Home to Pine Bluff an excerpt

photo courtesy of Dorriss Tatum

     We slipped away from California in the middle of the night.  My mother was less than miserable in her new marriage and we would leave with her.  My brother, Toure’, one year older than myself, and I packed ourselves into the back of my mom’s old, beat down, banged up, tan Volvo as she prepared to drive us through the California desert, east through Texas, and on to Arkansas.  We made it to Arizona before she gave up and turned around.  Before we went back, we’d spent the night beneath the desert’s pure light, looking up at all those billions of stars whose brilliance shattered the night’s peace.  I remember the silence, then I remember my mother’s voice.  It was a voice much like my grandmother’s; full of stories told in detail and in the rhythm I have come to recognize as purely Black and Southern.   These voices sound like blackberries tastes:  heavy, complicated by a joy/wildness/ and time.  They can be found quite often by accident, if you stop somewhere to get a cool drink, and turn right when you were directed to go left.  They sound like warm, whitemeal corn bread and don’t need nothing to go with them.  In the desert that night, my mother told my brother and me about UFOs and shooting stars as we traced the distant lights falling, streaming and then fading across the black and dotted sky.  She didn’t know we were afraid.  My brother caught a fever the next day and we had to go back.  But I didn’t want to; I wanted to go home.  My brother did too, sick or not.  And I knew he did because I did, and we didn’t do much on our own, that is, separate from each other, from the time  my mother carried me home from Jefferson County Hospital.   

     We’d ended up at Alexander’s a year later, after my mother finally figured out she might not want to stay in California.  We, my mother, my brother Toure’, my new brother Kiye’, and I rolled into Pine Bluff in the middle of the school year, 1976.  Earth Wind and Fire was hot on the radio and things were popping at their usual on the yard of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.  We moved into an apartment that sat on the edge of Lake Pine Bluff, and across from the college.  It had two bedrooms and white vinyl floors.  Fraternity boys lived next door to us and we could hear their canes tapping the floor late into fall evenings. Besides that, the place was quiet and most importantly, within walking distance to my grandmother’s house.   After we enrolled in school, and started taking the bus home, we would sometimes take the wrong bus, and get dropped off in front of my grandmother’s to spend the afternoon with her.  She had stale lemon cookies and lime sherbert waiting for us for just those occasions.  We knew we would get it for going over there, but we decided that price not to heavy for the comfort provided by our grandmother’s kindness.  My mother didn’t want us to weigh down my grandmother, who had already raised eight children of her own, and had my cousin Keesha in the house as well.   She was babysitting my little brother, Kiye’during the day and my cousin, Tarek, would be in on the weekends. Mama told us we need not worry my grandmother and grandfather like that.  But we couldn’t stay away.  And we took plenty chastisement for disobeying her. 

     After so many nights listening to the fraternity boys tap their canes on the floor, and being outdone by the stubborn, country roaches, we moved to the backwoods of the Jean’s edition.  During the sixties my mother had protested the city to get running water into the Jean’s edition.  The neighborhood consisted of lots complimented by white, black or blue trimmed shotgun houses with screened porches.  Most houses had patches for summer gardens.  Green, sharp grass or dirt covered the lots.  Thin, drop-chested, white-haired black and brown skinned ladies sat out on their porches with fly swatters and lemonade or sun tea.  They would wait for you to speak to them as you passed.  You spoke first, “Hey Miss Bob.” 

She would respond, “Hey deaah.  Ain’t chu’ Annie ______ baby?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Tell Mama, Bob said Hey.” 

“Yes, Ma’am,” slowing my walk to stay close enough to hear her without her knowing I needed to. 

“Tell Mama she need to call me ‘bout __________, and tell huh to let it ring ‘cause sometime I be at the back uh duh house, and it take me a minute to get to dat durn phone.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You be sure and tell huh, heah?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Alright, little bit."  She paused, as if she had a corn hull stuck in her teeth and needed to locate it first with her tongue to suck it out.  Looking at me now with a studied air, “You shole is gettin’ fat.”

“Uhn, huh.”  A familiar conflagration rose inside me.  

“Good to see you walkin’, though.”

By then, I had moved on.   

“Ok, Miss. Bob, I’ll tell huh.  Bye.”  That last bit flat and tippin ‘round mad.  My toes pointed toward North Spruce Street.   

Brief Portrait of a Woman: Tell My Story

ESE NE TEKREMA

"the teeth and the tongue"

symbol of friendship and interdependence

I met Carol when I returned to college, in Atlanta, August of 1990.  By then I was convinced that Bob Marley was a prophet, and that Bab-y-lon would soon fall.  When it did fall, I would be safe because I'd seen it coming and had covertly stacked up walls of protection:  nights of headachy arguments, a righteously restrictive diet, cot-ton fabrics and a head full of positive vibe-ray-shun! I-ah.

Along with two committed comrades, I rented a two-bedroom house.  Comrade number one, my promised fiance'; and comrade number two, one of his angelically agreeable female friends, a new sister.  She and I shared a first name, so he figured he could talk to us both at the same time.  Either that, or we should change one of our names.

This new sister and I had spoken over the phone all summer.  She arranged our housing and my pickup from Hartsfield International Airport:  an older, slacks wearing man named Louis.  Louis rolled up to the airport with his nephew and his cousin smiling alongside him. No problem.  We could all fit into his plush white Lincoln.   Smelling of wet cigarettes floating in beer, Louis swayed unsteadily toward the car, opening the door for us while I wondered if the ride would cost me the rest of my days.  We drifted down the two freeways leading to the West End.  We asked Louis questions about his ex-wives, hoping to keep him focused on the white lines that guarded against him sideswiping other cars.  Twice along the drive we asked the old man if he was ok to drive before he eventually pulled off the freeway, swerved onto Raymond Street, and killed the engine in front of our new house.  The brown one, second from the corner.   I pulled my stowed California burrito from my bag and sat on the untreated wooden floors of the first house I'd ever rented.  Over the next few days and weeks our thickly painted front stoop emerged as a gathering place for more comrades.

As a group, all of our encounters began with "Greetings," and ended with "Peace," or "Jah guide."  With each other, we plunged deeply into further enchanting notions about freedom and race and money.  We concluded the logic of history made it clear that we should cleave ourselves from what we saw as the traps of eating too much, buying too much, lying too much to ourselves, despising ourselves too much.  We decided to live as freely as we possibly could.

Any given night our house filled with laughter, slow-cooked one-pot food, highly competitive games of Spades, concentrated games of chess, a rock-steady ichieck of a rootical reggae beat, and a lingering coat of frankincense and myrrh.

We wore our hair long and natural.  We ate unsalted, vegan food.  We wore cotton and hemp fabrics.  Threw out our processed soaps and cleaning products.  We bargained rides out to Little Five Points or the DeKalb International Farmer's Market to buy up cheap and interesting whole foods.  We blasted outward, into the street roots reggae, straight up jazz, and any style of hip hop we could find.  Enthused, we dusted off and listened again to the music of our childhoods:  Gil Scott Heron, Richie Havens, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Joan Baez, and Marvin Gaye.  And we read everything.    I had just finished a biography on George Jackson, still shaking my head at how the California penal system justified his murder by San Quentin prison guards (Jackson supposedly had a pistol embedded in his afro).  My roommates enjoyed the Old Testament and the Metu Neter.  We opened a little library in the corner under the window of our front room.

We occupied the thick, green, sweaty neighborhoods around the Atlanta University Center.  We met there because we all went to school there:  Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Morris Brown, or ITC.  We moved with our few brown suitcases (tags reading LAX, OAK, SFO, and JFK) and no furniture into that roomy, echoic house on Raymond Street--just down the street from all five schools, yet a miles away from our gated experiences on campus.

At least two distinct worlds existed in the University Center.  We walked through the outside world onto the campuses of our college world with its sculpted trees, mix-matched tulips, and buildings with names like Rockefeller and Woodruff.  Outside the gates was the outside world, John Hope Homes and The Bottom, located at the pit of the slope of James P. Brawley Drive.  The Bottom sat smack in the dead center of the projects we dared through on Friday nights, looking for cheap liquor and new adventures.  The outside world spoke a language different from ours:  staccato, the words clipped at the end.  Carol was part of this outside world.

Many evenings we sat on our stoop as folks came by to play chess or just talk about the latest.  We had food--sometimes from Busy Bee, or Paschal's, a nice vegetable plate--or we had cooked up a big pot of brown beans and basmati rice.  Music played out into the street and a local would stroll by and ask if they could join us for a beer.  "Have some?" we would say.  And that would be it.  Some friendships come to us so quietly we don't even know from where.  They begin with an acknowledgement, however, an invitation:  we need each other.
  
Carol and I first spoke when she came by and I was alone.  I hadn't worked that day, nor had I gone to school.  I was not extremely friendly at that time, but was always willing to talk and to listen.  We ate together as I listened to her talk about her life.  I heard a subtle desperation in her raspy tone.  She looked at me with something I'd then mistaken as fear and confusion.  We talked about general stuff: where we came from;  what we liked to eat and listen to;  what we thought about the coming change in time.  I hated it.  Short days, less light.  She liked it, the day a dismal waste of time.

The next time we met to talk Carol brought her bottle.  Tucked in the back pocket of her loosely hanging jeans, it read, "Gin." I would stick to sipping my beer, hanging over me a fear of liquor as ominous as the fear I maintained of the worst parts of myself, the two always cavorting together.  Plus generic alcohol crossed my danger threshold.  I tipped my last swig of stock and noticed Carol's eyes, the color of root beer and soft like warm water.  She asked me about the flag in the window.  I told her we flew the Ethiopian flag because we all come from Ethiopia.

"That's in Africa?"

"Uhm huh."  Both of us talking slowly now.

"That's my daughter's name, Africa." She says proudly.

"Oh, yeah?"  I said, inescapably intrigued.

"Huh whole name, Africa Zaire."

"Wow!  That's beautiful, Carol.  What made you think of that?  I mean, Zaire?"

"When I was pregnant with her, my daughter Africa, I got real sick.  I didn't have no where to go, but some missionaries, I met.  They had a little church downtown.  Took me in.  Wanted to make sure I had my baby safe and right.  They told me to stayed wit them all the way through.  Had my baby in Grady, them two missionaries waiting right theay.  Told em I would neva forget them.  They was from Zaire, Africa.  So I named my baby Africa, Zaire.  It sound betta like dat."
"I think you might be right about that, Carol.  I like that.  Africa, Zaire."

That night Carol passed out on the floor of our living room and left a little puddle in the unfinished floorboard-- to remind us of her visit.   I went to school and to work the following days and would meet Carol's daughter, Africa, one day as I walked up Jeptha.  I knew she was Carol's daughter because she looked just like Carol, but with skin like fine black ink in a bottle.  I said hello as she passed, explaining that I knew she had to be Carol's because she had Carol jumping all off of her.  She was an older teenager.  She was also pregnant.  The next time I saw Carol, I would have to congratulate her on becoming a grandmother.
                                            .                             .                              .

Carol came by the house one evening as I sat on the stoop, the sun ducking behind a cloud in a western corner of the gold and blue sky.  The neon light from Paschal's Hotel beamed through our window.  On the wall it reflected a red, gold and green intimation, much more impressive than the flag we'd hung in the window.  Holy smokes we'd said staring at the back wall, now sure we were in good stead.  Carol plopped down on our stoop, partially drunk and not too steady.  She was completely different during the day when she hadn't had a drink.  But it was nearing nighttime, she was full of liquor, and in the mood for singing.  She sang to me, "I'ma tell you something, but you got-TA tell my story!  Only if you tell my story!"

Ok, I nodded my head yes, laughing a little.

"You promise to tell my story?"

Again, I nodded yes.  She then broke into a ballad about a man who took her down to Savannah/and tried to make money off of her/because he knew she liked to smoke crack.

"You like to smoke crack!?"

She smiled, "Yesssss!  I lovvvvee to smoke crack."
She said this as her hand waved through the air in an operatic moment.  I sat amazed. Carole didn't hit one note, but sang with passion.  I smiled and nodded my head with a beat, encouraging her to continue.  "He tried to sell me to other men/ He thought I didn't care nothingggg about myself.  I told him I wasn't raised to work on no street corner/ My momma taught me better than that/He passed out afterwhile/And I slipped away out a teeny tiny bathroom window/ Walked through the rain to get to a phone to call my uncle/ And he took the bus down to Savannah and found meeeeee/You gotta tell my stooryy!  Somebody tell it, please."

"Ok, Carol," I said, still tickled and stumped about the liking to smoke crack part.

That was October, 1990 and the last time I saw Carol.  Africa soon had her baby.  I would soon be expecting my own (testing the bounds of my commitment to communal living), and Carol would be dead by winter.  From the neighborhood I heard she'd had a stroke that killed her where she fell.  That urgency in her voice, that desperation and fear that I then had not understood, I see now as I see her eyes, the color of root beer and soft warm water.  

Cool slanting light marks another change in time.   I am thanking the night, then the day, and alas, I sit here still, at this desk--having fulfilled a promise to a friend:  to tell the story of a woman named Carol.