Everything became clear to me when I woke up that Saturday morning, August 22. The smells of cakes and pies being baked, greens being cooked, and chickens being fried settled like a cloud over the whole neighborhood. The Petworth Parents’ Club, headed by Mrs. Florence Billops, was holding one of its four-times-per-year dinners and bake sales. The money raised from these events paid for annual community trips for parents and kids to places like the New York World’s Fair, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and stuff like that.
So every mother in the neighborhood had started early in the morning, making her specialty. This meant me and my friends would have to hang around all day in case our mothers needed something from one of the corner stores, which they always did. Then we’d get the money and take off running through the alleys, pop over fences, shout at the friends who got to play kickball, and run in sweating to Mr. G’s or Chuck & Danny’s midnight delicatessen. Mr. G was this old — I don’t know, eighty years old maybe — heavyset bald-headed Jewish man, his fingers thick and curled up. He spoke with an accent I never figured out, maybe German, and all he ever did was grunt when we slid the money on the counter or if we told him, “My mother said she’ll pay you on Monday…” Then we’d take off again, racing three blocks to see who’d make it back to the front porch first.
Mom made peas and rice, cornbread, potato salad, greens, curry chicken, and fried chicken. We’d start taking the food to Mrs. Billops’s by 10 o’clock, and people would be coming into the neighborhood and double-parking all afternoon. In the evening, all my father’s buddies would start arriving for their weekly dominos games. Every week it was at a different house — this week it was ours. My father and his friends also worked “serving parties” in rich white households or embassies; you could tell when they had one of those jobs cause when they came over, everyone’s arms would be filled with trays of hors d’oeuvres and bottles of scotch, rum, ginger ale, beer, and all kinds of expensive-looking stuff.
Mr. Christian, Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Palmer, Daddy Shaw, and my father would go to the basement to play “cards,” as they called dominos. Upstairs in the kitchen, my sisters, cousins Ivy and June, my mom, and whoever else dropped by would heat up hot combs and turn the radio to WOL while they pressed each others’ hair. The air in the house filled with the smells of “My Knight” hair pomade and curry chicken, and with laughter from the kitchen, the booming voices from downstairs, and Martha Reeves singing “Jimmy Mack.”
I was in the living room watching Saturday night movies on TV when the screen door to the house swung open. It was Doris, who lived in the front room upstairs with her common-law husband Tommy, and you could tell she was drunk. Everybody in the kitchen went quiet.
“Hello, Miz Wizzdom, I’ma, I’ma… You fixin’ Valda’s hair? You shoulda waited for me, I’ll do it. Hey, suga…” She was getting ready to squeeze my little sister’s cheeks.
“Doris, gwan upstairs and sleep,” my mother coaxed.
“Ah, Miz Wizzdom, y’all think I’m drunk, but I ain’t been drinkin’. Where Tommy? He come back in yet?” She was slurring and thoughts were running from her mind to her mouth, getting her in deeper shit with the women in the kitchen. I was peeking out from my chair in the living room.
“Come here, Bobby, take this upstairs for me, will ya, hon?”
“No.” Mom didn’t allow any of the tenants to tell us what to do. “No, you take your things upstairs yourself. Bobby, gwan back to your TV.”
“Shit. Y’all bein’ like that, thinkin’ y’all something special. Y’all ain’t nuthin’ but some black nigger Jamaicans.”
Mom’s hand was on cousin Ivy’s arm. She was ready to jump.
“That’s enough, Doris.” The name was spoken in a way that said this was the last bit of politeness coming. “You don’t cuss me in front of me children. If you want food, there’s food—”
“I ain’t hungry.” She was trailing a shirt or something on the floor behind her.
Doris was a big-boned woman, maybe in her thirties, from South Carolina. Black-skinned and thick. She wore red lipstick and nail polish and loved to party. She already had false teeth and sometimes pushed the bridge out when she talked. She was always smoothing her beehive — “I got good hair,” she would say.
But tonight you could feel everybody was tight-jawed. From downstairs came the rumble of men’s voices; they couldn’t hear what was going on since the door to the basement was closed. Mom had always felt sorry for Doris and tried to help pull her life together. Mom had to put her out once already, then Doris came back and promised that she on a good track. But this was the second weekend she had come in drunk. By now, everybody knew that when she had been drinking, it meant she and Tommy were gonna fight.
“Tommy, you up there…?!” she shouted to nobody.
I walked around to the dining room and saw my mother staring at Doris with that red-hot comb in her hands. “Don’t you dare talk fresh in my house!”
That was it. Even drunk Doris knew better than to push this woman.
“You tek yourself upsteers and don’t bother comin’ back down ’ere” — each word slow and quiet, with no fear. Doris went upstairs and we heard her door slam.
“She gon’ have to go, Miss Inie, cause she nuttin’ but trouble. You can’t keep feelin’ sorry for sumtin’ like dat…”
Doris stayed up in her room, but the mood in the kitchen changed. Everybody spoke in hushes. “Lawd have mercy,” was my mother. “I know, I know,” was cousin Ivy. “You should tell Daddy…” from my sisters. “No…” from both older women.
This went on for half an hour until Ivy took June home. The game was breaking up downstairs, and we were pulling out the bed to get ready for sleep, then Slam!
Booming footsteps rolled across the ceiling above us, furniture was pushed, a body shoved… voices muffled, a man and a woman… My sisters and I looked wide-eyed at the ceiling and the swinging chandelier. The glass pieces were tinkling, catching some light from the streetlamps outside and making strange dancing patterns across the ceiling and walls.
BOOM Two bodies fell together, like Bruno San Martino and Bobo Brazil, and it was as if we were watching from underwater.
Then the door upstairs opened and sound came rushing out.
“I’MA KILL YOU, MUTHAFUCKA!!” Doris banshee-screamed.
My father was up from the basement and in the hallway shouting. Tommy pushed past him, muttering, “She crazy, Mr. Wisdom, crazy and drunk. I’m through—”