Chris! Chris, wake up!” lisps the three-year-old voice of my sister Sharon, her little hand tugging on my shoulder.
Without opening my eyes, I force myself to remember where I am. It’s very late on Halloween night, and I’m in my bed that occupies most of the small room in the back house where we’re living now—behind the “Big House” on Eighth and Wright that is owned by Freddie’s sister Bessie. As soon as these facts register, I ease back down into sleep, wanting to rest just a little longer. The irony is that while sleep sometimes brings nightmares, it’s the reality of my waking hours that can cause me the greater fear.
From the time that Momma came to get us, first taking me, Ophelia, and Sharon—who had been born in the women’s correctional facility during that time my mother was away—to live with her and Freddie, life had changed drastically and mostly for the worse. The world of the unknown that overwhelmed me when we stayed with Uncle Archie and TT seemed wonderful by comparison to everything that took place in the territory of the familiar over which Freddie Triplett ruled. Moms gave us all the love, protection, and approval that she could, but often that seemed to make him more brutal than he already was.
My instincts told me that the logical thing to do was to find some kind of way to get Freddie to like me. But no matter what I did, his response was to beat me down, often literally. Ophelia and I almost never got whippings when we lived with Uncle Archie and TT, but with Freddie we all got whupped all the time, usually for no good reason other than he was an illiterate, belligerent, abusive, and complete drunk.
Initially, I thought Freddie might be proud of my academic success. At five, six, and seven years old, school was a haven for me, a place where I seemed to thrive at learning and in social interactions. My early exposure to books paid off, and with Momma’s continuing encouragement, I quickly mastered reading. One of my favorite teachers, Mrs. Broderick, reinforced my love of books by frequently asking me to read aloud—longer than any of my classmates. Since we didn’t have a television at this time, reading became all the more meaningful at home, especially because Momma loved to sit down after her long day of working as a domestic to hear what I had read or learned that day.
My mother still clung to the hope that she would one day obtain the necessary schooling and licensing to teach in the state of Wisconsin. Until that time, she devoted herself to doing what she had to do to take care of her four children—Ophelia, myself, Sharon, and the youngest, my baby sister Kim, who arrived in this time period. While Momma didn’t complain about her days spent cleaning rich (white) people’s houses, she didn’t talk about her work either, instead living vicariously through reports of what my teachers had taught that day or by looking with me at some of the picture storybooks that I brought home. The Red Balloon was one book that I could read over and over, sitting next to Momma and showing her the photographic illustrations of a magical city where a little boy and his red balloon went flying, exploring the rooftops. Momma’s eyes lit up with a beautiful serenity, as if she was somewhere up in the clouds, maybe dreaming of being that balloon and flying up, up, and away. I never knew that the magical city in the story was a place called Paris in a country called France. And I certainly had no idea that I would visit Paris on several occasions.
My accomplishments as an elementary school student obviously made Moms proud. But if I ever fooled myself into thinking this was going to win me points with Freddie, I was sadly mistaken. In fact, Freddie Triplett—who could not read or write to save his life—spent every minute waging a one-man antiliteracy campaign. In his early thirties at this time, Freddie had stopped his schooling in the third grade back in Mississippi and couldn’t even dial a telephone until later in his life, and he could barely do it then. This undoubtedly fed a deep-seated insecurity in him that he covered up by declaring that anybody who could read or write was a “slick motherfucker.”
Of course, in his logic, this would have included Momma, me, my sisters, or anybody he thought knew something that he didn’t, which meant they could take advantage of him. You could see it in the crazed flare of his eyes that he lived in a world full of slick motherfuckers out to get him. Mix that attitude with alcohol and the result was big-time paranoia.
Though I started to figure out some of these dynamics early on, for a while I was actually willing to see past them and to be on my best behavior in the hopes that he’d somehow find a fatherly side of himself with me. That hope was shattered one afternoon during a visit from Sam Salter, Ophelia’s daddy.
In an odd matchup, Salter and Freddie turned out to be great friends and drinking buddies. This made no sense, not only because both had kids by Moms, but also because they were so different. Just as he did every time he visited, Salter entered a room with warmth and a southern gentleman’s charm. A nicely dressed, articulate high school teacher—who could read and write and talk trash so good everybody thought he was a lawyer, although Freddie never once accused him of being a slick motherfucker—Samuel Salter had nothing in common with Freddie Triplett, who took over any space he entered by siege. Sometimes Freddie cleared a room at gunpoint, waving his shotgun, hollering, “Get the fuck outta my goddamn house!” Other times Freddie cleared the room with a rant, gesticulating angrily with a lit Pall Mall in one hand and his ever-present half-pint of whiskey in the other.
Old Taylor was Freddie’s brand of choice, but he also drank Old Granddad and Old Crow, or basically any half-pint of whiskey he could wrap his hands around. He didn’t have a hip flask for his whiskey, like some of the more sophisticated black men I saw. Dressed in his workingman’s uniform that consisted of jeans or khakis, a wool shirt, a T-shirt underneath, always, and work shoes, Freddie just carried his little half-pint bottle. Everywhere. It was an appendage. How he managed to keep his job at A. O. Smith—eventually retiring from there, pension and all—was another mystery to me. Granted, as a steel man, he was a hard worker. But he was an even harder drinker.
That afternoon when Salter arrived, Ophelia and I ran to greet him, followed immediately by Freddie’s arrival in the living room. Whenever he came by, Salter brought a little something for us—usually two dollars for Ophelia, his real blood daughter, and one dollar for me, because he treated me as a pretend son. This day we went through the routine, with Ophelia getting a hug and a kiss and her two dollars before skipping off, waving, “Bye, Daddy!” and then it was my turn.
Salter grinned at my open hand and didn’t make me wait, commending me first on my good work at school and then handing me the crisp single dollar bill. Happy feelings swirled up inside, and I couldn’t help it as I asked, “Ain’t you my daddy too?”
“Yeah,” said Salter, nodding his head thoughtfully, “I’m your daddy too. Here—” and he took out another dollar bill that he handed to me, saying, “Now you go and put that in your bank, son.”
With a big smile on my face, even though I had no bank, I started to turn and strut off, one dollar richer, with Ophelia’s daddy agreeing to be my daddy too, when I was met by Freddie’s scowl as he bellowed, out of nowhere, “Well, I ain’t your goddamned daddy, and you ain’t getting shit from me!”
Talk about bursting my balloon. For a moment I glanced back at Salter, who shot Freddie a strange look that went right over my head and Freddie’s as well. Probably Salter meant something along the lines of what I was feeling—that Freddie had no call to say anything, number one ’cause I was talking to Salter at the time, and number two ’cause it was cruel and unusual punishment. Freddie had just made his point one too many times, on top of his incessant commentary about the size of my ears.
Even when I was standing nearby, whenever anybody asked about where I was, he answered with a roar, “I don’t know where that big-eared motherfucker is.”
Then, as if he did not care, he’d turn and look at me with a grin—like it made him a bigger man for stomping on me and my self-esteem—while I stood there and felt my naturally dark shade of skin burn red with hurt and embarrassment.
Another time I was in the bathroom when I heard someone asking for me and had to hear Freddie snarl, “I don’t know where that big-eared motherfucker is,” behind my back. It was bad enough when he said it in front of me, especially since he enjoyed watching me try to mask my seven-year-old pain, but it was almost worse hearing him say it when he really didn’t know where I was. Besides, when I looked at my ears in the bathroom mirror to see how big they were, I realized they were sort of big, which made his comments sting all the more. It didn’t matter that I would grow into them one day.
Between Freddie’s remarks and some of the kids in the neighborhood and at school calling me “Dumbo”—the flying elephant from the Disney cartoon movie—a toll was being taken on my self-esteem, compounded by the gaping hole left by having no daddy. Everybody else knew who their daddy was. Ophelia’s daddy was Salter, Sharon and Kim had Freddie, my friends all had daddies. That needless comment from Freddie that afternoon when Salter gave me the one dollar made it clear to my young sensibilities, finally, that he was never going to warm to me. The question for me then became—what could I do about it?
My long-term plan had already been formulated, starting with the solemn promise I made to myself that when I grew up and had a son of my own, he would always know who I was and I would never disappear from his life. But the short-term plan was much harder to figure out. How could I fend off the powerlessness not only of having no daddy and of being labeled “you big-eared motherfucker” but, much more damaging to my psyche, the powerlessness that came from the fear that never seemed to let up at home.
It was fear of what Freddie might do and what he’d already done. Big-time fear. Fear that I’d come home to find my mother murdered. Fear that my sisters and I would be murdered. Fear that the next time Freddie came home drunk, pulled out his shotgun, and woke all of us at the end of the barrel, shouting, “Everybody get the fuck outta my goddamned house!” he’d make good on his promise to kill us all. It had gotten to the point by this time that Moms slept on the living room couch with her shoes on—in case she had to run, carrying the baby and dragging the rest of us out of the house fast. Fear that the next time Freddie beat Momma up within an inch of her life he would go that inch too far. Fear that I’d have to watch that beating or watch Freddie beat Ophelia or take the beating myself and not be able to do anything to stop it. What could I do that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t, as many times as they’d show up and either do nothing or take Freddie away and send him home after he sobered up?
The questions of what was I going to do and how was I going to do it loomed large. They followed me at school, snuck into my waking and sleeping thoughts, and stirred up the nightmares that had troubled me most of my young life, nightmares that went back to foster care when there was a supposed witch down the street. Some of the dreams I was having were so terrifying, I was too paralyzed to wake, believing in my sleep that if I could knock something over, a bedside lamp, for example, it would rouse someone in the house to come to my rescue and help me escape whatever terror was in that dream at the time.
“Chris!” Sharon’s voice pierces my semiconscious state once more.
Now I open my eyes, sitting bolt upright, taking a fast inventory. Before I went to sleep, nothing eventful had happened, other than some Halloween trick-or-treating, after which Ophelia went to a party with her friends—where she is, apparently, at the present. Otherwise, it had been a fairly quiet night in the back house that we rent from my entrepreneurial aunt, Miss Bessie, the first in our extended family to own a home—which houses her beauty salon business, Bessie’s Hair Factory, in the basement.
Crying, Sharon pulls at my sleeve, telling me, “Momma’s on the floor.”
Not knowing what I’m going to find, I throw off the covers, grab my robe, and hurry down the hall into the front room. There, lying face down on the floor, is Momma, unconscious, a two-by-four stuck in the back of her head and a pool of blood spreading underneath and around her. Sharon’s cries begin to escalate as she stares down at our mother alongside me. “Wake up, wake up!” she screams. “Wake up!”
Fighting the paralysis of shock, I feel some other mechanism take over, and my immediate reaction is to assess what has taken place, like a crime-scene analyst.
First I observe that Momma was trying to get out of the house and move toward the door when Freddie attacked her with the two-by-four, bashing it into the back of her skull with such a force that the wood splintered into her skin, sticking into her, spewing blood not just underneath her but everywhere in the room.
Next, feeling the waves of terror that Momma is dead or about to die, I turn to see Baby on the telephone calling the ambulance. Freddie’s baby sister, affectionately known as Baby, reassures me that the paramedics are on their way and goes to calm Sharon.
Amid all my senses trying to compute the mess of blood, fear, my sister’s sobbing, and Baby’s insistence that Momma is going to the hospital and she is going to be all right, and more blood, the volcanic question of What can I do? erupts in me. The answer: clean the stove! I have to do something, anything. I need a job, a duty to perform. So I race to the kitchen and begin to scrub our old-fashioned cookstove that seems like it’s been used since the time of the Pilgrims and is caked with a grime of an unknown lineage. Using a scrap of a dishrag, Brillo, and soap and water, I commence to clean and scour with all my being, at the same time that I commence to pray. My prayer is even more elaborate than Oh, God, please don’t let Momma die. It’s that, but it’s also God, please don’t let anyone come in here and see this place all dirty like this.
The idea that the white paramedics and policemen will see the blood everywhere and then the dirty stove as well is too shameful to bear. So my job is to clean it up, to prove that decent people live here, not savages, with the exception of Freddie, who has drawn blood, once again, from a woman.
When the ambulance came, the attendants moved in quickly, spoke to Baby and Bessie, not to me of course, put Momma on a stretcher, with the two-by-four removed, took her out to the ambulance, and drove off.
Even then I continued to clean, the only task I could find to create order in the chaos. The world became very small for me that night. A part of me shut down in a way that froze me emotionally but was also necessary for my survival.
My efforts didn’t save Momma. Apparently what saved her was her thickheadedness. Literally. Thanks to the strength and resilience of her skull, Freddie’s attempt to kill her had failed. She returned the next day, bandaged, battered, but conscious enough to promise he was never going to be allowed to return. With a resolve I hadn’t heard before, she looked us all in the eyes and swore, “Well, he ain’t coming back in here no more.”
We might have gone an entire week without him, but before I could relax he had returned after all. I knew this roller coaster. We’d been on it since I could remember. Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he’d start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. Nobody knew when he’d go off, but at some point everybody knew he would. Again, and again, and again.
Why Moms fell for it each time was confusing, without question. By the same token, I understood that we were sometimes in the most dangerous straits when we were trying to get away.
While I had no control over the short term, I expanded my long-term plan. Not only was I going to make sure my children had a daddy, I was never going to be Freddie Triplett. I was never going to terrorize, threaten, harm, or abuse a woman or a child, and I was never going to drink so hard that I couldn’t account for my actions. This plan evolved over time as I studied at the virtual college of how to grow up and not be Freddie. For now, I could only hate him. It was an emotional truth that lived under my skin, close to the bone.
Small flickers of rebellion had begun to flare. As an antidote to my feeling of powerlessness, I did little things just to see if I could mess with Freddie. For instance, I knew that he couldn’t read and was threatened by anyone who could—which gave me an opening.
Sometimes I’d start reading aloud, for no reason other than sending him a message—I may have big ears, but I can read. Real good. You can beat us down, but you can’t read. Other times I was even more calculating, holding my book and pointing to a word as I asked Momma, very loud to make sure Freddie heard, “What does this word mean?” Or another variation: “What does this spell?” Or, at my most devilish, I might, out of the blue, ask her how to spell a particular word.
Momma had only to give me a gentle look, telling me just with the expression in her eyes—Son, you know very well what the answer is. It was our unspoken conspiracy, our private agreement that he wasn’t going to break us. Then, out loud, she’d say, “I don’t know,” and the two of us would smile at each other with our eyes.
Finally, in the dead of night that same winter after the two-by-four incident, Moms enlisted me and the rest of us in a full-scale rebellion. After Freddie unleashed on her, for the umpteenth time, and left the house to go drink in one of several local watering holes in the neighborhood, Momma got up from the floor, put ice on her swelling face, and began packing, urging us to help.
“We have to move,” she said simply as Ophelia and I helped pack, throwing our clothes and stuff into bags, gathering up whatever we could because we knew, without being told, that time was of the essence. Instead of going to stay with relatives, we were moving to a place that Momma had rented on Sixth Street, just two blocks over from the back house on Eighth and Wright. After we piled everything into a shopping cart that we wheeled together over to the new place, all four of us in tow, I watched her face fall as she frantically rummaged in her pockets and purse. Looking up at the second-floor apartment, she shook her head mournfully, saying, “The key…I don’t have the key.” She looked shell-shocked, completely defeated.
Studying the building, I pointed to a pole, telling Momma, “I can climb up there, jump down on the porch, come through the window, and then open the door from inside.” Being a scrappy, skinny kid at the time—used to climbing up tall trees for the fun of it—I not only thought I could do it, it was imperative that I succeed at opening up that door to our new life, free of Freddie. It was having a job to do, something concrete, and it was also a battle between him and me. I had to win. As proposed, I executed my plan—scaling the pole to the roof, jumping down from the roof to the porch, thankfully raising the window on the porch level, and sliding inside. From there, I opened the apartment door and flew downstairs, where the relieved look on my mother’s face was all I needed to see. As we all settled in that night, I couldn’t have felt more proud of myself.
Over the next few days Moms caught me looking worried and knew that I was scared Freddie would show up and try to conquer our new land.
“He ain’t coming back,” she reassured me in words. “No more. He ain’t never coming back.”
One evening I was summoned to the living room in the new place by the sound of a man’s voice that seemed to be threatening. The conversation was about money or rent. Instead of belonging to Freddie, the voice turned out to be that of a white man I’d never seen before. A nondescript fellow in layers of winter clothes appropriate for the season, he was speaking in a disrespectful way that caused my mother to tremble.
Almost by reflex, I ran to the kitchen and returned with a butcher knife, pointing it at the white man. “You can’t talk to my momma like that,” I interrupted.
My mother threw me a look that spoke volumes, warning me to amend my tone and my words, to be polite.
I sent her a look right back, telling her that I would obey her. Turning back to the man, knife still in hand, I spoke again, this time saying, “You can’t talk to my momma like that, Mister.”
He backed down, soon leaving us alone. It was, unfortunately, not the last time I heard that dismissive, superior tone being used toward my mother, my siblings, and myself. Throughout my life I would battle that same reflex to want to strike back when certain individuals of a different race or class spoke to me in that way.
The more immediate consequence was that Freddie came back. The roller coaster crested the top and plunged down again. Each time I hated him that much more. Barely gone more than a week, we packed up and returned to the back house, with Freddie giving us a respite of no less than a week without violence. Disappointment, and not understanding why, ate at me. Because I didn’t know that Momma had been in prison before, I couldn’t yet grasp that she was mostly afraid that Freddie would send her back again. Only later would I fully understand that she had little financial independence, certainly not enough to raise four kids, and no means of escape, but I could already sense that she was stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
This made my need to find that remedy to fix our situation that much more urgent. The answer came one Sunday afternoon, while watching Freddie eat a plate of Momma’s cooking—in this case, her unrivaled neck bones. As a rule, watching Freddie eat was as close as a city boy like me ever got to a pig trough. But on this occasion it only took this once to watch him suck, break, and knock neck bones on the kitchen table to experience permanent revulsion. Lacking any sense of embarrassment, Freddie not only embraced the porcine essence of himself while eating but combined that with the apparent ability to fart, belch, and sneeze all at once. Who was this Sonny Liston–looking and–acting, Pall Mall–smoking, whiskey-drinking, gun-crazed giant pig man? Where was the humanity in a man who didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone else thought of him and never missed an opportunity to batter, insult, embarrass, or humiliate any of us, especially me? Was it because I was the only male in the house, because I could read, because I was my mother’s only son, or a combination of all of those things and others known only to himself?
The answers to those questions were long in coming, if ever. But finally, I had an answer to what my short-term plan of action should be. I wasn’t even eight years old when it hit me like a strike of lightning, that Sunday afternoon, watching him suck on those bones as I thought to myself: I’m gonna kill this motherfucker.
In contrast to the danger that lurked at home, outside on the streets of Milwaukee’s north side—with all the fun and drama of our black Happy Days setting—I got to experience elements of a relatively safe and normal childhood. Safety came in part from knowing the lay of the land and also from having a sense of its boundaries. On the north border, running east-west, was W. Capitol Drive, above which the upwardly mobile bourgeois Negroes lived—where kids’ daddies worked as professionals, some of them doctors and lawyers, others teachers, insurance men, or government workers. There in the center of the north side was our lower-income yet still industrious community—mostly working-class steel and automotive workers stuck in between the land of movin’ on up (where we all secretly aspired to live one day, though we pretended we didn’t want to be with all the nose-in-the-air folks) and the bridge to the white world at the south side, which was never to be crossed, went the unwritten law of the racial divide. One of the main arteries, running north-south, was Third Street, which was lined with some of the nicer stores like Gimbels, the Boston Store, and Brill’s, as well as the Discount Center, right at Third and North, my favorite spot for buying clothes on a budget.
A couple blocks away from where we lived at Eighth and Wright was the lively intersection of Ninth and Meineke, near where I attended Lee Street Elementary School—coincidentally a school attended by Oprah Winfrey’s sister Pat when they lived in Wisconsin—across from which was Sy’s store. A big, balding Jewish guy, Sy was one of those few splashes of white in our community—even though I didn’t know until later that being Jewish was different from being White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—and he was well liked for extending short lines of credit to regular customers like us. We also felt comfortable with the two black men who helped run the business for Sy and later bought the store from him. Henry and his son—aptly nicknamed Bulldog on account of that’s what he looked like—were great characters and contributed to the inviting atmosphere.
Sy made and sold an array of incredible-tasting food, including the best sausage I ever ate in my life, and also offered an eclectic selection of home and personal items. Whenever Momma called for “Chrissy Paul…” it was her vocal signal that she was going to ask me to run an errand for her to pick something up at Sy’s, anything from a can of Sweet Garrett, the snuff she loved to dip, or Day’s Work, a popular brand of chewing tobacco, to some obscure personal item that I’d never heard of before. Whatever Kotex were, I had no idea. Much as I wanted to please my mother and return with what she needed, I almost always came back with the wrong item, especially when she asked, “Chrissy Paul, go run down to Sy’s and get me some taupe stockings.” I came back with any color but taupe. Eventually she started writing notes to Sy rather than have me try to figure it out.
Two blocks north from there, at Ninth and Clarke, was another landmark of the neighborhood that we familiarly referred to as the “nigga store”—not in any pejorative sense but because the owners, unlike most of the white-owned businesses, were black. Any money in my pocket, I was out the door to Ninth and Clarke to pick up a dollar’s worth of candy and a bag or two of Okey Doke cheese popcorn.
The challenge for me, starting at the age of seven or earlier, was figuring out how to get that money in my pocket. Most of the older kids and all the adults I saw seemed to have similar concerns. Everybody, on some level, was looking for their particular hustle, their angle to get over. My cousin Terry, Bessie’s thirteen-year-old son, was a ringleader of a group of cats I followed around sometimes—they provided me with the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur, 1960s ghetto style.
Opportunity came knocking when the City of Milwaukee began building a stretch of Interstate 43 right down the middle of our neighborhood between Seventh and Eighth Streets. Since all the residential and business properties on Seventh Street were being evacuated and prepared for demolition, Terry and his cohorts figured they’d try their hands at junking.
Eager to join in, even though I had no idea what junking was, I tagged along and helped the older boys literally tear apart places that had been condemned, looking for materials—fixtures, lead, copper wire, window weights, old clothes, rags, even paper. This wasn’t stealing—or so Terry would have argued—because we were really just helping the city to tear down condemned houses. And instead of the demo guys having to cart the stuff off, we helped by piling up shopping carts and rolling them all the way to the east side of Milwaukee, just short of where you crossed the river before hitting the lake. This was where Mr. Katz, a Jewish entrepreneur who bought this stuff by the pound, ran his junking business.
Wanting to increase our profit margin, we tried to be slick a few times, but we were no match for Mr. Katz—he had invented this game. Our silly ploy was to try to weight down our load—before he put our junk up on his scales—by wetting the rags and hiding them under milk cartons buried at the bottom of our heaps.
Mr. Katz knew all the tricks, backward and forward. He knew, almost instinctually, when the weight was too heavy for what he was seeing, as he immediately began to yell in Yiddish and start digging for the wet rags. It never worked. Nonetheless, we didn’t fare too badly in the junking business with Mr. Katz as our regular buyer. That is to say, Terry and his friends didn’t do too badly. My take of five or ten dollars was much less than each of their shares. Still, I was more than happy to spend my money on a few little things I wanted, without having to ask Momma for money for the movies or candy. It also introduced me to the main operating principle of any marketplace: supply and demand. The demand was obviously somebody out there who paid Mr. Katz for the junk we supplied. Not such a shabby deal.
Some of cousin Terry’s other hustles weren’t necessarily on the up and up, like the time he showed up in our backyard with cases of cigarette cartons and all of a sudden all the kids from the neighborhood, myself included, were back there smoking, with a vaguely suspicious-sounding story about these cases having fallen off a truck or some such thing. They were actually somehow stolen from a local tavern by Terry. It didn’t matter to me. We were so cool, I thought. Even better, we didn’t get caught.
But we usually did. In fact, part of the reason that we were given a lot of free rein to come and go as we pleased was that our friends’ parents were keeping an eye out on all of us. This was made quite plain to me once when I went over to see the Ball brothers, Arthur and Willie. With this group of friends, football later became our thing, and once I started to get bigger and taller, I assumed the role of quarterback. Our games were all about passing, running, and scoring, which resulted in so many touchdowns that final scores would end up being something like 114 to 98, more like basketball scores. The Ball brothers were the best blockers any after-school team could want, on their way to becoming the biggest cats you ever saw in your life. Two of the nicest, most gentle guys I knew, they were the size of professional football linemen by the time they hit adolescence. Early on, one of the first times I went to their house happened to be a particularly hot summer day, and when I arrived it was apparent that the screen in the door to the Ball house had been knocked out and the door was just a wooden frame. So, rather than mentioning the obvious, I just walked right through the wood frame and into the house.
All at once, Mrs. Ball, their mother, came into view and shook her finger at me. “Boy, you better get back outta here and open that door! Where’s yo’ manners?!”
I stood there for a second, not understanding. The screen was knocked out, so the door was already open, wasn’t it?
Mrs. Ball didn’t see it that way. As I pivoted around to obey her, she added, “You weren’t raised like that! I know your mother. Now, open that door like you got some sense. G’on back out there and open the door, you hear me?”
A heavyset woman, a little older than Moms, Mrs. Ball made it clear that this was her house and she was in charge.
Still saying nothing, I didn’t know how I was supposed to go back out through a door that was already opened. Did I exit by stepping out as I had entered, or did I push open the frame of the door? With her standing there, hands on hips, eagle-eyed watching me, I opened the wood frame of the door, went back out, and closed it.
Now she said, “Come on in.”
The moment I did, Mrs. Ball smiled and added, “How you doing, Chrissy?”
Not everybody’s family enforced the importance of manners in this way, but there were unwritten community rules for keeping kids out of trouble. In many households at the time, there was a distinction between abuse and being punished forcefully for something you did wrong. Rods were definitely not spared. Since everybody’s mommas and daddies all knew each other, it was perfectly acceptable for somebody else’s parent to give you a whuppin’ if you stepped out of line. Then they’d call your momma and you’d get it from her when you got home. Then you’d have to wait for your old man to come home, and he would just mop up the floor with you again, giving you a whuppin’ worse than any of the others.
Our household was slightly different. Freddie was excessive enough with beating us on a regular basis, whether we were being punished or not, so Momma chose not to whip us. As a true teacher, she was able to give us the real lessons we needed to learn without force; instead, her well-chosen words, the sharp tone of her voice, and the look in her eyes said all we needed to hear.
There were very occasional exceptions, like the one time I got it for stealing a nickel bag of Okey Doke cheese popcorn from the “nigga store.” The African American woman who owned the store not only knew my momma, she announced—when she caught me trying to be slick and walk out the door all seven-year-old innocent and grabbed me by the collar—but also knew where Momma was employed. For my trying to shoplift a nickel bag of popcorn, both the police and Momma received phone calls. And after my mother had to come and collect me at the store before escorting me home, I got my butt whipped with all the ferocity of a woman hell-bent on making sure I would never steal again.
Being creative about it, Momma whipped me with the coiled-up, thick, old-fashioned telephone cord that caused the bell on the phone to ring each time she struck me. Bing! Bing! Bing! Besides the physical agony of it—harsh enough to make me wonder if she was going to kill me—the psychological piece of it was the fact that for weeks after that, every time the phone rang, I had flashbacks. As the last beating she ever gave me, it certainly prevented me from even thinking about stealing anything for a very long time—at least until I was a teenager.
Maybe part of my mother’s fury was making sure that while I might enjoy tagging along with my cousin Terry, she didn’t want me following in his footsteps. The reality was that we all sensed Terry was on his way to trouble, one of those kids born to be a hoodlum.
“Hey, Chrissy,” Terry was always calling across our backyard, inviting me up to the Big House, as he did one morning when a bunch of us—his sisters and mine—followed his lead by turning the large staircase into a Disneyland ride. This was a change of pace from the competition to see who could claim to be the most interesting character from different movies. My pick from The Magnificent Seven was the character Chris, played by Yul Brynner, a really cool-looking cat in that movie. Even though my name was a match, I’d been overruled by the older guys who got first picks. Movies had a powerful influence on me, like books, letting me look through windows into other worlds. Nothing shaped my view of life more than The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie from childhood. One day I planned on living in Kansas where nothing bad ever happened except for a very occasional tornado.
In the meantime, I got to have some good old-fashioned playtime at Terry’s instigation. We spent most of that day while the adults were out by sliding down the stairs in cardboard boxes that went zooming down the steps and colliding into bumpers we made from the couch cushions. When we exhausted the fun from that, Terry proposed, “Hey, Chrissy, let’s do a pillow fight. Boys against girls!”
“Yeah!” I was all for it. It was him and me versus two of my sisters and three of my girl cousins.
Before long the pillow fight got out of hand, mainly because Terry decided to put a sizable piece of lead in his pillowcase. The next thing we knew he had smacked his sister Elaine in the head with his lead pillow, followed by shrieks, screams, and blood everywhere.
Everyone scattered as one of the older girls went to find Paul Crawford. This was Terry’s father, a man who was always referred to by both names. Although he wasn’t married to Ms. Bessie, Paul Crawford—a carpenter, handyman, and hustler—was very much present in the Big House, not only as our resident sheriff but as the provider of limitless supplies of one-hundred-pound bags of potatoes. We might have been money-poor but we weren’t ever going to starve.
Paul Crawford was somebody else’s daddy that I would have been proud to call my father, if that had been the case. He had a style, a hustling, tough guy, workingman’s pizzazz, just in the way he was never seen without his fully loaded tool belt slung low, his workman’s cap with an authoritative tilt, and, never without an unlit cigar hanging from his lower lip. The only time I ever saw Paul Crawford light it was the day he confronted his son about the serious injury inflicted on Elaine.
Once she was bandaged and taken to the emergency room, Paul Crawford summoned all of us to the living room in the Big House, where the furniture had been pushed to one side. In an eerily close reenactment of High Plains Drifter, a film I saw many years later, Paul Crawford slowly took off his tool belt, pacing the floor and looking into our eyes, waiting for one of us to spill the beans on Terry. We all claimed not to know who was responsible, including Terry.
“Well,” said Paul Crawford, striking terror in our souls, “somebody g’on tell me something,” and he now pulled out his pants belt, pausing dramatically to light his cigar.
The only difference between this cigar lighting and Clint Eastwood’s version was that in the movie he wore a cowboy hat; in Paul Crawford’s version he wore his worker’s hat. Instead of being a gunslinger, he was a belt slinger as it came alive in his hands, like an angry, out-of-control snake. Though his main focus was Terry, we all caught ricochet blows as Paul Crawford taught each of us the meaning of “putting the fear o’ God in yo’ black ass.”
That was the end of our indoor ghetto Disneyland, cigarettes, and pillow fights.
Looking for less controversial pursuits sometime later when the weather had turned beautiful and sunny, Terry and I thought no one would mind if we built ourselves a little clubhouse in the yard out back with some of the loose lumber lying around.
Unbeknownst to us, Freddie did mind and had supposedly been hollering, “Stop making all that goddamned noise!” because he was trying to sleep. With Terry hammering on the outside and me inside the clubhouse hammering, we couldn’t hear anything. Then I became aware that Terry had stopped hammering. Suddenly, the clubhouse begins to disintegrate around me with a giant reverberating sound going Whop! Whop! Whop! and the sun reflecting off the shiny metal blade of Freddie’s long-handled ax.
All I know is that the clubhouse is being chopped down with me in it, and Terry has split. Not only does Freddie not give a damn that I’m inside, he seems uninterested in the fact that splintering wood has slashed into one of my legs, which is now bleeding a small river onto our structure-turned-woodpile as I shriek from pain. Freddie is impervious, like a human buzz saw, demonically possessed with turning our annoying noisy project and me into mulch.
Amid the whop!s and my shrieks and blood and wood splinters flying everywhere, Momma’s voice enters the cacophony as she screams at Freddie, “Stop! Stop it!”
With a grunt, he brings his destruction to a grinding halt, defending himself by declaring, “I told him to stop making all that goddamn noise.”
Leave it to Freddie to destroy anybody else’s good time. Momma comforted me, making sure to clean out the gash on my leg and put a bandage on it. When it started to scab over, the irritation was so bad that I picked at it and the scab was soon infected. Momma applied another bandage that happened to fall off one day when she was at work.
After washing it off again, I looked for a big bandage to put over it and found what looked like a soft, fluffy, clean white bandage in that package from Sy’s store. I placed it carefully over the scabbing area by tying it around my leg. Then, pretty proud of my precocious medical abilities, I thought I’d take a stroll through the neighborhood and show off my cool-looking bandage.
Who should I run into on the street but my cousin Terry? I strutted up, only to watch his horrified face looking me up and down.
“What is that on your leg, Chrissy?” he exclaimed. Before I could answer, he went on, “What you doing wearing a Kotex? You crazy?”
For the life of me, I didn’t know why he was so angry and embarrassed.
Terry wagged his finger at me. “Don’t you ever let me catch you wearing a woman’s Kotex! Take it off! Right now! And don’t you ever let me see you wearing those things again!”
Although the scar caused by the ax incident never went away, I did outgrow the delayed humiliation that hit me when I found out why Kotex weren’t supposed to be used as bandages.
It was yet one more reminder of how much I hated Freddie, how badly I wanted him gone from our lives. But coming up with a way to get rid of him felt like one of those impossible quests given to young inexperienced knights to go off and slay unslayable, fire-breathing dragons.
How could I do it? With a gun? The prospect was terrifying. For Freddie, with his hunting and fishing country upbringing, gunplay was a natural prevalent thing, something he’d been doing all his life. It was also a form of addiction, like drinking, the only way he knew how to express himself when things didn’t go his way, to placate that inner rage, to settle differences when kicking somebody’s ass didn’t do the job.
At age eight, my track record with a loaded weapon was dismal. A couple of years before, one of my friends and I had been playing in an alley near the Thunderbird Inn and found a .22 in an abandoned stove. Without knowing if it was real, we decided to test it out by aiming at somebody—a true nightmare scenario. We missed, miraculously, but the girl we aimed the gun toward could have been killed. When Freddie got that phone call, which may have come from Momma for all I know, he barreled for me. I knew what I’d done was terrible, stupid, and wrong, but I didn’t want to get whupped, so I raced into my bedroom, slid under the bed, and held my breath. Before I had a moment to exhale, Freddie had lifted up the entire bed, exposing me there, shaking like prey. The belt lashing was bad, but the sense that he was omnipotent was worse.
Besides, even if I’d had a gun and could use it, that wouldn’t necessarily do the job. In fact, there was one night when news arrived that he’d been in a drunken bar fight and his best friend, Simon Grant, had shot Freddie in the stomach. Glory Hallelujah, praise the Lord! But Freddie’s huge belly acted like a bulletproof vest. He bled profusely, but after they removed the bullet and kept him in the hospital overnight for observation, he went right on in to work the next day.
Not knowing what tactic would serve me in the quest I had absolutely resigned myself to undertaking, every violent episode was further proof that I had no choice but to do away with him. That was very much in my mind one night when he was obviously preparing to beat Momma again and I ran to call the cops.
Right near Sy’s at the intersection of Ninth and Meineke was a bar called the Casbah. Sure that somebody would loan me ten cents to make a call on the pay phone outside the bar, I approached the first guy I saw—a cat who looked like a postcard version of a 1962 north-side Milwaukee player, with a snap brim hat, sharkskin suit, and pin knot tie.
“Mister, look,” I say, dashing toward him, out of breath, “can you please give me a dime? I gotta call the police, ’cause my stepfather’s about to beat up my mother.”
This cat, he doesn’t blink an eye, saying only, “You can’t hustle me, nigger.”
Now I want to kill this motherfucker in addition to Freddie.
After I find someone willing to trust me that my mother’s life really is in danger, I get through to the police, and two police officers, both white, are sent to the house.
When they arrive, Freddie is sitting on the couch, and they’re obviously surprised to see a man of his size. After they exchange nervous glances at each other, one of them clears his throat, asking, “Mr. Triplett, can we use your phone? We need to call the wagon.”
One of the few times Freddie exhibits anything close to a sense of humor he leans in to them and replies, “Hell, naw, you can’t use my goddamn phone to call the police to bring a wagon to take me to jail. Fuck you!”
It was ludicrous. They eventually coaxed him to go with them down to the station. Once he was gone, I asked Momma why they had tried to use our phone to call the police if they were the police and were already at our house. She said, “Well, maybe they thought they needed a couple of big police officers to get him out of here.”
This was as maddening as the day that Momma ran to hide at Odom’s corner store on Tenth and Wright. The owner, Mr. Odom, was the daddy of a school friend of mine, and he didn’t try to stop my mother from lying down behind the counter.
Waving his shotgun, Freddie stalked her into the store, demanding that Mr. Odom tell him, “Where is that bitch?”
Mr. Odom shrugged. “Well, she’s not in here, Freddie, and you got to get out of my store with that shotgun. You hear me?”
Mr. Odom suffered no fools. Knowing this, Freddie, like all bullies, was actually a coward when confronted by someone who refused to be bullied. Without so much as an argument, Freddie turned around and left, continuing up the block, holding his shotgun in broad daylight, looking for Momma.
She was able to lay low until later that evening, when he apparently cooled down. For the next two days or so, Freddie’s internal barometric pressure seemed to indicate that storms weren’t imminent, as if the valve had temporarily released some steam. But the signs were sometimes misleading, so we all walked on eggshells, all of us—me, Momma, twelve-year-old Ophelia, four-year-old Sharon, and two-year-old Kim—all the time.
While I knew that we all feared and pretty much loathed Freddie, the question of how my mother really felt about our increasingly intolerable situation was left as unanswered as the question about who and where my real daddy was. That is, until I happened to stumble over one of the only clues to her inner world that I would ever have.
Around this time, Moms actually made one of the only references to the man who fathered me. Freddie had, once again, reminded me that he wasn’t my goddamn daddy. Trying to console me, she mentioned offhandedly that I did have a daddy down in Louisiana, who had once sent me a letter with five dollars or so enclosed. I had never seen the letter, the money, or his name. Momma pointed out that she was always giving me money, as much as she could, which was true. But that didn’t explain why she thought my seeing my real father’s letter would cause me more heartache than not knowing anything about him.
That may have been on my mind when I was surprised to find myself home alone in the back house one late afternoon and decided to go rummaging in drawers, looking for that letter perhaps, and others. What I found instead was a letter written in Momma’s careful, simple script, which had no salutation, even though it was obviously being sent to a trusted friend. It seemed to slip right into my hands when I reached into her bedside drawer to pick up Momma’s little worn Bible she kept in there.
It was evident to me that even though Freddie couldn’t read any of it, Momma was aware that if he just saw the letter, he would view it as an act of treason. For that reason, she probably had to write it in stealth and then keep it tucked secretly into her Bible, where he wasn’t likely to find it.
There was much in the letter about things that were going on between her and the old man that I knew nothing about, and didn’t understand, including a business proposition he had going in Detroit that never got off the ground. The contents were overwhelming, staggering, especially the sheer panic in the words at the very start of the letter: Help, I fear for my life.
Of course, I knew that snooping around wasn’t right. But still, it took my reading of that letter to know the truth about what she was feeling and to know that she was trying to get help. For the next few days I watched her, making sure she didn’t suspect that I’d found that letter. Without realizing it, I had already developed the family skill of being able to keep a few secrets myself.
As a result, when at long last I came up with a viable method of killing Freddie and began to concoct the lethal potion that he was going to mistake for alcohol, nobody had a clue about what I was doing. My first feat was to slip off with his cup, his stainless steel drinking cup, the only one he drank from and treated as lovingly as a silver goblet embedded with jewels. Next, without any watchful eyes, I poured a little liquid bleach in, some rubbing alcohol, with healthy doses of all the cleaning agents and medicines that had poison warnings on them, and finally mixed it all together by adding near-boiling water. All bubbling and foaming, it was better than anything any Dr. Frankenstein could cook up in a movie, but the horrific stench was a problem. How was I going to get Freddie to drink it now?
One possibility was to leave it in the bathroom and just hope that he would take a sip out of curiosity. Great idea. Except, when I got in there and heard voices coming near, I got nervous that he’d make me drink it out of curiosity. My next thought was to try to trick him that it was one of those fancy flaming drinks. Ridiculous as that was, I lit a match and tossed it in. Poof! A towering blue and orange flame shot up in Freddie’s big steel cup! Besides my death potion being a bust, I was now going to burn myself up. The only option I could see was to empty the burning, foaming mess down the toilet. Throwing the top down, I figured that it was over but smoke and flames began to issue forth from under the lid.
“What’s that goddamn smell?” came Freddie’s voice.
Flushing the toilet—which miraculously made the smell disappear and didn’t cause an explosion that burned up me or the house—I stepped out of the bathroom, returned Freddie’s cup to where I’d found it, and answered, “What smell?”
Depressed that my effort had come to naught, I tried to comfort myself that it was a trial run and my next attempt would be successful. My latest plan was to try to do it in his sleep. Little did I know that my mother, with her gift for secrecy, was being pushed to a similar extreme. One night, after another brutal beating, she said out loud, to no one in particular, “He ain’t never coming back.” She added that if he did, she would kill him before he could hurt her or us again, stating matter-of-factly, “I’ll do it when he’s asleep.”
If she kept the details of her own fantasies of revenge a secret, there was one thing Bettye Jean Gardner Triplett couldn’t keep from me. Toward the end of these three and a half years that had followed since she came to get us from Uncle Archie’s house and just before she vanished again—without warning or explanation from others—I discovered that she had the astonishing ability to become almost supernaturally still. Shortly after finding her letter, I was in the living room watching TV in the evening, and she was at the dining table reading the newspaper when Freddie performed his one-man stampede to her side, ranting and raving, trying to agitate and engage her, outdoing all former tirades with language more foul and abusive than I’d ever heard.
On one level this was the most surreal atmosphere of denial, with Freddie acting the part of the ax murderer in the horror movie while Moms and I pretended to play the part of the kid watching TV and the mother reading the newspaper, a normal family at home. The more sound and fury that came from Freddie’s raging storm, the more still my mother grew.
I’d never witnessed anything like this in my life before—or since. Her stillness was fueled by a million times the energy that thundered in Freddie. That was the most still I’ve ever seen anything or anybody be in my life. A table moves more. Momma sat there motionless, eyes on her newspaper, frozen, not even turning a page, as if she had vanished deep within herself to prevent herself from responding—because she knew that if she said anything, if she turned a page, flicked an eyelash, breathed, he would hit her. Her stillness defeated his storm. To my shock, he gave up, blew his wad of rage, and turned to her like he just changed the channel on a TV set and said, “C’mon, let’s get it on!”
The ability to become still was born in me that night from watching Moms. It exists in the realm of instinct, when the choice is flight or fight. Stillness was my mother’s only defense against a predator, the way prey can avoid the attack of a killer cobra or a shark by being so still as to be invisible. And it may have been in that moment of stillness that she decided the time had come for the prey to find another way to get rid of the predator, to enact her own plan to make sure Freddie wouldn’t be coming back. It may have been then that she decided to take the necessary precautions to make sure that she had all of her children out of the house, me included, one night after Freddie had returned home drunk and passed out.
With her children out of harm’s way, she followed through on her plan to burn the house down while Freddie slept. Or that was the story I would eventually hear. How he woke up and stopped the fire, I never did learn. But I do know Freddie used her attempt to kill him to support his claim that she had violated her parole from her earlier imprisonment—which he had also instigated. And once again, his actions caused her to be sent back to prison.
The full details were never revealed to me or my sisters. All I got from this time was a mechanism for becoming still when scary forces preyed on me. Fear of losing my life, losing the life of a loved one, or the fear of losing everything I have—those fears followed me for years. Stillness has been my refuge and my defense. Even later, as an adult, I would cope by being still. Very still. It’s not something I would always feel good about, but it’s where I go whenever there’s too much chaos around me, when the world seems like it’s crumbling, when I suddenly fear that everything or everyone I cherish is going to be taken from me in the blink of the eye.
I get still.