Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  We had piano recitals once a year and before each one, my mother would tell me to tell Mrs. Thomas my name. We’d get certificates, and every one of mine says, “Bernice Little.” I hated to practice, and it was made even worse by the neighborhood kids who’d stand outside my house listening through the window and shouting at me to play boogie-woogie. They’d laugh at me for having to take lessons, for having to do something so “corny.” I would put in the effort when a recital was coming up, but every time, I would be so petrified when I was onstage that my fingers would literally shake side to side and hit the adjoining keys. It would be a mess. I’d be sweating with embarrassment, fighting back tears, and there would be my parents, sitting in the audience beaming, my mother’s head held high.

  After my part, I’d slink off the stage and join the rest of the students in a pew, and my mother would come to the end, whisper my name, and hand me a box. One time it was a bracelet, another time a charm, one time a gold chain with one pearl on it. I cry to this day when I think about the look on her face. She was proud of me. Even though I messed up, it was as if I’d been the star student. She never said a word about the mistakes, just gave me a trinket and patted me on the back and said, “All I ever wanted was a girl.”

  While my mother and I were deeply in love with each other, I was in many ways her opposite. I was dreamy and fearful. She was down-to-earth and fearless. In the 1960s and ’70s Newark was a hothouse of political action—especially post the 1967 rebellion, which happened when I was nine. There was Amiri Baraka’s New Ark, a group who lived together, took African names, rejected Christianity, and built their own way of life. There were Garveyites, Father Divine followers, and the Nation of Islam. The Nation was the most visible one when I was teenager. There were two mosques—a main one in the middle of postriot blighted South Orange Avenue and a satellite in my neighborhood on the residential Lehigh Avenue. The Nation owned a chain of restaurants called Steak-N-Take and ran a K–12 school. There were brothers, spit-shine clean, fine, polite, and confident, selling the newspaper Muhammad Speaks on every other corner. These “soldiers” were also recruiters of lost and founds, the term they used for folks who weren’t Muslims. On the heels of one of the country’s worst heroin epidemics, it wasn’t unusual to see someone go from a heroin-using, body-selling, no-count to an upstanding citizen—a soldier or a sister—in a matter of months.

  These brothers would ride around on Wednesday and Friday nights, and on Sundays, when the meetings were held, they would literally pick people up off the streets and drive them to the mosque to hear the teachings of their leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The Nation was as much about community “nation building” as it was about religion. The teaching was that Christianity had been forced upon Black people by slave masters, that it had been the White master’s religion, not the original religion of Africans, and that it was part of what continued to enslave Black people. The Nation was about self-reliance and self-respect. Members rejected ideas that many Black people had been carrying since slavery, that the White man’s ice was colder, that he was inherently superior. This was the main reason the group wanted segregation from Whites, or “devils,” as they were called. They jettisoned last names because they were slave names given by the Whites who had owned them. Members were given an “X” to replace the true last name, which we as a captured and enslaved people didn’t know.

  I began going to the mosque in my neighborhood because, like a lot of other people, someone I knew who was a member, Akbar Muhammad, aka Thurman Perry, invited me to come. My friends Carolyn Craft, Shirley Snell, Linda Judd, and I went at first for entertainment, bored teenagers looking for something to make fun of. And we did. We knew better than to do so while we were at the Temple, but as soon as we ran down a steep flight of stairs and were out the door, we’d fall into laughter mimicking their greeting, As-salaam alaikum, my sister.

  I’m not sure why I ended up returning. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I’d been somewhat politicized by my brothers Marc and Duane, who talked at the dinner table about the books they kept in our house like Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, Soul on Ice by Black Panther cofounder Eldridge Cleaver, and Black Rage by William Grier and Price Cobbs, two Black psychiatrists. I got the part about embracing one’s Blackness and not believing that we were in any way inferior. I was also influenced by what was in the air in Newark during that time—it was all about Black Pride. Both my brothers were away at college when I started going to the mosque, but Duane had joined the Nation earlier in the ’70s while he was a student at Stevens Institute of Technology, while Marc used to go to basement meetings of Amiri Baraka’s group in the mid-’60s. I started attending mosque regularly at the beginning of my junior year in high school, 1975, sometimes with Carolyn, my best friend, and sometimes alone. I liked that the members were so nice to me and to one another; I liked the feeling of community and of being cosseted; it was also a respite from being bullied. I decided to become a member. I had just turned seventeen.

  Often, when girls joined the mosque, there was a man involved, and in time, there was for me, too. I’d met him at the Steak-N-Take in my neighborhood, where I’d go to buy a fish sandwich once a week. Becoming a member of the mosque was a simple process of writing three letters, copying a xeroxed sheet exactly. Every potential member copied the letters sent. I never asked what they meant. I vaguely recall they said something like “Elijah Muhammad is the messenger from the God Allah,” or some such declaration of faith. After you received three separate responses from the headquarters in Chicago, you were granted your “X.” You were official. Because of my unusual name, I was Benilde X; someone with a common name, like James, could be CX; my brother Duane was 4X. I later took the name Rashida.

  The man I became involved with was ten years my senior and married. At first the interaction at the Steak-N-Take was respectful. It slowly became slightly flirtatious, although I knew he was married. All brothers, if they were out of high school, were. I didn’t know he was so much older than me, and I now don’t remember how we went from slight flirting to him asking me out—a strictly forbidden thing, even if he had been single. The rules said dates had to be approved and chaperoned. But we fell into an intense, passionate relationship that lasted a year. After a few months we were talking about him leaving his wife and marrying me. I was applying to colleges but decided to stop. I’d decided that I would not go, that I wouldn’t do anything other than be his wife and have a gaggle of kids. He did leave his wife. For a couple of weeks he moved in with his mother, a woman who so mourned the passing of her husband, his father, that she kept his shoes lined up on his side of the bed. I got to know his mother and liked her; she seemed to like me. I even spent a Thanksgiving with them.

  I graduated from high school and began working full-time at Bamberger’s in downtown Newark. We were happily going along, together every day. I was completely ignorant of the pain I was helping to cause his young wife, whom he’d been with since high school and who had borne him two children. All of a sudden, one day I didn’t hear from him; that turned into two days, then three. I panicked. I had that sick feeling in my stomach that something had gone very wrong. I called and called. Remember—I was eighteen. When I didn’t hear from him, I decided to drive to his house to see if his car was in front. It was. I parked. I sat, stunned and crying, going out of my mind with grief and betrayal and who knows what else. Part of me thought, Drive away and forget him, but the emotional creature that I was overwhelmed any good sense. I got out of my car, walked up the stairs, and rang the doorbell. He answered the door wearing a shirt, pants, and socks.

  “Rashida, what are you doing here?”

  He spoke to me as if I were a naughty child.

  I cried, “What are you doing here?”

  He closed the door behind him. He continued talking to me in calm tones, pleading with me to stop crying and to get in my car and go home, promising to call me later.

  His wife came from behind him, snat
ching open the door and screaming curses at me, windmill-swinging her arms. I started swinging too, and we were soon punching each other in a whirlwind, down the steps and onto the East Orange sidewalk, both of us screaming and cursing and pulling at hair. He managed to get between us and push us apart—both of us, breathing hard, glaring at one another, him talking, and neither of us hearing what he was saying. Eventually he convinced his wife to go inside and walked me to my car and sent me home.

  A few days later, he picked me up from my job at Bamberger’s and we drove to a quiet spot on Renner Avenue, near Weequahic Park, where he turned off the engine of his maroon Buick Regency. He told me that he had gone back home. He wouldn’t be leaving his wife after all.

  I broke out in a rash that covered my neck and back. That was my first breakdown. But it was also the breakthrough that officially began the end of my childhood.

  5

  Divine Intervention

  I MOVED to Jacksonville, Florida. Mom figured that I needed to be removed from my environment, and she asked my brother Marc to allow me to live with him. The whole thing with the Nation and the married man was simply too much; she seriously needed to rein me in. She’d somehow maneuvered the relocation so that I thought moving to Jacksonville was my idea. My brother was twenty-four, a famous radio disc jockey there, and lots of women considered him a catch. He let me stay with him in his one-bedroom apartment because my mother asked him. He gave me his room, complete with water bed, and a lot of freedom. He even got me a job at a record store.

  I loved almost everything about my job—my coworkers, playing records for customers, giving them recommendations, and even unpacking the albums. The thing I didn’t like was that I was making minimum wage. I quickly learned about budgeting and the reality of wanting things that were way out of reach, like the yellow Ralph Lauren cardigan sweater that sold for eighty dollars—my entire paycheck. I realized that I needed to figure out a career and get myself into college. After a year of living with my brother, he suggested I apply to Howard University in Washington, DC, because it had a good communications department. I planned to study journalism. It was too late to apply for that year, so I decided to go home and do my first year’s core subjects at Kean College (now University) in Union, New Jersey. It was a short drive from our house, and I attended full-time and went back to working part-time at Bamberger’s.

  Glenn, holding his and Monique’s daughter, Glynn; Monique; me; and Cliff after the book party they hosted for me in Brooklyn, 1996.

  To say that Howard changed my life would be understating the lasting impact those years had on me. When I enrolled there, I didn’t know anything about the school’s legacy or about HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). I didn’t go there because it was a Black school; I went because my brother said it had a good communications school, which had been founded by pioneer journalist Tony Brown. When I opened the acceptance letter from Howard, Mom and I were together on the front porch. She stood watching me, waiting. When I read the word “congratulations,” I looked at her and said, “I got in,” and we both starting jumping up and down. The truth is, she’d have been happy wherever I went, as long as I went. I knew how badly she had wanted to go to college.

  Two months before I was to begin at Howard, I realized I hadn’t gotten a room assignment. I called the school and was told that there was no record on file of me requesting housing. I’m not sure what happened to my request for housing, if I’d even filed one. I had done the entire application process on my own—not that unusual in those days, but unheard of in today’s college admissions frenzy. I remember holding the tan Trimline receiver in my hand, my mind racing. What was I going to do? How would I go to school in Washington, DC, without a place to live? I was on my way to a new life, my new beginning at my new school; I’d had a clear plan. I hung up the phone with no idea what came next. My mom, who was in the kitchen, took a look at me and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “They don’t have my housing application. There’s no dorm room for me, and it’s too late now. All the dorms are full.”

  Mom wiped her wet hands on the apron tied in front of her cotton housedress; she had been cleaning the stove, which for her meant disassembling it in order to clean it part by part. Flummoxed for about a second, she said something like, “We’ll figure it out.” We both knew I wasn’t going to let this fairly large obstacle stop me, but I’m sure I had a mini-breakdown, since that’s generally my default reaction to things that don’t go as I’d like. I gave myself a day to wallow. While I still didn’t know how I was going to fix this, I just knew I was going to enroll at Howard come fall.

  It was all in divine order when I ran into one of my high school classmates, Zara, at Bamberger’s days later. We hadn’t seen each other since our high school graduation two years before. She was the kind of self-defined girl who wore cool glasses and had a hip haircut. I’d admired her from afar, but we’d never hung out together. Her group consisted of some girls I’d gone to elementary school with, including my former best friend Robin, whom I had dropped in order to hang out with the popular girls, most of whom were cheerleaders. In retrospect, Robin had always been way cooler because she was comfortable being herself. I had been faking it because I wanted so badly to belong. I’ve never gotten over feeling horribly guilty for leaving Robin. We had had a deep connection in elementary school, all the way through eighth grade. Eventually I apologized to her at our thirtieth high school reunion.

  I don’t remember where Zara was going to college, but I told her that I was on my way to Howard but didn’t have a room. “Oh, wow,” she said. “My cousin Crystal is a senior at Howard and she and her roommate, Leslie, another girl from Newark, have a three-bedroom apartment, and they’re looking for a third roommate.”

  My body began to vibrate.

  “Yeah, their other roommate isn’t going back to school.”

  How could it be this perfect?

  Zara wrote down her cousin’s phone number and I gave her mine. As soon as I got home, I called Crystal. We talked a little while on the phone, and she told me about Leslie, whose mother knew mine. Crystal lived not far from me in Newark, in the South Ward, and told me I could come and pick up the key. As a transfer student, I would be starting school before her.

  Back then parents taking their kids to college hadn’t yet become an event. I was nineteen, and that idea wasn’t even entertained. My friend Joni and our older and more worldly friend Winnie offered to drive with me to school in the brand-new Chevette that my dad had bought for me. What should have been a four-hour drive ended up being double that. We got to DC without a problem, but getting around the city and finding Tacoma Park, Maryland, proved as confusing as my first semester at school. DC is designed in a circle, with all the streets named from “A” to “Z,” starting with one syllable, going to two, then three. We didn’t know that and must have spent hours going in circles. When we finally found the Park Ritchie apartment building, it was way past nightfall. And it was August, which in DC is beyond hot and sticky.

  As we were schlepping my stuffed yellow suitcases, my fake floor plant, and garage sale mirror from the car, a handsome, bearded, happy-faced brother was trying to exit the building.

  “Hey, let me get the door for you,” he said.

  He took the plant, a suitcase, and held the door for us.

  I could hear a twang that was different from the garbled “R”s we’d already become tired of after stopping a thousand times asking for directions.

  We thanked him over and over. He looked at us with kindness and in his amused baritone said, “Hi, I’m Danny Meachum,” as he stuck out his hand.

  Thirty-plus years later, he is still my closest male friend.

  Our stories differ here. He remembers that we basically handed him boxes and suitcases and insisted that he help us, ignoring that he was wearing a suit and was on his way out. The suit part is undoubtedly true because Danny always wore a suit or a jacket. He lived in the building with
two roommates who, like him, were students at Howard Law. He helped me that night and his roommates and mine spent the remaining year in DC sharing food, fun, and sorrows. Danny and I, born the same year, two days apart, forged a bond. While we were the same age, his parents had started him in school early, and I’d taken a year off before starting college, which is why he was in law school, while I was a sophomore. He’d grown up an only child in rural North Carolina and is a combination of nice, small-town boy and barrister baller. He would become a successful lawyer in Atlanta, with A-list celebs as clients and friends.

  Danny is still one of the few people I laugh hardest with and with whom I have some of the most fun. Danny I and will go years without seeing each other and maybe even without speaking on the phone, but we always can pick back up. A few years ago when Cliff, the children, and I went to Georgia for our niece’s college graduation, we stayed with Danny. My children, who didn’t remember meeting him before, began calling him Uncle Danny without either of us suggesting it. “Danny is the coolest person ever,” my daughter Baldwin said after she rode in his convertible Aston Martin when we all went out to dinner. Years later, on the morning of my mom’s funeral, I got dressed and walked downstairs, and standing in my living room was Danny. I didn’t even know that Cliff had called him. I will never forget that for as long as I live.

  Howard proved to be as confusing initially as the city itself. I’d thought being in school with Black people would be familiar, not taking into account that one in four students is from another country, and that the Black American students were from cities and towns across the nation, even from places like Wyoming and North Dakota. The most confusing group turned out to be the people from closer to home—DC folks, Virginians, and the folks from places that had a class and color stratification thing going on that I didn’t know anything about. I wasn’t aware of such distinctions when I was growing up. Where I came from, you were simply Black. I now see that the distinctions were there, even in Newark; I was just oblivious to them. It was there when girls picked on me in school, for example. My mom tried to explain that they were “just jealous,” but I couldn’t imagine anyone being jealous of the corny, oxblood-colored Buster Brown oxfords or the velvet-collared coat she made me wear. Belatedly, I understood that we’d had slightly more than many postriot Black Newark households in the way of material things—GM provided my dad a good salary—and we were an intact family. My mom’s salary pushed us another rung or two up the socioeconomic ladder, allowing for Marc’s braces, Duane’s science camps, two weeks every summer on the Jersey Shore, and all the other “cultural necessities” my mother deemed important, such as piano and dance lessons and theater tickets.