A Knock at Midnight(10)
And so I left. I left the Bogata of my childhood, those innocent days walking down Main Street to the Kwik Korner for a burger, the hours in my bedroom reading any book I could get my hands on. I left Billy. I left Mama, and I left Jazz. I left Jazz with Mama at her most ill and unstable.
But I was a teenager, and I couldn’t wait to get to what I saw as the faster-paced excitement of Commerce, a town of nearly eight thousand people five minutes from Mama Lena’s house in Campbell. As much as I was running away from my mama’s transformation, I was also running to something. The love and stability of my grandparents. The big high school in Commerce. And the first Black community besides my own family that I ever really felt a part of.
Commerce was where the action was: step shows at the Texas A&M–Commerce campus, where the Q-Dogs stomped in their purple bomber jackets and the pretty-boy Kappas shimmied and twirled their red-and-white canes. On weekends during the run-up to the high school basketball championships, all the top schools from the surrounding area would converge on Commerce for the weekend. It was like the Black population in town tripled overnight, with a true Friday Night Lights kind of energy, but with flavor. Master P’s “Make ’Em Say Uhh” blared from the speakers at halftime, and the stands would be packed with cute boys. My friends and I would put on our Tommy Hilfiger gear and shake the stands with DMX’s “Stop…drop…shut ’em down, open up shop” whenever our team took the court. I had my hair cut in an asymmetric blond bob like T-Boz from TLC, faded in the back courtesy of Dino’s Barber Shop, a painted belly button like Aaliyah, and way too many pairs of Air Max to match my clothes. All that Southern Blackness was medicine to my wounds.
At Commerce High I continued to excel academically, whipping through my classes despite sketchy attendance caused by a series of debilitating migraines, which I later realized were probably stress related.
My grandparents’ house in Campbell, my sole and soul refuge during my adolescence, was home to me now. But like most teenagers, I no longer spent my free time at home. I had my own life, and I threw myself into it. I spent most of my time in Commerce, with a whole new set of friends, with whom I felt, maybe for the first time in my life, entirely myself.
As in many larger rural towns in the South, the railroad tracks in Commerce marked the dividing line between Black and white. On one side of the tracks was the commercial center: the college, city hall, businesses, white residential neighborhoods—carefully kept that way, first by deliberate redlining and later by Jim Crow. On the other was the lower back end of Commerce, neglected by the city, with very few businesses and many signs of disrepair and government neglect. Through the sixties, the city of Commerce was known as a “sundown town”—any Black person found on the streets after dark was in danger of being lynched. The only place where Black citizens were safe from the threat of white violence was also the only place Black people were legally allowed to reside: Norris Community, known fondly by younger generations as “the Hole.”
The Hole was the Commerce hood. It was set in a valley and locked in by the tracks on two sides and a large field with no road at the far end. When you drove down into it from the high school—which we did almost every afternoon—you really drove down. The Sunrise Housing Projects in the Hole resembled most projects in the rural South, with small yards in front of single-story pink brick units, surrounded by a couple of feet of grass and a chain-link fence. From the outside, they couldn’t look more different from the high-rise stacked apartment complexes that stretch city blocks in big urban hoods. But in many ways, the conditions that led to them and shaped the lives of their residents were entirely similar. Beyond the innocuous-looking front yards and country porches of Commerce, most people struggled to survive.
But the Hole was ours, and I loved it. It was our hood, buzzing with the energy of Black people living their daily lives: our music blasting from houses and cars, our laughter from porches and corners. People gathered on their front steps to catch up after a day’s work. Kids rode their bikes in packs, swooping in and out of driveways from the sidewalk to the street. Mothers and grandmothers yelled for those same kids to come and eat. Teenagers drove slowly down the block, showing off shiny new rims. Other than our family road in Fulbright, I’d never been in a place where there was nothing but Black people. I felt more comfortable and at home than I ever had in my life. The energy of the Hole spoke powerfully to me. I felt a gravitational pull to culture, a pull as strong as an ocean tide.
Late afternoons, after school was out, we crossed the tracks to hang out in the Hole at the home of my new best friend, Ashley, who we called Sissy. Sissy recognized my soul and understood me. She was short and thick, with beautiful dark-chocolate skin, a pixie cut, and perfect teeth from her years in braces. She lived with her grandmother in a white clapboard corner house, next door to her aunt Cookie. The houses had twin dirt yards in the front and a big old oak tree on Aunt Cookie’s side that supplied shade in the blazing late-afternoon sun for all but a few short winter months. We’d sit in the shade in folding chairs in Sissy’s front yard with her grandma. Aunt Cookie came in and out of the conversation through the screen door from her front kitchen, where she was busy preparing potato salad for her weekly card game. I practically lived at that house in my high school years.
From Sissy’s place, we’d stroll down to visit Ms. Reynolds, the neighborhood Candy Lady, for watermelon Now-and-Laters and Frooties, sometimes a Kool-Aid pickle. Sissy was a sunflower seed queen, able to deshell multiple seeds with precision in her mouth and neatly deliver the seeds back to her bag. Almost every day, we’d sit in Sissy’s yard eating seeds, sipping our freeze cups, and gossip about everybody who drove past.