“What?”
“You always said you wanted your ears pierced. I ain’t got no money to take you somewhere to do it, but I been watching videos about how and I even got Lacy to give me these.” He grabbed his jacket slung across the couch and took out a pouch, shaking it into his hand. Two stud earrings fell out, leaf-shaped.
“You serious?”
His smile only grew. “Hell yeah, I’m serious. You ready?”
I sat on the carpet and Marcus kneeled next to me, a bowl of ice and a slice of apple in hand.
“You sure that needle’s clean?” I’d never had any part of my body pierced, begged Mama for years, but she refused. “Is it gonna hurt?”
Marcus waved me off. “I cleaned it, quit asking these damn questions.”
He stood up and went to the kitchen, turned the stove burner on, and dipped the needle in the fire before returning to me, tilting my head toward him. “What I say, Ki? I got you.” He held my gaze and it was like I was nine again, following him into the trees by the lake and watching as he and his friends lit a bowl, the way he inhaled like some part of him had always known how to do it. Watching Marcus makes you want to join him, follow him anywhere.
“Do it.” I squeezed my eyes shut and dug my nails into his shoulder as he slipped the apple behind my earlobe.
“Aight. I’m gonna count down from three.”
I gripped his shoulder tighter on the three, squeezed more on the two, and screamed out on the one, even though he lied and pierced the needle through my skin on two. It wasn’t nothing but a pinch. He pulled the needle out and slipped a piece of ice behind my ear as he fiddled with the stud and finally got it inside the hole, clasping the back on. He got a pan out from under the stove and held it up for me so I could see my ear, puffy and swelling with this tiny little leaf in the center. I looked up at him and beamed. It was perfect.
“Ready for the next one?”
I nodded and as I repositioned so my other ear was facing him, I caught Marcus look across the room to the little table set up between the kitchen and the door where the only Johnson family photo sat untouched, Mama in the center with her arms around all of us. Daddy stood there with his blazing teeth, like he was ready to pick up a saxophone and puff out a new tune. I hadn’t seen Marcus look so doe-like and small in months and something about it relieved me.
But he didn’t count this time and instead of that small pinch, my ear split into a raging burn, followed by a steady trickle of warmth leaking down my neck and Marcus’s whispered fuck. I didn’t scream, just looked at him, still holding the needle, bloody. The carpet still has a trail of blood spots and my earlobe still has a thin scar that only Marcus knows he is responsible for. Alé pierced that ear a couple days later, made sure to do it slow and careful.
Marcus brought me home a folded slip of notebook paper with his new lyrics every night for five days after my birthday. They weren’t about me or nothing, but the sentiment was clear. Over a year after he had taken me in and he was still trying, at least enough to have any words for me at all. Sometimes I still see flashes of the brother who would give anything to reverse my hurt, like when he said he’d get a job for me, but he’s becoming more and more unfamiliar.
I stare at the tub, unused with mold growing in each corner. Next thing I know I’m holding my phone to my ear like I’m really prepared for her to pick up. When the night nurse answers, I don’t even have to beg for him to let me speak to Mama since apparently it’s “free hour” and, moments later, she’s on the phone. It’s like the blood’s been sucked out of my body with everything else, completely evaporated.
Even when every other memory disintegrates, there is no way to forget your mama’s voice. Hers is so gravel, that Cassandra Wilson kind of deep, and it wraps around my waist, holds on tight.
I speak. “Mama?”
Mama don’t miss a beat, says, “Hi, baby,” and it feels like God climbing out her throat. Feels like every fear abandoned.
“I need you, Mama.” My voice comes out mumbled and I wonder if she can hear me at all.
Mama coughs. “Whatchu need, child?” That gravel voice fills up with her pride and I know my call satisfied all her hoping.
“I don’t know what I’m doing out here.”
“Don’t know nobody who does.” Mama doesn’t speak for a moment. I think maybe I should talk again. Or just hang up and forget I ever called her in the first place. Then her voice comes back and I let myself sink into it. “I’ve been thinking about you. Was telling one of the girls in here last week about how you used to draw those pictures for me, remember? The ones that you’d always do in the same damn color and I told you they must got more than just a red marker in that school of yours but you kept on saying you liked the red.”
“Yeah.” I don’t remember much about the actual pictures, but I remember how my teacher used to hide the red markers from me so I didn’t make another one like that, how I had to get one of the other kids to let me have theirs in exchange for some other prize I don’t remember giving.
“Your brother taking good care of you?” Mama asks.
“He quit his job today.”
“Why don’t you get one, then? I know I didn’t raise no incompetent child.” Mama dares to heighten her voice into that same octave she used to use pre-lecture.
“It ain’t that easy,” I say. “Got a gig but it don’t pay much and they raising our rent.”
Mama laughs.
“What?”
Her voice is too bright. “It just makes more sense why my girl decided to call for the first time now. Baby needs some money.”
“I’m not stupid, I know you ain’t got no money,” I spit back.
“Don’t mean I don’t know people who do.”
I scoff. “I don’t want none of your prison friends’ cash.”
“You know your uncle got money.”
“Also know he left the minute you did.”
“I still got his number,” she says, and I can feel the grin pasted on her face. “Family keeps each other safe, yeah?”
Ironic how she keeps on preaching family values, like she did not destroy this one. Our family started and ended with Mama, with the same voice that’s telling me how we keep each other safe when she never could. Sometimes it feels like Daddy was the only one she ever loved.
There’s nothing coincidental about their love story.
For someone so fixated on destiny and God’s plan, Mama always knew how to get up in everybody’s business and make something happen. Daddy had just joined the Panthers in 1977, late to the movement at nineteen but still in a honeymoon phase with the revolution, used comrade in every sentence, and wore black even in ninety-degree weather. He mostly just sold the party newspaper and helped out with filing, but every chance he had to get in on the action, he took.
A fight had broken out on Seventh Street in West Oakland. Daddy was on his way to work with a couple friends, rifles resting on their shoulders, berets on. Covered in leather. Daddy always described it as an attack; cops just sauntered up and started berating them. Pretty soon, Daddy was cuffed and in the backseat of a patrol car, charged with resisting arrest.
Daddy said his friend Willie was the one who started it, wrote a letter about Daddy and his case and released it to every chapter of the Panthers in the country. Got everyone in every city on the streets, signs up, fists pointed. Daddy never said it, but I think he was proud of the arrest; of having Elaine Brown’s right-hand man say his name and visit him in jail.