A Knock at Midnight(14)

    When I began my job at Chase three months later, my eye was still bruised. I told my co-workers I’d been in a minor car accident.

“Good thing you have that nice boyfriend to take care of you,” one of them said kindly.



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IT WAS A confusing time in my life. On one hand, I was an ambitious young woman on the rise; on the other, a teenage girl emotionally adrift without her mom, trying to take care of her sister while falling into an increasingly abusive relationship. I did well in college from the beginning, even while holding down a full-time job at the bank. I was good at my job, too. I came to see it’s partly how I cope with stress and chaos—I do what I’m supposed to do, like Daddy Sudie taught me, control what I can control, move forward with purpose.

When I started at Chase, I met one of the people who I’ve been fortunate to encounter all my life, mentors and friends who guide my path, who nudge me in directions that, once I take them, seemed to be there for me all along. I think of them as my angels, and my friend Ken Chuka-Obah is one. There were a lot of college students that worked in my department, and Ken was a few years ahead of me at UTA. When he learned I was majoring in finance, he took me to lunch and, in his lilting Nigerian accent, said, “Brittany, you should switch your major to accounting.”

“Why?” I was skeptical. Even when it came from friends as good as Ken, I never did like being told what to do.

“It’s not much of a difference, but accounting is three-sixty. You can still do finance with an accounting degree, but you can’t do accounting with a finance degree. Way more job options.”

That made perfect sense to me. And so I switched. In my sophomore year I’d enter the business school and begin as an accounting major.

    But my relationship with Red was going from bad to worse. He hadn’t stopped dealing or using, and the abuse wasn’t daily, but it was bad. I kept the whole thing under wraps—no one but Sissy knew anything was going on at all.

It took six months for that first black eye to heal. We had moved together to Arlington, over my mother’s tearful protests. She had figured out the truth about my bruised eye and was livid. Plus, she knew all too well how Red made his money. She wasn’t doing well herself—after getting out of jail in Clarksville her drug use had accelerated, the weight of her addiction stronger than the threat of more jail time for probation violations. But she was still my mom, and she tried hard to persuade me not to go. I was as stubborn as she was, seventeen, and in love. “I will be fine, Mama.”

“You’re making a huge mistake, Britt,” Mama said, her voice quavering with the urgency of getting the message across to me. I didn’t listen, but my mama was right.

The next time Red stomped my face, he wore a boot.



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SOMETIMES A SERMON comes just in time.

Ms. Eleanore Murrell, a co-worker at Chase, could see straight through me. She was an older Black woman, about my mother’s age, short and impeccably stylish, with the sweetest smile and a way of putting her hand on my shoulder and calling me baby that made me feel all was right in the world. Eleanore was a single mom of three kids and brought me into her fold as if I were one of her own. She made me lunches and took me home to have dinner with her and her family. We’d sit and eat her famous lasagna and laugh about the day just like family. In spite of my academic success, my positive persona, my internships, my tall tales of a happy home life, Eleanore could tell I was hurting. And though she never said anything about it, I’m pretty sure she knew that there’d never been any car accident.

    Lord knows I needed her kindness. On Sundays, she took me with her and her kids to Morning Star Baptist Church. I loved that church. It was a big church but had real pews and wooden walls, like the country churches of my childhood. Pastor Taylor had a beautiful, honeyed voice, and he sang through much of the service. As soon as the organ swelled and the first notes hummed, I could feel all those knots of tension begin to relax—my growing fear of what Red might do next, my worry and pain over my mom’s addiction, my guilt for leaving Jazz to deal with her alone. It was a lot to carry at seventeen. It felt good to lay my burdens down.

Church has often been one of the few places in America where Black people can feel truly free. On the Sunday that Pastor Taylor began to preach a sermon from Ezekiel, that’s exactly how I felt: free. And feeling free made me know that I could get free. “It’s clean-up time!” Pastor Taylor hollered, and on that day, his voice and message rang straight through to my soul. “It’s not straighten-up time! It’s not tidy-up time!” He paced to the other side of the pulpit, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, his voice lifting with each line. “You don’t throw things under the bed, throw things in a drawer! No! You clean up! All the way up! And do you know what time it is now? Right now? Today? It’s clean-up time!”

All my life I had felt this need, this urgency, to save people, to help heal them. But something in me realized that if I didn’t act soon, I might be the one who needed saving. It was as though Pastor Taylor had written that sermon just for me. And I responded as though he had. I cleaned up.

Red was spending the weekend in Commerce with his family, so I was alone in the apartment. That night, I called my daddy, an hour away in Campbell. “Please,” I said. “Just come get his stuff.” Forty-five minutes later, I answered a knock at the door. There was my daddy, calm as ever, requiring no explanation. Relief washed over me. He opened his arms and I walked into them, burying my face in his chest, letting myself be his little girl for a few moments. Then I took a deep breath and stood up straight. Almost without a word, we quickly set to work, packing my dad’s truck with Red’s belongings. It was a huge step toward freedom, and I’m grateful to God and my family that I was strong enough to take it.