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Chapter 4

Teenage Motherhood: A Babysitter for the Prom

One sunny morning in July of 1965, I woke up and found myself in a nightmare. My period, which unfailingly arrived every twenty-eight days, had not shown up as expected. For the next few days, I hoped against hope, running to the bathroom so often that my mother asked if I felt ill, but somewhere inside my fifteen-year-old self, I knew that the end of the world had arrived. I was pregnant, and for a girl like me, that was the equivalent of an atomic explosion. The Michelle Obama of the Lakeside Homes projects, the great black hope, that girl was pregnant. Pregnant, and not by my first love, who had deflowered me but also proudly professed his love to my outraged mother. Instead, I might be pregnant from a single encounter with Bobby K., a popular guy who, because of his short stature, seemed to feel more comfortable with younger girls. Bobby was director of a summer recreation program that the kids I was babysitting attended. When I picked them up, Bobby would sometimes give us a ride home in his hot little Mustang convertible. He was looking for sex; I was vulnerable to anyone who might make up for Hat Man’s betrayal and soldier Ronnie’s indifference. On one fateful occasion, Bobby K.’s persistence was greater than my resistance. Now, my disgrace was complete. Not only was my pregnancy a cause of shame—my parents had been married, and their parents before them—it was a looming financial burden to my mother’s fragile new re-marriage, and a fall from grace that would require the whole family to explain how such a thing could have happened. That entire summer, I carried my terrible secret and wondered how the world could still look so normal. If Valerie Graves was pregnant, the world as we knew it was over. As it turned out, that assessment wasn’t far off.

When my mother learned I was pregnant, she cried for three days. I could feel her crushing disappointment. Her hopes for me were going down the drain. The disapproval of our relatives and church family would be a heavy cross to bear. I did not know it, but she and Daddy had decided to reconcile and buy a house. Just when things might be looking up, I had thrown a giant monkey wrench into the works. As I walked home from school the first day after Mama found out about my condition, I was once again amazed by how normal the world looked. Nothing was normal or would ever be again. The one saving grace was that the burden of keeping my secret was lifted. Daddy came over one day, took me for a drive, and simply asked, “What happened?” My answer: “I messed up.” I had forgotten who I had always been. I had violated the standards by which I had been raised. I had even sunk below the monogamous code of my girlfriends. Loneliness and rejection had turned me into someone I did not recognize. Daddy and I talked briefly about Ronnie, but not about Bobby K., whom shame would not allow me to mention. Like a child, I willed the pregnancy to be the result of Ronnie’s wayward condom. I acted like a kid, and left what would happen from there largely in the hands of my parents.

We moved to the other side of town at just the right time. Seward Street, on the East Side, consisted of four nondescript blocks of modest Cape Cod houses on a practically treeless street. Our house was neat, even cute, sitting atop a little rise with a small lawn and shrubs bordering the front windows. The house, though small, was a step up. Mama and Daddy bought a beautiful set of the ornate French provincial furniture that was all the rage, and a marble-topped coffee table. The new cherrywood console hi-fi that Daddy had bought for his apartment now graced our freshly carpeted living room. We even got our first new car, an impressive Buick Electra 225, or “deuce and a quarter” as it was known among black folks. We were the third black family to move to the street. Our neighbors were mostly white factory workers from Kentucky and Tennessee. They were simultaneously cordial and distant. For Sale signs soon sprouted on their lawns like dandelions. In those days of real estate block busting, our street turned black overnight—though our new black neighbors were mostly strangers to me. For the first time in memory, I was content to be anonymous.

Once we moved to the house, life was calmer. My stepbrother Mack had decided to live with his mother’s relatives rather than leave the West Side. Sharon, after a brief period of compliance, had been truant so many days from school that she was not allowed to complete the school year. Now seventeen, she officially quit and took a job as a live-in nanny. Spurgeon, having briefly resided in our biological father’s home, seemed ready to give Daddy’s rules another chance

Although I was nauseous from unrelenting morning sickness, I attended school regularly. I hid my condition from teachers under big shirts and loose clothing. I fainted once in the sulfurous chemistry lab, and drowsiness regularly rolled over me in fourth-period French class after lunch. The teacher once instructed me, “Mademoiselle Graves, dormez bien cette weekend!” Among my black peers, my pregnancy was common knowledge. I identified Ronnie as the father, and no one other than him doubted me.

At school, my guidance counselor was the only authority who seemed to tumble to the situation. Mr. Ayling was a thirty-something white man who related to students in a cool, nonjudgmental manner that made him easy to talk to. I had come to see him to find out what would happen to my chances of graduating with my class if I dropped out for one semester. It turned out that the extra-credit advanced courses I had taken would be my salvation. If I could complete the fall semester, I could miss the following one, return in September as a senior, and graduate with my class in June. Instead of reporting his suspicions, Mr. Ayling became an invaluable ally. Having studied my entire school record, he was determined that this bump in the road would not run my life into a ditch. Somehow, he talked most of my teachers into letting me take final exams in his office, since by January my pregnancy was apparent. The lone exception was the straitlaced French teacher, who insisted I make my required oral presentation before the class. When I entered the classroom, just shy of seven months pregnant in maternity clothing, her face reflected first shock, then something like sadness. Clearly, she had not been told of the situation. Mr. Ayling had gone out on a limb for me, but to admit knowledge of a student pregnancy could have cost him his job. I walked to the podium and faced the room.

“Est-ce que les cirques ont eté invade par les anges? C’est possible d’y croisir si on a lu l’article dans cette issue de Paris Match,” I smilingly intoned to my stunned classmates. I still remember those opening lines, which I delivered with all the poise my public speaking experience could afford. My presentation concerned an angel hiding out as a circus clown. I could identify with the situation. I was no angel, but I was determined not to let my situation make me a clown. “Merci, Mademoiselle Graves,” the teacher said when I had finished. “Tu t’a fait bien.” She nodded her respect for my effort to show grace under pressure. Head held high, I walked out of the classroom and went home to await the birth of my baby.

Staying at home with no transportation gave me lots of time to read and watch TV. The nesting phase of pregnancy had taken hold, and television game shows, drugstore novels, and old movies were my daytime companions. I cleaned, dusted, ironed clothes, and peeled the potatoes that Daddy required as a daily side dish no matter what else was on the menu. My pregnant belly bounced and my unborn baby squirmed as I danced around the small living room to the hits on a local TV dance-party show. As usual, my dreams came mostly from books and television. In particular, Darrin Stephens of Bewitched piqued my interest. His fun job as an advertising professional seemed right up my alley, and like a surprising number of amateurs, I assumed that I could easily write great commercials. By that time, Bill Cosby’s uber-cool character, Scottie, was traveling the world playing tennis and fighting international bad guys on I Spy. I resolved to have a job that involved travel. Marlo Thomas’s character on That Girl, making her way in the big city of New York, where I hoped to live someday, was a female role model. Somewhere along the way, I began to have more positive feelings about the child I would have. I always envisioned my baby as a boy, and I began to talk to him about the life we would make together. I daydreamed the afternoons away, picturing myself and my baby in a cool modern apartment in a metropolis far away. While I still had the occasional self-pitying phone conversation with Ronnie, and sometimes cried myself to sleep at night, the last two months of my pregnancy were mostly a time of calm and reflection.

Nine months pregnant and weighing a whopping 129 pounds, I arrived at Pontiac General Hospital late one Wednesday night, a child about to give birth to a baby. Thirty-seven and a half miserable hours later, I was finally wheeled into delivery. I sucked in the anesthetic as if it were life-giving oxygen. “Take it easy,” the anesthesiologist warned. I ignored her; I didn’t care if the anesthesia killed me, as long as it stopped the pain. On Friday, April 1, while I was unconscious, my son Brian was born. It was quite an April Fool’s Day.

A family friend, the pianist from our church, worked in the hospital nursery. She came out and told my mother, “Deloris, you have a really beautiful grandson.” Mama’s pride was my first inkling that a cute baby could ease the sting of an illegitimate pregnancy. I think Daddy’s plan had been to ignore my infant, but it was an abject failure. The day after I brought the baby home, I began to run a fever as my breasts turned rock-hard and were engorged with milk. Mama took the baby into the living room so that I could get some rest. I was surprised to hear Daddy chuckle as Mama baby-talked to my infant son. By the next day, Daddy was phoning home from work to make sure that the baby was all right. His affection only grew deeper and lasted until the day he died. Daddy’s sister Mabel stopped by with shopping bags full of gowns, diapers, and baby undershirts she had bought at a local department store, a kindness I have never forgotten. Baby gifts poured in from other relatives, and even Les Jeunes Filles sent over a bassinet. For the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel so isolated and alienated from my previous life.

April was a perfect time to have had the baby. I had spring and summer to adjust to the demands of motherhood and plan my return to school. A baby was a lot of work, but I took pride in being a good mother to my infant. I washed and folded baby clothes and diapers, sterilized bottles, and did household chores whenever Brian slept. My grandfather’s eldest sister urged me to breastfeed him, and once I did, I loved the unfamiliar experience. I held my son close and breathed in his sweet baby smell. As he began to respond to the sound of my voice, to look into my eyes and make soft cooing sounds, I fell completely in love with my baby boy. We were alone in the house together all day, and as the touch of my hands and the sound of my voice became the source of his comfort and the answer to his every need, I also clung ferociously to him. He was completely dependent on me and I found in him a love, conditional only on my presence, which filled a need deep in my soul. The closeness of those first intertwined months of Brian’s life has resurfaced again and again and helped carry us through trying, potentially estranging times.

My girlfriends made the trip across town to visit and get a look at Brian. Word of my “pretty” baby, with his handsome features and desirable high-yellow complexion got around. I had expected the baby to be medium brown like myself, but I secretly thanked God that Brian shared soldier Ronnie’s mother’s color.

Then, just as my friend Ruth Ann was preparing for college, she suddenly got married instead. Not surprisingly, the marriage was motivated by an unplanned pregnancy. That situation turned out to be a godsend for me when Ruth Ann volunteered to watch Brian so that I could return to school in the fall. I could hardly believe such a huge problem would be so easily solved, but soon enough I was dropping off the baby at her house and returning to the classroom.

To my surprise, Daddy had expected that I would be going to work, not back to school. I thought he must be crazy if he expected me to be a high school dropout. Predictably, things around the house got tense. One night, after Daddy seemed to want me to simultaneously do the dinner dishes and quiet my squalling baby, things erupted into a screaming argument and I stormed out of the house with Brian and little else. A friend’s mother paid for the cab I took to their home, where I remained for weeks, much to my mother’s dismay.

I was a big fan of my friend’s mother, Shirley B., who had taken me in. Shirley was a tall, fierce black beauty with a big heart, a talent for drama, and a soft spot for slightly dangerous streetwise guys. Shirley, a daddy’s girl from an old Pontiac family, took no stuff from her man or anyone else. She had juice; her dad was in local law enforcement and her brother was a pro football player. When Shirley stepped out the door, with an attitude as sharp as her fur-collared walking suit, the world had better watch out. Living at Shirley’s was a crash course in the power of female sex appeal and the proper exercise of feminine wiles. Shirley was the sort of woman who left exes wondering what had hit them and how they could get back into her good graces. She schooled us girls—with limited success—in how to command the treatment we deserved. Of the guys who came by to visit us, she pointed out which ones were worth our time and which of them were a waste. Even twenty years later, when she met my handsome journalist husband, she gave an approving nod to his looks and social profile, granting him the Shirley B. seal of approval: “Well, it looks like I raised you right.”

While I lived with her, I went on a couple of dates with a guy who, when he came to Shirley’s house, immediately picked up Brian and began to play with him. “Hey, little man! What’s goin’ on?” After he left, Shirley said, “Now that’s a man right there. If you want to know how a man will treat you, watch how he treats kids, and watch how he treats his mama.” Since I wasn’t seriously interested in the guy, I didn’t bother to share that his mother lived with him in a house that he owned.

Life at Shirley’s was exciting and cool, but I had absolutely no money. My mother stopped by regularly with milk and baby food for Brian, but it was clear that if I wanted to be provided for, I would have to apologize to Daddy and move back home, something I was too willful to do. I would never wish on anyone the shame of abject poverty, but I think it must strike most deeply the souls of runaway children who have never provided for themselves. I was accustomed to having a roof over my head because someone loved me, to having nice clothes and trips to the movies and being entitled to raid the refrigerator because someone cared if I was fed. Now that the roof was far from assured and groceries not a given, I also felt bereft of love. Like an underage dark-skinned Blanche DuBois, my fortunes depended on the kindness of people whose generosity was sure to dwindle. When the family I lived with went out for burgers or ice cream, I was wrenched between the longing for a treat and the indignity of not being able to buy myself a twenty-five cent White Castle hamburger or a meager ice-cream cone.

I sometimes pretended not to want anything when my stomach was doing somersaults and my mouth literally watered. Most of the time, Shirley ignored my protestations and bought me whatever she was getting for her own kids, which made me feel like even more of a loser. What was becoming of my life?

The burden of my situation was plainly taking a toll on my mother, who was caught in the middle between Daddy’s and my battling egos. After Mama, fed up with my being a charity case, came and took Brian to her house, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay with Shirley much longer. It was one thing for my friend’s mother to keep an innocent baby out of the street. Adopting a teenage girl was a whole other proposition. Sure enough, when Shirley bought a new house, she advised me to call my mother and work things out. The thought of asking my real father for help never entered my mind. Even now, everything I know of him says that would have been a fool’s demeaning errand. Reluctantly, I returned to Seward Street for my feast of crow. After that, I bit my tongue and got along better with Daddy.

* * *

During the Christmas holidays, Ruth Ann’s cousin Hubert came home from Michigan State and we reconnected. I had always been attracted to his good looks and intelligence, and now that I was a little older, he was equally drawn to me. We talked for hours, in person and on the phone, and he spent every evening during the holidays with me in my parents’ living room. Like me, Hubert planned to “be somebody,” and everyone in town expected that he would. My family liked him; in many ways he was a lot like my two brothers: smart, cool enough, but basically a good boy. Like everyone else, he gravitated to my darling baby. At last, I had a traveling companion on the trip to “somewhere.”

Having a boyfriend who was in college did wonders for my self-esteem. I refocused on school and even managed to participate in some extracurricular activities. People were complimentary of my performance as emcee of the school talent show, and my poem “Middle-Class High” was published in the school poetry journal. I made my first white friend: blond, pint-sized, funny Diane, who had transferred to Central from a Catholic school. Nicknamed “Squeak,” she and I shared artistic aspirations and a dislike of physical education class. A few years later Squeak would pass me the first marijuana joint I ever accepted; I trusted her implicitly and she became a lifelong friend. My deepening long-distance romance with Hubert made it easier to stay at home when my friends were out. For the first time since Hat Man, I was in a relationship with someone who valued me. I wasn’t looking at anyone else.

As the end of the spring semester approached, my classmates and I focused on writing our first term papers. The black consciousness movement that was inflaming the nation’s youth inspired most of our topics. We former Negroes began to refer to ourselves as Afro-Americans. We embraced the descriptor “black,” which up to then had been a derogatory term to be hurled at each other when we wanted to be hurtful. Huey P. Newton and the fearless Black Panthers, who had taken to patrolling the streets with their berets and rifles, were a source of pride and wonder. My paper entitled “The Negative Effects of the Ghetto on the Black Child” was a chronicle of the disadvantages of growing up on the Mud Lake side of America. It was an easy A.

I could hardly believe senior year was ending. Hubert was home from Michigan State and escorted me to the senior prom. I wore a fashionable blue gown that was a gift from my proud Aunt Dean. Except for needing a sitter, the night of my prom was just as I had always imagined it would be. I was on the arm of my handsome, educated boyfriend who cared about me as much as I did him. Like almost all of the black students, we swung by the corny official prom only long enough to check out the decorations and have our prom portraits taken. Then it was off to Detroit, over the brightly lit Ambassador Bridge to Canada for dinner and a glitzy show. Even though I was not a fan of the comedy of Totie Fields, catching her bawdy act over a steak dinner at the Top Hat Supper Club made prom night even more ritzy and special. I drifted into my parents’ house at dawn, ending a night that couldn’t have gone better.

Now, graduation, the first hurdle between me and the life I wanted, was only a week away. It was customary for graduating seniors to wear mortarboards and gowns for the entire week. I never left the house without at least my cap. Unwed motherhood had not vanquished my dreams, and I wanted the world to know.

I had been so intent on graduating that the ambivalence of commencement took me by surprise. The slightly untethered feeling of no longer being a student was an unforeseen consequence of the end of high school. Even more than having a child, graduation launched me into the world of adulthood at a time when society was changing at warp speed. My generation—the Baby Boomers—was beginning to assert itself in movements that would grow to reflect the size of our cohort. With so many questioning young men in line to be drafted to Vietnam, antiwar unrest was picking up steam. Murmurings of female discontent were evolving into bra-burning demonstrations and a full-throated call for women’s liberation. The feel-good exuberance of the Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was being nudged leftward by the shaggy discontent of the Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction.” As young white Americans surged through the portal of adulthood feeling that satisfaction was their due, my newly minted Afro-American peers were taking their demanding cue.

Dashing young rebels like Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, and Huey P. Newton captured our attention as the vanguard of a black movement that dared to challenge the status quo, the Establishment, and the Man. The world I had been so eager to confront was calling my bluff, and a wisp of floating anxiety accompanied my liberation from secondary school. Without the protective, quasi-adult laboratory of college, would I be up to the challenge of everyday life in times that were growing more tumultuous by the day?

“Turn on the TV. The niggers are tearing up Detroit,” was how Hubert conveyed the news that the city was going up in flames. His choice of words telegraphed a world of information about which people in our community had set off the rioting in the streets. This was not the organized confrontation of our idolized Black Panthers, militant college professors, or radicalized prisoners. Detroit police had raided an after-hours club on Saturday night, rousted the hustling and hanging-out folk, and set in motion violence that would leave the big city of my youth nearly unrecognizable for two generations.

The whole concept of a race riot was an anachronism to my generation. Just as the killing of John F. Kennedy had raised the phenomenon of presidential assassination from the pages of our history texts, the riot in Detroit brought to life something that had once existed only in two dimensions. Mama, Daddy, and our adult relatives talked about the disruption with unequivocal disapproval, though Daddy was quick to return a Black Power salute thrown his way by a carload of tough-looking brothers.

My own brothers and their friends seemed to sympathize with the anarchistic fervor of their Detroit counterparts, but sat out the riots without taking to the streets. Like my parents, I didn’t see the sense of black people running around throwing firebombs in our own neighborhoods. The indignant little girl who had blasted our people at the NAACP meeting was revived within me as I sat glued to the television set. I was half fascinated by the rebellious spectacle, half frightened that the chaos and its clearly dark-skinned origins could place all of us black people in danger. Mostly, I struggled to understand what good the young men skittering past the TV cameras throwing bottles and rocks thought would come of their actions.

The transformative civil rights struggle of my childhood and the March on Washington had been grounded in the nonviolent leadership of Dr. King. Even the black consciousness movement that was taking hold of my peers and me was rooted in the concept of inner growth; we nurtured our connection to the African motherland in an effort to cast off the lingering self-hatred of slavery. My girlfriend’s father, incandescent Pontiac attorney Milton Henry, was a local hero who led our young adult revolution by example. Milton was a handsome, charming black man who had explored the traditional American route to success by serving his country during World War II, graduating from Yale Law School, and becoming a catalyst for change in our city government. His military unit was the Tuskegee Airmen—a black fighter pilot group that distinguished itself by never losing a single plane. Home from the war, he had experienced disrespect from a Southern bus driver after fighting for America’s freedom, and had been scorned by the Pennsylvania Bar Association after passing its test with a stellar score. He was told that his “black ass” would never practice law in that state, and Pontiac’s voting districts were later gerrymandered in a way that made it hard for him to retain his incendiary intellectual presence on the city council.

Milton’s discontent with the status quo led him to become a major activist, a confidant and adviser of Malcolm X, and a litigator of black grievances in and outside the courtroom. No cause was too small; when an interracial couple was refused entry to the Pontiac Central High School prom, Milton Henry led protests in the streets. No power structure was too intimidating; in the courts, he challenged the system by objecting to all-white juries in cases with black defendants as not meeting the standard of “trial by peers.” In the late sixties, after numerous visits to the African continent, he redefined himself by adopting an African name, becoming a vocal proponent of black nationalism, and wearing the dashiki that would soon be sported by everyone from the brother on the corner to George Jefferson on TV. Ultimately, Milton cofounded the Republic of New Afrika, a truly revolutionary group that urged the creation of a new country made up of five Southern states with majority-black populations. Almost miraculously, he promoted his causes without resorting to violence. Ultimately, he split from his compatriots, including his own brother, over the use of force. Because of Milton, I had seen firsthand how much could be accomplished through aggressive but nonviolent activism. I believed it was the way to achieve our common goals as black people.

Now, apparently in response to violence by raiding police, some of my frustrated brethren were throwing down a blazing gauntlet and being met with armed responses. Looking at the police and military being marshalled against them, I was afraid they were courting self-destruction and risking all of our lives. The fierce lack of give-a-fuck represented by flaming Molotov cocktails, looting, and sniper fire was a new and terrifying feature of a world where it seemed anything could happen. So, too, was the sight of National Guardsmen and the 101st Airborne soldiers patrolling the streets in trucks and tanks, fear in their eyes and guns in their hands. As assault vehicles rolled past ravaged buildings, I felt sympathy for the small-business owners who stood, discouraged and sometimes weeping, in front of stores that might have been built over a lifetime and burned out in an instant. The terror in the faces of mothers whose sons were running wild past gun-toting soldiers was also not lost on me, especially after the alleged murder of at least two black men by police officers at the Algiers Motel.

If the furious looting and burning of stores and businesses had begun as an expression of anger at a system that seemed weighted against the poor, they also provided an opportunity for those same people to take advantage of the “five-finger discount” that broken and breached storefronts put in front of them. During the Detroit unrest, while Ruth Ann and I were visiting a friend in Pontiac, the girl’s male cousins came by and used the dining room table to gleefully divide the spoils from a looted Detroit liquor store they had hit that morning. Other people were clearly torn between their disapproval of the riot itself and their desire to grab some free stuff while the getting was good. One black woman, being interviewed by a local TV station, decried the rioters and their violence on camera, saying, “I think it’s terrible, just terrible,” while diligently searching for the mate to a shoe she had just scavenged from a looted footwear store.