which made perfect sense when I thought about sleeping on the bottom and bumping my head on the top. Sometimes I'd crawl in the tent and sometimes Bobby would lift me to the top bunk, fifty million miles off the floor. Sometimes the bunk bed was a place to have fun but sometimes it was not.
They wanted me to take naps but I could not force myself to go to sleep in the middle of the day.
"Do you see this brush?" Bobby would say. "Do you see your face? They will meet."
He never raised his hand against me and his threats were more from being a linguistic artisan than from any intention to actually hurt me. I did not know that at ten and thirteen Angie and Bobby were just kids and did not know what they were doing. Yet, to me, they and the adults were one. When they tried to make me go to sleep, they were just acting as representatives of this illogical world with its unreasonable demands. And I did not know why in this world it is bad and hardheaded not to do something I cannot do. To this day, I must sleep with a cover over me. No matter how hot it is, I must have at least a sheet. No matter how grown up my conscious mind is, my subconscious mind, which governs my emotions, knows that the boogieman cannot get you if you are under the covers.
Angie and Bobby took me to a neighbor's apartment. A huge dark man with a huge dark belt was there. He beat me with the belt. I had no idea why he was beating me. He just sat there in that apartment in his white t-shirt. He knew what to do as soon as I came in. It was his reason for existing. “Thou shalt beat the children. Thou shalt not look to the left nor to the right but all that are brought to thee shall thou beat with the belt that is given unto thee." And then the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils and he became a living troll.
At some point, another man came into my life. To see him, my mother and I traveled further than I had ever been. I was excited. The neon signs and lights and people swarming the streets of New York fascinated me. Everything was so colorful: The yellow uniforms of the traffic directors. Green buses. Bright lights and signs to read everywhere. This was the city I had read about in the Little Golden books--the city of Carmen and Pedro and I loved it.
The man lived in a huge magic building. It had a magic door like the one on Rhode Island Avenue. We stood in front of a door until it slid open. Then we stepped inside a tiny room. Then somebody pressed a button on the wall and we turned around and looked at the door until it slid open again.
"Oh, is that your little girl?"
Since I was the only little girl in that tiny room I assumed the pretty lady was referring to me. My mom confirmed this.
"Yes, she is."
"She looks just like you."
This made my mom happy so I thought it was a good thing to look like your mother and I was happy that I did. Then we stepped out and everything was different. The foyer and huge door to the street outside were gone, so we walked down a carpeted hallway until we came to the door where the man lived.
The man was shorter than my mother, light-skinned like she was and bald-headed but he loved me.
"Rhonda, this is my father, Tippy. That makes him your grandfather," my mother said.
Imagine that. My mother has a father. I had never thought of it. He was also a performer. He played drums and had a tap dancing act: Tippy and Dickie at the Cotton Club.
When my mother left me with her father, some of his friends came over. And he let me sip on his beer. It was nasty but they thought it was so cute so I kept sipping it. Then somebody thought it would be cute to take a four-year-old girl on a roller coaster ride at Coney Island.
"YOU DID WHAT!" my mother screamed.
"It was just a ride for kids. She's a kid. She wasn't scared," Tippy pleaded.
"Not scared?! Look at her. She jumps when I call her name."
"Awww."
"Awww nothing! This child is so nervous. I can't even go out for five minutes before you do something crazy. This don't make no sense."
I could not make sense of all the hollering and screaming. Why do adults always try to quench a fire with kerosene? I grew afraid: Afraid of falling. Afraid of being high up. Afraid of people who laugh when I am in danger.
We left the city of Carmen and Pedro and I thought we were leaving the fear and roller coasters and laughing people, but the sensation of falling became a part of the symbology in my dreams. What does it symbolize?
I loved walking with my mother down the wide and sloping streets of Southeast D.C. with their red brick apartment buildings dotting the grassy hills. I held my mother's hand as I skipped toward her mother's apartment at the bottom of Savannah Street. When I remember that moment--that street--I remember Marvin Gaye singing If This World Were Mine--maybe because that was my mother's favorite song at that time or maybe because at the moment, the world was mine--but not mine to control.
"Mama, let me wear an afro. Pleeeease! Angie wears an afro."
Nothing so wild and free for a little girl. They continued to pin my hair down with two cornrowed braids down the sides of my head.
My grandmother's house was adorned with a bookcase full of delight: Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss, along with a set of encyclopedias. They taught me to read long before I entered school. By the time I was in the first grade the teacher put me in a class with the smart kids and it was downhill from there.
I tagged along when grandma sent Angie with a cake or something to give Miss Green downstairs. From this, we learned the value of generosity and the pleasure of making others happy.
They pulled out a trundle bed for me to sleep on.
Angie warned me, "Girl, you better not pee in this bed. Mama will have a fit."
That's all I remember about my mother's mother. There is a picture of her sitting at a table in a club one arm folded across her torso, the other hand holding up a cigarette as if it wanted to pose for the camera too, and her husband sitting beside her smiling like he was the luckiest man in the world. I remember her husband more than I remember her. Thad came from a family of French Africans named Duquét. When they immigrated to the United States, they changed the family name to Duckett. Legend has it that Angie was playing softball when an unstoppable ball came towards her immoveable head. Someone yelled, "Hey Angie, duck it."
She turned around. "What?"
And the rest is, how shall we say, his story.
When Thad’s story and my story converged, D.C. was a friendly place for old and young. Reaching up as far as I could with one hand to hold his sable hand while I dragged my Snoopy dog with the other, I felt grand.
"Who dat?"
"This my grandbaby."
He gave another meaning to the "grand" in "granddaughter." I remember the nights and I remember him.
Then grandma and grandpa went away, one after the other. Angie, Bobby and their sister Donna stood around in a solemn circle. I must have asked someone when grandma was coming back because I remember stepping away from the circle trying to contemplate the meaning of the word "never." To a six-year-old mind, there is no separation between time and space--between time and the universe. Just like there are different places where things that exist in one room do not exist in other rooms, could there be different times? Does never in this universe--this time and space--mean never in all universes--all times and spaces? I tried to stretch mind to a world I did not know--the world where I am 35 years old. That would be another world-- another reality. Will the never of the world where I am six years old still exist in the world where I am 35? On some deep level, I knew the answer but still I had to wonder until experience solidified the nebulous world of unknown possibilities. The root of the word "education" is the word "educe" which means to bring out that which is within. We come into the world with innate universal knowledge. Life's curriculum is how to apply that universal knowledge to the peculiar realities of this planet.
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