A Knock at Midnight(12)
When we saw each other, we smiled, or tried to. I still remember the feeling of horror in my throat, in my chest. I had never seen anything as demeaning and archaic as that uniform in my life. The uniform was clown-like: oversized, hanging off her shoulders and long in the arms. Mama had tears in her eyes when she saw us, but beyond that there was a sheepishness, a shame—and my mama didn’t show shame, not ever.
It wasn’t like our family wasn’t acquainted with law enforcement. We were a rural Black family in East Texas, where the arm of the law had quickly replaced the slave owners’ shackles as a method of social and economic control of its Black population. I had uncles and cousins who had been to jail. Mama wasn’t even the first in my immediate family to go—my father served thirty days when I was a freshman in high school for writing a bad check for construction materials. That was all it took: a bounced check when his previous job failed to pay him in time for it to clear. In he went. I remember his orange jumpsuit, I remember the visits. I knew what he was there for, and I knew when he was getting out. It wasn’t that big a deal to me. But this was my mama. There’s something about seeing your childhood hero, your guiding star, fallen. It rocks you to your core. Add the striped Looney Tunes suit, the white judge and lawyers, my mom’s shamed expression—it’s a primal wound, to see your mother like that. I will never forget the pain of seeing her in the run-down, time-warped courthouse in Clarksville, Texas. Whenever I think of Mama in prison, that image of her in humiliating stripes is still the first one I see.
Mama had already been in the Clarksville jail for two months pending court. That day she was given five years’ probation and released to Granny. She went back to work, and back to using.
Chapter 4
OTHER SIDE OF THE GAME
In our senior year of high school, Sissy’s grandmother passed away, and she moved to Dallas. When I drove up to visit her, my boyfriend, Red, came with me. Red always paid for gas, and always put a couple hundred on top for me, for my time. On the way, I’d stop off in East Dallas at a white clapboard house with pretty daisies and a gentle brindle pit mix in the front yard. Red would go in the house. Ten minutes later, he’d come out with a bundled package wrapped in several layers of plastic that he’d slip under the front seat. I knew what was in it. But we didn’t talk about it. At the end of the trip, I took the money he handed me without a thought.
My boyfriend was a drug dealer, and I knew it.
I met Red when I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior. His older brother, Courtney, also known as C-Money, was a beloved figure in the Hole, handsome and popular, with an infectious smile and a mouth full of gold teeth. C-Money and Red’s cousin Gerald—we called him Black—organized the block parties and summer Hoodfests, where everybody would come from towns all around, park their cars on a stretch of empty land, set up chairs and tables, play bones and spades all afternoon, and then party into the night. These gatherings were the social events of the summer, almost like huge family reunions. We’d sit on the backs of cars with paper plates on our laps, eating BBQ and drinking E&J Brandy out of Styrofoam cups, the girls’ hair stylish with Marcel iron curls and stiff with Pump It Up hair spray. The guys wore denim shorts with a crisp crease, painstakingly ironed with generous use of Sta-Flo starch. As a teenager, it was about seeing and being seen.
Red was easy to talk to, charming, and funny—so funny. He had heavy-lidded, light brown eyes that were always half-closed from smiling, and looked just like Brandy’s boyfriend, Q, on Moesha. He was slim and muscled with skin the smoothest brown and a pure white smile to contrast with his brother’s gold grill. He’d talk to anyone about anything and anybody and could have a room of us rolling with laughter in no time at all. We were friends for a long time before we started dating, but it was still nothing serious until I was a senior. By then, he was two years out of high school and on the grind pretty much full-time. I was taking extra classes before and after school to stay on track to graduate in three years instead of four.
By then the good, or even just steady, jobs that our elders had held—jobs on the Cotton Belt and Southern Pacific, Sherwood Manufacturing, in hospitals and even in retail—had long ago dried up. Under Reagan’s economic programs, several hospitals had closed. Small businesses had been wiped out by the arrival of a Walmart, and there were just two grocery stores and a few fast-food restaurants left. These jobs generally went to college students. There weren’t a lot of opportunities available for young men and women coming out of generations of poverty in East Texas. But there were drugs. Lots of them. A steady supply to feed an ever-expanding demand. The drug game was a lucrative hustle, and whole families ran businesses out of their homes. The risks were high, but as long as you didn’t get caught up, the immediate rewards were great.
There I was, graduating from high school a year early, at the top of my class, about to begin a full-time job at a bank and my first year of college, nothing but a gleaming future ahead. But I was also a young woman immersed in a culture where some level of drug involvement was the norm. I didn’t think much of Red’s dealing at the time, but when I look back now, the truth hits me hard.
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MAMA GOT OUT of Clarksville jail right in time for my graduation and even took me and Jazz on a mini college tour of the University of Texas at Arlington for orientation. We lounged around in the hotel room, laughing and loving just like we used to in the old days in Bogata. I was the first person to go to a university in my family, and even if it was just a few hours away, we were all excited.