My parents were trying to salvage their marriage. Sometimes on the weekends, my father and mother would make time for each other, and they’d leave us with one of their friends who lived in a cluster of apartment houses in the next town over. This friend babysat my brother and me often. From listening to adult conversation, I knew her husband beat her, and I knew that this was wrong. That was clearly delineated at least, and I knew this because once my mother’s entire family rode to Pass Christian with shotguns when my aunt’s boyfriend beat her: they stood out in the street in front of his house and told him if he ever touched her again, they would kill him, and he did not beat my aunt again.
Once, when I was nine and Joshua was six, my parents’ friend dared Joshua to drink from a bottle of hot sauce, and my brother, who always had a stomach of iron and had eaten dog food once when I dared him, drank it.
“Your booty going to be burning when you doo-doo,” she said.
He looked at her and smiled. His teeth were red. His breath was hot with Tabasco.
“No it’s not,” he piped up.
I was impressed. She tried to pass the bottle to me but I demurred. Sometimes he led and I followed. I realized that this time belonged to him. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for us and gave us small plastic cups of red Kool-Aid. My brother and I ate the sandwiches in big, breathless bites. Josh and I ran around barefoot in and out of the apartments, leaping from stairs, playing with stray cats, giving the Dumpsters in the parking lot a wide berth. They stank, and people sometimes missed the Dumpsters and left the garbage to rot next to them.
One day my parents’ friend left us downstairs, watching TV, while she visited her upstairs neighbors.
I was distracted. Maybe I wanted another grilled cheese sandwich, so I ascended the stairs to find the door to their apartment open. Their apartment was mostly dark, and pieces of art made of stretched velvet and glass etched with colored veins that made the glass look marbled hung from the walls. The couple was a white couple, and my parents’ friend and the man and woman sat in chairs around a smallish kitchen table. In the middle of the table, a mirror lay face up. The man was sliding a razor along the surface of the mirror, separating white powder into lines. He bent over and sniffed like he was sucking up his snot, like he was clearing his nose. His hair fell forward across his face. My parents’ friend looked up and saw me standing in the doorway and said, “Mimi, go downstairs.” I went. I did not know what it was. I did not know that I’d seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wits’ end did to feel less like themselves for a time. I did not know this need would follow my generation to adulthood too.
Somehow my mother and father still scraped together enough for our Christmases. For days beforehand, my grandmother cooked, made big pots of seafood gumbo and homemade biscuits, pecan and sweet potato pies. The fire in the wood-burning stove in the living room ran so hot, the grownups went outside to feel the cool air and take turns pushing each other on my rope swing. My brother and I slept uneasily on Christmas Eve, Joshua because he was giddy about the prospect of presents, and me because I was nine and wanted a ten-speed with everything in me, and I was wondering if all the begging I’d done for one would pay off. If there would be a miracle. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed the county police had come to the house to take all my uncles and my father away to jail. In my dream, I cried, and when I woke up, my face was wet. I do not know why I had that dream that night; I wasn’t aware that my father or uncles were hustling or involved in criminal activities. Now, as an adult, I do not think they were. As an adult, I know they were men, rascals who loved to drink and smoke and raise hell on the weekends. But as a child, I listened to my grandmother when she worried about her sons, about them being stopped by the police and searched for no other reasons than they were Black and male, about them getting into fights with White men at bars and being arrested for assault while the White men they fought went free. And I saw the tight line of my mother’s mouth when my father was absent and couldn’t be accounted for, and heard her worry about him riding his motorcycle and getting into an accident and being taken to jail for it. To an impressionable nine-year-old, trouble for the Black men of my family meant police. It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom. But after I woke from that dream and woke Joshua, we crept into my parents’ room to wake them and beg them to let us open presents, and a red ten-speed was propped in the corner of the living room for me, and I nearly forgot that dream.
My mother must have sat Joshua and me down and told us, perhaps in the living room on the same sofa where five years earlier my father had asked for my mother’s hand in marriage. After having two children, my parents married; after having two more, they’d decided to divorce.
“Your daddy’s not coming home. He’s going away.”
She didn’t say divorce. We wouldn’t have understood that word. But the next day, our father still had not come home from leaving for work the day before, and Joshua and I understood in our narrow, bony chests. Daddy was not coming home. He was going away. No more trailing around after him in the yard asking to hold nails or pieces of wood as he built rabbit hutches, no more fighting my way to the top of the rope swing, touching the branch, yelling “See!” to him, trying to make him proud.
Later, I would learn that my mother had said he should leave after she found out about his latest girlfriend, his youngest, the daughter of a coworker from the glass plant, who was fourteen when they met. She had worked a summer job at the plant the year that my father was fired. After my father lost his job and began working at the oyster plant and my mother found out about this latest infidelity, my mother realized my father would never change and their love was doomed. When my mother found out, she was pregnant with my fourth and last full sibling, Charine, but Joshua and I didn’t know it yet.
After my mother told us this, I took to the room we shared with our aunts and curled in the bottom bunk, Joshua’s bed, and alternately cried and read the latest book I’d checked out from the school library, shocked by the rejection of my father’s leaving, which felt like a rejection not of his wife or his domestic life but of me. Children often blame themselves when a parent leaves, and I was no exception.
Joshua took to the yard. It was summer, and it was hot. He ran around the house, lap after lap, round after round, wailing, crying for Daddy. The uncles and aunts ran after him, caught him, held him squirming to them, told him to stop, but he sobbed louder and fought and squirmed in their arms. He was six now, longer, his once blond afro shaved short, and he was strong. They let him go and he hit the ground running and crying. He circled the house for hours, and he only stopped when he fell to his knees, his sobbing dying to hiccups and moans. He fell asleep like that, his head bowed, outside in the dirt. One of the uncles carried him inside, and I made room for him in his bed.
Soon after, my mother filed for Section 8, a government subsidy for housing, and found a house two towns over in Orange Grove, Mississippi, in a suburb going to seed, and told my grandmother we would be moving that summer. I turned ten. Before we left to set out on our own, and even though I suspected I was too old for it, I wandered around Kidsland again, tried to conjure some of the old magic, the belief, and could not.