9
Silence
If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
My aunt’s voice, faint and scratchy, crackled over the phone. My brother had woken me up, or maybe I was already awake, to tell me she wanted to talk to me. I immediately knew why she was calling. I had been preparing for it. I hate to be caught off guard, so I try to prepare for everything, to the best of my ability. My aunt sounded tired. She had been dealing with the hospitals, both Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie and then Mount Sinai in the city, where, overnight, they had flown my mother days ago, maybe it was weeks. I mess up on the timeline of it all. “It happened so suddenly.” Isn’t that what they always say?
I knew this phone call would come. My mother’s illness was sudden. Pneumonia. People didn’t die from pneumonia. Not in the United States. Not in 1999. On the cusp of the millennium. If she had still been in Guyana, then it might have made more sense. But this was the greatest country in the world. They could save her. My brother had taken me aside when we were at Mount Sinai, after we had seen her, so distant and remote in her hospital bed. She had a fifty-fifty shot at survival, the doctors had told him. No one really talked to me. I was not yet fourteen, so they just talked around me, as they had always done. And as I had always done, I pieced the puzzle together myself.
“She could die,” Wayne had told me then, and I looked up at him. Silence. I didn’t know how he expected me to react. I didn’t know how I expected me to react. The school year had just started two months ago, my freshman year of high school. I was excited to become a real, red-blooded, American teenager. I’d make friends and go to parties and learn to drive and, who knows, maybe my mom would get me a used car once I had my license. She didn’t drive, so it would behoove both of us to have a car in the family. And the wonders it would do for my social life.
She had talked about finally getting me a computer, through one of those rent-to-own situations from Aaron’s, the store we lived above on Main Street. She had bought our beds, hers a queen, mine a twin, and the dining room table that way, and I needed a computer to keep up with the demand of my high school course load. And I would need a car to get to and from school and take her to the supermarket or the mall. So went my reasoning when I would campaign for a car. And of course, I would get a job to help pay for both. I had it all planned out. High school would be my time to blossom. Finally.
Middle school had been rough—it sucked, really. But in high school, I’d shine. My voice had changed, finally, and while I missed hitting those soprano notes, I anticipated what other changes my body would go through. Yes, things would be okay. I would be okay.
My aunt’s voice was almost like a stranger’s to me. A fifty-fifty chance, they had said. My mother’s age was a complicating factor. She was young, the doctors had said, though she had never been young to me. She had me when she was almost forty-two. She was now almost fifty-six. She wasn’t too old, the doctor meant, to fight for her life. She could still make it.
My aunt called me that morning, November 2, to tell me my mother hadn’t made it. I heard the words and felt them as they washed over me. I stood there holding the phone. Silence. My aunt asked if I had heard her. My mother was dead. I had heard her. I didn’t know what to say except, “Okay.” Was I supposed to cry? Why couldn’t I cry? Did I care at all? What was I supposed to feel? Could I feel, or was I just as numb as my mother’s body lying in the morgue at Mount Sinai? The only thing I knew was that I wanted to go to school, to pretend that my life was normal for one more day because it would never be again.
It’s inhuman to suffer in silence. I used to think it was brave, admirable, even. After all, when Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities, he’s not kicking and screaming, because it’s a far, far better thing he does, blah blah blah. And Jesus faced his suffering like a godlike man. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we all?
So many of us are taught to never complain. It’s un-American to show weakness. It’s also un-Guyanese, which is where I’m from. Both America and Guyana are former colonies of Great Britain, home of the famed stiff upper lip. They both inherited their stoic suffering from the United Kingdom, a source of countless other atrocities. At the same time, Americans are far less cool and collected, and far less likely to keep calm and carry on. There’s a rebelliousness here that will not quite go gently into that good night.
As much as our leaders would like us to remain silent, as silence equals complicity, America is a loud-ass country. You have to speak up in order to be heard, unless you’re carrying a big stick, like noted soft-speaker Teddy Roosevelt. Either way, there has to be a force about you that speaks volumes. Immigrants have to learn that the hard way. We come into this country with our own values and beliefs and traditions and are automatically assaulted with the cacophonous American way of life. We have to speak up. And speak American, which is a different language entirely from English.
In this new home, however, we are further silenced as we’re forced to assimilate. Thus we retreat into our own little communities, where we’re free to speak our language, enjoy our customs, and avoid being persecuted because of our differences. The image of the docile, hardworking immigrant is cliché by now. They’re stealing our jobs, the conservatives say. Jobs Americans don’t want, the liberals counter, adding, self-righteously, They keep our country running. And our country keeps them servile. Those who are here illegally dare not rock the boat, while those who are here legally fear being ostracized and called un-American.
Really, any member of a minority group who questions the evils of America is likely to be accused of being un-American. This accusation comes by way of the only “real” Americans in existence, the whites. And the whites are the loudest voices in the room. I’ve been in America for the majority of my life, but my voice will never rise to the level of that of a white. But my voice was silenced early on, before I even knew what it meant to be in the loudest country in the world.
Within that silence I think I may have felt guilty.
My mother and I were not unique in that we had a complicated, even contentious relationship. She wasn’t much for sharing her feelings, and so I wasn’t either. She hated when I cried. It seemed everyone hated when I cried. Guyana may be in South America, but culturally, it has more in common with the islands of the West Indies. Parents could be strict, even violent; homosexuality was discouraged; and there was a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a man. Or a boy.
My mother was raising me on her own, and I’m not so sure she had expected to raise a young boy at this late stage in her life. She had already raised my brother and would continue raising him till her death. I wasn’t a bad kid by any measure, but precocious kids are annoying. With their questions and their observations and their know-it-all attitudes. There was very little tolerance for children who didn’t know their place in most West Indian households. Mine was no exception.
When we were all still living with my aunt and uncle and their three boys, I had once told my mother to shut up. Let me tell you. I hear and see white kids telling their parents to shut up all the time, and I can’t help think to myself, That lucky little shit. You don’t tell adults to shut up among Black people, of any origin. It’s not gonna fly. That impudent child might fly across the room. But their insolence will not be tolerated.
So once those words came out of my mouth, it was a mad dash for my life, with my uncle in hot pursuit. “Shut up” was probably just something I heard from my favorite teacher, television, and I had repeated it, as I repeated everything. I was four, so I might not have known how bad it was, and considering who I am and have always been, I might’ve refused to apologize. Whatever the exact circumstances, I vividly remember running from the dining room, through the kitchen, down the stairs to the basement, my uncle right behind me, until he caught and pinned me against the bookshelf and hit me repeatedly as I wept and wailed. No one, no man, certainly, had ever hit me like that before or since. I remember my uncle hitting me, and I remember no one saying or doing anything about it. Including my mother.
From then on, I knew what was expected of me: silence. Like a good boy, I would be seen and not heard; I wouldn’t talk unless spoken to; I would never interrupt an adult; I could never truly express myself. So I turned inward. I hated speaking anyway. I have a stutter that manifests itself now as an inability to speak with the clarity I can only find in the written word. I hate that I tend to mumble and jumble my words together, but it so often feels like something out of my control. It’s a weakness that leaves me feeling powerless. I learned, then, that it’s easier to remain quiet and appear strong than to speak and reveal weakness. Silence became the refuge my family never could be. Years later I would cut them out of my life completely.
After I had sufficiently learned my lesson, my uncle let my aunt take me to the bathroom to clean up my snot and tears. But I couldn’t stop crying. My aunt, exasperated, told me sternly to stop. “Boys don’t cry,” she informed me, to my great shock. There I was disproving her words, but my aunt was the smartest person I knew, and I loved and respected her so much that she must have been right and I must have been wrong. I tried, for my aunt’s sake, to stop the tears, to stop the heaves, coming from deep in my chest, that shook my little body. I used to cry all the time. Tears came so easily. But I was always made to feel that they were wrong, that they didn’t belong to me, that boys didn’t cry and so I shouldn’t cry.
In elementary school, tears were my defense mechanism. If I turned on the waterworks, bullies would leave me alone or someone would go get a teacher and I would be escorted away from danger. But I also cried when I got disappointing test scores. I cried at the slightest provocation. In middle school, I found that my tears invited ridicule. My enormous sensitivity, or as some kids called it, being a fucking pussy, made me even more of a target. So I worked to deaden my emotions.
Eventually, I stopped crying altogether. Through a combination of my conscious decision, the unconscious onset of a numbing depression, and just getting older. Boys are conditioned in adolescence to numb themselves to their own emotions anyway. Not only did I stop crying, I stopped telegraphing my emotions. Because I wasn’t raised to talk through my feelings, I internalized them, especially my anger. When I was mad at someone, my default reaction was, and is, to stop talking to them. The good old silent treatment. Not only did I stop talking to whomever had hurt or offended me, but I denied their very existence. I was cold-blooded in my absolute dismissal of people. It just felt easier to cut someone off than it was to talk openly and honestly about how and why they hurt me.
For one, sometimes my anger would overwhelm me to such an extent that I didn’t know how to express my emotions, or I was afraid of how they would come out. I’m not one for sugarcoating things, and I never knew how my bluntness would be received. What if I were to say something that would send a fairly innocuous situation down a road of no return? Not that ignoring someone for days or weeks on end led to a better outcome. What often happened was I would be mad for a while and relegate someone to my silence, but once the anger had dissipated or the will to have a conversation had blossomed in my stony heart, I wouldn’t know how to end the silence. I usually relied on the other person to break it.
That’s the other thing. I was rarely on the receiving end of the silent treatment. Not that my behavior was by any means impeccable, but I endeavored to be beyond reproach. How could I, Lester Fabian Brathwaite, friend, son, and future saint, ever be in the wrong? And even if I was in the wrong, how dare you make me feel that way. For instance, I called my mom a bitch once. In my defense, I didn’t think she heard me. A correction: I called my mom a bitch many times, but never within earshot. Except that one time.
We were fighting (about what? Who knows, who cares?) and I had run into the bathroom, where she struck me, which she did from time to time. It was usually nothing more than a slap across the arm or back—you know, somewhere that wouldn’t leave a visible bruise. The last thing my mom needed was me running to some well-meaning white teacher and telling them how my mom beat me at home. She only did it as a last resort. This time, however, I overstepped. As she was walking away, I called her the offending epithet, and she heard me.
My mom wasn’t the disciplinarian, my uncle was, but the fact that I had the nerve to call her a bitch set off something in her and she hit me repeatedly as I clutched the towel rack. I sobbed. And then I refused to talk to her. I don’t know for how long. See, I could pull the silent treatment on everyone else, but when my mother was over it, so was I. Maybe I’d try to extend the period for dramatic effect, but ultimately she’d make me laugh, or take me somewhere, or buy me something I’d been whining about, and all would be forgiven.
Food was the simplest route. Also, I knew I was wrong, and the guilt just ate away at me. After that, my mother never hit me again. I think she felt bad. I also felt bad. I felt bad for calling her a bitch, but really, I felt worse because she had heard me. We had both lost our tempers. She was usually quiet and reserved, but I was acquainted with her other self. She loved to laugh, she loved to dance; there was a fire in her that I inherited.
There was this woman who used to ride the bus at the same time as my mother and me when we went to the supermarket. She was an off-putting woman, terrible wig, but also a terrible attitude. She would bully her way onto the bus and yell at anyone who stood in her way. So she decided to try my mother. Wrong move, ma’am. My mother wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t afraid of her, and without losing her composure, she told the woman off as I sat quietly next to her, living. She shut that woman up and then they kinda became friends. Or at least friendly. Game recognize game, I suppose. I was exceedingly proud of my mother in that moment, for standing up for herself, with all those people on the bus watching. Not like we were on a stage or anything, but sometimes it’s easier to just cower rather than stand your ground, especially with an audience present. I get that urge to slink away when faced with any confrontation, but then I remember my mother. If she could stand up for herself, then so could I. It’s funny how those little moments in childhood can have such resounding effects. Funny and terrifying. Which is the sweet spot in life.
My mother and I were similar in temperament, which means we got along as often as we didn’t. I remember…just always being mad at her. I took that old nursery rhyme to heart: “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” There were days I would deliberately step on every crack on the sidewalk in hopes of bringing the promised outcome.
And I would wish her dead. Often. She would make me so mad that I would wish her dead. But mad about what? Did any of it fucking matter? I was probably just being the impudent little shit who had told her to shut up at four years old. My mom and aunt loved to tell the tale of how I screamed and kicked my way into this country, pulling away from my aunt’s hand as we walked through the airport, as an example of how rowdy I had been as a child. Yes, we had just been on an impossibly long flight, in coach, and I was definitely tired, cranky, and scared to be ripped from all I knew and shoved into a different country. But they talked of me as if I were a wild colt in need of breaking. And my uncle would be the one to break me. And he did.
His heavy hand imparted on me the fear of god. In time, I would reject both he and Him. I resented my mother. For being poor. For not stopping my uncle from hitting me. For wanting me to be a banker when I wanted so much more. My anger at her most often arose from what she couldn’t buy for me. Because she was denying me what I wanted, denying my ability to become whomever I wanted to be. I resented her for saying she would never want a gay child, knowing full well (did she?) that that was exactly what she had.
My uncle had tamed my spirit, but he hadn’t broken it. I was still that rowdy, rebellious child, ripping my hand away from authority. I still am…and it’s exhausting.
I wished her dead so often, and then she was. It wasn’t my fault that she was dead, but maybe I deserved…I don’t know what, if anything, I deserve. She was sick for a while, but I didn’t think too much of it. She had missed days of work, which she never did. She was a hard worker and never took time for herself. Then after so many missed days, her manager, some kind white man, came to the apartment to check on her. And he immediately took her to the hospital. Shouldn’t someone in her family have done that? Someone should’ve checked on her and, seeing that she was so unwell, taken her to the hospital. But we weren’t a people who went to the doctor very often. I was a kid, so I kinda had to have regular doctor visits, but I was always raised to be tough, to get back up and dust myself off, to not cry, to not admit when I was in pain. If anyone in the family saw that she was ill, the prevailing wisdom was that she would get better. Maybe I had told her to go to the hospital and she refused. Maybe I could’ve done more to save her. Maybe I didn’t want to.
I felt guilty.
So many things are left unsaid in Black families, especially between parents and their queer children. I never got to come out to my mother. I think I would’ve sooner than later if I had the chance. I knew she had said she would never want a gay child when I was younger and within earshot, but I really feel she would’ve been fine with it eventually. Living in America had loosened the old girl up. All those pro-gay episodes of The Golden Girls we watched together must have seeped into her brain at some point. We had also started watching Will and Grace together, which premiered a year before she died. The woman loved her primetime sitcoms. As did her gay-ass son.
And despite our occasional animosity, I know she loved me and would never turn me out or reject me. Also, it’s not like it would’ve come as that much of a surprise. I mean, the woman lived with me for fourteen years—either she saw it or just ignored it.
With my mother’s and my shared love of TV comedy, it’s fitting that I kind of got to come out to her vicariously through an episode of the Netflix series Master of None. Written by the show’s co-creator Aziz Ansari and writer-producer Lena Waithe, “Thanksgiving” brought the Black coming-out experience into fresh, wonderful territory.
The episode follows Denise (Waithe) through a series of Thanksgivings with her mother, Catherine, played by Angela Bassett (and you know how I feel about Angela Bassett); her aunt (criminally underrated character actress Kym Whitley); her impossibly old grandmother (Venida Evans); and her best friend Dev (Ansari), whose Indian parents didn’t celebrate the holiday.
Denise gradually comes out over these Thanksgivings, over the course of twenty-five years. The episode’s first Thanksgiving is in 1992, then on Thanksgiving 1995 she begins to realize she has feelings for girls, eventually coming out to Dev on Thanksgiving 1999. They agree to use the term “Lebanese” as a matter of comfort for Denise. That always made me chuckle.
On one of the very gay episodes of The Golden Girls, 1986’s “Isn’t It Romantic?,” Dorothy’s (Bea Arthur) lesbian friend Jean (Lois Nettleton) comes to visit and falls in love with Rose (Betty White). When Dorothy tells Blanche (Rue McClanahan) that Jean is a lesbian, Blanche, thinking herself erudite and sophisticated, seems unfazed.
“You aren’t surprised?” Dorothy’s mother, Sophia (Estelle Getty), asks her.
“Of course not! I mean, I’ve never known any personally, but isn’t Danny Thomas one?” She had confused “lesbian” for “Lebanese,” and soon she begins to turn the word over and over, finally realizing that Danny Thomas is, in fact, not one. “Lesbian…lesbian?…LESBIAN!” Master of None’s “Lebanese” bit felt like an homage to that other landmark lesbian episode of television.
Denise is hesitant to come out to her mother. Of course she would be. The predominant trope among Black mothers and their queer kids had been, at least until this episode, one of dismissal, disgust, and disownership. The alternative was simply not to talk about it. My mother and I just didn’t talk about the pink elephant in the room, which was me lip-synching to Whitney Houston songs like my life actually did depend on it. It was my complete disinterest in girls or dating. It was my effeminacy, which didn’t seem to go away as I got older, as others had predicted and hoped. We didn’t talk about any of that; we just kept the peace while we could. There’s peace in silence, but also enormous guilt.
Denise finally comes out to her mother at the most unusual of the Thanksgivings, one without the family and Dev, at a diner in 2006. Bassett is stunning in this scene. When Denise finally speaks her truth, her mother isn’t upset that she’s gay; she’s upset that her life is going to be that much harder. “It is hard enough being a Black woman in this world,” she tells Denise. “Now you want to add something else to that?”
For Catherine, being gay seems like a choice, but what people fail to understand is that most people, given the choice, wouldn’t choose to make their lives harder. They wouldn’t choose to be ostracized, to be vilified, criminalized, stoned, ridiculed.
Wearing a gorgeous pussycat wig, Bassett conveys so much complexity: she’s disappointed, she’s angry, she’s partly relieved because the unsaid has finally been said, but above all, she’s scared. Tearfully, Catherine tells Denise, “I just—I don’t want life to be hard for you.”
That scene always guts me. It’s what I imagined, what I hoped, my mother would’ve said to me, could’ve said to me. My mother never told me she loved me. It just wasn’t her style, effusive emotion. It would’ve been nice to have heard it, to truly know rather than to have to intuit her love. But I always wondered if she would’ve loved me if she had known all of me, if she would’ve accepted me, if she could’ve been like Catherine.
Lunette Urla Brathwaite was born on November 12, 1943, in Georgetown, Guyana. Her first name was Lunette, but she went by Urla instead. Back then, Guyana was still British Guiana, a colony under that empire on which the sun never set. It declared its independence on May 26, 1966. Urla was twenty-two. What did it feel like to wake up in a new country, or did it feel like nothing at all? Three years later she gave birth to my brother, Wayne.
When her younger sister, Una Patricia Brathwaite, my aunt Patsy, went to America, Urla did not. I don’t know why. Maybe Patsy went for school or for work, and never looked back. She graduated, she married, she had kids, she got a job at IBM and a big house in Poughkeepsie, with a dog and an aboveground pool. What was Urla doing? Who was she? I would always ask her about her past in Guyana, but she never seemed to want to talk about it.
I, on the other hand, was fascinated. Unlike most of the kids I went to school with, I came from somewhere different and exotic, and that made me different and exotic. It was only natural I wanted to know more about it. I think she said she worked at a factory? How did she meet Carl Newton, my father? My father, who had other, full-grown kids. A handful of ’em. What were the circumstances? Do I even want to know? Of course I do. I’m nosy, and I love gossip.
Who was Urla Brathwaite? Was she lonely her whole life, like I’ve been? Did she crave love, only for it to be cruelly denied to her? Who was the man who knocked up a twenty-five-year-old woman in 1968 and didn’t marry her? Did Urla not want to get married? Or was she left forever heartbroken? My mother will always remain a mystery to me, and thus a part of me will always remain unknowable.
Patsy filed for her older sister and her two sons to come to America, and we arrived in early January 1990. Wayne’s birthday was later that month. He was turning twenty-one. I can understand how he could’ve gone wild as soon as he got here, confronted with this land of dreams and opportunity and women, so many women, so many white women, who were charmed by his good looks and accent. He just never grew older than twenty-one.
Wayne had two kids, a son named Wayne Jr. and a daughter, Jaiden, making me an uncle before I was eight. When we were on speaking terms, my brother and I barely spoke. We never had a real conversation. I guess he, too, will always remain a mystery to me, but that’s a mystery I’m less interested in cracking. That we were never close made cutting him out of my life that much easier. But even those I’m close to are not immune to my cruelty. I’ve walked away from relationships before, including my friends, my brother, and the rest of my family, though I’ve had no lovers to abandon. And it’s not as if I never think about the person again or don’t regret the way things ended. But to my understanding, life is ephemeral, as are the bonds we make. Anyone can be taken from you at any moment. Love fades, friendships end, people die, and you keep moving.
My aunt moved fast, organizing a funeral for her sister in a matter of days. She died on Tuesday the second and was buried on the fifth of November, my birthday. My mother’s was a week after mine. Scorpios. No wonder we were so often at odds. But Scorpios also love deeply, if not ostentatiously. I don’t think my aunt realized what day she had chosen for the funeral, or maybe it wasn’t much of a choice, maybe she just wanted to bury her sister as soon as possible and that was the soonest. And the most convenient. It was a Friday, after all.
But it was my fourteenth birthday, and for the rest of my life, my birthday will always remind me of the day my mother was buried. That, admittedly, messed me up a bit. For years it was a highly sensitive time, and I didn’t know how to celebrate it. Or if I should celebrate it at all.
And it was just like two weeks of a shroud hanging over me, from the second when she died to my birthday/the anniversary of her funeral on the fifth, and then her birthday on the twelfth. I used to think it was a punishment, or a curse, that my living should always be directly tied to my mother’s death.
That day exists in a fog of memory and yet…and yet…I can blink my eyes and be back there again because that day will always be a part of me. It is the clearest delineation between before and after. There was before that fifth of November and then there was everything after.
I’m fourteen today. Happy fucking birthday to me. I’ve waited for this day for so long, when I become a real teenager. Everyone knows thirteen doesn’t count. At thirteen you’re still a child. Today, I am a man. Or, at the very least, a teenage boy. I look over at my mom’s bed. I’m still sleeping in the same room, still on my twin bed from Aaron’s downstairs. It’s more comfortable than that old hand-me-down box-spring nightmare, that’s for sure. I want to sleep on my mom’s bed because it’s big and comfy and when she was at work I would always lay on it, though she told me not to, and I would rush to make the bed before she got home, in hopes she wouldn’t notice. Now it’s mine, I guess.
Wayne is still sleeping on the couch. But I can’t sleep on it. How can I? She was just there two weeks ago. Covered in blankets. Barely moving. Barely breathing. My suit is hanging in the closet, right next to her clothes, which I also tried on when she wasn’t home. She almost caught me in one of her dresses once. That heavily beaded, drop-waist burgundy number that zips up in the back. I always liked that dress on her. And it didn’t look too shabby on me either. I was trying it on, you know, out of curiosity and boredom, when I heard her key in the lock. Shit! I panicked trying to get the dress off, but the zipper was stuck, so I shimmied out of it as quickly as I could and hung it back in place before she saw me. Then, in my first free moment, I smoothed out the dress and the zipper. I had zipped her up into that dress several times.
I hate that suit. It’s too big. I’m too big. I look even fatter than I already am in it. On all the days I should look my cutest and thinnest, it’s this. God, I can’t wait for this day to be over. How am I going to get through it? You just get through it, Lester. You just get through it.
Wayne wishes me a happy birthday. I have to remember he also lost a mother. And they were together for a longer time; it was just them for like seventeen years before my big head came along. This can’t be easy on him either. Be patient. Be patient. At least he remembered my birthday. Will anyone else? Probably not. How can I bring it up? I probably shouldn’t bring it up, should I? Is that gauche? Is that what “gauche” means? I mean, it definitely feels inappropriate. “I’m sorry for your loss.” “Thank you, but also, fun fact, it’s my birthday.” I should get money for this day. Lots of money. “It’s your birth…oh, here’s a twenty.” Nah, that’s definitely gauche. And gross. I guess I won’t bring it up at all. Happy fucking birthday to me.
Hmm, wouldn’t you know it? First time I get to ride in a limo and it’s for my mom’s funeral. I can’t even enjoy this glamour. I wonder if this is how Princes William and Harry felt? We’re around the same age, aren’t we? Their mother died two years ago. I remember that. We were in Wildwood—me, Mom, and Aunt Patsy. It was a nice vacation, but then we heard the news about Princess Diana. We didn’t have any connection to her or anything. I mean, maybe Mom and Aunt Patsy felt a closer kinship to the royal family than I did, being former and forever citizens of British Guiana, but I was still sad. She seemed like a nice lady, and girl could dress. What a terrible way to die, and to lose your mother that young, and have the world watching you in pity.
I don’t have the world watching me, thank god. But all these people. They’re going to be looking at me. “That poor orphan bastard.” No one’s going to call you an “orphan bastard.” But they might think it. Everyone’s going to be pitying me. Not Wayne so much. He’s a grown-ass man. I’m still a kid. Little do they know that I’m fourteen now. Little do they care. It’s just sad. “That poor boy,” they’ll all say. Or maybe they won’t know what to say at all. Maybe they’ll just leave me alone. That would be great. I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this.
Everyone keeps asking me if I’m okay. Wayne, Aunt Patsy, Uncle Wilton, Gordon, Sherman, Randy. I barely talk to my cousins; they’re all so much older than me. I guess they care. They loved my mom, I think. Didn’t they? Didn’t I? I haven’t cried. I haven’t shed a single tear all week. What’s wrong with me? I don’t want to cry. I feel like I could at any moment, I feel I could break down at any moment, and I don’t want to, not in front of everyone. If I just look out the window of this decent midsize limousine, I won’t cry. I’ll get through this. I have to get through this.
Oh great, I have to sit in the front of the church, where everyone can see me. Where they can see me cry. No. Not today, Satan. Oh, there’s Mione and Marsha. Wayne’s baby mamas. They loved my mom. And she loved them, and the grandkids they gave her. Baby Jaiden doesn’t know what’s going on. Lucky. Little Wayne doesn’t either. He keeps asking, “Where’s Grandma?” Fuck. His little voice keeps asking, and it’s breaking my heart. My eyes are stinging. No. No. No, no, no, don’t you do it. I lower my head and keep it there during the entire service just to keep myself from crying. You’ll get through this. You have to get through this.
That was a close call. We’re almost there. We just have to put her in the ground. Why did they pick this cemetery? It’s right across the street from the Holiday Inn Express. What, are they gonna bury her in her uniform and rubber gloves, too? It’s nice seeing her co-workers, though. They’re so nice and seem really sad. Her manager, the man who took her to the hospital, shakes my hand, offering his condolences, and tells me if I ever need anything, etc., etc. I never want to step foot in that hotel again. But I thank him, my eyes still directed downward. The nice Haitian man who owns the store across the street from the apartment. Damn, that big belly is really straining against that jacket. I’m glad he’s here, too. He also shakes my hand, offers his condolences, and tells me if I ever need anything I shouldn’t hesitate to come to the store. All I have to do is ask. I say thank you and wait for this endless procession of mourning to pass.
I didn’t want to go up to her casket. To “say goodbye.” I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and no one forced me to. I don’t have to do anything today. Just get through it. Shit, now it’s raining? What is this? Who’s that woman? That’s quite the wig. Is that a wig on top of a wig? Must be a friend of my aunt’s. You know, I used to think that was my aunt’s real hair. My world was shattered when I realized it was all wigs. It was all fake. Oh god…the woman’s singing. What song is this? Some hymn. She sounds beautiful…my heart is racing, my throat’s dry, I can feel the stinging in my eyes. No, not here. Please, not here. I’m pleading to a god in whom I don’t believe.
There’s no stopping the tears. They start running, and then it’s too late. I’m sobbing, wailing as they lower my mother into the ground, as this woman’s voice carries her spirit away from me, and the sounds of my cries inspire those of others because there’s no sadder sound than a child crying out for his mother. Wayne holds me close to him. I feel small next to him. I look up at him. I’ll never be six foot, I think, not like him. Behind his sunglasses I see that he’s crying, too, and it just makes me cry harder. I cry for all the guilt I carry. I cry for all the times we fought over nothing. I cry for calling her a bitch and not always being patient or understanding. I cry because I’m still a fucking child. I cry because I’ll never truly know my mother, and she’ll never truly know me. I cry for all the pain I’ve stored up, too afraid to release it, too afraid what others might think, too afraid to appear weak or effeminate. I cry because I’ve lost my mother and I have so much life left to live. So much that she’ll never see. I cry because it’s my birthday and this will always be what I remember, every year.
In my senior year of high school, when I was taking up the life-altering task of applying to colleges, I knew exactly what I would write for my personal essay. I mean, what else could I write? My mother’s death hung over nearly my entire high school career, save the first two months of my freshman year. Still, I had persevered, not without a few stumbles along the way, because I was determined to get the fuck out of Poughkeepsie.
I had something (exactly) like a 4.3 GPA, a pretty good but not great SAT score (1275, out of 1600, a number that still haunts me for no real reason except my own nerdy obsessiveness), and a full plate of extracurriculars. I was a poor Black kid with no parents but with a strong academic record and ambition to spare—affirmative action was made for people like me. I knew the perfect essay would put me over the finish line.
I called it “Happy Birthday,” recounting, as I’ve done here, the day of my mother’s funeral. After penning the first draft, I sought out the help of my English teacher, Ms. Ricketts, a Jamaican woman with glasses perpetually at the lower bridge of her nose and pencils stuck in the hive of maroon-colored dreads she piled high on top of her head. That particular maroon ran its way through Black women’s hair for years in my youth—I remember when my mother had gotten that same shade and I thought it a bit young for her (as a baby gay I had very definite opinions about my mother’s, and everyone else’s, style), but it grew on me.
I loved Ms. Ricketts—she had spent months teaching us Song of Solomon, to the detriment of the rest of our course load, which wasn’t great for our year-end exams, but was ultimately enriching for me, at least, one of the very few Black kids in her Honors English class. Naturally, I asked her to take a look at my essay.
One day after school, I nervously dropped by her classroom with the essay in hand. I had expected to just leave it with her and come back the next day for her notes, but she asked me to stay while she read it. I hate watching people read my work. I inevitably end up stealing glances, looking for signs of their reaction—do they love it? Did they get that joke? Can they feel me watching them? I’d rather just get feedback at a later date, but apparently that wasn’t an option.
When Ms. Ricketts finished reading it, she took off her glasses and looked at me sympathetically. “This was very hard for you, wasn’t it?”
It was and it always is. My mother’s death still felt all too fresh in my head and so my writing, usually so fluid and alive, was stilted, halting. Ms. Ricketts had picked up on that. So she volunteered her time to help me work on the essay a couple days after school, between my other obligations.
When we met, she would just encourage me to talk. I was usually very silent in class. And really, everywhere, except with my closest friends, who knew how boisterous I could be. Otherwise, I preferred to be quiet. It’s what I was most familiar with, what made me comfortable.
I kept so much inside, and yet there was so much inside. I found that I could release it in its purest form only through my writing, as speaking was always a struggle. I would have ideas in my head but my lips and my teeth and my tongue and my jaw would rebel, and the words would come out garbled, stuttering, too fast, too low. Whomever I was speaking to would invariably ask me, “What was that?” so that I spoke with the intention of having to repeat myself, with the intention of being misunderstood or not heard at all. Silence was easier.
And then there was the way I was raised. Kids of West Indian parents are taught to speak only when spoken to, to never interrupt an adult conversation, to be seen and not heard, and all that toxic bullshit that led me to bury my feelings so as to bury myself, to be invisible so that I never felt seen to begin with. So not only did I feel physically unable to verbalize how I felt, I didn’t think I could or that I should. And that weighed heavily on me. Ms. Ricketts, as a West Indian woman, perhaps understood that, and she tried to help me to unburden myself.
She told me something I’ve never forgotten, because I had never thought of myself that way: “You have the kind of voice that when you talk, people listen.” That felt like a lot of power. Power I was not ready to accept, not that I would know what to do with it. “But you’re afraid of your own voice,” she told me. She was right. I didn’t know if I even wanted people to listen to me. It’s why I ate my words before they were fully out of my mouth, for fear of being exposed, of being vulnerable.
I silenced myself, diminished my presence, as so often minorities do out of fear or the instinct to survive. I shrunk myself safely in the back of Ms. Ricketts’s class and even when I knew the right answer or had an insightful remark, I stayed silent. What if I was wrong? What if no one understood what I said and I had to repeat it and what if then I stuttered over my words, revealing a weakness? Would they laugh at me, think me less smart, less worthy? I couldn’t risk it.
But now Ms. Ricketts finally wanted to hear me, really hear me. She asked me to project, to open my mouth and project as loud as I could.
I gave her a good “AAAAAAAH!”
She smiled widely and threw her arms open and said, “Louder!”
“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”
“Louder!” her arms and smile wider. I felt as if she was next going to have me stand on a desk and address her as “Captain, My Captain.” And I would’ve. I thrived on the attention I got from my teachers, especially Black women. It was the attention—and more important, the understanding—I couldn’t get at home.
Ms. Ricketts wanted me to realize the power of my voice, the power of expressing myself and being unafraid of doing so. In turn, I could finally write truthfully about that day, that fifth of November. By breaking my silence I was able to release just a bit of the pain I had buried that day with my mother.
My college essay was, I think, until this book, the most important thing I had written. It helped set me on the path of the rest of my life. And it taught me the importance of not just owning my voice, but owning my story. I turned the worst day of my life into the key to my future.