It was all over in five seconds with five moves on my mother’s part:
Move one: Push Jenny back to safety with the left hand.
Move two: Pull the right hand holding the Coke bottle away from Jelly Bean’s grip.
Move three: Grab the Coke bottle out of the right hand with the left hand.
Move four: Swing the Coke bottle downward and break it against the curb.
Move five: Swing the broken Coke bottle upward and damn near slice Jelly Bean’s arm off.
Jelly Bean sped away as I peeped around Mama. I saw a trail of blood leading to the corner from where the station wagon had been parked. And in a town as small as Kinloch, we never saw Jelly Bean again. Mama looked down at me and said, “C’mon.” Eyes crossed, I grabbed Mama’s hand, plugged my mouth with my thumb, and we continued to walk in silence down the rocky road. All I could think was, Where the fuck is my last swallow of Coke?
Mama changed my birth certificate so she could enroll me a year early; hence, I was always a year younger than my classmates. My teachers loved me and validated me. I was often called to stand and come forward in class. I was far from a great student, but I was Miss Personality, the class clown, and a natural leader. I was a shining light at school most of the time. Whenever I would bring a sad mood into the classroom, my teachers would notice and listen to me. That’s all I really needed.
I joined the Brownies and every after-school activity available. It kept me out of the house where my mom was often on the war path. She’d be bone-tired from cleaning two or three houses on the weekend, or working eight hours at the hospital, and then taking a long bus ride home, only to have to feed us, wash, iron, and sort out how to pay the bills. She was not in the mood for childish foolishness, and I was an overactive, needy kid.
My poor siblings bore the brunt of my hyperactive, mischievous ass. Like when they’d sit on the floor playing Monopoly. I was left out ’cause I didn’t have the attention span for anything as boring as a board game. So, I’d make sure Mama wasn’t around, and then, ever on a search-and-destroy mission, I’d run across the board, howling “I hate y’all!” as the pieces scattered.
Fortunately, my energy was channeled into sports and I was a pretty good athlete. Still, I often cheated, even going so far as to steal the blue ribbon from the judges’ table at a track meet. I felt being number one would gain more attention from my mother. But even when I brought home a blue ribbon, her praise felt short-lived. Mama might smile at our achievements, but she always had other fish to fry.
When I was nine, Mama moved us to a house on Jackson Street. It was certainly a step up; we were overjoyed to have hot water and indoor plumbing. Life seemed to finally settle in for my family, especially because Mama’s scrimping and saving meant she came home more often with bags full of groceries, giving us a welcome break from the powdered milk, lard, and blocks of government cheese.
The Jackson house is where I began impersonating movie stars and re-creating the dance moves I saw done by the Supremes and the Temptations on TV shows like American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show. I learned to curse in the house on Jackson, too. But I was careful; I knew a bad word could get a severe beating from Mama. The house on Jackson is also where I first found myself overcome by sadness at night. I didn’t think about where the sadness came from or tell anyone. I just would cry into my pillow or while I sat alone in the bathroom. To try to gain control, sometimes I would sing the mournful Mahalia Jackson songs that I loved so much.
The evening before my tenth birthday, we were hosting a meeting of the church’s youth group. Mama sent me to the kitchen to wash dishes. As I turned on the faucet, a siren pierced the air, and seconds later every church bell in town began to ring. We Midwesterners knew what was coming. The lights flickered. I looked out the kitchen window, and the sky turned black. Then the biggest flash of lightning I’d ever seen illuminated the magnificent funnel itself. I felt suspended in a dead, quiet calm until the tornado, sounding like a roaring locomotive, snapped me into action. I ran through the short hallway toward the group in the living room as we were overtaken by an unforgettable whooshing noise. The house lifted off its foundation, dumping the youth group kids out of their chairs, and onto the floor. In the darkness Mama shouted, “get to the basement!” We started to run through the kitchen to the basement stairs, but stopped when a lightning flash showed us the glasses and dishes I had been washing swirling around in mid-air, then shattering against the walls. We huddled in the hallway, praying, crying and screaming as hail as large as grapefruit pounded the roof and spears of wood pierced the walls as if God were using our house for target practice. Finally, silence—that horrifying calm after the storm.
The transistor radio told us we had survived a record-setting winter F4 tornado. Three people were killed in the St. Louis area.
The next morning, Kinloch was in shambles. Our house and our neighbor Miss Wood got the worst of it. It was the wood from her roof that had splintered, and pierced our house. It looked like a porcupine! But I wasn’t about to let a tornado get in the way of my birthday. I trailed Mama through the mess, humming, whistling, and singing so she would remember this was my special day. It worked, and I took my five dollars straight to Miss Bubbles’s Chinese restaurant. The owner, whose real name was Maddie Sue, had lived in far-away Chicago, and when she came back, she came back with the fried rice. You had to go down a cobblestone alley to the back of her house to order through the kitchen window. I used to love hopping from stone to stone to get a quart-size cardboard carton of egg foo young and fried rice, Chinese soul food–style.
Ultimately, our house was condemned. We moved to a house on School Way, into another basement that we again shared. It was sort of a step backward, because once again we had to use an outhouse or the tin bucket. We kids rushed to get out of the house every day because the last one out had to dump the bucket in the outhouse. Mama left for work before us and she’d say, “I don’t care who does it, but that bucket better be clean when I get home.” The task was especially humiliating because we were in full view of Kinloch High School across the street. To this day, my siblings tease me with, “Jenny, you never took out the bucket!” And to this day, I still respond with, “But I’m the baby!”