them. And when we did talk? He listened politely as I explored emotions, spirituality, and people’s subterranean feelings. I stayed focused as he discussed sports, politics, current events. Our emotional styles were like different parts of the ocean: Greg’s natural habitat was the waveless tidal pool; mine the roiling, fathomless blue. Each has its beauty. Yet they seldom meet.
Before my concern could blossom into alarm, the man I’d worried might be a bit too enamored of the status quo startled me. The agent of my surprise: a forward-thinking doctor whom a less open-minded brother might have dismissed as a kook.
The perfect birth required a special doctor. Jewel Pookrum was a respected physician who’d trained at prestigious Henry Ford Hospital before rejecting Western medicine and starting an obstetrics practice as organic as Eden. On my first visit, Dr. Pookrum looked me in the eye and asked, “Do you plan to have your baby at home?” My blank stare reflected my unspoken thought: As opposed to the mall?
“Um, no,” I said. “At a hospital.” Whereupon Dr. Pookrum presented a half-dozen reasons why no sane woman would consider giving birth anywhere as filthy and intrusive as a hospital. Reporting back to Greg, I steeled myself for his derision. He asked to learn more. Dr. Pookrum directed us to persuasive books by holistic physicians and described the intensive nutritional and educational preparation we’d receive. Our home’s location, minutes from two hospitals, she assu
red, would protect us in an emergency. Despite Mom, who reacted as if we’d invited a blind Zulu witch doctor to deliver her grandchild in a cave, we decided to go for it.
My son Justin Hamani was born on sheets Greg had boiled and stretched over a sterile layer of newspapers in the brass bed we had conceived him in. He had his dad’s portal-to-heaven eyes. Perfect.
A week later, my newborn started crying nonstop. Only two things seemed to distract him from his sobs: being carried on his belly, airplane-style, and quaffing breast milk as lustily as Henry the Eighth attacked his flask.
The rest of the time, Mani cried. And cried more. Then he really started sobbing, his tiny body writhing, his purple face convulsed. “It’s only colic,” our pediatrician shrugged, which did nothing to calm me or the upstairs neighbor, who started banging on his floor with a frying pan during my son’s hourly wail-fests.
The intrusion of imperfection into my do-over world had the unexpected benefit of drawing Greg and me closer as we tried everything with Mani that a half-dozen counselors advised: swaddling, rocking, singing to him, slipping him whiskey, massaging his belly, begging for his pity. Only feeding him quieted him for long.
Mom—wary of any infant nourishment that wasn’t a canned, factory-concocted brew—helpfully offered, “Maybe something’s wrong with your milk.” But I knew the problem was more basic:
Something was wrong with me.
Not surprisingly, the stress, sleeplessness, and uncertainty arising from my baby’s torment caused submerged feelings of inadequacy to surface. I was to blame for my baby’s agony, despite having faithfully gulped Dr. Pookrum’s liquefied grass drinks, meditated daily, and exercised into my eighth month. Yet unlike Darrell, whom I’d failed through my inattention, my newborn had been given every benefit I could think of. And still I had failed him. Knowing nothing about postpartum depression, I asked and re-asked myself the obvious question: What’s the matter with me?
