Something Like Beautiful (5 page)

Y
ou were not yet two months old on that night when we were curled up together in my room. The news was on and the anchor was reporting mayhem at the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. There were disturbing reports about women being snatched up, shoved around among the men gathered there.

The women were being groped, they were being groped violently. The police who were at the scene, Nisa, the same ones this society will tell you are there to serve and protect you, were laughing at the girls, who at this point were crying. This was on the news that night, Nisa, the news you could not understand, but I understand it, I do. Me, the mother of a girl child. Me, who was once a girl and whore-members cops like this, cops who laugh at young girls being groped. They did it to your auntie once, laughed when she told the cops that it was that man right there who had hurt her in a store in the section where they kept the Suzy Q's and Twinkies. Your auntie was nine then or maybe she ten. They did it to my high school girlfriend Xiomara, seventeen, whose boyfriend was a cop, thirty-five. His friends laughed at her and she heard them laugh and later told me so in our high school cafeteria. “Got you some nice tight pussy.” And now over fifteen years later, what has changed, baby girl of mine?

I am looking at these girl son the six o'clock news, the ones who talked to reporters and filled in the blanks about what had happened earlier that day and I am thinking that they, like you right now, once lay upon their mother's breast. And all their mothers wanted was to protect them. It's what I want most of all. Perhaps their mothers drifted off then, as I do now, into prayer about all the hurt and humiliations they had known. All the hurt and humiliations they were going to fight to ensure their daughters avoided.

It was hard enough to sidestep the indignities and pain when they were secretive, a dirty thing, an accepted wrong. But when the dirty thing, the mean shit, the cruelty, is made mainstream and called fun, what do we do to combat it? How does a mother raise her girl? What weapons does she brandish and teach her daughter to use, what armor? When do I begin her training, her tactical skills? When do I tell her the truth? When do I say, Nisa, they don't love us. And how do I say it, without either being hyperbolic or understated?

You are no longer a baby. This letter is taking years to write. The night we lay together when I watched the news about the parade has long since passed, and yet I still struggle with the very same questions. How do I tell you what's real, what is the way to be safe, to keep you safe, and where do I start? Do I begin in 1993 with Snoop and it ain't no fun if my homies can't get none?

Or was it when Nelly swiped a credit card down White Chocolate's ass?

Do I start with a bitch is a bitch?

Or should I let it all go and get right to the heart of the matter? Maybe I need only mention the girls in the schools in Colorado, Canada, and Pennsylvania who were singled out, lined up, sexually assaulted, and then murdered, murdered? And while every one
expressed concern about the spate of violence in American schools—How do we make the class room secure? policy-and home makers demanded—no one, at least no one whose voice was covered by the news, was asking, what does it mean that there's an epidemic of violence directed against the girls? Who asked, How do we secure our female children? The ones from Southeast Asia sold into sex slavery at nine year sold; the ones in the Horn of Africa, and then far beyond that region, whose vaginas are mutilated; the ones down the hall in the über-expensive co-op in mid-Manhattan with the daddy who can't keep his dick in his pants when he looks at his daughter. These were not topics on morning-show discussions. There were no special broad casts about violence against women. There was a moment of outrage against Don Imus and a longer moment against vulgar rap lyrics, but no time spent examining the thing itself, that which gave space to an Imus or a gangsta rapper in the first place.

Should I ever tell you, Nisa, about the gangs that jump girls in by running trains on them, and after that how the girls get sent out on the stroll, whatever money they make, confiscated. Do I tell you about the beatings? Is that too extreme? Is it, even if they happen to nice girls like you, little middle-class sweeties whose fancy and sparkling urban lives or else whose manicured front-yard suburban lives were supposed to shield them from them adness? Do I tell you that none of us has built-in protection? And that protection is created, called upon, and it arises out of truth and vigilance? If I tell you, tell you as part of a protection spell, will I be blamed, will someone yell at me, Why are you taking that girl's childhood away?

So maybe no. Maybe I should take another route altogether.

Maybe I should begin with a Barbie fascination that has morphed grotesquely into extreme body modification and girls who have
plastic surgery before they're sixteen and after that there's no stopping. Maybe I should begin with the burnings at the stake.

Or perhaps the American Constitution and Black people and women as the property of white men? Or else slavery and a population created out of rape and incest. Maybe I should begin with Thomas Jefferson.

Should I go back further? Do I begin with the Word and how the Word said it was a woman, all the fault of a woman, every sin, all that's bad, it was all our fault? I could begin there or I could begin with the Qur'an which, in the third sura, the one called Nisaa, which means, “the women,” advises its reader that a man can beat his wife?

If that's too big, too much to grab hold of, I could always begin with the incredible women in your family, the women who raised me, the woman I became, the women your auntie and grandmother, became, despite it all. And I could tell you about the great-grand-mother who didn't.

I mean, what is the alternative? Should I say nothing? Fly through the world on a wing, a prayer, and a couple of well-worn rules: don't give out your number; don't sit on his lap even though he's related to us; don't smile too wide, hug too close, wear your pants too tight.

How do I keep you safe, Nisa, keep you from the monsters when the truth is that the monsters are intertwined in our lives?

That's the question that visits me, night after night. It's been there from before you were born, that one question. And it should not have been. Here's what should have been the only questions to dance in my head. Here is all I ever should have wanted to know:

When will you take your first steps and where?

What will your first word be?

Will you want brothers and sisters one day?

Will you like school?

Will you be a singer, will you paint?

Will you write stories like me, or will you study theology like your father?

Will you like math or physics? Will you excel in subjects I never did grasp?

Will you be outgoing, will you be shy?

Will you be athletic?

Will you like living in Brooklyn, will you want to move to the

West Coast as I did, as your auntie Anne did?

Will we survive the teenage years still loving each other?

Will you learn how to drive by the time you're sixteen and will you make fun of me because I can't?

Will you learn many languages, play an instrument, visit many countries? Will you be outspoken, will you love deeply and be deeply loved in return?

Will your laughter come quickly, and will your sadness be fleeting?

Will you tell me how to love you, tell me what I can do to smooth the rough borders of the landscape onto which you were born?

Will you trust me? Will you trust that whoever you are is exactly who I wanted, who I always wanted?

Will you know you are loved by me, Nisa, with everything in me that is capable of loving anyone or anything, you are loved? And what of me? Will I be capable of ensuring the foundation upon which you can build your dreams?

Because it's not just that you are a girl who will one day be a woman in a world that has yet to prove its commitment to women. It's also that you are a Black girl. And that has its own history, its own long and painful trail.

When I began writing this letter to you, I began it in my head and I worked on it and months disappeared into years and then one day you were four. I don't know if you remember this day. We walked the Brooklyn Bridge alone together and ended up at the playground in Brooklyn Heights, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in our borough. We were the only Black people there, but I didn't notice this at first. I noticed it just at the moment a little girl took your toy away and refused to give it back to you. I held back, tried to let the two of you work it out yourselves. And when the girl ran with your toy, ran toward her mother, I encouraged you to speak: Go to her, I said. It's your right! Tell her to give it back to you, and you did that while I followed behind your scared but definite steps. You reached the girl and when you asked for the toy, she hit you, that girl. Her mother said nothing.

And in that moment, moments we have relived in various ways in various places, I had to make a decision about whether I should admonish the parent or just take you away, take you away from people who were not good enough to be around you.

Truly, I wanted to scream at that mother. I wanted to demand: What kind of child are you raising where she could hit another little girl and you do not scold her? How dare she? I wanted to say. But to argue when you are the lone Black woman or man in an unfamiliar place and you are surrounded by apparently wealthy white people, an argument is a risk because it can always spiral into something beyond your control.

In 1987, Yvonne Smallwood, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, was arguing about a traffic ticket when she was stomped to death by white police. We want to believe it is far outside the norm, a blip in reality, a rogue moment in the history of race and sex relations in America. But the truth is we've seen this happen again and again—whether women were arguing a traffic ticket or protesting the treatment of their children or just trying to get home. The truth is African Americans come from a long line of women who've been beaten down for speaking up.

And we, you, me come from along line of women who were forced to live their lives with the fear that if we speak, we will lose, we will be separated from our children. From slavery to the sisters right now today, who get picked up, often on charges that are minor or else false, but because the court systems move so dreadfully slowly and because if bail is set, it is often set too high for our mothers to make, and so by the time we are released from jail, our babies have been placed in foster care. And getting our children back is much harder to accomplish than having them taken. There are records to prove this, Nisa. And there are, of course, the childless mothers. Some of them are our neighbors today, right here in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where we make our home. I wish I didn't know these things. I wish there was no reason for me to think of them. And most of the times, I don't.

Most of the time when we are exploring the neighborhoods of New York City, or the woods of Northern California, the mountain son the Pacific Coast of Mexico, or the waters at the tip of the Long Island Sound, most of the time and in most of those places I don't see past the wonder and excitement in your face.

But there are these other times we have shared, times when I
have said nothing because to speak might have consequences greater than we can manage, that I can manage. At the prison, in the playground. Wherever. And I know this must somehow all be confusing for you: me, a mommy who sometimes speaks, who is sometimes silent. Me, a mommy who has standards but then seems to abdicate them and call it strategic. And I know I cannot clear it all up for you right now. I cannot even clear it all up for myself.

Because when I became a mother, all the love I thought I always had for children, for all children, but especially a child of mine, expanded exponentially and I thought I knew what all babies deserved. I thought I knew what all babies needed. I thought I knew what you deserved and what you needed. I thought I at least would know how to protect you at every turn.

But some of what exists out there that you have not seen and some of what exists out there that you have already seen that is all tied up with you being a girl, or you being Black, or you being a Black girl in this place at this time, is not what you deserved and not what you needed and if I cannot protect you, if I cannot shield you, then do I deserve you?

W
hen Nisa was a toddler, my girlfriend Raquel and I had a conversation about money and being a writer and not getting paid on time and what it means to be a good mother if you live in a world where it seems as though someone or something is destined to destabilize you. Some editor at a magazine was ducking her calls again for a story she'd turned in five months earlier and now the loss of that check—it was quite a substantial amount—left her spiraling into a debt she didn't know how she'd get out of. She said to me, that night on the phone, “You have to wonder what these mother fuckers would do if somebody just didn't give them their paycheck for months on end. I mean damn!”

We commiserated about not getting paid, and wondered out loud if our colleagues who made the choices not to process our payment ever considered the collateral consequences of not paying a single mother, the way it threatens, in real terms, the quality of our child's life. “And not even in the big ways,” Raquel continued. “I mean I know why I don't have health care. I know why sometimes I buy food I normally wouldn't but we have to have something on the table. I mean I think about the way it affects me psychologically—”

“And then what impact that has on our daughters,” I said, interrupting her, but completing her thought. But the subtext of all this is instability. Money, being paid on time and being paid a livable wage, allows a mother to plan, to think clearly. It reduces anxiety, which in turn reduces what are sometimes the results of being overanxious: smoking, overeating, drinking, compulsive shopping—the list nearly has no end.

We talk, not just my girlfriend and I, but everyone, about how children need stability, consistency. But how are they to get it if nothing in their parent's life is stable or easily stabilized? It's sort of fun and maybe even powerful to imagine that one can create anything and everything one needs in life to bring one joy and peace. But that kind of theory that keeps many people rich on the lecture circuit has little reality for people who live, in one way or another, in the margins of this society. And those people who do are usually poor, the working poor, but poor nonetheless. This is likely the relevant place to note that of all groups in society, single mothers are paid the least in every category. And no, despite the fact that fifty percent of households are now headed by single moms, no, that has not changed.

Yet, while I don't subscribe to the theory espoused generally by the privileged—that you can talk into existence whatever life you want—I do know we can work to make choices to edge ourselves up out of a hole. Money, or the lack thereof, was an anxiety that I resolved I would live with as long as I continued to choose writing as a career and pretty much be a stay-at-home mom. But what could be left behind, cast out, in the nervous breath of my world? The answer to that seemed cruel but there came a time when finally I could not avoid it.

 

T
HE
IT
IN MY
own life, the one I could not avoid, happens in a phone call, like nearly everything else that has reordered my life with Rashid. I learn it via a monitored call. It is July 15, 2000. Our baby is three months and one day old.

He says he got the paperwork from INS in the mail the night before. As it stands now, he is still under a deportation order, the result of a retroactive change in law instigated by Bill Clinton in 1996. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Whenever he is finally paroled, he will likely be sent back to Guyana, the place of his birth, the only place where he holds citizenship. There can be no appeals, according to the law as it currently stands.

I said nothing to Rashid that day on the phone. What words would mean anything? Back ten years ago, when I was first falling for this beautiful Guyanese man, I asked him if there was any chance he could be deported. He assured me then that immigration issues had been taken care of. When the new law changed this in 1996, if he mentioned it to me, it was a casual thing, nothing for me to think or worry about. And I didn't. Until now. Now I feel betrayed. I want to scream, cry, use my anger toward him to make this all go away. But that's stupid, pointless. That's why I say nothing. But I'm thinking.

I'm thinking that for years that have somehow spun into a decade—and a child—I have agreed to fight alongside him, stand up for him and with him to anyone, anything. I will push back, pull forward, keep the faith even on the days when the faith wasn't keeping me. After all that work, how could this be our here and
now? Rashid under a deportation order and there can be no hearing to say, But I have children in this country, a brand-new baby, a wife. No provision in the law for that, for Nisa, for me.

I am thinking these things as Rashid talks to me and I am thinking, bitterly, He sold me a lie. And that anger will sit there, it will grow tumorlike and malignant for years until it occurs to me that we all do it—that I do it—the same thing. It occurs to me one evening when I am selling Nisa the dream she most wants. It's my negotiation tactic with her: I need to write and she needs attention, she needs to make noise.

When she tells me, as she does most evenings, “Mommy, I
need
to jump and when I jump this sound
has
to come out,” I know she is not lying, my wild-as-the-wind Aries girl, my tiny, magical dragon. She came into this world with so much of her personality already affixed. Early in my pregnancy when I went for a sonogram that normally takes about fifteen minutes, it became a two-day trek back and forth to the hospital for me and an ordeal for the technician, who sighed, exasperated, “She just
won't
stay still.” Nisa in the womb was already who she was destined to be. That I know.

Which is another reason why I try more often than not to negotiate with her rather than yell at her to be quiet. On many a night, many a day, you can hear me and I am saying to her that Mommy is trying to figure it all out: how to buy her house, a home with more than one floor, a backyard big enough to put a swing set in. And, of course, this biggest of all promises: her very own puppy. I tell Nisa to trust me, I'm trying. I tell her if we work together as a team, we can make them happen, the dreams we have for ourselves.

That's when it occurs to me that I am doing to my baby what was done to me: the offering up of the idea of a life, a bigger life, a life outsize in its proportion of joy, if only she has faith, hope, an impossible sort of patience and perseverance, even on this one brilliant summer weekend when I am writing and she is holed up in the house. And as I settle into this practice, this practice of negotiating in what I would only consider good faith, I finally get it, finally I realize what Rashid did with me.

He asked me to hold on, to hold out for a dream he thought he could really make happen. He'd asked me before and then again, that July fifteenth: “Just hang in there, baby. I am going to fix it. I promise you. I
promise
you.” I said okay. I said I would, but there was nothing inside of me that allowed me to make a rational decision in the wake of that news. In the wake of disaster, we may say anything to send it all away—the unfolding reality before us. But a few days out, shock and denial turned to anger and it would be years before it diffused. Years and years.

At first I said OK. I said I could endure it, fight it with him. I mean, what else had I ever done? But then I found I couldn't even say the word, the terrible, brutal, life-altering word,
deportation,
without my throat, my stomach tightening, without feeling as though I might lose my ability to breathe right then, right there. When he called in the days just after, I changed my tone, though slightly. All I could say to Rashid, all I could say to myself was this: I can't. Can't talk, can't think, can't plan, can't stay, can't run. I can't believe. That was the bottom line. I couldn't believe. I did not say that aloud though. Not to him. Not to myself.

When I was able to lurch toward some level of engagement
with Rashid, then all I could say was, I'm tired. But of course that described nothing. If I were simply tired, I could get in bed, rest, sleep, come back out swinging the very next day. But there was no next day, there was no nothing. Nothing for us, nothing for Rashid, nothing for our family.

There would be no more fantasizing about the day we would be there, standing at the prison gate one morning, waiting as Rashid exits the facility for the final time. No more dream of walking these Brooklyn streets together doing what normal couples do—errands, a stroll in the park, playing hooky and sneaking in a weekday matinee and a slice of pizza afterward. There would be no coming-home party, no looking for a house together, no fashioning an oasis inside a concrete box in an overpriced apartment in an overpriced city. No lounging in bed together—our own bed, not a prison bed—with my family on some rainy or cold Saturday morning, reading the paper, making hot chocolate, eating popcorn, watching videos. No more hope that there will be more babies, maybe a dog.

It was all gone. All the dreams, all the stories that I had told myself for ten years, the stories I told to sustain myself, every part of them, eviscerated. And they were gone at the very moment that they most needed to be here, because here was Nisa and when we knew she was coming, we talked it through and we agreed yes, the first couple of years of her life, Rashid would be away, the first couple of years would be challenging, but what beauty lay on the other side of patience! Nisa's memory of her father would not be shaped by distance and bars.

And that's how we did it, that's how I did it, that's how I made it through the nine months alone but not lonely, alone but
not broken. It's how I made it through labor and birth. That's how I did not lose my composure when I came back to my apartment with my baby that first night, the night without my husband, and all we had was the phone and he called and sang the “Adon” in her ear and we felt close and we felt as though, no, no, everything wasn't as we wanted it, but that part, the as-we-wanted part, it was just around the corner. This is how I kept my sanity in proximity.

But now, what? What do we say to ourselves in order to make it across the rocky days? What tool did I have? These are the questions I would not ask of Rashid, the words I would not speak. That every piece of the life we had knitted together over the last ten years, everything we waited for, everything we believed in, sacrificed for, were gone. And if all our dreams were gone, all the dreams and all the pieces of dreams, then how could I not be gone too?

I asked girlfriends, a therapist, anyone who would listen, that very question. “Because of Nisa,” was always the quick answer shot back at me. And of course, of course. I wanted my love for Nisa to be enough to set aside the hurt, to crowd it out. And of course I did everything I could to compensate for all I was feeling. And of course too, it wasn't enough. Not really.

 

I
MET A YOUNG
man once who had only recently reintroduced himself to his son. He kept the child now every weekend, and from what I could see, he appeared to be a very devoted and loving father. But as we chatted, he went on to confess to me that he had hit a rough patch, and during that time—a year,
he told me—he didn't see his boy. According to him, he hadn't been involved in his son's life at all, not emotionally, physically, or financially. For mothers, for most of us anyway, there's no such option, no way to check out for a year or so while we get ourselves together, grieve, organize our finances, meditate, teach ourselves to breathe again. I don't imagine that many of us would even want that, but if we did, where would we go to take a break?

As much as I wanted to crawl under a bed, hide in a closet, escape, I couldn't. Both the joy and demands of motherhood each day grew bigger and more complex, and they required my presence. And I was, present. I was present at least during the day, during the hours in which responsibilities spiraled way over my head. I wrote and edited articles, books, maintained a modicum of my political activism, took Nisa to gardens, to museums, to libraries and playgrounds. I worked out, learned how to make (though I rarely did) organic baby food. I visited my parents most Sundays, traveled several times with Nisa in her first years of life to report stories or give lectures.

I was in the world. I was in it until the sun went down and the baby went to sleep and stories were filed and the phone calls were returned, and then, not immediately, but after a time when the pain swelled so large it felt as though I could not move or think, conscious or not, I fell into a half-life, a life checked out, a deported life, a life sent away by sweet wine, glasses and glasses of it, sweet wine and cigarettes. They transported me, but where? They allowed me to pass out, to not think about what had gone away. They allowed me to sleep without dreaming until the alarm went off and it was time to rise and pretend
to be more than I was, more than I was perhaps even capable of being. It was time to pretend that nothing, not the separation, not the deportation, nothing, cut or crippled me.

But before this, before I can recognize the way my sadness is forming a fence around my heart, before we're headlong into some new, distanced reality, Rashid calls me. It's September of 2000. Nisa is five months old.

“I know things are hard, baby,” he begins, “but they're going to get better. I'm going to beat this thing and be home with you and Nisa.” I hate to hear him say this because I am trying to come to terms with the new configuration of my life. I am trying to consider how to have new dreams. And yet I cannot stop listening.

“We've been issued a date for a trailer,” he continues. “Please. Just come up. Let's spend some real family time together. Let me take care of you and my daughter. Let me spoil you for two days, baby,” he says, and I'm right there again, right in the center of hope, right back in a life I thought I'd have to leave behind. But maybe. Maybe things will work out. Maybe we can love it all away.