No Place Safe (6 page)

Eventually, I went to sleep but woke up when I felt her get out of the bed to check the window again. This time he was there, and he saw her. In the time it took her to run around the bed to get to the phone, we could hear the crash of glass downstairs. Ma told me to take Bridgette into the closet and hide behind the suitcases she had stored in there. While Bridgette and I hid in the closet, Ma closed the bedroom door and pushed some furniture against it.

Using the two suitcases and a corner of the closet, I made a tiny four-walled room. We sat in the tiny room cross-legged, facing each other, and knees touching, making a ceiling of Ma’s skirts and dresses. Bridgette was still half-asleep, but she was awake enough to be afraid, even if she wasn’t sure of what.

“What happen?”

“Shh, whisper, okay? It’s like a game of hide-and-go-seek,” I told her, hoping it was enough to keep her quiet, trying hard to sound calm and grownup when I really just wanted to cry.

“We hide from Mommy?”

“Yeah, so hush, or she’ll find us.”

“She’s not counting. I don’t hear counting.”

I put a finger to my lips, even though Bridgette couldn’t see it in the dark of the closet, and listened for what was happening outside the door.

I could hear her on the phone, calling her off-duty cop friend who worked in the little gatehouse at the entrance of the complex. Ma was trying to sound like everything was okay while she told her friend to come, to hurry, but I could hear the panic in her voice. That scared me even more.

“Now I hear Mommy, but she still not counting. Who she talking to?”

“I don’t know, but if you stay quiet, you can have my turn for the prize in the cereal box.”

That shut her up finally. I could hear more furniture being pulled across the carpet. Ma was pushing something against the bedroom door, probably the tallboy. I wondered how she was able to move it alone.

Then it was quiet in the room, and I imagined the man coming up the staircase at that very moment, Ma waiting beside the closed and locked bedroom door with the bat in her hands, ready to swing, like on TV. Except this wasn’t TV, it was real, even if it didn’t seem like it. The closet smelled of Chanel and mothballs and worn-in shoe leather. Bridgette smelled like baby, good baby. She was three years old, but Ma still gave her a bath and washed her hair with Johnson’s in the pink bottle. I breathed in all the scents and the mix made me feel a little better, even the mothballs.

It seemed like we were in the closet forever from the time Ma had called the guardhouse, but it was only another minute later when I heard someone banging on the door downstairs. I was grateful that Ma had made good friends with that cop. The next moment, I could hear his voice yelling upstairs for Ma, and not long after that, she was opening the closet door. When I walked into the room, I could see that I’d been right about the tallboy. It had only been pushed away from the door enough to let in her police friend.

Ma hugged Bridgette and me, and called me a smart girl for taking care of my sister.

“You didn’t count. No fair.”

Ma looked at Bridgette, confused, then at me. Then she gave us another hug, which was when I could feel the tears coming but I wiped them away before she could see them. I was no baby like Bridgette, and Bridgette wasn’t crying. Ma’s friend turned the man over to some uniform cops who took him away, but it was a few days before I could get to sleep without being in her bed.

We never learned why the man was stalking her, but soon after that happened, we moved into another complex, and just two years after the Atlanta Police Department had hired its first black female officer, Ma enrolled in the police academy. She said the first thing she wanted to do was learn how to shoot a gun.

School wasn’t so bad after the first few days. Ma gave me money to get some new saddle oxfords, even though she fussed about having to spend more money when she told me the first pair were wrong the day we bought them. She kept telling me what they looked like in her day, so I was certain those were not the shoes I wanted to wear. It turned out she was right.

Black kids made up a whopping 1 percent of the school’s population. I figured it would be an easy thing to make friends with those kids since we naturally had something in common. It’s the thing you can always count on—black folks finding each other wherever we are few. As with every other thing I was learning about the school, it turned out this wasn’t the case. The kids had been attending since seventh grade, and had already established their groups, and most surprising, not all together. They were friendly enough, but I knew they’d likely never be my friends. Not like those in my neighborhood, or the kids I went to middle school with in the West End. Those kids talked like me, listened to the same music, could see the style in a pair of straight-leg jeans cuffed over a new pair of white Converse high-tops.

Not the black kids at my new school. They were about as unlike me as the rich white kids, and they seemed bland and assimilated. They’d heard of the bands that were unknown to me—bands with names like Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC. They could use the word
crap
without it sounding foreign on their tongues (in my neighborhood, we called it what it was—shit). Somehow, they could actually dance to the song “My Sharona.” I decided that trying to make friends with them would be no less difficult than making friends with the white kids. At least with the kids whose differences showed readily in their skin, in the intonation of their words, in their shiny Trans Ams and Corvettes that blasted “Sweet Home Alabama” from the radio, there would be no guessing where I stood, wondering where our similarities ended. So I did something I never would have expected I’d do a month earlier—I began making friends with some of the rich white kids.

They asked me stupid questions, and our initial conversations often involved discussions I’d never imagined I’d be part of.

“Does your hair get wet?” What, did you expect water would slide off as if my hair were a duck’s feathers?

“Can I touch your hair?” This I allowed only once. That one instance made me feel too much like a rabbit in a petting zoo, or a misunderstood circus freak, to allow it again. Each time someone asked to touch my hair after that, I had to fight an urge to hurt them. I wondered how they’d react if black people were all the time asking to touch their hair. But I didn’t really care to know, and besides, I already knew. In books, hair was always described as flaxen or being like corn silk, and I’d shucked enough ears of corn to know what that felt like. Smooth, shiny hair came on all the Barbie dolls, even the black ones. White people were hardly a mystery to me by the time I’d reached high school, because even though I didn’t know many personally—my teachers at the old school, a girlfriend of one of my aunts—their presence in my world was felt everywhere.

“Oh, you just have to come to the first school dance. You can show us all the new moves.” The most I could muster in response was a serious roll of the eyes. Being my first real experience with “overcoming stereotypes,” I wasn’t adept at doing so. No one asked me about a love of fried chicken or watermelon, but they wondered whether I’d be going out for the basketball team. I found it difficult to say, “Yes, I play basketball. I
love
playing basketball.”

I hated some of the things that I felt I had to do to make them comfortable with me, like talking differently when I was around them. It took nearly a year to let go of using “to be” as a present tense verb, as in “I be tripping when he tells a joke,” or “She be wearing a cute outfit to school every day.” It wasn’t as if I didn’t know how to conjugate verbs, not as though the nuns at my old school didn’t try to pound this particular verb usage out of our heads. It was just the way we talked around friends who wouldn’t suspect our intelligence because we talked that way. I realized early that people at the new school expected me to be less from the start, in a Catholic missionary “save the savages” kind of way, so I learned to speak the “right way” around kids when it used to be a requirement only around teachers.

It was like another chore outside of just attending school—learning to live this second life. I pretended to like the Eagles (until one day I realized I really did). When my classmates discussed ski vacations, I nodded as though I knew where Breadloaf was and tried to see the logic in wearing a down jacket with no sleeves during the winter. I wanted to ask,
Aren’t your arms cold, too?
Going five class periods without seeing a face like mine is not that big a deal, I told myself. I tried to call someone a “spaz” without it sounding ridiculous, but it always did. At first, it wore me out, made me grateful when I got off the bus downtown in a world that didn’t expect anything more of me than what I was. Eventually it got easier. Sometimes it was the fact that it
did
get easier that bothered me most.

*

New differences between the kids and me showed up daily. In the spirit of getting us more involved in PE instead of seeing it as a drudgery that caused our curling-ironed flips to fall before midday, the teacher suggested everyone bring an album or two that could be played during the PE hour. It was still early in the school year, before I’d really figured out just how foreign a place it was. I knew I’d never pass around the latest frosted blue eye shadows and pale pink lipsticks in the locker room the way my classmates did (I’d look like a clown in those colors). On the one Friday a month when we didn’t have to wear our uniforms, I knew I’d never be able to ask if anyone had a spare package of L’eggs
pantyhose because I’d put a run in mine. (Nude didn’t apply to bare brown skin and Suntan didn’t refer to the shade of mocha I turned after a day in the sun.) But my music was something I could share with them. I was excited about getting home and going through my album collection, which was impressive because one of my aunts was dating a DJ who spun records in a nightclub and he gave her his duplicates, which she always gave to me.

After much consideration, and recognizing that a PE class demanded something upbeat, I chose two songs that were hot in 1979, at least in my world: Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.” True, all I’d heard around school so far was a sound I didn’t know much about, southern rock from groups like .38 Special and Molly Hatchet, but I was sure my music would inspire the girls in class to move through whatever lame activity the teacher would inflict on us. This certainty made me get changed quickly and out to the gym floor before anyone else, where I handed my albums to the teacher so they’d get the first play. She took the albums from me without asking anything about them, and was lowering the arm on the school-issued record player just as all of the girls arrived in the gym.

The first few notes of “Ring My Bell” came out of the player’s speakers, sounding small and tinny compared to my stereo at home, and something like the special effects sound that always accompanied the firing of laser guns in seventies sci-fi movies. I looked around the gym floor at the girls to see if the music would have the effect I’d hoped for. Instead, there were small snickers, which grew into giggles, until finally all of them were laughing out loud.

“What
is
this?”

“Disco. Someone brought
disco.
” It was as if I’d introduced the plague into the gym. “God, I can’t believe it. Who brought disco?”

It didn’t take more than a quick glance around for them to conclude it must have been me, the one who least fit in and who looked most likely to spread the dreaded disco among them. The teacher tried to ignore the girls, I suppose out of kindness toward me, and let the record play,  tapping her foot to the beat until a funny look passed over her face and she lifted the arm of the record player abruptly.

That’s when it dawned on me that I hadn’t considered the lyrics when I made my selection, so involved was I in making sure the music would get the class fired up. About the same time I thought of this, the teacher must have figured out that
“Ring My Bell” didn’t have a thing to do with alerting Anita to her man’s presence at the front door. She put the record back in the sleeve and handed both albums to me, not even willing to give old Gloria Gaynor a try. On top of that, every girl in the place now knew for sure who had brought the records.

“I’ll take these back to my locker,” I told her. It was a good ten minutes before I showed up on the gym floor again, and hoped that by then I’d pushed my anger and embarrassment down enough to get through the class without cussing out the next girl to say
disco
. The teacher must have said something while I was gone, because the laughs and comments had been reduced to knowing glances, the kind that only high-school girls can give, the kind that can decide and relay to the rest of the pack a girl’s social standing in an instant. I just acted like it didn’t faze me, but I decided that would be the last time I’d try to bring some of my world into theirs.

*

On a Saturday in October that still had the makings of a summer day—warm and sticky, the air feeling almost too heavy to breath—we kids were taking a break from playing basketball on the driveway of the boys with the hoop. Our hosts were three brothers—one a year younger than I, one a year older than Bridgette, and a third who was too young to hang with any of us. His parents made his brothers look out for him anyway, which meant he tagged along behind the older kids like an afterthought, and always seemed to have skinned knees from falling while trying to keep up. All the kids from the Beautiful Family were there, a good thing because the boys were the best players on the street, and the best-looking.

Marie and I were the only girls the boys would take when choosing teams. We were the only girls willing to go hard to the basket and scrap for the ball without fussing about getting scratched, or worrying about our hair coming loose from our ponytails. Plus, we could shoot from the outside, a skill learned to avoid some of those under-the-basket skirmishes. Cassandra and her younger sister Latrice were there. Bridgette and Latrice were friends, and we gave them the job of chasing down a runaway ball or holding on to valuables that might get damaged in a game—eyeglasses (mine), a bracelet, loose change, a pack of Bubble Yum that would be returned to the owner soft from sitting in the sun or a pocket, and usually missing a piece. In return, they got to hang out with us older kids. Cassandra would never join a game, even if she knew how to play, because it required bumping up against sweaty boys, one of the reasons I enjoyed the game.