Many years later, I was on a spring break from college, watching TV in our den with my dad when we heard a loud boom. We looked at each other, and Daddy told me to stay put. He headed out of the house, down the street to where the sound had come from. It had been a gunshot from Mr. Richard’s gun. He’d shot himself in the head. The adults figured Mr. Richard could no longer live with the guilt he’d carried all those years for making his wife have the abortion. After his death, the girls scattered. The eldest moved to Arizona with her football player husband; Pamela died of something drug-related; and last I knew, Sadie was living in Atlanta.
Miss Margaret was another one of our neighbors. She and Mr. Dave, her husband, lived in a three-family house across the street from us. She was one of my mother’s close friends, like family. She was also one of the few stay-at-home moms on the block. Mr. Dave drove a Cadillac, had a gold tooth in place of one of his front teeth, a process, and was so black he looked blue. Sometimes I’d see him in his silk do-rag, and I couldn’t understand why Miss Margaret, who was pretty, with light-brown hair down to her shoulders, would be with him. He looked like a scary creature, except he was really charming and nice. Mr. Dave also worked a lot. I have no idea what he did, but like most men in the neighborhood, it was something with his hands and seemed to involve multiple shifts.
I was crazy about Miss Margaret. She was kind and spoke in a soft Kentucky-tinged voice. She had three sons; I think only one was biologically Mr. Dave’s. Maybe that’s why she liked having me around—all those sons. On the afternoons that I’d hang out at her apartment, she would make me tuna fish sandwiches and cut off the crusts. I’ve yet to taste tuna better than hers. We’d watch TV, the hours free and unencumbered, until Mr. Dave came home, always grinning and nice to me, but I’d be disappointed because I knew that my time with Miss Margaret was over. She’d have to serve him his dinner, which she’d cooked earlier in the day, and would sit with him to listen to him talk. My mother liked to tell me with a laugh that I used to ask Miss Margaret, “Does he have to come here?” We were a tribe of women, and all of us, young and old, understood that when a man entered, the coven was over; our ties to one another were put away until the men were gone again. Until next time.
But perhaps my favorite person on the block was Louie. He and I became best friends when his family moved next door to our house when he was five and I was four. Louie lived with his mom, Miss Earlene, another woman I adored and who adored me back. There was his dad, Mr. Louie Goolsby, a college football star, who walked with a limp because of a sports injury. He was the head of one of the Boys Clubs in Newark. Louie’s younger brother, Brian, was the Dennis the Menace of the block. His parents were much younger than mine.
Louie and I spent all our time “playing dolls.” First, baby dolls, then, later, we moved on to Barbies. Because Louie was a boy, whenever we played house, I’d tell him that he was the dad. He’d say no, that he was a mommy too, and he would put my brother’s plastic typewriter cover over his head as a wig. I loved Louie. I didn’t care what he put on his head, his face, or his body—in high school he started dressing full-on as a woman: dress, heels, makeup. He was smart and quick and hilarious. He knew pig Latin before anybody and tried to teach me so we could talk in front of grown-ups and they wouldn’t have a clue what we were saying. I couldn’t get the hang of it. He did everything well: jumped French and double Dutch, played jacks, kickball, hopscotch. What he wouldn’t do was play baseball or basketball or any ball with the boys in the neighborhood, even when they taunted him.
Sometimes when I was at their apartment, Miss Earlene would sit me in front of her mirror and redo my hair. She would brush it up in a top ponytail, and then she’d put my hair around a mesh doughnut to make a bun. Smoothing out my hair by running her hand in upward motions, she’d tell me how pretty I was. When her sister, Shirley, was visiting, which was often, she’d chime in, “Gonna be a knockout.” I’d smile, although I had no idea what that meant. I only knew that Shirley, who was single and childless and looked like Ronnie Spector, was beyond glamorous. Like Miss Earlene, she was cream-colored and tall, but she was thinner, wore dramatic black cat-eye makeup, and dressed in extravagant outfits like Pucci-printed jumpsuits.
By the time we were in middle school, when it was apparent and mostly accepted that Louie was gay, some boys would call him “sissy, sissy fag.” Louie always had a comeback. I saw his skin grow tougher, thicker. Louie was big for his age, tall and full. When he was about thirteen, he’d go around the corner to the packaged goods store to buy beer. He was that grown-up-looking, and he was fearless. Most of the time, he’d come back with the beer. We’d shake it up and splash it, but Louie would drink his.
Louie and his mother were close. He called her by her first name and had the same body type and walk. She was tall and full and would walk with her back straight and her head high. They were both slew-footed. My mom used to lovingly refer to her as that “big yella woman.” Miss Earlene came home from work every day usually wearing stretch pants and some kind of fitted top. She’d wave as she passed us kids gathered on my porch. Sometimes Louie would have to go inside with her, and sometimes she’d stop and talk to us and let him stay.
I never knew how Miss Earlene felt about Louie being gay—she certainly seemed to love him unconditionally—but we all knew how Miss Earlene felt about her other son’s behaviors. Everybody on the block knew that Brian was always up to trouble. He’d throw a soda bottle from their third-story window to hear it crash on the pavement. My mom would come outside, hands on her hips, and call for Brian to come outside. She’d grab him by his shirt or jacket and ring his body around a few times, yelling at him that he knew better and that someone could get hurt. Later, when she’d tell his mother, Miss Earlene would thank her.
While I never heard him say anything, I think Louie felt his dad’s disapproval. All the rest of us certainly did, once Louie started wearing women’s clothes. We were in high school at that point, and Louie hung out with a group of gay guys who dressed up and wore makeup. When he was in drag, he wouldn’t speak to me; he’d act as if I were a stranger. It remains a painful memory.
When I tell people I grew up in Newark, the response is sometimes “Oh, the hood.” I hate that, because it’s reductive, and in my mind I didn’t grow up in the hood, at least not the kind that most people imagine. There were no muggings, shootings (Mr. Richard’s suicide notwithstanding), or robberies, if you don’t count the purse-snatching I once witnessed as my mother and I were leaving the A&P on Bergen Street. A boy snatched a woman’s purse and took off. My mother, recognizing him as one of her former Boy Scouts, yelled after him, “Kevin, you bedda put that down, stop it!”
The next thing I knew, she’d thrown her brown leather satchel onto the pavement and taken off after him. She must have chased him two blocks before giving up when he’d gotten too far away. As she came back toward me, huffing, I was so embarrassed I wanted to pry up a piece of the asphalt and crawl underneath. Why, I thought, did I have to get the crazy mother?
Now it’s one of my treasured memories of her.
My childhood holds many embarrassing Clara moments that I now smile and feel proud about, like seeing her pushing a long-handled broom down the middle of our block, furiously mumbling to herself because the street cleaner had missed our street that day. Before she’d set out with her broom to do their job, she would call the sanitation department and cuss out the person in charge, along with the unfortunate soul who’d had the bad luck to have answered the phone. After a few of those calls, the street cleaner didn’t miss our block again.
When I think about where I grew up, and who made the difference between Hunterdon Street being just another stereotyped ghetto block or something better, it was my mother. Clara’s will, presence, and expectations gave children, hers and the neighborhood’s, a sense of deportment. She made sure everyone kept up their property, even the renters, and if they needed help, she and my dad were there to show them how to trim hedges
and keep the front litter-free. I can only imagine what new people thought when my mother would show up at their door with a welcome and marching orders. She didn’t allow us or other kids to eat anything other than ice cream from the Good Humor truck outside. She created the image of a small town, where she was the sheriff.
When the large oaks and maples on our street later started dying and being cut down, it changed the look of the block. My mother went out and made planters, cutting plastic garbage bins in half and filling them with dirt and petunias. When people started abandoning their properties and the city tore those buildings down, my dad created full lot-sized urban gardens. Prompted by my mother, he grew everything from collards to corn—perfectly tilled, neat rows of vegetables. A few years before my mother died, the courtyard of our elementary school was named after her.
* * *
* Asterisked names have been changed.
4
Sister Soldier
I’D COME home from middle school and was standing in the back doorway dressed in my starched white shirt with the Peter Pan collar and a wool plaid jumper. I was looking at my mother on her knees, scrubbing the floor, pushing and pulling that scrub brush across the brown and yellow linoleum as if it had done something to her. She pushed strands of sweat-soaked hair back from her forehead and looked up at me, her expression What now?
I was standing, chest puffing in and out, trying unsuccessfully to hold in the tears.
“The girls don’t like me,” I blubbered. “I don’t understand why.”
She went back to scrubbing. She’d heard this all before.
“They say that I’m a White girl. They say I think I’m better than them.”
Now, I was crying and snot was running.
Mom looked back up with an appraising, no-empathy look.
“They’re just jealous.”
“Jealous of what?”
I couldn’t imagine anyone envying my corny clothes, the double-breasted wool coat that I’d had to wear every year when everybody else had a plastic “wet-look” coat from Lerner’s.
“Why are they jealous?” I pleaded.
Mom wouldn’t answer me but would just repeat herself.
“They just are.”
In addition to the taunts, I lived with constant bullying. Notes were left on my desk: “You and me outside,” “I’ma kick your ass on Friday.” Girls I didn’t even know would come up to me at lunch and say they wanted to fight me after school. Even as I write this, fortysomething years later, I still feel a twinge in my body, a fight-or-flight response. To this day, I don’t want to be around people who have harsh, bossy personalities. I will overact with them and become overly harsh myself, a place I don’t like to be.
Mom used to tell me to ignore their words, but “If one of ’em hits you, pick up a brick and hit ’em in the head.”
Eventually someone’s taunts did turn to hitting—JoAnn Burwell. We were in Mr. Wilson’s sixth grade decorating the classroom for spring. She was at the back corkboard, putting up the paper tulips and robins and watering cans, and I was sitting toward the front of the class, cutting the construction-paper shapes. I was facing the front of the class, and she came up from behind me and punched me on the back of my head. JoAnn ran back to the corkboard, laughing and covering her mouth. I walked up to her, punched her in the face as hard as I could, and the fight began. We were punching and scratching. I threw her against the chalkboard, on top of desks—she was surprisingly light—while I was punching her. She was pulling at my blouse, trying unsuccessfully to grab me.
When Mr. Wilson came back, he found the class surrounding us and chanting, Fight, fight. He bore through the crowd, separating us and holding each of us by the shirt as he ushered us to the principal’s office. I was still breathing hard, my heart was racing, but I remember the look on the faces of the two secretaries when they saw us: my shirt askew, ponytail half undone, and JoAnn’s bloody nose, jacked-up hair, and scratches all over her face. The secretaries both knew my mother. They didn’t try to hide their horrified looks. They called our parents.
My family lived directly across the street from my elementary school, so my mother appeared in what seemed like seconds.
“What happened?” she said, as soon as she entered the small office where the secretaries sat outside the principal’s office.
I was sitting in a hard wooden chair, breathing slightly less hard, but my heart was still jumping out of my chest. JoAnn was sitting across from me, staring me down. I wanted to cry but couldn’t let her see that. I had, after all, beaten her ass.
The principal came out and greeted my mother; since she was the PTA president, they were on a first-name basis. She must have been so embarrassed, but I knew she was secretly proud of me for finally standing up to a bully.
My mother took my hand and quickly dragged me out of there. She probably knew I was about to cry—I cried all the time—and she didn’t want any of them to see me. I’d been telling her about JoAnn bothering me. It had been going on for months. She used to tell me that once I fought back one of them, they’d all leave me alone.
We got outside onto the limestone steps.
“I did it, Mommy. I did it.”
I’d fought back. I was excited because I thought, now, finally they would all just leave me alone, just as she had said they would.
For the first time in my life, she was wrong.
The girls kept coming after me.
It’s never a good idea to pick a fight with someone who is afraid. I had superhuman strength that was fueled by fear, which is why I never lost a fight—except maybe with Sheila, who was on top of me in a field next to Miss Jackie’s house one lazy summer afternoon. We were punching each other, but she was straddling me, getting more in, before someone came and pulled her off. In addition to JoAnn Burwell, I’d had two other fights. One in high school with a girl with whom I’d never had any contact or consciously laid eyes on. I was at the glass door of my best friend Carolyn’s class, mouthing to her to meet me after class. This girl, Kim was her name I would later learn, came out of the classroom and told me to get away from the door. I said I didn’t know her and she needed to stay out of it. She pushed me hard; I told her not to do it again. She did, and I said she was acting like a nigger; in those days of high Black political awareness, this was a serious insult. She pushed me a third time and while I was terrified and didn’t want to fight, I threw a George Foreman country haymaker, hitting her hard enough to knock her into the lockers that lined the walls. I punched her again and grabbed her and slammed her against the lockers. I then bit her on her cheek as hard as I could.
Security came and broke up the fight, and we were taken to the principal’s office. My dad’s first cousin Benny was the vice principal. Benny used to babysit me when I was a toddler and he was a college student. I was ashamed when I saw his face; I also needed him to know that I didn’t have a choice. Well, I guess I could’ve let Kim push me until she got tired, but even then, the way the street worked, she would’ve continued to come for me. As it was, when a family friend drove Carolyn and me to my house from school that day, Kim and her friend were there waiting for me. She had been to the hospital to get a tetanus shot and had a large gauze bandage on her face and still wanted to fight some more. We decided not to get out the car and drove the few blocks to Carolyn’s house, where we waited a while. I did go home eventually, and as I was telling my parents what had happened, the bell rang. My dad went to the door and it was Kim and her girlfriend wanting me to come outside so we could fight some more. I stood at the top of the stairs, my heart clomping in my chest. I heard my father say to her in his calm, soft way, “Why don’t you just go home. Look at you, got your face all messed up. It’s enough already.”
They left then, and after that there was no more from Kim. I think my mother might’ve gone to talk to her mother, but the details are sketchy.
What I do remember vividly is that twenty-eight years later, I was entering Unity Church one Sunday
morning. I had on clogs, a fur jacket and a polyester maternity top, although I’d recently given birth to Ford. There were a few members standing at the entrance, greeting people. A woman said, “Hi, Benilde.” I thought it was strange because I didn’t attend church often enough for anyone to know my name. Then she said she wanted to talk to me after service. I said okay, though I had no idea who the woman was. I sat in my seat searching my mind for who she might be. I have an exceptional memory for faces, but I kept drawing a blank.
When she came up to me after the program, she said, “Do you remember me?”
I looked into her eyes and suddenly it all came back.
“Yes, I remember,” I said.
Before I could say anything else, Kim said, “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was young and dumb.”
I was astounded. I half expected Oprah to come from behind a curtain.
“Do you forgive me?” she said.
I looked at her. Her sincerity was evident, and I said, “Of course.”
She was tall, a good two or three inches taller than my five foot six. She asked if we could hug and I said yes. We both had tears on our cheeks. At that moment, I told myself that her apology was for all of the girls who had ever bullied me, who had made so much of my childhood a waking nightmare.
My mother decided I should have piano lessons. To say she made me take them isn’t an overstatement. She found a teacher, Mrs. Ryan, an elegant woman who lived across from Weequahic Park and looked a little like Diahann Carroll. Mom saved up and bought a piano, a carved upright, from Griffith Pianos on Broad Street in downtown Newark. After a few years with Mrs. Ryan, whom I adored, she had some kind of nervous breakdown, and my mom found another teacher, a woman who couldn’t pronounce my name and decided it was “Bernice.” My new teacher, Mrs. Thomas, was stout, wore a lopsided wig, and had a raspy voice like Moms Mabley. She could play that piano. After every lesson, when my mom or dad would pick me up, Mrs. Thomas would report, “Bernice needs to practice more.” My mother would say, “Benilde,” and Mrs. Thomas would pronounce a version of Benilde, but by next week I was Bernice again. I was too shy to correct her.
Welcome to My Breakdown Page 3
