The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (3 page)

The tinny, out-of-tune serenade emanating from the ice cream truck sent every kid in the neighborhood scurrying home from the treetops, under bushes, abandoned lots, behind cars and street corners like cockroaches exposed to the light of day. “The ice cream man! The ice cream man!” could be heard up and down the street. Piggy banks were raided, parents were nagged, coins liberated from change purses. The collective blood pressure and stress level of the children in the neighborhood were dangerously elevated until a quarter found its way into a grubby little fist. Then there was a reverse mass migration out of houses as the now coin-bearing children raced to queue up outside of the ice cream truck, garishly decorated with a cornucopia of mouth-watering images of ice cream that included Drum Sticks, orange cream bars, sundae cones, Fudgsicles, Bomb Pops, rainbow snow cones and Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches (my favorite). After buying ice cream, we stood in a group slowly savoring our treats while regarding, with barely concealed contempt, the sad faces of the kids unable to get money for ice cream, who eyed us like hyenas on the fringe of a lion kill.

Another cause for excitement was the bimonthly visit from the bookmobile. Bookmobiles are mobile libraries designed to service communities without access to libraries. My love of reading can be directly attributed to my access to a bookmobile. I scoured the shelves for children’s books about the Greek and Roman gods, animals and dinosaurs. My fiction preferences leaned toward
The Berenstain Bears
,
The Cat in the Hat
,
Where the Sidewalk Ends, Curious George
and any of the Aesop fables. It was in the bookmobile that I discovered Ezra Jack Keats’s
The Snowy Day
. This book was a revelation because it was the first children’s book I ever read that featured a black child. His name was Peter, a pudgy, dark-skinned kid about my age dressed in a red jumpsuit, out in the hood exploring after the first snowfall of the season. Peter was a dude I could relate to. I checked the book out so often the librarian suggested I leave it for others to read. I’d eventually move on to other books but
The Snowy Day
would always be the first book that reflected who I was and what I felt as a small child growing up in the city.

•   •   •

My mother and father divorced eventually. My mother told me my father had been physically abusive and emotionally abusive even before they married, but she was too terrified to divorce him. She saw his imprisonment as the perfect opportunity to get out. After their divorce, my mother would go out partying with her friends a couple of weekends a month. I was never happy to see her getting dressed up in her tight, polyester, bell-bottom slacks and loose-flowing shirts with colors and patterns bold enough to be seen from space. I’d stand by pouting as she retrieved her wig, which was a glossy black helmet of hair indicative of the early Supremes. She’d preen in front of the mirror and spray the wig down with a thick coating of Aqua Net hairspray, which wreaked havoc on our lungs but got the wig as shiny as wet tar. Then she’d apply her makeup: a bit of red lipstick and black Maybelline eyeliner that she’d sharpen with a pocket knife and heat up with a match to the tip before tracing her upper and lower lids. Lastly she’d douse herself in the cloying sweet citrus aroma of Jean Naté perfume. While I enjoyed taking in the spectacle of her out-on-the-town routine, I didn’t like that it meant once Mama left, my eldest sister, Deborah, would be in charge.

Weekend nights normally meant we could stay up late and watch TV and play board games. These plans changed on the few occasions Mama was out and Deborah was in charge. Deborah was my mother’s favorite. She knew it and we knew it. This was made clear by the fact that they often giggled together in secret conversations; and when my mother went on errands, she always took Deborah. Deborah was even privy to the one thing nearly every child was denied access to: Grown Folks’ Business. Whenever my mother and her adult friends began to shift benign conversation about children, clothes and recipes into the realm of Grown Folks’ Business, which usually meant topics like sex, drugs, gossip or violence, we younger kids were banished to the outdoors while Deborah was allowed to stay. Her special privileges also included her word being taken above ours, riding shotgun, not having to do chores and taking charge whenever Mama wasn’t around.

Deborah had a leonine presence, with her golden skin and huge, perfectly spherical afro that seemed as pristine and impenetrable as a primeval forest. Her prison guard approach to babysitting was hated by all. As soon as the door clicked shut and the
thock, thock, thock
of Mama’s heels faded as she strolled across the concrete yard to her car, Deborah had a belt in hand, which she used to back us into our room like a lion tamer. With backup from my sister Donna, her rule was absolute over us younger kids. She was quick to squash even the hint of rebellion with threats and violence. She’d demand we go to sleep as soon as our mother left at eight
P
.
M
. We balked. “But
Night of the Living Dead
is on tonight!” “Too bad!” We’d try to shame her into letting us stay up by screaming, “We ain’t your slaves!” to which she’d reply “Tonight you are!” She’d shut us in and threaten us with a beating if we so much as peeked through the keyhole.

But she wasn’t fooling us. We knew as soon as Mama was gone and we were banished to our room, fourteen-year-old Deborah and thirteen-year-old Donna would invite their friends over, which included boys. We’d hear them laughing and playing records all night. They’d always manage to get their friends out and the house back in order before Mama came home. No amount of tattling from us would convince my mother that Deborah was anything short of an angel. The special intimacy she shared with our mother could not be breached.

Deborah could make our mama laugh, real gut-busting laughs that brought tears to my mother’s eyes. They held whispered conversations on the couch with their heads nearly touching like girlfriends. In fact that’s how I viewed Deborah. Not as my mother’s daughter but as her friend. My mother’s relationship with the rest of us was cordial, friendly at times, but nothing that I ever felt was affectionate. There was a sense of duty to keep us clothed and fed but never kisses and hugs and
I love you
’s. Deborah never got that either, but when they were together I felt their emotional bond and it fed my own need for love just to witness it between them, even though I somehow knew I would never be on the receiving end of it. Despite her many children, I didn’t get the sense that my mother particularly enjoyed children. There was tolerance, and every once in a while surrender to her predicament, but never joy.

Only once did I ever see my mother look on me with pride. A neighbor, distressed by my tomboy appearance, decided to dress me up and press my hair straight. I sat in a metal folding chair in her kitchen and let her swipe a hot comb through my hair saturated in Crisco cooking oil. The stench of burning hair and smoke made my eyes water. She followed up the press with a curling iron. Then she had me put on one of her daughter’s dresses that she’d outgrown, a short white frilly thing that reminded me of something Shirley Temple would wear. When I stepped outside, it seemed the whole block was abuzz with my transformation. So much so that someone was sent to get my mother from her friend’s house up the street. She came with a group of her friends and they surrounded me. “She’s gorgeous, Mary!” “Mmm-hmm! A doll!” My mother never said a word. She just looked at me, her eyes wide and a big smile on her face. A smile that told me she was proud and I was beautiful. A look usually reserved for Deborah.

Despite our rivalry, Deborah was my idol. She was fearless, sassy, beautiful and widely admired at school. At the age of eleven, she was the Panther school’s first graduate and was the mistress of ceremonies at the 1974 graduation. In a white dress, she stepped up to the podium surrounded by the school director, her teachers and my uncle, and gave a speech in which she praised Wednesday field trips, her favorite classes (math and reading) and the instructors. She remarked that she was sad to be leaving the school but happy that her experiences would prepare her to overcome the evils of the racist public school system where she would complete her education. She was especially sad to leave her teachers who “are not just teachers as they are in some schools—they are also our comrades.” Later she brought the house down with a trombone solo of the song “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb. She was quoted in
The Black Panther
paper: “One of the most important things I have learned at the Institute is what freedom means . . .” When complimented on the confidence displayed by the graduating students, Ericka Huggins, the school director, would comment, “Our children are not afraid.” Between 1974 and 1977, three more of my sisters would graduate but none with the fanfare and promise of the first.

Soon after graduating and entering puberty, however, all traces of my confident, talented and intelligent sister began to fade. It seemed she’d peaked as an eleven-year-old graduate, and from that moment on, slowly wandered away from us. The first clear sign I saw that the fearless, free girl was in decline emerged when she came to pick me up at school three years after she graduated. An older boy from Deborah’s graduating class was picking on me. I had climbed a tree on the playground and when I tried to come down, he would whip my legs with a switch to prevent me.

I was relieved when I saw my sister approaching. “You gonna get it now. My big sister gonna beat yo’ ass!” The boy looked over his shoulder to watch Deborah’s approach. “Who? Her?” he said with a sneer. It had never occurred to me that everyone wasn’t afraid of Deborah. She was such a force in my family and at school, I’d assumed the mere mention of her name would send tsunamis of fear washing over anyone fool enough to mess with her or us.

He threw down the switch and turned his back on me, crouching in the bare branches of the oak, and turned his tormentor’s eye on my sister. “So you gonna beat my ass, hunh?” he said as he stood half a foot above my sister with his chest puffed up. For the first time I saw fear on my sister’s face. When she looked up at me in the tree, I could also make out shame. Shame that this boy was belittling her in front of me. “I asked you a question, bitch!” he shouted in her ear and then shoved her in the face, sending her pinwheeling backward and landing solidly on her backside. She sat there on the concrete as passive as a puppy, with her chin in her chest. “I didn’t think so!” he chuckled as he strutted off with a stiff-armed swagger.

That’s when I jumped from the tree and ran to help my sister up. She swiped me away and stood up. After she brushed her clothes off, she said, “Let’s go,” as if the hero of my life had not just been felled. Seeing my big sister vulnerable and afraid was as devastating as some other kid being told Santa Claus isn’t real. She saw my disappointment, so she tried to play it off by telling me the boy was lucky she didn’t feel well or she would have cracked his head. But her bravado did little to repair what had been shattered. We walked the last few blocks home in silence. I didn’t know it then, but Deborah wouldn’t be the first girl I’d see lose her power after entering young womanhood. I made a promise to myself as I walked home with my big sister that I’d never let anyone make me feel small. The years would teach me it was easier said than done.

THE YEAR 1977
was one of big change. My father was released from prison, though I wouldn’t lay eyes on him for several weeks until one day he showed up unexpectedly at my school. I was playing dodgeball when I noticed the school principal, Ericka Huggins, leading a man across the yard then tapping the man on the shoulder and pointing in my direction. I knew him immediately even though the last time I had seen him, seven years earlier, I was three years old. He was wearing a black leather jacket and tan slacks with creases sharp enough to slice bread. His hair was trimmed short and he was smiling. Smiling at me! My classmates gathered around me to see what I was staring at. “Who’s that?” someone asked. “That’s
my
daddy!” I said, puffed up with pride. Then I ran to him and he scooped me up in his strong arms. “How’s my baby?” he asked over and over again, with his face in my neck, squeezing me so hard I could hardly breathe but I hoped he’d never stop. I couldn’t believe he was back and he was mine.

He spent the rest of recess watching me play. To have him there so handsome and well respected felt like being the daughter of a rock star. I without a doubt had the coolest daddy in the city and I wanted everyone to know it. After recess he kissed me good-bye and promised to come see me at home the next night.

Mama had us all take a shower and put on clean clothes in preparation for Daddy’s visit. She’d spent the day cleaning the house and rearranging the furniture in the living room. After five different configurations of our humble furniture, she seemed satisfied. She then changed into one of her muumuus, a floor-length floral dress that she told us was worn by women in Hawaii. Next she hit the kitchen and within a few hours had a big pot of gumbo with sausage, chicken, crab legs and shrimp simmering on the stove next to a large pot of white rice.

When Daddy knocked on the door, we four youngest kids all surged forward wanting desperately to be the first to let Daddy in. I got elbowed and shoved and gave as well as I got. Before a full-on riot erupted, Mama shooed us out of the way and opened the door herself. Daddy kissed Mama briefly on the cheek before turning his light on us. He bent to kiss us all even though he was burdened with two large heavy-looking bags, which he gave to us. It took two of us to carry one bag, which we carted off to the kitchen. The bags contained milk, eggs, flour and sacks of sugar. We squealed like we’d never seen groceries before and thanked our daddy over and over.

He laughed and let us take turns sitting next to him. My two oldest sisters, Deborah and Donna, seemed cautiously happy as they sat to themselves on the other side of the room answering our father’s inquiries about school and life with one-word declarations. Now that he was back, he told Mama, he was gonna take us to spend time with him. He’d gotten an apartment near Lake Merritt so we could even spend the night on weekends. This announcement sent us into near paroxysms of joy. Then Mama asked Daddy to help her move the coffee table against the wall, freeing up the center of the room—which could only mean dancing! Mama put some music on the record player, blasting “Car Wash” by Rose Royce, “Boogie On, Reggae Woman” by Stevie Wonder, and our favorite
,
”Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas, as we kids formed a Soul Train line and shuffled across the living room in front of Daddy. We got down with the Funky Chicken and the Robot, anything that would garner praise from our father, who’d cheer us on from the sidelines with “Aw, sooky sooky!” “Look out now!” “You outta sight!” “Get down wit da boogie!”

Afterward we ate dinner, which Daddy declared the best gumbo he’d ever had after each bite. Mama followed up the gumbo with a homemade peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Then she had us clear the table and wash up and told us to go watch TV in her room so she and Daddy could talk in peace. I couldn’t concentrate on TV with my daddy so near, so I sneaked back to the living room and poked my head in. Mama and Daddy were sitting on the couch and Mama was trying to kiss him, but he was pushing her away. He brushed her hands away when she tried to touch him. When he saw me, he stood up and said, “Baby girl! Go get your brother and sisters. I want to kiss them good-bye.”

I ran back with his request. As he held each of us, he promised he’d be back and pick us up to go stay with him. “Would you like that?” he asked. “Yeah!” we trumpeted. Mama stood to the side and watched, smiling in a way that didn’t touch her eyes. Then before Daddy left, I kissed and hugged him one last time for Mama.

A few weeks later, Daddy came back as promised and took my sister Louise and me to spend the whole weekend with him. After picking us up in his sporty new car that smelled like the little pine tree that swung from the rearview mirror, he drove to a nearby neighborhood. “I thought your place was near Lake Merritt, Daddy,” I said, peering at the shabby houses and apartment buildings that were as lackluster as the ones on my block. Surely Daddy didn’t live here. When he pulled up to the curb next to a large gray and white bungalow with an oil-stained and cracked driveway and an anemic lawn, he got out of the car and stuck his head back inside to tell us, “I have to see someone. Wait here for me.” Then he slammed the door and walked up to the house, straightening his shirt sleeves and adjusting his shirt collar. He knocked on the door, it opened, and he disappeared into the shadows of the house, which promptly sealed itself in his wake.

We sat waiting in the car for him for what could not have been more than twenty minutes but in the world of restless children equated to hours and hours of senseless confinement. That’s when my sister dared me to go knock on the door to see what was going on. “We didn’t come to sit cooped up in no hot car! Go tell Daddy we hungry and ready to go.” Anxious to free myself from the car, I slipped out the backseat and approached the house. I could see that there were worn-out Hot Wheels cars and the chewed-on twisted bodies of plastic toy soldiers strewn across the cracked concrete porch. I could hear conversation coming from the house as I stood on the porch but couldn’t make out the words. I tried to take a peek in the front window but the curtains were drawn tight.

After a few minutes of hesitation, I banged on the door and the conversation stopped. I could see there was a peephole in the door and I stood with my hands on my hips looking up at it. Then I heard my daddy say, “Is there a little girl out there?” and then a lady’s voice said, “I don’t see a little girl. Looks like a little boy though.”

Normally I never took offense to people mistaking me for a boy, but this time my face got all hot and my chest tightened. When the door opened and a pretty, slim lady with long braids, wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tight T-shirt answered, I was so angry I told her with my fists planted firmly on my hips, “I ain’t no boy, I’m a girl!” Then I brushed past her and stomped over to my daddy, who was sitting on the couch in the living room. “I came to tell you we tired of waiting out in the car and we hungry.”

The lady and my daddy started laughing, which only made me angrier. “Whew! She feisty, hunh?” the lady said, staring down at me. My daddy grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto his lap. I struggled to keep my feet and my temper, but then Daddy reached for my tickle spot, my neck, and I dissolved in giggles.

“I want you to meet Ann,” Daddy said. “Ann is a friend of mine and I want you to be nice to her.” I gave Ann a look that said,
Don’t count on it.
“I also want you to meet your brother.”
My brother? I already know my brother!
I was about to say when Ann left the room and came back with a little boy about the same age as my little brother. “Lawanna, meet your other brother, Randolph.” Not only was a new brother being sprung on me, he also had the same name and was a damn near carbon copy of the brother I already had. We stood in the middle of the room facing each other. He blinked at me. I blinked at him. “Give her a hug, Randy,” the lady said, as if being confronted with my father’s other family was the most normal thing in the world. When the boy reached out his skinny arms to hug me, I instinctively drew my fist back to punch him in the face, which got him to back off real quick. “Whoa, baby girl! What you doing?” my daddy asked, grabbing me by my cocked arm. “I’m going to wait in the car!” I announced, ripping my arm from his grip and heading out the door.

I never saw the boy or the woman again, although later as a young teen I would learn that I had many more half-siblings. Most were boys and, á la George Foreman, my father would name all of his boys after himself.

There were a few more trips with Daddy in which we spent the evening with him at his glass-and-steel high-rise apartment overlooking Lake Merritt. We knew he shared it with a woman, but this time he had sense enough to ask her not to be around when we were there. When we went out with Daddy in public, women were drawn to him. They laughed and giggled at things he said that were not funny. Stared into his eyes too long, extended conversations well beyond necessary, and their hands somehow found themselves squeezing a bicep or landing on his chest like wayward butterflies. I was proud that women found my daddy attractive, but I did not want to share him with them.

Our love affair with Daddy’s return began to wear for all of us. The rumors of secret families scattered across the city and his increasingly infrequent visits took a toll. Daddy avoided our mother and chose to pop up at our apartment to leave food and clothes for us at very inopportune times. Like on days we were playing hooky from school. Right in the middle of my sisters and I watching daytime soap operas, we’d hear a tapping on the front window and see Daddy peering in at us through a crack in the drapes. We’d scatter like rats on a sinking ship. “I saw you in there! Open the door!” But we knew if we ignored him long enough, he’d go away and then we’d retrieve the items he’d leave by the door.

We began to associate him with being in trouble because eventually his visits became limited to disciplinary encounters. My mother would call him whenever we kids got into trouble beyond the pale. Which didn’t occur often. But when it did, the prospect of being on the receiving end of Daddy’s wrath was nothing to joke about.

•   •   •

I noticed an increase in the amount of whispered conversations between Party members in the fall leading into 1977. The topics of these conversations were obviously Grown Folks’ Business so I had to employ a host of tactics ranging from listening under open windows or, if I was in the room, pretending to be engrossed in a game or book in order to discern what had the adults in my life so agitated. Sometimes I’d blow my cover by openly listening to the adults, at which point they’d stop talking and my mother or another adult would say, “Get out of my mouth!”—a way of telling me to mind my own business. From what I gathered from stolen bits of conversation I hoarded like a pack rat, the Party was under a lot of external and internal stress.

The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), founded in 1967 and designed to identify what it characterized as “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” was in full effect. It initially targeted groups including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Agents were expressly directed to focus on black leaders they labeled “messiahs” to prevent them and their organizations from “gaining respectability,” leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad and Stokely Carmichael.

The Black Panther Party did not make the COINTELPRO list until 1969, when J. Edgar Hoover would make it the program’s main target, with an aim to “disrupt and neutralize.” By July 1969, the Party would become the target of 233 of the total authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions, which would include numerous infiltrations of FBI agents. Many of the actions taken against the BPP were unlawful and strove not to prevent crime but to foment violence and unrest through infiltration and by “intensifying the degree of animosity” between the BPP and other nationalist groups as well as between its members. Some of these tactics included letter forging, unlawful wiretapping and telephone voice impersonations.

These tactics, in conjunction with a growing tolerance within the Party for misuse of funds, extortion, random violence and drug abuse, would lead to its eventual downfall by creating a climate of fear from within and without. The marriage of external attacks and internal power trips also led to a cancerous culture of extreme misogyny, which I witnessed firsthand when the bully who’d chased me up a tree at school turned on my sister Deborah and assaulted her on the playground. This didn’t just happen among students. It was not unheard of for Party women to be coerced into sex and sometimes outright raped by fellow Panthers, and beaten when they lodged complaints. Teenaged girls were a common target as well. With five female children to care for, my mother turned her back on an organization that was created to protect and empower but in the end would leave many of its members traumatized, disillusioned and beholden to a new master that was slowly taking over the bodies and minds of the community: cheap cocaine.

Despite the unrest that was brewing, I never believed we would leave the Party. It was all I knew and had become a strong part of my identity. I took great pride in telling people where I went to school, that my father was a revolutionary prisoner and my comrade was Huey P. Newton. I fully expected to be the fifth person in my family to graduate from the Intercommunal Youth Institute, despite the fact that like my mama, my daddy, upon his release from prison, became less involved in the Party. I believed this right up until the day I was in the middle of math class and the school’s director, Ericka Huggins, stuck her head in the room and beckoned me to join her in the hall.

Like any kid called out of class by the principal, I racked my brain to uncover what trouble I had been up to that would warrant this visit. When I got out in the hall, she informed me I was to go straight home. “Why?” “You can’t come to school here anymore.” Then she handed me a sack lunch and sent me on my way.

Stunned and confused, I walked through the gate to the sidewalk. Then I turned back toward my school, opened the brown paper sack and threw the peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the gate, followed by a boiled egg, an apple and carrot sticks. Then I ran home.