by Donna Britt
After four months, Mani’s colic disappeared, just as the doctor had predicted. So I wasn’t to blame. My real problem, I began to realize, wasn’t my insufficiency but the fact that everything had moved so fast between Greg and me. With my new husband, home, and baby, I’d been too dazed, busy, and hormonal to consider: first-time motherhood is a thrill ride few women are prepared for.
With our household blissfully silent, a pleasing calm descended upon Greg and me. After surviving a quickie marriage, new parenthood, two moves, and colic, we’d found our footing as a contented couple. We were different but loved each other and our baby. We had jobs we enjoyed, supportive families, and a desire to build a life together. Mismatched couples made it with less. We’d heard that layoffs were imminent at GM, but assumed my husband’s close friendship with his boss would protect him.
It didn’t. Laid off, Greg looked for work but found nothing. Suddenly he was a proud man entirely supported by his wife. With too much time on his hands, my dispirited husband returned to his occasional drug use. Before long, it flared into something more sinister.
As Greg’s experimentation with cocaine morphed into an addiction, I was examining dependencies of my own. Stumbling upon Marilyn French’s seminal 1977 feminist novel, The Women’s Room, I devoured the book, and took my first hard look at my unquestioning giving to men. I pondered everything—encouragement, support, cash, advice, and, always, the benefit of the doubt—I’d offered my beaus, friends, brothers, and now husband.
Why, I seriously asked for the first time, did I offer so much? Women growing up in the 1950s and most of the 1960s were socialized to give, by society, by their families, and by every book, magazine, TV show, and movie they encountered. Did that explain my inborn desire to give? It couldn’t have been home training. In the Britt family, everyone had worked. Mom was a force to be reckoned with; nobody rivaled Daddy in the tireless toil department. But my father had been stingy with his soul. More and more, that was the first thing I offered all comers. Because I hated thinking about Darrell’s death, I never considered that it might have anything to do with my propensity. The best reasons I could come up with embarrassed me: I enjoyed giving. I remembered meals cooked for Daddy, artwork drawn for Darrell, the Green Hornet trading cards I’d bought for Bruce, the coats that I’d retrieved for my parents’ party guests. Giving gave me pleasure.
More unsettling was the suspicion that my ratcheted-up giving was inspired by wanting the men in my life—and the men I wanted in my life—to love and admire me. In some panicked place, I felt that if I didn’t give generously, they might not either.
French’s book shook me into seeing what the “perfect” wife I hoped to be was trying to ignore: The increasing absence of even shallow conversation between Greg and me. The frigidness of exchanges we couldn’t avoid. The questions I didn’t dare ask.
One evening, I arrived home from work to find that Greg was out. He’d had a job interview and mentioned he might stop for a drink at a local lounge. Leaving Mani with our teenage neighbor Nyasa, I headed to the pub. Entering, I let my eyes adjust to the dimness.
Directly before me, in a booth with friends, sat my husband. Stylish in his three-piece suit, he was engrossed in a conversation, throwing his head back with laughter. I noted how expertly he balanced his Newport in one hand, his cocktail in the other. Something about the cigarette (which he knew I despised), the gale-force gaiety, the oddly unfamiliar laughter of my husband of more than a year, made me ask: Who is this guy? Worn out from work and distrust, from denying that my husband was uninterested in everything I liked best about myself, I regarded this stranger. Greg looked like he had the night I met him: confident, worldly, dashing. And I wanted none of it.
The glamour before me had no relationship to our lives. Money was disappearing from our joint account at an alarming rate; Greg’s explanations were increasingly unconvincing. His uncommunicativeness, I’d told myself, arose from his frustration over his joblessness. I couldn’t hurt him by being too intrusive about money or his job search. Yet my patience was draining away; I could barely recall the love that dropped me to my knees when we were dating. Regarding this dapper man-about-town, my mind uttered a staggering truth: this man is not my husband.
This handsome stranger wasn’t “bad” or unattractive. He just had no authentic connection to the real me. I left without a word.
Just like that, I knew: I’d had it with my self-imposed blindness, with giving unconditionally to an out-of-work husband whose comings and goings were increasingly murky and for whom I—ever the troopless Girl Scout—provided the perfect cover. Week after week, I could barely breathe while paying our bills; watching our limited funds evaporate with no explanation sucked the air out of me. Guardedly, I told my coworker Marty, also a wife and mother, about the feelings French’s book was stirring. “That book made me so angry,” Marty said. “I had to keep putting it down.”
So did I. When your kid is tiny and your mate is disappearing before your eyes, when you’re neither brave nor self-preserving enough to say, “Something horrible is happening and it has to stop,” putting the book down seems a sensible option. I was a God-fearing black girl weaned on the Bible and Essence magazine. I knew the Loyal Sister Mantra by heart:
The black man is even more burdened by the white man’s hatred than you are. He needs your support. Yours has lost his job; you’re supporting him. Would you further emasculate him by leaving him, by separating him from the black male child he adores? He’s his daddy, even if he’s destroying himself.
As the sister, friend, daughter, and lover of brothers, I knew everything that deeply affects American men affects black men more harshly. Being human is wrenching for everyone. Yet the level of hostility and suspicion directed at black men is so palpable, their culturally inflicted wounds so raw, I understood how a decent brother might be drawn to anything that eased the pressure. My husband was a good man grappling with demons he wouldn’t acknowledge. I had to stay. Had to help him.
Despite knowing better, despite sensing that the man I’d married would never be my true husband, I put the book down. Eyes burning with “don’t bullshit me” intensity, I told Greg, “Tell me what’s going on.”
He was, he finally admitted, an addict. This was scary but honest, a step in the right direction. His defenses and bravado gone, he promised to get help. He meant it.
But my husband was an addict, a bright, likable guy in the thrall of one of the most addictive substances known to man. Despite his assurances, things went from bad to worse to god-awful. There was nothing special about the lies, evasions, and mounting financial losses I experienced as the wife of an addict. Greg, too, must have felt let down: by my impatience, by my rage, by the deliberate distance I kept from him in bed and everywhere else, by every subtle indication that I was girding myself to leave him.
Inching toward that inevitability was torturous. Four years earlier, I had spectacularly failed a good man who’d needed me. Now I was failing another whom I’d promised before God to love, honor, and cherish, in sickness and in health. I begged Greg to confess that he’d been sexually unfaithful, committed some sin that would meet God’s requirement for my leaving. “I haven’t,” Greg insisted, knowing he had me.
I knew that the drugs he was using, not to mention the people who sold them to him, could kill him. After Darrell, could I live with that? Underlying everything, a voice whispered, “No one has ever needed your generosity more.”
But I had nothing left. I felt my mind being made up.
Then I learned I was pregnant.
It was impossible. Pregnant by a man I barely was speaking to? Because I had no memory of the sex that must have occurred, I jokingly called my second son my “immaculate conception.” But the pregnancy didn’t feel like a joke. This inexplicable development had God’s fingerprints all over it. I knew what it meant: I couldn’t leave.
In August 1985, my son Darrell was born. As beautiful as his brother, my newborn almost never
cried, which did seem like a miracle. For more than a month after his birth, Greg was a changed man. Gone was the snarling brooder who vanished for unexplained reasons. My husband was happy, helpful, engaged in family life and in finding work. He played with his sons. He and I talked, planned, and—unbelievably—laughed together.
Hopeful, warily, I reached out to him again, in small, just-testing ways: Fixing his favorite dishes. Offering my hand for holding. Nestling into the curve of his body as his arms wrapped around me at night. As my maternity leave lengthened, I warmed to the notion of even trusting him again. Daring to think we may have weathered the worst, I asked what had shifted. “I’m not sure,” Greg said. “I’m just different.”
I had scheduled a train trip to Media with Mani and Darrell to introduce Mom-Mommy to her new great-grandson. Wary of leaving when things were going so well, I confessed my concerns to Greg; he assured me he’d be fine. Still, I bundled my checkbook, ATM card, and diamond engagement ring into a paper bag and thrust it into Bruce’s hands. Consumed by anxiety, and distracted by my two small kids, I feared I might lose them. And I couldn’t risk leaving them with Greg.
Each day I was away, my husband phoned to reassure me all was well. Returning home, I learned two things: My bank account had been emptied, courtesy of a forgotten ATM card buried in my jewelry box, which my drug-craving husband had located. More astonishingly, Greg had smoked his Cutlass, literally trading our one source of transportation for a high. My despair was so acute that when Bruce returned my paper bag, I distractedly removed the ATM card and checkbook and tossed the bag in the garbage. It was days before I realized I’d trashed the tiny oval diamond I’d bought myself through monthly payments Greg had promised to repay. Mortified, I borrowed $800 rent money from a sweet male coworker whose eyes counseled, Leave him. My marriage, I told him, was over, but how could I leave? I had no money. Where would my boys and I live? What would happen to Greg?
A few days later, my work phone rang. It was Joe Urschel, a former Free Press coworker whose writer wife, Donna, was a close friend. The Urschels had moved to the nation’s capital when Joe was named managing editor of the “Life” section at USA Today, the colorful new daily that was revolutionizing newspapers. “I’d like you to work for me,” Joe said. “As a writer or an editor, whichever you like. When can you fly in for an interview?”
My retreat from Detroit in 1986 for Washington, D.C., was as speedy as a battle-weary woman could have wished. My coworkers threw me a lovely good-bye party, at which Greg looked so poised that Helen Fogel, a friend who knew every detail of our saga, pulled me aside in alarm. “Is Greg coming with you to Virginia?” she asked. She’d overheard him telling someone that he’d be joining us in Alexandria, where I’d found a town house. The ease with which he said it made her believe it.
Whatever. I flew with my boys to Virginia, settled in, and for the first time in months felt free—breathing my own air, responsible only for my sons and me. I waited for guilt to consume me for having left my husband at his life’s toughest juncture. It never came. I recalled how, at the height of the madness, I’d confessed to Greg that my distress was so intense, I feared becoming seriously ill. “If you get sick, I’m not going to blame myself,” he’d said. I could shrug, too.
In the months to come, Greg would hit rock bottom, move back to St. Louis, and kick drugs for good. I admired him; several of his friends would struggle for years to free themselves from the “nonaddictive” poison that had decimated their lives.
But my focus was entirely on my sons. Darrell was five months old; Mani had just turned four. Raising them alone was something I’d never planned. My worries were every single mother’s: money, child care, discipline, my own capabilities. What if my generous nature made me give them too much? Some nights, I even lay awake wondering if grabbing the life preserver of USA Today had been a mistake. I’d read a dozen books about black boys’ need for male role models; I’d kicked my sons’ loving father to the curb.
Always, there was the subconscious lesson of my brother. For eight years, I’d pushed memories of Darrell deep enough to shush them. But forgetting as a survival tactic exacerbated my sense of having betrayed him. Darrell had shown me how dangerous the world was for black men. Now I’d let another significant brother be consumed by it. Could I teach my sons to successfully negotiate such a minefield alone?
All of this was on my mind when I phoned a local Montessori preschool as a possible choice for Hamani. Everything about the soothing female voice on the other line suggested the school was top-notch. Warm and wise, the voice felt like a much-needed balm as it rubbed the wonders of the school’s curriculum and class size into my consciousness. Then I asked, “How many black students do you have? I wouldn’t want Hamani to be alone.”
The babbling brook of a voice sputtered, then stopped as abruptly as a turned-off faucet. Its owner could hardly believe her mistake. She was speaking to one of them? Recovering, the voice smoothed itself out. “Is your son… nice?” it asked. “We’ve had some problems with some of our black boys.” Panicked—we’re not like the bad ones!—I was poised to assure the administrator of my son’s sweetness when two questions screeched me to a halt: This school hasn’t had “problems” with white four-year-olds? Is this what my beautiful little boy will face?
By the time we finished chatting, the voice’s concerns seemed allayed. Invited to set up a time to visit the school, I never called back. But I couldn’t shake what the voice’s words portended. The question it raised was never far from consciousness:
Who was I to try to raise two black boys alone in a world poised to reject them?
Perfect
Donna and Kevin, 1990.
Mesmerized, I’m watching the driveway basketball court where my sons, three and six, play hoops. But today three ballers are weaving, tossing, leaping beneath the basket: my boys, their high voices screeching with excitement, and the man whose baritone encourages them. Black boys and backyard hoops I know by heart: Darrell and his friends trash-talking; Melech-once-Steve hacking his way past every opponent; me serving lemon Kool-Aid, though I’m the one drinking in the moves, the competition, the joy. Seeing this man play hoops with my kids plays havoc with my heart. Note to self: buy lemonade.
It happened one sunny afternoon in 1988, two years after I’d left Detroit. I hadn’t abandoned my dream of raising perfect sons. But the demands of single motherhood were so overwhelming, the only thing I envisioned doing perfectly was qualifying for institutionalization.
But on that bright day, something so amazing happened that I forgot that I’d been expecting it my whole life: I found the perfect black man.
As challenging as my life as a single mom was, I felt a new equanimity permeate my life. I loved my babysitter Tonya, and I enjoyed working as an editor of the “Life” section at USA Today, whose newsroom in a gleaming high-rise overlooking the Potomac seemed totally unrelated to the grit-and-grime of daily journalism. I’d never been an editor. But when Joe offered me a choice between writing and editing, I couldn’t imagine crafting nuanced prose at a paper whose every sentence seemed to beg for an exclamation point. My brilliant boss, Linda Kauss, and talented staff soon schooled me on the expertise required to write informative, engaging stories in a quarter of the space “real” papers used.
A year after I arrived at USAT, Joe Urschel called me into his office and asked, “Are you happy here?” Refraining from blurting that my gratitude for having escaped Detroit was such that I would have daily polished his loafers, I said, “Yes.” With a crafty-cat grin, Joe asked, “If you could do anything here, what would you do?”
Wary—was this a trick?—I reiterated that I really liked my job. Undeterred, Joe asked, “But if you could design any job for yourself here—anything at all—what would it be?”
What the hell. “Okay, I miss writing,” I began. “So I’d be a writer again. Features… or maybe movie reviews; I used to love that.” Then I froze. “But if I was a writer, “Life” woul
dn’t have any black managers… so there’d be a management aspect.”
Joe’s feline grin widened. “So where would this job be?”
“In L.A.,” I said without hesitating. Bruce had just taken a job as music writer at the Los Angeles Daily News. I missed him. “I’d love covering Hollywood.”
Still smiling, Joe said, “Okay, thanks,” turning his attention to papers on his desk. I returned to my desk, deflated after the high of fashioning my perfect job.
Two weeks later, I was back in Joe’s office. The grin was back. “In three weeks, we’ll have an opening for a Los Angeles bureau chief,” he said. “We’d like whoever takes the job to write entertainment features and be our backup movie critic. Are you interested?”
That was the moment I learned the magic of saying what you want aloud.
I was on my way to Los Angeles.
A year later, I’d adjusted to the Los Angeles sledgehammer sun and taught Mani and Darrell how to stand under doorways with pillows over their heads during earthquakes (the Whittier Narrows quake hit during our first week in town). I’d had a blast interviewing such disparate celebs as Kevin Costner (flirty), Pee-wee Herman (cagey), Barry Manilow (engaging), and Don Johnson (resplendent). Feeling that I’d earned a week away, I left my sons and new home to attend the National Association of Black Journalists’ meeting.
The annual conference was my brief yearly shot at confabbing with my peers and pretending to be the unfettered young thing I no longer was. On the second night, I met up with Jeanne, the Detroit friend who’d introduced me to Greg and who was now a recruiter for the Washington Post. She’d married Larry, the guy I’d acquainted her with at that fateful party. Now we were both mothers of two, briefly emancipated from family, and headed to a riverboat soiree.
