Yagga yo and what you mean? it said on the back of Rog’s memorial shirt. This was something he said often, I was told, but his cousins did not tell me its meaning. OPT, the shirt also read. Rog’s picture was an insult to the living man, too blurry, too static for the smiling, open-armed twenty-three-year-old he’d been. Written on the front of the shirt and finished on the back was the declaration: THE SAME THING THAT MAKE YOU LAUGH MAKE YOU CRY. This was too pat, I thought as I wiped my tears. In that moment, I could not remember ever laughing, could not recall what it felt like to open my mouth and scream my loud, embarrassing laugh with Rog. I looked at my family and friends, all of us crying and looking away from each other, and I could not recall having the ability to laugh at all. Only this loss, this pain. I could not understand why there was always this.
We Are Born, 1977–1984
I was born early at six months, on April Fools’ Day, 1977. My mother was eighteen, my father twenty. They were living with my father’s mother in Oakland, in his childhood room awash with the detritus of his teen years: Bruce Lee posters, nunchaku hung on nails, my father’s illustrations. My mother cannot remember the conversation that signaled my impending arrival, but I imagine my mother waking and telling my father, “I need to go to the hospital,” and my father laughing, thinking it a good April Fools’ joke. And then my mother would have curled over in pain on the bed. “I’m serious.” The look on her face: his doe catching a glancing blow from a car fender.
When I was born, I weighed two pounds and four ounces, and the doctors told my parents I would die. My skin was red, paper thin, and wrinkly, my eyes large and alien. My father took a picture of me, of my entire body, cupped in the palm of his hand. Because I weighed so little, I developed blood tumors, which swelled up and out: they were bulbous, swollen maroon, an abundance of blood barely contained by thin skin. Two burst and leaked. When I was around four years old, they would shrink completely flat and leave mottled scars where they’d sprouted and grown: on my stomach, my wrist, the back of my thigh. I had a growth in my abdomen, so the doctors sliced me open millimeters below my belly button for exploratory surgery before sewing me closed. The incision must have been done across the whole length of my small belly, and I imagine myself open like a frog on the operating table. Over the years, the scar would stretch, dimple, and pull where the stitches had been sewn. When the doctors realized I would survive, they told my parents I would have severe developmental problems. They were surprised that my lungs worked well, that I fought to breathe. She has a strong heart, they said. In another picture, the skin under my eyes wells in red bags, and my mother holds a breathing tube to my face. I look weary. I lived, silent and tenacious, in my incubator, my body riddled with multiple tubes. During the two months I lived at the hospital, my red color leached away. I slowly gained weight on my stomach, my gamy legs, my outstretched arms. My eyes shrank into my head. The medical staff discharged me, yellow, bald, fat, and scarred, on May 26, 1977: my mother’s nineteenth birthday.
We moved out of my grandmother’s house into our own one-bedroom apartment. I sprouted hair on my head, which grew half an inch, black and fine and curly, and stopped. It would not grow again until I turned three. In pictures of me from that time, my mother combed my hair forward in a silken cap in an effort to frame my face, to make me look more like a girl. In a picture from my second birthday, I am dressed in a long-sleeved red cotton peasant-style shirt, thick with maroon embroidery, and black pants. Red was the color my mother chose to dress me in, again and again: no pink or blue or green or purple, but red. Red as the blood tumors. I was not a pink girl. In one photograph, we are high in the hills above Berkeley and Oakland, dirt and yellow grass behind me. The dust in the dry hills makes the air look golden. I look healthy, like a beautiful boy. Most of the tumors, which were just beginning to shrink from their skin stretching red, were hidden by my outfit. My expression is serious as I gaze at the person behind the camera.
My father always told me he felt insulted when the doctors informed them that I would die. The doctor ignored me in the incubator, my head turned to the side, my lungs aflutter through the thin skin of my chest, and faced my parents and said: “Chances are she won’t survive.”
Daddy didn’t say anything. He stood there holding my mother’s hand. She would not cry until she could do so alone. There were a lot of things the doctors said to my mother and father when I was born, about my birth, the likelihood of my death, that they did not understand. Things they would not remember later when I asked them for the story. They were young and poor and Black in Oakland in the late seventies. My father waited until the doctor left, fit his solid hand into the plastic glove sealed into the side of the incubator, and brushed my tiny hand with one finger. He could not put his pointer finger in my palm for me to grab, since his finger was the size of my arm.
“I wanted to tell them you were a fighter,” he told me when I was a teenager. “I wanted to tell them that my baby wasn’t going to die because she was a warrior.”
We come from a line of men and women who have fought hard to live. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, raised seven children on her own in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Over the years, she worked and saved and transformed those two bedrooms into four. She held jobs as a maid, a hairdresser, a seamstress, and finally a factory worker at a pharmaceutical plant. “We need a woman who can work like a man.” My grandmother got that factory job after a man saw her lift and carry a full-grown hog on her shoulders. The men in my family have worked for decades as gardeners, carpenters, factory men, bootleggers, and shop owners, and have built houses from the ground up with their own hands.
My father said he knew even then that I would not disappoint.
I can remember little of those first three years in the Bay Area. My father had been a hellion before my mother and I showed up. He was picked up in raids when the police would target all the members of his gang for suspected drug activity, for scuffles with other gangs over narrow sidewalks, small roads. There were tens of them in holding cells, yelling at the police, shaking their heads, laughing, talking shit to each other: What did you do? Naw, man, what did you do? The artist in him fell in love with Jimi Hendrix; he put chemicals in his hair so that he could wear an afro, an afro that fell instead of stood. He was offered a scholarship at an art school when he finished high school, but he chose not to attend; he had his mother and his seven siblings to think of, so he worked. He worked at gas stations in ailing neighborhoods where prostitutes walked up and down the street. He treated them well, let them use the bathroom without buying anything from the store, joked with them while they were waiting for customers. On weekends, he went to drag races in Fresno with his friends and tripped on acid. But when my mother came to California, he slowed down some. He stayed home more, but his new domestic life with my mother didn’t prevent him from straying. Remaining faithful to my mother required a kind of moral discipline he’d never developed, since it was constantly undermined by his natural gifts: his charm, his sense of humor, his uncommon beauty. My mother fought with him about it, but this only made him cleverer and sneakier about his cheating, even as he said all the things my mother wanted to hear. Neither of us had daddies, so of course we going to be a family. Of course I’m going to be here. My mother was taking community college classes and working at my preschool during those years. She wanted to major in early education, to be a preschool teacher.