Photographs

A photograph helps me recover memory, however a tricky memory arrives. It arrives in a grandmother who knocks on a door. She orders a shotgun wedding like one might order a burger. Her daughter will soon have two babies. One is inside her belly, the other is on her knee. The daughter must get married. But the pictures show the daughter, who is nearly a child herself, smiling most when she stands alone.

She and her babies’ daddy will move into The Projects. These buildings are not government-owned. They are just that way. They are boxy and squatty duplexes with flat roofs.

An advertisement calls us over. “Attention Citizens,” says the ad to people who are treated as if they were anything but. Next, “You are cordially invited to inspect Kingsway.” Kingsway. Old England and all that it implies is on display now. Here, I spent the first five years of my life.

Our kitchen is narrow, but wide enough to place a tiny table and two chairs. My brother and I will sit here, eating oatmeal. We will someday wave goodbye, holding hands as we walk two blocks away from our mama. She will not leave our sight until we pass the trees holding sea grapes. These trees line the fence beside our preschool where my grandma is the cook. We get French toast while the others eat cereal.

We return home to an apartment with a piece of glass art colored orange and green, the colors of the 1970s. This art sits on top of a stereo. I can see this in a photo album. In another photo, I can see the bed on which my parents sleep. The powder blue bedspread is the thing on which to concentrate. The headboard and dresser, too. They are both made of the kind of wood that once you move it, the whole thing falls apart.

The photo of our aluminum Christmas tree is another thing to concentrate on. It does not need many ornaments. A piece of plastic is in front of it. Behind that plastic, a light bulb sits. The 1970s is also filled with plastic. This particular piece turns, showering our tree with color. For hours, I stare.

These are early days. There are lots of pictures. This is understandable. So few want to document the end. My parents’ marriage will end. But before it does, there are olive-green bed covers on twin beds. My brother and I are sleeping. My parents are now documenting what is seen in the children’s books and holiday cartoons. Even black children are tucked in, waiting for Santa.

We meet Santa at the Dade County Auditorium where Christmas presents rise from the orchestra pit. Any child whose parent works for the power company gets one and a plastic-mesh stocking filled with hard candy.

My daddy is a meter reader. His route takes him through yards where people speak Spanish. “Oye! ¿Quién es este chico?” (Hey! Who is this boy?) He comes home, laughing because he will have the final say on whether the lights stay on or off.

In another picture, he stands in front of a portable building. Although he wears a shirt and a tie, dress pants and dress shoes, he stands as if he is about to hit a lineman on a football field. He crouches like he is ready to play.

Mama was a majorette who high-stepped it on Coral Way. Coral is a word that circles back on itself. She high-steps it through Coral Gables, which used to be the name of a plantation that became a city with a university where black boys will someday play ball and scare the hell out of America. She high-steps it in front of stores she cannot easily enter, but she is happy because she has fallen for a young man who likes to drive fast. One day my father will go too fast. The Jaws of Life will help pull him from the mangled metal. But before it does, he waits in a car beside the big shark that goes round and round not far from the Miami Seaquarium where Flipper the Dolphin lives. This happens before their kids are born and before my brown legs kick inside a crib. I soon learn how to stand because I am not supposed to be here. To get pregnant is one thing. To get pregnant twice is something else. So I go easy on my mama. I am not supposed to be here. I stand, reach for the switch and the lights go on and off. Hey, lady, come feed me. This is what the blinking lights mean.

Sometimes she sleeps late and if I am under the powder blue spread beside her, I will crawl out, brown legs sliding onto the floor. Brown feet tip toward the living room and the olive-green sofa. I remove the lid from a jar of Vaseline and soon everything in that jar ends up in anything on me that has a crevice. Nose. Ears. My mouth. Everything.

My mother cannot help but laugh even if the sofa will never be the same.

“Serves you right for not getting up to feed her,” says the grandma who ordered the wedding like one might order a burger.

Not far from my home, I will sometimes sit on a verandah running along the second floor of the Sugar Shack. This is a boarding house that my great grandma runs. Her name is Louella, but we call her Lou. I sit and watch the people pass, my feet barely touch the floor.

A poster of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King is taped above Lou’s mantle. “The Kennedys some good people,” she says inside of her efficiency, which is on the top floor.

Efficiency. I barely know how to say the word, but that’s where I sleep beside her on a daybed if I must spend the night.

On Lou’s dresser, there are two Avon bottles that look like the characters on the It’s a Small World ride at Disney World, which has just opened a few hours north. One of the bottles is a woman with black hair. She looks Chinese. I do not yet know that everyone with small eyes is not Chinese. Marie, the lady behind the counter at the corner store, has such eyes.

The other bottle is a blonde woman wearing a purple dress that is now grey. If I sniff really hard, I can smell a bit of what had been inside. I can sniff at my past. I can sniff at a woman who is the color of a paper shell pecan and one who never learned to drive. But Lou, daily, makes a trek toward the white side of town where she will peep at the white ladies’ cast-offs in a thrift store inside the Episcopalian church. When she returns to our side, she may pick up a bundle of mustard greens. If she is feeling really adventurous, she will take a bus to the Jai Lai and sit with the Cubans, betting. Or go to Woolworth’s. Sometimes I join her. She orders a cheeseburger that we share. It is like a celebration. Not enough time has passed that we can sit anywhere we want.

There are days when Lou will send me downstairs to play. I will run around a mango tree with branches holding fruit too high to reach. I do this while Lou hosts a male visitor who may want more than a meal and a clean room.

There are days though when she hands me a soapy rag and tells me to wipe the floor behind the toilet. Her aching knees don’t let her reach it. This is probably the closest I will ever come to knowing what her life may have been for someone who is a generation from slavery.

Her first child came when she was only fourteen. Two more followed. She raised all three during the Depression. Someday she will sleep with a Klansman to get the groceries for the grandchildren who will someday come, too. My mama says she used to giggle when she saw the sheets coming. She need only look at the shoes to know all their names. One of them is a man who brings food every Friday. He also sits down at the bar where Lou works as a barmaid. She always has his drink waiting. No one speaks until he leaves.

One day, I will tell my grandma – Lou’s daughter, the one who ordered the wedding - how I study slavery and how black women strategically sleep with white men so their babies can stay fed and she will say, “That’s new?”

There is a day when I will go missing. The police are called. They find me wearing my red car coat, sweat dotting my head. I am surrounded by white dolls and crayons under my bed. Even now I mostly want to be alone.

The only other scare is the day I walk looking up at the sky.

“Stop walking with your head in the clouds,” my mama says.

A nail in a telephone pierces my forehead. Black boys in bloodied white t-shirts take turns carrying me. If you look really close, you can still see the scar on my forehead. It looks like the back of a cowrie shell.

I run out of our back door without incident and straight into my grandparents’ duplex apartment. I sip coffee from my grandfather’s saucer. He takes milk and sugar. The coffee I taste comes from a man who takes me and my brother to Miami International Airport. We give chase when the planes take off. Grandpa pulls on his cigarettes, cap tilted, watching.

Another picture that has my attention. I see my father is standing at the intersection of Douglas and Grand. He wears a suede vest like Hendrix and the Jackson Five. He leans against his 442, a white race car. Behind him is the Phillips 66 gas station and Jack’s Place. He likes the Tiki Club. Neon palm tree up high, blinking. I can see that, too.

I do not see the day I was born. There are so many babies, they put me in a hallway. My mama went to the nursery, looking. Where is my child?

By 1971, my father stands in a dashiki with my brother and I on either side. He looks directly into the sun, squinting. A shopping center is behind us. Maybe it is Northside Shopping Center.

North. Side. These two words are a clarion call for where we will go next. The north side of the county. He will pool his savings from the job at the power company and Mama’s job as a secretary and move twenty miles north. We go there after the whites go first. They get the starter homes made possible by the GI bill, but another government act follows. It calls for “fair housing.” The white people run again.

By now it is 1972. The Dolphins will have a perfect season. The names Mercury Morris, Walter Cronkite and Watergate are the words I most hear when I get my own bedroom. It holds a white desk, a white dresser and a white bed with a pink gingham canopy – all from the W.H. Grant department store on 183rd Street. Like the furniture in the Projects, the minute you move this stuff, it falls apart.

Mama is proud of those custom-made drapes that go with the red sofa from Levitz. Or was it Modernage? These are the two furniture stores beside the expressway where an arch like the one in St. Louis still stands.

Modernage.

Modern age.

All of this comes to me while I am looking at the pictures. I turn another page.

Black Lives Matter

Descendant Beauty