Over 42 percent of African American children under the age of six live in poverty.
When I was ten years old my mother bought a 45 of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack” and played the song over and over. It filled our house, it filled my head, hearing her sing—No more, no more, no more, no more—it filled that year. That song became my mother’s anthem as she mustered the courage to kick out my father.
I can still see clearly those final images of my father in our house: he’s drinking Seagram’s gin. On the record player is “The Thrill Is Gone,” and his eyes are closed as he croons how lonely he will be.
I begged Mama to take Daddy back. He was the one who protected me, who looked at me tenderly, who bought me things. But Mama didn’t take him back, and I grew deeply resentful.
Daddy got a job working as a chef for Amtrak and moved to the other side of the world: Syracuse, New York. It would be nearly two years before I saw him again. Every week when the Sentinel came out, I’d mail him a copy so he could keep up on the black community in Los Angeles. At Christmas, he sent a big box of gifts, most for me. Occasionally, he wrote or called. He told me how he earned the nickname Soup Maker after his train was stocked with canned soup and he threw a fit. He remained the only chef on Amtrak who cooked everything from scratch. He always ended our calls saying he missed me.
Right away, Mama had a new boyfriend, Mr. Albertus Fisher. The story went that Mama had been walking down the street when Mr. Fisher, a widower with no children of his own, saw her and instantly fell in love. But I’d heard his name before—in fights between my parents, Daddy claiming my youngest brother Isaac belonged with Mr. Fisher; Mama swearing that wasn’t true. No sooner was my father out than Mr. Fisher moved us from Aliso Village to a house on Olive Street in South L.A. My mother had finally made it out of the projects.
Our house had a garage in back, and behind that a gravel pile, where we’d have rock fights. My brothers and I found boxes of balloons in the garage, and we held them under the faucet and had water balloon fights. One day my mother saw one of my brothers holding a balloon. She looked at it funny, the long water balloon with a nipple on the end. She said, “Boy, where’d you get that?” We took her to the garage and showed her the boxes. She mumbled, “Those ain’t balloons,” and gathered up all the boxes.
If there’s one thing I have to say for Mama, she and Mr. Fisher were very discreet. That’s how Mama carried herself. Even though she and my father were separated, she was still a married woman and did not want to be seen going around with another man. Mr. Fisher never stayed with us. He never even came into the house and kicked back on the couch. The most I saw of him was when he’d pick up Mama in his gold Cadillac. A few hours later, the Cadillac would return to drop her off.
Unlike my father, Mr. Fisher was a man of few words. Daddy was spry and stood with command; Mr. Fisher seldom emerged from his car. Every few weeks Mr. Fisher would come by and my brothers would pile into the Cadillac and he’d drive them downtown to the barber college for haircuts. Though he drove that flashy car, Mr. Fisher wasn’t flashy in other ways; his clothes were plain, he didn’t wear jewelry. The only gift I recall he bought for us was a Monopoly game. We knew he was in real estate, and we knew he had money. One day I was ear hustling when Mama said to a girlfriend, “We’re at that motel so much, he might as well buy it.” Mr. Fisher lived Monopoly; he was savvy and shrewd. We were just rolling the dice and playing the game.
Mama still cleaned houses. She took the bus in the early morning to fancy parts of town, like Brentwood and Beverly Hills. One house she worked at belonged to film actor Robert Ryan. She spoke of him a lot because he was kind to her, unlike some of her other employers. She sometimes came home with bags of the Ryan kids’ old clothes, though nothing looked old or raggedy. I could tell their clothes were different than ours by the feel of that nice fabric on my skin. Once, Mr. Ryan invited our family to his home for a party. When Mama told us, there was hesitation in her voice and, as she eyed us up and down, as though sizing up what we’d look like standing in that house, I saw a twitch of shame. She wagged her finger, “At Mr. Ryan’s house, don’t say, Gimme. Don’t even say, Can I have.” I was excited to go to a famous actor’s house. But she must have decided against taking us, because we never went.
At 61st Street Elementary, I placed top in my class spelling contest, qualifying me to compete in the schoolwide spelling bee. I could tell Mama was proud. She and my brothers put on nice clothes, and I looked out from the stage and saw them. It’s a pivotal memory: my family showing up for me, rooting for me. I stood in the spotlight, watching them applaud. But just as quickly and easily as a slipped-up letter, that moment was there, then gone. I can’t remember the word I misspelled—or, for that matter, the words I spelled correctly. We went home, I changed out of my good clothes, and any remaining glow vanished, lost to the chaos around me.
My brothers had the run of the house. We were getting cereal one morning, Mama long gone on the bus, and I opened the silverware drawer but there were no spoons. Michael, the oldest, said, “You looking for spoons?” He thrust some at me—spoons that, unbeknownst to me, had been resting on the gas burner of the stove. When I reached for them, the burn went deep, so deep on my arm the white meat showed. I fell to the floor, kicking like a chicken. My brothers gathered around, deep-belly laughing.
They’d never have dared pull this kind of prank if Daddy had been around. I had to wait the whole day, my arm oozing, for Mama to come home. She told off Michael good, and bandaged me, but I didn’t go to any doctor. The scar would be with me for life.
I’d think of that day some forty years later, at Michael’s funeral. Alternating the image of Michael laughing while I writhed on the linoleum with another childhood night, around Christmastime, when Daddy came by the house with bikes for us, but he and Mama got into it. Daddy locked the front porch door, locking Mama in with him and the rest of us out, and Michael bravely tried to bust down the door to help Mama. I thought, too, about how, when Michael was a teenager, he fell asleep at the wheel and, though a narcolepsy diagnosis wouldn’t come until years later, he was prosecuted and sent to live at a juvenile detention camp in the mountains. The police who’d taken Michael away came by that Christmas and brought me a Chatty Cathy doll. But I didn’t want the doll, I wanted my brother back. Even though my brother had burned me, something made me connect the fact that Michael had been treated meanly by my father, and when you treat people mean they become mean.
In his thirties and forties, Michael turned to drugs and was eventually incarcerated for possession. While in prison, he got word that his wife, his childhood sweetheart, had stopped going to her kidney dialysis. She said it was all too much, she was too tired. Michael knew that without dialysis she’d die, but behind bars he was helpless to influence her or to provide her some comfort. At her funeral, my heart broke over Michael’s absence. By the time he was released, it wasn’t only his wife who was gone; he was too. He told me he had nothing left to live for. When a cut on his foot became infected, he wouldn’t seek help. Gangrene ate up his foot and then his life. I tried to intervene, talking with doctors and hoping to convince Michael to amputate his foot in order to save himself. He refused. His life and its hardships and disappointments had left him so defeated he was no longer rational. What was the point of caring about yourself when life was so hard? How do you keep going when there’s little hope of relief? I found a rest home for Michael and visited him every other day, up until the end.
When I was still in elementary school Mr. Fisher moved us from the nice house on Olive Street to a house on 41st and Figueroa, which butted up against the 110 freeway. I wondered if Mama and Mr. Fisher were on the outs or if he was angry at her. I also wondered why Mama let us move into that house. The ceiling was crumbling, and rats scurried along the floor and in and out of holes chewed between the kitchen cabinets. I’d never been to Mr. Fisher’s house, but I knew he lived in Leimert Park, an upper-class area, and one of the first planned communities.
I’d heard Mama say Leimert Park was so nice the telephone wires were buried underground so no poles messed up the view. Our house had a view of the southbound ramp. But even in this rundown neighborhood with the freeway out your front door, none of the houses were as raggedy as ours.
My mother wasn’t having it good. With her wages from cleaning unable to support six growing kids, she applied for welfare. I can only imagine the shame she must’ve felt, but she never said a thing. I grew accustomed to yearning for the first and fifteenth of the month, when the gray envelope from the government showed up. Then we could get groceries, though the food stamps never covered enough to fully feed us all.
Routinely, a white woman came to our house to look in the closets and search under the beds for any sign of my father. But this went beyond making sure my mother was, indeed, supporting us on her own. Years earlier, Daddy had been arrested for possession of marijuana, and with that felony record following him, he wasn’t allowed to live with us so long as Mama was, as we called it, on the County. That government money we so desperately needed distanced me further from Daddy, and, in my young mind, created yet another barrier to my parents ever getting back together. I longed for that gray envelope, but I felt guilty, because I longed for Daddy more. I longed for the way things used to be.
One night, a rat crawled into my bed. It was as big as my foot, and I screamed and kicked it onto the floor, its thick tail thrashing as though it was a mile long. The rats were becoming more and more bold, like we were the visitors and they were residents in this house. Every morning Mama made me sit on the floor between her knees to do my hair: a ponytail on top, two on the side, and one or two ponytails in the back. She’d sing, “Your hair is nappy, nappy to the gristle. Every time I comb your hair you jump up and whistle.” I was jumping up because her yanking hurt, but also because I didn’t want to be sitting on the floor, afraid those rats might bite me.
Mama said living in this house was only temporary, but month after month passed. For three years we lived in that hovel—which would be torn down the minute we moved out. Mama had eight or nine siblings, all in Texas, and I wondered why she never asked them for help. As I grew older, I understood more about her pride, realizing her family would’ve told her to come back to Texas or to go back to her husband, chastising her for having left both in the first place. So Mama soldiered on, in the only way she knew how. For those years, I lived in a constant state of fear. I was scared of my brothers and scared of my mother and scared of that house.
I tried to think up ways not to come home. My friend Kathy lived on the other side of the freeway, and it was her father raising her and her sister and they had a mean dog, but I spent a lot of time there. Another friend was Sharlene—we called her Shamp—and her house was my favorite. Her brother, Floyd, played music like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and her mother cooked some really good beans. Their house was clean, orderly, calm, no rats.
School was also my safe place. In the afternoons, I’d stick around the schoolyard and play tetherball. I was excellent at tetherball. I learned that, just like my daddy, I had an anger brewing inside me, and I could shoot that anger to my fists and whack that tetherball so hard it wrapped itself all the way around the pole. Nobody could get that ball as high as I could. I’d stay until the playground closed—or until Mama showed up. Mama wanted me to come home and clean up the house, and if she got back and the house wasn’t tidy, she’d come to the schoolyard holding an extension cord. Mama liked that six feet of cord. She’d make a noose, the rest wrapped around her hand for a tight grip, and she’d whoop me with that cord all the way home. She hit my thighs until U-shaped welts appeared. Sometimes, my skin opened.
Mama had two sides: the tornado of rage she unleashed on me, and the side she presented to everyone else. There wasn’t a neighbor who wouldn’t describe my mother as the sweetest person in the world, always generous, very soft-spoken. They wouldn’t have believed she carried that extension cord like a threat all around the house.
Maybe my mother resented me for getting so much of my father’s attention and love; maybe she resented the fact that she’d made it far from Texas in search of a better life, but this wasn’t anything near what she’d had in mind. She was just trying to hold on—hold on to a life that shouldn’t have been so hard. And maybe that’s what made it possible for her, at one moment, to whip me, and another moment to open the back door to a tattered white man asking for food for his family and give him one of the three potatoes she had for her own six kids.