I already knew I was going to get a beating for what I’d done. I got whipped at home for things far less dire than playing with a loaded gun. Something as simple as giving my mother a dirty look could get you lashed with an extension cord, a wire hanger, a shoe, a pot. Anything close to hand when the offense occurred was fair game.
I’d never been disciplined by my uncle but I had no reason to suspect it wouldn’t be like what I’d get at home. Usually, punishment at home was swiftly meted out. But it seemed like a long time since Uncle Landon ordered me to the living room. When he came out of the bedroom, I instinctively wrapped my arms tightly around my sister’s waist as she frantically tried to extricate herself from my grasp. But instead of reaching for me, my uncle did not even glance our way. He calmly walked into my cousin’s room where my aunt was and closed the door. Louise and I crept over and put our ears to the door to hear what they were talking about but could not make sense of their whispered conversation. When we went back to the sofa, my sister punched me in the shoulder. “Because of you they probably talkin’ ’bout us not coming here no more!” I rubbed my bruised shoulder and let flow a whole new round of tears. A few minutes later my aunt and uncle emerged from the bedroom as if nothing had happened. They told us to get washed up for dinner. My sister and I washed up, all the while giving each other disbelieving looks. Had I really dodged a bullet—so to speak?
Dinner was as enjoyable as always. We all cooed over the baby and talked about school. My uncle was his usual smiley, affable self. When we finished dinner we got dessert, fresh fruit salad. And that was that. So I thought. We played dominoes and then took our nightly shower in preparation for bed. Louise helped Aunt Jan pull out the sofa bed. Then Uncle Landon told me to go into his room. My guts dropped. I looked over at Aunt Jan, whose face always reflected her every thought and emotion. The look I read there was not unlike what a loved one would give a prisoner just handed the death penalty. My eyes pleaded with her to intervene but I got no succor there. I walked slowly into the room, followed by my uncle, who shut the door behind us.
My eyes welled up when he took his belt off. But I wasn’t the only one. I could see the tears welling up in his eyes too. “You can’t play with guns. You could have hurt yourself. If you had, your father would never forgive me.” His voice cracked and I could see he didn’t want to beat me any more than I wanted to be beaten. Then he bent me over his knee and gave me about ten half-hearted lashes. I screamed like I was being flayed alive because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He obviously was not very good at giving whippings.
• • •
My family moved often. Sometimes we were evicted. Sometimes my mother just wanted to be somewhere new. But each move took us only a dozen or so blocks from the previous apartment. We never left the confines of Oakland.
I adored my mother. I loved the way she looked, the way she smelled (she wore Jean Naté perfume). Nothing made me happier than to be near her. Every Saturday, after we stopped going to the prison, we made our weekly family trip to the drive-in movie theater. I helped my mother prepare bologna and cheese sandwiches, and pack them in the cooler with grape and orange soda. We piled into our old wood-paneled station wagon, all seven of us. My mother made the three oldest kids sit cross-legged in the backseat and draped a blanket over their laps. The three smaller kids (including me) curled up in the foot well, hidden under the blanket so we didn’t have to pay for the extra tickets. I was a happy little girl, sitting in that car that smelled of bologna sandwiches and family.
When the movie started, I’d sit on my mother’s lap, or my oldest sister Deborah’s; she always sat up front with Mama. We saw Star Wars, Eyes of Laura Mars, Jaws. The films were always horror and sci-fi, which we all loved despite our tender ages. To this day watching horror films brings on a sense of comfort rather than fear. If it was a double feature, we younger kids would leave the car during intermission to play in the drive-in’s playground. I enjoyed the velvety feel of the warm summer night stroking my face and bare legs as I tried to swing myself high enough to kick the moon.
There were several ways our big family coped with the stress of living in small apartments. Mostly it was by being outside as much as possible. But we also had coping strategies while inside. My mother coped by staking a clear claim on her private space: her bedroom. Though she allowed us to watch TV in her room (which we did every night) and even occasionally sleep with her, we all knew it was her space. We six kids slept from three to six to a room, depending on the size of the place we lived in. There was a lot of fighting and arguing over who owned what and what part of the room we could claim as ours. Then one day, one of my sisters came up with the idea of pitching a sheet tent in the corner of the room, held up by thumbtacking the corners to the walls and using books to anchor the hanging section to the floor.
My sister was proud enough to give us a brief tour inside. It was cozy and I loved the way the light inside took on the orange-sherbet glow of the sheet. She had a pillow and her comforter set up on the floor, along with her personal possessions safely out of reach. Brilliant! We all went in search of spare flat sheets and thumbtacks. Soon the tents got really elaborate. Some were broadened with two sheets and took up half a wall, with a broom stuck in a bucket in the center for support and string attached to a section and tacked to the ceiling to allow the occupant to walk upright. Inside were sleeping and seating areas. We created flap windows by cutting holes in the sheet, and closed the flap for privacy with safety pins. Everything was fine until someone decided they wanted to add a new addition that infringed on the “property line” of another. Fights would break out. Secretly, tents would be vandalized. Mama had to arbitrate disputes between neighbors until she got fed up and razed our little shantytown.
My poor mother. She couldn’t keep anything in her home nice. We kids tore up everything. It’s a wonder she continued to clothe and feed us. While roughhousing, we knocked out the picture window, scuffed up the walls, ripped curtains from the rod, flooded the bathroom and stained the carpet. My mother loved tropical fish. She bought a 20-gallon aquarium full of fighting fish, angel fish, oscars and tetras. It sat against the wall in the living room on a wrought-iron stand. She was very proud of her aquarium and decorated it elaborately with brightly colored gravel and lost treasure chests, spinning windmills and porous volcanic rocks for the fish to hide in. For night, she installed neon lights that gave the tank a serene glow. Whenever I learned she was going to the pet shop for supplies, I was the first one in the car.
She had to go to the pet shop often for new fish because we kids loved to feed them. Even when my mother told me not to, I’d get the fish food when no one was around and sprinkle so much in that it would cover the surface like fall leaves on a pond. I liked to see the fish dart to the surface for the treats. It didn’t quite click in my head that overfeeding them could kill them. Food makes you strong not weak. The more food the better, I thought.
At least twice we knocked over our mother’s beloved tank while playing or fighting too near it, sending twenty gallons of water and a dozen terrified fish across the living room carpet. My siblings and I scooped up the flopping fish and placed them in bowls and cups filled with tap water until we could get the tank righted and scoop up the gravel.
When Mama came home, she knew something was up because someone offered to help her with her coat and my older sisters had dinner prepared. We younger kids were sitting peaceably on the couch reading. But despite our best efforts, we could not distract our mother from noticing how her feet squelched as she walked across the carpet or draw her gaze from the cracked tank half-filled with cloudy water and two-thirds of her prized fish floating on the surface. She beat us all and sent us to our room. We could hear her crying on the phone to a friend, “I can’t have nothin’! They keep tearing everything up!” The next morning the tank was gone. It would be the last we’d ever see one in our home.
CHAPTER 2
WE GREW UP QUICK. It was not uncommon for the
other single mothers in my neighborhood to send small children outside alone. To gain this privilege, the child only had to demonstrate that she or he could walk upright most of the time, have sense enough to avoid getting hit by a car, and possess an aversion to dog poo. If you could wrap your mind around these few things, then you could pass through one of the first and most significant ghetto rites of passage: running the streets without adult supervision. I was six years old the first time I was allowed on the streets alone. The magnitude of this event, in my eyes, was no less significant than a young Maasai killing his first lion, or a Native American brave on a spirit quest.
The week before school started, Mama would take us all down to the local Goodwill to shop for school clothes. For years I didn’t know where clothes could be purchased new. I awaited the yearly trip to Goodwill with more anticipation than Christmas. I loved the worn, spotted linoleum floor, the fluttering fluorescent lights and the racks and racks of clothing. Most of all I loved the smell, a combination of floor wax, mold and cheap perfume that seemed to permeate the building and clothing—the ghetto version of the new car smell. What I loved about shopping at the Goodwill was not that I’d be getting something “new.” What I loved was what it signified. It meant the end of one year and the beginning of something new. A whole new year of adventures and learning and moving closer to being a grown-up.
Before our mother let us run loose in the store, she gave us the four rules of Goodwill shopping:
Stay away from the toy and book section because we ain’t here for that.
Get two pairs of pants, two shirts, a pair of shoes and a warm coat.
TRY THEM ON! If we get home and they don’t fit, you will be wearing it anyway.
Be back at the cash register in an hour or you can walk home with nothing.
And with that we were off. Two pairs of pants, two shirts, shoes and a coat may not seem like a lot for an entire school year, but it was more than many kids got in my neighborhood. Plus, if we got everything in polyester fabric, it could not only survive the school year but World War III as well. The fact that my mother could do this for all six of her children (she spent about two dollars per child) was nothing short of astonishing. Though she worked full-time as a welder, she struggled to support us and was not above supplementing the family larder with government cheese.
Government cheese was processed cheese packaged in unsliced blocks and distributed to welfare and food stamp recipients starting in the 1960s. It was originally used in military kitchens to feed soldiers during World War II. Once a month, government cheese and butter was distributed from the local elementary school. Lines of needy families stretched down the block. Usually the folks standing in line were children, as many parents were ashamed to stand in line for government handouts. It was a time when welfare was a dirty word. If you wanted to disparage someone whose family was on welfare, you could say, “At least we don’t live on government cheese!” That statement alone could send the toughest bully running home in tears.
But times were hard and Mama would send all of us down to the school the minute word reached her that government cheese was to be had. We came home with huge blocks of butter and cheese that Mama kept in a chest freezer. The entire neighborhood feasted on grilled cheese sandwiches fried in butter, mac and cheese, cheeseburgers, cheese omelets and cheesy fries for weeks.
• • •
Intercommunal Youth Institute was a huge, utilitarian two-story building equipped with eight classrooms, an art room, a curriculum center, a full kitchen (serving breakfast, lunch and dinner daily), a cafeteria and an auditorium with a seating capacity of 350 used for drama presentations and other school programs. All of this was surrounded by a sea of concrete and a chain-link fence, and located a few blocks from our apartment.
Our school had two mottos: “Educate to Liberate” and “The World Is Our Classroom.” It was fully accredited by the state and tuition-free, serving children between the ages of two and eleven years old. There were over a hundred students enrolled and placed in eight ungraded groups based on skills and abilities, not age. The Party’s Socialist leanings ran deep and could be seen in the flattening of hierarchy that existed in the relationship we students had with the teachers. We did not address our teachers as Ms. or Mr. So-and-So. We addressed our teachers as Sister Erica or Brother Ed. Also, students were empowered to take a strong interest in how the school was run. This egalitarian perspective was manifest in a youth committee comprising three representatives from Groups 2 through 8 that had input into academic and activity-related decisions at the school. Our school was a direct response to the substandard and often demoralizing atmosphere that prevailed in the public school system of the time.
My classmates and I started each day with a hot breakfast followed by calisthenics, classes and afterschool activities like art and music lessons (I played clarinet), sports, and readings from Chairman Mao Zedong’s manifesto, The Little Red Book. Although not formally members of the Communist Party, Panthers were Socialists, and we were taught to sympathize with revolutionaries like Mao and Che Guevara. We spent all day at school from eight A.M. until well into the night, when we would be dropped off by bus to our respective homes.
My father being in prison brought me a certain amount of cachet at school. He was considered a real revolutionary willing to sacrifice his freedom for the people. I’d smile with pride when adult Panthers would spot me and say, “Hey, there goes Randy’s little girl. She gonna grow up and be a soldier like her daddy!” I worked hard to be the best at school, to live up to my father’s image. I excelled in the classroom and on the playground. I was a tough kid, fearless on the monkey bars and just one of a few willing to swing full revolutions then hurl myself into space and, just when it seemed I’d crack my head open on the concrete, stick a perfect landing.
I was often mistaken for a boy. My mother never straightened my hair or pierced my ears. I wore my hair in a short afro. Because I played hard, my mother stopped dressing me in frilly girl clothes when I turned four. Before that, I remember she would dress my sister Louise and me—we were separated by one year—in short gingham baby-doll dresses with matching bloomers, because Louise and I looked so much alike. Louise wore the blue version and I red. We Williams kids strongly resembled one another, but there were some stark differences. Half of us had the darker skin and stocky frame of my mother’s side of the family, the other half had the golden skin tone and lean frame of my father’s side. What united us were our faces—baby faces with expressive, almond-shaped eyes, full lips and rounded cheeks we did not outgrow—faces that compelled many to say, “If you seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.” So my mother was able to convince folks for a time that her youngest daughters were twins.
It was a struggle for my mother to get me dressed up in anything feminine. The only time I would acquiesce was during the holidays, especially if we were going to visit my paternal grandmother. (My mother’s mother died before I was born.) She lived with my step-grandfather in a neat little house with fine furniture and a big picture-glass window. She made us homemade vanilla ice cream and sumptuous Thanksgiving meals. One Thanksgiving at Grandma’s, my mother noticed that I’d ripped a hole in the bodice of my holiday dress (a long granny dress with white ruffle down the front) while roughhousing with my cousins. She promised to “Light my butt up” when we got home. I ran crying to Grandma and begged her to let me stay the night with her, and she convinced my mother to let me stay.
After everyone had gone and everything was cleaned and put away, I sat on my grandma’s lap in her big chair and stroked her veiny, caramel-colored hand, the same color as my father’s. “Your skin is so soft, Grandma. Why is your skin so soft?” I asked. “Oh, it’s probably because I’m old and it’s rotting,” she replied nonchalantly. My grandma was like that. She didn’t dumb things down and she told it like it was. That same evening as we prepared for bed, I told my grandma I didn’t like my mama and I wanted to live with her. My grandma told me I shouldn’t sa
y that about my mama. I should be happy to have my mama. Then she told me an extraordinary story. She said she’d never known her birth mother. Soon after she was born, someone wrapped her in newspaper and put her in a trashcan in an alley. She cried and cried because she was cold and hungry. A lady taking out her trash thought the cries were from a cat, so when she lifted the trash lid and saw a baby, she was very shocked. My grandma said that lady became her mother—my great-grandmother was still alive and well at that time—and took very good care of her. I stared up at my grandma with my eyes and mouth wide open. How could someone throw away my beautiful, dainty, soft-spoken, gentle grandma? When my mother came for me the next morning, no longer angry about my dress, I left thinking I had the coolest grandma in the world. I’d find out decades later from my uncle Landon that Grandma’s tale of being an abandoned baby in the trash was completely false. I don’t fault her for it. She simply wanted to teach me to appreciate our family.
I had a love-hate relationship with being a girl. Growing up, I found that sex roles were so clearly defined that it was difficult for me to indulge in the full spectrum of things I liked to do without suffering the taunt of “tomboy.” While I liked dolls and play-cooking, I also liked climbing trees and rock fights. Nothing stressed my nerves more than being in a situation where I was forced to identify solely with being female. As we students shuffled from one class to the next, we had to get in two lines side by side, one for boys and one for girls. To separate the class in this way seemed wrong because most of my friends were boys. Boys shared my interests in bugs, dirt and scary movies. They liked me because of my antics, like the time I unwittingly ran straight through the plate-glass window in the dining hall without so much as a scratch. I also had a special gift that my classmates envied. I put on a little exhibition of this talent every day at lunch when teachers weren’t around. I’d take a swallow of milk, put my head down between my legs, allowing the milk to fill my sinuses, straighten up and let the milk run from my nose. “Ewwwww!” screamed the girls. “Cool!” yelled the boys. I was famous!