I’ll never forget it. My Mom grabbed me from school. “We’re going to Philly to see your Grandma.” Excited isn’t the word to express how I felt at that moment. ‘Elated,’ maybe? ‘Overjoyed’. “Over the moon.” I loved Philly. It was the only place in the world where I felt like I belonged. All the little girls had plats with barrettes like me. The rottweilers were scary but the neighbors who owned them were not. Going to the corner store to buy cigarettes for my grandmother with a dollar in my hand for some sour worms and a red quarter-water. Water ice and cousins with even icier jokes and jabs for each other. Being the only Black girl in the neighborhood was tiresome. In Philly, the only tiredness I felt was from the endless sessions of double-dutch on days we’d sweat out our press just by standing outside too long.
She picked up my brother too. He was inside of the middle school just a field away. I remember munching down on some McDonalds as I sat across from my brother on a Northeast Regional train to 30th. I don’t remember the conversations had or the people around us. Or what the drive felt like. I don’t think you know feelings in third grade, not in a way that you can accurately describe them. If I was to think and think hard, then I’m sure that I couldn’t wait to get to McMahon Street to see everybody. The summer vacation came early, I guess.
I never thought about my Dad. I wonder how he felt coming home from work to see his wife’s car gone from the driveway. Walking into a house with no children, no son downstairs in the basement playing Street Fighter II and no daughter upstairs in the family room watching PBS. I’m sure he panicked. I know he felt his entire world shake under his feet. What I do remember is that my Mom called him from the ‘Big House’ and that he called back and she didn’t want to talk to him. When she finally did, I recall my Dad asking me if I wanted to stay. Then my brother left because he wanted to go home and I didn’t see my Dad for another six months. My Mom enrolled me into school and I started building whatever-a-life-could-be at eight years-old. A life of feeling like I didn’t belong, a life of feeling awkward and out-of-place. Felt like I was made fun of more than having fun itself. Sleeping on a pull-out couch bed with my Mom every night, missing the five-bedroom house surrounded by White folks who also made me feel like I didn’t have the right to be there.
Felt good to go back into that house after a while. Until my mother tried to beat my Dad’s brains in with a broomstick as he screamed for my brother to call the police. When they came, I walked into a bedroom with blood splattered across the carpet and a shattered lamp miraculously still plugged in and on from being tossed to the ground. How the police let a child walk into a room like that says how they felt about it all. I would turn around to see my Mom at the end of the hallway with handcuffs on her wrists. She smiled at me, “Mommy’s going to jail.” I wouldn’t see her for another six months.
Then she just showed up. I yelled out for her when I saw her at the 7-Eleven up the street. Then years would follow with court dates, visitations, restraining orders. I would visit my Mom on Wednesdays and every other weekend until college. Before I left for school, the electricity was cut off and my Mom and I ate Chinese food we’d have to hold onto until the weekend was out. My Dad couldn’t afford to pay alimony and my Mom antagonized him for it. One day we drove past the apartment complex where she lived to see my bedroom set on the corner. Back to the ‘Big House’ she went.
ciara roslyn-james 