Tata packed some clothes in a plastic shopping bag and we bounced. Weeks went by and never once did Tata ask me to take her back to her mama’s house. Aunt Vanessa never asked me to bring her daughter home, either. That’s how my cousin started living with me.
The other three girls came not long after. Little Cee was nine, Cece ten, and Tomeeka eleven. They were Derrick’s sister Darleen’s kids. But sometimes Darleen got distracted from her parenting by her love of smoking crack. I went over to her place late one night looking for Derrick and found the three kids home alone, sitting in front of the TV.
“Where’s your mama at?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” Tomeeka said with a shrug, her eyes still glued to the flickering set.
“Y’all had something to eat?”
“Nah.”
I took them out to Lilly’s Soul Food, then back to my place. That first night they slept on blankets I spread on Ashley’s bedroom floor. After a few days, I realized their mama wasn’t asking me to bring them back, either. So I bought two sets of bunk beds, and the girls settled in.
With six kids living with me, my place felt like a group home. In the morning I’d get the kids breakfast and make sure all the girls’ hair was combed. There were clothes and hair clips, tennis shoes and Pop-Tarts wrappers all over the place. Then I’d drive the babies to day care and drop the older girls at school. In the afternoon they’d meet me on Ashby Grove. They’d hang out on their friends’ porches, listening to music and making up dance routines, while I served my customers. When it got late, we’d all pile into my Cadillac and go home.
One night, the girls announced they’d decided to form a professional dance crew, the Ashby Grove Girls. They pushed back the furniture, got in formation, and showed me the choreography they’d been working on; a perfectly synchronized routine featuring the Roger Rabbit, the Wop, and the Cabbage Patch, with Little Cee dropping into splits as a grand finale. I was so impressed, the next day I went to the mall and bought four matching extra-large neon orange and black T-shirts, with coordinating sunglasses and orange hair scrunchies. Those girls could dance to anything, but their best routine was to Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” which they played fifty times a night.
At thirteen, Tata and Tomeeka were only three years younger than me, but I was the one holding us down. I kept everybody fed and bought them all new clothes. I made sure they went to school, did their homework, and got their hair did every weekend. When CeeCee decided her personal style would be enhanced by a gold tooth, I was the one who took her to the dentist and picked up the hundred and fifty dollar tab.
It was a lot of work taking care of six kids. I’d holler and complain and tell them they were trying my last nerve, but really I loved every second of it. Having all that noise and commotion in the house gave me a family feeling. Sometimes I’d lie in bed listening to them giggling in the other room and think about how we were having the kind of good times I’d only ever seen on TV. Like on the Brady Bunch when all the kids enter a talent show. Only my girls really were talented. And instead of Alice cooking up a pot roast in the kitchen, it was me sitting at the kitchen table chopping up an ounce of crack.
It was summertime when I first asked the girls to hold my packages. I figured they were already out on Ashby Grove anyway, listening to the radio and practicing the Running Man. It only made sense that they should help me out.
“Put these in your drawers,” I said one morning, handing each girl a packet filled with a hundred dime sacks. At first they didn’t know what I meant. “Put them inside your panties,” I explained. “And hold them for me until I tell you.” Then it just became part of our morning routine. Sometimes Tata or Cece would hold down a corner, serving any customers who came through. All they had to do was reach into their underpants to make a quick sale.
Once in a while I got a nagging feeling that maybe I was doing something wrong. Before they’d come to live with me, none of those girls knew a thing about selling dope. They were good girls. They went to school; they didn’t talk back or mess with boys. Now here I was, practically their mama, bringing them into the game. It nagged me like a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but mostly I tried not to think about it. I was teaching the girls to survive, just like my mama taught me.
I stopped dealing with suppliers like Mello and the Mexican when I started running my own trap on Ashby Grove. Instead I found myself a new connect, Lamont, who wasn’t anything like other dealers I knew. He’d graduated from college, and during the week he worked in a fancy office building downtown. He said for him selling dope was “strictly supplemental income,” which he was due on account of the bullshit he endured as a black man in corporate America. “Money-wise, we got to level the playing field,” he said.
Lamont wore khaki Dockers, Hush Puppies shoes, and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He read the front section of the newspaper and was one of the only people I’d ever met who actually voted.
Lamont also had a special gift for making me think about things like no one ever did before. One time he asked me how come I had two black eyes. I told him Derrick punched me in the face. Everybody else in my life—Stephanie, Duck, Miss June, even Mama before she’d passed—always said the same thing about Derrick: “He’s no damn good.” But Lamont shook his head and asked, “Don’t you think you deserve better than this?” For weeks I couldn’t get that question out of my head.
Lamont wasn’t just good at conversation. He also had the added bonus of running his crack distribution business by delivery. I didn’t have to go to some abandoned strip mall with a loaded gun to get my product. Instead, every Saturday Lamont would come by my place with a package and collect his money.
I was sound asleep one morning when I heard him knocking. I jumped out of bed, rinsed my mouth, and rushed to the front door to let him in. I was more excited to see Lamont than usual. I wanted to show him: my brand-new dinette set.
I’d bought it at Wolfman Furniture Warehouse. It had a glass top and a fake cherrywood frame with matching claw-foot chairs. On top of the table I’d carefully placed a blue glass centerpiece bowl and filled it with plastic fruit, just like they did in the display model in the store.
“How you like my decorations?” I asked, waving my hand in front of the set. “It’s nice, right?”
Lamont ran his hand along the top of a chair and picked a fake green apple out of the bowl. He palmed it in his hand like a baseball. For a minute I thought he was going to throw it at me. But instead, he put it back in the bowl and sat down. “You like this table, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why, you think something’s wrong with it?”