One Crazy Summer (14 page)

Although the rally was still going strong, Vonetta, Fern, and I couldn’t get down into the crowd fast enough once we had spotted Cecile. We weren’t the hugging type, but we were all happy. We were happy Cecile had been released from jail and happy she was there to see us onstage reciting “I Birthed a Nation.” Thanks to Vonetta, now people called Cecile’s poem “I Birthed a Black Nation.” I had braced myself for her crazy anger at us for disturbing her poem like we disturbed her quiet, but she didn’t mention one word about all the “black” we’d thrown into her poem. In fact, Cecile just seemed different after having been locked up. She even limited her disguise to her big shades. She was feeling so good—in a way that I think only I could make
out—that she even gave us compliments.

Vonetta got hers at my expense. Cecile said, “See that, Delphine? You need to speak up like Vonetta. Now, that’s how you recite a poem.” She might as well have said Vonetta was Hollywood’s black Shirley Temple. Vonetta lived on Cecile’s praise for the rest of the summer and into the next year.

To Fern, Cecile said, “Who said you could write a poem?”

Fern said, “I didn’t write it. I said it.”

“Surely did,” Cecile said, beating her to it; and we all laughed. What Cecile didn’t say was Fern’s name. Fern didn’t seem to notice, but I did.

I waited for Cecile to give me my share of praise. I didn’t need it heaped on like my sisters did, but I knew it would be good, because mine would come last. For a change, I planned to roll around in it and grin like a dummy.

But then some of the organizers of the rally swarmed “Sister Nzila” and “Little Nzila.” They fussed over Fern, telling her how brave and clever she was. The organizers had also made time for Nzila to speak of her “unjust arrest,” but Cecile waved her opportunity away. “Y’all heard my daughters,” she said, more tired than proud. “They said it all for me.”

Vonetta, Fern, and I hugged Sister Mukumbu and Sister Pat and told them we had a great time at the People’s Center summer camp. They praised our work. Praised Fern’s
bravery. Vonetta’s loud, strong voice, and my being a leader and a helper. They told “Sister Nzila” all about us and that they wanted us back next year.

The rest of the rally was all the speeches about Huey Newton and Bobby Hutton. Cecile said she wasn’t staying for that, even though she could have been the star of the day. She said, “Y’all can stay and run around with your friends. Tomorrow you’ll be on the plane to New York.”

Vonetta and Fern ran off with Janice and Beatrice. Eunice and I found a place to sit and share a bag of chips. I told her we would be flying to New York the next day. She asked if we were coming back, and I said I didn’t know. I suggested we become pen pals and write each other letters once a month. That sounded okay to her. Neither one of us was really a talker or run-around player. So we just sat there.

Hirohito found us sitting and jumped into a karate pose. “Did you see me?”

“We saw you, Hirohito,” Eunice said. “It would have been better if you broke some boards like they do on TV.” She demonstrated with a karate chop to a pile of air boards.

He didn’t really look at her. He looked at me. “Want a ride on my go-kart?”

I didn’t know how to be with Hirohito while Eunice was there. I just said no and looked at my sneakers. I felt my face growing warm. My feet were too big. Too big for a sixth-grade girl.

“Hirohito, you let a girl on your go-kart? Your precious
go-kart?” I couldn’t tell if Eunice was teasing him or mad at him.

“Yeah. So.”

“You like Delphine.”

I hit her on the shoulder like she was Vonetta. She didn’t seem to mind. Teasing Hirohito and making me feel silly seemed to provide Eunice with entertainment and satisfaction. She put her hand over her mouth to gasp. “I can’t believe you, Delphine. You like Hirohito. You’re just as bad as Janice and your sister.”

This was the second time Eunice had gotten me, and both times had to do with Hirohito. I never had anyone over me like a sister or brother and didn’t know how to answer back. I didn’t want to deny it in case he liked me too, but I wasn’t about to be the one to say it in words. I hadn’t even said it to myself yet.

Eunice wouldn’t let up. She was finally enjoying herself. “Hirohito Woods, I can’t believe you let a girl ride on your go-kart.”

“So.”

I smiled without smiling like Cecile does. Besides. He could have said “I don’t like her” or “She’s too tall” or “She’s too plain.” He could have said what all the boys in my class said: “I wouldn’t like her if she were the last girl on earth.” Instead, Hirohito said, “So.” Like “Okay.” Like it was okay to like Delphine.

I said it too. “So.”

We told Cecile everything. About our excursion to San Francisco, the hippies, Chinatown. Vonetta told how the tall, blond, white people took pictures of her like she was a movie star, which I could see Cecile didn’t like one bit. Fern told how she saw Crazy Kelvin with two policemen just before the bus rounded onto the Bay Bridge. She gave us an earful about how Kelvin always said “racist pigs,” but he let the policeman pat him on the back like he was the policeman’s dog. To that, Cecile said, “If you can see that, then you’ll write poems, all right.”

We asked her about being arrested and being a political prisoner and a freedom fighter. Cecile made it sound like it was no big deal. “I’ve been fighting for freedom all my
life.” But she wasn’t talking about protest signs, standing up to the Man, and knowing your rights. She was talking about her life. Just her. Not the people.

Vonetta, wanting more compliments, said, “We put everything back, just the way you like it,” talking about Cecile’s workplace, the kitchen. I didn’t expect gushing, but it would have been nice if she gave us more than the nod.

We packed all of our things except for the clothes we’d wear in the morning. It was hard to believe four weeks had passed by so quickly. When Vonetta and Fern had gone to bed, I went into the kitchen to find Cecile hunched over her printer. Pieces of the machine lay out on the table. She had the screwdriver in her hand, putting it back together herself.

Although I didn’t hear the door swing when I pushed it, she had and knew I was there.

“I called your father when I got out,” she told me without looking up. “Delphine, why didn’t you tell him what happened?”

I stood there, surprised. Shocked. It didn’t enter my mind that she would have wanted me to call Papa.

“We thought you were coming right back.”

She kept screwing in one of the rollers, still not looking at me directly. “I counted on you to call him. Tell him what happened. I at least thought you’d figure that out. You’re the oldest, Delphine. The smart one.”

She had just told me I was smart and a disappointment, reminding me she hadn’t said one nice thing to me. Not one.

“Papa would have made us come back to Brooklyn. He would have been mad because I didn’t do what he said: look after Vonetta and Fern. And then Big Ma wouldn’t let a day pass without telling me for the rest of my life how you aren’t nothing but—”

“Delphine. You let seven days pass without calling your father. Seven days. That would have been looking out for Vonetta and Afua. You shouldn’t have taken this all on yourself. You didn’t have nothing to do with the police arresting me. I didn’t have nothing to do with the police arresting me. They came. They arrested me along with the two Panthers they really wanted. And Louis’s mother is going to say whatever she’s going to say. That’s just how it is. All you had to do was call your father. That was all.”

My eyes stung. I was spilling-over mad. I couldn’t stop what I had to say, even if she stood over me and became my crazy mother mountain and knocked me down. I was spilling over.

“I’m only eleven years old, and I do everything. I have to because
you’re
not there to do it. I’m only eleven years old, but I do the best I can. I don’t just
up and leave
.”

I was still on two feet. There was no sting on my jaw. My backside had not been touched. But I was ready for it. I closed my eyes, because I figured the slap wouldn’t sting
as much when it did come.

Instead I heard metal on metal. I opened my eyes. The sound I heard was the screwdriver missing the groove, hitting the printer’s metal innards. She laid the screwdriver on the table.

I had nowhere to go, but I wanted to disappear.

Finally, she nodded to the floor and said, “Sit.”

I did what she told me. There was a lot of silence, but then she spoke.

“It was just me and my mother until I was eleven.”

I wasn’t used to having her attention. Having her look at me and talk. All the while she spoke, she didn’t lift her eyes from me.

“A car hit her and she was gone. That was it. My aunt took me in to clean her house. Watch her kids. I slept on a blanket on the floor in the kids’ room for five years. I was sixteen when she announced she was getting married. She said it wasn’t good for a big gal like me to be in her house, seeing as she had a husband. She said in the long run she was doing me a favor. Then my mother’s sister made me a sandwich I couldn’t eat, gave me twenty dollars, and put me out.

“I slept in subways at night. During the daytime I read Homer and Langston Hughes in libraries. I tried to hide in the stacks, but they always found me and shooed me out. When I didn’t have fifteen cents for the subway, I slept on park benches. Wherever I could hide myself.

“Delphine, it’s a hard thing to sleep on the streets. A hard thing for a grown man. A harder thing for a teenage girl, no matter how big and tall she is. At night I talked to myself to stay awake. I said the poems of Homer and Langston Hughes. I liked the words. They comforted me. Their rhymes. Their beats. They made a place for me. They kept me strong.

“But I was always hungry, and I had gotten sick. Your father found me on a park bench. He and his brother had a nice apartment on Herkimer Street. He fed me. Gave me a bed to sleep on. I hadn’t slept on a bed since I was eleven years old and my mother was alive.

“Louis never bothered me. Didn’t ask me to do much but cook. Sweep. Wash his clothes.” She paused. “I had you the next year. Six years from where you are now. I had Vonetta next. Both times his mother came up from Alabama and delivered you and Vonetta in that apartment. She and I couldn’t get along, so she always went back south.

“Then I had the last one. That little one wanted out bad enough to come when she wanted to come. Early and fast. She was born on a Friday. All I could do was lie on the kitchen floor and let her come.”

She stopped for a minute and said, “You were there when she came.”

“I was?”

“I was down on the floor. You stroked my hair like I was
a doll, but you didn’t have any dolls. No toys. You said, ‘Don’t cry, Mama. Don’t cry.’ I think that’s the first time I heard you really speak. But when she came out of me, you didn’t say a word. You took the dish towel hanging off the icebox handle and wiped off your sister.”

I could hardly breathe.

“Then Darnell walked in from school. He did everything else needed to be done.”

Why couldn’t I remember seeing Fern being born? Telling my mother not to cry. Wiping Fern off with the dish towel. Where were those flashes of memory?

“Your life seems hard, Delphine, but it is good. It’s better than what I could have given you.”

Here was my mother telling me her life. Who she was. How she came to be Cecile. Answering questions I’d stored in my head from the time I realized she would not come back. Here she was telling me more than I could remember, understand, picture. Maybe I was too young to really take hold of it all, but for what seemed like the first time ever all I could think about was my own self. What I lost. What I missed. That no one said, “Good, Delphine.” No one ever said thank-you. Even after her telling me all of this, I was still mad. Maybe I’d been mad all along but didn’t have time to just be it. Mad.

“Is it true what Big Ma says? That you left because you couldn’t name Fern?”

I took her silence as a yes. For a while she said nothing,
so I guessed she was done talking. I started to get up.

Then she said, “I could’ve taken you with me and left the other two. You have my mother’s face. You didn’t cry. You didn’t want much. You didn’t talk, but you understood. But I didn’t have a penny in my pocket. I just knew I had to go. So I gave Vonetta a cookie. That was all she wanted anyway. I gave the baby milk and I…”

The picture flashed before me as it had many, many times.

“…put the doll baby in with Afua. The doll I asked Darnell to go to the store and get. I told you to be good and wait for Papa. Then I left.”

She told me everything I wanted to know and too much. It was too much. I’d have to take it out one piece at a time to look at it.

She said, “Did I leave because of a name? You’d have to be grown first before I explained. If I told you now, it would just be words.” She picked up her screwdriver and went back to working on her printer. “Be eleven, Delphine. Be eleven while you can.”

That was it.

In the middle of the night I woke up.

Afua?

“Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern! Get up outta that bed. Come on, y’all. It’s time to go.”

No one wanted to get out of bed. No one wanted to go. But Cecile stood in the doorway and called us one more time.

Fern was the first to spring up. “Hey. That’s my name. Our mother said my name!”

Cecile rolled her eyes and left the room.

Fern was a regular jumping bean. “She said my name! She said my name!”

Vonetta couldn’t take another excited minute of Fern jumping on the upper mattress. “Big deal. She said my name too.”

“Big deal to me,” Fern said. “She always says Delphine. She always says Vonetta. Today she said Fern, Fern, Fern.” She jumped in between each “Fern.” “Fern. Not Little Girl.”

Vonetta flung her pillow at Fern, but Fern wouldn’t be quieted.

I said, “That’s not your real name. The one she gave you.”

“It is too.”

“Is not.”

We kept it up, Vonetta and I on the same side for a change. “Is too.”

Then I broke it by saying, “Your name is Afua.”

I wasn’t known for joking. That sobered them as much as Fern’s name, which they both mouthed. A-FOO-A.

“Take that back, Delphine,” Fern said. “My name’s not Afua. It’s Fern.”

Vonetta pointed at her. “Ah-hah! Afoowah. Phooey. Chop Suey. Little Phooey. All over my shoo-ie.”

Fern turned red. This was the part where I was supposed to shut Vonetta up and take Fern’s side. Instead I said, “Get used to it. Your name is Afua, as in Delphine, Vonetta, and Afua.”

Fern balled her fingers into a fist and punched me in the stomach. Her hand was so little. I didn’t say “Ow!” to give her the satisfaction of knowing she caused me pain. I just said, “Go brush your teeth, Afua.”

Later, Cecile said, “Why’d you tell her that? If I wanted her to know her name, I would have told her.”

I couldn’t tell if Cecile was really annoyed or if she was just fussing. I decided she was fussing and that I couldn’t go through my life afraid of what my mother might do next. I shrugged and ate my cereal.

Delphine, Vonetta, Afua, Nzila. Some names made up. Some not. Did it matter what they really meant, or where Cecile got them from, as long as she gave them to us and to herself?

We spent the bus ride and the two-dollar taxi ride to the airport making fun of Afua. Once Cecile said “Cut it out,” that was the end of us teasing Fern outright. Still, Vonetta and my constant smirks erupted into snickers. Fern stayed mad.

When we got to the airport, Cecile called Papa collect. She turned her back to us and spoke to Pa for more than fifteen minutes. Big Ma wouldn’t be happy about the cost of the collect call, but I doubted Papa minded.

While we waited for Cecile to finish speaking with Pa, a white man came by and said how cute my sisters and I were in our matching outfits. He still had film left over from his sightseeing trip and wanted to use the last of it to take a picture of us. “Pretty girls, smile pretty!” he said. I could tell he was a nice man, but Cecile put a stop to it while Vonetta adjusted her hair band, already posing for the cover of
Jet
.

Cecile stood in front of us and said, “They’re not monkeys on display.” The nice man tried to apologize, but Cecile wouldn’t hear it. “How’d you like it if some strange man came snapping pictures of your daughters?” I felt bad for him, but I knew Cecile had to step in. Any mother would have at least done that.

We sat in comfy waiting-room seats without talking for almost half an hour. The hands on the big clock moved slowly. Fern nodded merrily like she was answering herself or singing. Kind of like Cecile tapping out beats with her pencil. Vonetta fiddled with her hair band or twirled her longest braid around her finger. I followed the janitor pushing his dry mop along the floor as people carrying travel bags danced around him or found seats. I stopped glancing up at the big clock or down at my Timex. I didn’t have to. The queasiness churning inside told me it was time to go. And then the boarding announcement was made over the loudspeaker.

She said, “Go on,” and we went.

I expected Cecile to walk away. To cut through the terminal in man-sized strides as soon as we got up and stood on line. When I turned to see if she had gone, she was standing only a few feet away, looking straight at me. It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all. I smiled a little and faced front to find something to do with myself.

Vonetta and Fern both held on to their own ticket. I
reached to take Fern’s ticket, afraid she’d crush it the way she was holding it. She felt me reaching and pulled her hand away. We moved closer to the front of the line near the ticket taker. Fern balled both hands, banging her fists at her sides, her ticket now completely crumpled.

Maybe she was afraid of the airplane ride and getting knocked around by those clouds. Maybe she didn’t know what to do with her hands without Miss Patty Cake. Or she could have still been mad about all that Afua teasing. My first move was to comfort her. I went to reach out to Fern, but she bolted from the line, ran, and jumped on top of Cecile. Vonetta and I didn’t hesitate. We broke off from the line and ran over to hug our mother and let her hug us.

How do you fly three thousand miles to meet the mother you hadn’t seen since you needed her milk, needed to be picked up, or were four going on five, and not throw your arms around her, whether she wanted you to or not? Neither Vonetta, Fern, nor I could answer that one. We weren’t about to leave Oakland without getting what we’d come for. It only took Fern to know we needed a hug from our mother.