IT HAD ONLY BEEN A couple of months since Mayisha saw Anthony at her retirement party, but she walked up to him and looked at him like she hadn’t seen him in years. Her greyish hair was covered by a turquoise-and-black hat that covered just enough of her face to keep the sun away.
“Hi, Mama,” Anthony yelled, running toward Mayisha, while Keenan and Terrance followed closely behind. “Oh . . . youuu look good!” he said, examining her physique the way an old friend would after not seeing their friend for a while. “You put on some weight, Mama! Jody been feeding you good, I see!”
Anthony did another full circle around Mayisha, continuing to laugh hysterically. “You looooooking good.”
Mayisha smiled and blushed, her light brown cheeks lighting up in the sun. She glanced down at her tight black pants and red-colored toenails. “Oh yeah, you know,” she replied in a soft tone while continuing to laugh. “I’m doing okay.”
Since her retirement party, Mayisha rarely came to the ranch. When she did come, to pick up mail, or see her children, she continued to take things back to her home in Riverside County. Some days it would be a horse, others it would be equipment from the ranch. Her home was on the market, and though she had plans to sell the property soon, her one-year lease was coming to an end in Norco, forcing her to rethink her plans.
“Anthony, I need you to do me a favor,” Mayisha asked after the laughter subsided. “Can you bring me six of those grooming kits buckets?”
“Six?” Anthony replied in a sarcastic tone.
“Yeah, I got a buyer,” she responded.
Anthony nodded and walked back to the tack room, accompanied by Terrance, to find the grooming kits, leaving Keenan alone with Mayisha in the driveway. The two cast shadows behind them as they walked together toward the back of the ranch, the same as they had done since they were teenagers. Their waist sizes had increased slightly, but their pants still hung loosely on their legs.
As Anthony rummaged through the equipment room, he noticed that its contents were dwindling by the day. Mayisha’s plans to help other horse-riding programs in her new neighborhood were evident, but at the current rate there would be no ranch equipment left in the tack room for the Compton Cowboys’ own youth program.
Keenan anxiously pointed his toe in the gravel and put his hands inside the pouch of his black Compton Cowboys sweater while they waited for Anthony to return. “You know I’m back now?” he said without making eye contact with Mayisha.
Mayisha looked up at him. “You’re back?” she asked, surprised.
“Yeah, the rent was getting too high in Inglewood so we had to move back.”
Mayisha looked at him and ruffled through her bag with one of her hands, searching for her phone.
“But we’re doing good now,” he said, raising his voice. “We’re back on it, and making sure things run smoothly around here.”
“Mhm,” Mayisha responded with the same speculation that a loving mother would have of a child who hadn’t yet shown that they’d overcome their bad habits.
The last time she and Randy had spoken, they had disagreed over the day-to-day operations of the ranch and the image that the cowboys were exporting to the outside world. She believed that the cowboys were more interested in self-promotion than they were about giving back to their community. Riding around the neighborhood bareback and in sandals was departing from the values she had fought tirelessly to uphold. Mayisha wasn’t yet convinced that they were interested in running the program. She believed that the cowboys’ best chance for survival was to continue building the relationships that she had created with wealthy donors.
If they were smart, she thought, they would continue to ride English. It would expose them to a different social class, one with more connections and funding. She believed that the clean-cut, conservative aspects of riding English were what brought respect to her program in the first place. Mayisha wanted that part of her program to continue, but that was the biggest challenge for the cowboys. It was February and only four children had showed up to the first orientation. Perhaps it was Mayisha’s initial choice to switch over to English that continued to deter many of Compton’s youth. Randy continued to hope that more young riders would show up with the switch back to western, fulfilling his dream of getting back to the roots of black cowboy culture.