A Knock at Midnight(7)
I thought more, too, about the Threadgills, one of the only other Black families in town, about the ways their story diverged sharply from my family’s and yet still seemed more familiar than that of the kids with whom I used to spend my time. Demitrice Threadgill was a grade above me, and we’d never been tight. But like me, Demitrice’s mom was addicted to drugs. By the seventh grade we shared an awareness of one another that none of us could put into words. We didn’t hang out together, weren’t close friends, but a bond hung in the air between us whenever we were around each other, a kind of unspoken kinship.
I remember sitting next to Demitrice on a school field trip to Dallas. Her grandmother, called Blue Eyes for the striking contrast between her rich, dark brown skin and marble blue eyes, had just been killed in a car accident. I knew somehow that Blue Eyes had been more of a mother to Demitrice in the past several years than her own had been. We didn’t say much during the bus ride, but I could tell by the way her body relaxed when I sat down, her nod of recognition, the way she leaned into my shoulder sometimes when the bus turned a corner, that my presence was welcome. At some point during a long stretch of highway, a white egret rose from fields on our side of the bus and flew beside us for a time, its long black-tipped wings working in perfect, elegant unison, its blue eye parallel with our own.
“Maybe that’s your grandma,” I said, and Demitrice looked out at the bird and nodded. We sat in companionable silence the rest of the way, quiet in the knowledge of what we shared, and what we knew. Far too much for our age.
* * *
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DRIFTING ON A memory, Ain’t no place I’d rather be, than with you-ou-ou-ou….
It’s two o’clock in the morning on a school night and the silky tones of the Isley Brothers waft through the house. Jazz sleeps deeply beside me, her arm warm against mine, her steady breathing uninterrupted by the jarring sounds of the last three hours—the heavy slap of Mama’s footsteps on the floor as she paces the house, the repeated slam of the bathroom door, the stereo being turned up or down depending on which Isley Brothers song is playing. Billy’s working the night shift at the mine. I have a history test tomorrow and Mama has work. But it’s two A.M. and both me and Mama are wide awake.
I can’t stop the thoughts running through my head. Why is she still up? Don’t she know we have school tomorrow? Don’t she gotta be at work in the morning? How can Jazz be so clueless? I have to pee, but I’ll hold it until I can’t hold it anymore. I don’t want to walk into the acrid smell of crack smoke piercing the heavy cloud of air freshener Mama uses to try to cover it up. My body is tense with a whole range of emotions: anger, sorrow, resentment, worry, fear. Every time I close my eyes I may as well be in the living room with her. By this time, I know that scene all too well.
There’s our beautiful mama. She sits in the corner of our blue sofa close to the stereo, her feet curled up under her. She’s got a half-burnt cigarette in her left hand, the curling smoke backlit by the blue light of the TV, muted hours ago. The light flickers on her face, highlighting eyes that have lost their way. Sometimes she leans forward, slow as molasses, and tips a tube of gray ash into the growing pile of half-smoked Benson & Hedges, a few still smoldering in the glass ashtray on the table. If her cigarette ash tumbles to the floor before she remembers, she’ll curse.
For the love of you…She tries to sing along, but she’s moving in slow motion, the sides of her mouth gummy with spit, the words coming out garbled, as though her jaws are glued together. There are three empty Michelob bottles on the coffee table next to the ashtray, and one that’s almost empty, but she doesn’t reach for it anymore. Her beautiful high cheekbones have gone slack with the weight of the chemicals coursing through her body. Her agitated temper of the last few days is nowhere to be found. It’s like someone doused the very flame inside her with that chalk-white milk coating the corners of her mouth.
That’s my mama out there on that couch. My mama. In a state where I can’t even recognize her, but that I know by now like the back of my hand.
Those were bad dream nights, except that I was awake. Alone in our room, sleepless, I’d try to wrap myself in the smooth sounds of Ronald Isley’s soothing voice, drift with him and his brothers on their dream that Mama had somehow managed to rewind and play again.
Sad to see…A new horizon slowly comin’ into view, yeah I wanna be livin’. For the love of you, oh, yes, I am. All that I’m givin’…is for the love of you, all right now, oh…
Wrapped in the music, I’d try to get my mind to catch onto something else. Anything but what had taken hold of our mother. I never could manage it.
* * *
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MY MOM HAD become an unstable, unpredictable individual I hardly knew, and I wanted none of it. Every weekend, I called Mama Lena. And every weekend, she drove the hour to and from Bogata to take me and Jazz home with her to Campbell. She’d sing Al Green the whole way home, smoking her Salem 100s and sipping out of the Pepsi she kept in the drink holder—it was a soothing ritual to take sips out of Mama Lena’s cup of ice-cold Pepsi. She never asked questions, and to this day I don’t think she knew how bad things had gotten with my mom. If she did, she kept it to herself, her full-body hugs telling me everything that I needed to know—that I was surrounded by love.