They also accused me of being lesbian because I didn’t wear dresses and I wore my hair in an afro when most of the girls wore their hair pressed straight. There was one instance when a substitute teacher mistook me for a boy, which sent the entire class into hysterics and me to the restroom in order to keep the kids from seeing me cry.
Another big adjustment was the indifference of the teachers toward the well-being of students. I was used to being coddled by my teachers at the Panther school. In public school I felt like I was tolerated. The teachers ignored the bullying that was an everyday occurrence and even turned a blind eye to fights that took place in the parking lot after school almost every day. After leaving the relative security of the Panther school, I found myself the target of male sexual predatory behavior that seemed rampant in the wider community.
Despite my difficulty fitting in socially, I enjoyed learning. I was especially fond of science and English. In junior high I joined the school newspaper and helped work on the school yearbook. I avoided group sports and other social clubs like death itself. It was difficult for me to make friends and so I spent my free time with my siblings and Panther friends after school, especially Neome. But more than anything I began to enjoy my solitude. I spent most of my free time between the pages of a book, usually Stephen King.
• • •
Every neighborhood has at least one weird family. On one of the many streets on which we lived it was the Taylors. They were a mother and father with a teenaged son and two daughters about the same age as the youngest girls in my family. They lived in a house whose backyard abutted the back of our apartment building. A tall wooden fence obscured by high, thick brush separated the two properties.
The Taylors initially came to my attention when their house burned down in an electrical fire. When we saw the flames leaping high into the air over the back fence, my sister Louise and I hightailed it around the block to see what was burning. We arrived in front of the burning house just as the fire engines arrived. It was a large, pretty house with two stories and large windows. I thought it a pity that such a house was engulfed in flames, with smoke pouring out of its windows and up the branches of an old oak in the front yard.
We, along with a street full of neighbors, watched as the firemen put the fire out but not before part of the roof caved in and a section of siding burned away. What was left looked like a torched dollhouse, in that part of the exterior wall was gone and one could easily see a cross section of the house. With most of the excitement extinguished with the fire and it growing dark out, we rushed home to tell our family everything we saw.
We went back a few weeks later to see if the house had fallen down. To our dismay it was still standing. A man with a pot belly and a wreath of kinky hair circling his otherwise bald pate was out front with a boy of about fourteen. The boy was light-skinned, lanky, with a big afro. We knew him as a boy our older sister had a crush on. With hammer and nails they were sealing up the busted-out windows with plywood. We could see that they’d already covered the holes in the roof with large tarps. We stood across the street and watched them work.
When they took a break, we walked across the street and up to the curb, where the man and his son sat drinking colas, and started talking to the boy. We wanted to know why they were boarding up a burnt-up house. The boy had nice white teeth. He was shirtless and skinny, but you could see he had a few muscles. The father sat a short distance away but was staring at us with obvious interest. We knew the father to be one of many neighborhood perverts who cruised around in their cars looking to pick up fast girls. He was well known because when he cruised around, he did it in an old van that we saw parked in the driveway.
We were ignoring the old man, so he left us with his son and went back to work on the house. After a few minutes of our annoying inquiries, the boy called out some names and two girls about our age came around from the back of the house. They were his sisters. They asked us if we wanted to come play in their backyard.
We left the boy and father to their work and followed the girls back down the driveway past the van, which was a funky throwback to the heyday of the hippie era. Their father was known to host prostitutes inside that van.
The girls told us since the fire the family had been living in various makeshift shelters in the backyard. The Taylors had a big backyard that was blanketed in weeds and years’ worth of dead leaves that had fallen from several large trees. In the back there also stood a large garage with peeling sky-blue paint and dirty beige trim that was probably white in another life. It looked more like a barn than a garage, with its two large swinging doors and pitched roof. We asked if we could look inside.
When the girls brought us into the garage, Mrs. Taylor asked who we were, but her daughters told her to mind her business. They ignored her follow-up questions, too, and told us to do likewise, so we did. I was a bit shocked. I’d never seen anyone get away with talking to their mother like that.
The garage was crammed full of the items they’d managed to salvage from the fire: a couple of chairs, garbage bags spilling over with clothing, photo albums, stacks of papers, board games, an old trunk. There were also lots of pots and pans and dishes, two sets of bunk beds, a card table with four metal folding chairs near another trunk that held a hot plate and acted as a makeshift kitchen. The electric hot plate was connected to a series of extension cords that ran along the floor and out the door and eventually connected to an outlet in a helpful neighbor’s house.
There were also several large plastic coolers and a large wooden bookshelf holding lots of canned food and several cases of generic soda pop. One of the sisters peeled off a couple of colas and offered them to us. They were warm but we drank them anyway. I asked about several kerosene-burning lanterns I saw lying about. They, along with flashlights, were used by the family to get around at night.
There was a corner of the garage that was separated from the rest by an old army blanket folded over a piece of cord nailed to the wall. Behind it was a single mattress on a folding metal frame dressed neatly with decorative pillows and a pretty handmade crocheted blanket with red roses. The night table was two stacked milk crates covered with a piece of white lace. That’s where the mother slept. It was behind the curtain that Mrs. Taylor fled when her daughters ignored her.
The garage was poorly ventilated because there were only two small windows. There was a horrible stench of unwashed bodies and rotting food. I saw a plate of what looked like half-eaten ravioli crawling with maggots. Roaches were everywhere. They used a corner of the yard where Mr. Taylor had dug a trench as a toilet, and they washed their clothes and bathed in a big metal tub behind plastic sheeting hung from a line. Far from being repulsed, I was fascinated by the Taylors. They were like an inner-city Swiss Family Robinson.
I became quite close with one of the sisters and played with her in the backyard nearly every day after school. The only hazard was Mr. Taylor. His hands had a way of creeping over me if I was caught unawares. One afternoon I was climbing up to join my friend on the top bunk when Mr. Taylor came over and grabbed me from behind, putting one hand between my legs and the other one on one of my breasts. When I slapped his hands away and gave him a dirty look, he looked back at me sheepishly, ensuring me he was just trying to help me up.
“You’re nasty!” I screamed.
“What’s going on?” Mrs. Taylor asked, pulling the hanging blanket aside to see out. She was a pudgy, soft-bodied woman who was bullied just as badly by her husband as her children.
“Nothin’s happening,” Mr. Taylor said, still staring up at me feigning innocence.
“Nnh-uhn!” I said. “He was putting his nasty hands on my coochie!”
“No! I was just helping her up,” he said as he walked out.
I wanted Mrs. Taylor to hit him with her shoe, or cuss him out at the very least. Instead she just let the blanket fall back into place, sealing herself away from her family.
My friend then whispered to me, “Just watch where he
is at all times. That way you have time to get away.”
My fascination with the Taylors quickly waned after that incident. The novelty of their unconventional living situation had worn off. I would have remained friends with the girls but the neighborhood kids bullied them because of their father and how they lived, so they never wanted to play anywhere but in their backyard, which for me was too close to their father for comfort.
It was at this point that fear crept into my life like a goblin that lived in the pit of my stomach promising ruin. I knew my childhood was coming to an end. The end of childhood for girls in my community meant being vulnerable to the predatory advances of men who saw young girls, especially girls without the benefit of stable homes, as fair game. I’d seen it many times. Girls in my school and in my own family who were strong and vital and curious became suddenly cowed, abused and abandoned soon after puberty. Many were saddled with children and adult responsibility before finishing junior high school.
It happened to Deborah and my sister Donna. At just ten, it had begun to happen to me. For most of my childhood I looked like a boy, dressed like a boy, played like a boy. This gender bending allowed me the freedom to explore my community with ease. But my body began to betray me, tiny, swollen boobs began to grow and blow my cover. Teachers and shopkeepers and neighborhood men took notice. Men old enough to be my grandfather started offering me sweets in exchange for sexual favors. I became adept at fending off their groping hands and unwanted attention. I didn’t know to tell anyone. Snitching was not allowed, even if you were the victim. I knew it was up to me to stay out of harm’s way.
I went from a child who loved being outside to one who spent as little time outside as possible. The most risky part of the day was the two-block trip to the bus stop to go to school. There were always a few perverts who liked to hang around there waiting for girls traveling on their own. We learned there was safety in numbers and made arrangements beforehand to arrive at the stop at roughly the same time. In the chill of early morning on any given weekday it was common to see girls huddled together at bus stops emboldened by their numbers, hurling insults at the perverts as they slowly glided by in their cars looking to give a girl “a ride” to school. The trip home was equally harrowing.
It was during this time that I developed a slight stutter and began seeking out hiding places that only I knew about. The attic space at home. The crawl space under the stage at school. Places where I could stash food and my favorite things. Places where I could ride out the coming apocalypse that was puberty. I also turned heavily to books to escape. I was particularly attracted to horror fiction and sci-fi: The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and lots and lots of Stephen King novels. They read like survival manuals, teaching me how not to fall victim to monsters. I also learned from some members of my family and people in the community how abuse of drugs and alcohol, partying and running the streets could ruin a person. I vowed from a very young age that I would never drink, smoke, do drugs or have sex.
My mother had no problem letting us watch films that had graphic sex scenes and she certainly had no problem talking about sex with her friends within hearing distance of us, but when it came to educating her kids about sex and the changes our bodies would go through, she never broached the subject. It left me thinking that sex and the female body were shameful and only good for crass jokes and secret conversations. Open educational sex talk didn’t happen in our home despite the fact that my mother was raising five girls. Most of what I knew came from afterschool specials, books, gossip and a sex education class at school.
The sex ed class was a bit more helpful. It was taught by an old white woman who seemed overly excited about the subject. She had long white hair with scraggly ends that hung down past her butt. She was too old to be a hippie but she dressed like one, in her peasant blouse and bell-bottom jeans that even then were a bit out of style. Her skin was as sun-ravaged as the dashboard of an old car. Her face was tan and cracked and would not have looked out of place on a shar-pei puppy, but her eyes were young. They were clear, blue, jovial and landed on each of us with the intensity of a searchlight.
As she began to unpack her teaching aids from a big duffel bag, all I could think about was her being somebody’s granny. Somebody’s granny who was handling a cross section of an erect penis. There were nervous snickers as she unpacked a bag that also contained a cross section of a female pelvis.
She began her lecture with a slide show. The first slide was of the male reproductive system with the various parts labeled. We were instructed to repeat back to her each part: “Head.” “Head!” “Shaft.” “Shaft!” “Testes.” “Testes!” “Anus.” “Anus!” She encouraged us to say each word loud and clear. It was exhilarating. It felt like Teacher was giving us permission to say dirty words in class. She repeated the exercise for the female reproductive system.
Then she showed us a short movie of sperm swimming toward the egg. She described the fertilization of the egg as the world’s tiniest footrace, with millions of sperm racing to reach the finish line. This part of the lecture was like listening to a synopsis of a movie. Each sperm released was full of ambition and hope. They raced along like spawning salmon to fulfill their destiny. Many would lose their way and Teacher pointed out deformed sperm with crooked tails that swam in circles, sperm that had two heads or two tails that couldn’t swim at all. Then there were the star sperm. They were the Sidney Poitiers and John Waynes in the story of reproduction, who raced along like little minnows, each as hale and hardy as the next; but only one was destined to win the grand prize and have its genetic material incorporated into a fertilized egg.
This whole sex thing was exciting and as interesting as an episode of Wild Kingdom. So later when Teacher asked for volunteers, I threw my hand up and was selected along with another girl and a boy. We shuffled to the front of the class. Then Teacher reached into her bag and presented each of us with a condom and a cucumber. When she told us to put the condoms on the cucumber, the class erupted into a chorus of raucous laughter, elbow jabbing and crude jokes. I was mortified. Even more so when I tore the condom trying to get it on. Teacher just laughed and said, “It happens.” As awkward as sex ed turned out to be, it filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge of the subject.
My mother would not discuss sex but she was not averse to having lots of it. From a young age I knew what the banging headboard and grunting noises that were still audible over the music blaring in her bedroom meant. It meant Mama and her boyfriend were doing the nasty.
Growing up in a sexually ignorant home had its consequences. One day, at age fifteen, Donna began asking us younger siblings to walk on her stomach.
“What for?” I asked, eyeing her suspiciously.
She told me her stomach hurt and walking on it would help.
“Why don’t you tell Mama you don’t feel good?” Louise asked.
“It don’t feel bad enough for the doctor. I just need you to walk on it. And don’t tell Mama.”
When I was convinced there would be no repercussions, I was more than happy to walk on my big sister, which she asked me to do several times a day for weeks. Then one evening she woke up the whole house screaming as if she were about to die. Mama rushed her to the hospital, leaving the rest of us alone at home to speculate about what was happening. We all knew she’d been complaining of bellyaches for months and I thought maybe I’d hurt her by walking on her belly. Mama returned a few hours later to inform us that Donna had had a baby. She’d managed to hide her pregnancy from all of us for seven months, then gave birth to a baby girl two months premature. How she managed to hide her pregnancy in a house in which true privacy was only achieved in REM sleep was beyond us all.
When we went to the hospital to see Donna, she lay in her bed crying, refusing to look at us as she was so ashamed. Mama told us that all the way to the hospital Donna denied she was pregnant right up until she delivered her baby. I felt sick when I realized that the reason she’d asked us to walk
on her stomach was because she was trying to miscarry.
We left Donna and went to the NICU to see the baby that Donna named Latasha. She was just two pounds, incredibly small, lying there in an incubator too premature to regulate her own body temperature or breathe on her own. She was hooked up to an impossible number of tubes and doodads. I’d never seen a baby so small. She looked like an ugly old man but I loved her on sight. The nurses called her a miracle baby because she thrived despite the lack of prenatal care and being born way too early. If only they knew that Latasha also had to contend with her mother actively trying to end the pregnancy too. She was indeed a miracle. She came home to us a few months later healthy and hearty and became the center of my world. It was like having the baby sister I’d always wanted. I helped with her feeding, as Donna did not breast-feed, as well as with diaper changes and cuddling. I loved to stick my nose in the space at the base of her neck where the sweet smell of baby was most concentrated.
She grew into an active and inquisitive toddler. She loved to scribble on paper with markers. One afternoon when she was left alone, we discovered that she’d gone around the apartment marking walls, doors and furniture with a little slash of purple. While I believed most kids would have found a spot and scribbled the pen dry, I thought it evidence of Tasha’s brilliance that she chose to mark many spots as if to convey “Tasha was here!” For weeks we’d run across undiscovered slashes of purple in odd locations, like on the underside of tables and one even inside the refrigerator.
The stress of helping to raise Tasha put a strain on my mother and sister’s relationship. They began to argue frequently. Mama threatened to kick her out. In order to get away, Donna got a new boyfriend and moved to Texas, taking Tasha with her. I missed my niece but just like with Deborah, we simply had to cope with the loss on our own. After they left I had to go on as if my heart wasn’t missing. Instead of feeling sad it was much easier for me to feel angry. My anger began to replace the love I once had for my mother, who I viewed as responsible for my sister’s leaving. Along with anger there was also fear. Fear that getting on my mother’s bad side would get me put out too. Instead of whippings, her new form of punishment became threats of putting us out on the street—threats that I knew weren’t idle.