P.S. Be Eleven (4 page)

Only a few seconds had passed, but waiting for him to speak was hard on me. There was something about this new Papa. Something I couldn't figure about this father who, out of nowhere, whistled a tune other than “Old Man River.”

I could smell his shaving cream and whatever else he wore. Woodsy, like he had put more of it on.

His voice cracked, but before he could pour out any words, Big Ma, who had been fanning herself before the open window, called out, “Your Pa is keeping company with a woman in Brownsville.”

Pa closed his eyes. “Ma . . .”

“Ma, nothing,” she said.

Fern looked to me and I said, “Pa has a lady friend,” as hard and odd as it was to say those words.

Vonetta had no trouble with the whole idea. “Pa's got a girlfriend!”

Fern sang along. “Pa's got a girlfriend.”

“Is that why you're whistling the Temptations?” I asked.

“And wearing perfume?” Fern asked.

“That's men's cologne,” Pa corrected her right away.

“I'll bet she wears perfume,” Vonetta sang.

“And lipstick,” Fern sang with her. Then the two of them made kissing smacks.

“All right, all right,” Pa said. “That's enough of that.”

Pa realized I hadn't spoken up. He beamed at me, waiting. I looked at the ground.

“Her name is Marva Hendrix. And I'd like you all to meet her.”

When I glanced up, I saw dimples. My father had dimples like Uncle Darnell's. I'd never noticed them before. I looked back down.

Fern said right away, “Marva. Rhymes with larva.”

Then Vonetta couldn't let it be, and added, “And George Washington Carver.” And while they argued if Carver rhymed with larva, I saw pictures of my Temptations-whistling, dimpled, smiling father sitting in the RKO movie theater munching on popcorn with his arm around Miss Marva Hendrix's shoulders. This wasn't the kind of picture you're supposed to have of your father while your sisters made kissing smacks. My papa was thirty-two and acting like a teenager. The hippies were right. You can't trust anyone over thirty.

Big Ma's dinner should have tasted like the meal of a lifetime, but how could it when there were two empty places at dinner? Pa was out keeping company with a Miss Marva
Hendrix from Brownsville, and Uncle Darnell was carrying a rifle in the jungles of Vietnam.

My sisters didn't have any problem lifting their forks. They ate and entertained Big Ma and told more than we'd agreed on about our time with Cecile. Thank goodness Big Ma was in a talking mood instead of a whipping mood. “Nothing but a piss-pot of boiling trouble,” Big Ma said. “I told him not to send you. I told him.” Only when she started in on Cecile did my sisters feel bad for telling all that they told.

“My son, my son,” Big Ma said. “He can pick 'em. I'll say that.”

My appetite never did catch up to me, although my sisters' spoons dived happily into their 'nana pudding. I got up and took a few dishes into the kitchen to wash. My Timex was waterproof, but I laid it on the counter while Vonetta and Fern fought over my untouched dessert.

It took one week and one day before we heard from Cecile. Leave it to our mother to make her own postcard. As grand and sturdy as a birthday card.

Big Ma got it first, along with the rest of the mail. I stopped dusting when she hollered, “What in the world?” I was all eyes and ears; my heart was skipping rope. Cecile's movable-type letters were bold enough to be seen from down the hall. I sped into the living room where Big Ma sat, going through the mail.

“Is that for us?” I asked.

She was reading it. Cecile's card. I couldn't tell if she had scrunched up her face from reading what Cecile had written or from turning up her nose at Cecile's movable-type
letters in red, black, and green. She read the card and gave a “Hmph.” Instead of handing it to me, Big Ma dropped the postcard on the table like it was nothing. “Come get it if you want it.”

You'd think I'd be angry that Big Ma violated our right to privacy and read our postcard. All the rights my sisters and I had been filled with only existed at the People's Center or out of the mouths of Black Panthers. We were back on Herkimer Street under Big Ma, and we had to keep most of what we learned in Oakland to ourselves.

I yelled, “Vonetta! Fern!” They raced into the living room. “Guess what came!” I held up the postcard so they could see the lettering.

They shouted, “Cecile!” and a lot of “Lemme sees.” I handed the card over to Vonetta, who did the honors and read the poem out loud in her poetry-reciting voice. While Vonetta recited, Fern did the dance that told of the summer leaves falling into color, falling away and then breaking through spring branches. Fern twirled to the part about leaves always coming back but in different shades. Then she went spring-leafy crazy on the buds-breaking-through-branches part, and Vonetta had to join her.

Big Ma called it beatnik nonsense.

Vonetta cleared her voice to make it deeper and read
the letter part in her Cecile voice:

“‘Dear Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern . . . ,'”

“She said ‘Fern'!” Fern squealed.

“Little Girl,” Vonetta kept it up in her Cecile voice, “I am blowing dust off your mind. Do not interrupt the great Nzila.” She cleared her throat and went on. It was all a funny joke to us that Big Ma didn't get, and for a moment my grandmother not liking my mother hurt like a dull toothache.

“I'm going to write,” I said.

“Me too,” Fern said.

“Okay. Me too,” Vonetta said in her own voice. “If you're writing, I'm writing.”

Vonetta and Fern fussed over the card until they almost tore it, so I took it away.

“Everyone in Oakland said hello,” I said. “At least they haven't forgotten us.”

Vonetta fluttered her eyelashes and said, “You mean, at least Hirohito hasn't forgotten you.”

“Hurraheeto? Hurraheeto?” Big Ma asked. “What's a Hurraheeto?”

“Delphine's boyfriend,” Vonetta said.

“Only ten and starting this mess already,” Big Ma said. “A mercy.”

“He's not my boyfriend,” I said, but he was the closest person to a boyfriend I'd ever had. Besides my father and Uncle D. “And I'm eleven.”

“Ten. 'Leven. Same difference,” Big Ma said. “And what kind of ooga-mooga name is Hurraheeto?”

“It's not ooga mooga, Big Ma,” Fern said, which we all knew was Big Ma's way of saying African. But she also called “Vonetta” and “Delphine” ooga-mooga names because they came from Cecile's imagination, when only Fern's name, Afua, was a true ooga-mooga name. I guessed that was why Afua was not on Fern's birth certificate or school papers. Big Ma had no use for anything African. Pa probably felt the same way.

“It's Japanese,” Vonetta said. “And his last name is black. Hirohito Woods.”

“Woods is not a black last name,” I said.

“Charlene Woods in my class is black. Her brother, Delroy Woods, is black.”

I probably had a “Cecile look” on my face for the times we said things that completely confounded her. I didn't even know where to begin with Vonetta's thinking.

Fern explained Hirohito to Big Ma. “He's Japaneezy looking and black.”

Big Ma gave another hmph. “War baby.” Both what she said and how she said it might as well have been street talk that Big Ma or Papa didn't allow in this house. But how did you correct someone who brought you into the world and held a strap to you?

“His mother is Japanese and his father is black,” I explained.

“And in jail,” Vonetta volunteered. I glared at her.

“Jail?” Big Ma was horrified. “That Hurraheeto's father's in jail? A mercy, a mercy. Shoulda never let y'all board that plane.”

“He's a political prisoner,” I said. “Unjustly incarcerated by the Man.” Now I was speaking like Crazy Kelvin. Crazy Kelvin, the strongest-speaking Black Panther my sisters and I had met at the People's Center, who was also shown up to be a phony. An infiltrator. Just a plain traitor.

“You can't tell me nothing about that war baby's father. He's 'bout criminal. Just like the rest of 'em. Nothing but a band of criminals leading good Negroes astray.”

Fern only heard “war baby” and thought that was a good thing. “War baby!” she said.

“Uncle Darnell's in a war,” Vonetta said. “I'll bet he has a war baby.”

“Ooh!” Fern cried. “I get to dress her.”

“It could be a boy,” Vonetta said. “We'll take turns.”

“Will y'all stop this nonsense?” Big Ma said. “Uncle Darnell ain't bringing no war babies home from Vietnam.”

“Shuck corn,” Vonetta said.

“Yeah. Shucks.”

I asked Big Ma for two dollars to buy first-class envelopes, a memo pad, and postage stamps so we could write a proper letter to our mother. And to my pen pal, Hirohito, but I kept that to myself. My sisters walked with me to the candy store around the corner on Fulton. They were more interested in leftover change for Jolly Ranchers candy than in stationery and stamps. When we returned home, I gave them each two pieces of candy and I began my letters.

I didn't know what else to write or where to send his letter. We said we would write to each other, but I didn't give him my address in Brooklyn and I forgot to get his address in Oakland.

I did know what to say to my mother and where to send her letter.

I received Cecile's letter by airmail, nine days later.

Things were back to normal—if Pa whistling was normal. Big Ma fell asleep in her chair during
Peyton Place
, with a movie-star newspaper in her lap underneath her Bible. I mopped the kitchen floor. My sisters took their baths.

I got used to Pa's new face and whistling. That he worked from early morning and was home in time for supper most days. No more working all day and all night for Pa. No more long, tired faces.

It was all because of Miss Marva Hendrix, his lady friend in Brownsville on the other side of Atlantic Avenue. I should have been glad my father's dimples showed when he smiled and that he wasn't tired from working day and night. I should have been glad my father had a
spring in his step and took his new shirts to the cleaners. I should have danced a jig and said, “Less shirts for me to wash, wring out, starch, and iron.” If Pa was happy, then I should have been happy too. But I wasn't.

One night after dinner, Pa said, “I think it's time you met Marva. Yes. The time has come.” He had used the same voice and the same words to tell us we were flying to Oakland to reunite with our mother. He'd said it was a thing whose time had come.

When he spoke those words about meeting Cecile, he was long-faced and serious. When he said them about Miss Marva Hendrix, he was lighthearted and ready for some teasing—at least from Vonetta and Fern. I tried to not be an old, wet sock, but I didn't feel like teasing. I felt like time had come too soon.

Before I could properly sulk about it, the doorbell rang and Pa was smiling and springing up out of his chair. Vonetta and Fern tap-danced in their tennis shoes until Big Ma warned them to stop acting like a bunch of untrained chimps and to not shame Pa.

He brought his lady friend inside like how the church ushers brought a visiting guest to the special pew up front.