I lunged at Sweetie, my arms swinging like windmills, trying to slap the shit out of her. The policemen reached out to pull me off, but Michael grabbed me first. “It’s okay,” he said, pressing my face to his chest. “It’s okay.”
He leaned down, held his mouth close to my ear, and whispered to me, “They’re not your kids. You’ve got to let them go.”
In the weeks after the girls went to live with their mother, they called a few times to tell me they were hungry and there was no food in the house. I brought them groceries and took them to get their hair done. But after a while, the phone stopped ringing.
Maybe I should have fought harder to get them back. But it felt like nobody was on my side. Dre, Sweetie, Miss Campbell, even Michael kept telling me the girls needed to be with their mama. I’d done everything I could to raise my nieces the right way, but once their real mama popped up, it was like I didn’t even matter. Fine, I thought. And I gave up the fight.
That June, Ashley graduated from Riverdale High School. Michael and I sat in the bleachers on the school’s football field, sweating through our good clothes in the noonday heat. This was the moment I’d been dreaming of since the day Ashley was born. No one in my family had graduated high school. Not me, not Mama, not Sweetie, not Aunt Vanessa or Uncle Skeet, or Dre or Andre or Jeffro or Granddaddy. My baby girl was the very first one.
I did it, I whispered to myself as Ashley walked across the stage in her cap and gown. I looked around at the other families seated beside me in the stands. There were daddies cheering their children’s names, and mamas smiling and dabbing their eyes with neatly folded tissues. I was the only one sobbing uncontrollably, tears and mascara running down my face.
In the car driving home later that afternoon I turned to Michael. “I keep thinking about Sweetie’s girls,” I said. I had big plans for my nieces. They were all going to graduate high school and make something of themselves. When Sweetie took her daughters back, I’d bawled my eyes out for weeks. It was like someone had snatched my own children away. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them now.”
LaDontay had been halfway through her final year of high school when she went back to her mother’s house. She was the only one of Sweetie’s girls to graduate. The next year, she was pregnant. Soon after, Destiny had a baby, too. When Jonelle, Sweetie’s youngest, turned up pregnant at thirteen, Sweetie sent baby-shower invitations to Jonelle’s entire seventh-grade class.
Chapter 26
Angels
It’s funny how you can spend your whole life chasing a dream only to find out when you get it that it’s just not enough. When I was living in Granddaddy’s liquor house, I’d fantasize about the kind of life I saw on TV. I wanted checkerboard curtains in the kitchen and a man who came home every night. I dreamed of a clean home, a fridge full of food, and children who hugged and kissed me and told me I was loved. Living in Riverdale with Michael and our kids, I finally had everything I’d hoped for.
Michael and I cheered on Nikia at football and helped Junebug learn to read. We got Ashley off to college and tried to get Michaela to play baseball, even though all she just wanted to do was dig in the dirt and complain about it being hot. Even after Sweetie took her girls, life was better than I’d ever imagined. But still, something wasn’t right.
It’s hard to put into words the feelings I had back then. All I can say is it reminded me of how I felt those days when I missed Free Breakfast at school and had to wait for hours for the lunch bell to ring. I had a hunger that gnawed at me like an empty belly. I knew I should be happy. For the first time in sixteen years I wasn’t taking care of other people’s kids, ripping and running, hustling to get by. But at night I’d lie in bed feeling the hunger taking over. Even Michael noticed something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” he asked, standing in the kitchen one evening, watching me wash the same dish over and over like I was in a daze.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I wasn’t sure what I needed to fill me up. I didn’t even know what I was craving. It wasn’t until months after Sweetie’s girls moved out that I finally found what I was missing.
I don’t know what the hell told me put my name on the sign-up sheet for the open-mic comedy show at a little neighborhood bar that night. My caseworker, Miss Campbell, had told me I should be a comedian all those years ago. Maybe part of me was curious to find out if she was right. Or maybe I just wanted the attention. All I know is once my nieces were gone, and the house got real quiet, I found something pulling me to the stage.
I only had one joke. Technically, it wasn’t even a joke. It was just me talking about my brother Dre breaking into folks’ houses. “So, my brother is a cat burglar,” I began, gripping the mic. “So he’s a cat burglar, but he’s fat as hell. He’s a muthafuckin’ fat cat burglar.” There was no setup, no punch line. It was just me talking about Dre until my five minutes were up. Standing at the front of the room, with the noise and laughter and all those folks listening to my story and smiling back at me, I finally felt full.
I remember my mama was on TV once. It was back in 1980, a few months before Curtis walked out on us. We were still living in the shotgun house on Oliver Street. I was eight years old and should have been at school, but instead I was home that day with Mama, the two of us glued to the set watching The Young and the Restless, when we heard a knock at the door.
Mama told me to go answer. When I flung open the front door, I was shocked to find Miss Monica Kaufman from Action News standing on the porch. Miss Kaufman was famous. She was the only black woman I’d ever seen on TV reading the nightly news and the only reason Mama tuned in.
“Hello,” Miss Kaufman said, leaning down to talk to me. I marveled at her perfect teeth and her baby-blue pantsuit. “What’s your name?”
“Rabbit.”
“Well, hello, Rabbit! It’s a pleasure to meet you, sweetie. Do you think you can go get your mother for me?”
“Yes, ma’am!” I ran to get Mama, then followed her back to the door so I could listen in on the conversation. Mama was dressed in a housecoat and head scarf, and kept reaching her hand up to brush her face, as if to smooth away a stray hair. I guess she didn’t realize she wasn’t wearing her good wig.
Miss Kaufman was asking Mama if she knew about the child murders happening around the city. Of course Mama knew. Everybody did. All those little black boys and girls who’d left their homes to go to the corner store or the movies, only to turn up dead, dumped in ditches or in the woods. The Atlanta child murders had been in the news for more than a year. There were seventeen missing children, and fourteen had already been found dead. It was so bad that, the week before Miss Kauffman showed up at our door, the mayor had announced a curfew. Everybody under the age of fifteen had to be inside by 7 p.m.