Looking back, though, I can see that there may have been some signs of trouble. When I visited my dad, he noticed that I didn’t play with my toys. Instead, I used other, bigger toys and objects I found around the house to destroy them. I used all my strength to rip my action figures apart, limb from limb. I snapped my dad’s high school basketball trophies in half, smashed my toy trucks into LEGO towers, and rammed them into the wall until various parts fell off. Once, I even found a sledgehammer in the closet and smashed my toy cash register with it over and over until my dad ran over and took away the hammer. No one ever asked why I was doing this, but I remember it feeling almost cathartic, a way of letting out the anger and frustration I’d tucked away.
After my mom threatened to send me to Afghanistan, I did finally confide in my grandmother. I was too afraid to tell her everything, but I talked to her about my mom’s paranoia. I told Lola that I loved my mom, that it made me feel good to see her happy—laughing and smiling—but most of the time she was either really angry or really sad. Though I felt powerless to help my mom, I also felt that I would have been a better son if I could make her life easier. A better son would have given his mother fewer reasons to be mad at him and more reasons to be proud of him. This desire to help, to do more, and to be of greater value stuck with me but would later factor into the worst mistake I’ve ever made.
After I talked to Lola, she encouraged my mom to check herself into a psychiatric hospital, and for four blessed months I was free. I stayed with Lola and Papa and visited my mom in the hospital once a week. Lola explained to me that my mother was going through a hard time and that she was getting help so that she could be there for me.
Every time I walked into my mom’s hospital room, her face crumbled. “Come here, Zachary,” she said, her eyes filling with tears as she reached forward to give me a big hug. After asking me about school and what I’d been up to, she veered into a strange conversation about an old man in the hospital named Silas who always asked her to buy him ice cream and why she thought the government wanted to turn her into a lesbian.
Back at Lola and Papa’s house, books became my refuge. The only thing I didn’t like about staying there was that I had to go to bed earlier than I did with my mom, so I hid a flashlight under my covers and stayed up reading after Lola thought I was asleep. In the basement, I found a collection of slim volumes about black historical figures. There were biographies about the inventor Garrett Morgan, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, W. E. B. DuBois, and so many more. There were about forty of these books in all. I spent an entire weekend down in the basement reading them, fascinated to imagine what life must have been like for these people, and all that had transpired since the time when they were alive for things to get to the way they were now.
“What are you doing down there?” Lola asked when she called me upstairs to eat.
“Just playing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I quickly finished my meal so that I could get back to the books.
But later that night, I couldn’t sleep. Something I’d read in the book about Frederick Douglass was bothering me. When Papa came into my room to check on me, I asked, “Why weren’t slaves allowed to read?” I had just discovered the way that reading expanded my mind. The idea that it had been illegal for an entire group of people to do so was unfathomable to me.
Papa sat quietly at the foot of my bed for a moment. He had a deep, booming voice, and when he spoke, he did so slowly and deliberately. “Z-Man,” he finally said, using one of his nicknames for me, “this country has never been ready for a black man with too much power.” He paused before continuing. “The two worst things you can be in this world are black and poor.”
At that point, I’d overheard enough grown-up conversations and news reports to know what racism was. Reading about the historical black figures had given me a greater understanding of how African Americans had been disenfranchised throughout history. But this was the first time that someone I cared about and trusted told me point-blank how unfortunate a position I had been born into. It was even more revealing that he was equating the ability to read with power. In those two sentences, Papa had managed to say so much. While we weren’t exactly poor—my dad always paid his child support, and Lola and Papa were solidly middle-class—it was clear to me that I didn’t have the same types of advantages as someone who’d simply been born into a different situation.
That night I went to sleep thinking about the many obstacles that went along with being black and struggling financially in America. The next morning at breakfast, I told Lola that I wanted to be like Martin Luther King Jr. one day—someone people could look up to and depend on.
Maybe a week later I was on the carpet at school during playtime when I asked the little blond girl next to me if I could share her toy. “No,” she told me stubbornly, “it’s mine.” We had a small childish argument over the toy before she turned to me and taunted, “At least my grandparents weren’t slaves.”
I was shocked, and I immediately thought back to what Papa had told me just a few days before. He was right, I realized. Slaves were the epitome of being black and poor, and here I was, a direct descendant. I thought about all forty of those books I had read, spanning the past two centuries. So much had transpired and yet so little had actually changed. I was free. I was allegedly equal. And yet this little girl still felt that she had power over me. There I was: still black, maybe not poor, but still disadvantaged—still the two very worst things that I could be.
As my love of books took off, so did my reading level. Papa gave me a pocket dictionary to use while I was reading, and every time I encountered a new word, I stopped and looked it up. I was still in first grade, but I was reading at a fifth-grade level. The older kids were in a separate building at the school, so I had to put on my coat and leave my class to go over there each day for reading.
The public school I went to wasn’t the worst in Detroit, but it wasn’t great, either. We didn’t have a library at the school, and most of the kids didn’t have access to books at home, as I did. It was obvious that many of the other kids there were bright, but they had a lot of problems at home. They often came to school without having eaten and wearing the same dirty clothes from the day before. Those kids would routinely get into fights and would occasionally pick on me for being a good student. My teachers worked hard, but they always seemed exhausted. They discouraged us from asking questions and probing different subjects. It was obvious to me even at that young age that they just wanted to get through the day and go home.
Every time one of my teachers rushed through a lesson or ignored one of my questions, I thought back to what Papa had told me. Most of the kids in my school were black. Yes, we were being taught to read, but we still weren’t being taught to think critically or creatively or in any way that would allow us to expand our minds. We were not being given too much power.
After four months, my mom was released from the hospital. She sat me down and told me in a sweet baby voice, “Zachary, honey, Mommy has something called bipolar disorder. It means that how I’m feeling will change, and I don’t have control over it. I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow or next week, but just know that I love you more than a monkey loves bananas.” She leaned forward and pinched my cheeks, and then her voice grew serious. “I’m going to take my medicine, and I’m going to get better, Zachary,” she told me. As I listened to her, I was convinced she meant every word, and I have no doubt that, in that moment, she did. But her behavior had always been unpredictable; the idea that her mind was sick and that she had little control over it was scary and very sad to me.
After that, my mom did stop thinking the government was after her, but everything else went back to our broken version of normal. Some days were filled with terror while others were nonstop fun. When she wasn’t angry or seeking thrills, she was usually very depressed and would lie in bed crying, asking me repeatedly if I lo
ved her. I always said yes, even if I was still upset over how she’d treated me the day before. But if I had those moments to do over again, I’d put my emotions aside, give her a hug and a kiss, and try to show more affection.
Most of the time, I was pretty sure she wasn’t taking her meds. One day, a few weeks after she got home, I asked her if she’d taken her medicine, as she’d promised. “Zachary, I wiped your black ass when you were little,” she told me angrily. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do.”
Despite what she said, not long after that I began to gain a better understanding of how much control my mom actually did have over some of her behavior. She could stop in the middle of one of her rants, pick up the phone, and thoroughly impress whomever she was speaking to, only to resume yelling the minute she hung up. She would also pull me aside and say, “Watch me fuck with Kevin. I’m gonna get him,” and then she would proceed to tell him what a huge disappointment he was, verbally emasculating him until he was literally in tears. Seeing Kevin cry proved to me how difficult life with my mom could be. I already knew that my mom’s behavior wasn’t normal—and now I had a name for it, bipolar—but it was shocking to see her deliberately reduce a grown man to tears.
This made it even harder for me to receive my mom’s love, to reciprocate her affection, or even to entertain the idea of having fun with her like I did when I was little. We still had a lot of fun together sometimes, but I didn’t look forward to spending time with her as much as I used to. I usually wanted to stay in my room, away from her, and read or play video games. She was fine with my love of books, but only if it didn’t detract from the attention I paid to her. If I spent an hour in my room reading, I had to spend an hour cuddling on the couch with her. Most of the time, I played along to avoid upsetting her—to keep the peace for as long as I could.
But my mom did a lot of good things for me, too. And I know full well that I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. She was determined to teach me from a very young age how to present myself well and win people over. She would spend hours coaching me on how to shake someone’s hand, introduce myself, look people in the eyes, and hold a conversation. I’d often practice on Lola or Kevin as my mom critiqued my performance. Pretty soon, most people I met immediately commented on what a firm handshake I had and how well-spoken I was. My mom loved getting these compliments and beamed with pride. But on the occasions when I failed to deliver in some small way, I was punished for it later.
During this time, I didn’t see my dad as often as he or I would have liked because he was so far away in DC. My mom wasn’t about to spend her time driving me down there to see him, and I was too young to fly alone. (Plus it was too expensive.) My dad made the nine-hour drive to see me as often as he could, usually at least once every few months. He’d leave DC right after he got off from work and drive all night, arriving exhausted in the morning to find me excited to see him and full of energy.
“Dad! What are we going to do today?” I’d ask him. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how hard this must have been on him. He never let on. Instead of insisting on resting for a bit, he always gathered his energy and took me out to eat or wherever I most wanted to go.
During the summers, I often went to DC to stay with him for a month or even longer. Although my mom would never drive me all the way down to DC, she did let me spend some of each summer with my dad. The summer when I was eight, I went for a special visit. My sister, Nicole, was born. My dad had been dating her mom, Brenda, for a while, and now that they had a child, they moved in together to an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.
I was so excited to have a sister and to see her for the first time. I wanted to hold her and take care of her, but my dad explained how fragile babies are. He placed Nicole in my arms with his hands securely over her, and I marveled at her tiny features, thrilled to be biologically connected to this pure, brand-new human.
When I wasn’t playing with the baby, I spent time reading and playing basketball with my dad. I loved being with him, and I always struggled with the idea that my mom so desperately wanted me to hate him. That was just impossible for me. He was the best father I could have asked for. I could tell him anything, but the one thing I couldn’t talk to him about was my mom. One day we were playing basketball at a nearby park when I tried to broach the subject. “Mom gets really mad sometimes,” I said.
My dad just shook his head. “Your mom loves you,” he told me as he shot the ball, easily swishing it through the net. “She just doesn’t know how to express it.” I didn’t respond. A huge part of me wished that my dad would intuit what I was going through and do something to change it, but it was clear from his demeanor that this conversation was over. And I was too afraid to offer any more detail on my own.
When I got back home to Detroit, my mom insisted on hearing every detail of my visit—what we did, what we ate, every word my dad said. But mostly, she wanted to talk about Brenda. I stood in our living room as she leaned back in her chair and grilled me. “What does her face look like?” she asked me. “What about her hair?”
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said uncomfortably. At the age of eight, my descriptive powers weren’t all that well developed. Plus, I had a feeling that there was no correct way to answer these questions.
“Zachary, I asked you what she looked like,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “You answer me, boy, or I’ll take off my belt. Don’t make me have to ask you again. I’ll knock your goddamn head through the back window.”
Nervously, I searched my mind for a way to describe Brenda to my mom. We’d recently watched a Jennifer Lopez movie together, and there might have been a slight resemblance between her and Brenda. “She kinda looks like Jennifer Lopez,” I said. And she didn’t even really look like Lopez, but I knew who Jennifer Lopez was from watching Maid in Manhattan, and so hers was the first woman’s name I thought of. Not that Brenda wasn’t attractive, but she wasn’t Puerto Rican and didn’t have straight hair. She actually looks more like Nia Long. That didn’t matter, though. Before I even finished my sentence, I realized that I had said the wrong thing. My mother put down her cigarette and leaned forward in her chair. “You think she’s more attractive than me,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. “You’re ashamed of me.”
This was the beginning of a three-hour rant about how Brenda was a nasty, dirty-ass ho, my father wasn’t a real man, and I was an ungrateful little punk-ass nigga. I just stood there as still as I could, trying my best to maintain eye contact with her the entire time. Every time my posture slumped or my gaze wavered, she threatened to hit me or have Kevin lay his hands on me.
When my mom finally released me, I went to my room. I was so angry and scared that I was shaking, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry. At times like these, I turned to the books in my closet. There was one about the Supreme Court that I’d already read several times. I took it off the shelf now and read it again, losing myself in the names of the justices from the last fifty years. Instead of thinking about my mom, I thought about those justices—how they had listened to both sides of an argument and formulated a compelling opinion. This was my escape, a way of thinking myself out of my current situation and into a whole other world.
I preferred that world, so I tried to stay there as long as I could. Even when I was in school, I was always asking questions and trying to learn more. When I saw how this paid off in the form of good grades and praise from my teachers, I was hooked. I realized that if I studied hard, which I enjoyed, I could fill my life outside of home with consistently positive things. So that’s what I did.
Over the next few years, I got all A’s, and I won several spelling bees and science fairs. Papa encouraged my studies, rewarding me with an allowance when I won a spelling bee or did extra reading. He used these rewards to teach me about money—how to save and invest and resist the temptation to spend it all at once.
The
school offered me the opportunity to skip a grade, based on my standardized test scores, but my dad was against the idea because he wanted me to stay socially normal. I already stood out and got picked on at times for being a good, ambitious student in a culture where it wasn’t valued, and he was worried that if I moved up and became the smallest kid in the grade, I’d become a target.
It wasn’t until I was in fourth grade that my probing and questioning became a problem. I was still getting great grades, but my teacher wrote on my report card that I was disrupting the class by asking so many questions and at times even challenging what was being taught, alluding to the books I’d read outside of school.
This infuriated my mom. No matter what she may have said to me at home, she was not going to tolerate a teacher reading my intelligence and probing questions as disruptive. “That’s it,” she told me after reading my report card. “You’re done with that school. Those little white boys in Grosse Pointe get the best education, and that’s where you’re going to go, too.”
My mom cared deeply about my education, both at school and in life. By this point, she’d already taught me to swim and then enrolled me in swimming lessons. She thought it was important for me to defy the stereotypes about black people. Soon after, I started taking golf lessons. It was clear that she wanted to do whatever she could to give me as many opportunities as possible. Now she set her sights on Grosse Pointe.
Grosse Pointe was a small, wealthy suburban town. It was adjacent to Detroit, but it might as well have been on another planet, considering the part of town we lived in. Our neighborhood was relatively safe, but I knew there was one direction in which I could not ride my bike. It was the sort of neighborhood where people looked out for one another, yet petty crimes happened all the time. My mom’s car was put up on blocks twice, and groups of kids fought in the street from time to time. Our home was a small condo, nothing at all like the huge waterfront mansions in Grosse Pointe.
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