madonna
Looking in the mirror, I saw what I always saw, plain old me. Short hair sticking out all over my head like it ain’t never seen a comb, lips too big, eyes puffy from being up all night. There ain’t nothing pretty about me. I’m sixteen, and I got a baby, but that doesn’t mean I’m some kind of freak. And I’ve never been a whore. Even though I’m up here all night wondering how I’m going to get something for Amiri. He’s old enough to be eating something more than cereal, but that’s all I had the money for. Money don’t come knocking on your door if you poor and black.
Amiri, he’s looking at me and don’t even know he needs some different food. He’s only nine months and is trusting in me and I ain’t got nothing for him. I ain’t got a job. I ain’t got a daddy for him. And it don’t mean nothing to him if I’m decent inside. Hungry go up against decent and it come away still hungry. So I’m sitting in the window all night looking down at 145th Street, watching the cars go by over the wet streets and the neon lights in the windows down on the avenue. Amiri didn’t sleep much, either. Even when I was rocking him in my lap.
When it got light and the bodega was open I put Amiri back in his bed and got the seventy-three cents I had for more cereal. It wasn’t enough for milk, I knew. I was thinking I could walk down to 125th Street to that new coffee place. They were new and still kept the milk for the coffee on the counter, and I could get some of those little containers. I knew in a few weeks they would see people taking them and then move them behind the counter with the sugar. But it was a long way to walk and to leave Amiri.
I got downstairs just as the sun was coming up over the buildings. That’s when I seen Billy Carroll, John’s son. Billy’s about eighteen, maybe even nineteen, and classy like his father. He always treated me like people. I appreciate it when people treat me right even though I ain’t got nothing going on.
“Letha, what are you doing up so early?” Billy asked. He was sitting on the stoop with his sketch pad and some square crayons or something he was drawing with. I looked at his pad and he was drawing the buildings. Billy could draw.
“Just going to the store,” I said. “What you doing up so early?”
“Wanted to get the sunrise coming over the buildings,” he said. “It’s close to the same effect as sunrise over the mountains, except the buildings have more red in them. When the sun hits them just right, they just about glow.”
I looked at his picture and then at the buildings. He got it down right. I told him I liked his picture.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling.
The rain had stopped but there were still puddles in the streets and water ran along the edge of the sidewalk toward the sewers. The neighborhood was waking up. People were coming out of their buildings going to work. A tall old man was bringing garbage cans out the side door of the supermarket. He turned them on an angle and kind of rolled them to the curb. The old black and white cat that hung around the secondhand shop was stretching itself in front of the rusty iron gates.
I went into the bodega and found the oatmeal. It was sixty-nine cents for a small box. Down near Broadway, under the el, you could get the same box for fifty-seven cents. It made me mad to have to pay twelve cents more for the cereal, but I was too tired to even think on it.
When I got back across the street Billy was still sitting on the stoop.
“Hey, Letha,” he said as I started up the stairs.
“Hey, Billy,” I said back.
“Letha, why don’t you let me paint you?” he said. “Are you busy this morning?”
“Paint me?” I looked at him.
“I’ll give you forty dollars,” he said. “I’ll come up to your place and do some sketches of you and take a few photos. It’ll only take a couple of hours at the most. And I really need a model. These buildings get to look all the same after a while. What do you say?”
I turned and looked down at him and he was looking dead in my face. A bunch of things went through my head at the same time. The first thing was that I felt bad Billy saying that to me. Talking about coming up to my place and paying me some forty dollars. For what? I wasn’t some pretty woman to be paying to have her picture painted. Was he thinking he was going to come up to my house and pay me forty dollars and do whatever he wanted to do?
It made me mad to think he was hustling me and I tried to come up with something to say back to him, something that was sharp and could cut him on down. I didn’t think of nothing right away and I knew I wasn’t going to think of anything. I’m not quick like that. Then I thought about having an extra forty dollars.
Forty dollars is not all the money in the world, but if your rent was already paid you could do all right on forty dollars. What you could do was buy some evaporated milk in cans and put them under the bed. Then no matter what happened Amiri would have milk. You could buy canned tuna and maybe a twenty-pound bag of rice. “When you coming up?” I asked Billy.
“About a half hour?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
I made the cereal for Amiri. I forgot I didn’t have any sugar. He didn’t want the cereal but he was hungry and he ate it. He looked at me and I knew if I smiled he would smile back. That’s what Amiri does. As long as I’m okay he’s okay. Sometimes, when I’m alone at night and I start to cry, he’ll cry, too. He knows when I’m sad, but I don’t know where he got that from. It’s like he was just born knowing stuff about me.
“Amiri, I don’t know what Billy Carroll got in mind,” I said. “I just hope it ain’t no mess. He looks like he’s okay, but you can’t tell with men. I know you won’t be mean to women when you grow up.”
I said it like I was annoyed. I was, too, because I didn’t think I would do just anything for money. But it was getting to be too hard. After Amiri was born I had some spotting and the doctor said I shouldn’t be doing work that was “too strenuous.”
“It sometimes happens with the first child,” he said.
He was looking at his papers. I guessed he meant that Amiri was the first child and that I probably would have a lot more. People jump to whatever conclusions they want when you’re pregnant and alone.
I looked in the mirror. I was wearing my beige blouse and a green sweater. I thought about changing, but I didn’t have anything nice to change into. My blue top wasn’t no improvement.
I wondered what Billy Carroll was going to say to me. What would he want for his forty dollars? Would he ask me to undress? Some of the guys in my school last year had gone around the neighborhood taking pictures of winos and junkies laid out in the street. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do. Make a picture of me like I was something pitiful.
After Amiri ate I put him back on his bed and gave him the purple bunny my mother had brought over for him. I had hoped she was going to buy him some clothes, or even maybe some disposable diapers, but all she had brought was some plastic toys and that stuffed bunny. I couldn’t be around her for two minutes without hearing how disappointed she was in me. Shoot, I was disappointed in myself just as much. It wasn’t that I was so wonderful or anything before, but at least I went to school and didn’t have any babies. Then Amiri came along.
Amiri’s father was like thirty or something and I didn’t even like him. He took me to a movie and then came home with me to my mother’s house. She wasn’t there and he started talking about how I “owed him some loving.” I knew I didn’t owe that fool nothing but I did want to know what it was like to have sex. I found out. It was a sweaty man grunting and hurting me and making me feel sorry for going too far. Then it was a sweaty man saying how he had to leave to get to some business downtown. Then it was me sitting by myself, sorry for what I had done and hoping that I hadn’t caught nothing or got pregnant. Then it was Amiri. Whatever I had owed his father there was no loving attached to it.
Billy knocked soft on the door. Almost like he was sneaking up on something. I didn’t want to answer it, but I knew I would. He came in and I could see his eyes look around real quick.
“Sit anywhere you want,” I said. There was one chair at the table and one near the bed.
“Actually, the light coming in your window is a northern light,” he said. “I don’t know if you understand about light, but the light that comes in from the north seems to reveal more things.”
“Oh.” I could see myself in the mirror over the dresser, but I wouldn’t look.
“So, do you want to sit in front of the window?” he asked. He turned the chair near the bed so it faced the window, about four feet back from the sill and the same distance from the bed.
I got up and sat on the chair.
Billy sat on the edge of my bed, put his hands in his lap, and just looked at me. I had my clothes on, but I felt naked. He asked me something and I didn’t catch it, and then he asked me again.
“Do you mind if I move the bed?” he asked.
I shrugged, and he moved the bed away so he could sit further away from me. Then he put his hands in his lap again and just looked at me.
Then, after a long time, he picked up his drawing pad. I could hear the scratching on the paper. He was drawing me.
I wondered if he was going to draw me and then tell me to take my clothes off. He hadn’t said anything about messing with me yet. He hadn’t said anything about the forty dollars, either. There was no way I was going to feel good. People looking at me like that made me feel bad and he should have known it. Maybe he did but just didn’t care. I tried to roll my eyes over to one side and see myself in the mirror again. All the while he was drawing.
The room was filled with the sound of Billy’s drawing and the even sound of Amiri’s breathing. I knew my son was asleep. There was a clock on the refrigerator, but I couldn’t see it or hear its ticking. My stomach began to cramp and I felt bad.
All Billy was doing was drawing me, like he said he would. And where I was feeling bad before about needing the money, almost bad enough to let him mess with me if he had wanted, now I felt ugly and he was writing down just how ugly I was.
“How about some photographs?” Billy asked.
He took a lot of photographs. He asked me to hold Amiri and he took some with both of us in the picture.
“What do you think of your son?” he asked me.
“I love him to death,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Hold him like you love him,” he said.
He took more photographs and I asked him to take one of just Amiri so I could send it to his grandmother. He said okay, but I could see he was more interested in taking pictures of me holding Amiri.
Billy gave me the money like he said he would. He said he was going to move the bed back but I said, “Let me feel how it’s like over there for a while.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling. “I’ll try to finish the picture sometime this week, maybe by the first part of next week.”
He wrapped all of his stuff up, making sure that I didn’t see any of his drawings.
When Billy left, with his stuff under his arm, I didn’t even know how to feel. I just sat there in the room for a while, trying to think of what had happened. I looked in the mirror again, and saw that I still looked a mess.
I went to the window and started thinking about the forty dollars, what I would buy with it. I wanted to run right down to the store, but I didn’t want Billy to see me just then. When I looked at the clock on the dresser it was past noon. Amiri wasn’t crying but he would be, soon. The boy knows how to eat.
In the supermarket I thought about Billy’s picture and wished I had at least combed my hair. Then I remembered the blue blouse I had worn to my mother’s house two Sundays ago, the one with the lace around the top. I should have worn that.
The cart was half filled when I saw this dude standing across from me. He was looking at me and I tried to ignore him, but then he followed me down the next aisle and stopped when I stopped.
“What you looking at me for?” I asked him. Amiri was on my hip.
“I hope you got the money to pay for that stuff,” he said.
“Get out my face, creep!” That’s what I said.
He was looking at me like I was a thief or something. He got a mean look on his face and crossed his arms. I was hungry and Amiri was starting to whimper and he would be crying soon. I put a pack of diapers in the cart and pushed it to the checkout. What I bought came to twenty-one dollars and three cents. I paid for it, gave the jerk who followed me a look, and started home.
Billy was on my mind all week, mostly because of the money he gave me. Amiri and I had enough to carry us through until there was more money in my welfare account. I don’t daydream about men usually, but I dreamed about him. I’m nothing special and men usually just want to get in between my legs and get on their way. So when he didn’t hit on me it made me feel good. To Billy I was something else he could draw, like the sun coming up or a car or a tree. I liked that, being ordinary. I also wondered what I would say if he did hit on me. Probably yes, but I didn’t think about that too much.
Almost two weeks had passed when Billy knocked on my door one morning. I saw he had the case he carried his stuff in. I was looking a little tacky, but the place wasn’t too tore up so I asked him if he wanted to come in.
“I’ve got the portrait,” he said. “I finished it from the photographs. Can I show it to you?”
“Sure.” I could see he was happy with it. He unzipped his case near the window and I sat down on the chair. Amiri pulled himself up on the side of his crib and made some noises like he was trying to talk.
“Well, there it is,” Billy said, propping the picture on the dresser. “What do you think?”
The boy could really paint. I liked the picture a lot, especially the way he painted Amiri. Because it looked just like him. It was mostly blue mixed with gray except for the girl and Amiri, who were brown but a nice brown that went with the blue in a way and stood out from it, too.
“It’s real good,” I said, looking closer. “That is just like Amiri. You painted him but it could be a photograph.”
“And your portrait?” he asked.
“That’s not me,” I said. “It kind of favors my face shape, but that’s not me.”
“It’s you,” he said. “It’s the best portrait I’ve ever done. It’s exactly how I see you. I call it Madonna and Child.”
I looked again. The girl in the picture did favor me, but she was really pretty. There was something nice about her, like she was good people. And I really liked the way she was holding Amiri. I remembered how Billy had told me to hold Amiri like I loved him. And the way the girl was holding him was just like that.
“I’m going to enter this picture in a group show in Brooklyn that’s opening next week,” Billy said. “But I’d like you to have it for a while. Let me know what you think about it after a few days.”
“Okay,” I said.
Billy asked me to be careful with the picture and I said I would. For some reason I couldn’t wait until he left. When he did I looked at the picture really close. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. It was funny because all my parts were there, my eyes, my mouth, my right ear, and my nose. But there was something else in the picture, almost like Billy had seen something that I couldn’t see. I tried to fix my face like the me he had painted, but it was still different.
Amiri wanted to touch the picture but I didn’t let him. He looked at it and made his baby noises and I knew he recognized us. I held him in front of it the way Billy had painted us. Every time I did I had to kiss Amiri, that’s the way the picture made me feel.
By the end of the second day I couldn’t take my eyes off Billy’s painting. I thought I was going to look all the paint off of it. So when I saw Billy on the street and he said he was coming to pick it up I wasn’t so happy.
“I’ll take you out to the show when it opens,” he said.
I didn’t go. For some reason I was just happy to have seen the picture in my room. Billy said somebody was thinking about buying it but he wasn’t sure about selling it because h
e liked it so much. I didn’t really care if he sold it because, in a way, I was always going to have that picture somewhere in my head. That and the memory of how Billy looked that day, how serious he was working on his drawings. Sometimes I try to imagine what he was thinking when he was in my little apartment and it makes me feel good. It does.
It’s been months since I had Billy’s painting in my house. Sometimes, when things get bad for me and Amiri, I pick him up and stand in front of the mirror and I can see just how we looked in Billy’s picture. When I look in the mirror I can see just how much I love Amiri, the same way that Billy saw it. Knowing that Billy, that someone can look inside of you and see something good is worth more than the forty dollars he gave me. It is.
the
real
deal
John Carroll was not in a good mood. He hated to see young black couples having difficulties with the mysteries of love. In his innermost heart he truly believed in the power of love to save the community and uplift the race. The fact that he had been part of bringing trouble to Mavis and Calvin bothered him, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it because Calvin was, after all, a fully grown man. A young man, perhaps, but a man.
It had all started the day that Sister Inez Tubbs was sitting at the table near the window complaining that his curried crab cakes didn’t have enough curry in them. The arthritis in his right ankle was bothering him something terrible, and then Mavis Brown had come busting into his shop with Calvin Williams asking about where he could get a part-time job to buy a gun.
“Boy, what you need a gun for?” John had asked, putting down the rag he was using to wipe off his counter.
“He needs a gun because he’s got to deal with Leon,” Mavis said. “Leon has been running his mouth up and down the avenue talking about how I ain’t this and how I ain’t that and how I was trying to be with him and he didn’t want me.”