Nightcrawling(24)
Ironic how she keeps on preaching family values, like she did not destroy this one. Our family started and ended with Mama, with the same voice that’s telling me how we keep each other safe when she never could. Sometimes it feels like Daddy was the only one she ever loved.
There’s nothing coincidental about their love story.
For someone so fixated on destiny and God’s plan, Mama always knew how to get up in everybody’s business and make something happen. Daddy had just joined the Panthers in 1977, late to the movement at nineteen but still in a honeymoon phase with the revolution, used comrade in every sentence, and wore black even in ninety-degree weather. He mostly just sold the party newspaper and helped out with filing, but every chance he had to get in on the action, he took.
A fight had broken out on Seventh Street in West Oakland. Daddy was on his way to work with a couple friends, rifles resting on their shoulders, berets on. Covered in leather. Daddy always described it as an attack; cops just sauntered up and started berating them. Pretty soon, Daddy was cuffed and in the backseat of a patrol car, charged with resisting arrest.
Daddy said his friend Willie was the one who started it, wrote a letter about Daddy and his case and released it to every chapter of the Panthers in the country. Got everyone in every city on the streets, signs up, fists pointed. Daddy never said it, but I think he was proud of the arrest; of having Elaine Brown’s right-hand man say his name and visit him in jail.
Mama was living in Boston with her cousin Loretta that summer. Loretta said she had some business to attend to out in California and thirteen-year-old Mama came right along with her. When they hit Oakland streets, Mama saw Daddy’s face plastered on signs and posters all over town. Said he looked like Louisiana bayous tasted: rich and overgrown; that skin a whole muggy river. Scrawny and prepubescent girl that she was, she said she was gonna make that man hers, make him show her where the water flowed in Oakland.
The Oakland Police Department decided not to press charges once The New York Times picked up the story, and Daddy was released two weeks post-arrest. Some of the Panthers threw him a release party in the streets, then had a barbecue at a West Oakland park. It was Mama’s last day in town and she begged her cousin to take her.
Mama went straight up to Daddy and said, “Hi. I’m Cheyenne, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Daddy didn’t pay her no mind, but Mama watched him all day. Watched the way he spread out his arms when he laughed. Watched him sing with that perfect mouth oval. Watched him dance with a pretty woman twice her age when the jazz came on.
Mama didn’t mind waiting. Went back to Louisiana, grew up, worked almost ten years in a hospital answering calls, and saved up enough to move out to Oakland. Then Mama went looking for Daddy, twelve years after she first met him in that park. She eventually found him bartending in a little pub off MacArthur Boulevard in 1989, when downtown was full of crackheads and abandoned buildings and cops who still liked to mess with Daddy, the lead-up to his eventual lockup.
Mama knew she was that kind of beautiful that seemed to have just walked out of a painting. Her hair was teased into a faux mohawk like she was starring in a Whitney Houston music video and she was a graceful tall, took these huge steps when she walked. Mama wore wide-leg red pants to go fall in love with Daddy and kept them even after they tore at the seams. This time, when Mama strutted up to him, he was so mesmerized he almost dropped a bottle of whiskey. Not by the way she looked but by the way she existed. Mama was like woman grown out a seed, arms twisting, fruit and breasts and all things hard to resist. Daddy wanted to wrap his arms around her trunk and Mama knew he would.
An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.
Mama married Daddy and they moved into the Regal-Hi by the time Marcus was born. When Mama looked at Daddy, she saw posters of a lightning boy’s face. She didn’t never see the way Daddy fogged up in the winter or how he would save a dollar bill before he’d ever save a family photo. I only ever saw Daddy and his music: dancing in the kitchen. Daddy was away in San Quentin from ages six to nine for me and I barely remember him not there. Marcus don’t feel that way, though. Used to throw a tantrum every time Daddy tried to touch him post-lockup. Mama used to tell him, “You lucky yo daddy got out ’fore you even grown a single hair on that face.”
And she was right: we were lucky that everyone knew Daddy’s name, until the day when suddenly we weren’t so lucky, and Mama’s trunk splintered.
“You’d really give me Uncle Ty’s number?” I ask.
Mama coughs again on the end of the line. “Course I would. Just want my babies to come see me out here first.” She says it and it sticks onto the insides of my stomach, the way Mama makes everything into a deal.
“Mama, we ain’t gonna try to get you out again or nothing. Can’t do it even if I wanted to. You in a halfway house now, you should be happy about that. And you know Marcus not going nowhere for you.” My teeth grind and I don’t know why she always makes me say it, crush all the parts of me that just want her to hold me and hum.
“You gotta talk to him, Kiara, really talk to him. I know you ain’t been trying like that and it’s okay, baby, I just need you to come here. Give me an hour and I’ll give you all your uncle’s shit. We got visiting hours Saturday morning. I know I’ll see my babies there. You be there.”