My legs tingled, as they do now, whenever Mama took my hand and walked me across hot asphalt on our way to the store. I remember her scolding Ariyeh and me not to “show out” in public whenever we acted up in the market. Other black moms were also strict, tsk-ing at Chicano and white kids who “ran wild.” This, too, was a pleasurable terror: the core of anger in our usually quiet mothers. Later, in Dallas, Mama remained unshakably strict, a holdover of our “down low” days before she remade us both.
When I went to work for the mayor, I was surprised to learn that remaking wasn’t just a black thing — it was as All-American as baseball and flag waving, two activities the mayor wore out during his reelection campaign, my first year on his staff. First pitches. Hitches on star-spangled parade floats. Mama loved these PR displays and appreciated my small part in them. But behind the scenes, the patriotic fanfare gave way to cynical maneuvering, just as smoothly as an alley slopes into a street.
Occasionally the mayor visited the city’s “oldest neighborhoods,” which offered the “most affordable housing.” Everyone on staff understood that when he mentioned old neighborhoods, he meant the black parts of town; “affordable housing” meant project homes. In courting the black vote, he remade himself into a civil rights champion (despite his abysmal record there). His hypocrisy disturbed many of his supporters, but he’d finally come ‘round to broadening his constituency, and we figured that was a good thing — even if he was spurred by polls that showed him trailing his opponent among minority voters.
I was stunned one morning when one of his aides ordered me to join the motorcade. My first limo! “Why me?” I asked. “The mayor thinks you might be useful at one or two stops he’s scheduled to make.” “My specialty is city planning,” I protested. “I don’t know the first thing about campaigning.” “Well, here’s your chance to learn.”
I wasn’t useful at all. For hours, I stood with other staffers as the mayor ate barbecued chicken and watermelon for carefully planned photo ops in an especially picturesque “old neighborhood.” He coddled several prize babies. Later, an inner-circle flunky confessed to me the mayor wanted me there after someone had pointed out to him I’d checked “African American” on my job application. “Hell, she doesn’t look like one,” he reportedly said. “But if she knows the lingo, maybe she can bail me out if I step into a load of crap.”
So the paper trail had caught up with me. The rest of the campaign, I had a seat in a limo, three cars behind the mayor, whenever he made a run into “old” Dallas. I never did a thing — what he thought I could do, I don’t know. He was adroit, deft, and charming, a natural vote-hound. Only once did he speak to me. One afternoon, in a ribs joint on the banks of the Trinity River, he wiped barbecue sauce from his hands so he could dandle a few squealing babies, then leaned close and whispered, “That old cook in the corner, he’s seventy-five years old, you believe that? That’s what he told me.” He nodded at a tall, stooped man smoking a hand-rolled cigarette just inside the kitchen. “He don’t look a day over fifty. I swear, blacks wear their age better than white folks do. Me, I look a full ten years older’n I am — no no, don’t flatter me, darling, I know it’s true.” He pulled a squirming girl to his chest. “Hell, this hustling life grinding me down.”
I thought of the old adage Black don’t crack. I’d heard it in high school — football jocks sizing up a buddy’s sexy mom — and wondered if I’d inherited a smooth, lingering youth despite my skin color. I also thought of Cletus Hayes, slumped at the end of a rope. He’d be young forever. An eternal “Negro problem.”
In cuteness and charm, the babies the mayor kissed were all award winners, but you couldn’t say their folks were pedigreed. As with the ribs cook, their youthful faces were offset by harsh surroundings, faded clothes, callused hands. Aimlessness. Hopelessness. The mayor wanted their votes, but it was clear he didn’t have any solutions to “baffling Negro problems”—chronic poverty, drug use in some of the neighborhoods, the way the black middle class had abandoned its brothers and sisters — and he didn’t plan to look for answers. Often, after a day in the projects, he’d attend gala fundraisers and promise his white donors he’d pursue a “Broken Windows” policy in the city’s poorest areas, cracking down on vandalism and petty mischief to deter larger crimes.
His cynicism and the smugness of his staff, who regarded the public as lazy kids to be “educated,” numbed me. The mayor’s girl, I wasn’t. Every day I thought of walking off my job. But I also liked belonging to a team, even a corrupt team; I’d been a loner so long. Besides, the campaign season was short. My real job was helping city planners: honest, absorbing work.
One day, a week before the election, the mayor led us to a wasteland in south Dallas, a shambles of crack houses, meth labs, prostitution fronts. He proposed a sixteen million dollar renovation plan, bringing “new energy and opportunity to this traditionally blighted area.” He announced support of a development firm that planned to build a huge apartment complex here. Several staffers smirked, assuming this was baloney, easy to ditch once the election was over (the polls had now tipped decisively in the mayor’s favor). What they didn’t know, and I did, was that this area bordered a soon-to-be-completed freeway, so the land value was bound to increase. I’d examined the documents in the city planning office. Even if the developers simply maintained low-income housing while waiting for the value to peak, the federal government would guarantee them $400,000 a month in subsidies, plus tax credits of over $1.5 million a year. And the mayor sat on the firm’s board. In this light, some baffling Negro problems didn’t seem so baffling, after all.
I was happy when the votes were counted, the black babies left alone — when my presence was no longer “useful,” and I could resume dreaming of better cities.
The flashlight wavers again, a weak battery. I shut it off and stand at the alley’s edge. Frogs chirp in humid fields nearby. I remember Mama telling Ariyeh and me good-night as frog chrrs drifted through open windows, then grew louder, softer, louder, a lulling night cycle. As she stood in our bedroom doorway, did Mama think of me as a “prize”? Mostly, I remember her correcting me as I grew older: “Get that mush out of your mouth. Speak clearly.” Or: “Don’t slouch like some grumbly ghetto kid. You’re better than that.”
Speak clearly. Lord. Another alley memory nudges me now. When I was eight or nine, and we’d returned to Houston for a visit, Mama sometimes walked me across here to a falling-down house at the edge of a culvert. There, I’d read to an elderly shut-in. I don’t recall her name, just her appallingly large head, her concave temples as though she were a slowly leaking balloon, and her thatch of hair, as fervid as Frederick Douglass’s ‘fro in those famous sepia pictures of him. As I read aloud — articles from Time, Ebony, Jet — Mama sat in a corner of the bedroom (a lemony soap and talcum odor in the doilies, the rug) correcting me when I slipped up, urging me to speak more clearly, enunciate, louder, louder. Who were these sessions really for, the old woman who needed distraction, or me, who apparently needed lessons in English usage? We were back in the old neighborhood, but this wasn’t my old Mama. This was the Dallas matron, the “Northerner,” training me to better myself, to shake off musty smells from dingy old rooms, to learn the rules of language and proper bearing. In the green-gold afternoon light, streaming through dirty windows past water-damaged curtains, Mama’s face was as delicately stern as a piece of hand-painted china, beautiful but precise in a predictably strict way that diminished its loveliness. Even when she smiled she seemed on the verge of terror, as I did, facing the street. What did she fear? That I’d never learn to enunciate clearly? Or was she reliving her own girlhood, gazing at me, the lessons that took, the ones she ignored? What traps was she still trying to flee, through me?