A Knock at Midnight(3)
That’s the kind of love that burns out fast, especially under the pressure of two newborns. Mama entered the deferred enrollment program for Fort Jackson, but she was reluctant to be away from me, her first baby. Granny told her, “That little black-eyed pea don’t want to go to no Germany!” So Mama relented.
Jazz was born a year after me, and by the time she was a year old my mom and dad’s relationship was all but over. For the next year we bounced around within a ten-mile radius in Hunt County, Texas, between Granny’s house in Greenville and my dad’s family home in Campbell, under the loving care of our dad’s mom, Mama Lena. Mama appreciated the help, but she wanted out from under all of it—away from her mama’s house, away from Hunt County, and especially away from my dad’s new girlfriend. So when Mama’s daddy, Pa-Pa, offered to fix up the old house he’d grown up in for us, it was a big deal for her—a chance, finally, for my headstrong, independent mother to be on her own with her girls.
Pa-Pa’s own daddy had built that house with his two hands, and by the time we moved in, it had seen better days. Still, it was ours. Pine trees grew out back, and the sky was sharp with electricity during tornado season. Fireflies delighted us on summer nights, and torrential downpours turned the red earth redder, releasing everywhere the sweet smell of new growth so potent it permeated our clothes drying on the line. Despite the cement floors and bare bulbs, the thick plastic nailed over windows for insulation in the winters and the pipes that froze all winter long, we had joy in that house, and so much love.
Pa-Pa’s family constituted more than a quarter of Fulbright’s one hundred fifty residents, and most of us lived on that same two-mile stretch of Fulbright Road—not quite dirt but not quite paved either, the old blacktop crumbling back into the rich soil. We were the first house you’d come to if you turned up that road, a little ways after the old church where we’d go some Sundays, gospel hymns shaking the wooden floorboards. My cousin Charla lived across from us with my great-aunt Mary Ann, and a few paces down the road my great-aunt Opal made my favorite plum jelly from the massive trees in her front yard. Just around the bend my great-grandmother, Mama Toni, tended her flowers and cooked up sweet rice with carnation milk and sugar from her family’s recipe in the Philippines. Across the road from her was Pa-Pa’s house, my grandfather Edward, who worked in the coal mine. Pa-Pa’s cattle and horses grazed in the fields around the house, and in the summer he and Uncle Willie would be in the field all day with their rumbling tractor, pitching hay that fell loose from the fresh rolled bales. There we all were—descendants of Fulbrights, living on Fulbright land in a town that bore our mama’s name. There was rich history in that small East Texas town. We knew we could knock on any of those family doors on Fulbright Road if we needed to. And we knew we had a proud, hardworking mother, who dressed every weekend in the white nurse’s uniform she’d bought secondhand at a store in neighboring Lamar County and starched and ironed until it looked almost new.
The year was 1988 and my mother was only twenty-three, with two toddlers underfoot. Though she’d given up her dreams of the military, she was determined to make something of herself. She attended nursing school all day in Paris, Texas, through the week and worked the evening shift Thursday through Sunday as an aide in a nursing home. Mama would carry us to the car, asleep, and when she knelt by the backseat to wake us and usher us into daycare, it would still be pitch black, no other children there but us.
When Mama’s financial aid package got cut as part of President Reagan’s austerity program that closed several hospitals in the area and cut drug treatment programs, childcare initiatives, and education, daycare was no longer an option. Without daycare, Mama’s future was in jeopardy. Mama Lena offered to take us, but Evelyn wasn’t having it. “They’re my girls, Lena,” she said. “I’ll figure out a way.” And with grit and determination, she did.
The whole family pitched in. Pa-Pa left his truck at the end of our driveway when he came home from the coal mine at night and walked the rest of the way home so Mama would have a vehicle to drive to the nursing home to work second shift. And every weekend, without fail, Mama Lena came to collect us and spoil us rotten at her home in Campbell while Mama was at work. Everyone pitched in to make sure we didn’t want for anything. At least, if we did, we didn’t know it. In our family, as in much of the South, Black love was Black wealth.
* * *
—
JAZZ AND I were sitting on the edge of the front porch, our skinny arms circling the peeling slats, when a huge blue and silver Silverado truck, set way up high, rolled up the driveway of our little house in Fulbright. We looked on with interest as a brown-eyed, handsome man with a box haircut slid out from behind the wheel of the truck. He was shorter than our daddy but sturdily built, with a round face and wad of snuff tucked in his lower lip. He wore a thick TXU work jacket and a wide, kind smile that put us immediately at ease, and at the bottom of the porch steps he stopped to pay his respects to us as if we were grown-ups. “What you know good?” Billy said, and we appraised him for only a moment before Jazz clambered off the porch, walked straight up to him, and said, “Do that truck fly?”
That’s how Mama’s new boyfriend, Billy, always seemed to us—a superhero. And we, his apprentices, to whom he worked to impart all of his steadfast values from the day we met him, just as though we were his own blood. That day, he laughed his quiet laugh and took Jazz to sit in the shiny cab, showed her how the controls worked, didn’t even complain when she got Teddy Graham crumbs on his seats. Just like that, Billy became a part of our family. We loved to see him coming and ran outside whenever we heard his truck rumbling down the road. We joke now that he rescued us from that old drafty Fulbright house, and he did.