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.