Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  We watched Julia, Bonanza, The Monkees and Tarzan on TV. Mom would have us sing and perform together Motown hits that were popular on the radio. The latest single would come out, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” or “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” or “You Got Me Going in Circles,” and she’d have us act it out. Then one of the ladies in the neighborhood who liked kids helped us form a little dance group. We’d make up dances and sing to songs like “Kung Fu Fighting” and perform them at the local Delta Sigma Theta mixer. I laugh when I think back on how much all this would aid me as a lip-syncher later in life. Mom would also take us to the movies. We saw Lady Sings the Blues, which my sister loved—after she saw it we had to learn all the Diana Ross songs. We also saw The Ten Commandments and Superfly. I was in love with the Jackson 5 and daydreamed I would marry one of them—probably whoever had the cutest, roundest Afro at the time. In my imagination we would have children and live in a real house.

  Every summer my mother would send us to North Carolina to visit Aunt Golden and Uncle Grover. I loved going to visit them. We would stay for about a month and come back with boxes of clothes. They helped us out because my dad sure wasn’t providing anything. We got no support from him. I guess Daddy just didn’t know how to be a father. Now that I think back on it, I realize that when my dad didn’t fill his role, the men on my mother’s side of the family, like Daddy Leroy and Papa, stepped in. Our relationship with these men was reflected in what we called them. Daddy Leroy and Papa were my grandfather and great-grandfather, but we called them what Mama would call them.

  When I was about seven or eight, we traveled up to North Carolina to go to Grandmom Brownie’s funeral. That’s where I saw my father for the first time since I was a very little girl. I remember thinking that he was cute. He had a pencil mustache, big daddy hands and a little wave in his hair. I also met my half sister, Jean, the daughter from my father’s first marriage. She was about twelve at the time, and really pretty with dark skin and long black hair. Jean lived in Winston-Salem. She must have thought my father and mother were still together, because I’ve heard she told my mother, “He’s not going to stay with you, either. He didn’t stay with us.”

  Several years later, while visiting Aunt Golden and Uncle Grover, I would meet Jean’s half sister, Lynn, who is not related to me biologically because she’s not my father’s child. She and Jean have the same mother and were raised together. I grew to love Lynn as a sister, nonetheless. Lynn is about five years older than me. To this day I’m not exactly sure who her biological father is. Yet in the tradition of my family, she called both her mother and Aunt Golden mom, and Uncle Grover dad.

  Over the years my mother worked herself up into better jobs. She got a job at Family Services—“the welfare,” we called it—doing data entry. We were on assistance until my mother started working at “the welfare.” I guess you couldn’t be on welfare if you worked for welfare. When she began hearing from other people about the process of getting child-support money, she learned the ropes and realized she didn’t have to provide everything for us. She ended up getting sixty dollars a month from Daddy. We said, “Yeah! Go, Mom. You really did something—you made the system work for you.” My mother was always there for us, raising us, providing for us.

  But I’m also thinking she probably wanted some quality companionship, along with needing help with raising us. My mother had welfare, she had her secretarial job and other gigs, but my daddy wasn’t sending the sixty dollars consistently. During my childhood she had a couple of boyfriends. There was the young boyfriend, Billy. I remember one time somebody broke into a gas station and he called my mother up and told her to come by and help him take some cigarettes and things. He looked at it like a windfall, a blessing—like somebody else had done a deed that he or my mother would never do, but since the deed was done they could take advantage of it.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” my mother said. “There’s right and wrong, and that is wrong.”

  When I was about eleven, my mother and Billy were planning to get married. One night about a week or two before the wedding—the justice of the peace was already hired—I woke up to discover Billy touching me. He stopped as soon as I awakened and, I guess, went back into the room with my mom. I just remember that it was the longest night in creation. I thought, “I can’t wake my mama up now. I have to wait until daylight until he’s gone.” When Billy left I raced into her room.

  “Mom, B-Billy, Billy was feelin’ on me last night,” I cried.

  My mother listened carefully and was calm and concerned. I don’t remember ever sensing that she didn’t believe me. I knew she was on my side. That evening Mama set me in a chair. She and Billy sat across from me on the sofa.

  “Angela, now Billy and I are going to get married,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “Mom, I know you were going to get married and that you love him, but I don’t think you should,” I told her.

  “Okay,” she said, then turned to Billy and said, “Get out!”

  Perhaps Billy’s fondling of me happened out of the blue. Until he felt me up, he had done nothing to make me feel uncomfortable; I had no indication that he was looking at me funny. Today I wonder if maybe he didn’t want to get married and that was the way he got out of it. Maybe he didn’t have the courage to say, “I don’t want to do this,” so acted out so he could get out of it. He chose one hell of a way. Mama must have been absolutely devastated, but she protected me anyway.

  Then Mom started dating this old guy. He was a yard man. He had a lawn service and a truck with a lawn mower in the back of it. He worked hard. He had integrity. He was always helping and very nice. And you could always get him to give you thirty-five or fifty cents. He worked his full, hard day and at the end of the day he would relax with a drink. It seems like he drank about a pint of some clear liquid every day. Anyhow, I woke up in the middle of the night one night, and he was feeling on my butt! Well, this time I couldn’t wait until morning. I just went right into Mama’s room, crying.

  “Ma-Ma-Mama, he—he was feeling on me.” Nothing happened as dramatic as that other time, but that was the end of that one, too. The old guy stayed around as a friend but their relationship was over. My mother stood up for me once again. Because she empowered me at that moment, neither situation seemed to scar me.

  Mama didn’t have the best luck when it came to men, but she always protected me from them. Now that I’m older I sometimes think back on the situation. Mama had two children, but she was still a young woman. She was working overtime for the state to earn anything extra she could. She had to be lonely. She had to want a relationship. But on two different occasions she chose to believe her baby—her kid—over her man. You hear stories all the time about women who side with the boyfriend. Women who choose to believe him, choose not to see what’s going on under their nose. If my mother had chosen to look the other way and didn’t take my word for it, ain’t no tellin’ how jacked up I would be right now, how that would have played out. My life could have gone in an entirely different direction. By believing me she gave me such a gift!

  Fortunately, I was around other good and decent men like Daddy and Papa and some father figures at school. Yet both times I was violated, the men walked past my sister’s bed to my bed. I was fourteen months older than D’nette and have always appeared a little older, plus I was more developed. But she never had those issues. I started wondering, “What is it about me?” I have never quite answered that question.

  Sometime around then my mother started talking to me about sex. She tried to give me the information I needed without giving me a license to experiment. Some folks are very free sexually—that was never her vibe. In her book, sex was fine when you got married. Until then, there were certain things that weren’t proper, that you did not do. Laying up in your mama’s house with your boyfriend was one of them. That demonstrated a lack of respect. Having a boyfriend was one thing. Shacking up was another. But she did give me conflicting message
s. On the one hand, she was very “don’t you bring no babies in here!” But at the same time, whenever we were at Eckerd’s Drugstore, she would show me, “Now this is a condom—and if he don’t want to use it, fuck him. I mean, don’t fuck him!” People would be walking down the aisles. I was sure they were listening. I would be so embarrassed.

  One time she told me, “Okay, do you know how to excite a man? You grab his penis.”

  “Oh, Mom. No, you don’t!”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Oh, God, really?”

  “Yeah, and you rub it.”

  I was in the seventh grade or so at the time—very young. Way younger than when I was potentially going to do it. So I guess she felt it was safe for her to talk about it. Because the closer I got to the age when I could potentially be doing this, she got stricter. “Don’t do it! You better not bring no babies in here because I am not taking care of them.”

  Now, while this all was going on, my mother allowed Mama Emma—the Jehovah’s Witness—and her friend to come over and instruct D’nette and me spiritually every Wednesday night. We never went to Kingdom Hall and Mom never took part in this particular activity, but she allowed us to sit there and read whatever their little book was. The book had these pictures of people running from destruction and hell and brimstone. It would scare us to death because the world was supposed to be coming to an end in 1976 and it was 1973 or ’74. “Oh, Lord, I got but two more years to live!” According to what my grandmom told us, only 144,000 were going to be saved. That seemed like a big number—but not that big. I didn’t think I was special enough to make the cut. Then again, I thought, “She doesn’t seem too frightened by it. Is it really going to happen?” We were not a very receptive audience.

  After I graduated from Jordan Park Elementary School, I was bussed out of our neighborhood to attend Disston Middle School to attend seventh grade. It was 1970—the first year bussing was implemented to integrate public schools in St. Pete’s. I distinctly remember the little faces of my white classmates whose parents couldn’t flee during “white flight.” I hadn’t been around many white people before, other than people like the clerks at the grocery store or the shoe salesman over on Central Avenue. (I remember D’nette lying on the carpet while we were buying shoes one time and just wanting her to stand up straight and act “right” around all these white people.) Once I got bussed to Disston I remember hearing rumors about “race riots” at the high school and white students bringing dogs and something called brass knuckles to school. I remember thinking, “Oh, my gosh!” Thank goodness, in the seventh grade we were sweet little kids and were all just interested in each other and getting along. “Hi, excuse me, thank you.”

  The next year I was bussed to Azalea Middle School, where I attended eighth and ninth grade. The principal was a redheaded white man named Mr. Kreiver, who used to be an army sergeant. Although the world around us was racially charged, at Azalea everything was cool. Academically, my mother’s sense of excellence was starting to kick into full gear. She stayed on top of our grades. After struggling through her life, she started telling us we were going to go to college. “You ain’t gonna go through this thing, here,” she’d say about her own life. Mom would come to school with her steno pad to talk to the teachers. She would be very regular at home, but she’d show up at school and pull up and act “queenly”—an interesting duality. “What is she doing in your class? Um-hum, um-hum,” steadily taking shorthand notes—bip, bop, bip.

  When I was in ninth grade, I got my first boyfriend, Ricky. My mom let him come over on weekends. She would go get us Burger King and we’d sit on the couch and listen to Al Green on the eight-track tape over and over. We’d kiss, and then he’d try to unbutton my little shirt and get into my bra. I’d jump, button it back up and say, “You can do whatever with those other girls over there, but we’re just going to kiss and that’s where it’s going to end.” I remember him playing “You Got It Bad Girl” by Stevie Wonder.

  When you believe in a feeling,

  And it’s holding you back from my love,

  Then you’ve got it you got it bad…

  “Well, I’m just gonna have to have it bad. Because I’m gonna be somebody one day!” I’d tell him. And I remember laughing to myself and thinking, That’s not gonna work on me!

  Sometime during this time my mother got a new boyfriend. His name was Theodore Slaughter and went by the name of Teddy. Teddy seemed to be nice, one of those quiet dudes. He built swimming pools for white people. They dated for several years. I always liked Teddy, he was always nice to me. And I was a good kid. I never disrespected him. If Ma told me to be home when the streetlights came on, that’s when I hit the step.

  Over the summer between ninth and tenth grade, Mommy and Teddy got married. A day or so before the wedding we moved into Teddy’s home. After spending most of our lives living in the projects, it was our first time living in a house! D’nette was especially happy about the move up and that we were getting a daddy. D’nette was always talking about wanting a father. When she would get mad at our mother, she would say, “I want to go live with my daddy.” I’d remind her, “Well, your daddy ain’t here. He ain’t sent no birthday card, no money or nothing. Mama has to take care of everything. And now you’re mad at Mama and want to go with your daddy? Do you think things will be better with him?” Then she’d quiet down and reconsider her fantasy life with Daddy.

  Mommy and Teddy got married on a Saturday. The next day she sent us up to Winston-Salem for our annual summer vacation. Seven days later she called to tell us she was getting her marriage annulled.

  This is the story she told me about the annulment. It had been raining “cats and dogs” in St. Pete’s one night that week. My mother went to her girlfriend Mattie’s house. They were picking out patterns and sewing. When Mommy came home, Teddy asked, “Where have you been?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she answered. It was very much like my mother to say things with a lot of attitude. (“It ain’t what you say, it’s how you say it,” she would tell us.) Well, a little altercation ensued. All of a sudden he’s beating and slapping her and whatnot. Now, my mama done talked “smack” before they were married, she done talked and said whatever she had to say, and he never raised a hand to her. But here it was a week after getting married and he was beating her up. I guess maybe it was his idea about what being husband and wife meant. My mother told us she had rollers in her hair and that every roller got knocked out, save one. In the process of beating her, he fractured her nose. Afterward, he took her to the hospital.

  Now, to get to this one particular hospital you had to go down a cobblestone road that ran by a little crick. I don’t know the actual name of it but we called it Bugga Crick. It was dark there, with overhanging trees—mossy, swampy, spooky. Well, Mama says that while they were driving by Bugga Crick, Teddy told her, “And somebody’s gonna kick Angela’s ass, too, ’cause she’s just like you!”

  Now why he would want to speak that destiny on a sixteen-year-old girl, I will never know—I never did anything to him. When I found out about it, it hurt my feelings. Mama told me, “I wanted to defend you, baby, but we were going down Bugga Crick and it was dark. I thought if I said something he would run off the road and kill us both. I told myself, ‘Just let me shut up until I can get to the hospital and away from him.’”

  When Mama got to the hospital, she got taken care of and then called us up to tell us the deal. She also filed charges against Teddy. Of course, D’nette was upset because she had always wanted a daddy.

  When we came back from North Carolina a few weeks later, we thought, “Where we gonna live now? Oh, God, I guess it’s back to the projects.” But the preacher at Stewart Memorial, where we had gone to church for all these years, had a parson-age he didn’t live in on the other side of town. He let us live there for a while. But even after we moved in, my mother just lay on the couch, crying. She just couldn’t do anything. You had to bring her wate
r and everything. Now that I think back on it, I’m sure she was crushed, but, of course, being dramatic, Mama milked every moment out of it.

  Apparently Teddy tried to reconcile—or at least reason with my mother to drop the charges against him. I remember Aunt Viola, who owned the beer garden, coming over to talk to Mama while she was lying on the couch.

  “Betty, now, Hiram has hit me, too, you know,” Aunt Viola told Mom. “But we’re still together. It’s no big deal. Forgive and forget it.”

  “Heck, no, no, no, no, no,” my mother said to Viola. “If Hiram beat you, that’s on you. With all due respect to you, I’m not going through that. No, no, no, no!”

  Then Teddy wrote my mother a letter—“Please, Betty, forgive me. I’m sorry,” he wrote—blah, blah, blah, blah. He made the mistake of writing it in red ink. I saw it and thought, “Oh, no, here she goes.”

  “He wrote the letter in red ink,” my mother shouted. “That’s my blood! His name is Teddy Slaughter and he tried to slaughter me. His last name isn’t Slaughter for nothing!”

  Being a teenager, after a while I thought, “Get up! Get up! I’m tired of being your slave. Just stop crying and being all sad. You don’t want to go back to him but you won’t get up.”

  Now, for some reason, around that same time my father came to St. Pete’s for the first time. He came for the weekend and spent time with us. My mother gave him her bedroom and she slept on the couch. He said, “Why don’t you sleep in here?”

  She said, “Hell, no! Them days are over. You are here to see your children.”

  Well, one evening while Daddy was visiting, Teddy came by the house. My mother told him, “I don’t know you. Just keep driving by.”

  I peeked out at him from the front picture window as he walked back to his car. I saw him reach in and start to pull out something long and dark.