Power & Beauty
POWER & BEAUTY
A Love Story of Life on the Streets
Tip “T.I.” Harris with David Ritz
Turn the fear into energy
’Cause the toot and the smoke
Won’t fulfill the need—MARVIN GAYE
Contents
I
t was a Saturday in June, nine o’clock in the morning, when the explosion hit. It rocked our little apartment in Conway Court; rocked our whole neighborhood; rocked my world and flipped the script on our lives.
After that morning, just two months before my sister and I turned sixteen, nothing was ever the same.
At first I thought it was a terrorist attack. But why the hell would terrorists be launching attacks on niggas on the west side of the ATL?
“It’s Charlie’s Disco!” my sister started screaming. “I can see it from here!”
Charlie’s Disco sat right across the street from where we stayed. Charlie’s Disco was run by Moms’s friend, Charles “Slim” Simmons. Moms helped Slim with his bookkeeping. Sometimes when she was working in his office above the club she’d let me sit downstairs at the bar and drink lemonade. I liked that. I liked being inside the smoky club with the black leather booths and plush ruby-red carpet. I studied the disco ball that hung over the dance floor and imagined what it was like when the place was packed with the flashy pimps, hustlers, and hos—Slim’s best customers.
But Moms would never allow me in there when the place was packed. Moms knew better. After all, she started out as a waitress at Slim’s. She said Slim was always good to her, but Moms wanted to do better. Moms went to night school to learn bookkeeping so she could buy me and my sister, Beauty, nicer clothes. Moms put money away in our college fund. Moms always said she was raising me to be a polite Southern gentleman. People said Moms was the only woman Slim respected. Everyone respected Moms.
“Where’s Mom?” I yelled, jumping out of bed when the explosion hit.
“I don’t know, Power,” Beauty said, her voice shaking. “She mentioned something about going over to see Slim.”
My heart started racing. My brain started panicking.
Moms couldn’t be at Slim’s.
Moms had to be okay.
Just last night Moms had made us dinner. Just last night Moms had helped us with our math homework and read out loud from the Bible.
Moms was a young woman, healthy and strong. Moms hadn’t gone over to Charlie’s this morning. She probably just went shopping. Moms was fine.
I threw on some sweats and, together with Beauty, ran across the street.
Holy shit!
Charlie’s was ablaze. Biggest fire I’d ever seen up close. The heat was incredible. Fire trucks, firemen, cops, folks milling around, everyone trying to figure out what the fuck had happened.
“Anyone inside?” someone asked.
“They pulled out one body. The woman was dead.”
The woman was dead.
Beauty and I heard the words at the same time.
“Can’t be Moms,” I said to my sister. “Moms went shopping.”
Beauty didn’t speak, but I knew what she was thinking.
“Moms is probably already home by now,” I said.
Beauty ran over to the firemen and started asking questions. The fireman directed her to a cop. The cop said something that made Beauty’s eyes go wide. She put her hand over her mouth. She started screaming. I ran over there.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He’s gonna take us to the hospital. We gotta get to the hospital
.
”
After that, my brain went blurry. Riding in the cop car. Sirens screaming. Arriving at the ER. Running through the hospital. Looking for doctors. Talking to nurses. Going up and down hallways until we finally found the one doctor who asked the question that I didn’t wanna hear.
“Are you related to Charlotte Clay?”
“She’s our mother,” said Beauty.
“I’m afraid she’s gone.”
“Gone where?” I asked. “Gone to Macon? Gone back to where she was born in Alabama? Gone
where,
motherfucker?” I was losing it.
“She’s dead,” the doctor said.
“Can’t be dead!”
I started hollering.
“Must be another woman. My mother went shopping. She didn’t go to no Slim’s. Not that time of morning. She’d have nothing to do with Slim that time of morning. It’s all a big mistake!”
The doctor put his arm around me. I pushed him away and screamed even louder.
“Fuckin’ hospitals get shit mixed up all the time! Fuckin’ hospitals can’t keep nothing straight! That woman who died ain’t my mother!”
“Would you like to identify her?” the doctor asked.
I couldn’t.
Beauty could.
Beauty went into the room.
I stayed behind.
Beauty came out, shaking and weeping, running to me, falling in my arms.
“She’s gone.” Beauty was crying.
My heart was hammering so hard it felt like it was coming out my chest.
“She’s gone,” Beauty said again. She looked up at me and asked, “How we gonna live without her? How are we going to make it, Power?”
Relatives and friends called. Relatives and friends came by. The crib was packed when we got back home. But we made it clear that we really couldn’t be with anyone. Seeing other folks weeping and sobbing was too much. We told them that we appreciated their concern, but we needed to be alone.
No mother. Just sister and brother.
That night, the first night without Moms, Beauty slipped into my bed. She was crying so hard her body was shaking. Her shaking didn’t stop until I held her.
She wasn’t my blood. Beauty had African-American/Asian blood. She had Asian eyes, Asian skin. Mom had adopted her five years ago when we were both eleven. But she was still my sister. Didn’t matter that she was beautiful; didn’t matter that she had a killer body that every boy in school was looking to tap. I knew that I couldn’t see her that way. Moms always said, “You gotta watch her back, boy, not her backside. She’s family. And never forget it.” But at times I did forget it. I took me more than a few peeks in the keyhole when she undressed at night. And I caught her taking more than a few peeks at me coming out of the shower.
Sometimes—well, more than sometimes—
most
times when I jerked off, I saw Beauty in my mind. In my mind, I did everything to Beauty to make her scream out my name. But that was fantasy. When it came to reality, I did what Moms told me to do.
But tonight Moms’s body was at the funeral home, and Beauty’s body was next to mine. She had come to my bed. She needed to be held. I needed to be held. We needed to do something to make this new and horrible fear go away. The fear was all over us.
The midnight hour came down on us.
We were alone in the crib without our mother.
We were alone in bed.
Beauty brought her mouth to my mouth.
I had never tasted her mouth before. It was soft, sweet. I pressed my lips against hers. I felt her tongue touching mine. I felt her opening her heart, her mind, her soul.
I knew it was wrong.
She knew it was wrong.
We were crying out to each other.
Moms was gone, Moms was dead, we were alive, we were holding each other, feeling each other in a way we’d always wanted to but never had.
We couldn’t.
We shouldn’t.
But the horror and the confusion of losing the most important person in our universe had turned our universe upside down. The person who made sense of the world, the person who kept us safe, the person who gave us the rules was no longer there. The rules were no longer there.
We could do what we wanted.
In our confusion, our pain, our fucked-up fear, we faced each other that night in bed. We did what we had longed to do.
It was not the first time for Beauty, and it was not the first time for me. But it might as well have been.
Once we started, we couldn’t stop. It was crazy. My mind couldn’t stop saying
crazy crazy crazy crazy
but my body wasn’t listening, my body didn’t care, my body fought off my mind.
For five years we had fought for Moms’s attention. We had teased and taunted each other to the point of tears. For five years we were rivals.
Now we were lovers, loving so deep and with such crazy don’t-stop don’t-ever-stop passion that I wasn’t even sure it was really happening.
I had fallen into a dream. I was loving Beauty in a dream. In a dream, we were doing everything we had long dreamed of.
But when I woke up, the dream was there next to me.
I was naked.
She was naked.
The dream was not a dream.
The dream was real. The nightmare of Moms’s death was real. Our reaction to her death now seemed like a nightmare.
“Power,” Beauty said to me, “we can never tell anyone. We can never do this again.”
“I’ll never say a word.”
“Never,” she said.
“Never ever!”