We all chuckled at this. I gave Aunt Nell a big hug and told her I loved her.
“I love you too! Will you remember to call me?”
“Yes, Aunt Nell. I’ll remember.”
• • •
Mama told me she went to bed around six P.M., so if I wanted to visit or call I should do so before then. It was a few weeks before I learned she wasn’t exactly telling the truth.
One evening I called her shortly before six P.M. trying to catch her before she went to bed to see how her day went. When she answered the phone and said hello, I could tell she was sloppy drunk.
“Hey, Mama. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check in with you before you go to bed.”
“Check in?” she said with a sarcastic slur.
Here we go, I think. I knew this moment was coming. The moment I would be reintroduced to the ugly Mama who ran me off years ago. I didn’t know when or where, but I knew she’d crawl out of her lair sooner or later.
“It doesn’t sound like it’s a good time so I’ll let you go.”
“No, Lawanna. I got thangs on my mind. I want to talk about the lies you wrote about me.”
“That’s fine, but let’s do it in person.”
“No! I want to talk about it now!”
“I don’t want to talk to you when you’re drunk!”
I could feel myself losing my temper, but she ignored what I said and my tone, and continued on.
“Why did you write those nasty things about me and your sisters? You talked about us like we was dogs.”
“Did you even read what I wrote?”
“I don’t want to read them lies! You not the only one who can write! We can write nasty lies about you too!”
“Did I lie when I wrote you were an alcoholic?”
She paused on the other end of the phone. I could hear her television blaring in the background.
“I hurt my knee!”
“What?”
“I drank because I hurt my knee. I was in pain.”
“Well, that doesn’t change the fact that your drinking got in the way of you taking care of us!”
“How did my drinking hurt you? What did I do wrong?”
“You checked out!”
“I kept you fed. I kept you clothed.”
“It wasn’t enough!”
I was so pissed at this point that, like a demented David Letterman, I ran down for her the Top Ten list of ways her drinking hurt our family, starting with the physical and verbal abuse and ending with her indifference to my leaving with Jane. She denied it all. Denied whipping me with an extension cord despite the fact that I bear the scars on my body.
“I never beat y’all with extension cords! That’s how I got whipped when I was little, I never did that to y’all.”
So that was where she got it from. In her booze-addled state, she insisted we were an idyllic family and held up my college-educated sister as proof of her good parenting. I had to really hold my tongue to keep from telling her that Teresa’s success was despite her, not because of her. I wanted to ask her why only two of her remaining children wanted anything to do with her.
“You got a selective memory!” she yelled.
“No. I remember the good times. I remember when you were an awesome mother. And I remember when you changed.”
“You’re lying!”
“You’re in denial!”
This was exactly where I didn’t want to be, out of control, angry and yelling like a crazy woman at a crazy woman on the phone. My rational mind was wondering when someone would call the hotel front desk to complain about the noise.
Then I realized that this was the moment I’d been waiting for. This was my Everest base camp and I had to choose if I was going to continue climbing upward or retreat. It was time to make my stand. I decided to do the most difficult thing I could have possibly done. I stopped yelling, blaming, raging. Instead I listened. I’d open my heart and listen.
“You lie! I never hurt you. I was a good mother! You were the bad one. You were a bad child.”
She recounted a time when I was eight and my little brother was seven and she sent us to the store to buy cigarettes for her. But instead of going straight to the store, we stopped by the laundromat to troll for leftover change in the slots. One of the washing machines was emptied before finishing the spin cycle and I stuck my arm in to stop it spinning. When I couldn’t, my brother tried and his arm got tugged along by the centripetal force, which injured his arm.
“If I was a bad mother, I would have beat you for what you did to your brother. Because of you he couldn’t play professional baseball. He could have been a great baseball player. You were an awful child.”
She also told me how much my brother loved me and felt abandoned when I left, thus also emotionally scarring him.
“I’m the only one here who wants to see you ’cause I’m your mother, not Jane Fonda!”
After a while I thought my silence had a soothing effect on her. She told me I must understand that she started having kids early. She had three kids before she was twenty-one years old. “We was all growing up together.”
She talked of the physical and psychological abuse she and my older siblings experienced from Daddy. How she came home one day and found my older sister Donna, just a few months old, with swollen lips from where Daddy thumped her over and over again to keep her from crying. How he scheduled her life right down to what meal should be cooked on what evening. How he came home one day, ate his dinner, looked at the schedule and saw the wrong meal had been cooked and beat her savagely. How she ran to the neighbors for help many times. One evening the neighbors called the police to report a bloodied woman running through the neighborhood. That’s when the Panthers intervened and put Mama and her kids in Panther housing to give Daddy less opportunity to beat her and draw the attention of the police. She talked about how scared and depressed she got. How she’d dream about her mother comforting her, telling her she’d be all right, and how those visitations gave her the will to keep going.
“He beat every woman he was with. When I heard his last wife turned him in and he got five years in prison, I was so happy I didn’t know what to do. To this day if I ever run into that woman, I’d shake her hand for what she did. I’d thank her for doing what I couldn’t do.”
I was beginning to understand why my mother lived like a teenager, spending her days listening to rap music, playing video games and hanging out with her friends at the mall. She was enjoying her freedom. Better late than never.
“I really did my best but it was hard. I didn’t know a lot of things. I lost my mama too early. I didn’t have no one to help me. I had a lot of things I wanted to do but I knew after I started having kids I’d never get to do them. Did you know I wanted to be a scientist?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
Suddenly her tone changed and she was angry again. “No, you didn’t! I saw how you looked at me when you first came over. I saw in your eyes how you thought I was ugly and old! Nobody!”
“No! Don’t tell me what I thought! I didn’t think that at all.”
My heart was breaking for her. Breaking for the young girl living her life saddled with so much abuse and responsibility. Straining under the stress of being marginalized because of her sex, race and class. I finally had a crystal-clear view of the woman who was more than just my mama. She was a woman with hopes and dreams of her own. An amazing, flawed and spirited survivor born into circumstances that deprived her of being something even more extraordinary. I tried to reassure her that I was not judging her, but her anger was rekindled and she was dismissing me.
If she wanted to remember her child-rearing years as all sunshine and lollipops, who was I to deny her? I didn’t want to make her see things as I experienced them. I came to Oakland to share the future with her, not the past. I told her I didn’t want to fight. If she wanted to talk more, we could do it another time. We hung up.
The next day she called as if nothing had h
appened. She chatted about the latest episode of True Blood and the trouble she was having cracking a video game. “So we still going to the flea market tomorrow?” she asked. “Of course,” I said, willing to pretend with her that we had not just angrily yelled at each other the night before. And, surprisingly, the next day we had a wonderful time at the flea market.
CHAPTER 18
THE WILLIAMS FAMILY was hosting “Fun in the Forest,” a weekend camping trip at Samuel P. Taylor State Park across the bay in Marin County. The Williamses in attendance were my Uncle Landon, his current wife, Ora, my cousins and their friends. There were about twenty folks in all. The fact that Uncle Landon was getting everyone together for a camping trip was not surprising. I remember him always being a lover of the outdoors. One of my earliest memories is of him taking me and my sister Louise, his young daughters Thembi and Ayaan, and Aunt Jan on a trip to a California beach where we spent the day eating pizza, playing, swimming and watching the sunset before packing up the car and heading back to East Oakland.
This camping trip gave me the opportunity to reconnect with Uncle Landon’s two oldest daughters, Kim and Kijana, from an earlier relationship with his current wife, Ora. I spent a lot of my early childhood with Kim and Kijana, especially during the period my father was in prison. Kijana was flying down from Seattle with her husband, and Kim was coming with one of her two grown sons. I was especially excited to see my cousin Petik, the only child of my paternal aunt, Virginia.
Though I didn’t see her often, the times we did spend together were memorable. Part of the reason I didn’t see much of Petik was because her parents were not heavily involved in the Party. As a small child, I identified strongly as a Panther before anything else, before being American or even female. So to have a family member not in the Party was puzzling. I thought of Petik as a tragic princess. Tragic mainly because she was an only child. I couldn’t fathom how she occupied herself without any brothers or sisters to play and fight with, and she didn’t have any friends over that I ever saw. Aunt Virginia and Uncle Al didn’t seem to be the type of parents who’d let her just go play in the street, either. Also Aunt Virginia was an amputee who needed a wheelchair to get around. She was always well dressed and sweet-natured (she invited us all over and bought each of us Easter baskets one year when Mama didn’t have the money), but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.
Petik also had the aura of a princess. She lived in a beautiful apartment (well out of my neighborhood), and had her own room complete with a girly bed with frilly bedclothes and stuffed animals. Her toys weren’t broken or abused. Her bedroom was like a real-life representation of the bedrooms of kids I’d seen on TV. When I tuned in to watch Leave It to Beaver or The Brady Bunch, no matter how many episodes I saw, the kids’ beds, like cousin Petik’s, were always made as if they’d never been slept in. There were never toys, clothing or dirty dishes strewn around the room, like at my house.
Kim and Kijana and Kim’s twenty-one-year-old son, John, picked me up from my hotel. When I went down to the parking lot to meet them lugging an oversized duffel bag, they took one look at me and burst out laughing and I knew perfectly well why. From the look of my bag, it looked like I was about to rehike the Appalachian Trail instead of spending a weekend in the forest. I really had not brought much. What was bulking up my bag were several full-sized blankets I was bringing to supplement a sleeping bag in case the evenings got really cold. I was not quite sure what Kim and Kijana had packed. The entire rear of Kim’s SUV was nearly stuffed to capacity with just their things.
Before we worked out how we would get my bag into an already overpacked vehicle, I greeted my cousins. Kim was petite, with neat dreadlocks, and had the striking hazel eyes that I had coveted for as long as I can remember. Her son, John, was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with thick curly hair and rich brown skin that was a perfect blend of his mother’s African-American and his father’s Mexican bloodlines. His looks were swoonable. Kijana was well built and had the baby face and radiant smile typical of the females in our family.
There were embraces all around. John crammed my bag into the rear of the vehicle, leaving Kim barely a sliver of space to see out the back window. He chastised us for our decadence and pointed out the fact that he had only brought a small tote bag to get him through the weekend. We pooh-poohed him and set off chatting a mile a minute as we scrambled to get caught up with each other’s lives.
As we crossed over the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge into Marin County, John pointed out Quentin Prison, which occupies a very picturesque position on primo waterfront real estate overlooking the north side of San Francisco Bay. I thought how ironic it was that one must go to prison to get to live in such a beautiful spot but without the benefit of seeing the views. I thought about the many Panther members who had been locked up here and in places like Soledad. I felt a hollow ache in my chest for my daddy. I asked my cousins when was the last time they saw my father. There was a long pause while they tried to recall the last sighting. They conferred with each other, then told me they had not seen him since they were children and each of them was now in their forties. John had never met him. This news made me give up any hope of seeing him during that visit. It saddened me that the best memory I may ever have of him was within the walls of a prison, the only place that kept him from running away from me.
As we passed by the sweeping seascapes along the bay, through the idyllic streets of Marin and into the cool shade of towering redwoods, I could feel my body tingle with anticipation of a new beginning with my family in a primeval forest.
I stared out the window, admiring the towering hulk of the redwoods and the smaller flora like redwood sorrel, elk clover, giant trillium and mountain lilac. We pulled into the campground and drove over a little bridge that spans Paper Mill Creek, which an interpretive sign informed us is “ . . . one of the last natural spawning corridors for coho salmon and steelhead trout.” A hard right brought us to our three reserved campsites.
I saw two Asian fellows and a woman already parked near our campsite. Kijana pointed to one of the men and told me he was her husband, Yupo. Her face was aglow at the sight of him and I felt happy for my cousin. The other two people with him were his brother and sister. I could also see Thembi’s daughter, Indigo, playing with a group of friends whom she had invited to camp with us. One of them was a white boy. I was really digging the multicultural vibe of our campsite. There were other members of our group milling around the site getting things set up before dusk. We began to unload the car, leaving most of the heavy lifting to John, who seemed resigned to the role of pack mule.
We were among the last to arrive at camp and I could see a group of women sitting in camp chairs around a crackling fire. One of the women was my cousin Petik. She jumped from her seat at the sight of me and gave me a big hug. She was a tall, beautiful woman and bore a striking resemblance to Cousin Ayaan and I told her so. This set off a round of discussion about who looked like whom, an exercise that we never seemed to tire of as we all looked so damned similar. Petik grabbed my hand and informed me that we would be tenting together.
I could see that there were several large tents already erected. They were the Cadillac of tents, multichambered and tall enough to accommodate a standing person. When I was a hardcore backpacker, my friends and I used to make fun of the kinds of people who used tents like those. To us they were “glampers,” a despised hybrid of camper unwilling to leave the glamorous aspects of city living out of camping. My camping friends would be horrified to see me at a campsite harboring mega tents and a picnic table laden with three kerosene-burning stoves, a set of kitchen knives, chopping boards, saucepans, stacks of plastic cups and more food and beverages than many African villages see in a month.
I was the kind of camper fond of cowboy camping, which meant sleeping on the ground without benefit of a tent or tarp. If I did bring a tent, it was portable and about as roomy as a coffin. I cooked on hand-sized camp stoves and subsisted on Rame
n noodles, couscous and trail mix. Although I am proud of my camping prowess, it had been a long day, the forest was damp and chilly and my back was aching, so I wasn’t feeling very judgmental at that moment about sleeping in a two-room tent. Uncle Landon, Aunt Ora and their little dog would be in the second room, which I jokingly referred to as the master suite. I also did not feel an inkling of shame when I got excited to learn that there were hot showers to be had for fifty cents.
Petik and I ducked into our tent to get set up. I laid out my yoga mat, which would be doubling as a sleeping pad, then unfurled a spare sleeping bag Uncle Landon was lending me and laid it on the pad, along with a pillow and the extra blankets from my hotel for added warmth and comfort. I was pretty pleased with my posh accommodations. Then Petik brought out the biggest air mattress I’d ever seen. Upon being fully inflated, it was at least the height of a bed with box spring and mattress and towered above my setup. Petik smiled sheepishly when she saw me eyeing it.
“I know it’s big. Sorry.”
“Don’t be embarrassed!” I said. “If I had an air mattress like that, I’d be using it too!” I chuckled, pointing at my suddenly not-so-comfy-looking pallet.
As evening fell, we all gathered around the fire pit. It was a chilly night but the warmth of the fire and good food kept everyone in good spirits. Cups of booze and hot chocolate and plates of turkey sausage, burgers, chips and salad settled into waiting laps. Kijana’s husband, Yupo, sat a little apart from the group, surrounded by the children. He was telling scary stories. He must have been very good at it because they stared up into his face with fierce interest.
As the firewood and conversation began to wane and the cold crept in, folks started to turn from the glowing embers into the dark that blanketed the tents and waiting sleeping bags. Petik and I made our way to our tent. Uncle Landon and Aunt Ora had turned in hours before, so we tried to be as quiet as possible. It was freezing and we both opted to sleep in our clothes. Once we were tucked in, we had a whispered conversation in the cold darkness.