A Knock at Midnight(4)
When I started kindergarten, Jazz was left by herself, gathering the last of the sweet plums, feeding stray pups, sneaking out to ride bikes with our cousin Chauncy while Mama slept off the night shift. Each day she waited loyally for the mailman at the big tin mailbox in front of our house so she could proudly carry in the letters.
One afternoon Jazz was standing outside waiting for me to get off the bus after school—I could see her standing there on one leg like a stork, using the other to worry a scab on her calf, her hair a wild mess because Mama hadn’t had time to put the comb through it.
“Brittany,” Jazz announced as soon as I was in earshot, her eyes wide with wonder at the day and the pleasure of the telling. “Yo mama gone crazy today!”
“What happened?” I said.
“Yo mama’s so happy she’s gone crazy!” Jazz said. “Jumping around, hugging me—she spun me around and around! Yo mama got her driver’s license!”
“Mama already has a driver’s license,” I said, in the bossy old wise woman tone I used whenever I explained anything to Jazz in those days. “What are you talking about? How you think we drive everywhere?” But sure enough, Mama—never one to show much affection—met me on the porch, her smile wide as I’d ever seen it, and swung me around, too.
“We did it, Britt! We did it! Your mama is a nurse!”
That night Billy took us all to the Tip-Top in Bogata to celebrate. We toasted Mama’s success over the Tip-Top’s should’ve-been-world-famous burgers and thick homemade milkshakes. We were so proud of her, and she was so happy. “I am a nurse!” she kept saying. “All those long nights, all those days of dragging you poor girls to the daycare at the crack of dawn! I am a nurse!”
She was our hero.
* * *
—
MAMA WORKED HARD to enrich our lives. When she was home, despite what must have been her extreme exhaustion, she read storybooks, made French toast, and played Candyland and Uno. When she could she took us to the movies, to the circus, to county fairs. And she did whatever teachers asked of her. One time she stayed up after working a full shift to help me make a poster for class, a public service announcement to keep folks from messing with the power lines. That poster took us hours: MC Hammer’s face realistically rendered, his trademark glasses mirrored with carefully applied glitter, 3-D speakers in the corners blasting “Don’t Touch This!” with power lines in the background.
In 1991, Mama married a smitten Billy in Mama Toni’s front yard, wearing Granny’s old wedding dress. Jazz, six by then, was the flower girl—happily tossing the flowers to guests on only one side of the aisle—and I carried Mama’s train. A year later, they decided it was time to get out of the rickety old house in Fulbright for good. With Mama a full-fledged nurse and Billy’s coveted benefits job at the coal mine, they bought a house in the town of Bogata—pronounced entirely Texan, with an “uh” sound for the o and a long o for the first a—about seven minutes up the road from Fulbright.
Bogata was another small Red River County town, but with a population of twelve hundred, a thousand more people than Fulbright, it dwarfed our old neighborhood, let alone that road with our family in every house. While our road in Fulbright had been peopled with our grandparents, cousins, great-aunts and -uncles, Bogata was almost all white. My cousin Charla and I were the only Black students in my class, and there were only a handful of other Black families living in the town. Even today, if you pull into the road leading to our old house, you’ll see the bright blue letters announcing DIXIE KITCHEN against a Confederate flag backdrop. But sheltered by my family’s love, I was shielded from racism growing up. The Bogata of my childhood was an idyllic country town, and my memories of those first few years there bring me nothing but pleasure.
Mama worked in the nursing home, and Billy worked in the coal mines in week-long shifts, seven days on, seven days off. We spent those off weeks as the tightest-knit family you can imagine. Biking down Main Street to the snow-cone stand, making signs to root for our football team while Billy drenched ribs in his secret-recipe barbecue sauce. Jazz playing out back with the horses while I sat inside on the couch, inhaling another book from the Babysitter’s Club series. My mom perched on a lawn chair, shaving her long legs in the water hose as Billy fixed the fence and teased her about her feet, Jazz hollering at me to get my nose out of the book and come play catch. Me and Billy shooting hoops in the front yard around our Little Dribblers trophy while my mom and Jazz put extra glitter on their Dallas Cowboys poster. Always the sound of laughter. I had a happy country childhood in our small rural town. But those times didn’t last.
I didn’t know then about the system of law and order closing like a vise around my community, my family. I wouldn’t really know until years later. I was a kid, enjoying my kid life in my doors-unlocked-and-windows-wide-open piece of rural East Texas. But when the drug war came for us, it came with a vengeance. When the drug war came for us, it came straight for my mom.
Chapter 2
HERO ON GROUND ZERO
“Come on, Jazz! What are you doing in there? I gotta pee!” I banged on the bathroom door. I’d already been standing there for what seemed like a whole episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I could hear Jazz being her little Jazz self in there—humming, singing, probably making a mess with the toothpaste. “Jazz!” Lord knows I loved her, but my little sister was a handful.