FROM THE SKILLET TO THE FRYING PAN
Every year, 650,000 Americans are released from incarceration—a number larger than the entire population of Wyoming or Vermont.
Living at my mother’s house, I spent as much time as I could with Toni. Still, she seemed perpetually angry at me, and I suspected my mother was tainting her. I tried hard to win her over, saying, “Hey, Toni, let’s go for a walk.” “Hey, Toni, let’s go get ice cream.” I bought her a Malibu Barbie. But she wouldn’t allow me to get close to her. Nothing I could do pleased her. She threw the Barbie, like a bone, to my brother’s dog. She insisted on calling me Sue. In a way, I suppose I understood—I hadn’t been around, and that’s who I was to her.
Through the government’s Work Incentive Program, I found a job in a county office, filing probation files. I made the minimum wage, then under $2 an hour. All day long, my boss sat across from me, leering. He made me feel like I was back on the street corner. Thing was, on the corner, I made a lot more than minimum wage.
I got to thinking about that corner. There was a man I’d met back when I was with James. His name was Mark, and he passed my corner every day. I’d see him driving slow in his Cadillac, not a used one like James’s, but a Cadillac that was shiny and new. Window rolled down, he’d try to flirt with me. I hadn’t dared flirt back. If James got wind of it, he’d have beaten me up. I was there to serve customers, but Mark would lean out the window and say he wasn’t about sharing his girl. I went back to my old corner and found what I was looking for. This time, I got into Mark’s car. I was now a woman who worked in an office, not someone working the street and living with her pimp.
Tall, slender, and brown skinned, with a short, close haircut and a thin mustache, Mark Hamilton dressed conservatively and always looked well put together. In his thirties, he was fifteen years older than me, a real man. And his attitude was all Romeo. Mark and I began seeing each other, and he soon made it clear he wanted to take care of me—and that he had the money to do so. I was used to being treated like a dishrag, but here was Mark, telling me a woman should be adored and honored. James used to tell me about the Garden of Eden, and how all women, maybe with the exception of his mother, bore the punishment of Eve’s betrayal. He used the Bible to hit me. But Mark told me about the preciousness of a woman, and he made me feel beautiful, even cherished.
Mark moved me into his apartment on Broadway and Slauson, above a barbershop he ran as a part of his business. Although Mama tried to convince me to stay with my county job, Mark assured me I’d want for nothing, and neither would Toni. With no doubt in my head, I quit my job. My final paycheck went to my mother’s house; I didn’t even bother picking it up.
Toni was fascinated by the electric hotplate at Mark’s place; she’d never seen such a thing. I was fascinated by other things about this suave, cultivated man. Mark introduced me to Courvoisier and Dom Perignon. And, before long, to cocaine.
It was the early 1970s, and cocaine was expensive and seemed sophisticated and elite. On occasion, Mark and I did lines. Along with a glass of fine champagne, it was an enjoyable way to spend an evening. It was purely recreational, we weren’t addicts, we didn’t need it. Only, Mark did need it, in a different way.
I’d catch a glimpse sometimes, in the offices behind the barbershop, of stacks of cash and mayonnaise jars filled with white capsules. People who weren’t there for haircuts or shaves came and went. But I pretended I didn’t see. Having learned well from my mother, I convinced myself I didn’t know.
Mark was kind to Toni but, no surprise, she didn’t like him much. She still didn’t like me, either. Though I kept trying. I’d put on my brightest voice, “C’mon, Toni, let’s go to the movies.” “Hey, Toni, what are you reading?” “You sure you don’t want to walk with me and get an ice cream?”
At best, she’d brush me off with chilling politeness. “No, thank you, Sue.” But more often, she was bull-headed. “Sue, I want to go home.”
“You are home.”
“I want to go to Mama’s.”
“I am your Mama.”
Many years later, Toni would tell me she felt I’d chosen Mark over her. But Mark was a calm presence, a father figure, and he provided very well for us. I wanted both of them. I wanted us to be a happy family.
A few years went by, and then a woman began calling our home, saying she was Mark’s wife. I had no reason to believe her. Mark and I lived together, and I prided myself on having developed a keen instinct, and of being able to decide for myself what I’d entertain and what I’d overlook. But it was true.
All this time, he had a wife, another home, and three sons. All this time, I’d been duped, thinking Mark was all mine, thinking we’d get married. I’d touted Mark as so much better than James, but I’d only jumped from the skillet to the frying pan—I was still being lied to and still being used.
The calls from Mark’s wife became irate and threatening. Even when Toni answered the phone with the unmistakable voice of a child, his wife would question her and call me names. Mark suggested that, for our safety, we move out of Los Angeles and set up a new life. He painted a picture straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. What other choice did I have? How else was I going to be taken care of like this? In Mark’s magical way, he kept me entranced, and he made it all come true.
We moved just outside of Dayton, Ohio, to a lovely townhouse in a pristine neighborhood called Knoll Ridge. Every day, Mark headed into Dayton for business. I happily spent my days taking care of our home, shopping at the mall, cooking dinner. Although I had wanted Toni to move with us, she stayed on with my mother and visited Ohio during school vacations. I could have insisted she live with me, but she pleaded, and I didn’t want to argue. Her attitude reminded me of how I’d been with my mother, a dynamic I didn’t want to reinforce. Besides, Toni was doing extremely well in elementary school in Los Angeles, having been chosen to be in the Young Ambassadors program, a prelude to Upward Bound, which was a federally funded program for low-income kids who’d be the first in their families to go to college. I knew Toni was smart and on the right track. She made good grades, was a good reader, and was very talkative and inquisitive. She asked a question about everything. Every single thing. Why? and Why not? and How come? and How long? and How does the washing machine work? and What makes the honking noise on the horn? and Why is it humid in Ohio? and on and on and on. It could wear a person out.
In 1976, I learned I was pregnant. Mark and I were overjoyed—even Toni seemed happy about it. Going on nine years old, she was excited to be an older sister. I gave birth to a baby boy and named him Marque, after his father. The baby resembled us both, though he was slim like his dad. We called him K.K. for short. With my son, I had a clean slate. I was twenty-five years old and thought I had the maturity to be a good mother.
For business Mark often traveled back to Los Angeles, and that’s where he was early one morning when I was in bed and heard the lock turning in the front door. The next thing I knew, the police were in my house, their search warrant having required the landlord to hand over the keys.
Toni had arrived in town only a day earlier, and she jumped from bed, eyes wide with fear. I took the baby from his crib, and we watched helplessly as the police combed my home—which I let them think I shared with my husband, though Mark and I weren’t married.
“Where’re the drugs?” an officer said.
“I don’t have any.” I glanced at Toni, standing there silently.
Eventually they found something: residue of cocaine in a sifter. I said, “I don’t know what that is, but it isn’t mine. I don’t pry into my husband’s business.”
But one of the policemen turned and looked me straight in the face. “He’s not the only one doing it, you are too.”
To me, it was solely Mark’s business. Maybe, sometimes, I’d go along for the ride. But the policeman’s words were a like an electric shock, jolting me. My role in Mark’s business had, indeed, subtly grown over time. And with him gone more and more, I would deliver, I would pick up, I would meet airplanes. When Toni accidentally had knocked over a plate of powdered sugar, I’d shouted like hell at her. She didn’t say a word, but her eyes said, I despise you, I despise what you’re doing. If it’s powdered sugar, why don’t you just vacuum it up? I hadn’t bothered to notice I’d become entangled. I’d been walking around in a fog, only it was I who wielded the fog machine. I wasn’t a drug dealer, I was a suburban housewife and mom. Who also made a fine living in cocaine.
I called one of my friends who lived nearby to pick up Toni and K.K., and I was taken to jail. From there, I called Mark. He said he had to stay away but told me to inform on people, that he’d give me names. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Instead, my next call was to George, the bail bondsman in Los Angeles. I knew I could count on George, though, for the first time, he sounded uncertain. “I don’t know if I can post bail being so far away,” he said. “I’ll try, but it might take some time.”
The jail in Dayton was like a dungeon. I was locked in a communal cage, and all around me women were kicking heroin—dripping sweat, throwing up on the floor, moaning, violently shaking.
Every day I called my friend’s house and Toni was handed the phone, but she refused to offer more than one-word replies. Years later she revealed that she knew I’d hidden a baggie of dope in K.K.’s diaper because she saw it when my friend went to change the baby.
I remained in the cage for a week before George came through. Out on bail, I packed up the townhouse and moved us from the suburbs into a house in Dayton. I didn’t bother telling Mark. I knew where the cash was, and I emptied our accounts. By this point, I’d become savvy; I knew the right people and how to ask the right questions. I retained the top lawyer in the city. This time, when the gavel came down, it was clear the difference having money and a good lawyer made: I walked away with no time, only a fine.
A free woman, I returned to my house, to my children, and to work. Like the policeman had said, it was me: I knew everything about the business, and I carried on. It had become a way of life, and I’d become accustomed to the spoils.
One evening I was coming out of a restaurant, a bag of barbecue takeout in my arms, when someone grabbed me and tried to push me into a waiting car. But I wasn’t about to go. I fought with everything I had, and flung myself from the grip of a man whose face I couldn’t see. And then, I heard a sharp pop.
A pain seared through my middle. I fell to the ground.
Then, sirens. An ambulance. I’d never been in an ambulance before. A hospital corridor, an operating room. Then, blackness.
When I came to, I was informed the bullet had penetrated to my liver. I vowed that if I survived, I’d clean up my life. I’d be done with Dayton, and done with cocaine.
I called my mother’s house to talk to Toni.
“Now what happened?” Toni asked, as dryly as if she’d heard the story a hundred times. Then it occurred to me: she had heard this story before, she’d seen me shot before.
After two weeks in the hospital, I called Toni again. “I’m coming back to Los Angeles,” I said.
I could almost hear her shrug. “Okay” was all she said.
My mother was now living in a house off Highland Avenue that Mr. Fisher had bought her, and it had rental properties around back. Toni and K.K. stayed with my mother in the main house, while I took one of the bachelor apartments.
From a Help Wanted sign in the window of a nearby realty company, I got a job soliciting housing loans. I made minimum wage, but received a bonus for every signed loan. This was very different from how I’d been living, but I was getting by. Periodically, I’d see Mark. We’d have a glass of champagne and, for a moment, I’d dream of how things could have been. But he soon stopped coming around to visit K.K., which also meant he was no longer giving me money for child support.
My savings from Dayton were running out, but I focused on the children and on parenting the best I could. I desperately wanted to learn how to be a good mother, and I didn’t want to default to the way I’d been raised simply because that was what I knew. I didn’t want my children to fear me, didn’t want to be a mother who barked orders or walked around with an extension cord, dangling her power. I also didn’t want secrets filling the house, suffocating us as silently as carbon monoxide.
Years later, when I traveled to Ghana, the place of my people’s origin—and from where my ancestors were taken—it was striking to see how differently children were raised. For the first three years, Ghanaian children are wrapped close to their mother’s body, fostering a deep sense of well-being, community, and safety—feelings I’d never known growing up. I had been searching for where I came from, needing to know my roots back before the plantations had starved and mangled them. But on my return home, I felt even more acutely that I’d been robbed. The beautiful culture of my ancestors had been stolen from me and from so many generations of us.
Toni silently scoffed at my intentions to do better. I’d cook a nice dinner and say, “At five, we’re going to sit down and eat.” She’d say, “Sue, they only do that on TV.”
She’d fold her arms, find a spot on the wall, and stare at it: that was her pose. It was as though she didn’t need me. There was some truth to that; she was thriving all on her own. When we found out Toni got into Granada Hills High School, it was a time for celebration. Though she’d have to be bused an hour to the San Fernando Valley, this excellent school in a wealthy neighborhood meant opportunity for my daughter. I bought her a bunch of new clothes, but she looked at them funny and told me how corny the polo shirts with the little alligator were. I promised her that’s what the kids at Granada Hills were wearing. I wanted her to have nice things, and to fit in. I wanted her to have the best chance at the life I didn’t have.
To my mother’s credit, she, too, was doing things differently with Toni, as though my daughter was an important second chance to her. I saw my mother patiently answering all of Toni’s questions. I saw how she listened to and respected my daughter. But I suspected Mama was also dripping poison into the well—which Toni would confirm decades later. You don’t want to turn out like your mother, Mama would tell her. Susan, she’s a bad seed.
It didn’t come as much surprise to me that my mother felt that way; if I was nothing but a bad seed, then Mama was absolved. She didn’t have to take responsibility for the present, or the past.
Perhaps K.K. was my second chance. I was a different person than I’d been at fifteen, when Toni was born. K.K. was friendly and sweet, though he had a mischievous streak. When he behaved poorly, I sat him down and talked with him about it. And when he began school, I walked him door to door.