Early on a Saturday morning, Tracy headed for Chelten Avenue to catch the bus to the Broad Street subway. She was decked out in white Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a turquoise silk shirt, carrying her black leather Coach bag. She was on her way downtown for her fourth week at work in Jeans & Shirts. It had rained the night before, so the pavement was still damp, and a chilly wind blew through her asymmetric hairdo. She had done away with the baby dreadlocks, reverting back to the honey-blond-tipped asymmetric look, donning her triangular-shaped Tracy earrings again with her neck laced with gold.
Victor Hinson cruised up behind her in his blue Mercedes Benz. He stopped alongside her, rolled down his passenger-side window and leaned over the seat. “Hey, pretty. You want a ride?” He looked handsome, almost coal black with moon-white teeth.
Tracy was not sure if she wanted to oblige. After Raheema’s news about Mercedes going into a rehabilitation center, the awareness that Victor dealt in drugs made him no longer acceptable to her. Morally, Victor was no better than Cash. “I don’t think so.” she told him.
Victor speeded up the street and double-parked. He then popped on his hazard lights, jumped out of his car and walked over to the sidewalk to wait for her.
Tracy was apprehensive as she slowly approached him. Oh my God, I don’t have time for this, she thought to herself. She had to be at work in less than an hour.
Victor, in a sky-blue and white terry-cloth sweat suit with white BK shoes and no socks, danced to the music that rocked from his car, as he waited for Tracy to get closer to him. His sweat-suit jacket was zipped down to his stomach, and his gold V dangled from his chain and glimmered against his black chest. He then stepped in front of Tracy and grabbed her hands, ever so gently.
“I just wanted to hold you again, but I guess that you’re over me now,” he said to her with a smile. He knew that she wasn’t.
Tracy stood there with him, at a loss for words, and was motionless. Am I over him? she asked herself, feeling his touch for the first time in nearly three years.
“I can’t even give you a ride to where you’re going?” he asked her. “Where are you going this early anyway? You got a job or something?”
Tracy was still trying to gather her thoughts. Am I over him? she continued to ask herself. “I gotta get to work,” she finally told him. “I have to be to work in like forty-five minutes, and I need to get to Broad and Olney to take the subway.” She still had not released herself from his hold on her.
Victor pulled her to his car and said, “Come on, then.”
Tracy didn’t want to get in, but she found no desire to pull away from him. She had never been inside of a Mercedes Benz, and before she knew it, Victor had shut the door on her and run around to the driver’s side. Tracy found herself quickly relaxed as she leaned back into the blue leather interior, admiring the Mercedes Benz dashboard and the car phone. And the sweet strawberry incense that dangled from his mirror was pleasing to her senses. Damn, this car is decent! she could not help but thinking.
Victor glanced over and smiled at how sexy and tempting Tracy continued to look to him. He had a confession to make to her. “You know what? I don’t know what it is, but every time I see you, I keep getting these urges to say something to you. And it’s like I can’t help it.
“I mean, to be straight up about it, I’ve been with a whole lot of good-lookin’ girls, but none of them held my interest like you do.”
Tracy cracked a huge smile. “Because you like me,” she suggested to him.
Victor chuckled to himself and asked, “Why would you think I liked you, out of all the girls that I’ve had?”
Tracy thought as quickly as she could and responded, “Because I didn’t sweat you like they did.”
Victor burst out laughing. “Come on now. What are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that I never had you waiting for me at the playground and whatnot?”
Tracy grinned, embarrassingly. “That’s when I was younger.”
“So what ’chew sayin’? I couldn’t do that to you now?”
“Hell no,” Tracy snapped at him.
“But do you still like me though?”
Tracy paused. “Have you ever loved a girl before?” she decided to ask him.
Victor thought about it. “Love? You mean, like, ‘I love you’ love?”
Tracy laughed. The idea sounded alien to Victor. “Yeah. Have you ever loved a girl?”
“Damn, that’s a good question. I mean, I remember girls that I liked a lot, and I still talk to them and all, but I ain’t never said that I loved them or no shit like that.”
“Why it gotta be ’shit?’ ”
“Well, I don’t mean ‘shit,’ like in unimportant, I mean, ‘shit,’ like in complication. You know what I mean?”
Tracy sucked her teeth and stared at him. “Do you love me?” she asked. She was surprised that she had asked him, but once it was done, she felt good about it. She was finally beginning to assert herself with Victor.
Victor looked straight into her hazels with his piercing blacks. “Do you think that I love you?”
“Sometimes. Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because. I mean, you’ve been looking out for me and stuff, like I’m your little sister or something.”
Victor shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve done that with a lot of girls.”
“Have you done it with them?”
He shook his head. “Naw, not really. But you were big for your age, so I had to have you.”
Tracy cracked up as they approached Broad Street a little too quickly for her. “You sound like a pervert,” she told him.
“Come on now, I ain’t that much older than you. How am I gonna sound like a pervert?”
Tracy grinned at her ill reference of him. “I was just playing with you. Don’t take it personal.”
“Well, ain’t this your stop?” he asked, pulling right up beside the subway entrance.
Tracy was enjoying her conversation with him too much to leave. Fuck it! You only live once, she told herself. “You wanna ride me downtown?” she asked him.
Victor smiled and shook his head. “Naw, I got something to do.”
Tracy then remembered her hesitancy to ride in his car in the first place. He was a drug dealer.
“I wanna talk to you about that when we get a chance,” she told him.
Victor ignored her. He knew what she was getting at. Several other girls had asked him how he felt about selling drugs to his people, and Victor gave the same response as all the other dealers, Nobody’s forcing them to take it.
“Come on now, I’m running late,” he told her.
“Not until you tell me that you love me,” she decided, playfully. I’ll talk to him about that drug-selling stuff at another time, she promised herself, realizing that he had brushed her off about it.
“Well, you gon’ be late for work then,” he warned.
Tracy climbed out of his car and said, “You’re gonna tell me that you love me one of these days.”
Victor had another laugh. “What ’chew think, you’re training me now or something?”
Tracy smiled at him as she walked toward the subway. “I think you wanna be my man.”
“Oh yeah? Well, why would I want to be your man after I already had you?” he asked with a smile.
“Because I’m flyy. And you know that,” she responded with confidence. I’m finally on equal footing with him, she told herself excitedly.
Victor rolled up his window and drove off, still grinning. “That girl’s getting too smart for her own good,” he told himself. “I like that.”
Tracy’s new job proved to be an effortless hype of self-esteem. Young black men from all over Philadelphia came to the centrally located store and bought more than they expected. They all wanted to keep “Flyy-honey-brown” in sight, pressing her for dates and for her phone number, while trying to give her theirs.
Tracy turned all of their offers down. Even her Italian boss, Joseph Bamatti, made moves on her whenever he could get close enough to her without the other girls noticing, and that only irritated her. Tracy feared losing her job in an argument about it, but she refused to be harassed.
Tracy called Pam into the dressing room in the back, so “Little Joey” could not hear her comments about him.
Pam quizzed, “What’s up, girl?” She was big-boned and taller than Tracy.
Tracy whispered, “Did Joey ever try to hit on you?”
Pam smirked. “Hell naw. My boyfriend would kill his little ass. But he’s sayin’ dumb shit to you though?” Pam was large enough to have a huge boyfriend. Tracy could see why she had nothing to worry about from Little Joey. “Look, if that muthafucka is bothering you, then tell ’im the fuck off. I do. That’s why he respects me.”
Tracy looked at Pam’s size again, thinking, That ain’t the only reason why Joey respects you. “Well, did he try any other girls?” she asked.
“He probably did, but nobody told me shit about it. And that’s probably why ’dem two Italian girls don’t like you in here.”
“You think so?”
“Hell yeah, girl. He was probably playin’ favors for them. And you the next trick on his list,” Pam said jokingly.
“No the fuck I ain’t,” Tracy snapped.
Pam said, “Well, look, I’ll talk to you on the phone about it, ’cause we losin’ commission.”
“Stop lunchin’ and start working, Tracy,” one of the Italian girls remarked.
“Ay Maria, come here for a minute,” Tracy called.
Maria had an outright attitude. Disgust was written all over her olive-colored face. “What?” she answered skeptically.
Tracy asked, “Why don’t you like me?”
“Who said I don’t like you?”
“I mean, by the way you act toward me, it’s obvious.”
“It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that you spend too much time bull-shitting around and not enough time working.”
“Well, Joey ain’t complainin’,” Tracy said purposefully. She wanted to see if that was the problem.
Tracy hit pay dirt. Maria snapped, “I mean, are you fucking Joey or something?”
“No, are you fuckin’ ’im?”
Maria rolled her eyes and said, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Tracy felt like smacking the color out of her. But it wouldn’t look good for her image, since it would be painted that they were fighting over her boss.
Joey interjected, yelling from the front counter, “HEY! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO DOIN’? Come on, get a move on! We got customers in here ready to spend hundreds of dollars. Look, this guy here wants to buy a sweat suit. I mean, are yous’ workin’ or not?”
• • •
“Ra-heem-ma, let me tell you, girl-friend. I was so ready to kick this Italian bitch’s teeth in today,” Tracy told her neighbor.
Raheema was enjoying the spring night air as Tracy walked up. “Why?” she asked, smiling. Tracy always had a story to tell.
Tracy shook her earring-wearing head. “This bitch think that I’m fuckin’ my Italian boss named Joey, and she be havin’ attitudes with me. And oh my God, I felt like kickin’ that bitch’s ass t’day. But then everybody might think that I was fighting her over him. And I don’t like this other Italian bitch in that store either, but I wanted to kill that Maria bitch.”
Tracy was right out in front of her house, cussing up a storm. Raheema sat there chuckling.
Tracy finally calmed down and took a seat on Raheema’s steps. “Damn, I hate petty bitches!” she claimed. “So what’s the news, ABC Channel 6?”
Raheema paused. She didn’t have any good news for Tracy. She said solemnly, “Victor got locked up today.”
Tracy responded hoarsely, “What?”
“They said that he resisted arrest, and they had a warrant for attempted assault and battery against him, up in Cheltenham. Jantel told me about it.”
Tracy trembled and choked up. “I don’t . . . Why . . . Dag!”
Raheema moved closer, feeling almost as bad as Tracy did. She squeezed Tracy’s hand, trying to comfort her.
“After all this shit,” Tracy muttered sorrowfully. “Why did they have to get him now? Those muthafuckas just had to wait until now. Didn’t they?” She bit her lower lip, trying to hold back the tears. They started falling rapidly down her face.
Tracy snatched her hand away from Raheema and stood up. “The Cheltenham police are racist anyway. Fuck the cops!” she exclaimed. She began pacing down her block toward Wayne Avenue.
“Where are you going?” Raheema asked her fearfully. She was afraid that Tracy might try something stupid in her rage.
“No-fuckin’-where!” Tracy fumed. Raheema followed her as she pouted. “I don’t believe this! And the police are never around to lock up criminals when you need ’em to. They just know how to take niggas away, that’s all. Punk-ass cops!”
Raheema realized that Victor was in the wrong, and although he had been Tracy’s first love, Raheema suspected that her neighbor/girlfriend knew it, too. It was just the wrong time for Tracy to admit it.
That next Sunday morning, Tracy had promised her college friends that she would go with them to an African Cultural Festival in Fairmount Park. She tried to back out, but Lisa and Kiwana would not let her. Lisa had room in her car to take Raheema, since Joanne was back in New York.
“You gotta get out and shake this thing off, girl. And you should’ve never stopped hanging out with us in the first place,” Lisa was saying to Tracy. “I mean, just because you and Carl couldn’t work things out doesn’t mean that you had to cut us off.”
Kiwana said, “I know. Girlfriend just up and disappeared on us.”
Lisa and Kiwana both wore African Kente outfits. Raheema and Tracy wore matching Nike sweat suits, looking like twins.
“So I guess you know what your name means, right?” Kiwana asked Raheema.
“Unt unh,” Raheema responded shyly, especially around Kiwana. Kiwana looked so healthy. Her skin was clear and as smooth as a baby’s.
“It’s a Muslim name, meaning kindhearted and good,” she told Raheema.
Raheema nodded, embarrassed by her acne-prone skin, wishing she could have Kiwana’s.
“I’m gonna get you some vitamins, and some aloe vera products to heal your blemishes. You have to stop eating oil-producing foods, too.”
Raheema was all ears and no complaints, with advice coming from someone as beautiful as Kiwana.
Lisa interjected, “Yeah, remember? Joanne had acne real bad when we first got to school.”
“Yup. And we got her on a vegetarian diet and eating the right foods, and it straightened her right out,” Kiwana said. “But the key is not to damage your skin. Acne can be taken care of. It’s the scars that do the real damage.”
“Yeah, and you just gotta start feeling positive about you as a person,” Lisa added. She could tell that Raheema was guarded.
Tracy said, “I didn’t know that Joanne had acne.”
“Yeah, when we were freshmen,” Lisa answered, as if it was years ago. They were only sophomores.
Kiwana asked Raheema, “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Mercedes.”
“God. Why did your parents name her that?”
Raheema smiled. “Because my father wanted one.”
They all roared with laughter inside of the small car.
Kiwana shook her head. “That’s a shame.”
Lisa asked, “So who named you?”
Raheema answered, “My mom did. She said that she knew this Muslim girl in high school, and she told me that she had always liked her name.” She was beginning to open up to them.
“Oh,” Lisa said. “So your mom and her are still good friends?”
“No. They didn’t hang out or anything. My mom just liked her name, and she said that she moved to Washington years ago.”
“Washington, D.C.?” Kiwana asked.
“Yeah,” Raheema answered.
They pulled up to Fairmount Park and found a parking spot. Black men wearing black suits and bow ties were yelling and waving newspapers. “FINAL CALL! GET YOUR FINAL CALL . . . FINAL CALL! GET YOUR FINAL CALL!”
They were sharply dressed, clean-looking and masculine. Tracy heard her college girlfriends talk about “The Nation of Islam” before, but she had never seen any up close. They looked strong and upright.
“Hi are you sisters doin’ today?” one asked.
“We’re doing fine,” Lisa answered for all of them.
“All right, now. Y’all have a good time,” he said. He continued waving his papers as they passed. “FINAL CALL! GET YOUR FINAL CALL!”
Tracy said, “They look like they can kick some ass.”
“Yeah, but I’ll take an Afrocentric man, myself,” Lisa retorted.
“Here you go with that again,” Kiwana responded to her. “We gotta stop separating ourselves like that. I’ll take any black man who has his head screwed on straight, and who is willing to go to battle culturally, religiously, economically, academically and spiritually. I’ll take a Muslim brother any day.”
Lisa contested, “Yeah, you talk that stuff, Kiwana, but all the guys at school say that you think you’re all that, with your nose all up in the air.”
“Well, if any of them start knowing how to act on our campus, then just maybe they would find out that I’m trying to become a queen first, by getting to know who I am and my strongest aspects. And then I’ll look for my king, who knows who he is and what his strongest aspects are. And that may take years,” Kiwana announced.
Tracy and Raheema were thinking that Kiwana was already “a queen.” Tracy figured that she had found her king, but he was behind bars, awaiting trial.
Tracy had never seen so many bright and cheerful colors in her life. African descendants definitely had a way with using attractive colors. Bright oranges, blues, yellows, purples, greens and earth browns were everywhere, as they sold their handmade Kente outfits, clothes, hats, and shirts, along with carved art, paintings and ethnic foods. The girls were having a good time, and Fairmount Park was packed, vibrating with the sounds of celebration and the drum.
The sun was out with a vengeance that afternoon, heating things up. The African Cultural Festival lasted until seven o’clock. They then planned to go see the Spike Lee Joint, School Daze, but first Kiwana wanted Tracy and Raheema to listen to a lecture being given by African, Caribbean and African-American poets.
An older black man with graying dreadlocks held the stage. He wore a long, earth-tone cloth from his neck to his ankles. He looked to be sixty or more, and had the strong and steady eyes of wisdom, as if he could see through walls. And he spoke with a Caribbean accent.
“Our wi-mon in Ameri-ca, on de Islands and on de mainlands of Afri-ca must a-gain be the tea-chas of our chil’ren. We cannot raise any proper nay-shun without our sistuhs knowing exactly who dey are and what dey should be do-eng. Dey must know how to feed themselves propa-lee to be able to give propa nurturing to our future generay-shuns.
“Our wi-mon of old, have been our Nandi, raising Shaka, our Candice, fighting de white barbarians in Ethiopia, our Nefertiti, Hat-shepsut, Cleopatra, Harriet Tub-mon here on de mainland, sistuh Rita Marley in de Islands, and our mother goddesses, O-shun and Isis.
“Our wi-mon must know dare past to be able to plan for our future. Any nay-shun with mothas who do not know dare past to teach dare chil’ren can not possibly rise. So I say to de wi-mon on dees day that you must know your desti-nee. You must know your divini-tee. And you must know, dat through you, all nay-shuns live, all nay-shuns die.”
“Well, you got one more year, Tracy, and then you’re on your own,” Patti said, getting Jason ready for his last week of first grade. It was also Tracy’s last week as a high school junior. “I see you went back to that old ‘natural look’ again,” Patti added with a chuckle.
Tracy smiled and looked into her mirror. Her hair was twisted-up again. She had stopped working at Jeans & Shirts after the first two months. She was turning down a lot of money, but she was tired of being exploited for her looks. For her last day of school, she was wearing a collage t-shirt, sunglasses, blue-jean shorts and no socks with her tan Dockside shoes.
“What is that?” Patti asked, noticing the small wood carving of a naked black woman hanging from her daughter’s neck on a black leather string.
Tracy eyed the naked black woman, bouncing against her chest and held it in her hand. “It’s a fertility symbol, mom.” She smiled, feeling bashful. Kiwana had given it to her a couple of days ago. “Raheema got one, too.”
“Well, what’s with all this African stuff, all of a sudden?” Patti asked. She was curious, noticing the books that Tracy was reading.
“I don’t know. I’m getting it from Kiwana.”
“Tracy goin’ to Africa, mom?” Jason asked.
“I don’t know. Are you going to Africa, Tracy?” Patti said sarcastically.
Tracy grinned. “One day.”
They then headed downstairs to the kitchen.
“And what’s with this health-nut stuff you been getting into? Is that from Kiwana too?”
Tracy laughed. “Mom, I don’t believe you.”
Patti didn’t know much about things outside of Philadelphia. But she wasn’t stupid.
“I’m sorry, mom. I love you,” Tracy said, realizing her careless thoughts.
Patti looked at her as if she was crazy. “I love you too, honey, but you’re starting to act a little loony on me now. I’m gonna have to take you to a mental health clinic soon,” she joked.
Tracy asked her mother while pouring some orange juice, “Did they teach you much about African health methods and whatnot when you were in that nutrition program, mom?”
“No,” Patti said curiously. Tracy may have been learning some things that she didn’t know. “Well, go ahead, ‘Ms. Africa.’ Teach me something,” she responded. Patti smiled and sat down. And she was serious.
“Don’t you have to be at work soon, mom?” Tracy asked, backing down from her mother’s challenge. She was embarrassed.
Patti joked, “Oh, naw, Ms. Africa, ma’am. I ain’t gotta be t’ workin’ for ’da massa till tin ’dis here mornin’.”
Tracy giggled. Then she got serious. “Well, I was reading this book that Kiwana gave me, and it said that women only bleed with periods because of their appetites, and that the chauvinistic environment in America is stopping women from developing their full feminine capabilities. And Kiwana said that white women are not really developing power with their feminist movement, they’re just getting to be as aggressive and destructive as men are, like Margaret Thatcher in Britain.”
“Go on, girl, teach me,” Patti said excitedly. She was proud that Tracy was using her mind and exploring things.
Tracy asked, “You ever notice that African women look a lot fuller than us, mom?”
“Yeah, I’ve always been saying that. And they don’t be fat either, just healthy-bodied. But I got a nice shape though,” Patti said, standing up to check herself out.
“Yeah, well that’s because we lack proper nutrients and vitamins in urban areas with all this fast-food stuff and canned foods. You notice how women down South and out in the country are shaped more like African women? That’s because their food supply is healthier.”
“Go ’head, girl,” Patti cheered her on. “Well, I’ve been feeding you the right foods in here, and I do know the proper food groups,” she responded.
“But mom, I don’t know if them white doctors are teaching us the right stuff, ’cause they’re still experimenting with different foods and all. Africans mastered what and what not to eat thousands of years ago. But see, black people think that white people know everything and that we don’t. But we’ve had vegetarian and fruit diets before the white man even came out of his caves. And they didn’t have any fertile land to learn from, until the turn of the century when they started attacking everybody.”
“GO ’HEAD, GIRL! THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!” Patti shouted.
Jason ran into the kitchen to find out what was going on. “What she doin’, mom?” he asked.
“Dag, mom,” Tracy responded, surprised by her mother’s excitement. “I mean, I got a lot more to learn, but I’m getting there,” she proudly added.
“Well, we all have to get a move on,” Patti said, squeezing Jason’s head as she walked toward the door. “Jason, turn that TV off.”
Tracy and Jason followed their mother out.
Tracy said, out the door, “Yeah, I’m gonna have to buy Jason some books to read, so he won’t get wrapped up into little white-boy fantasies.”
Although he didn’t understand what his sister was talking about yet, Jason nodded and said, “Okay.”
“I am so proud of you,” Patti announced, driving them to school. “My little baby’s gonna be one of those sistas who puts the white man in his place. She’s gonna be like Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. Yup, my daughter gon’ be another Sojourner Truth.”
Patti did know something. But Kiwana called Tracy “Camara,” one who teaches from experience.
Throughout the summer, Tracy and Raheema enjoyed each other’s company. It was the most inactive summer Tracy had had in her life. Mr. Keith was finally giving himself and his family room to breathe, and Raheema seemed a lot more cheerful. Both girls struggled to hold on to the vegetarian diet Kiwana had strongly suggested, and Raheema’s acne slacked off with its use.
The girls laughed about all of the arguments they had and all the boys that had been on their block, trying to talk to either one of them.
Their futures looked bright. They argued about what colleges they would go to and the types of black men who would chase after them. “Probably some perverted professors,” Tracy joked. But finding “the perfect man” was a mystery to them both.
“Do you still think about Victor?” Raheema asked Tracy while they enjoyed the moonlight and the cool nighttime breeze. They were not serious about boys anymore, unless anyone would ask Tracy about Victor.
“Yeah,” she admitted, hesitantly. “I’ve never met anybody like him. . . . Remember Mercedes used to talk to Kevin?” Tracy asked, viewing the house across the street from them, where Kevin used to live.
Raheema nodded. “Yeah. That was her first boyfriend.”
Tracy paused. “You know, sometimes I wish I could have one of those voodoo dolls, and just make guys act right.”
Raheema laughed. “Me, too. But then again, girls don’t really like guys they can control.”
Tracy gave her a hi-five. “Ain’t it the truth.”
Raheema then got quiet, too quiet for Tracy.
Tracy quizzed her, “What are you thinkin’ about?”
Raheema rubbed her long ponytail. “I was just wondering how your little brother is gonna treat girls.”
“Oh. Girl, he ain’t thinkin’ ’bout nothin’ but that damn television. But I’ve been trying to get him to read books though.”
“Why do you think you like Victor so much?” Raheema wanted to know.
“Well, to begin with, you know that he was my first, just like Kevin was probably Mercedes’ first. And that shit just does something to you if you liked the boy at all. You’ll find out soon enough,” Tracy assured her with a grin. “But outside of that, I see Victor as a black butterfly. And you watch him fly and land, and then you sit and admire him for a while, knowing that he gon’ fly back away before you can grab him. And now his ass is in jail, just when I was getting close to him again with my net.”
Raheema smiled.
“What?” Tracy asked, veeringly.
“I think that poetry you been reading is rubbing off on you.”
Tracy sat silently, in thought. “I wrote a poem about Victor,” she revealed.
“Yeah? Well, let’s here it,” Raheema piped.
“How you know I know it by heart, Ra-Ra?”
“Because you know Victor by heart.”
Tracy grinned, admittedly. “Okay,” she said. “It’s called, ‘King Victorious.’ ” She closed her hazels as Raheema looked into her smooth, honey-brown face. The moonlight was shining on them both.
Tracy started with a mellow voice, “I once knew a young black man who stole my heart. And then he gave it back to me when I begged for him to keep it. I said, ‘Thieves don’t give back the goods.’ But he said, ‘This thief can take all the goods in the world with his black skin and his kingly ways.’ And I said, ‘But these goods of mine are more precious than the furthest North and the furthest South, and if you run from me East to West, you will only run in circles of misery.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but this king can jump to the moon, and to Jupiter and as far away as Pluto, searching for more conquest.’ So what could I do, but to say that I would follow him to the edge of the universe? And then he took me by my hand and ran me through the darkest pits of hell. And I yelled, ‘Oh, my black king! I will still follow you, no matter how much you torture me!’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you are a fool of limited wisdom and no self-respect.’ And I then corrected him, saying, ‘No, I am love eternal, giving you life, so who are you to take mine away, just because I love you so?’ And he said, ‘You should have known then, that I would deceive you because I am a warrior, who is not to be seduced.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but even black warriors need a place to rest and to feel secure in the warmth that only I can give you.’ ‘I need no rest,’ he said, ‘and I can fight on until I am no more.’ And then I said, ‘And with my tears, I can bring you back again.’ And then he fell to his knees and cried, ‘Then I have been the arrogant fool, while you have been the wise one all along.’ And I said back to him, ‘Stand up, my king of black skin, black as your thoughts before I gave them life. For you shall discard me again with your blind arrogance. And I shall chase you again to the edge of our universe, bringing you to your knees, reminding you that through me you became alive, with my eternal love. So love me as you would love your mother, who is me, before I separated myself to make more black kings, stretching to the furthest corners of my earth.’ And then he nestled up beside me like my son, and I loved him, like my husband.”
Tracy sat with her eyes closed, letting the moon feed her.
Raheema exclaimed, “That was so decent! When did you write that?” she asked, as soon as Tracy had opened her eyes again.
“I wrote it while sitting out here in the dark one night.”
“Girl, you’re gonna be rich and famous one day, if you keep writing stuff like that.”
Tracy smiled and revealed her source. “That’s from reading that Egyptian stuff, girl. Men have been forcing the world to follow their ways of aggression for a long time. So now we have to remind them that we gave them life. But first we have to know that we are the substance of dark that the Bible talks about. And the world was begun like a baby in our wombs.”
Raheema simply stared at her for a moment. “Dag, Tracy! You’re getting deeper than Kiwana. I can’t even understand you anymore.”
Tracy smiled and said, “Yeah, but I still love Victor though. I just can’t help it.”
It was a week away from Tracy’s seventeenth birthday, on a Saturday.
“Dave, I think that you and Tracy need to just go away somewhere and be together for her birthday. I won’t mind, because you haven’t had a real father-daughter chat with Tracy in a while, and she’s been learning a lot lately,” Patti said to her husband as she climbed into bed.
Dave nodded. He was in bed already. “Sounds good to me. We can go out to eat at whatever restaurant she wants to go to.”
“Yeah. My baby been studying about Africa,” Patti alluded.
“Oh, really? How much does she know?”
Patti smiled. “I’ll let you decide for yourself.”
“Oh yeah. Well, hell, I’m looking forward to this.”
“So you’re gonna spend the entire day with her?”
Dave frowned. Here she goes nagging again, he thought. “Patti, I said that I would. Okay? Yes, I will.”
Patti smiled and cuddled up with him, glad to have him back.
Dave grinned himself, thinking, Women. You can’t live with them, and here I am anyway.
When Saturday morning came around, Jason was the first to shout, “Happy birthday, Tra-cy!” He hit her on her arm, trying to count to seventeen. His little punches were hard, but Tracy was too pleased to complain.
Patti didn’t bother to buy her daughter any clothes for her seventeenth. She gave Tracy fifteen hundred dollars toward her college tuition next fall instead. It was part of the money she had been saving up to move out if Dave had refused to come back. Patti knew that her first baby was going to college. Tracy was still trying to decide if she wanted to go to Howard University, where all of the handsome men were, or to Spelman, an all-girls school, where she could study without distractions. Lisa told her that Morehouse, an all-boys school, was right around the corner, “in case you get horny one night,” she joked. Tracy was not anticipating any of that. She wanted to learn more about being a black woman first.
“So your mother told me that you been studying up on Africa.” Dave sat with his daughter at dinner later that birthday night, at Friday’s restaurant on Philadelphia’s City Line Avenue. They had been all over the city, and Tracy was pleased to have his company at a dinner for two.
“Yeah, a little bit,” she answered modestly.
Dave started munching down the salad appetizer as if he was hungry. He wore an off-white sports jacket and a rayon shirt with navy blue pants and black leather shoes, looking jazzy. He smelled good, too. Tracy was damn proud that he was her father, but not by the way he was eating his salad.
“Dag, dad. That food ain’t goin’ nowhere,” she hinted with a smile.
Dave looked up from his plate, watching the twinkling honey-colored eyes she had inherited from him. Tracy grinned, wearing a purple skirt and blouse outfit she had bought with the money she earned from working at Jeans & Shirts.
Dave said, “You know, you’re starting to look like my mother a little bit with your hair like that.”
What a coincidence, Tracy thought. But she didn’t want to talk about Africa, fertility and heritage with him. Tracy wanted to ask her father straight up about men.
“Dad? Why do y’all act the way y’all do?” she asked him bluntly.
Dave was too cool to be startled by it. “Because most of us don’t know any better. My mother spoiled the hell out of me,” he responded, wiping the French salad dressing from his lips. “Hell, I thought I was women’s gift to the world. But see now, some other cats get hurt by a woman and then start actin’ real shady with them. But I never had to worry about that.”
Tracy was surprised that her father was so willing to be open-minded with her instead of saying, “God did it.” He still looked twenty-something, although he was forty.
“So are you saying it’s my grandmother’s fault?” she asked.
“Well, I can’t put all of the blame on her. Of course not. I had my little quirks and things.”
“And what really happened between you and mom?”
“Now see, your mother had her problems, too. That’s why we need some type of support mechanisms with these families. And since you’re studying Africa, I guess you know that the African family was extended. And if the black man could afford it, he took on several wives.”
Tracy was surprised her father was talking so much. She was afraid to eat. “So you needed more wives?” she asked him, attempting to be objective about it. Like most American women, Tracy felt polygamous marriages were totally unacceptable.
“Well, I guess it ain’t no secret that a lot of women were attracted to me. And I used to go to work, looking and smelling all good when I first started working at the hospital that I worked at. And them women used to say, ‘Excuse me, but are you married?’ And then when I said I was, they start making up shit. ‘Oh, ’cause I got a girlfriend that you would make a perfect match with. But oh well.’ And I’m thinkin’, ‘Who the hell they think they foolin’?’ And then some women were straight up bold about it, telling me to call them if I ever had any problems I might need worked out.”
Tracy laughed at his candor, imagining older women falling all over him, like the girls did with Victor. “I liked this guy that reminds me of you, dad.”
“So what’s up with him? Is he your boyfriend?” Dave asked, trying to sound young and hip.
Tracy smiled. “You a trip, dad.”
“Yeah, but you still ain’t gave me an answer yet,” he pressed her.
“Well, he’s like you, hard to keep.”
Dave didn’t want to address that statement. It sounded convicting. He moved right along. “So is this cat in college, or what?” he asked, dodging Tracy’s intentions. She wanted him to explain his own butterfly ways, so maybe she could understand him and Victor.
“No,” she said annoyingly, ready to talk about him.
Dave was fast at being evasive. “He’s not in school, hunh? So is he heading for jail or already in there?” he joked.
Tracy was shocked. She didn’t want her father to know that he was actually right. She wasn’t sure how he would react if she told him the truth, that she was in love with a drug dealer who took her virginity when she was only thirteen.
“What, are you thinking that just because a guy’s not in college that he gotta be into something no good?” she retorted defensively.
Dave smiled, confused. “I’m just jokin’ with you, girl. I want the best man for you. I want a man who can at least give you what I gave you and your mother.”
“But will he leave me and run away?”
There was a sharp silence across the table. Tracy had struck her father’s serious bone. Dave looked into his daughter’s face with a seriousness that she had never witnessed from him before. “The black man in America needs a system where he has to stand up and correct himself. Now that ain’t gon’ happen on its own; sometimes you gotta go through hell before you realize it. But there’s a lot of good brothers out there who got things workin’ the right way.
“Now of course, I’m far from perfect, but I did take care of business while I was away. I had to do a lot of soul searchin’, and I didn’t have no damn support.
“My father died when I was eight. My mother was an only child, and I was an only child. So where was my support?
“Your mother was wearing me out before I think I was ready to be married. I mean, your mother loved this marriage thing, but I felt trapped, like life itself was kicking my ass. And the whole relationship with your aunts got on my fuckin’ nerves.
“Now I have to admit that I got greedy and I stayed away longer than what I had planned to, and I’m sorry for that, baby. That was real selfish of me, but I just needed some space and some time to think alone.”
Tracy smiled, loving her father more, because he was admitting that he was human, subject to mistakes and vulnerable.
“We needed to have this talk a long time ago, dad,” she told him.
Dave looked into her glassy hazels and realized that she had matured a great deal. “I love you, your mother and your brother to death, but it was hard as hell to do things all on my own. I had too much weight on my shoulders. Something had to give. So whatever you do, you make sure that your man has some type of outside support. ’Cause no matter how strong us black men think we are, there’s gon’ come a time when we need somebody to lean on. And I ain’t have nobody.”
When Tracy got home that night, at almost one o’clock in the morning, she was exhausted. She headed straight in to bed after kissing her father good-night.
There was a letter on her dresser with no name or return address. It had a seven-digit I.D. number in the upper-lefthand corner.
“Oh my God!” Tracy yelped excitedly, wondering who it was. The intrigue was enough to make her want to read it out under the moonlight.
She sprinted outside to her patio energetically, and breathed in deep as she opened it.
Dear Tracy,
I know I’m surprising you by writing you this, but I think we understand each other. Here I am twenty years old and sitting in a cell now for three years and shit, and I don’t know what will become of me. But I do know that you have eyes to see what I feel for you. Out of all the girls that I had, Tracy, and I stopped counting after 100, you were the only one that I kept up on. I studied you. And from my conclusions, I know that you’re the girl that I would like to marry. Now I want you to go to college and all, but when you do go, make sure you study the right information. The white man has set us up for all this shit we been through. And all I was doing was running around dicking every girl that I could get, beating up niggas, robbing and stealing and I even shot at some people. I realized that I was trying to outdo my brother. He always overshadowed me with that basketball shit. And I didn’t know who I was, and what my mission was in life. But you know white people have a lot of pitfalls set up that distract us from searching for the truth. They be having us playing them “Supernigga” roles. But yo, it’s some brothers in here that have been putting me down with the Nation of Islam and Minister Louis Farrakhan. And I’ve been getting educated. We need to be able to tell the truth as it is and we can’t allow our parents or anybody else to stop us. So the brothers have told me that I must discipline myself by doing the right thing and choosing a wife for stability. Shit, the guards are closing shit down. I don’t have much time to tell you more things that I want to do. But I want you to marry me when I get out and be the mother of my children. Me and you can raise a correct family, Tracy. And you are strong enough to understand me. All I want is three children and a wife who is supportive. You have that kind of drive that I need from a woman. You have that certain confidence. And I want you if you want me. But you have to wait for me, love me and never let another man come between us. I’ll be waiting for you.
P.S. I hope this letter gets to you in time for your birthday September 6. I remembered even though you probably think I didn’t know. And oh yeah, send me a pretty picture of you. A big naked one.
RIGHTEOUS LOVE
Victor Hinson “the slave”
Qadeer Muhammad “the man”
# 2158796
There was a return prison address under his name.
Tracy giggled and laughed, reading it over and over, touched to tears, and still not believing it. Her desire had been fulfilled, and Victor was proposing to her in a letter that she would keep forever.
She wiped away happy tears, as she trembled blissfully. “I’ll be here for you, baby . . . I’ll be here for you,” she mumbled with a smile.
A rush of elation overwhelmed her as more tears helplessly flooded her eyes. Tracy wiped them hurriedly, dreaming of Victor, Qadeer, black, strong and righteous, as the moon shone and the wind blew, adding to her birthday joy.