I was released from Fulton County jail on a cold day in January 1992. I’d served eight months and gotten out early because of overcrowding. Derrick came to get me. The first thing I wanted was for him to drive me to Slim’s house so I could pick up the kids. As we headed down Marietta Boulevard, I told him things were going to be different. I was turning my life around, I said. “You know, I was thinking like maybe I could get my GED and get some kind of job.”
When he heard this, Derrick swiveled his head and looked at me like I’d just sprouted wings and told him I was flying to the moon. Then he bust out laughing. “A job?” he said. “Girl, you ain’t getting no job! You can’t do nothing but hustle. Besides,” he added, “you got the kids to take care of. What you need to do is get your ass back on the block and start making that money.”
I took a deep breath and stared out the window. I thought about Brenda’s list of employment opportunities: secretary, home health-care aide, paralegal, dental hygienist . . . She said I could do anything I set my mind to. But Derrick was talking to me like I was a fool. “G fuckin’ E D my ass!” he laughed. “Who you think you is, Claire Huxtable? Ha!”
Suddenly, I felt so stupid. What was I thinking letting Brenda and Eva fill my head with crazy ideas? Dreaming big was fine when I was locked up. But it didn’t make any sense in the real world. Derrick was right, I had kids to feed and rent to pay. That’s the power he had over me. He could make me doubt myself and change my mind like nobody else.
The next week, I borrowed a thousand dollars from Duck, bought myself some product, and within the week I was right back where I started, hustling on Ashby Grove.
The block looked exactly the same. The only difference was the laundromat had a new sign out front. Painted on the glass window, it said hood wash & dry. I thought it was messed up that somebody had labeled the place “hood.”
“You think white people have a laundry that says ‘Cracker Wash and Dry’?” I asked Jerome, staring at the sign. He laughed and told me that some guy named Hood had bought the place. “Girl, that’s why it’s called Hood,” he said. “Not because it’s in the hood.”
Hubert Hood was a middle-aged man with a potbelly and rectangular reading glasses that sat on the end of his nose. I met him when he came out of his office at the back of the store one afternoon and found me beating the shit out of Duck’s cousin Reggie with a giant jug of Clorox bleach.
I’d been in the laundry minding my own business, when Reggie walked in and started hollering at his girlfriend, Tanisha, who was using the washer next to mine.
“Bitch! Who told you to leave the muthafucking house?” he yelled. Then he grabbed Tanisha by the throat, shoved her up against a dryer, and started punching her in the face.
I never liked Reggie anyway, and I definitely wasn’t going stand there and let him whoop Tanisha’s ass, so I grabbed the bottle of Clorox off the counter and slammed it into the side of his head. Reggie ignored me and kept swinging on his girl, so I twisted the cap off the bleach and dashed it in his face. Reggie fell to the floor, hollering about his eyeballs being on fire. That’s when Hood came running out of his office with a pistol in his hand.
“Whoa!” he yelled. “What the hell’s going on out here?” Hood grabbed Reggie by the collar, dragged him over to the sink, and shoved his head under running water. He turned to me: “Girl, you trying to blind this boy?”
“Hell, yeah!” I said. “He was beating on my friend.”
Hood looked from me, to Tanisha, then to Reggie, who was soaking wet, with his Jheri curl plastered to the side of his face.
“Well,” said Hood. “I can’t argue with that.”
The next time I had to do laundry, I brought my kids. They sat in plastic lawn chairs Hood had set up against the wall. Ashley kept herself busy reading a book her teacher had given her about a bunch of talking bears, while Nikia chewed on the head of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Hood came out of his office and nodded hello. Then he noticed my kids. I could see him giving them the once over. Nikia had a fresh haircut and was wearing a pair of snow-white Jordans, creased Levis, and a crisp navy-blue Polo. Ashley was dressed exactly the same, except her Polo was red and her hair was braided into four neat plaits, each one finished off with a red clip in the shape of a bow. “Those your kids?” Hood asked.
“Yeah.”
“How old are they?”
“My girl’s five and my son’s coming up on four.”
“Nice looking. Quiet, too.”
“Say hello to Mr. Hood,” I told the kids.
“Hello, Mr. Hood,” they said together.
“Real mannerly,” he muttered to himself, walking back into his office. “I like that.”
After that, whenever Hood would see me—which was pretty much every day, since I was selling crack right in front of his laundromat—he’d ask, “How your kids doing?”
He came outside one chilly afternoon while I was leaning up against my car hustling and the kids were in the backseat. Ashley was doing a worksheet on top of her winter jacket, which she’d folded up on top of her book bag to make a desk in her lap. Nikia was pretending to feed his G.I. Joe french fries from his McDonald’s Happy Meal.
“How long you gonna keep these kids waiting in the car?” Hood asked.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe two, three more hours.”
“Why don’t you send them inside?” Hood suggested. “It’s cold. And I don’t like the way all these knuckleheads out here acting the fool when the sun goes down. It’s not safe.” I took the kids into the laundry and told them to sit on the lawn chairs. But Hood motioned for me to bring them inside his office. “I got a TV in there,” he said.
When I went to check on them a little while later, Ashley was curled up in an armchair in the corner of Hood’s tiny office, reading her storybook out loud, while Hood sat at his small metal desk with Nikia, teaching my boy to count the coins Hood used to make change for his customers.
Hood became my kids’ regular after-school activity. They’d be with him for hours, doing their homework or watching TV, while I hustled. Sometimes he’d stay open later than usual, until nine or ten o’clock at night, just to wait on me.
Hood was like a granddaddy to my kids. And sometimes when they were at school, I’d slip inside the laundromat to spend time with him myself. “Hey Rabbit,” he said when he saw me standing in his office doorway one afternoon. “C’mon in.” He had a stack of bills spread on his desk in front of him, a little calculator, and a notebook. “I’m just taking care of my finances,” he said, picking up a bill. He peered at it over the top of his reading glasses, made a note in his ledger book, then he wrote a check and slipped it inside the envelope.
“You sure got a lot of bills,” I said after he’d stuffed more envelopes than most folks had utilities.
“Credit cards,” he explained. He reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, and pulled out a Visa card. “I got a twenty-thousand-dollar limit on this one. I don’t touch it, though.”
“What’s it for then?’