A Knock at Midnight(13)
I’ve always been driven. Billy once asked me and Jazz what we wanted to be when we grew up. At five, I knew for sure. “I’m gonna be a lawyer!” I said, chin lifted, that stern expression on my face that everybody said I’d gotten from my mama. I loved The Cosby Show, and I might have been Rudy’s age, but I idolized Clair Huxtable—an attorney, beautiful, stylish, and always in control.
Up through the sixth or seventh grade I never wavered from wanting to be a lawyer, but as you get older your dreams begin to shrink, narrowed by what’s around you—so slowly you don’t even realize it. No matter how many times my dad urged me to reach for the stars, my understanding of the universe was still confined by the world’s limited notion of what a Black country girl from the South could do or who she could become. By high school the idea of myself as an attorney had receded. I didn’t know any lawyers, not a single one, and I had begun to internalize some of the harder messages of my environment. Being a lawyer seemed out of my league.
Around that time, I read Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel Brothers and Sisters, in which the protagonist is the operations manager for a Los Angeles bank. She enjoyed her career, and her lifestyle seemed glamorous to me. Just reading about a Black career woman gave me something to hold on to. I could do that, I thought, and I set my sights on majoring in finance and becoming a bank VP.
My dad urged me to go to the University of Texas in Austin instead of the satellite campus in Arlington—he’d leave different university booklets with his poems, encouraging me to aim high in my applications. I would have gotten into Austin, too; I was in the top ten percent of my class, which means automatic admission to any Texas university. But I didn’t listen to him. Even though I had successful businessmen as role models in my own family—my grandfather with his cement company and nightclub, my dad who by this time was growing his contracting business—their success was local, rooted in our corner of East Texas. Austin seemed way too far away for me, too big-time, too other—let alone the out-of-state colleges my dad encouraged.
Besides, I was seventeen and in what I thought was love. Things between me and Red had gotten serious. Tragedy drew us even closer. During my senior year, his brother C-Money had been pulling stunts and wheelies in front of their grandmother’s house when his motorcycle spun out of control. He was in a coma for three days before he succumbed to his injuries. The entire neighborhood mourned C-Money the same way the nation mourns the loss of a celebrity. After the funeral, we gathered in the street where the accident had happened wearing T-shirts screen-printed with his beaming face and favorite phrase, “You do the math!” We drank alcohol and smoked blunts in a tragic imitation of the beloved Hoodfests C-Money had so diligently organized, trying to numb our disbelief that he was really gone.
Red told funny stories about his brother so we could mix laughter with our tears, but the angle of his shoulders and the hoarse, desperate sound of his voice told of his pain. He had to put on a hard front. With C-Money gone, he had more responsibility. Both the game and his grief took their toll on him. He didn’t laugh as much as he used to, didn’t joke. Unbeknownst to me, he’d started to use cocaine. All I knew was that the boy I loved was hurting.
We decided to move to Arlington together. I had already lined up a job for the fall at Chase Bank. For Red, it would be a fresh start, away from the pressures and memories of his family home. He talked about getting out of the game. I believed him.
A week after I graduated from high school in 2001, Red and I were sitting on his couch, sharing the pepperoni pizza I’d just brought over to his apartment, the game on the TV. “You talked to Jay lately?” I asked Red, reaching for the napkin that had fallen off the glass coffee table. “I saw him at the corner store when I got the soda. He’s doing real good, just got a new job over at Raytheon. He was telling me about the benefits and everyth—”
Crack!
The blow came so hard and fast it knocked me from the couch to the carpet.
I didn’t even know what had happened until I looked up from the floor. I don’t even think I made a sound. I was so surprised. Red had never hit me before. Nobody had.
Red stood over me, his face twisted with rage. “Bitch, you talked to who? Why the fuck you talking to Jay, Brittany? Huh?”
“Red, what the hell?” I said, starting to sit up, confused.
With his heel, he stomped down hard on my face. I blacked out.
When I came to, the whole side of my face was pounding, my head heavy and hurting like I’d been hit with a brick. My eyesight was blurry, my right eye already swelling shut, though I wouldn’t see the extent of the damage until later. I could barely make out Red pacing the apartment. He stalked in and out of the tiny kitchen, paused now and then to curse and hit the wall. “Look what you made me do, Brittany!” he kept saying, angry at first, then despondent. “Just look what you made me do!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I avoided my family the rest of that summer, hiding my swollen face behind oversized sunglasses. I knew if Daddy or my uncles saw my eye, they’d find Red and kill him. And like a lot of young women trapped in a cycle of abuse, I was sure I loved him. He’d never hit me before, and I hoped he wouldn’t again. I’d go from work to Red’s, avoiding any store where I might see a cousin or anyone who knew my family. I was doing so much hiding that summer—hiding my mom’s addiction from my friends and colleagues, my boyfriend’s abuse from my family, any sign of weakness or pain from myself.