The First Nine Read online

looks swirled around me, in front of me and behind me in a solemn march towards a waiting switch.

  Inside the preschool, the people who were there to watch us were just kids themselves--barely teenagers--but they were huge grownups to me. One day Aaron pushed me down and got on top of me. The Watchers watched and laughed, urging him on but fortunately, not in. They always found something to holler at me about. I did not lay my head on the table at nap time exactly the way they wanted me to-- my cheek flat on the hard wood, not cushioned by my folded arms, which they snatched out from under my head. They did not know why I was so hardheaded and I did not know why I had to obey people who did not protect me. Though we were in a Church, I did not associate that big gothic building or its people with the spirit who watched over and comforted me at night.

  At some point, my father made himself "okay" with Margaret and came into my world. He was another mystery that popped out of some nook and cranny. I began to recognize him as someone who was supposed to be there but it would be four or five years before I knew that he was my father. But at four years old, I began to wonder. Other kids had fathers so why didn't I? Was I supposed to have a father? Why? Why not? What is a father? What are they supposed to be? What am I supposed to do with them? Was DeeDee my father? But none of the other fathers I'd seen was bald and grey and scraggly like DeeDee. This man looked more like what a father is supposed to look like. Supposed to? How can anything be if it is not supposed to? What is this man supposed to be? Could I ask him? He was not stately. He was not "up there." He played with me and had beautiful eyes.

  "You're my father, aren't you," I asked him one day.

  For the first time, something I said to him hung in the air between us and I feared I'd said something I wasn't supposed to say. It hung there then clung to his face like an epoxy he had to remove before he could speak.

  "Where did you get that from?"

  It was too late to smile. He knew that but he tried anyway. Kids--so easy to divert their attention. They won't remember. They won't understand. But they understand playing. Let's play.

  He told my mother what I had said and she jumped on me. I had said something wrong--something bad. Was it bad for me to wonder if this man was my father? Bad for me to wonder if I had a father at all? Bad for me to have a father? Why? What? Who?

  "Shut up! You don't know what you're talking about so just shut up!" she screamed.

  I absorbed her rage into my little body and unleashed it on my father when he came again.

  "Why you tell my mother I said you're my father? I don't want to talk to you anymore. I don't want to play with you. Just go away."

  I ran into a side parlor where there was no one else. Then I crawled under the claw-footed couch and just said every cuss word I had ever heard.

  Rhode Island Avenue

  She came for me. She came and we were going away. The beautiful woman whose smile I had seen in light bulbs. In my winter white coat, opaque white stockings and fire engine red shoes I didn't even mind that my mittens kept me from sucking my thumb. I was with my mother! I looked out the car window as the neat, narrow and cozy streets of Northwest D.C. disappeared behind us and we entered the wide vista of Rhode Island Avenue. The building was so big and the glass doors so thick. But she pulled them open with her great adult strength and we entered a new world. In that world, I found Gumby and Pokey, baby swings, Pinocchio and joy.

  There was a nursery school on the ground floor of the building. I sat on the floor with the other kids watching the television that hung from the ceiling. I watched Tom Jones wiggling his hips and jerking his head back. I don't know where at that age I had learned to interpret this behavior as arrogance--don't know where I had learned to dislike arrogance, but something about the way he jerked his head back made me dislike him more and more each time he did it.

  The other children did not speak to me. I did not speak to them. They were not real to me, and it never crossed my mind that I was supposed to do something to make myself real to them. They were a part of this world in which I found myself. I was here to observe this world, not affect it.

  Later, when my hearing impairment had progressed to profound deafness, my mother remembered that the teacher in the nursery had asked her if I was hard of hearing. But in the late sixties conventional wisdom did not understand the many degrees of hearing impairment. You could either hear or you couldn't. We did not understand the ways a person could be hearing impaired. Consonants give words their meaning but vowels make words pronounceable. Because consonants are higher pitched than vowels, a person with a hearing impairment might hear but not understand speech. For a child, what was missed or not understood could be ignored and forgotten because "wasn't nobody talking to you anyway. Mind your business. Go play." So it was decided there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I was just a daydreamer who liked to go off into another world. And of course, I could hear what I wanted to hear. All these things were decided and certified as common sense--as what everybody knew about me and the way I am. Unlike hearing being impaired, it was decided that what was wrong with me was something I would outgrow or have beaten and ridiculed out of me. As I went from daydreamer to problem child, hardheaded and hateful, the fact that I did not know what thing this hatred was based on was taken as proof of that thing.

  Still I was an observer in a world that gradually gave me less and less auditory and visual things to observe. I observed my mother. She would talk to anyone, whether it was women on the elevator exclaiming over how much I favored her or Will, the man who lived upstairs, always wore dark glasses and carried a long white cane. She just talked to people and they talked to her. And she talked to me. Explained to me about the wonders of that Rhode Island Avenue apartment, which were so different from the wonders of the house on S Street: no high wooden baseboards or wide wooden doorframes. I'd always had to be careful not to fall against the golden radiators in Margaret's house, but here I needn't worry about danger from the white boxes under the windows that poured air into the room. And there was a store right in the building on the first floor. I saw the beautiful brown women sitting cross-legged and elegant in the lounge. They did not speak to my mother as we passed by on our way somewhere. That's strange. My mother speaks to everyone. But these women--so aloof--don't they know that? Is something wrong with--something--I don't know? We were on our way somewhere and did not stop long enough for me to do anything but register the silence that said so much in the space of a quick glance.

  We went downtown where I was astonished. I had never seen so many White people before. They were everywhere, scurrying down the streets of downtown Washington. It was like we had stepped out of the cab into a whole nother world. It wasn't the skin color (before the California sun got to her my mother was as light as some of them) but something else told me that what I was looking at was something I had never seen before except on television.

  As we walked beside one of the government buildings there, was a group sitting and standing on a low grassy hill. I was probably too young to know about other planets, but I had a feeling they had come from somewhere far away. There was one woman who was so pale. Her hair was pale. Her skin was pale. Even her eyes were pale. She scared me. I had wandered away from my mother and, having no one to express my fears to, I just stood there staring at her. A man came up and shook my hand. His huge hand was so cold and clammy around my little hand that I lived the next decade of my life thinking that White people were cold blooded like amphibians and reptiles. When I found my mother, or rather, she found me, she took me into the Kennedy Center where we were the only Black people in sight. I had never been the only Black person anywhere. Copying the way I had seen Blacks on television responding to Whites, I raised my little fist in the air and chanted "Black is beautiful! Black is beautiful!" Cute kid.

  My mind, even as a baby, has always been inquisitive, seeking, wondering and never satisfied
with given answers but only with those answers that resulted from my own exploration. From my earliest memories, I peered through wooden slats at my mother and other huge people who faded in and out of existence as they came to my crib to exclaim over me then disappeared to go about their business. Came back. Went away. Came back. Gave me a toy. All these memories are thrown haphazardly into a mental box with the memories of Margaret, with no chronological order to the various snapshots in my mind.

  The slats I peered out of became broken and jagged--some of them missing all together. Angie, my mother's five-year-old sister, would climb into the crib with me and we'd play footsies. Breaking the slats as she climbed in was part of the fun and we did not care.

  Out of the crib. Walking. Running. Angie taught me to play jacks and her brother Bobby taught me to tie my shoe the sophisticated way--no bunny ears. He'd come home sometimes just as dry.

  "Bobby, it's raining outside, but your coat is not wet?" I'd exclaim.

  "Aw girl, I run so fast the rain don't have time to make me wet."

  We built a tent by hanging blankets from the upper mattress of their bunk bed. I thought they were called bump beds,