Doris was running down the steps. “I’ma get you! You ain’t no good, I know you been seein’ that bitch!”
Tommy was out the door.
“Doris—” my father started to say.
“I ain’t talkin’ to you, you on his side. Where he at?!” Doris screamed.
My mother huddled us into a corner. “Unna just stay pon the floor… Elly, come back in, let that fool ’oman go.”
Blam!
“Omigodalmighty!” My mother was on top of us. I was on the bottom, holding my little sister but wanting to look out of the window that we were now under.
Blam! Blam!
I could hear Tommy far off, shouting, “Woman, you crazy, you done shot that man!”
For a tornado of minutes there was more shouting, crying. I was straining to look out the window. My mother was yelling at me to get down, then yanked me away.
“What’d I do?” I demanded. “I didn’t do nuthin’… Doris shot him!!”
“Don’t say nuthin’! Just shut you mouth…” She was crying.
I could see that Miss Lucy, the other American tenant, had made it to the middle of the stairs and was humming and mumbling to herself: “…You let me see, hmmhuhp, those people are trouble, you know…”
My father was out front. “Ya nah come back in my ’ouse.”
My mother: “Elly, don’t let har back in.”
By now, all the neighbors were out and we could hear police sirens coming down Georgia Avenue and around 9th Street. Doris was out front crying, “I’m sorry, I’msosorry, I’msorry… Tell Tommy don’t leave me…”
My mother and older sister moved out to the door.
“Miz Wizdom, don’t let the police take me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
To get my little sister to stop crying, we started jumping up and down on the bed, trying to reach the chandelier. Trying to make it start swinging again.
A little while later, I was falling asleep while the police stood in the hall talking to my mother and father. Miss Lucy was sitting on the steps picking at her feet and minding everybody’s business. My sisters and I were in a heap on the bed. I heard Tommy come in to get some things. “Say goodbye to the kids for me.”
A fresh breeze blew across my face. I opened my eyes to find that the sun was up. My mother came in to wake us at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 23.
“Mom, is Doris in jail?” was the first thing I thought to say. I wanted to know if that room would be empty. If I could finally move up there and have my own room. It was the dead-center of the mid-Atlantic summer. Already the air was wet and heavy. The cool night breeze was all but gone and we would slowly drown the rest of the day in the sweltering summer heat. My older sister went upstairs to the bathroom. My little sister rolled up in her pillow for the last few minutes she could steal. I sat in the window. The street was quiet. I saw Reverend Gilmore come onto his front porch with his Bible under his arm and head to his car with his wife.
“Is everything all right over there, Mr. Wisdom?”
“Every ting is juss fine.”
My father said good morning to someone else on the street. He must have been sitting out there on the porch all through the night. I just sat looking out, hearing the quiet, thinking how I wanted to go on up to Rock Creek Park and get lost in the woods. I glanced over and my mom was standing there silently. She eased my little sister’s head off the pillow and sat her up. Then went into the kitchen to fix breakfast. I could hear her crying.
By 9 o’clock we were in the morning service. My mother, who taught Sunday school, always brought us early. My father only came to church for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. We were sitting in the middle section and the wooden chairs threatened to tip over with the big bodies. The junior choir had everybody on their feet and a fan cooled the sweating bodies. I was in my iridescent blue suit, white shirt, and tie. I just looked around at everyone and the smooth wooden floors and the feet walking by, carrying this one big woman after she got the spirit. The choir master was leaning back, mouth open, and the people were singing and clapping, but I couldn’t hear a sound. I ran the toe of my shoe through a smooth groove in the floor-board. Blam! Blam! the only sound in my head. Everything else around me was a blizzard of empty details. Details that would be packed away inside me without being looked at, without letting them touch me. Blam! My hands were sweating into my little sister’s — the only touch I let myself feel.
Fast forward: My stories don’t really come all crafted into a nice tale. There are a whole bunch of things that come up as I tell this, and these are part of the story now. These little memories like bees in my mind’s eye, threatening, buzzing around my head. Dangling threads that invariably lead to something deeper and darker… the innocence of learning to slow-drag with a girl on the dance floor and how the next day she was attacked and raped by a much older man. But nobody ever really talked about it. My friend was way different after that and nobody ever danced with her again. These are now just memories from the comfort zone of my current life, away from police sirens, getting jumped after school, and having to fight regularly just to get home. Long bus rides across D.C. to Spring Valley, to a world where there were no gangs, knives, anger, violence, roaches, and threats — at least, not in the streets where you had to look at it all the time.
You see, the cats I grew up with didn’t hold on to our stories, we kept pure emotion hidden, cause we were the kids of the city. You had to be a quick study to survive. If you showed any feelings, much less reflection, you got your ass kicked over and over. Those kids who moved up from North Carolina and came into our neighborhood with their accents and their openness were laughed at till they conformed. If your parents cared, they fought to create some conditions so that you could value your life, your experiences — but on the street your story didn’t have any value. Top dog/dirty dog. Only material things were valued on the street… One day I’ma get me a [insert Cadillac, $50 shoes, etc].
When I started going to an exclusive private school, I became convinced my stories didn’t have value. So it was better to appropriate their stories — be like them, at least on the outside — because what could my stories contribute to the lives of these princes.
In college, there was an unspoken message to let go of the past, of my story, to move forward. When I came home for holidays and caught up with Green Jeans, Brock, or Black Joe, they told me stories, all the stories of who got locked up, broke down, shot, or OD’d. These stories were snuffed out and then forgotten, never to be recounted. College brought me pan-Africanism, the Nation of Islam, and other progressive movements meant to shape the black identity, to give us “real” stories. As these movements required new names, clothes, identity, I started feeling a strong pull back toward my own stories, though I still didn’t have the will to tell them.
An anchor dropped in high school kept me connected with the life stories I owned. My track coach, Brooks Johnson, drilled into me the importance of character and pride. His mantra took root in my life and became magnified through the men and women around me: my father and mother, my father’s best friend Mr. Christian, other coaches, and my Episcopalian headmaster Canon Martin. These were fiery and gentle people whose lives seemed guided by their stories. The light and the dark.
I had to find ways to avoid being consumed by the myriad of dark impulses that came into my life. I had to figure how o live before I could recount, before I could truly own my story. It is very long and it continues. The stories I began but couldn’t finish can now be looked at and coaxed back… I can take the gloves off, stop fighting life and instead hold it.