Читать книгу Pressure Makes Diamonds - Valerie Graves - Страница 9

Chapter 2

Mom Drops the Nuclear Family Bomb

When I was thirteen, my mother married the man next door. Albert Munson was a nice-looking, dark-skinned man who moved into his Lakeside apartment with his children Mack and Sharon when I was ten. Mack and Sharon’s mother lived elsewhere in the projects with several younger children from a different marriage. Mack was a fairly good-looking guy, but Sharon was really quite beautiful, with a lovely face and a body that attracted a lot of attention from older guys. One day Sharon, who was two years older than me, was bored enough to cross our shared front lawn and talk to me. We bonded over the revelation that her favorite aunt was married to my cousin and that my little cousins were also hers. From that time on, if her real friends, a couple of tough girls named Ritchie and Mary Jane, were not around, we would watch TV, gossip, and bake cookies or cupcakes together. If Mr. Munson came home while I was at Sharon’s, we might exchange a few words. Like most of the fathers I knew, he did not spend a lot of time hanging out and talking to kids. I was very surprised when Sharon angrily told me that her father had decided that my brother Spurgeon and I would be the only kids allowed in the house while he was not there. Sharon largely ignored his directive; Ritchie and Mary Jane stopped by often to hang out with her, puffing cigarettes and blowing smoke out the windows of Sharon’s bedroom.

Once, Sharon and I spent Thanksgiving night and the following day visiting our mutual relatives and babysitting while the parents worked. We got into a long, rambling conversation about how our race was perceived, which turned into a verbal example of the Stockholm Syndrome, and I blush when I recall the conversation. We tongue-lashed our people like a couple of crackers at a Klan meeting, egging each other on as we recalled loud, unruly public behavior, messy restaurant counters left behind, boisterous classroom behavior, fighting instead of studying in school, and all manner of missing decorum when it came to the behavior of Negroes. If we wanted to be treated better—and I can only hope we used the inclusive term “we”—we would have to learn how to conduct ourselves in polite society, instead of showing the ignorant side of ourselves that was so often on display. Something possessed me to write all this down.

When my cousin’s wife, Sharon’s aunt, came in from work, we proudly shared our dissertation. As proof of the damage racism inflicts on the self, she agreed with us. So did the president of the local youth chapter of the NAACP, who invited us to read our work at the next meeting at the Lakeside Community Center. Sharon was a no-show, but since I had shot off my mouth, my mother made me go. Eleven years old and still wearing lace-trimmed socks with my black patent-leather church pumps, I stepped to the front of the room and proudly read my excoriation of all of us for being the cause of much of the treatment we received from the white world. I sat down to a thunderous ovation that may have been further proof that racism drives people out of their minds.

As the hip organ music of Ray Charles’s “One Mint Julep” signaled the start of the partying that most of the teenage audience had come for, I thought, Wow, Sharon is so stupid. She missed it. Savoring the spotlight and the rare privilege of being present at a teenage social gathering, I watched from the edge of the stage as one of the neighborhood’s best dancers swung his partner onto the dance floor. Whirling past, he shot me a smile that was icing on the cake of my evening as the Lakeside projects’ official social activist smarty-pants. By the time I was twelve, I realized that Sharon, in skipping out on that celebration of self-hatred, had made a wise decision.

My mother’s first meeting with Sharon’s father was so cute that it became a favorite family story. As she was hurrying to her job as a church secretary one morning, Al Munson appeared at his front door and called out to her: “Miss Deloris, can I speak to you for a moment?”

She wondered what we kids had done now that required a neighbor to talk to her. “Can I stop by when I get off work? I’m running late.”

He agreed; she went to work and worried off and on all day about what had happened. She knocked on his door as soon as she came home from work.

He came to the door and quickly started talking: “Thanks for stopping by. Um . . . listen, what I wanted to talk to you about . . . I heard that you broke up with Don.”

Don had been my mother’s boyfriend for a couple of years. He was a decent guy who turned ugly when he drank alcohol. Don was never mean to us kids, but one night after a few drinks, he made the mistake of hitting my mother. He promptly found himself without a girlfriend. My beautiful mother would not lack for replacement suitors, and Al Munson hoped to be one of them.

“I don’t know if you heard, but I broke up with my girlfriend too. I was wondering if maybe we could go out sometime?”

My mother, shivering on the doorstep, said, “Well, maybe you could ask me to step inside. It’s cold out here.” She walked into his living room and he walked into our lives.

The first time I heard my mother call Mr. Munson “honey,” I felt a shock pulse through me. I had answered the phone, so I knew who she was talking to. Mama and Mr. Munson had gone out on a couple of dates by this point. One time, they went to a music club and stopped for Chinese takeout on the way home. This was cool with me; I loved the spicy jumbo shrimp Mama brought home from their date. I was hoping for more dates and exotic leftovers. But “honey”? When did Mr. Munson turn into “honey”?

Before Don, there had certainly been men buzzing around my mother: Emmett, a friend of our Detroit cousins, used to come by. Captain B., an army officer who had been Mama’s teenage boyfriend, took her to the movies while visiting Pontiac one summer, provoking no end to my fantasies about life as the captain’s daughter. The owner of the local record store, whose name I forget, came by one Christmas Eve to personally deliver the console hi-fi my mother had purchased. He brought Ahmad Jamal’s new jazz album as a present and hung around for a holiday eggnog.

Guys hitting on my mother were nothing new. “Honey” was. I was right to think this relationship was different. Mama and Mr. Munson grew closer and their relationship grew more serious. After making dinner and feeding us, Mama would now spend most evenings next door at Mr. Munson’s watching his Zenith remote-controlled television, the first I had ever seen. He began to be included in family gatherings and we started meeting other members of the Munson clan. Increasingly, we traveled in his used but freshly painted black-cherry Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight. If he were around on hot days when the ice cream truck came jingling through the neighborhood, he would give us money for frozen treats, and on cold winter mornings, if we were ready, he would drop us at school on his way to work. Riding in the car, cozy and warm, listening to Jackie Wilson crooning “Lonely Teardrops” or Howlin’ Wolf wailing “Smokestack Lightning” from Mr. Munson’s state-of-the-art mobile record player, I thought that if only he liked Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Smokey, life with Mr. Munson in it would be pretty cool. Later, when he and Mama decided to marry and become a family with four teenagers who had little in common, I changed my mind.

Actually, their wedding was pretty cool. After I had thrown a heroic tantrum, cried myself weak, and made an empty threat to move in with my father—“Go ahead,” was my mother’s knowing response—I accepted the inevitable and hoped for the best. Mama’s maternal grandmother, Allie Williams of West Blocton, Alabama, whom we called Mama Allie, came up for the wedding at my great-grandparents’ house on Houston Street. My mother wore a bright fuchsia two-piece silk sheath dress for the occasion, which scandalized her grandmother. “So, they’re marrying in red, now?” Nevertheless, Mama looked gorgeous and Mr. Munson was beaming.

After the ceremony there was a big family party of my favorite kind, where nobody paid attention to us teenagers and we hopped in and out of family cars that went on seemingly endless trips to the store for more ice, beer, and ginger ale. The highlight of the evening was when we rode with a couple of older cousins to roust their husbands from a local bar. One cousin’s wife, the instigator of the expedition, was a big-boned, outspoken Southern belle from Macon, Georgia. She had a personality as large as the shapely hips that had attracted my cousin in the first place, and was always the source of some manner of outrageous good time. The guy cousins had sought refuge from our too-tame family gathering at the notorious Club 88, steps from the infamous corner of Bagley and Wesson streets where gamblers and bums hung out. We kids didn’t get past the bar’s blue neon sign, but watching my bad-boy cousins make a hasty, shamefaced exit was worth the trip. Their indignant wives chattered all the way back to Houston Street.

“Did you hear Henry trying to say he wasn’t sitting with that cheap floozy?”

“Well, James couldn’t even try that. He was sitting there big as life with his arm around some little hussy.”

Neither of these women was worried about losing her man; they just weren’t about to be disrespected in front of the whole family. For us teenage girls, the incident was a fun sidebar to a memorable evening. No two ways about it, my mother’s wedding was fun. While it lasted.

Maybe Mama and Mr. Munson had been watching too much TV. What was their vision? A perfect family where the motherless kids and the fatherless kids lived happily as one united crew? In fact, my fifteen-year-old brother Spurgeon had become too much the man of the house to accept a father figure whose permission was now required to do almost anything. My slightly wild stepsister thought she had been stuck with the silliest goody-two-shoes sister in the projects. My stepbrother, a poor student, had already developed some bad habits like shoplifting, though the adults didn’t know it. I, while happy to have a daddy figure, had a bad reaction to my mother’s sudden deference to her husband. Every time I heard, “What do you think, Al?” my thirteen-year-old mind interpreted this as a stunning loss of self-confidence. It was a phrase she uttered far too often for my liking. I also thought my stepsister Sharon, with her tough friends, cigarettes, and grown-man suitors, was fast and embarrassing.

For a short time, we all lived in the two-bedroom apartment I grew up in. To my mind, the roll-away bed in the downstairs hall was a booger on our cute, modern living room—by then updated with a sectional sofa and blond corner table—and offended my upwardly mobile sensibilities. Shortly after Mama’s wedding, I awoke after sharing that roll-away bed with Mama Allie to the sound of the television, and was greeted by the sight of tens of thousands of marchers in the streets of Washington. The night before, having heard of the intended demonstration, I had said a silent prayer that at least a few hundred people would show up. I did not leave the TV for the duration of the day’s activities. I was buoyed by the spectacle of so many of my brethren gathered together to demand participation in a world that was as omnipresent as the propagandizing television screen, and as unattainable as a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyland. The multitude marched for jobs and equality. I was too young to work, but my snotty idea of economic justice had a lot to do with a single-family home with three bedrooms and a new living room suite, in a neighborhood where the furniture would not be called a living room “suit.”

For Mama and Mr. Munson, hereafter known as “Daddy,” things were already getting better. Two incomes and one rent afforded them a bit of economic relief, both were taking steps toward better jobs with the federal government, and they were in love. Even for me, those days were not all bad. One bright, indelible spot is the night I persuaded my brother Gary to use his new driver’s license to chauffeur Spurgeon, our cousin Dorethia, and me to Berry Gordy’s Motown Revue at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. For about three dollars, we saw thrilling live performances by the Supremes, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Temptations, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, and other acts from this celebrated label where I would one day work. Our senses were nearly overwhelmed by the lights and the tuxedo-clad Earl Van Dyke Orchestra, the glamour of silk suits, mirror-shined shoes, sequined dresses, deftly coiffed wigs, and sophisticated choreography. All the way home, we relived our favorite parts of the show, singing snatches of songs, talking over each other, so excited we hardly noticed that the heat in my mother’s old Buick had stopped working. When we got home, our delight was so apparent that even Mama and Daddy were happy we had gone. For at least that night, we were a happy family.

Our move to a larger project apartment eliminated some of my superficial concerns, but I was still dismayed by the changes in my mother’s behavior. My stepsister, though never verbally disrespectful to Mama and Daddy, became ever more incorrigible outside the house. Despite my mother’s kindness, Sharon wanted an adult life more than she wanted a mother, and was soon placed in a residential facility because of school truancy. My stepbrother remained aimless. My brother Spurgeon was smoldering with resentment, and Daddy’s attitude—“This is my house; whatever I say goes”—was a perfect accelerant. It wasn’t long before spontaneous combustion between the two of them became a feature of our lives. Once, despite the truth of what Spurgeon was saying, I thought a lightning bolt would strike him when he said to Daddy, “You know, you just keep repeating the same thing over and over. I wish you would just shut up.” By today’s standards it seems almost innocuous, but in the 1960s, a black child who spoke to a parent like that was likely to be physically assaulted. I wondered why Mama and Daddy couldn’t have been content to just be boyfriend and girlfriend living next door to each other.

I should have been careful what I wished for. In a little less than two years, fearful that his conflict with my increasingly insubordinate brother would lead him to commit violence—something that never happened—Daddy moved to a small apartment on the South Side. My mother was welcome to visit him. Between work, night school classes, a twenty-five-mile commute, and her efforts to save her young marriage, my mother, the most reliable person in my life, had less and less time to spend with me. I developed a rough, persistent facial rash that threatened to make me miss our class trip to Washington, DC; otherwise, there were few outward signs that I was losing my way. A dermatologist declared me not to be contagious, my skin cleared up, and I enjoyed a wonderful class trip, prom, and graduation. My grades had faltered slightly, but I managed to get through ninth grade without anyone realizing that I might need help. Coincidentally, I was making new friends, and like most teenagers, I had no idea how much I needed my mother’s guidance.

My new friends were already in their first year of high school. Because I had skipped a grade, I was hanging out with girls who were two years older, a big gap when the ages are fourteen and sixteen. My friends were nice girls like Ruth Ann, from good Pontiac families, so my mother didn’t seem to worry that I spent so much time with them. Her mind was on bigger and more obvious problems. Marriage, which was supposed to bring our family together, seemed to be pulling it apart.