My childhood was easy until I got back to Philly and then it got super hard. The boys’ childhood is nothing like mine because I will never let it get super hard for them, I don’t care what I have to do.
--from the interview with Tahija Elison
[I read all of this except for the part about becoming a reparationist]
Chapter 14
On my way to the third floor that night I peeked into Tahija’s open door to see Lamarr in the overstuffed orange chair, a floor lamp shining down on him and his son.
“He still asleep?” I asked.
“Been woke and gone back.”
Damear’s face rested on his father’s strong forearm, his lighter complexion highlighted, his little stockinged feet in his dad’s big hand.
“He looks like you,” I said.
“Pumpkin head.”
“Why you call him that?” I asked.
“Haven’t you noticed what a big head I have?”
“No,” I said, telling the truth.
“Fat head on a stubby little neck.”
“Don’t you call my baby fathead,” Tahija said, coming in.
“I didn’t call him fathead,” Lamarr answered. “I called him pumpkin head. Kathryn says he looks like me.”
“He looks like me,” Tahija said. “Mahad looks like you.”
“Then who’s little Lamarr look like?” I asked.
“My mom,” Tahija said. “Has her same light-green eyes.”
“How you gonna call them light?” Lamarr asked. “His are dark green. Your mom’s are way light, freaky light.”
Damear woke and worked an arm out of the blanket, as if he meant for his eyes and no others to be the focus of conversation. Damear’s eyes. They were the black of black agate marbles, lamplight reflected as bright in them as planets in a deep desert night. You didn’t see his pupils until he looked directly at you, and then you saw deeply into them — twin wells fed by one underground stream. What buckets he’d lift from those depths I couldn’t know. I hoped I’d be around to find out.
<<>><<>>
Damear was born with two teeth — small off-white teeth set at an angle in his bottom gum.
“Those aren’t teeth,” the doctor said.
“Look like teeth.”
“Babies are not born with teeth.”
“Then what are they?”
“Calcium spurs. They will dissolve of their own accord. They are not teeth.”
Tahija said they were teeth, milk teeth, that milk teeth ran in her family and they would not dissolve of their own or anyone else’s accord.
She was right. Those two teeth, the not-teeth, made themselves known during breast-feeding and held their place as baby teeth came in, like the baby himself holding his place as his brothers came home.
First from the womb, first from the hospital, the only one with teeth and the only to be breastfed — Damear, Mear, Mear-mear, Meana.
<<>><<>>
When the day came for little Lamarr to be released his great-grandmother Agnes Grealy appeared, to escort his parents to the hospital and deliver him home. Seeing the basinet in Tahija’s small middle room, she assumed all three were to be crowded in there and proceeded to tell us what she thought of that plan.
“Why when I ran a day care center each crib had to have at least eighteen inches on either side, and furthermore, the temperature must be kept at at least — “
With a flourish, I opened the nursery door.
Matching blue flounces fell from the made-up mattresses of the three cribs (Tahija’s work); morning sunlight picked out what color remained in the old carpet Sam had sold us; and a new space heater had the room close to eighty degrees.
“Well, this’ll do,” said the grandmother.
Lamarr walked in with Damear in his arms and was told, “Put that baby down, you’ll spoil him.”
My heart sank as Lamarr lowered his son into the crib. From my perspective, the growing bond between them was a tender shoot to be watered, not pruned. But these boys were not going to be raised from my perspective, and if I had accepted that then and there I’d have saved myself a good deal of heartache.
Kaki came in, swooned at the temperature, and went straight to the space heater. To her way of thinking electrical appliances came with two settings only: off and low.
“Tahija says can you watch Damear while we’re going for Lamarr,” big Lamarr said to Kaki.
“I can,” I said to her, “if you have work.”
Kaki looked at me — yeah right. We’d both helped with him a little, but his time so far in our arms could be measured in minutes. Kaki was as eager as I was for an uninterrupted stretch of baby.
“Oh, I think I can make the time,” she said, fronting majorly.
“But don’t pick him up,” the grandmother said. “That baby should never be picked up unless he’s sick.”
Lamarr arched his left eyebrow. He knew we’d have that baby out the crib the moment they left. Did he approve though? Was this no-holding rule one he and Tahija intended to
follow?
“All right now, come on ya’ll,” Tahija said.
“Like it’s you been waiting for us,” Lamarr said.
Twenty Damears could have fit width-wise in the crib — he was so small. He wore a baby blue onesie. Tahija had just bathed him and rubbed baby oil into his skin and in the bit of hair on the very top of his head. Did he sense that soon one of his brothers would be near again? They hadn’t met since their adventure in the delivery room, when he beat Lamarr into the bright light simply by lying still and waiting. Had it been a vaginal birth he would likely have been last and been given the last name, Lamarr.
“Now he ate, he doesn’t need to eat again,” Tahija said as they went down the stairs. “And don’t pick him up, it’ll — “
“I know,” I said, “spoil him.”
With parents and grandmother gone Kaki and I walked Damear around the room, showing him the bare branches of the tree outside and the patterns sunlight laid on its smooth gray trunk. Although we would love to have shown him Purrsilla the cat (who would not by any means be persuaded to enter the nursery), and the downstairs, and the backyard, we did not take Damear anywhere that day, except into our hearts.
I had held plenty of babies, but holding Damear then, when he was so tiny, just over four pounds, and so profoundly present, I felt something in me rising to the surface, something I hadn’t known was there. When I laid him back down in his crib I could not put that feeling down, and never have.
<<>><<>>
In the movie Sankofa by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, an African American model on a shoot in Africa visits Cape Coast Castle, the infamous slave-trading citadel where captured Africans were held before being carried off to death during the Middle Passage or short lives as slaves in the “new” world. The tour turns nightmare when the model is suddenly wrenched backward in time to a life as a slave.
She survives the Middle Passage and is sold to a plantation. There, she looks on as a woman far along in pregnancy is whipped to death. The white overseers stand guard, guns ready, forcing the Africans to watch. When the woman breathes her last a midwife steps forward. The others encircle her, facing outward, defying guns and dogs, determined to save the unborn one. From within the circled slaves the cry of a baby sounds out and the newborn is raised up — life taken from death.
Lifting the newborn to heaven this way is an African tradition. Within the cauldron of North American slavery it became a radical act of defiance. We will survive. And this one may be the one to lead us out of Pharaoh’s land.
She was not there in Temple’s operating room to do it, but back home in the nursery, as Damear slept, Agnes Grealy unwrapped little Lamarr from his receiving blanket and held him in both hands high over her head, smiling as Lamarr took pictures.
Kaki and I were honored to witness this. And I was aware — could not let myself be unaware — that if an ancestor of mine ever had witnessed it they might well have done so from behind a gun, or through the iron grating in the deck of a slave ship.
<<>><<>>
Little Lamarr had gotten used to the bottle and couldn’t be persuaded. So along with breast-feeding Damear (he of the precocious teeth), expressing milk to be frozen and delivered to Mahad, who was struggling to reach four pounds (the hospital benchmark for release), Tahija now had the added chore of bottle feeding little Lamarr.
At five pounds, Lamarr the baby did in just a few hours what big Lamarr hadn’t been able to do in six weeks of sleeping on the floor of Tahija’s hospital room: win over the grandmother. She favored little Lamarr shamelessly. He was the only one raised up to the ancestors that way, and when she went with us to a doctor’s appointment it was little Lamarr she wanted to hold.
He was a handsome baby, to be sure. Of the three, his eyes were the most striking: green, and as lavishly lashed as his mother’s, larger even than hers. His features were pleasingly proportioned, his forehead high and shining. He too was a joy to hold, and the first one I saw laugh. Though Damear would lead the three developmentally for a time, Lamarr was the most active. You could see how it was he’d found the birth canal first. Before long the windows on three sides of his crib showed hand and foot prints, and the blinds that hung there would not stay hung long. He was tender headed and had a terrible time teething. He cried so much he was nicknamed Wah-wah (a as in at), which was shortened sometimes to Wah.
The one who had managed to be both the first and the last, with the “bad” hair, the “good” eyes, the long lashes, all three of his father’s names, his great-grandmother’s favor, the only one to suck his thumb — little Lamarr, Mar-mar, Mar, Wah-wah, Wah, on the bed beside Damear.
<<>><<>>
Mahad was breathing well enough on his own but still couldn’t seem to maintain his body temperature. More life-threatening, though, was that fact that he wasn’t sucking efficiently. They searched out tiny veins and fed him intravenously. The veins spasmed and collapsed. They had been about to try a vein in his head when Tahija walked in on them and forbade it.
She of the needle phobia said he was too tiny for all that sticking, they’d stick him to death. He gained two ounces, then lost three. He was a brush fire on a rainy day, not quite catching. He was the question no one wanted to ask: Is this nature saying two is enough?
<<>><<>>
“Why isn’t she bringing milk in? Why isn’t she visiting?” It was the head nurse from the hospital nursery calling. Mahad still hadn’t gained enough weight to leave, and with two home Tahija’s visits had dropped off.
“The other two take all her time,” I explained. There was a pause. “The other two triplets.”
“Well doesn’t she want this one?”
I knew enough about the system by then to know that this was no casual question, and that a flip answer, or an in-depth honest one, could cause problems. So I didn’t say, “I’m not sure what she wants or if she knows herself what she wants; she’s fifteen, poor, and in the middle of a series of traumas that’ll take her years to begin to recover from.” Nor did I ask the nurse if she’d read in the papers about the Albanian refugee mother of triplets who right in our neighborhood had killed herself just the week before, herself and the three babies.
I just said, “We’ll be there shortly, and thanks so much for calling.”
<<>><<>>
To enter the nursery, you had to wash and put on a paper gown and mask. Then you waited like a diner to be shown to your table. This time, we waited near an older baby. He was a very dark-complexioned boy in a crib off in the corner, wearing only a diaper. And he was screaming. I noticed a pacifier beside his mouth and leaned over to put it in.
A nurse rushed up. “You’re not supposed to be touching the babies.”
“He was crying.”
“I know he was crying,” she said.
“For awhile.”
She glared at me. When a pinkish little girl’s crying brought two nurses fast I felt, as
Tahija would say, some kind of way. Was Mahad getting less care because he was dark? Was it starting already? I didn’t know the whole story; you never know the whole story. Maybe the older baby had been crying for days and they’d tried everything. Maybe he was a crack baby, and inconsolable.
But I remembered another black boy, also dark and big for his age. I had been volunteering at a public-sector day care center. In one class they sent me to was a boy who had obviously earned villain status. The only black male in the mostly white class, he was punished often. When I knelt to comfort him after a scolding he fell into my arms and sobbed convulsively: pain that had been building for more than one hard day.
I told the two teenaged white girls in charge that I thought he was being punished too much. They said I didn’t know him, that he was very bad. He was four, and as far as I could see a quiet, well-behaved child. Outside later, when a girl playing near this boy began crying, one of the caregivers swooped down without investigation and yanked him up, carrying him by the armpits to the open window of the classroom and tossing him through like a sack of laundry. The boy screamed through it all.
The center’s director refused to fire those two girls. She could pay only six an hour, she explained, and six an hour didn’t buy you much.
Standing in the nursery waiting to see Mahad, remembering that boy’s shaking sobs, and other children, other cruelty and injustice I’d witnessed or heard tell of, I did not reach out to touch the off-limits baby a second time. But I made him a promise. I promised that in so far as it was in my power I would favor the one in the corner, the one singled out to receive the poison of racial hatred. Unfairly, unconditionally, over the sweetest, most innocent white child, even should that child be of my own blood, I would favor and prefer him.
Well aware that no one action or series of actions on my part could begin to balance the scales, I nevertheless made my covenant: I became — before I even knew the word — a Reparationist.
<<>><<>>
When we were let to go to Mahad at last, we found him awake, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, fists clenched beneath his chin. A kind nurse brought a rocking chair over and Tahija sat to accept the tiny bundle. He wore a white stocking cap, his wee chin and nose crowding up close to a little bow of a mouth. She held the bottle of breast milk she’d brought to his lips. He appeared to suck but when she held the bottle to the light we saw how little had gone in.
She kept trying, and eventually accomplished a full ounce, then surprised me by asking if I wanted to try.
I sat down and felt his almost weightless weight in the crook of my arm.
“He’s so tense,” I said.
“It’s all that sticking him, I told you,” Tahija said.
His eyes, smaller than Damear’s and Lamarr’s, were medium brown, and focused unblinkingly at the fluorescent lights overhead.
“See what’s happening is,” Tahija explained, “he’s holding his tongue against the roof of his mouth, like this.” She raised his upper lip to show me. “Try holding his tongue down with your pinky.”
I did, and it seemed to be working, but when I pulled the bottle out we noticed the diaper tucked under his chin was soaked. I gave him back to his mother. She tried it with his head lower, the bottle higher, her pinky in his mouth; she tried nuzzling his neck so he’d laugh and unloose his tongue. The third-shift nurses came and the second shift left. Finally Tahija raised an empty bottle.
“Four ounces!”
“Four ounces,” echoed a nurse.
“She got four in,” called another.
“Good job.”
She burped him. More praise. When the time came to leave, we didn’t want to. He looked so small and alone in the crib, hands fisted, eyes glazed, mouth open, as if in shocked surprise.
“Guinea-pigging him is what they’re doing,” Tahija said as we walked between snow banks to the car. “Going to try and put a needle in his head!”
“It’s awful.”
“I told them ‘I didn’t sign for that!’ Now you know me Kathryn, do I look like I’m about to sign for them to stick a big long needle into my baby’s head?”
“No.”
“Guinea-pigging him to death.”
This sounded paranoid to me, until I thought of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and of the ads in subway cars for people to “take part” in clinical trials. A Hundred Dollars a Day. Big Completion Bonus. You never saw such ads on the freeways heading out to the suburbs.
“You’ve got to get him home,” I said. “Get his weight up, get him home.”
And she did. At six weeks old, Mahad, or Mahddy as he was often called (rhymes with body), lay between his brothers for the first time since Damear had been lifted from the womb.
It was a wonderful sight. Though their faces were quite similar, and people would often confuse them, they differed in many ways: Damear, Mear-Mear, was relatively stocky, with a round face, head still mostly bald, just a bit of hair on top, the black agate eyes; Lamarr, Marr, Wah, was longer, with the high forehead and thinner face, a full head of tight hair, and green-sometimes-brown eyes; and Mahad, Mahddy, Mahd, thin and short, the darkest, with chipmunk cheeks and brown, widely spaced eyes, his hair somewhere between Damear’s and Lamarr’s, his hairline straight and low.
Tahija combed a glistening curl so it dropped handsomely over Mahd’s forehead and took their picture. Marr caught hold of Mahd’s diaper. Mear found his arm, and all seemed to agree that it was good to be together again. It was the way it should be.
copyright E.K. Gordon 2009
