“It was James Perkins!” Peaches exclaimed after a few moments of thought. “Yeah, that’s right. Old Perky.” Peaches erupted in laughter, and I had to join her. God had brought us both a long way from our James and Raphael days.
“No, you’re the one who all but kicked me and your family to the curb because we tried to tell you that Raphael was nothing but trouble. But no! You wouldn’t hear of it!”
Peaches yelled, “Don’t talk about my baby’s daddy!”
“No,” I stopped her, “don’t bring Eric into it. This is about hardheaded Patricia Miller. We told you Raphael was runnin’ game, but you were ‘in love’ and he was ‘fine’ and he was the first one to tell you that you were ‘fine’ after you lost all that weight.”
“I knew I was fine before I lost the weight.”
I continued, “Matter of fact, we almost got ourselves killed goin’ up in that club with you to confront that woman he was seeing—like we had guns or something in our purses. Know good and well if that woman had said ‘boo’ we would have both jumped back!”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Peaches gave in. “You’re right. I was hardheaded. But not anymore. Through that experience, I learned to seek out and take heed of wise counsel.”
Peaches caught her breath and got back to Deniessa. “So now you’re the one with the issue. What did Jamal say when you told him to hit the road?” Peaches jerked her thumb to one side.
“I didn’t exactly tell him to hit the road, Peaches.” Deniessa wagged her head. “I told him I loved him and I cared about him, but we just couldn’t live together indefinitely. He said, ‘So is this about the M-word again?’ And I told him, yes. Then we went around and around about how old-fashioned marriage is. The whole time I was thinking to myself, If I’d been a bit more old-fashioned to begin with, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess now. I didn’t even respond to his comments, because I was so close to kicking myself for letting him get so much free milk for so long. Besides, I didn’t want to say a whole bunch of things that I might regret later.” Deniessa gave a hopeless grin. “And that’s what happened.”
I sensed her despair, knowing that what she did was right yet unpopular. Knowing that she’d ultimately done the best thing but immediately inconvenienced herself.
I didn’t know exactly where Deniessa stood on all the hot dating issues, but I’d cut off sex altogether when I put my foot down on the kind of mess that I would no longer accept in my life. The vow to become celibate seemed overwhelming at first. After years of sexual activity, celibacy felt as if I were giving up womanhood itself.
“I think I can relate to at least part of what you’re going through,” I shared with her. “Peaches, you remember when we first started talking about celibacy? That was what—two or three years ago?”
Peaches nodded. I faced Deniessa. “Girl, I thought I was going to fall out on the floor at the thought of celibacy. I had that booty-call phonebook right in my nightstand. I mean, I had some top performers on standby, okay?”
“Well, I wasn’t getting any to begin with, so it wasn’t a problem for me.” Peaches pursed her lips. We laughed at Peaches as she continued with her testimony. “After I had Eric, I closed up the shop. Twenty hours of labor will do that for ya, you know?”
“Ooh, please, not the twenty hours again,” I begged her.
“I cannot wait until you give birth.” She eyed me. “I am going to record every single hour of it.”
The finale for the evening was dinner, which we made together in the kitchen. We prepared spaghetti, corn, garlic bread, and Peaches’ marvelous Caesar salad. I tried to see what she had going into that salad, but she brought the ingredients in a brown paper bag and refused to let us in on her secret recipe.
“Get back.” She threatened with the tongs.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” Deniessa told her.
“You’re about to have these tongs on you.” Peaches waved them around and turned her back to us again, hunching her shoulders over her corner of counter space.
I don’t know why we tried to eat while we were talking. It was a miracle that none of us choked on anything, as much as we laughed about life and work as black women in turn-of-the-century America. Deniessa told us how she almost got into it with a woman at Walmart.
“So I was in the express line and the sister in front of me has, I know, a good forty items in her basket. This white lady behind me said something about counting items and reading signs, but the sister in front of me thought I’d said it,” Deniessa clarified.
“Next thing I knew, she was like, ‘You got something to say, you need to say it in my face.’ I just kind of smiled and told her that I didn’t have anything to say. The white woman behind me who really said it was as quiet as a mouse. I don’t think she meant for her comment to be heard. If I had told that sister in front of me that it was the white woman behind me who’d said it, it would have been all over in that store.”
“I bet she’ll think about that the next time she’s standin’ behind a black woman in the express line,” I smirked, climbing onto my racial soapbox. “White folks could stay out of a whole lot of trouble if they would just keep their opinions to themselves. They always got somethin’ to say, but when somebody checks them on it, they get scared.”
“That’s true,” Deniessa agreed, “but sister-girl was wrong for having forty items in the checkout lane. You know, we can be pretty bad about following directions sometimes.”
“Girl”—Peaches raised her hand to tell us a tale of woe about her world in human resources—“I was training one of the H-R representatives last week, and we sat down with a brother who didn’t realize he was making almost fifty cents an hour less than his manager told him he would be making. He had worked six months without ever sitting down with his paycheck and a calculator to make sure he was actually making seven twenty-five per hour. I couldn’t believe it. Girl, that’s the first thing I do when I get my printout. I make sure it’s all there!”
“Maybe he just didn’t know how to figure it out,” I said. “You would be surprised what people know and don’t know.”
“But black folks know our money if we don’t know nothin’ else,” Peaches countered me. “He was just being lazy.”
“I’m with Peaches on this one, ‘cause any other black person wouldn’t have even made it out the door without seeing that,” Deniessa said. “I know I wouldn’t have.”
“Well,” I reiterated, “I just know that some of the things we take as common knowledge aren’t common to everybody else. I sit down with parents every day who don’t know how to average their child’s grades. It all boils down to education in America. The system has done a poor job of teaching people what they really need to know. Especially when it comes to educating our kids.”
“Yeah, but some stuff can’t be taught,” Deniessa said. “Nobody should have to tell you to check your check. If you don’t know how to do it, ask somebody. It’s that simple. Well, let me take that back. We are talking about a black man, aren’t we? You know a brother ain’t tryin’ to ask for help.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t go there on the brothers,” Peaches scolded her. “I won’t hear of it!”
“Anyway! You didn’t start with all this until you had Eric. You know you were the main one dogging brothers out until you had a son. Now, all of a sudden, it’s ‘Don’t talk about the brothers.’ Girl, please, I just call it like I see it.”
“I have to recognize”—Peaches took a bite of her breadstick and used the remainder to conduct her words—“Eric is a husband in training. Somebody’s gonna have to put up with him once he leaves my care. I refuse to make him another sister’s burden.”
“What if he doesn’t marry a sister?” Deniessa joked.
Peaches closed her eyes and swallowed the bread in a hurry. I smiled, waiting for what would surely be some outrageous statement. “I wish Eric would bring home a white woman! It wouldn’t be nothin’ but a whole bunch of ugly. No, ma’am, I’m raising Eric to be
a black husband to a black wife and be a black father to some little black kids. I want naps on my grandkids’ heads. I’m talking beady- beads.”
“Okay, I don’t know about the beads. But I do second that black thing,” I agreed.
“Speaking of black things, I’ll let you two know the next time the undergrad chapter I sponsor steps at Paul Quinn’s Greek show. It’ll be fun,” Deniessa said by way of invitation.
“Just let me know,” I said.
Chapter 3
Our first place, an apartment, was on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, come to think of it, we were always on the wrong side. But we used to be on the wrong side of the wrong side a long time ago. It was a two-bedroom, one-bathroom deluxe cheap apartment complete with shag carpeting and lime green psychedelic lava lamps in every bedroom. I shared a room with Jonathan, who always got up at the crack of dawn, fooling around with toys or watching cartoons. Other than that, I enjoyed living at the apartment. It was close to my school, and sometimes Momma would take us to the school playground to play on swings that actually had the seats in them. The playground at our apartment complex was always being vandalized by teenagers, most of whom weren’t even residents.
I was happy to see a moving van parked near our building, but Daddy said it was high time we moved when our last set of upstairs neighbors moved in. “I refuse to live right next door to a clan of Mexicans!” he declared.
At the time, I didn’t know what a Mexican was. From the way Daddy talked, I thought Mexicans were bears or something.
“We gon’ have roaches before you know it.” Momma shook her head. “You mark my words! Jon Smith, we better hightail it out of here!” It was one of the few times they openly agreed on something.
Watching them pace around the room as the Mexicans moved their furniture upstairs was rather exciting from my perspective. When I got the chance to peek between the slats of our blinds, I saw a little girl. Finally, a girl! I went outside to play with her that evening, and we played dolls until the lamps came on. Never mind the fact that she didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Words weren’t important. Smiles, hand gestures, and laughter were all the communication we needed to have a good time.
Momma told me to make sure I took a good bath that night. “Those Mexicans are nasty,” she told me. “It’s all right to play with the little Spanish girl outside, but don’t think you’re gonna spend the night over there with her and her kind. Don’t even ask.”
“What’s Spanish?”
“It’s the way they talk. It’s a different language,” she told me as she double-checked my scrubbing efforts.
“How come she speaks a different language?”
“Cause she ain’t learned how to talk English yet.”
“Is she ever gonna learn to talk like we do?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” Then Momma said under her breath, “She should have learned it before she got here. They ought to make ‘em all learn it before they cross the border. That’ll cut out a lot of this mess.”
I envisioned a group of teachers meeting the Spanish girl and her family at a bus station and then teaching them English in a matter of minutes. “Can I teacher her English, Momma?”
“You ain’t got time to teach her English.” She stood me up and wrapped a towel around me before lifting me out of the tub. “You need to worry about your own education first.”
* * * * *
The answering machine blinked the number 2 when I got home. The first message was from my brother, wishing me a happy birthday. The second was from my mother, checking to make sure that I was coming over for dinner. I picked up the receiver and called to assure her that I would be there in a few minutes.
“You gonna bring the rolls?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
“Well, come on, then. Me and your daddy’ll be waitin’.”
I hung up my church clothes and put on an all-season denim dress with a split up the back. Too risqué for my church, but fine for Sunday dinner with the parents. I slid into a pair of low-heeled mules and pulled my hair back behind a headband.
I took the old familiar back roads to “the hood.” It was beautiful scenery—always had been, until you got across the tracks. I glanced down at my panel, making sure that my doors were locked. As much as I loved the hood and my people, I couldn’t deny the uneasy feeling I had in this twenty-first-century Brockmoore neighborhood. It wasn’t the same since most of the original homeowners moved out. The new owners, younger and poorer, didn’t give two cents about their property or the neighborhood. Their yards were unkempt, their nonfunctioning cars sat propped up on bricks in front lawns, and dangerous-looking dogs were chained to stakes in the ground.
And yet, it was my hood, my stomping ground. I had roots there, even if the ground was less than desirable. If I can’t fit in here, where do I fit in?
It had all been so simple when I was a teenager. Everybody knew everybody. I wasn’t allowed to socialize with all the kids in the neighborhood, but I did know their names and they knew mine. I could ride my bike and pump Jonathan on my handlebars without worrying about some strange white man kidnapping us.
Now almost everyone looked strange. Addicts as skinny as the hungry African children on television walked the streets, giving me gestures and then blank stares. They wanted to know if I sold drugs. Their beckoning made me feel blessed and ashamed at the same time. Blessed because it could have been me. Ashamed because I thought, could I have done something to change this? It also made me wonder how much of the problem was due to addicts’ bad choices and how much was environmental, system- oriented.
My parents’ house looked as if it had landed on the wrong street, with its new coat of paint and well-tended lawn. The chain-link fence around the front yard kept the neighborhood kids from making a shortcut across their corner lot. Momma and Daddy had put their everything into that house and refused to move, even after someone tried to break in a few years earlier. They were getting old, and I feared for them sometimes, but 700 Dembo was their little piece of America.
When I stepped inside my parents’ house, I could smell Daddy’s mouthwatering fried chicken from the porch. Lord knows, if that man couldn’t do anything else, he could burn. Everything he made tasted like heaven.
The screen door gave me a quick swat on my behind as I crossed the threshold, and I followed my usual path to the kitchen. Past the off-limits living room and the hall bathroom was the large central kitchen. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I liked the feel of that room; it seemed to branch off into the other rooms of the house. The kitchen’s aromas roamed into every passageway and every corner. Some of the kitchen’s old tiles were torn, but they had been worn so much that they’d smoothed out with time; as though they were supposed to be that way, ripped edges and all.
Jonathan and I had tried to convince Momma to resurface her counters, but she’d refused. Aside from the refrigerator, everything in that kitchen was at least fifteen years old. The cabinets were dull olive, and the wallpaper was a sad pattern of flowers and teapots. All of Momma’s pans, some of which were on the stove, were missing their handles. But she said she wouldn’t dare part with them. “That’s when they get good,” she’d said. The ever-present supply of leftover grease in the Crisco can sat between the stove’s eyes, ready to fry up anything at a moment’s notice.
“Hello!” I called.
I heard the television blaring and figured Daddy was in the middle of watching some football game. With the chicken finished, he’d already done his part.
“Hey, baby,” Momma called as she came from the back bathroom. She shuffled into the kitchen toward me, her graying hair pulled back into a soft bun. I could still see the impression that her Sunday hat made on her light bronze forehead. She would not be caught dead at Sunday service without a hat on. She had a dash of her latest discovery, lipstick, on her lips. When I was growing up, Momma had always said that she wouldn’t paint her face. But lately I noti
ced her branching out, though not so far as to cause the saints to speculate.
Her bifocals dangled near the edge of her nose for just a moment, then she pushed them up with a forefinger and wrinkled up her nose to hold them there for a second and get a good look at me. Her light brown eyes met mine and checked me, as they always did when I saw her. She could decipher my mood with one glance. She could tell I was fine, and unwrinkled her nose so that her glasses could begin their descent into the soft, pink groove near the center of her bridge.
Her thick arms embraced me, but only for a moment. There was work to be done. I hung my coat on the coat rack and rejoined her in the kitchen. I put my purse down in a chair, washed my hands, and grabbed an apron from the stove handle.
Daddy came in and stood over me, scrutinizing my every move. His favorite belt buckle, an oversized silver mold of Texas, pressed into his round stomach. He’d never give it up, even though it was on the last notch. In fact, I think he’d poked another hole in it, just to keep on wearing that belt with his name stamped into the back in big brown capital letters: JONATHAN.
His wardrobe was much like the kitchen decor—old-fashioned and so outdated that it was just about back in style. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt bearing the Coca-Cola emblem that I recognized from a Christmas long gone. His salt-and- pepper hair had been brushed back with a few unfocused strokes. The deep brown skin poking out at the top of his head shined like a light bulb, as though he had a bright idea.
My father might have been a fashion disaster waiting to happen, but he always smelled good. He splurged on cologne, though he rarely went anywhere since retiring. He said that Grandmomma Smith always taught him that you might be poor, but you didn’t have to be dirty or stinky. As was routine, I ignored his inspections and continued with my duty.
Boaz Brown Page 3
