I didn’t even look at the paper Jeanne gave me before stuffing it in my cleavage. But at yoga class the next day I began to sob uncontrollably, and I went straight home and called that number.
A few days later, when I met Jeanne’s friend Rachel, I was in an extremely agitated state. I could not look Rachel in the eyes and was unable to sit still. I dropped to the floor and began to do push-ups as she watched from her small armchair. She asked a couple of superficial questions. I batted them away as I rose from the floor to look out the window. Her incisive eyes followed me around the room, obviously assessing my every move. My modus operandi is to scare a bitch when I feel vulnerable, and I felt my hackles rise. She calmly told me to take a seat, which I did—on the back of the couch with my bare feet on the seat cushion. I responded to her next question dismissively. Then, Rachel dropped the bomb: “Tell me about your mother.” Seeing red, I lunged off the couch into Rachel’s face, yelling through clenched teeth and pounding my chest: “I came here to talk about my career! Don’t. You. Ever. Mention. My motherrrr!!”
NINE
KINLOCH
My earliest memory of Mama is her roughly pulling a white ruffled shirt over my head when I had the measles. “Mama, it hurts,” I said, referring to the shirt on my tender skin. She softened, but just a bit. She had no time for coddling.
Dorothy Mae Johnson Lewis, the eldest of sixteen children, was herself the mother of seven by the age of twenty-six. To say Mama was strong-willed and outspoken is an understatement. Once, ADC (“welfare”) sent a white male investigator to our house. When Mama opened the front door, the social worker peered in and said, “Nigger, how can you afford a piano?” Mama calmly said, “Just a moment” and closed the door. Thirty seconds later she reopened the door and threw a bucket of piss dead in his face.
My mother was the sort who found my father in a bar with another woman and took his cash from him right on the spot. She told his date, “You’re gonna buy your own drinks tonight because this money is going to feed his seven kids.”
Edward James Lewis, my father, was a sharply dressed, good-looking man the color of the walnuts that grew plentifully around town. The story goes that my mother was walking home from high school one day when Ed rode up on his bicycle, put her on the seat, rode her to a romantic spot and proposed. She was nineteen years old when they married in 1949. I arrived in 1957, after Wilatrel, Vertrella, Larry, Edward (Ba’y Bro), Robin, and Jackie.
My parents separated when I was just two weeks old, and Daddy wasn’t around a lot as I grew up. Like many men in Kinloch, Daddy drank. He was often out of work, again, like a lot of men in Kinloch, and when he did work, it was for low wages.
Kinloch was the first self-governing black town in Missouri. We were a racially segregated island of poverty surrounded by the white St. Louis suburbs—Berkeley and Ferguson. Yes, that Ferguson, where the murder of a young black man by a police officer in 2014 reinvigorated a nationwide movement against police violence.
The Kinloch of my childhood consisted of little wood houses, some not more than shacks, outhouses, and rocky roads. Most residents were so damn poor they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor unless they were damn near dead. It seemed that people were always dying just walking down the street or coming out of the Threaded Needle, the only legal bar in town (there were many underground juke joints that sold moonshine). Diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart attacks took out all kinds of folk, young and old. Drugs weren’t pervasive during my formative years, but there were plenty of liquor stores and alcoholism was the norm, along with the violence and despair that often occur when people see no way out of their lives. No one could afford a gun, but there were plenty of knives, bricks, and baseball bats. People were always on edge in Kinloch, and a fight was always breaking out, sometimes right there at home.
Don’t get me wrong; there were a lot of good things about Kinloch, too, especially the benefits of growing up in an all-black town. The people in authority came from our community and were part of our culture. We had our own mayor, a police force, school system, post office, stores, and churches, of course—everything but a bank. No need for a bank when no one had more cash than what was in their pocket. We had wonderful black teachers who cared that we were well educated and classes small enough for this to be possible. Kinloch produced many high achievers, including Congresswoman Maxine Waters, entertainer and activist Dick Gregory, R&B singer Ann Peebles, and my good friend Beverly Heath.
People knew each other in Kinloch. We were a tight community with half of the folk in town related in some way. We sat on front porches, calling out to each other from the road or across the yard. We had some characters, too. There was Huckabuck, Kookoo, Chicken Neck, the Pigfeet Man, and Cat Johnny, who always drove a Cadillac. We had a number of small shops and restaurants—Shack Pappy’s for barbecue, Hal’s Drive-In for delicious garlic fried chicken, and Uncle Dick’s, where we bought dill pickles, Lay’s potato chips, and penny candy. My favorites were Mary Jane’s, nut chews, and watermelon suckers. We all ignored the sweat that dripped off the owner, Mr. Harris, and into the ice cream buckets when he bent to scoop cones for us.
All the kids had their real mamas and one or two “play mamas.” When Mama was really struggling and our refrigerator was empty, I could stop by the house of any of my play mamas: Miss Barnes, Miss Clark, or Miss Benson. When I got real lucky, someone had made a tub of greens or cornbread in a skillet or a pot of neck bones.
Mama hated being poor and being dependent on government assistance. She was a proud woman active in the church and community. Mama was a den mother for the Boy Scouts and even got involved in politics. She served as an election judge during the 1950s.
She was ambitious for herself and for us kids. Shortly after I was born, she got job training and soon secured employment as a certified nursing attendant. When I was one, she found a job at St. Louis County Hospital, where she worked until it closed in 1982.