Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  She was passionate and intense and idiosyncratic. She read the newspaper at night in bed and watched Eyewitness News at five o’clock every day. She had opinions, she didn’t care if they were unpopular, and everybody in the neighborhood knew not to waste her time with “fool talk,” which was her estimation of small talk. If someone, friend or acquaintance, burdened her with too much, she had no problem saying, “I ain’t got time for this fool talk!” And boom, she’d hang up the phone. I remember more than once witnessing her ending a phone call this way and saying to her, “How do you have any friends?” She’d look at me and her grin would turn into a cackle. “Mabel know I’m busy,” she’d say.

  My mother was purposeful. President of the block club and the PTA and a Boy Scout den mother, she worked full time at night, 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. at Saint Michael’s hospital in Newark as a pediatric nurse’s aide. She worked that job for thirty-two long years—thirty-two years of nights. And she cleaned our two-family frame house like Pac-Man. She was an impeccable housekeeper and had set days when she cleaned certain rooms in particular ways. She’d do the floors and wash the towels (always with Tide) on Mondays, drying everything on the clothesline that hung from the second-floor back hall window because doing so made them smell fresh. On Tuesdays she did the bathroom and the kitchen floors, scrubbing with a brush soaked with Mr. Clean and water, on her knees. Every week she would clean the creases in the lampshades, do the ironing, which included her bras and my father’s boxer shorts, and clean out the refrigerator, wiping it out with a little ammonia mixed in a bucket of water. She’d defrost the freezer every other week and take the stove apart about that often as well. She was a flash of activity—cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. It wasn’t until I was a woman with a family of my own that I finally realized that, for my mother, who grew up with the notion that a clean house made one superior, cleaning was also her therapy. It was how she’d work out all that anxiety that was always in her. She wasn’t judgmental, except about other people’s housekeeping abilities. “You know, she got a nasty house,” said in a conspiratorial whisper, was the worst thing she could say about someone. To her, an unclean house was a major character flaw.

  I never saw my mother relax or just lie down on our brown floral slipcovered couch, or soak in the tub, or go for a walk. The only time she would come close to kicking back was when her sister Thelma came for a late-afternoon visit, and even then, while they were having a cold one—always Schaeffer—my mom was ironing, clipping coupons, or balancing her checkbook to the nickel. My aunt Thelma was my favorite of my mother’s six sisters. (I have no memory of Aunt Eva, who died when I was very young.) Thelma was the only sister who was childless and was one of the few people who could tell my mother off, and whom my mom would actually listen to. They were that close. Aunt Thelma was as tough as a workingman, yet always dressed in pretty clothes, royal blue chiffon, powder makeup from her compact, and red lipstick. When Mom wasn’t in her mint-green work uniform, she dressed in classic clothes like pressed cotton shirtwaist dresses, skirts, and turtlenecks, but at home, my mother always wore a housedress—a shapeless, cotton shmatte that snapped up the front and had patch pockets. These were popular in the ’50s and ’60s, but my mom wore them her entire life. It was usually the only thing she’d ever ask for on her birthday or at Christmas. It became really hard to find such things by the ’90s.

  On my mom’s nights off, Thursday and sometimes Friday, we’d have family Pokeno night. Aunt Thelma had introduced Mom to Pokeno. We’d have little Dixie cups filled with pennies and boards similar to bingo cards, and Mom would bake a Tree Tavern frozen pizza, topped with olive oil. These are some of my all-time favorite childhood memories. She was relaxed, and she and my dad and everybody got along. It was the only time that I can remember my brothers Marc and Duane, Mom, Daddy, and me playing something together. Aunt Thelma and Miss Bertha, who lived in our downstairs apartment, were also included.

  Miss Bertha was a childhood friend of my mother and her sisters. She was divorced from a prominent man in Newark who had left her for another woman. In those days, divorce was still scandalous—but not for my mother and her sisters, each of whom had had at least two marriages. One had had three. Before she met my father, my own mother had been married to another man. She’d become pregnant at sixteen and had wed the father of my oldest brother, Larry. She had divorced that first husband not too long after the baby was born and moved home to her mother’s house. It seemed to me that the Eleazer sisters would cut a husband loose with as much thought as they gave to changing their stockings. Miss Bertha, on the other hand, had been devastated by her divorce, and my mother and sisters despised her ex-husband for it. The sadness that surrounded her was discernible even to me at ten years old. My mom always included Miss Bertha in whatever we did, and often I would go down to her apartment, equally bleach-clean as ours, to just sit with her. We’d watch TV and eat ice cream. She was really thin, had ice-blue eyes, light skin, and a deep baritone voice that would sometimes tremble because of some unknown (to me) health issue that made her frail. She looked a lot like a mixed gray-haired Lauren Bacall. She was very kind to me, always. While my mom had lots of friends, there were a few women who were “family.” Miss Bertha was family.

  When Aunt Thelma died of a stroke in her midfifties, it was the first time I’d seen my mother cry. My aunt was having coffee after church when it happened and died a few days later. At the funeral, as the family viewed the body, I became hysterical, dropping to my knees when I saw her in the coffin. I hated that the lady ushers dressed in white picked me up and took me off to the ladies’ room to fan me and put water on my face. Even at fourteen, I viscerally understood that this was an appropriate response to losing someone you loved. Why sweep the person away? Let the tears and all of it come. It was the first time I’d lost someone close to me, and also, knowing how much pain my mother was in was killing me. My mother was the strongest person I knew, and back then I thought strong people didn’t cry.

  Mom and our dog Rinny outside of our house in Newark.

  Clara Little was a renegade without ever using the word. When Mom was in elementary school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 1935, her class used to sing a song called “Old Black Joe.” This was a common song in those days of legalized Jim Crow apartheid.

  Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,

  Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,

  Gone from the earth to a better land I know,

  I hear their gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.”

  One day, my mother decided the song was demeaning and she wasn’t going to sing it anymore. She got her hands slapped with a ruler, but once she’d decided she was never going to sing the song again, she took the ruler every time.

  Her insurgency continued in her lifelong commitment to the PTA. It was her heart’s work. She was serious about improving educational opportunity for inner-city kids. She didn’t believe in referring to these kids as “underprivileged.” “Ain’t nothing underprivileged about them,” she’d say. “It’s the damn big shots who don’t want to spend the money on kids and the mamas who don’t vote.” She remained active in the PTA long after her own children had graduated from high school. She was eventually elected president of the Essex County chapter, which included twenty-two towns. She often said, “All children are my children.” And she spent a good part of her life fighting for people who didn’t know how to fight for themselves. She knew in her bones that it was just morally wrong that wealthy towns should have better public schools than poorer ones. The PTA was so much a part of our lives that before I was old enough to go to kindergarten, I used to answer the phone, “Are you a member of the PTA?”

  If one of her PTA cronies called and it was one of her two nights off, well, she could be on the phone for an hour discussing who wasn’t carrying their weight, what teacher had to go, what other school districts in the county got that Newark didn’t, and the strategy sessions to demand change. She’d hel
p run campaigns for local council people and would regularly raise hell at city council and school board meetings. Former Newark mayor Sharpe James, who in 2008 was convicted of fraud, had a close relationship with my mother for decades before becoming mayor. He wrote a letter from jail that was read at her funeral. She had mentored him when he began his career as a block club president, then ward leader, then councilman representing our South Ward neighborhood.

  After the 1968 riots in Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland, Black people decided it was time for them to be in charge of the cities where they were the majority. After the riots (“rebellion” is what certain Newarkers call them) there was an exodus from Newark of 100,000 people, most of whom were White. The city’s population went from 400,000 to 300,000 almost overnight. A group of kingmakers, Amiri Baraka among them, convened to decide which Black man (I doubt a woman was ever actually considered) would be the first Black mayor of Newark. They chose an Alabama-born-and-raised civil engineer named Ken Gibson, but while there was much excitement around his candidacy, my mother didn’t support him. I’m sure many people were surprised at her decision. “Aren’t you a race woman?” they’d ask, knowing how dedicated she was to the betterment of Black people. But she was not confused about being an advocate for her people and choosing someone whose sole qualifications, in her opinion, were that he was Black and college educated. She was a practical, strategic person, one who’d turned down many officials who’d tried to get her either to run for the South Ward city council or to be appointed to the school board. She wasn’t interested in power for power’s sake, but she knew it was vital to have the ear of those in power. But just as she didn’t like “fool talk” from her friends, she eschewed it from politicians as well.

  By 1974, Gibson had alienated some of his supporters in his efforts to keep White businesses from leaving the city. One of those who lost faith in him was Amiri Baraka, who called him a “neo-colonialist.” He said that Gibson was for the profit of “huge corporations that run in and around and through and out of Newark paying little or no taxes,” while the residents were ignored. It was true that corporate and state interests had major influence in the city. Unemployment soon reached 50 percent. Mom resisted gloating.

  Mom (third from the right) and her PTA cronies.

  I once asked her why she hadn’t supported Ken Gibson. “I was my own woman, had my own mind, and I just didn’t think Gibson was the one,” she told me. “Never was impressed by him. Matter of fact, thought he was kinda dim. I ain’t care that he was some engineer. I ain’t ever felt like I had to prove nothin’ to Black folks,” she went on. “I was born in the South when it was rough, where we could only take a few baths a week, where we slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Shoot, you talk about uncomfortable.”

  When Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was published, I read it in one night and all the while I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. I bought her a copy, and she also inhaled it. Many writers and activists said the book told an unflattering and untrue story of Black men, and they launched a major attack on Alice Walker, saying she hated Black men. When the movie came out, there were lots of protests, some of them televised.

  I took my mom to see the movie and afterward we had lunch. “I don’t know what them folks on TV was talkin’ about,” she told me. “I knew plenty men like Mister down South, okay. Alice Walker ain’t made nothin’ up. There were plenty of men just like him down South. Just mean as hell.”

  Mom told me years after this conversation that she’d been raped in the fields in Georgia by an older man, a Mister. I was left speechless and pained by her revelation, yet she showed little to no affect in the telling. She said it just as a fact of being a vulnerable Black girl, as if she had no choice but to survive. She’d been twelve.

  3

  My Neighborhood

  My brother Duane and me after watching a parade with our dad in downtown Newark.

  HUNTERDON STREET, where I grew up, runs almost the length of Newark, crossing roughly three of its five wards. Newark was a city of neighborhoods. Our block was a self-contained island, filled with characters.

  My porch was often the gathering spot where we’d hang. That was when kids used to have long afternoons free after school, after homework was finished and before we were called inside for dinner, before Mandarin and soccer practice three times a week became de rigueur. In addition to playing jacks and jumping French rope, our favorite form of amusement was Mr. Webb coming home from his construction job every Friday drunk as “Coota” Brown. Louie, my next-door neighbor and first best friend, would stand on a banister, holding on to a pillar, which allowed him to see all the way to the corner of our block.

  “Here he come!”

  Monday through Thursday Mr. Webb would walk past us, construction boots dusty from the day’s work, lunch pail in hand, sober as a Mormon, back straight as a pole, head erect, gaze directly forward. He would never speak, even if we said hello. But on Fridays, we’d see him weaving up the block from one end of the sidewalk to the other. He’d stumble and stop in front of us on the porch, alcohol fumes strong enough for us to get a contact high. He’d look at us and start to wave his finger, as if he knew something that we didn’t.

  “I know you,” he’d say, pointing at me. “You Missa Liddle’s daughter.”

  He’d stand, swaying like a sapling in the wind, smiling like a toothless baby as he peered at us.

  “I know you, too,” he’d say to Louie. “You Missa Goosby boy.”

  After appraising the other kids on the porch, he’d be on his way, weaving down to the end of the block, where he and his wife lived. They were the only childless couple on the block. We’d hold our composure until he was gone, and then we’d fall out laughing, holding onto our sides. It cracked us up every time.

  Daddy and Mom with Mom’s lifelong friend Ruth Brooks and her husband, Jesse.

  One of our neighbors, Miss Jackie, was a lesbian. We didn’t know that word at the time, but even as children we saw clearly that Miss Jackie was different from the other women on our street. She lived alone in the first-floor apartment of the three-family house that she owned. She mostly dressed in her khaki or navy-blue work uniform, the kind men wore, and she carried a lunch pail to work, like Mr. Webb. She had dark chocolate skin and a gold tooth in the front of her mouth. Her short hair was relaxed and slicked down to her head, and sometimes she’d wear a do-rag knotted in the front of her forehead, like a man with a process. She smiled a lot and was always kind to us children. Miss Jackie was also a grandmother. Her grandkids lived down South somewhere but would come up every summer and stay with her. The girls, three of them, became part of our group during those visits.

  “How you doin’, baby?” Miss Jackie would say enthusiastically whenever I’d see her. She lived next door to Direen, part of our posse, whose porch we hung out on when we got older and moved from hanging out on mine. Louie, who was gay and way more mature than the rest of us, introduced us to the slur “bull dagger.” Sometimes when Miss Jackie would walk past and out of earshot, Louie would spell “b-u-l-l-” and add with a dramatic flair, “dagger.” We all started saying it too, but just like when Louie would speak pig Latin or when he would say he was “paper bag tan,” I had no idea what he was talking about. Miss Jackie was as much a part of the neighborhood as anybody. I never heard any of the grown-ups talk badly about her or mention anything different about her. She was a part of the Block Association, which meant she was a good neighbor, often sweeping the front of her house and the houses nearby. We knew Miss Jackie was “mannish,” and that was just a fact, as was Louie being chubby and a “sissy” and me being a crybaby. Miss Jackie had a funny kind of walk, fast and slightly hunched over to one side—a pimp walk—and her voice was kind of raspy, like too many cigarettes and too much whiskey, although I never saw her appear anything close to drunk. Back then everybody smoked, and she often had a cigarette dangling from the side of her lips, the ash long and miraculously hanging on.

 
Upstairs at Miss Jackie’s house in the second-floor apartment lived the Harris* family. Mr. Richard,* his wife, Miss Rita,* and their three daughters were our closest family friends. Miss Rita, like my mother, was a nurse’s aide. Mr. Richard was square. He didn’t smoke or drink; he drove a square car, a Dodge Dart; and he liked to take pictures with his square camera. I was right in the middle of the Harrises’ younger daughters, Pamela* and Sadie.* I always preferred Pamela; I loved her. We’d go to the beach together during the summer holidays. It was one of those rare situations where the moms and dads and kids were all friends with one another. In most ways, our households were identical. There were three differences, though: the Harrises always took a family photograph and sent it as their Christmas card; they didn’t own their house; and they used to get the Sears catalog. I used to love to go over to their house and leaf through every single page of that Sears catalog.

  I vividly remember the day I came home early from kindergarten and found my mom crying because President Kennedy had been killed. Two years later when I came home and found almost the same scenario, I was scared to death. I went to Mom and put my arms around her. I asked her what happened and she mumbled something I couldn’t understand. She repeated herself, and then again, and finally I understood what she was trying to say: Miss Rita had died. Mom told me that Miss Rita had died of a heart attack. Not until I was an adult did Mom reveal that Miss Rita had actually bled to death after having an abortion. It was 1965 and abortion was still illegal. Miss Rita had apparently had an affair and gotten pregnant. Mr. Richard had known that the baby wasn’t his and had told her to get rid of it. She did, and had come home after, lain down, and bled to death. Her daughter Sadie, who was still in kindergarten, had found her mother dead in bed, the sheets soaked with her blood.