“Well, we all have to get a move on,” Patti said, squeezing Jason’s head as she walked toward the door. “Jason, turn that TV off.”
Tracy and Jason followed their mother out.
Tracy said, out the door, “Yeah, I’m gonna have to buy Jason some books to read, so he won’t get wrapped up into little white-boy fantasies.”
Although he didn’t understand what his sister was talking about yet, Jason nodded and said, “Okay.”
“I am so proud of you,” Patti announced, driving them to school. “My little baby’s gonna be one of those sistas who puts the white man in his place. She’s gonna be like Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. Yup, my daughter gon’ be another Sojourner Truth.”
Patti did know something. But Kiwana called Tracy “Camara,” one who teaches from experience.
Throughout the summer, Tracy and Raheema enjoyed each other’s company. It was the most inactive summer Tracy had had in her life. Mr. Keith was finally giving himself and his family room to breathe, and Raheema seemed a lot more cheerful. Both girls struggled to hold on to the vegetarian diet Kiwana had strongly suggested, and Raheema’s acne slacked off with its use.
The girls laughed about all of the arguments they had and all the boys that had been on their block, trying to talk to either one of them.
Their futures looked bright. They argued about what colleges they would go to and the types of black men who would chase after them. “Probably some perverted professors,” Tracy joked. But finding “the perfect man” was a mystery to them both.
“Do you still think about Victor?” Raheema asked Tracy while they enjoyed the moonlight and the cool nighttime breeze. They were not serious about boys anymore, unless anyone would ask Tracy about Victor.
“Yeah,” she admitted, hesitantly. “I’ve never met anybody like him. . . . Remember Mercedes used to talk to Kevin?” Tracy asked, viewing the house across the street from them, where Kevin used to live.
Raheema nodded. “Yeah. That was her first boyfriend.”
Tracy paused. “You know, sometimes I wish I could have one of those voodoo dolls, and just make guys act right.”
Raheema laughed. “Me, too. But then again, girls don’t really like guys they can control.”
Tracy gave her a hi-five. “Ain’t it the truth.”
Raheema then got quiet, too quiet for Tracy.
Tracy quizzed her, “What are you thinkin’ about?”
Raheema rubbed her long ponytail. “I was just wondering how your little brother is gonna treat girls.”
“Oh. Girl, he ain’t thinkin’ ’bout nothin’ but that damn television. But I’ve been trying to get him to read books though.”
“Why do you think you like Victor so much?” Raheema wanted to know.
“Well, to begin with, you know that he was my first, just like Kevin was probably Mercedes’ first. And that shit just does something to you if you liked the boy at all. You’ll find out soon enough,” Tracy assured her with a grin. “But outside of that, I see Victor as a black butterfly. And you watch him fly and land, and then you sit and admire him for a while, knowing that he gon’ fly back away before you can grab him. And now his ass is in jail, just when I was getting close to him again with my net.”
Raheema smiled.
“What?” Tracy asked, veeringly.
“I think that poetry you been reading is rubbing off on you.”
Tracy sat silently, in thought. “I wrote a poem about Victor,” she revealed.
“Yeah? Well, let’s here it,” Raheema piped.
“How you know I know it by heart, Ra-Ra?”
“Because you know Victor by heart.”
Tracy grinned, admittedly. “Okay,” she said. “It’s called, ‘King Victorious.’ ” She closed her hazels as Raheema looked into her smooth, honey-brown face. The moonlight was shining on them both.
Tracy started with a mellow voice, “I once knew a young black man who stole my heart. And then he gave it back to me when I begged for him to keep it. I said, ‘Thieves don’t give back the goods.’ But he said, ‘This thief can take all the goods in the world with his black skin and his kingly ways.’ And I said, ‘But these goods of mine are more precious than the furthest North and the furthest South, and if you run from me East to West, you will only run in circles of misery.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but this king can jump to the moon, and to Jupiter and as far away as Pluto, searching for more conquest.’ So what could I do, but to say that I would follow him to the edge of the universe? And then he took me by my hand and ran me through the darkest pits of hell. And I yelled, ‘Oh, my black king! I will still follow you, no matter how much you torture me!’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you are a fool of limited wisdom and no self-respect.’ And I then corrected him, saying, ‘No, I am love eternal, giving you life, so who are you to take mine away, just because I love you so?’ And he said, ‘You should have known then, that I would deceive you because I am a warrior, who is not to be seduced.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but even black warriors need a place to rest and to feel secure in the warmth that only I can give you.’ ‘I need no rest,’ he said, ‘and I can fight on until I am no more.’ And then I said, ‘And with my tears, I can bring you back again.’ And then he fell to his knees and cried, ‘Then I have been the arrogant fool, while you have been the wise one all along.’ And I said back to him, ‘Stand up, my king of black skin, black as your thoughts before I gave them life. For you shall discard me again with your blind arrogance. And I shall chase you again to the edge of our universe, bringing you to your knees, reminding you that through me you became alive, with my eternal love. So love me as you would love your mother, who is me, before I separated myself to make more black kings, stretching to the furthest corners of my earth.’ And then he nestled up beside me like my son, and I loved him, like my husband.”
Tracy sat with her eyes closed, letting the moon feed her.
Raheema exclaimed, “That was so decent! When did you write that?” she asked, as soon as Tracy had opened her eyes again.
“I wrote it while sitting out here in the dark one night.”
“Girl, you’re gonna be rich and famous one day, if you keep writing stuff like that.”
Tracy smiled and revealed her source. “That’s from reading that Egyptian stuff, girl. Men have been forcing the world to follow their ways of aggression for a long time. So now we have to remind them that we gave them life. But first we have to know that we are the substance of dark that the Bible talks about. And the world was begun like a baby in our wombs.”
Raheema simply stared at her for a moment. “Dag, Tracy! You’re getting deeper than Kiwana. I can’t even understand you anymore.”
Tracy smiled and said, “Yeah, but I still love Victor though. I just can’t help it.”
It was a week away from Tracy’s seventeenth birthday, on a Saturday.
“Dave, I think that you and Tracy need to just go away somewhere and be together for her birthday. I won’t mind, because you haven’t had a real father-daughter chat with Tracy in a while, and she’s been learning a lot lately,” Patti said to her husband as she climbed into bed.
Dave nodded. He was in bed already. “Sounds good to me. We can go out to eat at whatever restaurant she wants to go to.”
“Yeah. My baby been studying about Africa,” Patti alluded.
“Oh, really? How much does she know?”
Patti smiled. “I’ll let you decide for yourself.”
“Oh yeah. Well, hell, I’m looking forward to this.”
“So you’re gonna spend the entire day with her?”
Dave frowned. Here she goes nagging again, he thought. “Patti, I said that I would. Okay? Yes, I will.”
Patti smiled and cuddled up with him, glad to have him back.
Dave grinned himself, thinking, Women. You can’t live with them, and here I am anyway.
When Saturday morning came around, Jason was the first to shout, “Happy birthday, Tra-cy!” He hit her on her arm, try
ing to count to seventeen. His little punches were hard, but Tracy was too pleased to complain.
Patti didn’t bother to buy her daughter any clothes for her seventeenth. She gave Tracy fifteen hundred dollars toward her college tuition next fall instead. It was part of the money she had been saving up to move out if Dave had refused to come back. Patti knew that her first baby was going to college. Tracy was still trying to decide if she wanted to go to Howard University, where all of the handsome men were, or to Spelman, an all-girls school, where she could study without distractions. Lisa told her that Morehouse, an all-boys school, was right around the corner, “in case you get horny one night,” she joked. Tracy was not anticipating any of that. She wanted to learn more about being a black woman first.
“So your mother told me that you been studying up on Africa.” Dave sat with his daughter at dinner later that birthday night, at Friday’s restaurant on Philadelphia’s City Line Avenue. They had been all over the city, and Tracy was pleased to have his company at a dinner for two.
“Yeah, a little bit,” she answered modestly.
Dave started munching down the salad appetizer as if he was hungry. He wore an off-white sports jacket and a rayon shirt with navy blue pants and black leather shoes, looking jazzy. He smelled good, too. Tracy was damn proud that he was her father, but not by the way he was eating his salad.
“Dag, dad. That food ain’t goin’ nowhere,” she hinted with a smile.
Dave looked up from his plate, watching the twinkling honey-colored eyes she had inherited from him. Tracy grinned, wearing a purple skirt and blouse outfit she had bought with the money she earned from working at Jeans & Shirts.
Dave said, “You know, you’re starting to look like my mother a little bit with your hair like that.”
What a coincidence, Tracy thought. But she didn’t want to talk about Africa, fertility and heritage with him. Tracy wanted to ask her father straight up about men.
“Dad? Why do y’all act the way y’all do?” she asked him bluntly.
Dave was too cool to be startled by it. “Because most of us don’t know any better. My mother spoiled the hell out of me,” he responded, wiping the French salad dressing from his lips. “Hell, I thought I was women’s gift to the world. But see now, some other cats get hurt by a woman and then start actin’ real shady with them. But I never had to worry about that.”
Tracy was surprised that her father was so willing to be open-minded with her instead of saying, “God did it.” He still looked twenty-something, although he was forty.
“So are you saying it’s my grandmother’s fault?” she asked.
“Well, I can’t put all of the blame on her. Of course not. I had my little quirks and things.”
“And what really happened between you and mom?”
“Now see, your mother had her problems, too. That’s why we need some type of support mechanisms with these families. And since you’re studying Africa, I guess you know that the African family was extended. And if the black man could afford it, he took on several wives.”
Tracy was surprised her father was talking so much. She was afraid to eat. “So you needed more wives?” she asked him, attempting to be objective about it. Like most American women, Tracy felt polygamous marriages were totally unacceptable.
“Well, I guess it ain’t no secret that a lot of women were attracted to me. And I used to go to work, looking and smelling all good when I first started working at the hospital that I worked at. And them women used to say, ‘Excuse me, but are you married?’ And then when I said I was, they start making up shit. ‘Oh, ’cause I got a girlfriend that you would make a perfect match with. But oh well.’ And I’m thinkin’, ‘Who the hell they think they foolin’?’ And then some women were straight up bold about it, telling me to call them if I ever had any problems I might need worked out.”
Tracy laughed at his candor, imagining older women falling all over him, like the girls did with Victor. “I liked this guy that reminds me of you, dad.”
“So what’s up with him? Is he your boyfriend?” Dave asked, trying to sound young and hip.
Tracy smiled. “You a trip, dad.”
“Yeah, but you still ain’t gave me an answer yet,” he pressed her.
“Well, he’s like you, hard to keep.”
Dave didn’t want to address that statement. It sounded convicting. He moved right along. “So is this cat in college, or what?” he asked, dodging Tracy’s intentions. She wanted him to explain his own butterfly ways, so maybe she could understand him and Victor.
“No,” she said annoyingly, ready to talk about him.
Dave was fast at being evasive. “He’s not in school, hunh? So is he heading for jail or already in there?” he joked.
Tracy was shocked. She didn’t want her father to know that he was actually right. She wasn’t sure how he would react if she told him the truth, that she was in love with a drug dealer who took her virginity when she was only thirteen.
“What, are you thinking that just because a guy’s not in college that he gotta be into something no good?” she retorted defensively.
Dave smiled, confused. “I’m just jokin’ with you, girl. I want the best man for you. I want a man who can at least give you what I gave you and your mother.”
“But will he leave me and run away?”
There was a sharp silence across the table. Tracy had struck her father’s serious bone. Dave looked into his daughter’s face with a seriousness that she had never witnessed from him before. “The black man in America needs a system where he has to stand up and correct himself. Now that ain’t gon’ happen on its own; sometimes you gotta go through hell before you realize it. But there’s a lot of good brothers out there who got things workin’ the right way.
“Now of course, I’m far from perfect, but I did take care of business while I was away. I had to do a lot of soul searchin’, and I didn’t have no damn support.
“My father died when I was eight. My mother was an only child, and I was an only child. So where was my support?
“Your mother was wearing me out before I think I was ready to be married. I mean, your mother loved this marriage thing, but I felt trapped, like life itself was kicking my ass. And the whole relationship with your aunts got on my fuckin’ nerves.
“Now I have to admit that I got greedy and I stayed away longer than what I had planned to, and I’m sorry for that, baby. That was real selfish of me, but I just needed some space and some time to think alone.”
Tracy smiled, loving her father more, because he was admitting that he was human, subject to mistakes and vulnerable.
“We needed to have this talk a long time ago, dad,” she told him.
Dave looked into her glassy hazels and realized that she had matured a great deal. “I love you, your mother and your brother to death, but it was hard as hell to do things all on my own. I had too much weight on my shoulders. Something had to give. So whatever you do, you make sure that your man has some type of outside support. ’Cause no matter how strong us black men think we are, there’s gon’ come a time when we need somebody to lean on. And I ain’t have nobody.”
When Tracy got home that night, at almost one o’clock in the morning, she was exhausted. She headed straight in to bed after kissing her father good-night.
There was a letter on her dresser with no name or return address. It had a seven-digit I.D. number in the upper-lefthand corner.
“Oh my God!” Tracy yelped excitedly, wondering who it was. The intrigue was enough to make her want to read it out under the moonlight.
She sprinted outside to her patio energetically, and breathed in deep as she opened it.
Dear Tracy,
I know I’m surprising you by writing you this, but I think we understand each other. Here I am twenty years old and sitting in a cell now for three years and shit, and I don’t know what will become of me. But I do know that you have eyes to see what I feel for you. Out of all the girls that I had, Tracy, an
d I stopped counting after 100, you were the only one that I kept up on. I studied you. And from my conclusions, I know that you’re the girl that I would like to marry. Now I want you to go to college and all, but when you do go, make sure you study the right information. The white man has set us up for all this shit we been through. And all I was doing was running around dicking every girl that I could get, beating up niggas, robbing and stealing and I even shot at some people. I realized that I was trying to outdo my brother. He always overshadowed me with that basketball shit. And I didn’t know who I was, and what my mission was in life. But you know white people have a lot of pitfalls set up that distract us from searching for the truth. They be having us playing them “Supernigga” roles. But yo, it’s some brothers in here that have been putting me down with the Nation of Islam and Minister Louis Farrakhan. And I’ve been getting educated. We need to be able to tell the truth as it is and we can’t allow our parents or anybody else to stop us. So the brothers have told me that I must discipline myself by doing the right thing and choosing a wife for stability. Shit, the guards are closing shit down. I don’t have much time to tell you more things that I want to do. But I want you to marry me when I get out and be the mother of my children. Me and you can raise a correct family, Tracy. And you are strong enough to understand me. All I want is three children and a wife who is supportive. You have that kind of drive that I need from a woman. You have that certain confidence. And I want you if you want me. But you have to wait for me, love me and never let another man come between us. I’ll be waiting for you.
P.S. I hope this letter gets to you in time for your birthday September 6. I remembered even though you probably think I didn’t know. And oh yeah, send me a pretty picture of you. A big naked one.
RIGHTEOUS LOVE
Victor Hinson “the slave”
Qadeer Muhammad “the man”
# 2158796
There was a return prison address under his name.
Tracy giggled and laughed, reading it over and over, touched to tears, and still not believing it. Her desire had been fulfilled, and Victor was proposing to her in a letter that she would keep forever.