river
07-06-2004, 02:02 PM
Family,
I do hope that ya'll really love me because I am about to take off all the fig leaves here.
As much as my godmother loved my mother, it was hard having two strong women in the same house and they would get into such verbally violent fights. I would stand in the corner of my room crying and screaming as Margaret stormed in and grabbed a vase or something to threaten my mother with. Certainly, my young heart reeled inside me to see the two women I loved tear at each other like this. My world was crumbling and unstable when they fought.
Margaret never let anything slide. She returned every insult or imagined insult with tax. I remember one day she was nailing a carpet to the floor. I was in the next room imitating the sound of her hammer with my toy blocks. She thought I was mocking her and threw the hammer at me. It came that close and I'm sure if she had really wanted to hit me no doubt she would have. I could not have been more than two or three, but you don't forget a hammer coming at you from the hand of someone who loves you.
While I lived in that house on S Street, I woke up every single morning knowing without doubt that before I even had breakfast I was going to get a spanking. A few times I would try to get up early and change the sheets but she always found them and went straight for the backyard to get a switch while I stood in my room waiting and crying. I had bad dreams and I'd beg her.
Margaret, let me sleep with you. Please! I won't pee in your bed. I promise.
I know you won't pee in my bed, 'cause you sleeping in your bed.
There was a lot of wonder and fascination for a little child in a Victorian house. So many nooks and crannies, doorways and stairways where the imagination could nestle into mysteries and endless exploration. In a straight line from the front porch to the back porch lay the foyer and the livingroom, mysterious in its forbidden and forbidding formality. Then the diningroom where Margaret kept pretty things on a white mantle piece above my eyes.
One had to walk around the dining table, past the white sideboard and the china closet to get to the kitchen which was a room all itself. The kitchen was where Margaret sat at a big table and snapped fresh green beans into a huge kettle. It was where I discovered that I could eat ten Hungry Jack biscuits but not one lima bean and no one could convince me that there was not an unbridgeable gustatory chasm between hamburger and meatloaf.
Upstairs I had a room to myself at the other end of the hall from my godparents' room. Almost all the furniture in Margaret's house was made of wood and painted white with gold carefully painted into little crevices and engraved curly cues. In my room I had a show and tell record player and a big collection of Disney albums. While I listened to Peter and the Wolf in my room, I also listened to Ray Charles downstairs. In the grey of dusk I'd lay on my bed and imagine I was a woman waiting for a man whom she knew would never come. It was a delicious projection of the blue, sweet, dusky and private--a bearable pain.
Don't you know that I wait in the darkness of a lonely room
Filled with sadness, filled with gloom.
Hoping soon
That you'll walk right through that door
And love me like you tried before
Freda Payne
The basement held endless mysteries. This was where Margaret kept her antique designed sewing machine and seamstress dummy. She made clothes for her neighbors.
Go on and sing for Miss Mabel. I could only stare transfixed at the stately women who came to be measured for or to pick up capes and coats with intricate embroidery and hidden pockets.
Oh, she's shy, but her mama can really sing. Woo, that woman has a voice. Don't you want to sing for Miss Mabel? Sing that pretty song you learned from your Disney albums. She looked at me, coaxing and expectant. Miss Mabel looked kind, important and skeptical. I did not open my mouth.
Margaret kept a television in the basement so she could watch The Edge of Night or Gun Smoke while she ironed clothes. I sat in awe watching White men in black clothes and slippery looking shoes running through the night to escape cars and bullets and women.
She sometimes combed my hair in the basement. That was a job for Superman. I've always had thick, tightly curled hair. Curled so tightly in fact, that I'm pretty sure Pharaoh would have caught the children of Israel if Moses had been trying to part my hair. Hold still. Hold still. said the Inquisitor to the little girl on the rack. If the Emotions were singing on the radio while she combed my hair, I'd sing along with them. Show me. Show me. Show me. Show me hOOWW!
I liked to play in the big back yard. There were so many mysteries and wonders. Just the way the sun played through the leaves raised fascinating questions: what are shadows? If they are pictures, how can they move? I'd gaze at the black beetles I found under flat rocks and wonder why the rock did not crush them. I wondered why the dirt did not fall out of my bucket when I swung it upside down on my arm. I stood on my high back porch over the basement door and surveyed my domain. The world and its mysteries were mine alone. From my porch, I could see across the alley, and I thought that if the houses weren't in the way I should be able to see on forever across the world.
I shared this domain with my dog Lobo that my godmother found in the woods. He was a jet black half wolf with one white spot on his chest. That dog loved me and half raised me. He almost killed my uncle Bobby for standing too close to me while we were playing ball. But Lobo let Margaret's little grandson Kevin play with me. He was a cute little golden brown boy with long silky, curly black hair, and we were like cousins.
One day when I was about three, I was leaning over the wooden stretch gate that Margaret kept over the top of the back porch stairs so that I wouldn't fall. I was leaning cat-a-corner, half over the gate and half over the iron railing of the steps. The porch must have been almost a storey high in the back because it was only a few steps from the ground to the basement door below the porch. Kevin came and opened the gate to go down into the yard and I fell right over the railing, bounced off my wooden rocking horse and onto the cement ground. All I can remember is women scurrying around saying Don't let her fall asleep. Don't let her fall asleep. It was for moments like this that God made little kids' heads so hard.
The world below my front porch contained even more mysteries than my house or my backyard. And one strange mystery more enigmatic than anything I had ever seen or heard: other children. I remember feeling a sense of alienation from the other children in my neighborhood as if I wasn't quite a part of their world but only observing it.
There's the ice cream truck, Rhonda. Tinks and tinkles of frosty, bright music rang from the truck like all the snow and toys of Christmas coming down the street. Margaret would take me out to get a cup of vanilla ice cream, but she was more real to me than the other children who clamored around the truck.
I remember going outside alone for the first time and seeing them playing in this thick, red-brown mud. For some reason I found the mud so repulsive as if it were dog stuff or so indistinguishable from it as to hide a possible danger.
Being an only child I played by myself a lot. I liked to be outside in the sultry summer evenings wondering at the stars and the music that floated unbidden through the air. All the children were huge and seemed to already know each other. What's your name? Where you live? How old are you? Huge, nebulous questions from huge, nebulous people. Then a girl came up who was even taller than everyone else. Deep chocolate skin with bright doll baby eyes, as sultry as the night and belonging to it--belonging to this world where I happened to find myself. Oh, she's cute. Then the same huge, nebulous questions, some oohs and ahhs of short lived fascination and then she skipped off. The other kids followed her so I continued playing alone as I always had.
When I was about three or four years old my godmother gave me a little children's prayer book and sat with me while I said my good night prayers. I remember one night I was laying in my bed very troubled about something. I asked the Lord to be with me and somehow I knew He was there. There was no blinding flash of light, no voice booming from the clouds. But His presence was very real.
Margaret went to a Church on the corner and would take me to meetings that the women held in the evenings.
This Church also had a preschool in the basement and when I was old enough I started going. I still wasn't used to other children so when they let us play outside I mostly played with the wooden blocks and other toys. I did make one friend named Barbara. We would play together and made up a funny walk with giant steps. Now I had two friends, Aaron, the little boy next door and Barbara. But the other kids weren't a part of my world and I was not a part of theirs. Twice a crowd of kids followed me home.
Ooh, you did it
Now you gonna get it
But I didn't mean to wet my pants. It just happened. Questions and verdicts, snickers and rolling, slit-eyed looks swirled around me, in front of me and behind me in a solemn march towards a waiting switch.
Inside the preschool the people who were there to watch us were just kids themselves, barely teenagers, but they were huge grownups to me. One day Aaron pushed me down and got on top of me. The Watchers watched and laughed, egging him on but fortunately, not in. They always found something to holler at me about. I did not lay my head on the table at nap time exactly the way they wanted me to--my cheek flat on the hard wood, not cushioned by my folded arms which they snatched out from under my head. They did not know why I was so hard headed and I did not know why I had to obey people who did not protect me. Though we were in a Church, I did not associate that big gothic building or its people with the God who watched over and comforted me at night.
I stayed with Margaret and DeeDee off and on for several years after they moved back to Birmingham, Alabama where Margaret had a house that was paid for.
When I was eleven I went down to visit her during the Christmas season. It's a magical feeling to get off a plane and drive through Birmingham at night with all the Christmas lights. And I loved the thought of a new beginning, for the grownups had consented to my pleas to stay there and go to school.
I went to visit Kevin and his mother Jackie left us alone while she went to get something. Kevin had grown up some and he knew a thing or two about what to do when his mother was gone. He taught me how to french kiss. Hmm, a new beginning. When Margaret found out she raised hell and everything under it at Jackie for leaving us alone, but she bragged to her friend, and in her boasting she imagined things that had never transpired.. Girl, they been screwing. Is that another name for french kissing?
Margaret was proud of her son, Kevin's father, a pimp. She would brag to me about all the women he had. With his thick, crooked eyebrows, pock-marked face and long, greased down wavy hair, he looked like Michael Jackson's father Joe.
This same woman who taught me to pray when I was three, tried to discourage me from believing in God when I was eleven.
How do you like that book? She asked me. It was nothing like the clean, clinical book my mother let me read when I was nine or ten.
Mom, can I read this book? Love and Sex in Plain Language. Somehow I knew I was suppposed to ask. She looked over the book and gave her approval. Good, I thought, because I already read it.
But the books Margaret gave me to read pricked some as yet inchoate centers of sensation. Like prepubescent french kissing or perfumes in a rose seed. It would be twelve more years before what was inchoate became a reality, but I dreamed and I touched.
You know, I think Hell is just a bad feeling you have when you know you are about to die and you look back at all the stuff you have done.
What have you done, Margaret?
What the hell do you mean what have I done? I'm just telling you the Bible is all full of contradictions. In one place it says an eye for an eye, then in another place it says turn the other cheek. What do you make of that?'
I didn't know how to answer her then but I knew there was an answer. I began to wonder but I never began to doubt.
Come back for the third and final part
I do hope that ya'll really love me because I am about to take off all the fig leaves here.
As much as my godmother loved my mother, it was hard having two strong women in the same house and they would get into such verbally violent fights. I would stand in the corner of my room crying and screaming as Margaret stormed in and grabbed a vase or something to threaten my mother with. Certainly, my young heart reeled inside me to see the two women I loved tear at each other like this. My world was crumbling and unstable when they fought.
Margaret never let anything slide. She returned every insult or imagined insult with tax. I remember one day she was nailing a carpet to the floor. I was in the next room imitating the sound of her hammer with my toy blocks. She thought I was mocking her and threw the hammer at me. It came that close and I'm sure if she had really wanted to hit me no doubt she would have. I could not have been more than two or three, but you don't forget a hammer coming at you from the hand of someone who loves you.
While I lived in that house on S Street, I woke up every single morning knowing without doubt that before I even had breakfast I was going to get a spanking. A few times I would try to get up early and change the sheets but she always found them and went straight for the backyard to get a switch while I stood in my room waiting and crying. I had bad dreams and I'd beg her.
Margaret, let me sleep with you. Please! I won't pee in your bed. I promise.
I know you won't pee in my bed, 'cause you sleeping in your bed.
There was a lot of wonder and fascination for a little child in a Victorian house. So many nooks and crannies, doorways and stairways where the imagination could nestle into mysteries and endless exploration. In a straight line from the front porch to the back porch lay the foyer and the livingroom, mysterious in its forbidden and forbidding formality. Then the diningroom where Margaret kept pretty things on a white mantle piece above my eyes.
One had to walk around the dining table, past the white sideboard and the china closet to get to the kitchen which was a room all itself. The kitchen was where Margaret sat at a big table and snapped fresh green beans into a huge kettle. It was where I discovered that I could eat ten Hungry Jack biscuits but not one lima bean and no one could convince me that there was not an unbridgeable gustatory chasm between hamburger and meatloaf.
Upstairs I had a room to myself at the other end of the hall from my godparents' room. Almost all the furniture in Margaret's house was made of wood and painted white with gold carefully painted into little crevices and engraved curly cues. In my room I had a show and tell record player and a big collection of Disney albums. While I listened to Peter and the Wolf in my room, I also listened to Ray Charles downstairs. In the grey of dusk I'd lay on my bed and imagine I was a woman waiting for a man whom she knew would never come. It was a delicious projection of the blue, sweet, dusky and private--a bearable pain.
Don't you know that I wait in the darkness of a lonely room
Filled with sadness, filled with gloom.
Hoping soon
That you'll walk right through that door
And love me like you tried before
Freda Payne
The basement held endless mysteries. This was where Margaret kept her antique designed sewing machine and seamstress dummy. She made clothes for her neighbors.
Go on and sing for Miss Mabel. I could only stare transfixed at the stately women who came to be measured for or to pick up capes and coats with intricate embroidery and hidden pockets.
Oh, she's shy, but her mama can really sing. Woo, that woman has a voice. Don't you want to sing for Miss Mabel? Sing that pretty song you learned from your Disney albums. She looked at me, coaxing and expectant. Miss Mabel looked kind, important and skeptical. I did not open my mouth.
Margaret kept a television in the basement so she could watch The Edge of Night or Gun Smoke while she ironed clothes. I sat in awe watching White men in black clothes and slippery looking shoes running through the night to escape cars and bullets and women.
She sometimes combed my hair in the basement. That was a job for Superman. I've always had thick, tightly curled hair. Curled so tightly in fact, that I'm pretty sure Pharaoh would have caught the children of Israel if Moses had been trying to part my hair. Hold still. Hold still. said the Inquisitor to the little girl on the rack. If the Emotions were singing on the radio while she combed my hair, I'd sing along with them. Show me. Show me. Show me. Show me hOOWW!
I liked to play in the big back yard. There were so many mysteries and wonders. Just the way the sun played through the leaves raised fascinating questions: what are shadows? If they are pictures, how can they move? I'd gaze at the black beetles I found under flat rocks and wonder why the rock did not crush them. I wondered why the dirt did not fall out of my bucket when I swung it upside down on my arm. I stood on my high back porch over the basement door and surveyed my domain. The world and its mysteries were mine alone. From my porch, I could see across the alley, and I thought that if the houses weren't in the way I should be able to see on forever across the world.
I shared this domain with my dog Lobo that my godmother found in the woods. He was a jet black half wolf with one white spot on his chest. That dog loved me and half raised me. He almost killed my uncle Bobby for standing too close to me while we were playing ball. But Lobo let Margaret's little grandson Kevin play with me. He was a cute little golden brown boy with long silky, curly black hair, and we were like cousins.
One day when I was about three, I was leaning over the wooden stretch gate that Margaret kept over the top of the back porch stairs so that I wouldn't fall. I was leaning cat-a-corner, half over the gate and half over the iron railing of the steps. The porch must have been almost a storey high in the back because it was only a few steps from the ground to the basement door below the porch. Kevin came and opened the gate to go down into the yard and I fell right over the railing, bounced off my wooden rocking horse and onto the cement ground. All I can remember is women scurrying around saying Don't let her fall asleep. Don't let her fall asleep. It was for moments like this that God made little kids' heads so hard.
The world below my front porch contained even more mysteries than my house or my backyard. And one strange mystery more enigmatic than anything I had ever seen or heard: other children. I remember feeling a sense of alienation from the other children in my neighborhood as if I wasn't quite a part of their world but only observing it.
There's the ice cream truck, Rhonda. Tinks and tinkles of frosty, bright music rang from the truck like all the snow and toys of Christmas coming down the street. Margaret would take me out to get a cup of vanilla ice cream, but she was more real to me than the other children who clamored around the truck.
I remember going outside alone for the first time and seeing them playing in this thick, red-brown mud. For some reason I found the mud so repulsive as if it were dog stuff or so indistinguishable from it as to hide a possible danger.
Being an only child I played by myself a lot. I liked to be outside in the sultry summer evenings wondering at the stars and the music that floated unbidden through the air. All the children were huge and seemed to already know each other. What's your name? Where you live? How old are you? Huge, nebulous questions from huge, nebulous people. Then a girl came up who was even taller than everyone else. Deep chocolate skin with bright doll baby eyes, as sultry as the night and belonging to it--belonging to this world where I happened to find myself. Oh, she's cute. Then the same huge, nebulous questions, some oohs and ahhs of short lived fascination and then she skipped off. The other kids followed her so I continued playing alone as I always had.
When I was about three or four years old my godmother gave me a little children's prayer book and sat with me while I said my good night prayers. I remember one night I was laying in my bed very troubled about something. I asked the Lord to be with me and somehow I knew He was there. There was no blinding flash of light, no voice booming from the clouds. But His presence was very real.
Margaret went to a Church on the corner and would take me to meetings that the women held in the evenings.
This Church also had a preschool in the basement and when I was old enough I started going. I still wasn't used to other children so when they let us play outside I mostly played with the wooden blocks and other toys. I did make one friend named Barbara. We would play together and made up a funny walk with giant steps. Now I had two friends, Aaron, the little boy next door and Barbara. But the other kids weren't a part of my world and I was not a part of theirs. Twice a crowd of kids followed me home.
Ooh, you did it
Now you gonna get it
But I didn't mean to wet my pants. It just happened. Questions and verdicts, snickers and rolling, slit-eyed looks swirled around me, in front of me and behind me in a solemn march towards a waiting switch.
Inside the preschool the people who were there to watch us were just kids themselves, barely teenagers, but they were huge grownups to me. One day Aaron pushed me down and got on top of me. The Watchers watched and laughed, egging him on but fortunately, not in. They always found something to holler at me about. I did not lay my head on the table at nap time exactly the way they wanted me to--my cheek flat on the hard wood, not cushioned by my folded arms which they snatched out from under my head. They did not know why I was so hard headed and I did not know why I had to obey people who did not protect me. Though we were in a Church, I did not associate that big gothic building or its people with the God who watched over and comforted me at night.
I stayed with Margaret and DeeDee off and on for several years after they moved back to Birmingham, Alabama where Margaret had a house that was paid for.
When I was eleven I went down to visit her during the Christmas season. It's a magical feeling to get off a plane and drive through Birmingham at night with all the Christmas lights. And I loved the thought of a new beginning, for the grownups had consented to my pleas to stay there and go to school.
I went to visit Kevin and his mother Jackie left us alone while she went to get something. Kevin had grown up some and he knew a thing or two about what to do when his mother was gone. He taught me how to french kiss. Hmm, a new beginning. When Margaret found out she raised hell and everything under it at Jackie for leaving us alone, but she bragged to her friend, and in her boasting she imagined things that had never transpired.. Girl, they been screwing. Is that another name for french kissing?
Margaret was proud of her son, Kevin's father, a pimp. She would brag to me about all the women he had. With his thick, crooked eyebrows, pock-marked face and long, greased down wavy hair, he looked like Michael Jackson's father Joe.
This same woman who taught me to pray when I was three, tried to discourage me from believing in God when I was eleven.
How do you like that book? She asked me. It was nothing like the clean, clinical book my mother let me read when I was nine or ten.
Mom, can I read this book? Love and Sex in Plain Language. Somehow I knew I was suppposed to ask. She looked over the book and gave her approval. Good, I thought, because I already read it.
But the books Margaret gave me to read pricked some as yet inchoate centers of sensation. Like prepubescent french kissing or perfumes in a rose seed. It would be twelve more years before what was inchoate became a reality, but I dreamed and I touched.
You know, I think Hell is just a bad feeling you have when you know you are about to die and you look back at all the stuff you have done.
What have you done, Margaret?
What the hell do you mean what have I done? I'm just telling you the Bible is all full of contradictions. In one place it says an eye for an eye, then in another place it says turn the other cheek. What do you make of that?'
I didn't know how to answer her then but I knew there was an answer. I began to wonder but I never began to doubt.
Come back for the third and final part