MAMA
CHAPTER 6
“Oh, hell no!”
Those are my first words. I’m in the womb and I’m screaming out loud, bubbling up the placenta juice, because my world is turning upside down, ass backward, and all-out crazy.
I remember this like it was yesterday. Even if I am a third-trimester fetus at the time.
One minute I am floating safe and warm in my mom’s belly. Next second it’s like I’m in a blender. Everything’s all shook up.
What are you doing, girl, going on a roller coaster when you’re sixteen years old and eight months pregnant? I think.
LaVoya Ealy. My mom, my home away from home for the first nine months. Beautiful fresh girlfriend to my dad, George Gladney, basketball star in Shreveport, Louisiana. Just as young as she is.
Carrying me inside her belly, LaVoya’s riding on a bus in the shadow of Shreveport’s Texas Street Bridge over the Red River. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, 1941, only MLK is like twelve years old then and nobody knows he’s a prophet yet.
The bus driver suddenly gets high or falls asleep or has a stroke or experiences the rapture and drives right off the road. The world turns over and over. Pretty little pregnant teenager banging around like a cue ball on the inside of an upside-down downtown bus.
“Hell, no!” My first words. My first curse against the world. My tiny fist raised in black-power protest, in the womb.
It shakes me up. All I can say is that, looking at the evidence of how my life turns out, I know that something did it. Something sets me on a path that isn’t like any road anybody else in the world is traveling.
I might as well blame a bus accident that happens before I am born.
My mom’s family says that us surviving, me and my mom, is a miracle. They are shocked LaVoya isn’t dead, shocked that the unborn-fetus me ain’t miscarried all over the highway like some bloody crime scene.
Five weeks later I am birthed out into the world. Against my consent. Still upside down and loopy, a bus-plunge baby, funny as shit and born to shock people.
Shreveport, Louisiana. The deep, deep South. So deep the Confederates there keep right on fighting for weeks after the Civil War ends. Shreveport is where Jefferson Davis is running to when they catch his ass. One of the last die-hard outposts of the Old South.
Back then, Shreveport is what we used to call a “bourgeois” town, meaning a hateful, racist place. Huddie Ledbet-ter, the great blues singer Lead Belly, hung out a lot in Shreveport.
Lead Belly has a song called “The Bourgeois Blues” that I always think about when I think about Shreveport. Yeah, Lead Belly’s song is about Washington, D.C., but he could just as well be singing about Shreveport in the 1940s: “Them white folks … they know how/To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow.”
Shreveport is also where the great soul singer Sam Cooke gets arrested in 1963 for making a public disturbance, trying to check into a whites-only Holiday Inn. Cooke pulls up in a $60,000 Maserati, with his band following in a Cadillac limo, and they won’t let him in. Racists are such stone-cold imbeciles.
NEGRO BAND LEADER HELD IN SHREVEPORT, reads the New York Times headline the next day. The whole incident is Old South all the way.
By 1963, I am long gone from Shreve-town, but fifteen years later I wind up playing Sam Cooke in the movie The Buddy Holly Story. By then the story of Sam Cooke’s run-in with a*shole crackers has taken on the status of legend, and Shreveport has earned its reputation as a racist place.
I leave Louisiana when I am seven years old, but while I’m there I’m not thinking of racism or bourgeois towns or anything like that. I remember my time in Louisiana as though it is surrounded by a golden haze.
A golden haze of family.
A golden haze of Mama.
The key person in my life is my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Aimay Ealy, whom everyone inside and outside the family calls Mama. She is the spitting image of the actress Esther Rolle and even embraces some of Esther’s no-nonsense characteristics. It’s like I am raised by Florida Evans from the TV show Good Times. Only I’m not Jimmie Walker.
Mama is the boldest of the bold. No one messes with Mama, and I am her favorite. It is her love during my childhood that shelters me, creates me, molds me into the man I am today. I could never endure the racism and prejudice in Hollywood if not for the strength and character she gives to me.
I am born in a house with a midwife. That’s how everyone does it back then. Only women are in the room. The menfolk get kicked out. Everyone is screaming, “Good Lord, here comes Ealy’s kid!”
That year, 1941, is the same year a scientist creates plutonium for the first time. Me and plutonium, born simultaneously, both with designs to blow up the world.
Starting at a very young age, too young for me even to remember, I am treated like a very special child. I’m not sure if it is because of my looks, my voice, or my personality, but I am shrouded in some kind of special gold haze, completely protected from racism and prejudice.
My memory of Mama in Shreveport is of an amazing, strong woman. She is really petite but carries herself as though she is ten feet tall. She is so tough, she sleeps with a hammer. Every night, she crawls into bed with a two-pound roofing hammer snugged up against her. Just in case.
Mama raises everyone’s kids in town—her own kids, the neighborhood kids, and eventually her grandkids. LaVoya and George are sixteen still, practically babies themselves, so instead of standing by and watching babies raise a baby, Mama takes over. She cares for some white folks in Shreveport, too, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and minding their children.
I have to laugh when I go to downtown Shreveport with Mama. She catches some white kids misbehaving, she whoops their asses and makes them go home. They are scared to death of her. It tickles me. That is one of Mama’s supreme lessons. Ain’t nobody thinking they’re better than us when Mama is in the picture.
Mama wakes up every morning pondering whose ass she is going to whoop. Mama is always whooping ass. My ass, your ass, the neighbor kid’s ass. That is her reputation.
“I’m passing out lollipops and whoopin’s,” she says, “and I’m fresh out of lollipops.”
Mama tells me a story from when she’s young, and she runs away from home. She has a bandanna tied to a stick with a supply of food inside it.
“I only get as far at the cotton patch,” Mama says. “Then I get scared and run back home.”
And when she returns, her own mama gives Mama an ass-whooping for running away from home.
Hearing that story makes me laugh the hardest I ever laugh as a kid. I make her tell it to me again and again. The idea of Mama, the ultimate ass-whooper, getting a whoopin’ herself, makes me laugh until my gut hurts.
I think this is what makes me a comic. The world going upside down and butt backward plants the seed of all my comedy, still to this day. Mama giving an ass-whoopin’ ain’t funny, because it’s expected. Mama getting an ass-whoopin’, now that’s hilarious. I learn early on that flipping the world butt backward and saying the unexpected in the punch line is funny.
Mama’s husband is Preston Ealy, a Jamaican with Caddo and European blood in him. I call him Daddy. He looks like Jane Fonda’s daddy, Henry. Daddy Preston is a hunter. He goes out after small game nearly every day, bringing back food for the family stew pot.
Daddy: Preston Ealy, my grandfather and a great outdoorsman
Later on in my life, when Richard Pryor is going crazy shooting up his own house, I am able to go up there and deal with him and all his guns because of my experiences as a child hunting with Daddy Preston. He gives me my good grounding in weaponry. It comes in handy.
My Shreveport life is all Mama and Daddy and uncles and aunts and cousins. And the Church. Daddy Preston’s brother, my uncle Shank, is a minister. His other brother, Uncle Tip, is a deacon and an outrageous drunk.
Mama’s best friend in Shreveport is this witch lady, Miss Amerae. She is Creole and looks Indian. She makes her own potions and poultices. Miss Amerae practices voodoo and can predict the future.
Miss Amerae is like the boogie-woman of my childhood. She scares the pants off me. She chews tobacco and spits it out in big spouts of brown phlegm. She speaks in broken French.
“I can make a snake kiss a chicken and a cat kiss a dog!” she says. She tells us her five husbands all get sick and die after eating mushrooms. Her sixth husband won’t eat mushrooms, so he conveniently “falls” off a cliff.
Miss Amerae has no children, but she does have a pet goat named Willie. I wake up with nightmares when I’m five years old, thinking about Willie’s Satan eyes. Whenever Mama sends me over to her house to borrow baking soda or snuff or pig’s feet or whatever, I face off with Willie. He looks at me like he’s going to take my soul.
I slip past Willie, go inside, and politely say, “Hi, Miss Amerae.” I never look at her. I stare at the floor. Miss Amerae gives me what Mama wants. I say, “Bye, Miss Amerae.” I don’t want to make that woman mad at me.
When we misbehave, Mama says she’s going to get Miss Amerae to put a spell on us if we don’t act right. Women around town go to Miss Amerae for abortions. I hear everyone talking about it. White folks, black folks, Indians, they all go to Miss Amerae to get fixed. She knows where all the bodies are buried. A few of them are buried in her own backyard.
Mama has a lot of African ways. When she is cold or in pain, she hums. We all love us some humming. Mama hums to heal. I’m humming right now just thinking about it … Hummmmmmmmmmm, ah-hummmmmm.
Later on in life, when I encounter mantras and meditation and all that New Age business, I hear people chanting the holy Hindu syllable Om and I recognize it right away. It’s Mama’s hum.
The Sanctifying Church we go to is the American one that’s the most like African religion. I get sanctified myself when I am five. The parishioners lift me up, pass me around, and then carry me out, like kids at a rave.
Folks speak in tongues. The better the actor you are, the more popular you are in church. Aunt Katie can act. She is always feeling the spirit. Mama accuses her of doing it just to show her ass. My aunt Erma Lee always wants to preach. But the town is sexist. They won’t allow women to be preachers. They look on her like she is a demon.
The same people come to church every week, screaming “Help me, Jesus!” and “Lord have mercy!” People have fits and ask for a healing when they’re sick with gout or arthritis. They are always jumping around trying to cast out the devil.
Years later, when I happen to encounter a man on the Santa Monica Promenade having an epileptic seizure, I think he is rolling around, talking in tongues. I walk by him and say, “Amen!” It’s my Pentecostal upbringing.
People confess their sins to my uncle Shank, the minister. One parishioner confesses to sleeping with another man’s wife. It turns out it is Uncle Shank’s wife. Uncle Shank starts wailing on him, and the two have a fistfight right there in church.
The church teaches us lessons about how things are between black folks and white folks. We are always going out in groups from our congregation. I see how careful everyone is in public, putting on a different face for the white people to see.
At a church picnic, Mama tells me that the word picnic comes from white people lynching black people. Picnic is short for pick a nig.
“They pick a nigger, any nigger they want,” she says, “lynch him, and then have a family picnic.”
Anyone still hungry after that? I know now that it’s not true, that it ain’t where the word comes from, but as a child the idea makes a deep impression on me.
Early on, I become convinced that my aunt Katie Gates’s son has formed a poisonous jealousy of me. I’m the cute one. I got the face people go to the plastic surgeon to get.
As a child, I always think Bobby Gates is ugly as sin. He’s so homely and ill-favored, you have to tie a pork chop to that boy just to get a dog to play with him. So naturally Bobby despises me. It is my first experience of something that happens to me all through my life: being hated on because I’m good-looking.
So when Bobby fools around with fire and burns our house down, I’m certain it’s me he’s after. Nobody else is at home.
I’m five years old. I see smoke curling up in the hallway outside the room. I know the house in on fire. So what do I do? With the scared-ass logic of a five-year-old, I hide under the bed. I imagine Bobby, watching pretty Paul burn up, rubbing his hands together and laughing like a movie villain.
Only I didn’t burn. My aunt Pressie comes wailing into the house, drags me out from under the bed, and runs out of the house with me in her arms. She’s screaming and flailing and I’m snuggling in her embrace as quiet as the baby Jesus.
Outside the house is a big crowd of family, all crying and worrying over whether I’m okay. It’s like a warm bath of love. Bobby’s fire backfires and I survive. I’m just doted on all the more.
Everyone in Shreveport loves them some Ealys, except maybe Bobby and one other creature. It’s our neighbor’s parrot, Feathers. Feathers screams out “Nigger” all day long, every single day. It’s the only f*cking word he knows. Everyone in the neighborhood can hear it.
Maybe it’s only fitting. The first time I hear the word nigger, it’s out of the mouth of a parrot. All my life, I hear that word parroted mindlessly, and I think of Feathers.
Mama hates on that parrot. Really hates the bird. No one ever calls her “nigger.” Not to her face. Nobody even thinks it. They are either too scared, too much in awe, or too loving. Them white folks she works for, they take care of her like she is pure gold.
We stay in Louisiana until I am seven. A whole lotta black folks move North at the end of the 1940s to find better jobs. We are among them. No discussion. Mama just announces it.
“Let’s pack our bags,” she says. “We’re moving to Oakland.”
I’m wondering, Oakland? Where’s that?
Oak Land. That’s how I pronounce it. Like it’s two words.
Mama sends Daddy on ahead. He rents us a house. So we get on the train, all our belongings packed with us, and embark on our new life.
As soon as we leave the station, Mama leans over to me. “Well, we’re never gonna have to hear that parrot say ‘nigger’ no more. You know why?”
“’Cause we’re going to Oak Land, Mama?”
“Nope,” she says, grinning. “Because I poisoned it!”
We laugh at that as we leave Louisiana behind. Looking out the train windows is like watching a movie for me. I sit on Mama’s lap and watch the countryside roll past.
I have a fantasy as a child about what would happen if the black people take over and run things. Mostly it involves me having all the candy I want, a bigger house, a nicer car, Mama retired at her ease, and Daddy wearing a nice suit.
But as that train travels through East Texas and then hits the plains, I think, This country is too big for black people to run. The train goes a little farther, and now we’re in the grasslands that never end. I think, This country is too big for white people to run, too.
Why don’t we just run it together? Nice fantasy, child. I fall asleep to the clickety-clack of the train wheels.