P.S. Be Eleven Read online

  I turned to face Big Ma to explain. Before I saw it coming, I got the one thing Big Ma always promised in her scolding: the sting of her right hand.

  I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face. My face burned and the salt trickled down my cheek but I wouldn’t utter a sound. The humiliation of being hit like that in front of my sisters hurt more than the slap itself. I held it inside because it was the only power I had.

  Big Ma’s face was screwed up tight around the lips and jaw but she managed to say, “I don’t know what you did, but I know one thing. It was wrong enough for that white woman to come over here, and it was bad enough she thought you had something coming.”

  Big Ma didn’t stop scolding until the bluish-green Volkswagen was well on its way.

  Vonetta inched nearer to me and I felt Fern’s small hands over mine.

  Then I saw the Wildcat.

  My Girl

  Big Ma said Pa had been circling around the airport to give her enough time to fetch us. That way he wouldn’t have to pay more than the law should allow to sit his car in an airport lot.

  The tan-and-black Wildcat crawled up to the curb, its growl low and tame. Vonetta and Fern hopped around as if the concrete below them was too hot to stand on. They flapped their arms crazily and shouted, “Papa! Papa!” before he got the car door open. There was nothing Big Ma could do about it with Pa right there, and I enjoyed that like I enjoyed a Mr. Goodbar all to myself. My feet, however, didn’t dare leave the ground, nor did my arms rise up to fly with my sisters’.

  All of the windows in Pa’s car were cranked down, and Big Ma scolded, “It’s your fault they’re out of hand,” shaking her pointer finger at her oldest son.

  My tears had long dried but I wiped my face anyway. Pa swung open the door and stepped out of the car. My heart leapt toward him. No one was as handsome as my father was, even when his face was long, plain, and sad, which was always. Today, he looked chipper, I supposed from being glad to see us after all this time.

  Although I didn’t jump all over him like Vonetta and Fern did, no one had missed him more than I. In Oakland I saw pieces of Cecile in me, but I knew Pa had his stamp all over me, and I was happy to grow in his shade.

  I was first. He leaned down and kissed my cheek twice. If he tasted any salt on my face he didn’t say a word. I missed him so much that everything about him seemed new. The freshly cut growth that made the side of his face rough. His cool, shaving-cream smell, with something extra. Not perfume. Men didn’t wear perfume. It was woodsier, like standing among Christmas trees. And his shirt was new. Robin’s-egg blue. Short-sleeved. Not worn and familiar like all the shirts I’d starched and ironed for him.

  Vonetta and Fern were busy jumping and squealing from being tickled by Pa, who usually left the playing around to Uncle Darnell. They didn’t notice how new Pa looked.

  Big Ma noticed. “Junior! Junior!” She rarely called him that. “Stop all this carrying on in public!” She looked around expecting others to gawk and point at us Negroes, carrying on. Folks cared more about their luggage, taxis, and hugging their own families. That didn’t stop Big Ma from being embarrassed.

  Pa planted a kiss on Big Ma’s cheek like he hadn’t driven all the way from Brooklyn with her earlier. She bristled from both not liking it and liking it in spite of pushing him away.

  The bell captain blew his whistle for us to get a move on. Pa gave the three of us one more squeeze and loaded our suitcases in the trunk.

  “What’s the matter, Delphine?”

  “Nothing, Papa.”

  Big Ma chomped at the bit and couldn’t be stopped. She was only too happy to report on me. “I’ll tell you what the matter is,” she began. “You sent them out in that piss-pot of trouble and now she’s too big for her britches. As that one goes”—she meant to point at me, but aimed out of the back side-window—“the other two’ll follow.”

  Pa looked in the rearview mirror. My eyes caught his before falling to my lap.

  Our lessons on solidarity with Sister Mukumbu at the People’s Center hadn’t gone for nothing. Vonetta came to my defense. “It’s not Delphine’s fault she knocked the white man’s newspaper down.”

  Then Fern added, “It’s not Delphine’s fault I had to you know and the line was too long.”

  Then Vonetta: “And that’s why she had to jump Fern ahead.”

  “Of all those people waiting.”

  “All those mad people with Mickey Mouse ears.”

  “And the bathroom lady came.”

  “Talking about, ‘Look at all this mess!’”

  “And you told her she had the mop.”

  “Because you peed on the floor.”

  Then Fern lurched across my lap and punched Vonetta in the arm. Vonetta socked Fern, and I pulled Vonetta off Fern but Vonetta’s fists were still going like spinning bicycle spokes, and Big Ma yelled, “Stop it. Stop it, you wild heathens!” Then to Pa she said, “That’s that Cecile in them,” like our mother was typhoid. “I tried to tell you.” Then back to Vonetta and Fern, “Wait until I get you in the house. Just wait and see what I got for y’all.”

  And since they had already witnessed how Big Ma hadn’t spared me from a small taste of what was waiting for us, Vonetta and Fern pulled apart and settled down on both sides of me.

  “And you!” Big Ma’s hat and wig turned sideways because she couldn’t turn her head all the way around while sitting up front next to Pa. “Wait. Just wait. I’m gonna beat the Oakland out of you. I tell you NOT to go out there in public stirring up a grand Negro spectacle and you make it your business to do exactly that. Don’t you know the world’s got its eyes on you? But an eyeful isn’t enough. No, sir. You haul out the Amos ’n Andy Show for all the spectators. Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, how many times must I tell you, they’re always watching. Always.”

  I prayed Vonetta and Fern knew when a question didn’t call for an answer.

  “It’s that no-mothering mother . . .” Big Ma went on.

  “Ma,” Pa interrupted, probably to keep her from talking about Cecile. “Your blood pressure.”

  To that, Big Ma gave a spit sound without actually spitting. “If my pressure don’t kill me, these children will.”

  Pa sighed. “It sounds like Delphine had to get Fernie to the toilet, and Fernie couldn’t hold it,” he said. He was calm while the Wildcat went back to rumbling.

  “Surely couldn’t,” Fern said.

  “That’s why you hit everything but the toilet bowl,” Vonetta said.

  And before they started up, I gave them my own evil eye, and Fern muffled a “she started it.”

  Big Ma said to Pa, “Junior, there’s a right way to go about things and a wrong way. Wrong will get that gal strung up. Mark my words.”

  “We’re in Brooklyn, Ma.”

  Another spit sound. “Brooklyn. Alabama. You still have to carry yourself just to get by.”

  Vonetta and Fern hadn’t stopped poking at each other. Vonetta said, “I didn’t start it but I’m ending it,” and stuck out her tongue. Fern couldn’t get back at the Mouseketeers who had stuck their tongues out at her, but only one person separated her from Vonetta. Fern tried to kick Vonetta but ended up kicking me, and then Pa said, hard, firm, but not loud, “All right, girls,” and put an end to it all. My knee throbbed.

  Traffic on the Belt Parkway kept us in Queens longer than Pa had planned. The drive to Brooklyn seemed to go better if no one spoke. We all took the hint, including Big Ma, but we were all thinking about something.

  A white woman had spoken to Big Ma about me. I resigned myself to seeing lightning in the whipping of a lifetime. A whipping that would outdo my last whipping at age nine for letting Vonetta and Fern get into the grape jelly. They dropped and broke the glass jar and had grape jelly and glass everywhere, when I should have been watching them.

  At least the short brunette stewardess didn’t show up to report how we ran away from her.

  The Wildcat crouched, leapt, then sat alo
ng the Belt Parkway in spurts. Silence had given way to yawning, and then Big Ma, Vonetta, and Fern napped. They slept hard and didn’t stir when the quiet got broken up by the Temptations. Not the singers in matching suits, spinning and snapping fingers into one loud pop from the radio. Just one of the Temptations’ tunes whistling clear-water cool through Pa’s lips. I heard all the words and instruments, complete with stereo highs and bass lows to “My Girl,” fluting out of his long but happy face.

  Herkimer Street

  I felt like a thief trying to steal a good look at my father’s face through the rearview mirror. He caught me and winked. For a second it was like having Uncle Darnell with me. Uncle D. Always happy, singing, and still doing the Watusi when that dance had been long gone.

  I shuddered as a picture flashed before me. Would my father pick up dancing? The last thing I wanted was a father who danced and carried on like he was fresh out of high school.

  As soon as that shudder passed, another overtook it. The gymnasium in June. The sixth-grade dance. The happening no sixth grader could avoid, unless her parents forbade her to go. That wasn’t likely. All the PTA mothers looked forward to sewing dresses, teaching their sons to do the box step, and giving assemblies on how sixth graders are expected to behave at the dance. For us it meant bowing. Curtsying. Dancing boy-girl with hands touching. Sweaty, cookie-crumby hands. I shuddered.

  For me, the sixth-grade dance meant trying to match steps with boys I’d slugged. Boys I’d said “Your mama” to in the school yard because they’d said it to me first in a battle of the Dozens. For me, and me alone, it meant waiting to be asked to dance when no one would ask because they’d have to look way up at me and now I was even taller than when I’d left for Oakland.

  I surely didn’t want to be the girl no one asked to dance. I didn’t want to be the girl who swayed by the punch bowl and cookie table, pretending to enjoy watching everyone else dance. I didn’t want to be Miss Merriam Webster’s definition of a sixth-grade wallflower.

  Those thoughts and pictures kept flashing before me.

  Then Big Ma snorted. I remembered where I was. Sitting in the backseat of the Wildcat, awaiting a whipping. Only then did the pictures of the sixth-grade dance cloud and fade. June was far, far away.

  Driving down Atlantic Avenue was almost as good as being home. When I was younger than Fern, I worried the Atlantic Avenue El train above us would come crashing down—trains, tracks, and all. Now I looked up and saw steel as strong as it was old. I heard and saw the sturdy old El, the train shooting across Brooklyn. The sounds above felt familiar. A few sparks jumped out beneath the train as it roared and rumbled overhead, and I made a wish on those lucky train sparks.

  We were back in Bed-Stuy. The redbrick armory stood in the distance on Bedford and Atlantic Avenues like a fortress, or as Uncle Darnell would tell us, like a princess’s castle. The Wildcat turned down Schenectady and again on Herkimer Street. It all looked good and welcoming. St. John’s Hospital, Friendship Baptist, our elementary school, the big old softball stadium. We passed by the People’s Bank—which was nothing at all like the People’s Center in Oakland. We passed by burned-out buildings and weedy, littered vacant lots. Although the neighborhood begged for Change, Positive Change on every other election billboard after the riots, I was glad to find everything where we had left it. Even neighbors sat on their stoops as if they hadn’t moved since we had gone.

  Herkimer Street. Good old Herkimer Street. I was glad to be home, but I dreaded it all the same. Big Ma wasn’t the kind to fall back on a promise, and she had promised me a whipping. I’d have to yelp and cry to satisfy Big Ma that I had learned my lesson. Worst of all, I’d have to put up with Vonetta’s and Fern’s teasing afterward. Maybe there’d still be some Oakland left in us, and my sisters would show me some solidarity, like when they gathered around me and Fern held my hand at the airport.

  Pa stopped whistling “My Girl.” We pulled into our driveway, and when Pa hit the brakes, the Wildcat lurched forward sharply enough to wake the nappers. Among rows of brown-brick homes, all standing together like gingerbread houses surrounded by black, spiked, iron fencing, I knew our house was odd. Not odd in the way Cecile’s green, prickly stucco house was odd in Oakland. Our house was odd because the gingerbread houses stood in their own brown-brick solidarity, and our house stood apart, made from brick, stone, and siding. Whatever Pa could turn into a house. With Uncle D’s help, he’d nearly built it from scratch. If anything broke down or needed fixing, he’d sigh and talk about the house like it was some old soul he’d been knowing over the years. He’d tell me how he was barely twenty and could have bought a two-year-old Thunderbird that ran like the wind, but ended up getting the lot with the burned-out frame of a house at the city auction. He’d tell me—but not Vonetta and Fern—“I was thinking of you and your sisters before I knew you’d be born.”

  When we got the suitcases in the house, Pa put his arms around Big Ma and spoke low in her ear. She pushed him away, saying, “This is the ruin of all things.”

  Pa, who had been sweet, became firm and said, “Ma. Not on their first day home.”

  “Ruin,” Big Ma said, although clearly Pa had won. Big Ma creaked along into the recesses of the house. She peeled off her hat and wig as she went. “Spare not. Spoil not.”

  “Beat not,” Vonetta said as soon as Big Ma was safely out of earshot.

  “Surely not.”

  Heckle and Jeckle

  “We should let Cecile know we’re here,” I said.

  “Back in Brooklyn,” Vonetta said.

  “On Herkimer Street,” Fern said.

  “Too bad she doesn’t have a phone,” I reminded my sisters.

  “Or a television,” Fern said.

  “Or a deluxe stereo like ours, with a record player,” Vonetta said. “Too, too bad.”

  Then it came to me, and I rapped my knuckles on top of the largest suitcase. “We’ve got something.” I pushed open the suitcase latches while the two of them bounced on Fern’s bed and asked, “What? What?” I made a mess of our folded summer clothes until I found it. A Chinatown postcard of a parade dragon from our San Francisco excursion. “We can drop it in the mailbox.”

  “But that’s our souvenir,” Vonetta protested.

  “For show-and-tell.”

  Vonetta’s arms folded. “We don’t want to send it.”

  Fern also folded her arms. “Surely don’t.”

  I didn’t entirely blame them. Cecile didn’t wrap her arms around us when we first arrived, but when we hugged her good-bye, she hugged us back like she didn’t want to let go. That was reason enough to send her our only souvenir, whether Vonetta and Fern liked it or not.

  “She’ll worry about us,” I told them.

  “She will not,” Vonetta said.

  “Yes, she will,” Fern decided, and that was all I needed. To have one sister on my side. I would’ve sent the postcard anyway, but things went better when both thought they had an equal say.

  “You know she’ll worry,” I told Vonetta. Truthfully I hoped she’d worry about us. With Cecile, you just didn’t know for sure.

  Vonetta gave in.

  “Before we send it,” I said, “we should work out what we’re going to write. How about, ‘Dear Cecile . . .’” I left room for my sisters to join in.

  “No,” Vonetta said, cutting off our rat-a-tat-tat flow before we could get it going. “We should start it with, ‘Dear Mom.’”

  Fern went, “P-tooey, p-tooey, p-tooey.”

  I agreed with Fern’s fake spitting. Cecile was our mother but she wasn’t a “Mom” or “Mommy.” She wasn’t even a “Ma” or “Mama.”

  “Okay, okay.” Vonetta was hurt by our rejection but deep down she knew Cecile wouldn’t like that “Mom” stuff. “Mom” was a TV mom, and Cecile wasn’t like any mom on television.

  Vonetta cleared her throat as if she were onstage at the Black Panther rally. “How about ‘Dear Sister Nzila’? Yeah! ‘Dear Sister Nzila, Poet o
f . . .’”

  “The people! The people,” Fern cried. “‘Dear Sister Nzila, poet to the people.’”

  “That’s good!” Vonetta said. “Poet to the people instead of power to the people.”

  Vonetta and Fern were back in the flow of things, but I refused to write. My best handwriting was fine but large lettered. I’d never fit all of their Heckle and Jeckling on the back of our small postcard.

  “Equal say” hit a pothole. How could “equal say” work when there were three of us and one small postcard? So I did what I always do. I took over.

  “She knows who she is,” I said in Papa’s firm voice. “Instead we’ll write, ‘Dear Cecile,’ because that’s what we call her. ‘We’re back in Brooklyn, safe and sound on Herkimer Street. Sincerely, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern.’ That says it all and there’s enough room for her address and our return address.”

  “Boring,” Vonetta said, adding a yawn to make her point. “It should be, ‘We’re back in Brooklyn, safe and sound . . .”

  “Not in the lost-and-found,” Fern added.

  Heckle rolled her eyes and shook her head. “It’s ‘safe and sound on the ground.’”