by Janet Mock
Those streetlamps are the last things I remember about the yellow house on the hill, the one shrouded by trees, the one Dad, Chad, and I ran away from a few months after Derek returned home on crutches. In early 1994, in the middle of the night, we boarded a Greyhound bus to Dallas, Texas, Dad’s hometown. He refused to let us say good-bye to Janine, fearful that she’d guilt him into staying. Dad cut people off quickly, moving on from relationships with little care or accountability. I don’t know what became of Derek or the kids on my block like Junior, and I was sad to hear from my father only a few years ago that Janine passed “a while back” from kidney complications after years of dialysis. Dad didn’t make the three-hour drive to attend her funeral in Houston, where she had relocated a few years after we left Oakland.
He later told me that running away was the only way he felt he’d get out of Oakland alive. He was running away from the violence that was so close to home and the pipe that was his constant companion. Dad called our bus ride “an adventure,” one where he played spades with Chad and we ate all the barbecue-flavor Corn Nuts we wanted, stinking up the bus.
Sitting on my knees, I followed the lines on the highway as we rode for thirty-six hours from Oakland to Los Angeles and Phoenix to El Paso and finally Dallas, where the city was in a joyous uproar over the Cowboys’ back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 1993 and 1994.
Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ home in a suburb of Dallas, the same neighborhood where Dad and his four younger siblings came of age, was a day of food, family, and football. Grandma Shellie ruled the ranch-style house. She had dark, reflective skin, constantly glowing alongside sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes and full red lips. Her most defining feature was her elegant, slender hands, which she put to work as a seamstress for fashion designer Todd Oldham. I remember sitting quietly in her garage as she worked among racks of garments in plastic bags. The only sounds were the needle and thread meeting the fabrics and the machine’s humming motor, a steady music of labor. Grandpa Charlie was also constantly at work, spending his nights on the highways as a cross-country truck driver.
Despite Grandpa’s absence, Grandma’s house was filled with family. I played hide-and-seek and tag with a gaggle of cousins, all a few years apart from one another. Each of Dad’s four siblings had one or two kids, except for my perpetually single Uncle Bernard, who was Dad’s shadow and even lived with my parents for a bit when they were in Long Beach.
There were too many Mocks in Dallas for me to ever feel alone. Even when the sound of questions regarding my identity began ringing louder in my head, I rarely had room to reflect because the sound of family was overwhelming. Grandma’s metal pots and pans clacking; Dad and Uncle Bernard and Uncle Ricky’s cheers for the Cowboys; Auntie Linda Gail’s mouth-smacking gossip and Auntie Joyce’s soothing mhmms; my cousins’ yelps from the backyard; Sadie, the family’s slate-gray pit bull, barking at the applause from the house as her chain collar rubbed against the metal back gate; the white-noise gurgling of the crawfish pond outside Grandma’s property line.
Grandma Shellie prepped dinner before Sunday service, and her house filled up with people and good food afterward. Dad scoffed at church and rarely attended. He said church was two hours too long and all arrogance, and that he didn’t need a minister serving as his medium to God; he could speak to God whenever he wanted. He apparently spoke to him every day, with a can of beer in one hand and a Newport in the other. It was one of the many things Grandma and Dad disagreed on, including suffering and hard work being the prerequisite of living a good life, as Grandma often said.
“Mama, don’t tell my babies that,” Dad once rebutted Grandma. “That ain’t true.”
“Babies, that’s why your daddy ain’t got shit,” she said, serving Chad and me unfiltered truth about the ways of life.
I was enamored by my grandmother and lurked around her kitchen, where the Mock women—Grandma, Auntie Linda Gail, and Auntie Joyce—gathered. I eavesdropped on them discussing grown folks’ business, about the way Ms. Cindy, Auntie Linda Gail’s neighbor, had been asking after Dad. It was all the more scandalous because she had just split from the father of one of her three sons, and Dad quickly filled the vacancy, secretly staying nights at Cindy’s.
“Now, he ain’t got no business to be sneakin’ at his age,” Grandma said from the stove, where she stirred two pots of gumbo. (She always made one without shrimp because Uncle Ricky and I were allergic to shellfish.)
Auntie Joyce, whom we lovingly called Wee Wee (her childhood nickname), nodded and mhmmed in agreement, her eyes looking through the glass cup, where she was measuring vegetable oil for a chocolate box cake.
“Well, that ain’t nothing,” Auntie Linda Gail clucked as she tore her long, curved acrylic nails through stems of collard greens she was washing over the sink. “When I asked Cindy about it, she had the nerve to tell me that it was none of my business. I ’bout bopped her on her head.”
I had to do everything in my power not to laugh with them. I silently soaked them up like a biscuit to honey butter. Then Auntie Wee Wee, with her large eyes and tall, slender frame and sweet smile, winked at me and said, “Come help me out, baby.” Making the chocolate cake gave me entry to graduate from eavesdropping to being one of the girls. Auntie Wee Wee whipped the batter with a wooden spoon as I greased the pan with a stick of butter. She beat the mix for a couple of minutes before pouring the brown gooey sweetness into the round cake pan. I placed it in the oven and watched it bake under the light’s glow while licking the bowl quietly as they continued talking.
This is womanhood, I thought, watching the women in Dad’s life cook and cackle in the kitchen. Auntie Linda Gail had two sons and paid her bills with the help of welfare but stayed fly in the projects by doing hair out of her kitchen. She rocked an asymmetrical haircut, with a long, honey-blond weave bang that sat prettily over her left eye. She had more style than any woman I have seen in my entire life, the epitome of ghetto fabulous before there was such a thing. Auntie Wee Wee, on the other hand, chose an effortless approach to beauty. She wore small silver hoop earrings and black shoulder-length hair that she tied back in a ponytail. Her large eyes were usually rimmed with a stroke of black liner, and her lips were perpetually painted plum.
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like intersectionality and equality, oppression, and discrimination. They didn’t discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
Witnessing these women, albeit in the bits and pieces and slices that I was lucky to observe, contributed greatly to my womanhood. Collectively, they made the demure secretary I had said I wanted to be in the second grade look like a caricature. They elevated my possibilities of being someone more powerful. They were pleasure-seeking, resourceful, sexy, rhythmic, nurturing, fly, happy, stylish, rambunctious, gossipy, feeling, hurt, unapologetic women. They were the kind of women I wanted to be.
With my hands properly sticky and my cake in the oven, I walked into the living room and began to chant, “Wait till you taste my cake! Wait till you taste my cake! You’re gonna love my cake. Wait till you taste my cake!” Legend says I punctuated this freestyle rap with the Cabbage Patch dance. I adamantly deny ever doing the Cabbage Patch.
Twenty minutes later, the smell of something burning cut the air. I heard the oven slam and Grandma grunt, “Sheeeiiit!” I ran into the kitchen and saw my charred cake in Grandma’s oven-mitted hands. She had set the oven on broil rather than bake.
Dad, who seemed to have ignored my cooking (partly because the Cowboys were on, partly because he didn’t want to berate me for baking), came into the kitchen. He saw the burnt cake and my head bowed and—like anyone with impeccable comedic timing and an insatiable appetite to be the center of attention—sang, “Wait till you taste my cake . . . You’re gonna love my cake . . . Wa
it till you taste my cake.” He mocked my rap by improvising the Cabbage Patch. My cousins soon joined in. They were the chorus that created the “Wait Till You Taste My Cake” family legend.
I was sensitive and easily wounded in the presence of Grandma and my aunts. I tearfully ran into the guest bedroom, the one where we stayed during our first few months in Dallas, while Dad cleaned himself up. I sank my face in the nearly flat pillows and cursed him. Seeing him do that song and dance of my own creation made me reflect on myself. I had seen my eerie similarities with my father. He was proud and selfish and wanted to be the center of attention. I was also those things, half formed. I yearned to be seen and appreciated but had done nothing notable. Being chosen to help with the cake had made me feel special, and I wanted everyone to see that I mattered. The chaos came to a halt when Aunty Wee Wee spoke.
“Toosie,” Aunty Wee Wee said, using Dad’s nickname (he was Grandpa Charlie’s namesake, the second Charlie in the Mock family, hence Two C, or Toosie). “Leave him be.”
When she came in the room, Aunty Wee Wee said we could buy another cake and do it right this time. She offered the kind of coddling I craved. She let me be soft and never forced me to be anything other than who I was. My aunts and grandmother were the iridescent cellophane I needed, another layer of protection and care that complemented Dad’s shiny foil—the kind of protection that often cut.
A few Sundays later, we left Grandma’s house and began spending our nights at Cindy’s, which was across the hall from Auntie Linda Gail’s. Cindy was rail-thin but no one could stop her from flaunting her size-zero frame and stick legs in cutoff shorts and miniskirts. Her boys were just as frail, with matching buckteeth. Two of them regularly peed the bed, even though they were around our age. What disturbed me wasn’t that they peed the bed but the fact that their family grew accustomed to the urine smell. I remember getting my head smacked for pointing the stench out to Dad our first night there. Fortunately, Chad and I couldn’t sleep in the crowded urine room, so we gladly shared the plastic-covered living room sofa, sleeping foot to head during our time there.
I settled into fourth grade in Dallas at the first of many uninspiring schools there. We were enrolled and transferred according to Dad’s love life. Cindy was the first in a long line of girlfriends we shacked up with in Dallas. Dad went after women with children, single moms who felt lucky to call Toosie theirs, even though he had no job, was raising two kids, and was rarely faithful.
After Cindy came Teeny, Diamond, Sandra, and finally Denise, who became Dad’s longest live-in girlfriend in Dallas. Denise loved to party and drink beer just as much as Dad, which I believe sustained their relationship. Denise had the freedom to be a good-time girl because her children were way past puberty. Anthony, Denise’s eldest, didn’t live in the two-bedroom apartment we shared with Makayla, sixteen, and Kevin, fourteen, with whom Chad and I shared a room. Makayla slept in the living room, the hall closet being her only private area in the apartment.
Makayla was the first young woman who made an imprint on me. Her vibrant, fabulous presence, her endless string of cute outfits, and her bouncy press-and-curl impressed me. She had a petite figure with a pop of booty. She was just as brown as I was, with lips that looked permanently puckered and soft features that needed only a wad of mascara and some lip gloss. Makayla knew she was cute and boasted about her “I Got It Going On-ness.” She was sweet on me, letting me hang around with her in the living room as she talked on the phone and got ready for the mall.
I watched in awe when she treated boys as if they were entertainment, toys she returned to their shelf when she grew tired of them. When Makayla was over a guy, my job was to get rid of him for her over the phone. I’d lie that she wasn’t home, but one day when she actually wasn’t home, I stretched the lie a bit further, creating an imaginary friend who proudly took Makayla’s sloppy seconds. If Makayla didn’t want these guys, I wanted to have fun with them.
“Makayla told me you were calling,” I said to a guy named Alan.
“Who is this?”
“Keisha,” I said as effortlessly as breathing.
I liked any girl name that ended in a prolonged ahhh: Makayla, Alicia, Aaliyah, Keisha. It sounded elegant and unique. In my sketches of Keisha, she was cute, curly, and flirty, the kind of girl Makayla would hang out with at the mall. In the guise of my alter ego, I daydreamed out loud about my life as a girl. I told Alan stories about my girlfriends at school, about trying out for the dance squad, about buying a new outfit at the mall, about the guys who asked for my number in the food court. I let myself inhabit the life of the teenage girl I yearned to be. Talking on the phone was my first bit of storytelling, and Keisha was my heroine.
I spoke to Alan and maybe three other guys over those months, rotating calls and conversations. Alan was my only steady, the guy I’d talk to at least once a day. He had been to our apartment complex before to hang with Makayla. She told me she didn’t like him because he gave her a weird vibe. “Like he wanted to kiss me or hold my hand, but instead of doing it, he would just stare at my lips or my hand while I talked,” she said. “Creepy.”
I found his lack of courage sweet, but I knew nothing about dating. I was only eleven. Alan and Keisha were a good match, though. He was the only guy who didn’t get antsy about meeting up. It was as if he were more comfortable talking on the phone than in person. After a few weeks of talking every day, I began looking forward to the bell ringing at school at three P.M. so I could run home and chat with Alan. We’d talk for half-hour intervals. Everyone assumed that I was talking to my best friend, Veronica, a chunky girl with oily shoulder-length hair that stuck to her head like a helmet. She always wore one piece of clothing that was purple. That’s why jerks at school called her Barney in the hallways. We bonded over the snickers, though, and Veronica was the only one who knew I had a phone boyfriend and engaged with Keisha.
With her friendship, Keisha felt more and more real to me. So real that I agreed to meet Alan at the playground across the street from Veronica’s apartment, the same spot where I would meet her in the mornings to catch the school bus. In Veronica’s room, I swapped my Cowboys starter jacket for one of her purple sweaters and plum barrettes. Being a girl was simple in my preadolescent mind, just a change of clothes and accessories.
My heart was beating fast as we approached the playground together, Veronica’s round figure shielding me from Alan’s view. He sat on the top of a park bench, his long legs hanging over the tabletop; stretching to a height that would make him six feet tall. As we got closer, I saw peach fuzz over his full lips and dark brown eyes under a baseball cap. He smiled as Veronica and I walked side by side past him. He was taller, cuter, and manlier than I had expected. Seeing him sitting on that bench, I realized I was in over my head.
I didn’t approach Alan because I was scared he’d find out the truth and Keisha would be dismissed as a fraud. She was no longer imaginary to me; she was the most authentic thing about me. I don’t know if Alan knew that the girl with the plum barrette and purple sweater pretending to be fourteen, pretending she was woman enough, was Keisha. I avoided his calls by deepening my voice when I answered the phone. I said Keisha wasn’t there, like I had done for Makayla just months before. Alan eventually stopped calling, and I became bored of being a girl on the phone.
• • •
“Ooohhh, I couldn’t stand your little ass,” Dad recently admitted with a chuckle while we spoke on the phone. I could almost see him shrugging as he laughed about it.
In my late twenties, I began having these raw, revelatory conversations with my father, the kind a person can have only when they accept the faults, flaws, and fierceness of the people who happened to wrong them when trying to do right. Dad never used a filter in his conversations with me, regardless of my age. He never dumbed down his message or softened his language. “You know your dad,” he’d say after what some would take as a controversial statement, such as admitting that he couldn’t stand me.
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In my half-remembered, wounded memories, my private soap operas involving Dad, I was the victim: the helpless child who had to follow him wherever his heart and dick said we were going; the one who had to hide who I was and listen to lectures on why I shouldn’t play so much with girls; the one who was forced to play “Smear the Queer” with Chad and his roughhousing pals.
“Aww, baby, you almost made it all the way. Remember?” Dad said, taking us back to that courtyard with the patchwork of grass and brown dirt.
I see myself at eleven, all limp wrists and swaying hips, running around with my cousin Mechelle, Auntie Wee Wee’s only child, as Chad, all dirt and scraped knees, sprinted with the boys at Auntie Linda Gail’s. The tangy taste of Now and Laters in supersize pickles and chili-topped bags of Fritos filled those Saturdays, the same ones Auntie Linda Gail, Uncle Bernard, and Dad enjoyed with weed and beer. They were an inseparable trio who loved to party and shit-talk. A sober Auntie Wee Wee was there, too, high on the company of her siblings.
Chad was the Queer in Smear the Queer, a childhood game of tag in which whoever carried the object (in this case the football) was “it” and would need to be tackled. “Sheeit, that’s my boy!” Dad, with a bottle of Colt 45 in his hand, cheered from the stairwell overlooking the courtyard.
I watched from the sidelines, half interested in the game as Mechelle showed off the sassy moves and anthems she’d learned at cheer practice. Chad was quick, but he couldn’t outrun his crowd of pursuers, who tackled him in the “safe zone.” I watched him stand up, brush the dirt off his shirt, and walk away with such humble swagger. The next thing I knew, Dad was beside me, pulling me by the T-shirt and throwing me into the crowd with Chad and his friends. I could smell the beer on his breath even though he didn’t say a word to me. “You didn’t want to play,” he later reflected. “But I didn’t know any better.”
Chad handed me the football because, as the new kid, I was being initiated as the Queer. “Do you even know how to play?” one of the boys said, laughing.
