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
Community Change, Inc.
I ended this reading before the end of the chapter for some reason. Here I've included the whole chapter, with a ** where I stopped in the actual reading. I wish I could quote here the deep discussion we had between these two chapters, and after. Somehow it now feels like the book is expanded to take in that group's insights. I guess it's me who's expanded...
whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral,
dressed in his shroud
—from Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Chapter 19
Tahija worked very hard. Though I had never had a child myself, I’d seen what the first months are like for a new mother. It’s wonder upon wonder, and overwhelming. There can be a terrifying sense of losing oneself to the demands of the newborn. Depression is common and often unaddressed, with more than a quarter of teen mothers suffering from it. Imagine three babies! Tahija was determined not to let them “run over top of her.” And indeed they must have felt sometimes like a stampeding herd, or a tidal wave. Added to these pressures was the omnitheater of watching adults, any one of whom might with a phone call set the bureaucratic ball rolling to take the boys away. There was the home nurse; the DHS home aides mandated by DHS (the indomitable Mrs. Abstinence not, as it turned out, among them).
Then there was Kaki and me. It must have been like having two live-in mother-in-laws from another culture. It’s a wonder poor Tahija didn’t fall apart or snap out. She did go off once on big Lamarr, but it was only a butter knife from the kitchen drawer, and he had taken little Lamarr to the house of the very aunt she had expressly forbidden him to take any of her babies to.
She was under a lot of stress. Containment made sense to her and control worked. But when the stretch-limo stroller arrived, I thought sure Mear, Mahd and Marr were going to make the acquaintance of the park at last.
They were six months old when the Lutheran services agency that had given Tahija pro-life counseling when she was pregnant gave her a triplet stroller. Inside the huge box it came in were six wheels, dozens of pieces, scores of nuts, bolts and screws, and twelve pages of instructions. In French. Tahija threw the instructions aside and in one of her manic bursts put it together with two screwdrivers and a wrench.
When I came back from shopping, there it was, as long as the sofa — a twelve-point buck of an assembly job.
“You must be some kind of mechanical genius.”
“It was easy.”
The seats went front to back, with hoods above and sturdy wire baskets beneath. The cloth was a heavy-duty navy blue patterned in small white dots. I suggested we give it a test drive, with riders.
It was a sunny afternoon, the park alive with people: two half-court basketball games going, lovers under the grape arbor, parents and seniors on the circular knee wall around the playground, and children working every inch of the equipment. The infant swings beckoned. I couldn’t remember the last time Tahija had gone outside for anything other than a doctor’s appointment or a quick trip to the grocery store around the corner.
She came to the door I’d opened and peered out, left and right, focusing not on the green oasis of the park but on the strangers in the crosswalk, the car speeding past, the disheveled man weaving up the sidewalk. Just released from prison, he was a little unstable, unpredictable. But Elva’s husband Raphael, our block captain, was out. Raphael knew him, kept him calm.
Tahija drew back.
“It’s too cold.”
“It’s almost June!”
“Pneumonia weather.”
She parked the stroller in the shamrock room, and there it stayed.
“Those boys won’t leave this house until they’re four years old,” Lamarr declared. I didn’t believe him. It was so in his own childhood, he said, and would be so in theirs. But they needed to grow, to explore, to be stimulated by new sights and sounds, I argued. No, they needed to be kept safe, away from dirt and germs, freaky people, and gun fire.
The stretch-limo stroller was in danger of becoming a conversation piece. But I kept asking, and then one warm day as she was leaving for school Tahija said yes.
“Just to the park and back.”
“Okay.”
“And coats on, zipped up, and hats.”
“Right.”
“You can dress them in the blue onesies, second drawer, left side.”
“Second drawer left.”
Tahija dressing her boys was fast and efficient — a gift-wrapper in December. I was not. Getting the third fully dressed before the first got overheated took athletic focus. And then getting them outside! I developed two techniques: Babies in the stroller and then out, or stroller out and then babies in.
In-then-out went like this. After I had them dressed, I’d bring two down, one to a hip, and put them in their place in the stroller. (I felt compelled to place them in the order Tahija always did: Damear, Mahad, Lamarr.) Then I’d run up for the third, who was most likely crying by then. I’d bring him down and put him in his seat. Then I’d buckle everyone in and wheel the stroller into the short, narrow hallway.
The heavy security door wouldn’t stay open on its own, so I used the footrest of the first seat, while holding the inner door with my free hand. Then I’d push the stroller forward until the two front wheels projected out from the stoop, with poor Damear (who was quite brave) in mid-air. Then — boing (really excellent suspension) — I’d bounce the middle wheels, beneath Mahad, down onto the upper step, then tip back, with Damear pointing skyward now, and bounce the rear wheels onto the step. Then I’d slowly lower Damear, taking it on faith that the sidewalk was down there somewhere.
Once I had us horizontal and facing park-ward, I’d go down the line checking everybody. Only little Lamarr, who had a fear of heights, seemed to question, with contracted brow, my nannying abilities.
Out-and-then-in was easier, but only worked if a trusted neighbor was outside to help. What I’d do is bounce the stroller down the steps empty and get it facing park-ward then run back in for one of them, strap him in, and run back for the other two. Usually by then Rosa and her Chihuahua were watching from the window of her third floor apartment, a grandmotherly smile making her eye patch look downright cheerful.
“Tres bonito bambinos,” she’d call.
“Si, gracias.”
When we finally reached the park that first day we walked the full length of all four of its walkways, then strolled the shady perimeter, stopped often by folks from the nearby senior center. The boys were so good. Mahad fell asleep and woke up. Lamarr began to cry but shifted to laughter at the sight of squirrels scampering over the roots of a great oak tree.
We stopped beneath the tree and were soon surrounded by second graders on recess, Porsha, the youngest King sister, among them. She deigned to act as spokesperson for us, informing the other children that she knew me, I lived on her block, and no, I was not their mother, obviously, I only watched them while their mother, Tahija, was in school. And sometimes she, Porsha, helped me.
The second graders absorbed this important information, stared a moment longer, then whirled away like leaves in a gust to decorate the playground with their happy cries.
<<>><<>>
When I took the boys out after lunch we’d sit on the low wall that encircled the park and watch for Tahija to come up the block from school. Sometimes she’d sit with us and if she was in the mood field the questions that inevitably came. She granted any polite asker up to three, so long as the first question wasn’t too ignorant. “How ever do you take care of all three?” would be your first and only question.
Some questions brought down her scorn and the questioners were memorialized forever after, as in, “Remember Lamarr’s cousin, at that party? Going to ask, ‘Do they think alike?’ How am I supposed to know do they think alike? Do I look like a mind reader? Or that lady at the seaquarium — ‘Are they twins?’ Come on now.”
One day a girl poling by on a single old-style skate stopped and bent over to see Damear, in the stroller, up close. Then she looked at the other two, in my lap and Tahija’s.
“Which one is the baby?”
“Him,” Tahija kissed Mahad’s forehead. They were eight months, and still very small.
“Which one’s oldest?”
“He is,” Tahija pointed to Damear.
“By about two minutes,” I added.
As if she knew she had been granted just the three questions, the girl paused and considered, skating her foot back and forth. She looked from me to Tahija and back at me.
“Do all ya’ll live in the same house?”
“We do.” I pointed across the intersection. “Third door in.”
She looked that way, then back at us. “That’s all right.”
<<>><<>>
It was the lone question of the woman in Rite-Aid that stuck with me. Like a tick it stuck, like a sliver of glass.
We were out on the Avenue in the stretch limo. Things were going well. Mahad had fallen asleep, as he often did in moving vehicles, and the other two were so busy staring up at the rattling tracks of the El they didn’t think of complaining. Tahija had one of her headaches, but she was in a good mood, even answered a few questions when we were mobbed in front of the grocery store. She enjoyed the attention, to a point, as long as people got it that they were triplets and not the results of three separate pregnancies. She was only sixteen, and sensitive to the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy.
We stopped in Rite-Aid. Tahija liked Rite-Aid. Her mother had worked in one once and she bought most of her many skin and hair care products there. We were having a good outing, until that woman said what she did. She was white, around sixty, and already walking away from us when the words hit — five words, one for each of us,
“Well I hope she’s done.”
I heard Tahija take in a deep breath, steady herself, and set her mind (or did I just imagine/fear it?) to never bring the boys outside the house again.
The woman was gone before I could respond. That undelivered response swelled within me, to come out months later as a letter, and the start of this book.
“These boys are a blessing,” I wrote her. “I don’t believe you’d shake your head in disgust at the sight of three matched white faces. I believe you value the lives of black boys but little and believe that no good can come through them into your world. Your prejudice is a curtain drawn before your eyes, and your fear and clinging to privilege would draw that curtain over their future. Through the curtain you don’t see the bright lights of their eyes — black, brown, green; you don’t see the sacredness of the number three: moon, earth and sun; heaven, earth and humanity; angles in a triangle; the holy trinity. What could the universe have meant by such abundance if not a blessing, and a challenge, and a promise: that if we meet the challenge we shall have the blessing.”
“Already for me it has been so. What challenge have you not accepted, stranger, woman with skin and hair like mine, about the age of my mother, born in the depression, knowing the hardship these boys’ parents know, though the 90’s are not depression years? Perhaps your challenge today was to smile, and say to the mother what most women of color say, God bless you.”
“Oh I wish you had stopped and spoken kindly. I wish we had enjoyed the talk so much that Tahija took down your address and promised to drop you a line now and then and let you know how the boys were. Then you would see, the curtain would fall away and you would see not potential criminals, not threats, but children with all the light of childhood in them: perhaps one someday to lead a town or city, or even a nation; perhaps one to create a song or a painting that opens the eyes of your grandchild, walking alone and depressed one day, to the beauty of life; perhaps one to live in great pain and to succumb, to understand the addictions of his grandparents and forgive — them, his parents, himself, and perhaps in there somewhere in his thirties or forties you, the stranger who did not bless him, whose blessing might have meant something. Who can say what it might have meant?”
Chapter 31
After awhile, with bookshelves and a desk, a chair in the sunny nook, the nursery began to feel like just any other room. Sometimes my eye would fall on a powder-blue windowsill and I’d think, that’s the windowsill Damear could reach. Or I’d forget and try to pull down the blind Lamarr had torn, and which we’d never replaced. Or I’d cut on the light and remember holding Mahddy up to the switch so he could work it — up down, on off, up down. . . .
Would they remember the Beatle songs I’d sung them? And the drinking songs from my Irish grandmother’s old 78, “I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,” and the dirges, “When you look in the heart of a shamrock, sure you’re dreaming of I-er-land, and home.” And that one from my Scottish grandmother, the words I couldn’t recall replaced by made-up ones,
Hush little baby don’t say a word
Auntie’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
and if that mocking bird don’t sing
Auntie’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
and if that diamond ring don’t shine
Auntie’s gonna give you this heart of mine
and if this heart don’t tick long enough. . . .
I’d make up things I’d buy and ways they might not work and other things I’d buy instead. If I could rhyme it I could buy it. My grandmother had sung it “Momma’s gonna buy” not “Auntie”; I’d felt the need to change it though, felt guilty using “Momma.” Which should have told me something, been a warning.
Ach, I thought, indulging a bit of the melancholy I come by honest, as Tahija would say — from the Irish as well as the Scottish side — if you’re always looking for warnings surely you’ll find them at every turn. It was by God’s grace that our paths crossed, and it would be by God’s grace should we meet again.
To be sure though, my heart was broken, and no comfort for it.
<<>><<>>
Was I a racist? Had my racism caused Tahija to feel she had to move out? Were there different kinds of racism? How did you know when you were done, free, clear, clean? What were my deepest motives? What were Kaki’s? Were hers different from mine? Had we done too much, or too little? Exercised too much authority, too little, or the wrong sort? Had I damaged the boys? Would Tahija always be harder on Damear? Would I ever see them again?
Would they remember me?
In the days that followed, these and other questions weighed upon me. I didn’t like walking in Fishtown anymore. I felt angry at the way some there might treat the triplets. I remembered the Rite-Aid lady and her, “Well I hope she’s done.” But I didn’t like walking in our neighborhood either. Too many mean or suspicious looks, from strangers mainly, but there were many strangers. One day two men I thought might be from the Donminican Republic abruptly stopped talking when I neared. Then one of them spit on the sidewalk inches from my shoes.
Is that what the white race had earned for me and mine? I felt ashamed to be white. I had felt ashamed, I realized, since I was a child first witnessing racism. Had that shame motivated me to move hear, to give of my time and labor? Only to find now, in the quiet house, yellow walls gleaming like a sun whenever I passed the still-empty nursury, that the shame stung as much; more, in fact. Or perhaps it was just nearer the surface.
I could not love myself, or forgive myself, and of course, in many small ways, the world collaborated in confirming that I was unlovable and unforgivable and perfectly correct in assuming the worst about myself. For example, one day while driving I nosed out into a busy street, trying to turn left with the light. When the light changed and I tried to back out of the crosswalk, I couldn’t because a car pulled up. An older black man trying to cross was forced to walk around the front of my car, dangerously close to traffic. He glared at me with such hatred that I rolled down the window and said,
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t back up there’s a — ”
He cut me off. “Think they own the whole street!”
And the whole world, his scorn implied. You and your kind. As he stepped up onto the curb and strode on — his day ruined, I feared — I began to cry. I wanted to run after him, tell him about the triplets . . . all the diapers I’d changed, the prayers I’d prayed, the inner changes I’d tried to make. I wished I had the boys in the car, or the King sisters — black faces to show him, to testify to him, to prove . . . what? That I was not a racist. But I could never prove it finally, totally, to anyone but myself, and my maker. There would always be hurt and bitter people who would see only my white face; and cynical others who would see and try to make use of my guilt. That was on them. But what was on me, my responsibility, was not to use people in some confused subconscious drive to redeem myself. Wasn’t that just another form of racism?
The light changed and I pulled out, driving past the man’s rigid back, past other folks, women, mostly, standing on corners waiting for busses, looking at me in my car as centuries of serfs had looked up at landowners on horses, their looks seeming to say, Yes, however you care to intellectualize it, you are just another racist.
It was better then, wasn’t it, that they had moved out? Better that I should never see them again.
<<>><<>>
“You know what one of my favorite movies is?”
“What?” asked Kaki.
We were up on the third floor, on the couch in the front room, looking out over the telephone wire where the white leather sneakers still hung, no more worn out, it seemed, than on the night when I’d changed my mind about Tahija and the babies living with us. The trees in the park look pale and dry. The grass needed mowing.
“The Mission.”
“Never saw it,” she said.
“It’s about Jesuits in South America, when Spain and Portugal were carving up the land. There’s this mercenary and slave trader, Rodrigo Mendoza, played by Robert DeNiro. He walks in his brother in bed with a woman he loves, and kills him. In jail he’s tormented by remorse. A Jesuit priest visits and converts him. Mendoza not only converts but decides to become a priest himself.”
“Now why is this your favorite movie?”
“Well, Robert DeNiro for one. But mainly it’s the waterfall scene. The head Jesuit is going above the falls, where the Guaraní went to escape slavery, and he takes the converted mercenary along. They have to climb up this cliff face, under, around, through the waterfalls, for like a mile.”
“Okay.”
Purrsilla padded up the stairs, appraised the possibilities, and jumped into Kaki’s lap.
“Here’s the amazing thing. Mendoza’s hauling behind him, up this cliff, a full suit of body armor, his old body armor, see — helmet, shoulder pads, boots, all that — dragging it about thirty feet behind him by a rope tied around his chest.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. So they get to the top of the cliff, the Jesuit first, Mendoza trailing, with his armor dangling over the cliff, swinging in the air, pulling him backward, so you think it might just yank him back over the edge. A Guaraní man, maybe the chief, embraces the Jesuit, but when he sees the former slave trader he starts yelling, because not only did this Spaniard terrorize the tribe for years, he captured and enslaved the man’s own mother. We find that out later.”
“Good plot. So what does the man do?”
I scratched behind Purrsilla’s ears.
“Well, he takes this machete-type knife and heads for DeNiro, with the Jesuit explaining something in the native language. Or maybe he explains it first and then the man gets out the knife. I forget.”
“So what happens?”
“The man walks past DeNiro and looks over the cliff. He says something — the Jesuit translating — about Christ and forgiveness, then he cuts the rope. He cuts through it and the armor crashes down all the long long way they’ve just climbed, and sinks into the river.”
“He forgives him.”
“Yeah.”
“So why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.” I picked Purrsilla up and squeezed her and put her back down. “Tahija will be seventeen next month.”
“On the 8th. If we had her address we could mail her a card.”
“They don’t have addresses on Palethorpe!”
“Of course they do.”
Twilight had come as we spoke. The white sneakers were shadows now. “We said we’d be her legal guardians until she turned eighteen.”
“It was her choice to move out,” Kaki said. “Is this the suit of body armor you’re dragging up the cliff?”
I went for some tissue and came back blowing my nose. “Oh what do you Lutherans know about guilt.”
But she did know some things. I could tell that by her next question.
“Do you believe a white person living today is to blame for the crimes of the past? For things like slavery that happened before they were born?”
“Collective karma? No, I don’t think so. But I think you can choose to carry the responsibility, to sort of take on the debt.”
“Doesn’t that thinking lead you down the road to some kind of sick, egotistical martyrdom?”
“Or maybe to some kind of healthy, spiritual martyrdom?”
“And how would you know the difference?”
“Good question. I think if you’re miserable, it’s probably the first kind.”
“And if it’s the second kind?” she asked.
“Um, you radiate peace and joy.”
“So, how do you feel?”
I blew my nose again, leaning into her. “Point taken. But I know one thing. All this talk about forgiveness, and self-forgiveness, self-acceptance . . . I know they’re steppingstones on the way to emotional health. But I think there’s also humility, and patience, and self-awareness. I think you can’t just turn around and cut the rope your own self. That’s not forgiveness; it’s evasion, escape. No, someone has to come and cut the rope for you. Someone who wants to cut it, who can’t stand the idea of that weight, that burden, on you, on anyone.”
“But who?”
“Well,” I stood up and went to the window. The lamps in the park had come on. “When I look back on all the mistakes I made, all the anger when love was called for, all the failures to open to another’s humanity — and not just here with Tahija and Lamarr, there’s other failures, things I haven’t told you about, from way back in middle school — when I look on those and past those into American history, it seems like it can’t be just one person cutting one rope.”
“No?”
“It has to be millions and millions of opening hearts boldly, bravely forgiving, when nobody would blame them for doing otherwise. I mean, who would have blamed the chief for killing the man who kidnapped his mother? Except oh, what power, what peace when he strides past hatred and bitterness and vengeance and slashes that rope with one stroke.”
**“And what relief for DeNiro.”
“To be sure.” I sat back down with her.
“But if it’s not one person forgiving another, how will you know, how will you feel it, when the armor’s been cut away?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “You just do, the universe just shifts.”
“And how do you know it hasn’t already shifted? That the armor isn’t laying rusting on the bottom of the river? I mean, we’ve had the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Junior preaching brotherly love, peace, non-violence. I come back to my worry about unhealthy guilt.”
“But how can there be forgiveness,” I asked, “before there’s been the apology, or even an admission of wrongdoing?”
“You mean, the chief can’t cut the rope if DeNiro doesn’t climb the cliff?”
“You’re getting pretty good at extending those metaphors.”
“Thank you,” she said.
We sat thinking about our extended metaphor as night came on and the empty quiet in the house grew emptier.
copyright 2009 E.K. Gordon
whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral,
dressed in his shroud
—from Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Chapter 19
Tahija worked very hard. Though I had never had a child myself, I’d seen what the first months are like for a new mother. It’s wonder upon wonder, and overwhelming. There can be a terrifying sense of losing oneself to the demands of the newborn. Depression is common and often unaddressed, with more than a quarter of teen mothers suffering from it. Imagine three babies! Tahija was determined not to let them “run over top of her.” And indeed they must have felt sometimes like a stampeding herd, or a tidal wave. Added to these pressures was the omnitheater of watching adults, any one of whom might with a phone call set the bureaucratic ball rolling to take the boys away. There was the home nurse; the DHS home aides mandated by DHS (the indomitable Mrs. Abstinence not, as it turned out, among them).
Then there was Kaki and me. It must have been like having two live-in mother-in-laws from another culture. It’s a wonder poor Tahija didn’t fall apart or snap out. She did go off once on big Lamarr, but it was only a butter knife from the kitchen drawer, and he had taken little Lamarr to the house of the very aunt she had expressly forbidden him to take any of her babies to.
She was under a lot of stress. Containment made sense to her and control worked. But when the stretch-limo stroller arrived, I thought sure Mear, Mahd and Marr were going to make the acquaintance of the park at last.
They were six months old when the Lutheran services agency that had given Tahija pro-life counseling when she was pregnant gave her a triplet stroller. Inside the huge box it came in were six wheels, dozens of pieces, scores of nuts, bolts and screws, and twelve pages of instructions. In French. Tahija threw the instructions aside and in one of her manic bursts put it together with two screwdrivers and a wrench.
When I came back from shopping, there it was, as long as the sofa — a twelve-point buck of an assembly job.
“You must be some kind of mechanical genius.”
“It was easy.”
The seats went front to back, with hoods above and sturdy wire baskets beneath. The cloth was a heavy-duty navy blue patterned in small white dots. I suggested we give it a test drive, with riders.
It was a sunny afternoon, the park alive with people: two half-court basketball games going, lovers under the grape arbor, parents and seniors on the circular knee wall around the playground, and children working every inch of the equipment. The infant swings beckoned. I couldn’t remember the last time Tahija had gone outside for anything other than a doctor’s appointment or a quick trip to the grocery store around the corner.
She came to the door I’d opened and peered out, left and right, focusing not on the green oasis of the park but on the strangers in the crosswalk, the car speeding past, the disheveled man weaving up the sidewalk. Just released from prison, he was a little unstable, unpredictable. But Elva’s husband Raphael, our block captain, was out. Raphael knew him, kept him calm.
Tahija drew back.
“It’s too cold.”
“It’s almost June!”
“Pneumonia weather.”
She parked the stroller in the shamrock room, and there it stayed.
“Those boys won’t leave this house until they’re four years old,” Lamarr declared. I didn’t believe him. It was so in his own childhood, he said, and would be so in theirs. But they needed to grow, to explore, to be stimulated by new sights and sounds, I argued. No, they needed to be kept safe, away from dirt and germs, freaky people, and gun fire.
The stretch-limo stroller was in danger of becoming a conversation piece. But I kept asking, and then one warm day as she was leaving for school Tahija said yes.
“Just to the park and back.”
“Okay.”
“And coats on, zipped up, and hats.”
“Right.”
“You can dress them in the blue onesies, second drawer, left side.”
“Second drawer left.”
Tahija dressing her boys was fast and efficient — a gift-wrapper in December. I was not. Getting the third fully dressed before the first got overheated took athletic focus. And then getting them outside! I developed two techniques: Babies in the stroller and then out, or stroller out and then babies in.
In-then-out went like this. After I had them dressed, I’d bring two down, one to a hip, and put them in their place in the stroller. (I felt compelled to place them in the order Tahija always did: Damear, Mahad, Lamarr.) Then I’d run up for the third, who was most likely crying by then. I’d bring him down and put him in his seat. Then I’d buckle everyone in and wheel the stroller into the short, narrow hallway.
The heavy security door wouldn’t stay open on its own, so I used the footrest of the first seat, while holding the inner door with my free hand. Then I’d push the stroller forward until the two front wheels projected out from the stoop, with poor Damear (who was quite brave) in mid-air. Then — boing (really excellent suspension) — I’d bounce the middle wheels, beneath Mahad, down onto the upper step, then tip back, with Damear pointing skyward now, and bounce the rear wheels onto the step. Then I’d slowly lower Damear, taking it on faith that the sidewalk was down there somewhere.
Once I had us horizontal and facing park-ward, I’d go down the line checking everybody. Only little Lamarr, who had a fear of heights, seemed to question, with contracted brow, my nannying abilities.
Out-and-then-in was easier, but only worked if a trusted neighbor was outside to help. What I’d do is bounce the stroller down the steps empty and get it facing park-ward then run back in for one of them, strap him in, and run back for the other two. Usually by then Rosa and her Chihuahua were watching from the window of her third floor apartment, a grandmotherly smile making her eye patch look downright cheerful.
“Tres bonito bambinos,” she’d call.
“Si, gracias.”
When we finally reached the park that first day we walked the full length of all four of its walkways, then strolled the shady perimeter, stopped often by folks from the nearby senior center. The boys were so good. Mahad fell asleep and woke up. Lamarr began to cry but shifted to laughter at the sight of squirrels scampering over the roots of a great oak tree.
We stopped beneath the tree and were soon surrounded by second graders on recess, Porsha, the youngest King sister, among them. She deigned to act as spokesperson for us, informing the other children that she knew me, I lived on her block, and no, I was not their mother, obviously, I only watched them while their mother, Tahija, was in school. And sometimes she, Porsha, helped me.
The second graders absorbed this important information, stared a moment longer, then whirled away like leaves in a gust to decorate the playground with their happy cries.
<<>><<>>
When I took the boys out after lunch we’d sit on the low wall that encircled the park and watch for Tahija to come up the block from school. Sometimes she’d sit with us and if she was in the mood field the questions that inevitably came. She granted any polite asker up to three, so long as the first question wasn’t too ignorant. “How ever do you take care of all three?” would be your first and only question.
Some questions brought down her scorn and the questioners were memorialized forever after, as in, “Remember Lamarr’s cousin, at that party? Going to ask, ‘Do they think alike?’ How am I supposed to know do they think alike? Do I look like a mind reader? Or that lady at the seaquarium — ‘Are they twins?’ Come on now.”
One day a girl poling by on a single old-style skate stopped and bent over to see Damear, in the stroller, up close. Then she looked at the other two, in my lap and Tahija’s.
“Which one is the baby?”
“Him,” Tahija kissed Mahad’s forehead. They were eight months, and still very small.
“Which one’s oldest?”
“He is,” Tahija pointed to Damear.
“By about two minutes,” I added.
As if she knew she had been granted just the three questions, the girl paused and considered, skating her foot back and forth. She looked from me to Tahija and back at me.
“Do all ya’ll live in the same house?”
“We do.” I pointed across the intersection. “Third door in.”
She looked that way, then back at us. “That’s all right.”
<<>><<>>
It was the lone question of the woman in Rite-Aid that stuck with me. Like a tick it stuck, like a sliver of glass.
We were out on the Avenue in the stretch limo. Things were going well. Mahad had fallen asleep, as he often did in moving vehicles, and the other two were so busy staring up at the rattling tracks of the El they didn’t think of complaining. Tahija had one of her headaches, but she was in a good mood, even answered a few questions when we were mobbed in front of the grocery store. She enjoyed the attention, to a point, as long as people got it that they were triplets and not the results of three separate pregnancies. She was only sixteen, and sensitive to the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy.
We stopped in Rite-Aid. Tahija liked Rite-Aid. Her mother had worked in one once and she bought most of her many skin and hair care products there. We were having a good outing, until that woman said what she did. She was white, around sixty, and already walking away from us when the words hit — five words, one for each of us,
“Well I hope she’s done.”
I heard Tahija take in a deep breath, steady herself, and set her mind (or did I just imagine/fear it?) to never bring the boys outside the house again.
The woman was gone before I could respond. That undelivered response swelled within me, to come out months later as a letter, and the start of this book.
“These boys are a blessing,” I wrote her. “I don’t believe you’d shake your head in disgust at the sight of three matched white faces. I believe you value the lives of black boys but little and believe that no good can come through them into your world. Your prejudice is a curtain drawn before your eyes, and your fear and clinging to privilege would draw that curtain over their future. Through the curtain you don’t see the bright lights of their eyes — black, brown, green; you don’t see the sacredness of the number three: moon, earth and sun; heaven, earth and humanity; angles in a triangle; the holy trinity. What could the universe have meant by such abundance if not a blessing, and a challenge, and a promise: that if we meet the challenge we shall have the blessing.”
“Already for me it has been so. What challenge have you not accepted, stranger, woman with skin and hair like mine, about the age of my mother, born in the depression, knowing the hardship these boys’ parents know, though the 90’s are not depression years? Perhaps your challenge today was to smile, and say to the mother what most women of color say, God bless you.”
“Oh I wish you had stopped and spoken kindly. I wish we had enjoyed the talk so much that Tahija took down your address and promised to drop you a line now and then and let you know how the boys were. Then you would see, the curtain would fall away and you would see not potential criminals, not threats, but children with all the light of childhood in them: perhaps one someday to lead a town or city, or even a nation; perhaps one to create a song or a painting that opens the eyes of your grandchild, walking alone and depressed one day, to the beauty of life; perhaps one to live in great pain and to succumb, to understand the addictions of his grandparents and forgive — them, his parents, himself, and perhaps in there somewhere in his thirties or forties you, the stranger who did not bless him, whose blessing might have meant something. Who can say what it might have meant?”
Chapter 31
After awhile, with bookshelves and a desk, a chair in the sunny nook, the nursery began to feel like just any other room. Sometimes my eye would fall on a powder-blue windowsill and I’d think, that’s the windowsill Damear could reach. Or I’d forget and try to pull down the blind Lamarr had torn, and which we’d never replaced. Or I’d cut on the light and remember holding Mahddy up to the switch so he could work it — up down, on off, up down. . . .
Would they remember the Beatle songs I’d sung them? And the drinking songs from my Irish grandmother’s old 78, “I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,” and the dirges, “When you look in the heart of a shamrock, sure you’re dreaming of I-er-land, and home.” And that one from my Scottish grandmother, the words I couldn’t recall replaced by made-up ones,
Hush little baby don’t say a word
Auntie’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
and if that mocking bird don’t sing
Auntie’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
and if that diamond ring don’t shine
Auntie’s gonna give you this heart of mine
and if this heart don’t tick long enough. . . .
I’d make up things I’d buy and ways they might not work and other things I’d buy instead. If I could rhyme it I could buy it. My grandmother had sung it “Momma’s gonna buy” not “Auntie”; I’d felt the need to change it though, felt guilty using “Momma.” Which should have told me something, been a warning.
Ach, I thought, indulging a bit of the melancholy I come by honest, as Tahija would say — from the Irish as well as the Scottish side — if you’re always looking for warnings surely you’ll find them at every turn. It was by God’s grace that our paths crossed, and it would be by God’s grace should we meet again.
To be sure though, my heart was broken, and no comfort for it.
<<>><<>>
Was I a racist? Had my racism caused Tahija to feel she had to move out? Were there different kinds of racism? How did you know when you were done, free, clear, clean? What were my deepest motives? What were Kaki’s? Were hers different from mine? Had we done too much, or too little? Exercised too much authority, too little, or the wrong sort? Had I damaged the boys? Would Tahija always be harder on Damear? Would I ever see them again?
Would they remember me?
In the days that followed, these and other questions weighed upon me. I didn’t like walking in Fishtown anymore. I felt angry at the way some there might treat the triplets. I remembered the Rite-Aid lady and her, “Well I hope she’s done.” But I didn’t like walking in our neighborhood either. Too many mean or suspicious looks, from strangers mainly, but there were many strangers. One day two men I thought might be from the Donminican Republic abruptly stopped talking when I neared. Then one of them spit on the sidewalk inches from my shoes.
Is that what the white race had earned for me and mine? I felt ashamed to be white. I had felt ashamed, I realized, since I was a child first witnessing racism. Had that shame motivated me to move hear, to give of my time and labor? Only to find now, in the quiet house, yellow walls gleaming like a sun whenever I passed the still-empty nursury, that the shame stung as much; more, in fact. Or perhaps it was just nearer the surface.
I could not love myself, or forgive myself, and of course, in many small ways, the world collaborated in confirming that I was unlovable and unforgivable and perfectly correct in assuming the worst about myself. For example, one day while driving I nosed out into a busy street, trying to turn left with the light. When the light changed and I tried to back out of the crosswalk, I couldn’t because a car pulled up. An older black man trying to cross was forced to walk around the front of my car, dangerously close to traffic. He glared at me with such hatred that I rolled down the window and said,
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t back up there’s a — ”
He cut me off. “Think they own the whole street!”
And the whole world, his scorn implied. You and your kind. As he stepped up onto the curb and strode on — his day ruined, I feared — I began to cry. I wanted to run after him, tell him about the triplets . . . all the diapers I’d changed, the prayers I’d prayed, the inner changes I’d tried to make. I wished I had the boys in the car, or the King sisters — black faces to show him, to testify to him, to prove . . . what? That I was not a racist. But I could never prove it finally, totally, to anyone but myself, and my maker. There would always be hurt and bitter people who would see only my white face; and cynical others who would see and try to make use of my guilt. That was on them. But what was on me, my responsibility, was not to use people in some confused subconscious drive to redeem myself. Wasn’t that just another form of racism?
The light changed and I pulled out, driving past the man’s rigid back, past other folks, women, mostly, standing on corners waiting for busses, looking at me in my car as centuries of serfs had looked up at landowners on horses, their looks seeming to say, Yes, however you care to intellectualize it, you are just another racist.
It was better then, wasn’t it, that they had moved out? Better that I should never see them again.
<<>><<>>
“You know what one of my favorite movies is?”
“What?” asked Kaki.
We were up on the third floor, on the couch in the front room, looking out over the telephone wire where the white leather sneakers still hung, no more worn out, it seemed, than on the night when I’d changed my mind about Tahija and the babies living with us. The trees in the park look pale and dry. The grass needed mowing.
“The Mission.”
“Never saw it,” she said.
“It’s about Jesuits in South America, when Spain and Portugal were carving up the land. There’s this mercenary and slave trader, Rodrigo Mendoza, played by Robert DeNiro. He walks in his brother in bed with a woman he loves, and kills him. In jail he’s tormented by remorse. A Jesuit priest visits and converts him. Mendoza not only converts but decides to become a priest himself.”
“Now why is this your favorite movie?”
“Well, Robert DeNiro for one. But mainly it’s the waterfall scene. The head Jesuit is going above the falls, where the Guaraní went to escape slavery, and he takes the converted mercenary along. They have to climb up this cliff face, under, around, through the waterfalls, for like a mile.”
“Okay.”
Purrsilla padded up the stairs, appraised the possibilities, and jumped into Kaki’s lap.
“Here’s the amazing thing. Mendoza’s hauling behind him, up this cliff, a full suit of body armor, his old body armor, see — helmet, shoulder pads, boots, all that — dragging it about thirty feet behind him by a rope tied around his chest.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. So they get to the top of the cliff, the Jesuit first, Mendoza trailing, with his armor dangling over the cliff, swinging in the air, pulling him backward, so you think it might just yank him back over the edge. A Guaraní man, maybe the chief, embraces the Jesuit, but when he sees the former slave trader he starts yelling, because not only did this Spaniard terrorize the tribe for years, he captured and enslaved the man’s own mother. We find that out later.”
“Good plot. So what does the man do?”
I scratched behind Purrsilla’s ears.
“Well, he takes this machete-type knife and heads for DeNiro, with the Jesuit explaining something in the native language. Or maybe he explains it first and then the man gets out the knife. I forget.”
“So what happens?”
“The man walks past DeNiro and looks over the cliff. He says something — the Jesuit translating — about Christ and forgiveness, then he cuts the rope. He cuts through it and the armor crashes down all the long long way they’ve just climbed, and sinks into the river.”
“He forgives him.”
“Yeah.”
“So why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.” I picked Purrsilla up and squeezed her and put her back down. “Tahija will be seventeen next month.”
“On the 8th. If we had her address we could mail her a card.”
“They don’t have addresses on Palethorpe!”
“Of course they do.”
Twilight had come as we spoke. The white sneakers were shadows now. “We said we’d be her legal guardians until she turned eighteen.”
“It was her choice to move out,” Kaki said. “Is this the suit of body armor you’re dragging up the cliff?”
I went for some tissue and came back blowing my nose. “Oh what do you Lutherans know about guilt.”
But she did know some things. I could tell that by her next question.
“Do you believe a white person living today is to blame for the crimes of the past? For things like slavery that happened before they were born?”
“Collective karma? No, I don’t think so. But I think you can choose to carry the responsibility, to sort of take on the debt.”
“Doesn’t that thinking lead you down the road to some kind of sick, egotistical martyrdom?”
“Or maybe to some kind of healthy, spiritual martyrdom?”
“And how would you know the difference?”
“Good question. I think if you’re miserable, it’s probably the first kind.”
“And if it’s the second kind?” she asked.
“Um, you radiate peace and joy.”
“So, how do you feel?”
I blew my nose again, leaning into her. “Point taken. But I know one thing. All this talk about forgiveness, and self-forgiveness, self-acceptance . . . I know they’re steppingstones on the way to emotional health. But I think there’s also humility, and patience, and self-awareness. I think you can’t just turn around and cut the rope your own self. That’s not forgiveness; it’s evasion, escape. No, someone has to come and cut the rope for you. Someone who wants to cut it, who can’t stand the idea of that weight, that burden, on you, on anyone.”
“But who?”
“Well,” I stood up and went to the window. The lamps in the park had come on. “When I look back on all the mistakes I made, all the anger when love was called for, all the failures to open to another’s humanity — and not just here with Tahija and Lamarr, there’s other failures, things I haven’t told you about, from way back in middle school — when I look on those and past those into American history, it seems like it can’t be just one person cutting one rope.”
“No?”
“It has to be millions and millions of opening hearts boldly, bravely forgiving, when nobody would blame them for doing otherwise. I mean, who would have blamed the chief for killing the man who kidnapped his mother? Except oh, what power, what peace when he strides past hatred and bitterness and vengeance and slashes that rope with one stroke.”
**“And what relief for DeNiro.”
“To be sure.” I sat back down with her.
“But if it’s not one person forgiving another, how will you know, how will you feel it, when the armor’s been cut away?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “You just do, the universe just shifts.”
“And how do you know it hasn’t already shifted? That the armor isn’t laying rusting on the bottom of the river? I mean, we’ve had the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Junior preaching brotherly love, peace, non-violence. I come back to my worry about unhealthy guilt.”
“But how can there be forgiveness,” I asked, “before there’s been the apology, or even an admission of wrongdoing?”
“You mean, the chief can’t cut the rope if DeNiro doesn’t climb the cliff?”
“You’re getting pretty good at extending those metaphors.”
“Thank you,” she said.
We sat thinking about our extended metaphor as night came on and the empty quiet in the house grew emptier.
copyright 2009 E.K. Gordon
Worcester State Hospital March 18
[At the reading, I left out a few paragraphs that I thought were too dense and too hard to hear. Maybe I just didn't want to alientate people....anyway, they're starred here.]
This first long excerpt is from Tahija Elison's in-progress autobiography, "My Life as I Know It"
It was a calm night. I felt as if I didn’t have a worry in the world. I was sitting on my bed reading a book when all of a sudden I began to get sharp pains in the middle of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine what was going on and why I had the pain. I waited for about twenty minutes but the pain was still there it was a constant pain and it made me begin to worry, being as I was five and a half months pregnant I began to not only worry I began to actually panic. I was thinking to myself, why was this happening. It was too early for this to be happening. Was there in fact something wrong. I quickly ran to the bathroom to see if there was any change in my body that I could see, but there was none. I then quickly called the hospital and they said for me to come into the emergency room right away. If I wasn’t afraid before I was surely afraid now not knowing what would happen next. The whole way to the hospital I was thinking, is it something wrong with me or is this a normal situation for someone in my shoes. You see I had never been in these shoes before. All of this was new to me so I was very confused and most of all scared.
The panic I was in when we got to the hospital. First they made me wait until the doctor could see me which seemed like forever, but was actually a few moments. I guess when you are afraid you lose track of time minutes begin to feel like hours and one hour seems like three. The thought of not knowing what was wrong with my babies began to make me feel sick with fear. All of the emotions that were coming over me were starting to overwhelm me. I had to know what was wrong and why.
--Tahija Ellison
Chapter 8
One night when Kaki and I were out for the evening Tahija began having pains. Lamarr was with her, and when the pain didn’t quit they phoned the emergency room and were told to come in. They took a taxi. It was false labor, but the ER doctor decided to admit her. Hospital bed-rest had begun.
When I found her room, Tahija said, not looking up from combing out her hair,
“Now what I’m supposed to do in this bed all day, Kathryn?”
“Complain, like you been doing,” I said, coming in. She had a single room with a big window looking out on another wing’s windows.
“And I can’t hardly move without those going off.”
She flicked her comb at three fetal heart monitors stacked like stereo equipment beside the bed. Sheets of continuous-feed paper zeet-zeeted out the backs and wires ran from the fronts to three belts around her belly. Each monitor beeped steadily, but no two beeped in sync, with the effect of a continuous stream of sound, like an oboe holding a high off-pitch note.
“I don’t know how you can sleep,” I said.
“I can’t, that’s just it. Something truly wrong with these people if they think I’m — “
“Hey, you named them.”
“They been had names,” she said.
On each monitor was a strip of masking tape with a name printed across it in black magic marker. Damear, Mahad, Lamarr. I tried pronouncing them.
“Not Duh,” she corrected me, “Dah” — a tired feet hitting hot water type ah.
“Damear.”
“No, Damear.”
“Okay, second syllable stressed. So the next is Mahad?”
“Close.”
She was sitting up on top of the covers, bunched pillows at her back. She had on her Stop the Violence t-shirt, the gray sweat pants, new striped socks. She scooped hair grease from a jar at her side. Her hair reached about six inches out from the top and sides of her head. Braiding it in front of me was either an unavoidable necessity or a show of trust. Of all her passingly Muslim girlfriends, Tahija was the most serious about covering — she occasionally wore even a nekob, or face veil. And here I’d come upon her with her hands up in her hair and she hadn’t missed a beat.
"So how do you decide who gets which name?”
“Okay whoever is born first, he’s Damear,” she said, head to the side, braiding fast along one strand, eyes half closed, “second, he’s Mahad, like that.”
“You going to call Lamarr Junior?”
“Better not call no son of mine Junior.”
If it wasn’t himself, walking in with a cheesesteak for two. Lamarr had schmoozed the staff into letting him sleep over in the room the night before, and appeared to be ready to hold vigil until the births, which was a good thing, given Tahija’s needle phobia. If any shots were going to happen, Lamarr had to be there.
He set his tape player on the top monitor (Damear) and sat in the one chair. I was glad to see him in a quilted shirt. I’d been wondering just how cold it had to get before a coat of some kind appeared, then I figured it out: the number concerned wasn’t in degrees, but dollars.
“How’s the telemarketing going?” I asked.
“Going great,” he said. “They walked a new client through today checking us out, like we were race horses or something. Credit card insurance. If he signs we’ll have full-time for like a month.”
I pictured the converted factory Lamarr had described: cafeteria-style tables crowded with back-to-back computers. Oddly, there were no phones. The computers dialed, moving through databases like mowers through a field. You heard a click in your headset, then a voice, often wary (they’d heard the click too), and in you jumped: icy water all day.
Reaching for her half of the cheesesteak, Tahija set off one of the monitors — a hard-edged eeeee that brought a nurse running. The nurse moved Damear’s sensor around Tahija’s belly until the mislaid heartbeat sounded again.
If it had not been a false alarm and one of the three hearts had stopped, Tahija would have been rushed to the operating room for a dangerously early c-section.
“See, I can’t hardly move,” Tahija said. “And I sure can’t use . . . that thing.”
“The bed pan? Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“Look, I’ll show you how,” I said, moving toward it.
Her laughing caused Mahad’s belt to slip, setting the middle monitor off. Lamarr did as the nurse had, then leaned in close to say,
“Mahad, get back where you supposed to be!” Sure enough, before the alarm reeled in any staff, it quit. “Better mind me,” the father-to-be said, pulling Tahija’s shirt back down.
“The only one not starting trouble is Junior,” Tahija said.
“Don’t call him Junior,” Lamarr said, eyebrows in a Mr. Spock V.
“I’ll call him what I want to call him, long as he not big-headed like you.”
Thus began the repartee that used to sound to me like bickering, but which I heard now as flirting. A good time for me to leave.
<<>><<>>
Hearts beating inside their mother, father’s voice a sonar through the amnion . . . as it should be. But other things were not as they should be. Tahija worried her children would be taken by the state as soon as they were born — stork morphed into hawk. For her and Lamarr, as for many poor families, the circling hawk was a fact of life. Because they were so young, fifteen and sixteen, and not in the care of their parents, and because three babies were due, the Department of Human Services had been alerted as soon as Tahija entered the hospital. Soon after, a relative of Lamarr’s reported her as a runaway. Inquiries were made. One of her doctors reported that he hadn’t seen any parents visiting and he suspected she was homeless. This same doctor maintained, to her and to DHS, that she was too young to handle triplets. (Tahija learned about his efforts through a nurse who had been a teen mother herself and believed, she told Tahija, that she could do it.)
The hawk was circling.
*At twelve, Tahija had become stand-in mother to her two younger sisters and baby twin brothers. From a much earlier age Lamarr had had to scramble to keep utilities on and food in the house as his parents and other family moved from crisis to crisis. Both Tahija and Lamarr had endured evictions, had been without a dollar in the house or an egg in the refrigerator. Both of them more than once had kept DHS from removing siblings as the family life raft took one wave after another. It didn’t matter if supplies were so low the survivors were at each other’s throats. The raft was better than the frigid deep. The raft was better than the auction block.
*The auction block. Had it started there? Was their fear that old, inherited like Tahija’s overcrowded bottom teeth and Lamarr’s tensile brow from men and women who rarely saw their children grown, who left for the fields before dawn knowing that when they returned after dark one more of their loved ones might have been sold away? Not that their being there could have stopped it, not that strong arms encircling or voices beseeching or hearts breaking could have stopped it.
Though I could look back on my childhood and identify families, some quite close to home, whose children should have been removed by the state, I had not grown up in the shadow of the hawk. My parents and my friends’ parents had been presumed competent, even if proven otherwise. Tahija and Lamarr were presumed incompetent, and feared they were not going to be given the chance to prove otherwise.
Chapter 11
It was the start of her twenty-eighth week. Tahija was an Olympic marathoner approaching the stadium, a pilgrim nearing Mecca, a mother carrying children to term, or as close to term as anyone can carry three.
The night before the morning she went into labor she told Lamarr she felt sick. As he had most every other night of her long confinement, he slept on folded blankets on the floor. In the morning she felt the same, and told him he should cancel his breakfast appointment with Kaki. He didn’t though, and minutes after he left the room her water broke. She told the nurses to run after him, but he was gone. And so she was alone when the hospital social worker came with her briefcase and informed her, after verifying that she was the one expecting triplets, that an anonymous caller had reported her a runaway. DHS was opening a case.
Soon after the social worker left, around noon, the contractions began, and this time the shot that had been stopping them or at least slowing them down didn’t do anything. She paged Lamarr, but he didn’t call back. He always called her back. Lamarr calling her back was the one thing she could count on. She punched in the code that meant emergency. Still no call, and no Lamarr all big and smiling in the doorway.
She called his friends and told them page him, go find him, tell him come straight to the hospital. Then she called her cousin Mia, who lived close by, and told her, “Get yourself over here quick because I’m about to have these babies.”
<<>><<>>
Temples throbbing, womb clutching and unclutching as it had been doing now for days, she lay with eyes closed remembering scenes, images from her life. . . . Lamarr in the hallway at school, his smile, Lamarr throwing her cigarettes into the street, the feeling he gave her . . . the ocean at Wildwood, how light she felt with him, the waves lifting and settling them, lifting and settling, the music of the boardwalk, close yet far, the double ferris wheel tipping . . . and then farther back in time, turning the corner of her street and seeing — what? — some pick-up truck angled like an accident across the sidewalk, three strange men changing the locks on her house. Not even asking them, not having to ask what they were doing, knowing every last thing in the house would be forfeited for back rent, and no mother arriving all loud to rescue her oldest girl’s school clothes, her pictures, her journal, her video collection, the stuffed animals arranged just so on her bed. Homeless since then, now again. Though herself a home for three.
<<>><<>>
Lamarr was eating a ham and egg sandwich. Unaccountably, his faithful pager wasn’t working. Kaki sat across from him asking questions that she hoped would lead him toward more clarity about his future. Because it was his future, gosh darn it, and when was he going to wake up and smell the roses?
“Roses?”
“Appreciate life.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Do you appreciate the fact that you are about to become the father of three?”
“Yes.”
“Well what are your plans for the future?”
Lamarr’s future was a favored topic of Kaki’s. Her own father’s work ethic waited like bunched bulbs to be separated and shared. He had been a successful advertising executive. He’d raised two boys and two girls who’d gone to college and become successful in their own right — an engineer, a head nurse, a high-profile missionary, and Kaki, former middle-management executive with a 401k and some very nice suit sets to show for it. Kaki wanted Lamarr to be able to provide for his family, and long serious talks over food were somehow part of that. They talked about community college, about trade schools and training programs, about The Streets, as in — was he still running them, gambling with his life now that he was about to be a father?
Lamarr reminded her about his best friend Dimitri. Dimitri had been shot at close range, in the head. He spent most of a very long night dying.
“I sat with him,” Lamarr said.
“I know you did.”
“Sat with his mom after. I’m not about putting my mom through that.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
<<>><<>>
She couldn’t hold them off any longer. As a nurse swabbed her belly purple she paged Lamarr one last time. Then they lifted her onto a gurney and the room that had grown smaller and smaller over the last weeks was suddenly behind her forever.
Down the corridor, past the room where the moaning woman had been, past the nurse’s station — “Good luck sweetie. You go girl. At last!” — then through another contraction to surgery and down a long, long hall, fast toward the No Admittance doors and through, into the bright lights of the operating theatre.
Mia appeared, out of breath, and received her instructions.
“Don’t look away, not once. You hear me?”
Mia nodded as a nurse fit a surgical gown over her arms.
“And make sure they’re taking pictures. Is somebody taking pictures?”
Somebody was.
“I want pictures of all this because if something goes wrong . . . Mia, you make sure they don’t leave nothing in me, like they did my mom. All right? Mia, you listening?”
Mia looked like she was going to faint. And there hadn’t even been any cutting yet.
<<>><<>>
As they were getting into her car, Kaki noticed that the month of cheesesteaks and cheesefries from the Deli across from the hospital had put some weight on Lamarr. Was he still working out? she asked. He wasn’t, he said, hadn’t had time. She suggested he start again soon. He said he thought he might.
<<>><<>>
Three female obstetricians prepped for surgery. One was from Turkey, one from China, one from New Jersey. Behind and beside the three female obstetricians stood three assisting nurses, and behind the three assisting nurses one three-person emergency post-natal team for each baby. That made fifteen doctors, nurses and technicians — all women, as Tahija had requested.
Only the anesthesiologist was a man. And he was useless anyway.
Scrubbed and prepped and ready to enter was the male doctor who had been saying for six weeks that she was too young to handle three. Well she was about to handle three, and he was about to miss his big chance to witness triplets being born — the first ever at Temple University Hospital — because she refused him admittance.
Mr. Useless gave her an epidural, which did not work. Might as well have been aspirin. She felt everything. Just like at the dentist, and did the dentist listen to her? No, he did not listen to her, either. Nobody paid her any mind, not even Lamarr. She should page him one more time because he always . . . and now . . . but. . . .
<<>><<>>
Lamarr Stevens strolled down the maternity ward hallway and turned into the room he’d been all but living in for six weeks. Then he bounced out like a handball and tore off down the hall.
“Straight down and left!” a nurse called after him. “She’s — “
<<>><<>>
She heard a doctor say, “I have the first one.”
At 1:55 PM, with Lamarr in full sprint, the name that had been on the top heart monitor settled like a butterfly onto the forehead of a healthy three-pound-eight-ounce boy. Damear, the oldest, though little Lamarr had made it nearly all the way down the birth canal and was crowning.
A nurse placed Damear beneath a heating lamp. Gloved hands reached in and lifted out Mahad, the smallest at three-pounds four-ounces. Meanwhile Lamarr, about to become big Lamarr, let them put a surgical gown on him and pushed through the crowd in time to see his namesake being pulled back from the birth canal and lifted out through a doorway he hadn’t even known was there. Little Lamarr, the big guy at three-pounds nine-ounces.
Of the births, Tahija wrote, “The happiest memory I have of being a mother is the first time I heard them cry, because the doctor told me that they might not cry because they were real premature and their lungs might not be developed enough. The second was when I held them in my arms at the same time. I knew they loved me just as much as I loved them from the little smirk they had on their face, like Joy I finally see who I was kicking all that time.”
I think this is my favorite scene to read, or a close tie with Mahddy defeating the mossy rock (0:
copyright E.K. Gordon 2009
This first long excerpt is from Tahija Elison's in-progress autobiography, "My Life as I Know It"
It was a calm night. I felt as if I didn’t have a worry in the world. I was sitting on my bed reading a book when all of a sudden I began to get sharp pains in the middle of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine what was going on and why I had the pain. I waited for about twenty minutes but the pain was still there it was a constant pain and it made me begin to worry, being as I was five and a half months pregnant I began to not only worry I began to actually panic. I was thinking to myself, why was this happening. It was too early for this to be happening. Was there in fact something wrong. I quickly ran to the bathroom to see if there was any change in my body that I could see, but there was none. I then quickly called the hospital and they said for me to come into the emergency room right away. If I wasn’t afraid before I was surely afraid now not knowing what would happen next. The whole way to the hospital I was thinking, is it something wrong with me or is this a normal situation for someone in my shoes. You see I had never been in these shoes before. All of this was new to me so I was very confused and most of all scared.
The panic I was in when we got to the hospital. First they made me wait until the doctor could see me which seemed like forever, but was actually a few moments. I guess when you are afraid you lose track of time minutes begin to feel like hours and one hour seems like three. The thought of not knowing what was wrong with my babies began to make me feel sick with fear. All of the emotions that were coming over me were starting to overwhelm me. I had to know what was wrong and why.
--Tahija Ellison
Chapter 8
One night when Kaki and I were out for the evening Tahija began having pains. Lamarr was with her, and when the pain didn’t quit they phoned the emergency room and were told to come in. They took a taxi. It was false labor, but the ER doctor decided to admit her. Hospital bed-rest had begun.
When I found her room, Tahija said, not looking up from combing out her hair,
“Now what I’m supposed to do in this bed all day, Kathryn?”
“Complain, like you been doing,” I said, coming in. She had a single room with a big window looking out on another wing’s windows.
“And I can’t hardly move without those going off.”
She flicked her comb at three fetal heart monitors stacked like stereo equipment beside the bed. Sheets of continuous-feed paper zeet-zeeted out the backs and wires ran from the fronts to three belts around her belly. Each monitor beeped steadily, but no two beeped in sync, with the effect of a continuous stream of sound, like an oboe holding a high off-pitch note.
“I don’t know how you can sleep,” I said.
“I can’t, that’s just it. Something truly wrong with these people if they think I’m — “
“Hey, you named them.”
“They been had names,” she said.
On each monitor was a strip of masking tape with a name printed across it in black magic marker. Damear, Mahad, Lamarr. I tried pronouncing them.
“Not Duh,” she corrected me, “Dah” — a tired feet hitting hot water type ah.
“Damear.”
“No, Damear.”
“Okay, second syllable stressed. So the next is Mahad?”
“Close.”
She was sitting up on top of the covers, bunched pillows at her back. She had on her Stop the Violence t-shirt, the gray sweat pants, new striped socks. She scooped hair grease from a jar at her side. Her hair reached about six inches out from the top and sides of her head. Braiding it in front of me was either an unavoidable necessity or a show of trust. Of all her passingly Muslim girlfriends, Tahija was the most serious about covering — she occasionally wore even a nekob, or face veil. And here I’d come upon her with her hands up in her hair and she hadn’t missed a beat.
"So how do you decide who gets which name?”
“Okay whoever is born first, he’s Damear,” she said, head to the side, braiding fast along one strand, eyes half closed, “second, he’s Mahad, like that.”
“You going to call Lamarr Junior?”
“Better not call no son of mine Junior.”
If it wasn’t himself, walking in with a cheesesteak for two. Lamarr had schmoozed the staff into letting him sleep over in the room the night before, and appeared to be ready to hold vigil until the births, which was a good thing, given Tahija’s needle phobia. If any shots were going to happen, Lamarr had to be there.
He set his tape player on the top monitor (Damear) and sat in the one chair. I was glad to see him in a quilted shirt. I’d been wondering just how cold it had to get before a coat of some kind appeared, then I figured it out: the number concerned wasn’t in degrees, but dollars.
“How’s the telemarketing going?” I asked.
“Going great,” he said. “They walked a new client through today checking us out, like we were race horses or something. Credit card insurance. If he signs we’ll have full-time for like a month.”
I pictured the converted factory Lamarr had described: cafeteria-style tables crowded with back-to-back computers. Oddly, there were no phones. The computers dialed, moving through databases like mowers through a field. You heard a click in your headset, then a voice, often wary (they’d heard the click too), and in you jumped: icy water all day.
Reaching for her half of the cheesesteak, Tahija set off one of the monitors — a hard-edged eeeee that brought a nurse running. The nurse moved Damear’s sensor around Tahija’s belly until the mislaid heartbeat sounded again.
If it had not been a false alarm and one of the three hearts had stopped, Tahija would have been rushed to the operating room for a dangerously early c-section.
“See, I can’t hardly move,” Tahija said. “And I sure can’t use . . . that thing.”
“The bed pan? Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“Look, I’ll show you how,” I said, moving toward it.
Her laughing caused Mahad’s belt to slip, setting the middle monitor off. Lamarr did as the nurse had, then leaned in close to say,
“Mahad, get back where you supposed to be!” Sure enough, before the alarm reeled in any staff, it quit. “Better mind me,” the father-to-be said, pulling Tahija’s shirt back down.
“The only one not starting trouble is Junior,” Tahija said.
“Don’t call him Junior,” Lamarr said, eyebrows in a Mr. Spock V.
“I’ll call him what I want to call him, long as he not big-headed like you.”
Thus began the repartee that used to sound to me like bickering, but which I heard now as flirting. A good time for me to leave.
<<>><<>>
Hearts beating inside their mother, father’s voice a sonar through the amnion . . . as it should be. But other things were not as they should be. Tahija worried her children would be taken by the state as soon as they were born — stork morphed into hawk. For her and Lamarr, as for many poor families, the circling hawk was a fact of life. Because they were so young, fifteen and sixteen, and not in the care of their parents, and because three babies were due, the Department of Human Services had been alerted as soon as Tahija entered the hospital. Soon after, a relative of Lamarr’s reported her as a runaway. Inquiries were made. One of her doctors reported that he hadn’t seen any parents visiting and he suspected she was homeless. This same doctor maintained, to her and to DHS, that she was too young to handle triplets. (Tahija learned about his efforts through a nurse who had been a teen mother herself and believed, she told Tahija, that she could do it.)
The hawk was circling.
*At twelve, Tahija had become stand-in mother to her two younger sisters and baby twin brothers. From a much earlier age Lamarr had had to scramble to keep utilities on and food in the house as his parents and other family moved from crisis to crisis. Both Tahija and Lamarr had endured evictions, had been without a dollar in the house or an egg in the refrigerator. Both of them more than once had kept DHS from removing siblings as the family life raft took one wave after another. It didn’t matter if supplies were so low the survivors were at each other’s throats. The raft was better than the frigid deep. The raft was better than the auction block.
*The auction block. Had it started there? Was their fear that old, inherited like Tahija’s overcrowded bottom teeth and Lamarr’s tensile brow from men and women who rarely saw their children grown, who left for the fields before dawn knowing that when they returned after dark one more of their loved ones might have been sold away? Not that their being there could have stopped it, not that strong arms encircling or voices beseeching or hearts breaking could have stopped it.
Though I could look back on my childhood and identify families, some quite close to home, whose children should have been removed by the state, I had not grown up in the shadow of the hawk. My parents and my friends’ parents had been presumed competent, even if proven otherwise. Tahija and Lamarr were presumed incompetent, and feared they were not going to be given the chance to prove otherwise.
Chapter 11
It was the start of her twenty-eighth week. Tahija was an Olympic marathoner approaching the stadium, a pilgrim nearing Mecca, a mother carrying children to term, or as close to term as anyone can carry three.
The night before the morning she went into labor she told Lamarr she felt sick. As he had most every other night of her long confinement, he slept on folded blankets on the floor. In the morning she felt the same, and told him he should cancel his breakfast appointment with Kaki. He didn’t though, and minutes after he left the room her water broke. She told the nurses to run after him, but he was gone. And so she was alone when the hospital social worker came with her briefcase and informed her, after verifying that she was the one expecting triplets, that an anonymous caller had reported her a runaway. DHS was opening a case.
Soon after the social worker left, around noon, the contractions began, and this time the shot that had been stopping them or at least slowing them down didn’t do anything. She paged Lamarr, but he didn’t call back. He always called her back. Lamarr calling her back was the one thing she could count on. She punched in the code that meant emergency. Still no call, and no Lamarr all big and smiling in the doorway.
She called his friends and told them page him, go find him, tell him come straight to the hospital. Then she called her cousin Mia, who lived close by, and told her, “Get yourself over here quick because I’m about to have these babies.”
<<>><<>>
Temples throbbing, womb clutching and unclutching as it had been doing now for days, she lay with eyes closed remembering scenes, images from her life. . . . Lamarr in the hallway at school, his smile, Lamarr throwing her cigarettes into the street, the feeling he gave her . . . the ocean at Wildwood, how light she felt with him, the waves lifting and settling them, lifting and settling, the music of the boardwalk, close yet far, the double ferris wheel tipping . . . and then farther back in time, turning the corner of her street and seeing — what? — some pick-up truck angled like an accident across the sidewalk, three strange men changing the locks on her house. Not even asking them, not having to ask what they were doing, knowing every last thing in the house would be forfeited for back rent, and no mother arriving all loud to rescue her oldest girl’s school clothes, her pictures, her journal, her video collection, the stuffed animals arranged just so on her bed. Homeless since then, now again. Though herself a home for three.
<<>><<>>
Lamarr was eating a ham and egg sandwich. Unaccountably, his faithful pager wasn’t working. Kaki sat across from him asking questions that she hoped would lead him toward more clarity about his future. Because it was his future, gosh darn it, and when was he going to wake up and smell the roses?
“Roses?”
“Appreciate life.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Do you appreciate the fact that you are about to become the father of three?”
“Yes.”
“Well what are your plans for the future?”
Lamarr’s future was a favored topic of Kaki’s. Her own father’s work ethic waited like bunched bulbs to be separated and shared. He had been a successful advertising executive. He’d raised two boys and two girls who’d gone to college and become successful in their own right — an engineer, a head nurse, a high-profile missionary, and Kaki, former middle-management executive with a 401k and some very nice suit sets to show for it. Kaki wanted Lamarr to be able to provide for his family, and long serious talks over food were somehow part of that. They talked about community college, about trade schools and training programs, about The Streets, as in — was he still running them, gambling with his life now that he was about to be a father?
Lamarr reminded her about his best friend Dimitri. Dimitri had been shot at close range, in the head. He spent most of a very long night dying.
“I sat with him,” Lamarr said.
“I know you did.”
“Sat with his mom after. I’m not about putting my mom through that.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
<<>><<>>
She couldn’t hold them off any longer. As a nurse swabbed her belly purple she paged Lamarr one last time. Then they lifted her onto a gurney and the room that had grown smaller and smaller over the last weeks was suddenly behind her forever.
Down the corridor, past the room where the moaning woman had been, past the nurse’s station — “Good luck sweetie. You go girl. At last!” — then through another contraction to surgery and down a long, long hall, fast toward the No Admittance doors and through, into the bright lights of the operating theatre.
Mia appeared, out of breath, and received her instructions.
“Don’t look away, not once. You hear me?”
Mia nodded as a nurse fit a surgical gown over her arms.
“And make sure they’re taking pictures. Is somebody taking pictures?”
Somebody was.
“I want pictures of all this because if something goes wrong . . . Mia, you make sure they don’t leave nothing in me, like they did my mom. All right? Mia, you listening?”
Mia looked like she was going to faint. And there hadn’t even been any cutting yet.
<<>><<>>
As they were getting into her car, Kaki noticed that the month of cheesesteaks and cheesefries from the Deli across from the hospital had put some weight on Lamarr. Was he still working out? she asked. He wasn’t, he said, hadn’t had time. She suggested he start again soon. He said he thought he might.
<<>><<>>
Three female obstetricians prepped for surgery. One was from Turkey, one from China, one from New Jersey. Behind and beside the three female obstetricians stood three assisting nurses, and behind the three assisting nurses one three-person emergency post-natal team for each baby. That made fifteen doctors, nurses and technicians — all women, as Tahija had requested.
Only the anesthesiologist was a man. And he was useless anyway.
Scrubbed and prepped and ready to enter was the male doctor who had been saying for six weeks that she was too young to handle three. Well she was about to handle three, and he was about to miss his big chance to witness triplets being born — the first ever at Temple University Hospital — because she refused him admittance.
Mr. Useless gave her an epidural, which did not work. Might as well have been aspirin. She felt everything. Just like at the dentist, and did the dentist listen to her? No, he did not listen to her, either. Nobody paid her any mind, not even Lamarr. She should page him one more time because he always . . . and now . . . but. . . .
<<>><<>>
Lamarr Stevens strolled down the maternity ward hallway and turned into the room he’d been all but living in for six weeks. Then he bounced out like a handball and tore off down the hall.
“Straight down and left!” a nurse called after him. “She’s — “
<<>><<>>
She heard a doctor say, “I have the first one.”
At 1:55 PM, with Lamarr in full sprint, the name that had been on the top heart monitor settled like a butterfly onto the forehead of a healthy three-pound-eight-ounce boy. Damear, the oldest, though little Lamarr had made it nearly all the way down the birth canal and was crowning.
A nurse placed Damear beneath a heating lamp. Gloved hands reached in and lifted out Mahad, the smallest at three-pounds four-ounces. Meanwhile Lamarr, about to become big Lamarr, let them put a surgical gown on him and pushed through the crowd in time to see his namesake being pulled back from the birth canal and lifted out through a doorway he hadn’t even known was there. Little Lamarr, the big guy at three-pounds nine-ounces.
Of the births, Tahija wrote, “The happiest memory I have of being a mother is the first time I heard them cry, because the doctor told me that they might not cry because they were real premature and their lungs might not be developed enough. The second was when I held them in my arms at the same time. I knew they loved me just as much as I loved them from the little smirk they had on their face, like Joy I finally see who I was kicking all that time.”
I think this is my favorite scene to read, or a close tie with Mahddy defeating the mossy rock (0:
copyright E.K. Gordon 2009
Temple University, 2/26
This is most of what I read at Temple. I changed my mind last minute. Had planned to read the harder to take section about Mahddy being failure to thrive. This seemed to work. The chapter starts with an excerpt from a written interview Tahija agreed to do while I was working on the book.
The only problem I had was I didn’t want them held all day because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if they were too spoiled. Kathryn felt that they should be held more but if she sat and held them all day she would need a maid to cook and clean and she would need a nanny to watch the baby for herself to get washed. It was three of them not one which is totally different you can’t even compare the two situations. I think we had a difference of opinion.
--Tahija Ellison, from the interview
Chapter 18
I overheard two crossing guards at a corner talking. They were neighborhood women, forty-something, dressed in uniform blue, patent-leather billed caps. They were talking about a woman who was pushing a baby stroller across the street.
“That baby’s too young to be outdoors,” said one crossing guard, an African American woman.
“No, he’s not,” said the other crossing guard, an Italian-American woman.
“Sure he is.”
"But he’s six months old, if he’s a day.”
“That’s right,” said the other, “too young to be out in this pneumonia weather.”
They were not arguing, merely stating what each took to be commonly accepted facts.
It’s healthy for babies to get out into the fresh air, the colder the better, toughens them up. It’s unhealthy for babies to be out in the air, especially cold air.
Put that baby down, you’ll spoil him! You can’t hold a baby too much!
Don’t you cut your eyes at me. Look at me when I’m talking to you.
You don’t have to call me “miss,” just call me by my name. Child, did I hear you call that lady by her name? Didn’t I teach you better?
Child-rearing “facts” and philosophies vary greatly by culture and class. I knew that, in my head; now my heart was about to find it out.
By mid-summer Damear and Lamarr were crawling quite a lot, and fast — up on their toes, Lamarr preferring reverse. Mahad would get in position and watch them, rocking, revving the engine. I felt they needed to crawl and explore their world, and that that world needed to become gradually larger. Pots and pans from the kitchen cabinets, books from the bookshelf, Mommy’s stuffed animals (Tweetie Bird presided over a whole menagerie now), phones, the interesting space beneath Kaki’s desk, and every little thing that was too big to fit into a mouth — all these should be their domain, I felt . . . the whole (baby-proofed) house, with a good stretch every day in the park, also their domain, as was the whole natural world, the sky especially, the wind and the sun. I wanted them to know how rich they were.
There were cultural differences here, to be sure. But Tahija and I were by temperament on opposite ends of the range of those differences: me way down at one end with Meet Every Need; she at the other end of They don’t have needs I don’t say they have.
She said spoil as if it were a disease, and me a carrier.
I learned that not everyone considered spoiling as awful as did Tahija. I learned this from our neighbor Miss Tina. Miss Tina worked days and watched her granddaughter Kayla evenings. Sometimes she sat on her stoop with the four-year-old in her lap, and I’d sit on mine (usually babyless). One day I asked her if she wasn’t worried about, you know, spoiling the girl.
Miss Tina laughed and rocked backward, hands in the air. “Oh I spoil her something terrible, I admit it, I’m to blame.”
A woman after my own heart. I laughed with her, relieved. But grandmothers have rights caregivers don’t, and how did the girl’s mother feel? Was she just putting up with the spoiling until she could get her own place and move out? Was Tahija?
Tahija paced the length of the livingroom reading from the book in her hands. After a convention-defying daredevil dive, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had just woken up to find himself in an academy for spiritually minded gulls.
“Is he dead or what?” Tahija asked.
“Keep reading,” Kaki said. She sat cross-legged on the chair, happy, with the autumn chill, to be back in her flannel shirts. She was also very happy to have us together in the livingroom reading. In her world it’s what families did, and what she wanted more than anything, I think, was to be part of a family. She would have liked Lamarr to be sitting there with us, as when we watched movies together, but lately he’d been needed to watch his nieces while his sister worked.
Tahija read on. Jonathan, it turned out, had gone from rebel to sage. He taught gulls to fly like they’d never flown before. He taught them that flying was less about height and speed than faith and fearlessness.
Upstairs, Damear started crying. He’d been weaned for some time, but still seemed not quite to have given up. Tahija stopped her pacing at the foot of the stairs.
“Da-mear!”
Louder crying.
“Maybe he needs something,” Kaki suggested.
“I fed them, changed them. What’s he got to be all falling out about? He’s playing me.” She read on over his crying then finally marched up the stairs, coming down a moment later with Damear wrapped and quiet in a blanket.
“See?” she said. “Soon as I picked him up, he stopped crying. Means he’s spoiled. He didn’t need a thing, not one thing.”
“Maybe he needed to be held,” I suggested, “and now that he has it — “
“He stopped crying,” Kaki finished.
Tahija got comfortable in the rocker. His eyes reflecting the lamplight, Damear gazed out at us from the billows of his mother’s t-shirt, not the least interested in Kaki or me.
“Got her all to yourself now, don’t ya?” I said. He smiled, the tears of a moment before still wet on his cheeks.
“Spoiled rot-ten,” Tahija said gently. Finding her page, she went on reading and read straight through to the end of the book, stopping only to threaten to write the author and complain about a plot turn that simply made no sense.
Fighting sleep as long as he could, Damear listened to her voice as if to the music of the spheres.
Big Lamarr taught me something about spoiling. He and I had little Lamarr and Damear in for their check-up, the first that Tahija had let them go to without her. We were sitting in the waiting room practicing the waiting yoga, when time for the 2:00 bottle came around. Tahija had packed bottles in the diaper bag. Big Lamarr removed one and held it where little Lamarr, in my lap, could see it. Damear was asleep in his lap.
Little Lamarr began to whine and reach for the bottle.
“That won’t work,” Lamarr said to him. “So you might as well stop.”
Uh-oh, I thought, here comes major crying and everyone looking at us. But we didn’t have crying. Little Lamarr just sat very straight in my lap concentrating on the bottle as big Lamarr read a car magazine.
“Saturn’s getting to be a good buy,” he said.
“Yeah?” I was concentrating on the bottle too.
“Engine’s made by Toyota.”
“I didn’t know that.”
I thought it extraordinary. Babies in my family would have been screaming bloody murder by then. But little Lamarr just sat looking at the bottle, glancing from time to time at his dad’s face. When he started to let out a little whine Lamarr said “Ah-ah-ah,” and he stopped.
The spoiled baby in me was scream-thinking, “Oh give it to him for God’s sake!”
In a few minutes, he did. Little Lamarr accepted the bottle, examined it, then leaned back against me with a sigh and drank.
“See?” said dad. “Waiting works, crying doesn’t.”
One night Mahddy wakes with a nightmare. Damear wakes too and stands up in his crib, watching as both parents calm and comfort Mahddy.
“Usually Mear would cry,” Tahija said, telling me about it the next morning.
“Being spoiled,” I said. I was at the sink doing dishes, Tahija leaning chin in her hands on the countertop.
“Right. He’d cry, or start that laughing like he does, you know. Trying to play you, get you to pick him up. But last night he just stands there in the crib, and stares.”
“He knows Mahd needs you more.”
“Yeah. Mahd wouldn’t stop screaming, not until I held him against my heart — right here.”
She showed me, though I knew where her heart was. Hadn’t I seen it enlarging daily?
“And Lamarr’s going to say he’s spoilt,” she continued. “But that’s not spoilt.”
“No. You comforted him.”
“He needed it,” she said.
“And when he got it — ”
“He stopped crying.”
How lovely the mixing bowl in my hands seemed then as I went around it with a sponge. Lamarr and Tahija’s ways, my ways, methods passed to us along questionable routes, through landscapes twisted by hardship and oppression, were mixing in this house, in talks in the kitchen, under the backyard clothesline, in the nursery. We were changing each other, and it was good.
The only problem I had was I didn’t want them held all day because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if they were too spoiled. Kathryn felt that they should be held more but if she sat and held them all day she would need a maid to cook and clean and she would need a nanny to watch the baby for herself to get washed. It was three of them not one which is totally different you can’t even compare the two situations. I think we had a difference of opinion.
--Tahija Ellison, from the interview
Chapter 18
I overheard two crossing guards at a corner talking. They were neighborhood women, forty-something, dressed in uniform blue, patent-leather billed caps. They were talking about a woman who was pushing a baby stroller across the street.
“That baby’s too young to be outdoors,” said one crossing guard, an African American woman.
“No, he’s not,” said the other crossing guard, an Italian-American woman.
“Sure he is.”
"But he’s six months old, if he’s a day.”
“That’s right,” said the other, “too young to be out in this pneumonia weather.”
They were not arguing, merely stating what each took to be commonly accepted facts.
It’s healthy for babies to get out into the fresh air, the colder the better, toughens them up. It’s unhealthy for babies to be out in the air, especially cold air.
Put that baby down, you’ll spoil him! You can’t hold a baby too much!
Don’t you cut your eyes at me. Look at me when I’m talking to you.
You don’t have to call me “miss,” just call me by my name. Child, did I hear you call that lady by her name? Didn’t I teach you better?
Child-rearing “facts” and philosophies vary greatly by culture and class. I knew that, in my head; now my heart was about to find it out.
By mid-summer Damear and Lamarr were crawling quite a lot, and fast — up on their toes, Lamarr preferring reverse. Mahad would get in position and watch them, rocking, revving the engine. I felt they needed to crawl and explore their world, and that that world needed to become gradually larger. Pots and pans from the kitchen cabinets, books from the bookshelf, Mommy’s stuffed animals (Tweetie Bird presided over a whole menagerie now), phones, the interesting space beneath Kaki’s desk, and every little thing that was too big to fit into a mouth — all these should be their domain, I felt . . . the whole (baby-proofed) house, with a good stretch every day in the park, also their domain, as was the whole natural world, the sky especially, the wind and the sun. I wanted them to know how rich they were.
There were cultural differences here, to be sure. But Tahija and I were by temperament on opposite ends of the range of those differences: me way down at one end with Meet Every Need; she at the other end of They don’t have needs I don’t say they have.
She said spoil as if it were a disease, and me a carrier.
I learned that not everyone considered spoiling as awful as did Tahija. I learned this from our neighbor Miss Tina. Miss Tina worked days and watched her granddaughter Kayla evenings. Sometimes she sat on her stoop with the four-year-old in her lap, and I’d sit on mine (usually babyless). One day I asked her if she wasn’t worried about, you know, spoiling the girl.
Miss Tina laughed and rocked backward, hands in the air. “Oh I spoil her something terrible, I admit it, I’m to blame.”
A woman after my own heart. I laughed with her, relieved. But grandmothers have rights caregivers don’t, and how did the girl’s mother feel? Was she just putting up with the spoiling until she could get her own place and move out? Was Tahija?
Tahija paced the length of the livingroom reading from the book in her hands. After a convention-defying daredevil dive, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had just woken up to find himself in an academy for spiritually minded gulls.
“Is he dead or what?” Tahija asked.
“Keep reading,” Kaki said. She sat cross-legged on the chair, happy, with the autumn chill, to be back in her flannel shirts. She was also very happy to have us together in the livingroom reading. In her world it’s what families did, and what she wanted more than anything, I think, was to be part of a family. She would have liked Lamarr to be sitting there with us, as when we watched movies together, but lately he’d been needed to watch his nieces while his sister worked.
Tahija read on. Jonathan, it turned out, had gone from rebel to sage. He taught gulls to fly like they’d never flown before. He taught them that flying was less about height and speed than faith and fearlessness.
Upstairs, Damear started crying. He’d been weaned for some time, but still seemed not quite to have given up. Tahija stopped her pacing at the foot of the stairs.
“Da-mear!”
Louder crying.
“Maybe he needs something,” Kaki suggested.
“I fed them, changed them. What’s he got to be all falling out about? He’s playing me.” She read on over his crying then finally marched up the stairs, coming down a moment later with Damear wrapped and quiet in a blanket.
“See?” she said. “Soon as I picked him up, he stopped crying. Means he’s spoiled. He didn’t need a thing, not one thing.”
“Maybe he needed to be held,” I suggested, “and now that he has it — “
“He stopped crying,” Kaki finished.
Tahija got comfortable in the rocker. His eyes reflecting the lamplight, Damear gazed out at us from the billows of his mother’s t-shirt, not the least interested in Kaki or me.
“Got her all to yourself now, don’t ya?” I said. He smiled, the tears of a moment before still wet on his cheeks.
“Spoiled rot-ten,” Tahija said gently. Finding her page, she went on reading and read straight through to the end of the book, stopping only to threaten to write the author and complain about a plot turn that simply made no sense.
Fighting sleep as long as he could, Damear listened to her voice as if to the music of the spheres.
Big Lamarr taught me something about spoiling. He and I had little Lamarr and Damear in for their check-up, the first that Tahija had let them go to without her. We were sitting in the waiting room practicing the waiting yoga, when time for the 2:00 bottle came around. Tahija had packed bottles in the diaper bag. Big Lamarr removed one and held it where little Lamarr, in my lap, could see it. Damear was asleep in his lap.
Little Lamarr began to whine and reach for the bottle.
“That won’t work,” Lamarr said to him. “So you might as well stop.”
Uh-oh, I thought, here comes major crying and everyone looking at us. But we didn’t have crying. Little Lamarr just sat very straight in my lap concentrating on the bottle as big Lamarr read a car magazine.
“Saturn’s getting to be a good buy,” he said.
“Yeah?” I was concentrating on the bottle too.
“Engine’s made by Toyota.”
“I didn’t know that.”
I thought it extraordinary. Babies in my family would have been screaming bloody murder by then. But little Lamarr just sat looking at the bottle, glancing from time to time at his dad’s face. When he started to let out a little whine Lamarr said “Ah-ah-ah,” and he stopped.
The spoiled baby in me was scream-thinking, “Oh give it to him for God’s sake!”
In a few minutes, he did. Little Lamarr accepted the bottle, examined it, then leaned back against me with a sigh and drank.
“See?” said dad. “Waiting works, crying doesn’t.”
One night Mahddy wakes with a nightmare. Damear wakes too and stands up in his crib, watching as both parents calm and comfort Mahddy.
“Usually Mear would cry,” Tahija said, telling me about it the next morning.
“Being spoiled,” I said. I was at the sink doing dishes, Tahija leaning chin in her hands on the countertop.
“Right. He’d cry, or start that laughing like he does, you know. Trying to play you, get you to pick him up. But last night he just stands there in the crib, and stares.”
“He knows Mahd needs you more.”
“Yeah. Mahd wouldn’t stop screaming, not until I held him against my heart — right here.”
She showed me, though I knew where her heart was. Hadn’t I seen it enlarging daily?
“And Lamarr’s going to say he’s spoilt,” she continued. “But that’s not spoilt.”
“No. You comforted him.”
“He needed it,” she said.
“And when he got it — ”
“He stopped crying.”
How lovely the mixing bowl in my hands seemed then as I went around it with a sponge. Lamarr and Tahija’s ways, my ways, methods passed to us along questionable routes, through landscapes twisted by hardship and oppression, were mixing in this house, in talks in the kitchen, under the backyard clothesline, in the nursery. We were changing each other, and it was good.
from Foulkeways Reading
I liked going to college, but first of all I couldn’t afford it, and second of all I had to go to work to support my household.
--from an interview with Tahija Elison
Chapter 32
A few times that summer and fall I drove past the small paved park near Palethorpe longing for a glimpse of the triplets; they were never there. A friend of Kaki’s told her about a law giving visitation rights to any adult in whose house a child had resided for a year or more. We appreciated this validation of our relationship to them, but didn’t want to demand visitation rights. It was hard to imagine Tahija cooperating, and I think, too, we were afraid of making ourselves vulnerable again. The boys were young, they would forget us. It was better this way.
That New Year’s Eve, the last of the millennium, we were surprised by a call from Miss Millie Ellison wishing us, “you girls,” as she always called us, happy New Year. A few days later Diane Ellison called to see how we were doing and say hi. We hadn’t spoken since the fast, but it felt as if we’d been playing roles then, and now we could play ourselves.
I told her I was worried about Tahija. “You know welfare cut her off.” I’d heard it from Stefanie, who came still for reading practice. I dreaded the thought of Miss Congeniality coming up against a new roll-cutting caseworker without us watching her back. Not that she didn’t know the system much better than Kaki or I knew it; it was just that she had this bad habit of assuming herself worthy of a basic level of respect.
“She told me,” Diane said. “It’s hard times all around. They’ll be alright. She’s been acting grown so long, let her find out how hard it is.”
And if it was too hard? I’d seen enough of the walking wounded to know the answer to that.
“But three two year olds!” I said. “What if it’s all too much?”
Diane answered with words I had heard many times from Tahija. “Well then that’s on her.”
And if she wasn’t in our house, it wouldn’t be on us? On me?
I’d known Lamarr walked a dangerous edge, being a young black man in an America whose leadership is just now apologizing for its failure to outlaw lynching. But as I woke up more and more to reality, I began to see the edge Tahija walked. I had thought it was poverty. Though poverty, to be sure, is a cold, gusting wind that buffets her non-stop, the edge she walks isn’t poverty. God help her, I fear it’s insanity. Over the years, Tahija would be diagnosed with depression, paranoia, bi-polar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She agrees with the last diagnosis and is seeing a psychiatrist regularly.
Walk with her. It’s what I had been guided by. But how far, for how long, to where?
Once, standing beneath a cherry tree in the park, I was asked by a little girl to give her a boost up. I made a stirrup of my hands and she stepped into it, grasping the forked trunk. Just then something in my lower back gave, but I wasn’t about to drop her. I held her until she’d found her foothold.
Did I pull back too soon from Tahija’s higher-stakes climb? Was Palethorpe a dangerous fall, or the lower branches of a long climb? When we said yes to her living with us, and yes to legal guardianship, Kaki Nelsen and I took on the responsibility of asking such questions, and, if they couldn’t be answered, of carrying them with us forever.
<<>><<>>
In early spring Millie Ellison surprised us with another phone call inviting us to family and friends day at her church. We accepted gratefully.
The appointed Sunday was a rainy day. We’d given up the car, and so went by bus to Millie’s church, which was about eighteen blocks west of Palethorpe. We wore our best — dresses, hose, and heels, my shortish hair blow-dried into something semi-feminine, Kaki’s held back by side barrettes.
Once in the church, we had trouble finding Millie Ellison because the white-gloved woman usher who greeted us knew her as Miss Mary. When we had that clarified and she was leading us up the middle aisle — all the way up, to the second row — I worried she might think us presumptuous, using the family name as we had. And did Mary Millicent Ellison even want us to sit with her so far up? Did we appear to be expecting special treatment? Were all guests led to their seats in this way?
We were reminded of the mindfulness and humility members of the dominant majority need when we accept invitations into the places that have been havens from us, and which, like the African Methodist Evangelical (AME) Church, arose in response to segregation and exclusion. And if we should find ourselves excluded, for a time, or in some cases forever, we can choose to see that as payback or we can take it as a test — an opportunity to show that yes, despite our dismal record, we from the excluding class can bear up under a little exclusion. Humility goes a long way, and opens doors in what had appeared to be walls.
When we found Millie Ellison, Miss Mary, near the front, it seemed appropriate to sit in her row, but at the outside end. We admired her beautiful hat (she’s known for them) and greeted Diane and her husband Jules. Little Diane, who was close to Tahija and had stayed over at the house a few times, was happy to see us. We also knew and greeted the four-year-old twin boys — the triplet’s uncles.
“This does feel a little like family,” Kaki whispered to me.
“I guess we earned it,” I whispered back, speaking not out of pride so much as fatigue. When we met her Tahija’s life was an island in the path of a hurricane, and we had stayed.
The men’s choir processed slowly up the center aisle, its resonant cadence raising a “that’s all right” from several in the congregation. As the pews filled and the women’s choir entered singing, “I will glor-i-fy the name of the Lord,” Kaki and I looked often to the back of the church hoping to see the faces we knew so well.
Even without her great-granddaughter Tahija, born Dianna, and her great-great-grandchildren Damear Donovan, Mahad Dante and Lamarr Lamont, Miss Mary Millicent Ellison had more members of her family in attendance that day than any other family in her large congregation. Kaki and I had supposed we were there as friends on this “Family and Friends” day, but when the minister called for the Ellison family, Millie gestured for us to follow her into the center aisle. And so, with scores of others, we promenaded past the altar to be counted among four generations of the Ellison family.
It was a moment and a day I will treasure forever.
<<>><<>>
The first time I saw Tahija again was at the post office near Palethorpe. We’d talked by phone a few times, and Lamarr had been over (with nary a triplet). I was working full time on the magazine and most days walked or biked to the post office to pick up submissions and subscription orders.
So one day on the phone I suggested to Tahija that we meet there, and she said, “We can,” and we did.
An alley ran behind Palethorpe’s few houses and ended alongside the post office. Tahija was waiting there with Stefanie. She wore her biege outergarment, black kemar pinned tightly under her chin. It had been six months since I’d seen her, two years since we’d first met.
We hugged, and stood in the alley catching up.
Big Lamarr had been sick, back and forth to the emergency room, and had finally been diagnosed with Type II, or adult-onset, diabetes. The doctors couldn’t get it under control. He allowed himself to be admitted to the hospital, where, with his sugar levels perilously high they had put him on an insulin drip. In the middle of the night his insulin level crashed and he woke with every muscle in his body paralysed. A nurse who noticed tears on his cheeks may have saved his life.
This did permanent damage to his liver, and still nothing seemed to work to keep his levels stable. One day of manual labor took him three days to recover from. And the pay was so low after taxes and mandatory transportation costs (you were required to take the company van to work), seeing his paycheck made him feel, Tahija told me, as if he’d been raped. His months at Phame helped him secure a good factory job, but he passed out one day while operating a metal-stamping machine. His supervisor liked him (nearly everybody does), but said he couldn’t keep him on without a doctor’s note verifying that he was fit to work around heavy equipment. Lamarr’s doctor would not sign such a note. He encouraged him to apply for Social Security Disability Insurance. He did several times and was rejected each time.
Tahija was not well either. Heavy hemorrhaging and pain, caused by her polycystic ovarian syndrome, had led two different doctors to recommend hysterectomy. I phoned the mother of the boy whose nanny I’d been — she was a gynecologist now — and she told me she had never heard of a hysterectomy being recommended for that condition in a woman so young.
“That’s what they said,” Tahija insisted when I asked her. “And they said I need to stay off my feet, told me I can’t work. But I have to work.”
After moving out, she had managed to complete fall-term classes. Then her benefits had been cut, because she’d changed districts, she was told. It took two months to get the paperwork in place, and when she did the new caseworker informed her that she had to leave school and find full-time work if she wanted to keep benefits. She began a nine-to-five training program that mainly involved designing a resume. Design it to death, I thought, still it wasn’t going to have a high school diploma on it, or the AA degree that had been within reach, or any job other than the flower-shop job she’d had in ninth grade.
This pulling her from school seemed to me symbolic of so much, and frighteningly arbitrary. The new act behind TANF dictated that states could allow up to 20 percent of those on welfare to count college as work-related training. But which 20 percent? Didn’t an enrolled sixteen-year-old with two semesters of good grades behind her and three children to feed look like a good bet? Apparently not. And when I later saw studies indicating that education and other discretionary benefits, such as travel stipends, were given more to white welfare recipients than to black, I was angry, but not surprised. All along my walk with Tahija I had seen how the broken glass of racist bias littered her already difficult path. I had heard about the caseworker who said — the first words out of her mouth when Tahija sat down in her cubicle —
“Three? You must be one of those girls can’t keep her legs closed.” And then there was the one who cut off her cash benefits and neglected to inform her that the family still qualified for food stamps.
A five-year entitlement didn’t entitle you to anything more, Tahija has said, than “five years of being hassled down.” I could see the effects of it on her face, in her eyes. There was a deadness to them. The whites were veined with red, and the dark rings were back, wider and lined. She joked that no one at her job believed she had just turned eighteen. She could have passed for thirty.
Tahija wasn’t philosophical or political about having to leave college. She was realistic. “I liked going to college,” she wrote, “but first of all I couldn’t afford it, and second of all I had to go to work to support my household.” She’d keep her textbooks, and later encourage friends to enroll, coaching them through registration and placement tests. But it just wasn’t possible for her.
I took her out for a belated birthday dinner and heard about her new job in an elementary school cafeteria. She liked it. One of the women there was truly psychic, the scary supervisor turned out to be softhearted, and the kids were adorable. She told me about a little freckle-faced boy who asked for a peanut butter sandwich every day.
“I mean every day, Kathryn. Now you know those sandwiches, how we make them is we lay out the bread when it’s frozen and spread peanut butter on, going down the row.”
“Easier that way,” I said.
“Right. But the bread thaws out all soggy and them sandwiches nasty. So I tell him,
I say, try something else baby. But he won’t.”
“Hardheaded.”
“Exactly.”
Tahija worrying what this hardheaded little white boy ate made me so mad. What was going on in her that nurturance flowed so easily in his direction? What was going on in this country that a young, intelligent black woman in poor, rapidly deteriorating health was commuting three hours a day, gone from can’t-see to can’t-see, as the slaves used to say, in order to feed the well-fed children of white women while her own children languished, underfed, underweight, under the weight of decades of policies that moved the jobs to the suburbs while segregating hourly wage workers in the inner cities.
If I sound angry, I am. Head Start’s few incredibly effective federal dollars threatened by “restructuring.” Library funding slashed all over, by 50% in Pennsylvania, when so often the library was the only safe the kids in my neighborhood could go after school. College grants and loan programs slashed, rungs in the ladder out of working poverty cut away by people who took college and grad school as givens, and don’t seem to intend to give anything back. Making cuts in not enough leads to less than not enough, and less than not enough has a face for me now. Three faces.
<<>><<>>
When the school year ended, and with it her cafeteria job, Tahija found and enrolled in one of the for-profit training programs springing up in the wake of welfare reform. In eight weeks, the brochure promised, she could become a Certified Nurse’s Aid. Then she’d be able to earn the state-mandated minimum for CNA’s — $11.00 per hour. While still in this program, she found work through a job fair at a nursing home in the suburbs. The starting pay was only $6 an hour, but there would be opportunities for overtime, she was told, and once she was certified the higher wage would kick in.
She woke before dawn and rode two busses out to Christian Home. She liked the work, and the residents liked her; she indulged them in small ways: a foot rub, lotion for their hands, a few minutes of listening. . . . They had so many stories, so few visitors. Though she often worked twelve-hour shifts, occasionally double shifts, because of the way the hours were allocated the promised overtime rarely showed up in her check, which hovered just under two-hundred dollars.
The day finally came for her certification examination. She called us from the new house to tell us about it. Kaki and I listened on the same phone.
She’d been very nervous. She arrived at the testing place early and waited with about ten others from her training program. She did well on both sections of the test — practical and written. Although everyone else who took the test that day failed, she passed on the first try with a near perfect score, and the one question she had missed — Kaki and I both agreed — was a judgment call, plain and simple. You might tell a resident that another resident had died, or you might not, depending.
She was so proud. I worried about a training program that managed to pass only one of its students, but I was glad she had been the one. She thought she might go into nursing, or maybe counseling, something where you helped people.
Then the blow came.
The week after the big test, at about the time she was expecting to see the higher wage boost her paycheck up over two-hundred finally, she came into work to find her name missing from the schedule. Was she fired? Laid off? No one would say. When pressed, her supervisor, a Karen, told her she simply was not Christian Home material.
Last week she was but this week she’s not?
Tahija thought it was because she was Muslim. Several times this Karen had remarked on the white kemar Tahija wore with her uniform. It seemed to me that the higher wage might have had something to do with it too. Kaki researched it and encouraged Tahija to go to legal aid and fight the firing. But Tahija was too disheartened to do it, or anything, in her own behalf. It was same-old, same-old — the strong exploiting the weak, the system outdoing her at every turn.
I had often felt that Tahija’s hopelessness and defensiveness aggravated or even caused most of her problems. If she could only be more positive, more cooperative. . . . But then a Karen came along, and her hopelessness seemed logical, her defensiveness sensible. Tahija and Lamarr operated in a dimension where gravity had a far greater force than the gravity I knew. Really, in the end, I could not know what they were going through. I could only listen when they tried to describe it; listen and resist the urge to jump into that mightiest of North American rivers, de-nial.
We tried to advocate for her at the nursing home but were stonewalled. The human resources office blocked unemployment payments for months by refusing to file the needed paperwork. This also kept the family from getting TANF benefits reinstated, since Tahija couldn’t prove she had been fired. The unemployment office launched an investigation, got nowhere, and then caught someone from human resources lying during a three-way phone call. Declaring that Tahija had been unfairly terminated, they awarded her back benefits. These were extended twice during the recession that followed September 11th.
A teacher at the CNA training program told her she had had a similar experience with the home.
“I had them two years in court,” she told Tahija, “and lost. Just forget it.”
Tahija couldn’t forget it. That day when her name had disappeared from the schedule she’d felt so betrayed. They wouldn’t even let her get her things from her locker. She sat on the stone steps of the home for a long time, crying and crying, looking out over the lawns and winding walkways she knew well. The residents liked her, they said so. She had tried so hard. She remembered washing the body of a dying woman . . . the breaths coming at longer and longer intervals, the sunken chest barely moving. The head nurse had looked in, telling her to hurry up, the family was on its way. She chose the best nightgown, slid it over the pale, thin shoulders, working the cloth down, as she’d learned to do. And when the last breath came, she was there.
She stayed a long time on those steps. All the disappointments came back to her, the abandonments, broken promises, betrayals. Security would come soon and escort her off the premises. But for now she sat. Had you been driving by you might have noticed her, a heavy-set young black woman in a white uniform, waiting for no one, expecting no ride home.
copyright 2009 E.K. Gordon
for P-Flag, 1/18
I read these passages at the beautiful new LGBT center on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where P-Flag Philly holds its meetings. (That's Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.)
from the Introduction
I came back to Philadelphia because I could not run away again. Twice I’d lived on the affordable edge of its inner city, and twice left. The first time I was twenty and sharing a house with five University of Pennsylvania students. Not a student myself, I was nevertheless learning. It was the late seventies. I went to open mikes in storefronts painted Peter Max style, crashed a poetry class at Penn, and relished a workshop at the Jewish Y with Sonia Sanchez. Money I earned selling leather coats at the downtown mall.
I enjoyed the tree shaded enclave of the Penn campus, with its modern sculpture and fortunate young people, but the streets drew me too: vendors and preachers, the suddenly shifting compositions of fountain and child, spire and cloud, “angels in the architecture” (as Paul Simon sings it), genius in the graffiti. A street musician played his plastic recorder out to the side as if it were a silver flute. When I heard the same man’s music not long ago, almost thirty years later — Greensleeves echoing in the portico of City Hall — I felt I knew Philadelphia well, and loved it.
But I did not always love it. The noise and the pollution, the poverty and my reaction to the poverty, and most of all the racial tension made me eager to leave. Growing up white in South Florida I had seen how violently many white people fought school desegregation, how the black students and teachers endured. I knew our Broward County town had two halves, but only one police force, and that one white. The race riots in nearby Liberty City and the rioting beamed contextless into our livingroom between Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island left me fearing that the black people on that other, othered side of town would come get us if they could. It seemed only logical. And nobody telling me about King’s agape illogic, or showing me the few white people trying to trade in white supremacy for the beloved community King called forth.
At twenty, oblivious to my white privilege and largely ignorant of America’s racial history, I yet felt the fear those who expect to be held accountable feel, and guilt that made living on the edge of the inner city a personal dilemma — one I wasn’t ready to solve. When it came, I welcomed the chance to get away. The day my first love and I drove her VW bug out of West Philly, with Schuylkill the kitten clawing at the windows to stay near his namesake river, I didn’t think I’d ever see
Philadelphia again. When I was drawn back for a visit a few years later, I supposed it was out of nostalgia for the college relationship that by then had ended. With a heart more numb than ever to the relationship the city offered I once again walked its streets. I like to think I crossed the paths of the young parents at the center of this book, Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, who were just then beginning their lives, but it’s unlikely: They lived in a neighborhood I would have avoided then, though it became my own and precious to me, the very North Philly where this story takes place.
The second time the city of B. Free (Ben) Franklin reeled me in I was thirty. I lived in Germantown, in a cooperative home where the writer Toni Cade Bambara had once lived. Across the street was a rehabilitation program for women in recovery. There I met women who’d nearly drowned in the flood of crack cocaine pouring into the inner cities through channels that seem to have had government sanction, if not downright sponsorship. It was crack that stole the mothers of Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, for a time, and stole their chance at a happy childhood forever.
Just as my roots were beginning to take hold, I felt the pull to leave. I told myself I needed more time in nature, that the city was too expensive, that I should move nearer my family, but something else was happening, something simple and human, yet complex and mystical. I was waking up to my membership in the dominant majority; I was hearing a call to change and to work for change. I have met people as young as twenty and certainly many at thirty who have heard and answered such a call. I was not like them. What I heard, faintly, I had neither the confidence nor the hope to respond to in a meaningful way. And so I ran away again. But the people I’d met and the stories I’d heard clung to me like wildflower seeds patient for a chance to take root.
I moved to New York’s Hudson River Valley and found part-time work at a community college teaching writing and literature. That’s what I was doing when I met the woman who would lure me back to my first city. It was 1997, and I was nearly forty. I didn’t know exactly what it was I had been running from all those years but I knew enough to know that, like Jonah, I ran at my own peril. Philadelphia is not, however, my Nineveh; Philadelphia’s the whale. And the shore that whale spit me out on is this book.
<<>>
from Chapter 1
How long Lamarr Stevens had been at the front door I didn’t know. I was up on the third floor painting my new bedroom (white with dark green trim). A guy from the apartment building across the street was washing his car, blasting brassy salsa like it could blast him a lawn and circular drive. During a quiet interval (was he washing the speakers?) I heard the knocking.
I opened the window on a stream of bus exhaust and looked down to see a big head flanked by broad shoulders, arms very dark against a white t-shirt. Though it was cold enough, he wore no coat, no sweater even, and nothing on his head but the silver curve of headphones. He pushed these back and hung away from the handrail, looking up at me.
“You Kathryn?”
“Yeah.”
“I been hearing about you.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot.”
He smiled, and I saw he was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen.
“I’m Lamarr. Kaki said I could use the shower.”
And I said, “What, now?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And the salsa music resumed its pinballing up and down the street.
I went down the stairs to find out about this promised shower. Before me, on the other side of the wrought-iron bars of a security door the house’s previous owners had put in, was a young black male, on the stocky side, wanting in. His white t-shirt reached low over creased jeans so baggy only the orange tips of his boots showed. I was being seen through the bars too: middle-aged white woman, medium build, ruddy face, small hazel eyes, short hair, jeans and sweatshirt marked by green paint. Hesitating.
“I called Kaki last night,” he said, “asked could I use the shower, I have this meeting, with a record producer? She said yeah, she’d tell you.”
I’d been living in that neighborhood known as the badlands long enough to notice how even the small children formed protective associations. The very postures of the stray dogs and edgy cats said it: don’t trust anybody. But he had an open, expressive face, eyebrows like strokes of charcoal on a dark brown canvas, and he spoke in a reassuringly even voice.
“She must have forgot,” I said.
He smiled, his cheekbones two knobs nudging the outer corners of his eyes upward. “That’d be Kaki.”
<<>>
Kathleen Nelsen became Kaki on the way home from Hawaii. Her missionary brother had invited her there, for a vacation, he said. And the hotel was four star, but it wasn’t a vacation, exactly, it was an Intervention. A born again former lesbian locked her in earnest conversation and did everything short of kissing her to persuade her that lesbianism was a sin. At the airport, she bought a key chain with the Hawaiian spelling of her name on it: Kaki (sounds, she tells people, like cocky, but with the stress on the second syllable). Perhaps to buffer herself from the family that loved her but couldn’t seem to love all of her, she adopted the new name. Back at Penn Mutual her co-workers tripped over it — Khaki, Cookie, Keekee. It just didn’t seem the sort of name a mid-level insurance executive ought to have. But she wasn’t going to stay a mid-level insurance executive much longer, anyway.
One day a group she’d given a 401k presentation to went into the silence: fifty or so middle-aged people sitting, eyes closed, hands in their laps. They were Quakers.
Kaki stood before them in her suit-set, hose, heels, and gold hoop earrings wondering what to do. What was there to do? She sat down and went into the silence too. Within a year she’d joined a Quaker meeting and begun going with its members into the prisons. She began to facilitate workshops in the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP), and before long the disparity between her privilege and the extreme poverty so many of the prisoners had survived struck her as unconscionable. How could she share her faith in Transforming Power when she’d never walked the streets they’d walked, never been asked in the face of death to count on grace instead of a gun?
So she left; left the promising career, the house designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, the relationship of fifteen years. She was forty-one. She rented awhile then bought a row house in the neighborhood whose young men fed the bellies of the upstate prisons. Now when she talked about non-violence she drew upon real-life encounters set on real-life corners: Broad and Erie, 2nd and Diamond, Kensington and Allegheny. She told about confronting a man as he beat a woman in front of a grocery store, how he’d been so shocked by her mild “Do you need help here?” that his outburst stalled and he went into an explanation that ended in tears. The prisoners said she was crazy, said she should move out of the neighborhood or at least learn to mind her own business in it, but they had encounters to talk about too — conflicts, fights, crises that might have gone differently.
So much could go differently with peace as an alternative. Asking people to consider that became her work. She lived simply, and much of what she did she did for free.
Because “Kaki” sounded to some of her neighbors like a Spanish slang word, many called her Aki instead: in English, here.
<<>>
I met Kaki Nelsen at the 20th annual Quaker Lesbian Conference. Like many of the women attending, she lived in Philadelphia. Unlike the rest, she made her home in the inner city. I told her how I’d lived on the edge of Philly’s inner city in my early twenties, and again in my thirties; how each time, leaving, I had felt a strong pull to stay, for what exactly I hadn’t been sure; and how now, near forty, I had this sense that I should go back to Philly, find out what for.
I might have moved to the city Kaki or no Kaki, but maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe I needed the anchor of a place to live and the carrot of a good relationship. And it did seem that, except for the fact that a significant portion of our fellow citizens thought our love strange, threatening, or downright sinful — all attitudes that affected me more than I could know. Affected but did not prevent. And so there I was, a year after falling in love with her and an hour after meeting Lamarr Stevens, driving down rush-hour 95 looking for a prison.
She had told me to watch for pink buildings with windows like the handles of disposable razors. Just north of an older prison’s crumbling stone turrets I spotted it — a Pepto-Bismol colored complex that but for the razor wire topped fences might have been a community college. I pulled up just as the doors opened on a dark blue stream of corrections officers (CO’s). Within it drifted a bright buoy — a tall woman in a red pullover with Build Community Not Conflict across the front. A white headband held back her long brown hair, leaving short bangs to bounce as she walked. From one arm hung a straw bag, from the other two striped hula-hoops.
I knew those hula-hoops. I’d tripped over those hula-hoops. They were filled with beads that whirred like skateboarders on a plaza. When she opened the door and tossed them into the back seat they seemed to chuckle — contraband laughter. We kissed hello and told how our day had gone. Hers had been the last in a week-long workshop attended by inmates and C.O’s. Mine had featured Lamarr’s visit.
“Oh that’s right,” she said, “I forgot to tell you he was coming over.”
“Forgot to ask me you mean.”
Right there in the white Chevy Cavalier her father had left her we had our first argument over Lamarr and Tahija (or Tamarr and Lahija, as we sometimes trippingly call them). Not very heated, it turned into one of the debriefing, self-assessment sessions that was becoming our habit: processing our experience of life in the ‘hood, examining, owning, trying to stretch our perspectives.
“So what did you feel,” she asked when she’d finished kibitzing with the guard at the front gate, “having a young black male you’d never met before show up telling you he could use the shower?”
“Come on,” I said, “I did desegregation in middle school, in the south.”
“South Florida’s not The South.”
“It’s more south than Minne-so-ta.”
She smiled, just, but it was enough. Her mother had the same smile: paired hills of the upper lip rising and sloping down again to a valley, a point, that looked penciled on. But she was so serious. As I drove through the bleak white neighborhood that surrounded the prison, I thought back to that morning.
“I guess it did seem a little . . . I mean, I didn’t want to be doing something where everybody would say later, ‘How could she be so stupid?’ You know. But I could see he wasn’t one of the addicts who come around selling stuff — ”
“Boosting,” she said, “selling stolen goods.”
“Right. So I open the door, and what comes into my head, when he’s standing there in the livingroom, is this black kid from first grade, the only black kid in the class, probably the whole school. He was tall, reddish hair, serious, angry — I thought. The way the nuns treated him I figured he must be angry. Plus it was 1963, riots on TV, the white people around me all ‘talking shit,’ like people here say, you know.”
“Scared, guilty, projecting their own motives onto a people they hardly knew,” she said.
“I guess,” I agreed, glancing at her to see if she meant me. Here was someone who at twelve-years-old left her Methodist church when it refused to invite to services a poor black family the church had been giving charity to, left and never went back.
“So Lamarr’s standing there,” she prodded.
“Right. And this fear from first grade, fear of this kid, hits me, and it sets off a sort of domino chain . . . and when the last domino falls, smack, there it is: guilt.”
“Guilt,” she said.
“About feeling the fear.”
“Okay.”
“About reacting mainly, or at all, to his skin color.”
Kaki turned to me, her knees bumping the gearshift (her 5-10 height is all in her legs).
“Lamarr’s had it hard, I kid you not. Food, clothes, deodorant, a bed, a shower, cash to keep utilities from being cut off — you name it, he’s had to provide it off and on for himself and his younger twin brothers since he was small — I mean like five. Sympathetic white people were the only renewable resource around. Watch him, or he’ll be playing you like a gosh-darned banjo before you can say Jiminy Cricket.”
That’s the best cussing Kaki, raised Minnesotan, can manage.
“So I should have feared him?” I asked.
“No. But neither should you let him manipulate you.”
“I didn’t let him manipulate me.”
“Did you give him any money?” she asked.
“No. Well, two subway tokens.”
“That’s what I mean!” she said.
“You’re the one told him, without informing me, that he could use the shower.”
“He had a job interview.”
“He told me it was a meeting with a record producer,” I said.
“For Pete’s sake! So did you let him take a shower?”
“Yes. And he knew right where everything was, Miss Banjo.”
We were on 95, heading toward the city and not, with the crawling commuters, away from it. Stretching to the right of the elevated highway was Fishtown, the working class white neighborhood separated from ours by the El. I walked there sometimes. The corner bars and football fields felt more familiar to me than the drug corners and basketball courts of my new neighborhood, and I could blend in there, comfortably anonymous for awhile.
To the left, east, flowed the Delaware River. On its New Jersey shore in the shade of the Betsy Ross Bridge hunkered another new prison — rows and rows of the razor-handle window slits.
“At least those prisoners have a river to look out at,” I said.
“Unless the windows were placed above eye level,” Kaki said.
I didn’t want to think about a world in which windows were purposely placed above eye level. Yet here I was in it, as I always had been.
<<>>
from Chapter 17
Was I just meeting his need, watering spindly roots, or did I have a need to bond with Damear? Better to ask someone who’s parachuted out of an airplane whether they have a need to land.
It happened that fast. I remember the day the glue set. The other two were asleep, Tahija at school. I rested on my side on the edge of her bed, my body a guardrail as Damear crawled about on the expanse of wine-red bedspread, discovering its braided tassels and the curiosities on the windowsill: a bonky plastic cup, the squishy nose-suctioning bulb, a hard red comb. . . . Soon the exploring wore him out and I laid him on my chest to sleep.
I have always loved that zone between waking and sleep. It’s a crowded shoreline, an intertidal zone rich in imaginative life . . . images, symbols, dreams, memories, insight. Damear lingered there, raising his head now and again to look into my eyes, questioning, opening, going deeper, coming back to look into me again before he submitted completely to sleep’s warm depth. I followed soon after, and when I woke found that there had been a blending, there in sleep, or in sleep a journey to some place where we are all of us blended. Waking, I simply remembered that place, that oneness; I think Damear did too.
I bonded this deeply with the boy I cared for the first time I was nanny, with one of my sister’s three, with my brother Joseph, and with Damear.
<<>>
[I read this section below for the first time, thinking the parents and friends of lesbians and gays would appreciate it more than other audiences.]
Kaki still had her bedroom/office on the second floor at the front of the house. She lived with traffic noise on one side and, with Tahija’s bedroom next door and the nursery down the hall, teen and baby noise on the other. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to turn the unused room on the third floor into a bedroom. Our bedroom.
When I first moved in we had felt we ought to forgo sex, for a time, until some green light of higher direction told us move ahead. The problem with that, living in the same house, was that all manner of other green lights kept going off. She was just too wonderful and, well, there. Soon we were forced to lower the bar: separate beds in separate rooms. But now, with so much activity on the second floor, all rendezvous of a romantic nature tended to happen on the third. Why not just put the bedroom there? It did make a kind of sense, as if our sacrifice of space and privacy brought with it a little bonus: an unselfish reason to lower the bar still more.
Or put it right on the floor and just step over it, as if it were . . . well . . . a broomstick. Niether marriage nor civil unions between same sex partners was legal at that time, any place (in the U.S anyway). In some Quaker meetings — Kaki’s included (with my old meeting beginning to deliberate the question) — gays and lesbians were being married or, using some other term, joined “under the care” of the meeting. Still, growing up when and as I had marriage was not really within my conception of what my life could be. In a sense though, as we walked together with this young family, Kaki and I made marriage-like commitments. Circumstances seemed to push us into it, but I wonder — did we feel we had to earn a right so many others took for granted?
So, sharing a bedroom was a symbol. This particular symbol, however, was not a very
pretty one. The room measured ten by ten. Clammy plaster crumbled from the walls, which the previous owners’ son, a troubled teen, neighbors had told us, had painted dark purple. Spills of this purple, and older colors, lay like growths on the bare floor boards. The barred window looked out on the same alley Tahija’s room faced, with views into the rooming house next door.
“It needs a lot of work,” I said.
“Lamarr’s younger brothers could do it,” Kaki said. The twins, Donovan and Dante, visited from time to time. I liked them because they liked to hold their nephews.
For the work it afforded two young men, and the step deeper into commitment it gave two women too long alone, the purple room became a bedroom (not, however, a master bedroom), and the stage for one of my most treasured memories of Lamarr.
Donovan and Dante, with Lamarr, did do much of the work, framing the walls and hanging sheetrock, but first the old plaster had to be sledgehammered off. Somehow one Saturday this job fell to Lamarr and me.
Within minutes we were two white-haired dust-covered people, and by the end of the day the floor was buried under half a foot of rubble.
“That was the easy part,” said Lamarr, lowering his dust mask. “Hard part’s getting it out the house.”
Someone told us later we might simply have sheetrocked over the old plaster. That’s not what we did. What we did was lower it from the roof using a rope-pulley we bolted there. Because the third floor had only two rooms to the other floor’s three, its hallway window opened on the flat, tarred roof of the nursery, a kind of terrace. We shoveled rubble into Spackle buckets that we then passed out through the window and carried to the edge of this roof. Then I went down through the house to the back yard and looked up at Lamarr on his belly on the roof, shoulders and arms over the edge, ready to lower the first bucket. His hair, half-an-inch or so long then and worn natural, was framed by the pale-green leaves of our tree, with behind the leaves blue sky. He’d inch a bucket down. I’d reach up to steady it, bearing some of the weight as he eased it the last few feet to the ground.
In this way over and over I trusted him not to lose his grip and let a bucket drop onto my head, and as many times he trusted me not to let go too soon and let one yank him over the edge.
copyright 2009
Elizabeth K. Gordon
from the Introduction
I came back to Philadelphia because I could not run away again. Twice I’d lived on the affordable edge of its inner city, and twice left. The first time I was twenty and sharing a house with five University of Pennsylvania students. Not a student myself, I was nevertheless learning. It was the late seventies. I went to open mikes in storefronts painted Peter Max style, crashed a poetry class at Penn, and relished a workshop at the Jewish Y with Sonia Sanchez. Money I earned selling leather coats at the downtown mall.
I enjoyed the tree shaded enclave of the Penn campus, with its modern sculpture and fortunate young people, but the streets drew me too: vendors and preachers, the suddenly shifting compositions of fountain and child, spire and cloud, “angels in the architecture” (as Paul Simon sings it), genius in the graffiti. A street musician played his plastic recorder out to the side as if it were a silver flute. When I heard the same man’s music not long ago, almost thirty years later — Greensleeves echoing in the portico of City Hall — I felt I knew Philadelphia well, and loved it.
But I did not always love it. The noise and the pollution, the poverty and my reaction to the poverty, and most of all the racial tension made me eager to leave. Growing up white in South Florida I had seen how violently many white people fought school desegregation, how the black students and teachers endured. I knew our Broward County town had two halves, but only one police force, and that one white. The race riots in nearby Liberty City and the rioting beamed contextless into our livingroom between Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island left me fearing that the black people on that other, othered side of town would come get us if they could. It seemed only logical. And nobody telling me about King’s agape illogic, or showing me the few white people trying to trade in white supremacy for the beloved community King called forth.
At twenty, oblivious to my white privilege and largely ignorant of America’s racial history, I yet felt the fear those who expect to be held accountable feel, and guilt that made living on the edge of the inner city a personal dilemma — one I wasn’t ready to solve. When it came, I welcomed the chance to get away. The day my first love and I drove her VW bug out of West Philly, with Schuylkill the kitten clawing at the windows to stay near his namesake river, I didn’t think I’d ever see
Philadelphia again. When I was drawn back for a visit a few years later, I supposed it was out of nostalgia for the college relationship that by then had ended. With a heart more numb than ever to the relationship the city offered I once again walked its streets. I like to think I crossed the paths of the young parents at the center of this book, Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, who were just then beginning their lives, but it’s unlikely: They lived in a neighborhood I would have avoided then, though it became my own and precious to me, the very North Philly where this story takes place.
The second time the city of B. Free (Ben) Franklin reeled me in I was thirty. I lived in Germantown, in a cooperative home where the writer Toni Cade Bambara had once lived. Across the street was a rehabilitation program for women in recovery. There I met women who’d nearly drowned in the flood of crack cocaine pouring into the inner cities through channels that seem to have had government sanction, if not downright sponsorship. It was crack that stole the mothers of Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, for a time, and stole their chance at a happy childhood forever.
Just as my roots were beginning to take hold, I felt the pull to leave. I told myself I needed more time in nature, that the city was too expensive, that I should move nearer my family, but something else was happening, something simple and human, yet complex and mystical. I was waking up to my membership in the dominant majority; I was hearing a call to change and to work for change. I have met people as young as twenty and certainly many at thirty who have heard and answered such a call. I was not like them. What I heard, faintly, I had neither the confidence nor the hope to respond to in a meaningful way. And so I ran away again. But the people I’d met and the stories I’d heard clung to me like wildflower seeds patient for a chance to take root.
I moved to New York’s Hudson River Valley and found part-time work at a community college teaching writing and literature. That’s what I was doing when I met the woman who would lure me back to my first city. It was 1997, and I was nearly forty. I didn’t know exactly what it was I had been running from all those years but I knew enough to know that, like Jonah, I ran at my own peril. Philadelphia is not, however, my Nineveh; Philadelphia’s the whale. And the shore that whale spit me out on is this book.
<<>>
from Chapter 1
How long Lamarr Stevens had been at the front door I didn’t know. I was up on the third floor painting my new bedroom (white with dark green trim). A guy from the apartment building across the street was washing his car, blasting brassy salsa like it could blast him a lawn and circular drive. During a quiet interval (was he washing the speakers?) I heard the knocking.
I opened the window on a stream of bus exhaust and looked down to see a big head flanked by broad shoulders, arms very dark against a white t-shirt. Though it was cold enough, he wore no coat, no sweater even, and nothing on his head but the silver curve of headphones. He pushed these back and hung away from the handrail, looking up at me.
“You Kathryn?”
“Yeah.”
“I been hearing about you.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot.”
He smiled, and I saw he was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen.
“I’m Lamarr. Kaki said I could use the shower.”
And I said, “What, now?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And the salsa music resumed its pinballing up and down the street.
I went down the stairs to find out about this promised shower. Before me, on the other side of the wrought-iron bars of a security door the house’s previous owners had put in, was a young black male, on the stocky side, wanting in. His white t-shirt reached low over creased jeans so baggy only the orange tips of his boots showed. I was being seen through the bars too: middle-aged white woman, medium build, ruddy face, small hazel eyes, short hair, jeans and sweatshirt marked by green paint. Hesitating.
“I called Kaki last night,” he said, “asked could I use the shower, I have this meeting, with a record producer? She said yeah, she’d tell you.”
I’d been living in that neighborhood known as the badlands long enough to notice how even the small children formed protective associations. The very postures of the stray dogs and edgy cats said it: don’t trust anybody. But he had an open, expressive face, eyebrows like strokes of charcoal on a dark brown canvas, and he spoke in a reassuringly even voice.
“She must have forgot,” I said.
He smiled, his cheekbones two knobs nudging the outer corners of his eyes upward. “That’d be Kaki.”
<<>>
Kathleen Nelsen became Kaki on the way home from Hawaii. Her missionary brother had invited her there, for a vacation, he said. And the hotel was four star, but it wasn’t a vacation, exactly, it was an Intervention. A born again former lesbian locked her in earnest conversation and did everything short of kissing her to persuade her that lesbianism was a sin. At the airport, she bought a key chain with the Hawaiian spelling of her name on it: Kaki (sounds, she tells people, like cocky, but with the stress on the second syllable). Perhaps to buffer herself from the family that loved her but couldn’t seem to love all of her, she adopted the new name. Back at Penn Mutual her co-workers tripped over it — Khaki, Cookie, Keekee. It just didn’t seem the sort of name a mid-level insurance executive ought to have. But she wasn’t going to stay a mid-level insurance executive much longer, anyway.
One day a group she’d given a 401k presentation to went into the silence: fifty or so middle-aged people sitting, eyes closed, hands in their laps. They were Quakers.
Kaki stood before them in her suit-set, hose, heels, and gold hoop earrings wondering what to do. What was there to do? She sat down and went into the silence too. Within a year she’d joined a Quaker meeting and begun going with its members into the prisons. She began to facilitate workshops in the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP), and before long the disparity between her privilege and the extreme poverty so many of the prisoners had survived struck her as unconscionable. How could she share her faith in Transforming Power when she’d never walked the streets they’d walked, never been asked in the face of death to count on grace instead of a gun?
So she left; left the promising career, the house designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, the relationship of fifteen years. She was forty-one. She rented awhile then bought a row house in the neighborhood whose young men fed the bellies of the upstate prisons. Now when she talked about non-violence she drew upon real-life encounters set on real-life corners: Broad and Erie, 2nd and Diamond, Kensington and Allegheny. She told about confronting a man as he beat a woman in front of a grocery store, how he’d been so shocked by her mild “Do you need help here?” that his outburst stalled and he went into an explanation that ended in tears. The prisoners said she was crazy, said she should move out of the neighborhood or at least learn to mind her own business in it, but they had encounters to talk about too — conflicts, fights, crises that might have gone differently.
So much could go differently with peace as an alternative. Asking people to consider that became her work. She lived simply, and much of what she did she did for free.
Because “Kaki” sounded to some of her neighbors like a Spanish slang word, many called her Aki instead: in English, here.
<<>>
I met Kaki Nelsen at the 20th annual Quaker Lesbian Conference. Like many of the women attending, she lived in Philadelphia. Unlike the rest, she made her home in the inner city. I told her how I’d lived on the edge of Philly’s inner city in my early twenties, and again in my thirties; how each time, leaving, I had felt a strong pull to stay, for what exactly I hadn’t been sure; and how now, near forty, I had this sense that I should go back to Philly, find out what for.
I might have moved to the city Kaki or no Kaki, but maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe I needed the anchor of a place to live and the carrot of a good relationship. And it did seem that, except for the fact that a significant portion of our fellow citizens thought our love strange, threatening, or downright sinful — all attitudes that affected me more than I could know. Affected but did not prevent. And so there I was, a year after falling in love with her and an hour after meeting Lamarr Stevens, driving down rush-hour 95 looking for a prison.
She had told me to watch for pink buildings with windows like the handles of disposable razors. Just north of an older prison’s crumbling stone turrets I spotted it — a Pepto-Bismol colored complex that but for the razor wire topped fences might have been a community college. I pulled up just as the doors opened on a dark blue stream of corrections officers (CO’s). Within it drifted a bright buoy — a tall woman in a red pullover with Build Community Not Conflict across the front. A white headband held back her long brown hair, leaving short bangs to bounce as she walked. From one arm hung a straw bag, from the other two striped hula-hoops.
I knew those hula-hoops. I’d tripped over those hula-hoops. They were filled with beads that whirred like skateboarders on a plaza. When she opened the door and tossed them into the back seat they seemed to chuckle — contraband laughter. We kissed hello and told how our day had gone. Hers had been the last in a week-long workshop attended by inmates and C.O’s. Mine had featured Lamarr’s visit.
“Oh that’s right,” she said, “I forgot to tell you he was coming over.”
“Forgot to ask me you mean.”
Right there in the white Chevy Cavalier her father had left her we had our first argument over Lamarr and Tahija (or Tamarr and Lahija, as we sometimes trippingly call them). Not very heated, it turned into one of the debriefing, self-assessment sessions that was becoming our habit: processing our experience of life in the ‘hood, examining, owning, trying to stretch our perspectives.
“So what did you feel,” she asked when she’d finished kibitzing with the guard at the front gate, “having a young black male you’d never met before show up telling you he could use the shower?”
“Come on,” I said, “I did desegregation in middle school, in the south.”
“South Florida’s not The South.”
“It’s more south than Minne-so-ta.”
She smiled, just, but it was enough. Her mother had the same smile: paired hills of the upper lip rising and sloping down again to a valley, a point, that looked penciled on. But she was so serious. As I drove through the bleak white neighborhood that surrounded the prison, I thought back to that morning.
“I guess it did seem a little . . . I mean, I didn’t want to be doing something where everybody would say later, ‘How could she be so stupid?’ You know. But I could see he wasn’t one of the addicts who come around selling stuff — ”
“Boosting,” she said, “selling stolen goods.”
“Right. So I open the door, and what comes into my head, when he’s standing there in the livingroom, is this black kid from first grade, the only black kid in the class, probably the whole school. He was tall, reddish hair, serious, angry — I thought. The way the nuns treated him I figured he must be angry. Plus it was 1963, riots on TV, the white people around me all ‘talking shit,’ like people here say, you know.”
“Scared, guilty, projecting their own motives onto a people they hardly knew,” she said.
“I guess,” I agreed, glancing at her to see if she meant me. Here was someone who at twelve-years-old left her Methodist church when it refused to invite to services a poor black family the church had been giving charity to, left and never went back.
“So Lamarr’s standing there,” she prodded.
“Right. And this fear from first grade, fear of this kid, hits me, and it sets off a sort of domino chain . . . and when the last domino falls, smack, there it is: guilt.”
“Guilt,” she said.
“About feeling the fear.”
“Okay.”
“About reacting mainly, or at all, to his skin color.”
Kaki turned to me, her knees bumping the gearshift (her 5-10 height is all in her legs).
“Lamarr’s had it hard, I kid you not. Food, clothes, deodorant, a bed, a shower, cash to keep utilities from being cut off — you name it, he’s had to provide it off and on for himself and his younger twin brothers since he was small — I mean like five. Sympathetic white people were the only renewable resource around. Watch him, or he’ll be playing you like a gosh-darned banjo before you can say Jiminy Cricket.”
That’s the best cussing Kaki, raised Minnesotan, can manage.
“So I should have feared him?” I asked.
“No. But neither should you let him manipulate you.”
“I didn’t let him manipulate me.”
“Did you give him any money?” she asked.
“No. Well, two subway tokens.”
“That’s what I mean!” she said.
“You’re the one told him, without informing me, that he could use the shower.”
“He had a job interview.”
“He told me it was a meeting with a record producer,” I said.
“For Pete’s sake! So did you let him take a shower?”
“Yes. And he knew right where everything was, Miss Banjo.”
We were on 95, heading toward the city and not, with the crawling commuters, away from it. Stretching to the right of the elevated highway was Fishtown, the working class white neighborhood separated from ours by the El. I walked there sometimes. The corner bars and football fields felt more familiar to me than the drug corners and basketball courts of my new neighborhood, and I could blend in there, comfortably anonymous for awhile.
To the left, east, flowed the Delaware River. On its New Jersey shore in the shade of the Betsy Ross Bridge hunkered another new prison — rows and rows of the razor-handle window slits.
“At least those prisoners have a river to look out at,” I said.
“Unless the windows were placed above eye level,” Kaki said.
I didn’t want to think about a world in which windows were purposely placed above eye level. Yet here I was in it, as I always had been.
<<>>
from Chapter 17
Was I just meeting his need, watering spindly roots, or did I have a need to bond with Damear? Better to ask someone who’s parachuted out of an airplane whether they have a need to land.
It happened that fast. I remember the day the glue set. The other two were asleep, Tahija at school. I rested on my side on the edge of her bed, my body a guardrail as Damear crawled about on the expanse of wine-red bedspread, discovering its braided tassels and the curiosities on the windowsill: a bonky plastic cup, the squishy nose-suctioning bulb, a hard red comb. . . . Soon the exploring wore him out and I laid him on my chest to sleep.
I have always loved that zone between waking and sleep. It’s a crowded shoreline, an intertidal zone rich in imaginative life . . . images, symbols, dreams, memories, insight. Damear lingered there, raising his head now and again to look into my eyes, questioning, opening, going deeper, coming back to look into me again before he submitted completely to sleep’s warm depth. I followed soon after, and when I woke found that there had been a blending, there in sleep, or in sleep a journey to some place where we are all of us blended. Waking, I simply remembered that place, that oneness; I think Damear did too.
I bonded this deeply with the boy I cared for the first time I was nanny, with one of my sister’s three, with my brother Joseph, and with Damear.
<<>>
[I read this section below for the first time, thinking the parents and friends of lesbians and gays would appreciate it more than other audiences.]
Kaki still had her bedroom/office on the second floor at the front of the house. She lived with traffic noise on one side and, with Tahija’s bedroom next door and the nursery down the hall, teen and baby noise on the other. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to turn the unused room on the third floor into a bedroom. Our bedroom.
When I first moved in we had felt we ought to forgo sex, for a time, until some green light of higher direction told us move ahead. The problem with that, living in the same house, was that all manner of other green lights kept going off. She was just too wonderful and, well, there. Soon we were forced to lower the bar: separate beds in separate rooms. But now, with so much activity on the second floor, all rendezvous of a romantic nature tended to happen on the third. Why not just put the bedroom there? It did make a kind of sense, as if our sacrifice of space and privacy brought with it a little bonus: an unselfish reason to lower the bar still more.
Or put it right on the floor and just step over it, as if it were . . . well . . . a broomstick. Niether marriage nor civil unions between same sex partners was legal at that time, any place (in the U.S anyway). In some Quaker meetings — Kaki’s included (with my old meeting beginning to deliberate the question) — gays and lesbians were being married or, using some other term, joined “under the care” of the meeting. Still, growing up when and as I had marriage was not really within my conception of what my life could be. In a sense though, as we walked together with this young family, Kaki and I made marriage-like commitments. Circumstances seemed to push us into it, but I wonder — did we feel we had to earn a right so many others took for granted?
So, sharing a bedroom was a symbol. This particular symbol, however, was not a very
pretty one. The room measured ten by ten. Clammy plaster crumbled from the walls, which the previous owners’ son, a troubled teen, neighbors had told us, had painted dark purple. Spills of this purple, and older colors, lay like growths on the bare floor boards. The barred window looked out on the same alley Tahija’s room faced, with views into the rooming house next door.
“It needs a lot of work,” I said.
“Lamarr’s younger brothers could do it,” Kaki said. The twins, Donovan and Dante, visited from time to time. I liked them because they liked to hold their nephews.
For the work it afforded two young men, and the step deeper into commitment it gave two women too long alone, the purple room became a bedroom (not, however, a master bedroom), and the stage for one of my most treasured memories of Lamarr.
Donovan and Dante, with Lamarr, did do much of the work, framing the walls and hanging sheetrock, but first the old plaster had to be sledgehammered off. Somehow one Saturday this job fell to Lamarr and me.
Within minutes we were two white-haired dust-covered people, and by the end of the day the floor was buried under half a foot of rubble.
“That was the easy part,” said Lamarr, lowering his dust mask. “Hard part’s getting it out the house.”
Someone told us later we might simply have sheetrocked over the old plaster. That’s not what we did. What we did was lower it from the roof using a rope-pulley we bolted there. Because the third floor had only two rooms to the other floor’s three, its hallway window opened on the flat, tarred roof of the nursery, a kind of terrace. We shoveled rubble into Spackle buckets that we then passed out through the window and carried to the edge of this roof. Then I went down through the house to the back yard and looked up at Lamarr on his belly on the roof, shoulders and arms over the edge, ready to lower the first bucket. His hair, half-an-inch or so long then and worn natural, was framed by the pale-green leaves of our tree, with behind the leaves blue sky. He’d inch a bucket down. I’d reach up to steady it, bearing some of the weight as he eased it the last few feet to the ground.
In this way over and over I trusted him not to lose his grip and let a bucket drop onto my head, and as many times he trusted me not to let go too soon and let one yank him over the edge.
copyright 2009
Elizabeth K. Gordon
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