I came home from school and the apartment appeared to be empty. I reasoned that Mom and Grandma must still be at work and my sisters were probably still at school. That left the question, where was Sylvester? Actually, that was always the question.
At that moment, a craving took over my body. I wanted a great big salad bowl filled to the brim with Cap’n Crunch. Isn’t that the best after school snack in the world? It’s sweet and crunchy and it shreds the shit out of the roof of your mouth. What more can a kid ask for?
I opened the wooden door of the cupboard. Just as I reached for a bowl, I was startled by a sharp bump.
“What the hell was that?”
Bump. There it was again. Bump. It was coming from my mother’s room. I took the stairs two at a time. When I got to the top of the staircase, there it was again. Bump.
I got to the doorway of my mother’s room and there I saw him. Sylvester had my mother’s head gripped firmly in his hands, banging her skull against the wall. BUMP. BUMP. BUMP. BUMP. BUMP. BUMP.
Each impact reverberated throughout the room. BUMP. The plaster on the wall had cracked. BUMP. The wallboard was dented in the shape of my mother’s cranium. BUMP. A ceramic statue fell to the floor and shattered. It was the image of a small child, exaggerated eyes wide and innocent, arms extended. The caption underneath read, I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH. I had given it to Mom last Mother’s Day. I suffered through my allergies for a week, mowing lawns for a dollar a job in order to buy it. BUMP. All of my hard work lying in shards on the floor. BUMP.
My mother was in her bathrobe, her face streaked with mascara. They hadn’t seen me. I had to do something, but what? BUMP.
I ran back downstairs into the kitchen. What to do? What to do? No time to start boiling water. What to do? Then, I saw it, there in the sink. The shiny blade of Grandma’s butcher knife, its brown handle pointed in my direction. It was the sharpest knife in the house.
Remember that when you were a kid? There was always “the sharpest knife in the house.”
“Don’t touch that,” your mother would admonish. “It’s the sharpest knife in the house.”
It was as though the knife would cut you just by looking at it.
I grabbed it by its brown handle and took it upstairs. The bumping had stopped. Now Sylvester had her pinned to the wall by her throat. She was choking.
I stood in the doorway, the blade of the knife pointed in his direction. The rage in my gut spewed from my lips. I regurgitated a lifetime of bile. My system was finally throwing up the poison contaminating my young soul.
“Let her go!”
He ignored me.
“Let her go, you son of a bitch.”
Sylvester whipped around to face me, his ebony vise still clinched around my mother’s windpipe.
“Get the fuck out of here before I whip your ass,” he said.
“Let her go or I swear to God I will stick this knife in your fucking heart!”
By the way, I didn’t know who this was talking. It sure as hell wasn’t me.
“Let her go,” I screamed.
The monster was amused. He actually smiled.
“What? You a man now, motherfucker?”
I paused for a moment. The answer was obvious.
“Yes. I’m the man of the house, and I want you to get out!”
My face was wet. Tears.
“Let her go!”
He loosened his grip. She coughed and began to catch her breath.
“Do you know I will kill you?” His stare was cold, steely. It had struck terror in my heart for as long as I could remember. That day, for some reason, it didn’t. Like a Jewish boy at his bar mitzvah, that day I was a man.
“Do you know I will kill you?” he repeated.
“You’re going to have to if you don’t let my mother go.”
He looked at me. It was a strange look of—I don’t know, admiration? He let her go. He turned . . . and walked toward me.
Oh shit. Now what do I do. I was a little over four feet tall. He was a chiseled mountain of obsidian, a strapping creature sculpted from coal, powerful enough to snap me in two without so much as breaking a sweat. I felt like Admiral Yamamoto after the Pearl Harbor attack. I had awakened the sleeping giant.
He advanced toward me, his eyes ablaze with fury. How dare I be insolent with him? How dare I challenge his warped sense of authority, of demented masculine privilege? I had an inkling of what those black men living under Jim Crow felt as they were dragged from their beds in the dead of night to be punished for some perceived impertinence, “disciplined” for speaking or behaving out of their place. Taught a brutal lesson for being “uppity.”
I gripped the knife so tightly that my fingers were numb. I hoped I didn’t have to do this. I didn’t even know how. Grandma still cut my meat, for God’s sake.
Like lightning, he reached for the knife. I slashed blindly at his torso, barely missing his brawny flesh.
“You little motherfucker,” he grunted through clenched teeth.
I knew that if I let him catch me, I truly was dead. We danced around the room in a death tango. After what seemed like an eternity, he reached for me again. He lunged. Again I struck. This time I hit pay dirt, nicking the outer palm of his right hand. A thick, crimson stream trailed down his arm as he examined the wound. What do you know? The bastard was only human after all.
“Goddammit!” he said as he lunged for me yet again. This time, he grabbed my right wrist. I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t maneuver the knife. I couldn’t defend myself. He had me. He had me and I was going to die. No, dammit! Not like this. Not today.
I balled my left hand into a fist and with all of the force my sixty-pound body could muster, I hit him squarely in the balls. He yelped. It was the sound that a dog makes in the street at the exact moment of impact, the exact moment that the car hits him.
His grip on my wrist loosened, but I still wasn’t free. I still couldn’t move the knife. I tightened my left again and let loose with the hardest adrenaline-fueled punch I had ever thrown. Again it found its mark. Sylvester’s hands dropped to his crotch. His eyes watered and he made a guttural sound. It was his pain that he was trying to mute, now. Welcome to my world, you cocksucker.
I was free. I used the opportunity to back away from him. My wrist hurt, but I was still holding the butcher knife. I still had it.
Now it was Sylvester’s turn to catch his breath. He reached for me with both hands. I was watching him every second but I never saw him coming. Before I knew it, he had his hands around my throat. We had been here before. Not again. Please, Lord, not again.
My mother screamed. Her screech was broken by a pounding at the front door.
“Police! Everything all right up there?”
I guess that one of the neighbors must have noticed something “amiss.”
I somehow found the air to yell back.
“Help!”
With that, Sylvester took his hands from around my neck. I gasped for air. My neck was bloody. His blood. The next few minutes were a blur. There was the sound of the splinter of wood, footsteps on the staircase, and the crackle of walkie-talkies. Sylvester shook his head in disgust. He was disgusted! He pushed past me and walked out the door into the hallway. I could hear him talking to the police as I closed the bedroom door.
I walked over to my mother, who pried the butcher knife from my hand, laid it down on the bed, and hugged me.
“You know,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks and sliding into the nape of her neck, which was turning the plum color of a bruise, “you really shouldn’t talk to your father that way.”
For the life of me, I never understood what she saw in him. Grandma’s husband, Stacy Arbee, her father, my grandfather, was the same guy. He was the same vanishing act, always making promises and then “Poof!” disappearing for years at a time, leaving behind a web of deceit and familial neglect. He was the same guy, the same lazy, sorry, no-good, not-worth-a-damn individual. He was the same man that no one ever accused ofnot being “a genuine black man.” Despite all of that, my mother loved her father—and she loved Sylvester.
My mother was an only child. I’ve read that only children have difficulties finding and maintaining healthy relationships. Looking at it from an adult perspective, I think that her relationship with Sylvester may have been a reflection of how she saw herself on some level. Though I wasn’t an only child, I would have many of the same problems in my own relationships after I grew up. My friends used to tell me that I had a “Henry Higgins complex.” I’d find these poor, downtrodden women and try to turn them into “my fair lady.”
“So, you live in the gutter? And you’re addicted to crystal meth? Repeat after me, ‘The rain in Spain . . .’ I think I’m in love. I’m gonna date her!”
I worked my way past that, thank God. My mother didn’t live long enough to.