by Bobby Love
“Empty your pockets, boy,” the officer said to me.
I pulled out the money I’d shoved in my pocket. The officer grabbed it from the table and showed the principal the markings he’d made. Apparently so many kids had complained about missing money at school, the principal had hired a detective to set up a sting operation. I’d fallen right into it.
I was so angry with myself. If I hadn’t been so greedy, I’d be getting ready for homecoming instead of getting ready for a future at a juvenile jail.
“Goodbye, Mr. Miller,” the principal said like he was just happy to see me go. And with that, the officer grabbed me again and led me out of the office.
When the officer stopped in front of my house, I knew Mama was home. She’d heard the car pull up, come to the door, and watched as the officer yanked me out of the back seat and then forced me up the steps in front of him.
“Buddy,” my mother cried, opening the door. “What did you do now?”
“Are you his mother?” the officer asked.
“Yes, sir,” my mother answered, her face careening between fear and rage.
“Your son was caught stealing in the school and is being arrested for theft. I understand he’s already on probation, so we will be contacting his probation officer to handle the situation.”
My mother went from looking at the officer with shame to looking down at me with disappointment.
“Thank you, officer,” Mama said. “I’ll be sure he’s here when Mr. Allen comes for him.”
The officer tipped his hat to Mama and then turned on his heels and left.
Mama then dragged me into the house. I could feel the heat rising off of her.
She barely waited for the door to close before she started hollering at me.
“When is it going to stop, Buddy? Why do you keep doing these things?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said, but she didn’t want to hear any apology from me. She continued to yell at me until she had to sit down and catch her breath. I was afraid she was going to make herself sick. Over the summer Mama had lapsed into a diabetic coma. She had type 1 diabetes and had forgotten to take her insulin. The doctor told her she had to stop working so hard and try to relax more. And here I was making her worse.
“Mama, please calm down,” I said. “I promise I won’t do it again. I don’t know why I did it. But I promise I’ll be good. Please, just don’t get yourself all upset.”
Mama looked at me like she’d lost all hope. Like she didn’t believe me.
“Buddy, there isn’t going to be another chance for you if you don’t stop doing these things.”
“I know, Mama,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be my lucky number seven, Buddy,” Mama reminded me. “You’re not supposed to end up like your brothers.” She sounded so sad when she said that. I knew I’d let her down. Deep inside I knew that I could do better. I knew I could stop stealing if I wanted to. I just hadn’t wanted to badly enough.
Mama sighed and hoisted herself up.
“Go on in your room, Buddy, and think about what you’ve done. When Mr. Allen gets here, you can try to tell him you’re sorry, but I don’t know if it’s going to make a difference.”
I didn’t want to cause my mother any more stress, but I also didn’t want go to jail. My mind started calculating my options. As I paced around my room, trying to figure out what I should do, I stopped for a moment and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I saw a scared kid staring back at me. A sheen of nervous sweat covered my face and made the pimples on my forehead stick out even more. I had a bad case of acne. Mama said it was because I was running the streets, living the fast life. “You’ve gotten away from God, Buddy,” she told me when I complained about it. “Those marks on your face are the devil’s handwork.”
I turned away from the mirror and pushed my mother’s warnings to the back of my mind. I decided I wasn’t going to jail. I opened my sock drawer and grabbed the few dollars I’d saved, threw some clothes in my backpack, and hopped out my bedroom window. Without looking back, I hightailed it to the Greyhound bus station and bought myself a ticket to Washington, DC, where my older brother Raymond lived with his wife and three young sons. I figured I’d be long gone from Greensboro when Mr. Allen showed up at our house.
“Sorry, Mama,” I whispered as the bus pulled out of the station.
Unfortunately for me, Raymond wasn’t interested in helping me avoid my punishment. As soon as I showed up on his doorstep and told him what I was fleeing from, he called Mama and sent me back home.
A judge sentenced me to thirteen months at the Morrison Training School, a juvenile facility that was established in 1923 for young Black men who were in trouble with the law. I’d heard about Morrison, and the rumors about the place put a cold fear in my heart.
“Please, Mama, don’t let them send me there,” I pleaded with my mother after the hearing.
“Buddy, I’ve already told you that I don’t know what else to do with you,” Mama said. “You don’t mind me. You don’t do anything you’re told.”
“I promise I’ll be good. I’m not a criminal. I don’t need to go to jail,” I pleaded. It hurt me that my mother wasn’t willing to fight for me in this moment. I knew that what I had been doing was wrong, but deep down, I still felt like I was more good than bad. When I measured my thievery against all the rest of me, the tally wasn’t all negative. I played sports. I knew how to work hard. I took care of my nieces and nephews and my little brother. I loved my family. I didn’t think of myself as bad. But obviously others did.
Mama started pulling her gloves on. It was only October, but a chill was already coming to Greensboro. “Listen, Buddy,” Mama said. “Mr. Allen tells me that the Morrison School isn’t that bad. You can take high school classes and learn a trade. They got all kinds of programs up there for you. And maybe they’ll knock some sense into you. Lord knows I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked.”
Mr. Allen walked over to us then. He greeted Mama and me.
“You ready to go, Walter?” he said.
“No, I’m not ready. Why do I have to go there?”
“You know what, Walter?” Mr. Allen said. “I think this is going to be exactly what you need. You haven’t had a father figure around to teach you right from wrong, and you just won’t obey your mama, so this is where we are. If you don’t like it up there, play by the rules so you can get out and come be with your family.”
I tried to take in what Mr. Allen was saying, but it was impossible to think positive about Morrison while also trying not to cry.
“I’ll pray for you, Buddy. Just do your best” were the last words Mama said to me before she turned to head home.
CHERYL
When I turned thirteen, my father finally let me buy my own copies of Right On! magazine. I no longer had to borrow them from my friends and sneak down to my godmother Katherine’s apartment to read them. Daddy had a lot of rules for me when I officially started turning into a young woman. No makeup, no high heels, no boys. If it weren’t for Sis and my godmother standing up for me, Daddy would have kept me a baby forever.
But time wouldn’t stand still, not even for Daddy.
By the time I turned fourteen and started high school, he let me wear lip gloss, and I would sometimes sneak a pair of high heels in my backpack and change into them at school. The thing was, Daddy had to leave the house before us kids, so he didn’t really get to see what I looked like when I walked out the door. I wasn’t trying to rebel, but now that I was in high school with a whole new crowd of kids, looking good mattered to me. I paid attention to the latest fashions, kept my hair nicely styled, and flashed my dimples whenever necessary.
My two best friends, Carla and Deena, and I had decided to attend August Martin High School in Jamaica, Queens. The only reason we chose to go to a school so far away from our homes in Brooklyn was that it was the only high school that all three of us had gotten into, and we refused to be separated. So we tolerated the one-hour ride
on the Q7 bus at 7:00 in the morning and then again coming home in the afternoon.
Despite the commute, I really enjoyed high school. There were new kids to meet, and our teachers gave us more freedom as well. We could leave school grounds for lunch, and in between classes we could hang out and socialize. Plus, there were a lot of cute boys to talk to, and I was happy to discover that they wanted to talk to me too. The only downside about attending high school in Queens was that I didn’t have time to join any of the after-school clubs and activities. Daddy didn’t want me walking home from the bus stop after it got dark outside. But I still sang in the church choir and participated in other activities at church. Daddy was glad to see me in church as much as possible, so doing extracurricular stuff there helped to keep everyone happy. And that’s how I liked things. I didn’t want to cause any commotion, and I wanted Daddy to be proud of me. I kept my grades up in school, did my chores around the house, and that way I was allowed to go out with my friends. Daddy said no boys until I was fifteen—not even on the phone—but that didn’t stop me from looking at boys and talking to them with Carla and Deena.
Everything was going great until one day I came home and found the kitchen table was missing from our apartment. So was Estelle.
Daddy wasn’t home from work, and Scott and Don were just as confused as I was.
“Where’s the table, Cheryl?” Scott asked me.
I looked at him and shared my confusion. “I don’t know.” I knocked on Daddy and Estelle’s bedroom door, but there was no answer.
The three of us tried to solve the mystery of the missing kitchen table but had to wait until my father came home to tell us what happened.
“Estelle moved out,” Daddy said when he got home that night. There was no explanation. He just said she moved out and then he went and changed out of his work clothes like he normally did. My brothers and I looked at each other like Daddy was crazy, but we didn’t say anything to him about our stepmother. Not even when he dragged an old trunk into the kitchen for us to eat on. Or when he served us plates of franks and beans for dinner with no vegetables.
I knew the kitchen table was Estelle’s because she brought it with her when she moved in, so if she was gone, I guess the table was gone too. I felt bad for my father because he obviously seemed upset that his new wife had left him, but secretly I didn’t mourn her leaving. While I was grateful for Estelle’s help around the house, she never became a good substitute for Mommy.
I didn’t want Daddy to get overwhelmed, so I immediately started offering to cook dinner, and I cleaned up the kitchen after we ate, too. I tried to keep things neat and tidy in the apartment, and I made Don and Scott help out. They were eleven and eight, so they were old enough to pull their weight with chores. By the time Estelle had been gone for a month, we had a pretty good rhythm going and I knew we’d be okay. But then Estelle came back.
Oh, brother, I thought when I got home that day and saw the kitchen table back in its usual place. Daddy had never told me why he and Estelle had broken up, but I figured they must have patched things up if she and her table were back. Like my father, Estelle never said anything to me about why she left. She didn’t apologize or reassure us that it would never happen again. She just made dinner and acted like she hadn’t disappeared.
Scott, Don, and I sat down at the table and basically kept our mouths shut. But I for one was trying to figure out what was going on. Daddy didn’t seem upset. He had on his typical happy face for us kids, and he told Estelle that the pot roast she’d made was delicious. I couldn’t keep up with grown folks and their issues. I was only fourteen and had no interest in figuring out their problems.
But Estelle left again about a year later. This time Daddy said it was for good. I didn’t need to ask why she’d left. There were definitely cracks in the relationship, and it appeared to me that Estelle just didn’t want to raise us kids full-time. She acted like we were a burden and a nuisance. I knew she still loved my father, because Daddy continued to visit Estelle and stay over at her apartment, but she was done being a mother to us.
“I didn’t need her stingy butt anyway,” I complained to Deena and Carla one day on the bus ride after school.
“Yeah, Cheryl. You guys are better off without her. She was so mean,” Carla reminded me.
“I know that’s right,” I said.
But now I had to take on all of the work of the house for real, including taking care of Don and Scott. I had to cook breakfast and dinner, do the cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping. Daddy was so happy that I’d stepped up. He kept telling me how proud he was of me and how thankful, and so I didn’t have the heart to tell him how all that work was wearing me out. But I had no problem telling my friends.
“Maybe she’ll come back again,” Deena offered.
I gave her a look. “I don’t want her to come back,” I said. “I just don’t want to have to do everything.”
And that was the truth. I didn’t want Estelle to come back. I actually liked the idea that I got to choose what we would eat for dinner. And I liked that we could all go back to watching TV together on Mommy and Daddy’s bed. I liked that we didn’t have to tiptoe around Estelle and her strict rules. When she was around, we couldn’t laugh too loud or talk too loud. What I didn’t like was that taking care of my brothers, washing everybody’s laundry and cooking and shopping meant I didn’t have any time to do the things I wanted to do, like hang out with my friends or go to parties or even take a later bus home after school. I loved my little brothers and I loved my father, but I was quickly beginning to resent being the one responsible for running the house. But I kept my feelings to myself.
Daddy always taught us that what happened in our house stayed in our house. We weren’t supposed to air our business out in public. That meant that we weren’t supposed to tell anybody that he and Estelle had adjusted the rules of their marriage and that she lived in her own apartment. I didn’t understand why we had to maintain the illusion that Daddy and Estelle were together. I just knew that we had to do it, especially at church, where Daddy was a deacon and Estelle was a deaconess. Estelle would drive herself to church, and we would meet in the parking lot and walk in together. This went on for years. I thought it was embarrassing and weird that we had to keep pretending, but I went along with it because that’s what Daddy expected from us kids. Plus, I didn’t mind Estelle being a part of our lives from a distance and showing up for events with my father, like a mother normally would.
“What do you guys want to eat for dinner?” I asked my brother Scott as he sat between my legs on a Sunday after church. I was braiding his hair so his Afro would stand up nice and tight for school on Monday. Don would be next, and then I had to start cooking. I wouldn’t make anything elaborate like Mommy used to for Sunday dinner, but I at least wanted to make something my brothers would like.
“Can we have hamburgers, Cheryl?” Don asked from the sofa, where he was stretched out reading a comic book.
I did a review in my mind of what we had in the refrigerator. I knew we had ground beef and frozen fries in the freezer.
“Yeah, we can have burgers,” I said to Don. “But you gotta go to the store and get some buns.”
“Okay,” Don said. I knew he wouldn’t mind going to the store because he could buy himself some candy with the leftover change. Both Don and Scott had no problem stepping up in their own ways now that Estelle was no longer part of our household. They cleaned the bathroom and helped me haul all the dirty clothes over to the laundry. On Saturdays, they helped me mop the floors and change all the bedsheets. But it was on me to do everything else. I got up early to make sure they had breakfast and checked that they had lunch money for school. Sometimes in my efforts to get them out the door on time, I’d miss my own bus and get to school thirty minutes late. After a while, I stopped trying to make it to class on time and just decided that getting to class a few minutes late was okay. If I needed extra time to get to school, I decided that with all of the
hard work I was doing, I deserved it.
Pretty soon, that extra hour I needed to get to school stretched into entire days that I needed to rest. I still didn’t tell my father that taking Estelle’s place was too much for me, but inside I was growing irritated, and skipping school became my own form of protest. Not only did I skip school, but also I’d have my friends over and we’d party in the apartment until it was time for my father to get home. I thought I was being careful, but there were eyes all around our building watching me. My godmother cornered me one day and said, “Cheryl, I didn’t see you at the bus stop the other day. Is everything okay?” I hated to lie to my godmother, but I’d gotten good at it.
“Everything’s fine,” I assured her.
My godmother didn’t look like she believed me, but she let it pass.
I don’t know if my father ever suspected something wasn’t right. He seemed content with the way things were going. He complimented me on my cooking, which was getting better every day because I had taken my simple recipes that I’d learned in home economics class and improved on them by reading some of my mother’s old cookbooks. And while I resented the fact that I had to do so much work, I also felt proud that I could run a household and keep my brothers fed and looking sharp. The thing that made me mad, though, was that my father praised me for being mature enough to take care of things around the house, but he didn’t think I was mature enough to go out with my friends and have fun like other kids my age. I didn’t think it was fair.
“Daddy, you say I’m grown enough to do the shopping and to take care of everything around the house. How come I can’t go to a party with my friends?” I would argue, being sure to keep my tone respectful.
“Cheryl, you know the rules: no partying when there’s going to be boys there,” Daddy would say.
Because I was feeling grown, one night I decided to sneak out to a party Daddy had strictly forbidden me to attend. The event was being held in the community center at the Pink Houses so it was easy to get to, and I knew I could sneak back home before Daddy returned from his deacons’ meeting at church.
