Did you ever have a day that, even though you didn’t know it at the time, would change the course of your entire life? I had a day like that. Images from that day play out in my like scenes in a movie. Images of hands. Little hands. My eight-year-old hands reaching across a square glass coffee table toward a deck of blue Bicycle playing cards. You know the ones—with the squiggly hieroglyphics and the three circles in the middle with the naked, chubby angel on a bike riding toward you.
Suddenly, another hand darts into the picture. A smaller hand. An annoying little hand with chipped red nail polish and a thumb flattened from years of sucking. My sister, Tracie. She’s six.
“It’s my deal!” she shouted in her lisping, high-pitched voice.
You know, it’s been thirty years and I still don’t know what her deal is. We were in our house, in the Bay Area town of Hayward, California, playing rummy—or as my family calls it, five hundred. I was glad that we were playing. It had been a rough day. I needed the distraction.
“I said, it’s my deal!!” she ranted.
“No, it’s my deal!” I shouted right back at her.
“Mom!”
My younger sisters, Delisa, age four, and Tonya, two, looked up from their Barbie camper. Too young and disinterested to play cards, they were taking Barbie and one of my G.I. Joes on a date. The shrieking of the word, ’“Mom,” broke the magic of their imaginary outing. It was almost Pavlovian the way a cold shiver would run down all of our spines when one of us yelled for Mom.
My mother sat across the coffee table on a gold velvet couch that was hermetically sealed in plastic. (To keep it fresh, I guess.) It was scorching outside, but in spite of the heat, my mother was poised and regal. She’d been a print model when she was younger, and she always maintained her perfect posture. Her smooth hands, tipped with perfectly manicured nails, rested in her lap, as Tracie and I eagerly awaited her decision on our dispute.
Suddenly, another hand darted into the picture. A bigger hand. Bigger than mine and Tracie’s put together. A hand that’s known work. Hard work. Grandma’s hand.
“Oh, give me the doggone cards!”
Grandma, wearing a flowered dress with a white apron, sat next to my mother on the couch. She’d spent the morning cooking at one of the convalescent hospitals in Oakland and would spend the evening taking care of us. She was capable, no-nonsense.
“I said give me the doggone cards!”
Grandma took the cards and dealt them. As always, Tracie had to start trouble.
“Mommy, I don’t got no wild cards.”
“No, Tracie, it’s ‘I don’t have any wild cards.’ ‘I don’t got no’ is a double negative, which cancels itself out, so that would mean you do have wild cards.”
Tracie studied her cards in confusion and then showed them to Mom: “Where?”
“Gal, hold your cards where she can’t see ’em,” Grandma said, shoving Tracie’s cards away from my mother’s gaze.
When my family plays five hundred, we play with wild cards. Deuces and jokers are wild; they’re worth fifty points and can be used in place of any other card. I was intently studying my cards when I heard a loud smack, as though someone has just been slapped in the face. I looked up to see my mother with a joker stuck to her forehead. Whenever she’d get a wild card, she’d stick it to her forehead to psych the rest of us out.
Incidentally, that’s one of the joys of being black: oilier skin. It’s bad when you’re young because of acne, but as you get older, you don’t wrinkle. You’ve heard the expression “Black don’t crack”? That’s where it comes from.
My wife is my age and Caucasian. She says that forty years from now, she’ll look her age, but I’ll still look good. When we go places, it’ll be like I’m driving Miss Daisy.
Smack! My mother had a joker stuck to her forehead, and all that regal stuff just went right out the window.
“Gal, you got another wild card?” Grandma said. “Shit!”
“Suer!”
My mother never called my grandmother anything other than Suer. Grandma’s siblings call her “sister.” When my mother was little, it came out as “Suer.” It stuck.
“Ooh, Grandma said a bad word!” Tracie intoned, the gleeful profanity police.
“Suer, stop cussing, and Tracie, I told you to call her ‘Nana.’”
Tracie, always the shit disturber.
“Mommy, where were you born?”
“Providence, Rhode Island.”
My mother always said that, because Providence, Rhode Island, is where white people come from. There’s a factory there where they crank them out on an assembly line.
You see, my mother really wanted white children. I know, I’m stereotyping and profiling here but, come on. She wanted us to call Grandma Nana. Black people don’t talk like that.
“Nana, might I trouble you for some more grits, please?”
Never in a million years.
“Providence, Rhode Island,” she continued.
Grandma huffed a disgusted, “Shit.”
“Suer, I asked you to stop cussing.”
“Then quit lying to the gal!”
“Providence, Rhode Island.”
“Your ass was born in Birmingham, same as me.”
“Providence, Rhode Island,” she insisted, gritting her teeth. “Now you know I ain’t never been to no doggone Rhode Island so how in the hell was you born there?”
Now poor Tracie looked back and forth, not knowing what to do. She knew that one of them was lying, and that whichever one she accused, rightly or wrongly, was going to smack her in the mouth. In a white household you call an adult a liar, you get a time out. In a black household, you call an adult a liar, you’re lucky if you ever come to. You DO NOT call an adult a liar in a black household.
I decided that I was going to play the peacemaker.
“Well, you know Grandma, maybe you just thought you were in Birmingham but you were really in Providence, Rhode Island. Because in Rhode Island, they put fire hoses and dogs on black people, too, and . . . ”
“Boy, hush. That gal was born in Birmingham!”
My mother refused to give in.
“Providence, Rhode Island!”
Our little geographical discussion was interrupted by a smell that wafted through the room. The musky smell ofBrut. You know, that cheap men’s cologne. That smell could mean only one thing. Sylvester, my father, would come walking in the house. In about five minutes.
Two years prior, Sylvester had left the house, saying that he was going to the store, and vanished. Three days ago he came walking in the door carrying a bag of groceries and bitching about the long line.
He was always doing things like that. When I was a kid, Sylvester was in the army during the Vietnam War. I swear to you the first military term I ever learned was AWOL. Absent Without Leave. I remember the MPs knocking on the front door.
“We thought he was with you,” my mother told them.
Now, Sylvester breezed into the room with his usual greeting.
“What’s happening?”
“Mommy was born in Providence, Rhode Island!” Tracie said.
“Shit,” Sylvester replied as he walked down the hallway to his bedroom.
During this entire card game, I had been drinking Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer. It was the only “dad” who had consistently been in my life up to that point.
Is that “black”?
I’d had just about as much root beer as my little eight-year-old bladder could handle so I got up to go to the bathroom. In order to go to the bathroom, I had to walk down the hallway and pass Sylvester’s room. As I approached, I was quiet. I was always quiet around him because I was afraid that he’d tell me that I was “cutting my eyes” at him or something. That was a consistent refrain from Sylvester.
“Quit cutting your eyes at me!”
I didn’t know what it meant then. I don’t know what it means now.
“Quit cutting your eyes at me before I rip ’em out of their goddamned sockets.”
I got so I’d just close my eyes around him altogether.
“I’m just here with my dog and my cane, Dad.”
“Tell that damn dog to quit cutting his eyes at me!”
Sylvester was crazy. I never knew what he was going to say or what he was going to do. He used to mess with my head.
“Hey, Brian, come here,” he’d say. “Yes, Daddy?”
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
He’d then slap me in the head and say, “What the fuck did I tell you about answering the door when you don’t know who’s on the other goddamned side ofit?”
Once when I was five, I sniffed in a way that Sylvester thought was directed at him. He grabbed my nose and pinched it so hard that it was bruised for a month. When people asked what happened he said, “The boy fell off his tricycle. I told his ass to be careful.”
As I approached Sylvester’s room, I was quiet. I felt my stomach climb into my throat as I noticed that his damned door was open.
“Hey,” he shouted.
“Yes?”
“Quit sticking your lip out at me!”
I’ve got to tell you that it had been a hard day. The reason for the card game was that I’d come home from school upset and everyone was trying to cheer me up, to distract me. That day at recess I had been playing kickball, and I was the worst. I had no athletic ability whatsoever.
Not black. I told you.
That day, I was in the outfield and this little redheaded kid came up to kick. He was the best kicker in the second grade. You know the one. He got a home run every time he was up. He kicked the ball directly to me and for the first time in my life, I caught it. I actually caught it! Usually it would fall through my arms or bounce off of my chest, but this time I caught it. I was ecstatic. I was elated. I was so happy for about fifteen seconds, until the kid looked me dead in the face and yelled, “Nigger!”
Now, I’d heard the word before, usually from Sylvester. He apparently thought that it was my first name. He was always yelling it at me.
“Nigger, turn that shit down.”
“Nigger, close the door, it’s cold in here!”
But I’d never heard it like this before. This was different. This hurt.
“Nigger, I said quit sticking you lip out at me,” Sylvester screamed.
“Huh?”
“You heard me, motherfucker!”
“I’m not sticking my lip out at you, Daddy. It’s the way my lips are made.”
I turned and headed down the hallway. I got two, maybe three steps before I heard:
“Motherfucker! You must be crazy talking to me like that. You a man now, motherfucker? Huh? You a man now?”
I was suddenly lying on the floor of the hallway with a grown man on top of me, my father strangling me.
“You a man now? Come on, motherfucker. Talk some more shit. You such a goddamned man, talk some more shit.”
Out of nowhere came the voices of my mom, my grandma, and my sister.
“Leave that boy alone!”
“Stop it, you’re killing him! You’re killing him!”
“Let him go.”
I was coughing and crying. I threw up a little bit. Then suddenly it was quiet. Everybody was gone. My head rested in my mother’s lap. I guess I must have blacked out.
“It’s okay. He’s gone,” she soothed. “He’s gone. I won’t let him hurt you. We’re going to get away from him. I don’t know where but I’ll find us a place. Some place. I promise. I promise.” The next day, my mother came walking in the door from work with a big grin on her face. It was as though she had a great big joker stuck to her forehead.
“Guess what?” she said. “We’re moving. I found us a place, a nice place. We’re going to move to San Leandro.”