The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (6 page)

RELIEF CAME FOR ME
that summer when Uncle Landon came over one evening to ask Mama if she was interested in sending me, Louise and my brother to summer camp in Santa Barbara. Mama was quick to agree and I was excited to get a break from her and Oakland. I didn’t know where Santa Barbara was, but I knew it couldn’t be worse than Oakland.

Landon told Mama the camp was owned by Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden. Both Jane and Tom were supporters of the Black Panthers and friends of Uncle Landon. They’d recently returned from a working trip to Africa. The camp taught theater arts and self-esteem to children of varied races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Jane told my uncle that it would be a good idea for some Panther children to attend the camp. My uncle agreed. That summer my siblings and I were put on a Greyhound bus. It would be my first trip away from home.

Laurel Springs Children’s Camp stood on a hundred and sixty acres in the hills above Santa Barbara. At 2,800 feet above sea level, it offered spectacular views of Los Padres National Forest and the Pacific Ocean.

Before I attended Laurel Springs, I had not known I was poor. I brought a light jacket, one pair of pants, two shirts and a pair of shorts that doubled as a swimsuit when worn with a T-shirt. Toiletries? A bar of Irish Spring soap, a worn-out toothbrush and an afro pick.

I couldn’t believe the stuff coming out of my bunkmates’ suitcases! One girl brought four swimsuits and a fresh pair of undies for every day of the week. (I knew this because the days of the week were printed on the back of each pair.) The other children received care packages from home crammed with food, magazines and books.

When we talked at night around the campfire, I found out many of them had their own rooms
and
bathrooms at home—and they thought about the future, speculating about careers. Would they understand anything about my life? I doubted it. So I put on a happy-go-lucky front, said little about my background and threw myself into theater arts, writing and performing skits with the other kids.

I signed up to try everything that was offered: arts and crafts, canoeing, swimming, hiking, baseball, gardening; but my favorite was theater. I loved getting onstage and becoming someone else. I played a nurse in my very first play. After a performance, the counselors were always very complimentary, as if no other kid in the history of the world could have played a better nurse.

I became close with the head counselor, a woman named Marin. She was a petite brunette who I saw as a maternal figure. We’d become pen pals when the summer ended. The other camp counselors were a ragtag group of hippies who made everything easy and fun. I felt I could mess up without it being seen as a character flaw.

I was devastated when my first summer at Laurel Springs came to an end. We all stood weeping, kids and counselors, in the world’s biggest group hug. Then I reluctantly grabbed my bag, jumped in the van and headed back down the mountain toward my real life back in Oakland.

When I got home I wouldn’t shut up about camp for weeks. My siblings were not as enamored as I was because they chose not to return the next summer. I went on my own. In fact I returned to Laurel Springs for several summers in a row, and I got to know Jane better. Smiley and chatty, she often wore snug sweatpants and a T-shirt baring her toned midriff, her hair bouncing and behaving. She invited me to her cottage for lunch one day and coached me on monologues. She focused on me, taking in everything I said as if it were the most fascinating thing she had ever heard. She hugged me whenever we crossed paths at the camp, held my hand when we walked together, scratched my back when we sat next to each other. This touch, this healthy loving touch, was a revelation.

I got to know her children, who also attended the camp. There was Vanessa, who was my age. She was a spunky girl with a pixie haircut who seemed even as a young girl to know exactly who she was. Then there was Jane’s son, Troy, who was a few years younger than me. He was spider-monkey thin and full of mischief, but he was a kind boy and seemed drawn to me. I enjoyed his company. They were my ready-made summer family and I looked forward to seeing them each year.

•   •   •

School was the closest thing I had to a safe haven outside of Laurel Springs. But it too became dodgy when I entered puberty. I was tall for my age, and to my abject horror I was developing sooner than the other girls. When I started growing breasts, the few girls I called friends singled me out for bullying because of it. On more than one occasion my hall locker was set on fire. The arsonist would squeeze lighter fluid between the air vents in the locker door and follow it up with a lit match. I got into physical fights with the boys, too, who made fun of my developing body. One boy made the mistake of copping a feel in the hall between classes only to find himself gasping for air in a headlock after I wrestled him to the ground. A male teacher also took notice and I had to look out for his groping hands and scanning eyes. I resorted to wearing baggy clothes and a jacket even on the hottest of days to hide the hateful new body that I believed was out to destroy me.

I envied the girls whose bodies remained as curveless as a boy’s. They didn’t have to worry about being betrayed by boobs and hips set on drawing negative attention like a picnic drew ants. My new wiggly parts prevented me from participating in games I loved, like baseball and basketball, because that involved running and jumping. The worst part was feeling that I could not talk to anyone about my problems. Personal problems were not shared in my family, especially if they were related to sex. Having problems that one couldn’t solve on one’s own was a sign of weakness, and I’d learned from an early age not to show weakness. One of the worst things you could be called in my neighborhood was a punk, which was someone incapable of defending themselves.

Mama was drunk nearly every day and I did my best to stay out of her way by heading straight to my room after school or visiting Uncle Landon and Aunt Jan. My remaining sisters looked for more permanent solutions to the problems at home. Teresa was enrolled in college, Louise devised a different plan. When home became unbearable for Louise, she moved out and, in the process, dropped out of school. I didn’t know where she’d gone and pined for her because she was my best friend. About a week after she’d gone, she showed up at school one day and told me she was living in the basement of an empty house. I could see she was quite proud of herself for finding her own place to live even though it was a basement. I was glad to know she was OK and eagerly accepted her invitation to visit her place after school.

I was expecting a dank, dark basement in a run-down, abandoned house but it turned out to be in a newer home that for some reason was empty. The room was dry and had windows that provided natural light. The floor was smooth concrete and she’d managed to furnish it: stacked cinder blocks and a piece of wood with a cloth over it was a table, a few beanbag chairs to sit on, a piece of carpet remnant for the floor and several layers of comforters on the floor for her bed. I was actually jealous of her setup and would have moved in with her, but I was scared of sleeping there at night because she had no electricity. She only lived in the basement for a few weeks, after which she enrolled herself in Job Corps and moved out of state, where she eventually would work for a GED and learn a trade.

I had no plan of escape. It was my summers at Laurel Springs that enabled me to get through the stresses of my life in Oakland. Even when I wasn’t attending camp, just looking forward to camp each summer kept me motivated. I was also staying in contact with Jane and my camp counselors via letters. Their communiqués were always encouraging and I relied heavily on them to keep me feeling good about myself because they were always full of praise. They helped to keep me from internalizing the verbal abuse I was receiving from my mother, who was keen to call me worthless, no good and destined to be a teenaged mother.

It was around this time that my half-sister, Clara Jean, who was my mother’s firstborn by a different father, came into my life. She was raised by my mother’s parents so I never saw much of her when I was a young child. Mama said my father would not accept her when they got married so she left her with her parents in the same little house on Church Street where she met our father, whose family lived next door.

Clara lived in that little house throughout her childhood and the death of our grandmother. She was a young woman in her twenties and taking care of our grandfather, who was called China because when he was a baby he was fat and bald just like the Buddha. China had a lot of health problems. He had diabetes and was paralyzed on one side of his body as the result of a stroke. He was also an amputee, having lost his left leg from the knee down as a complication of his diabetes.

The house they lived in was run-down and Clara Jean was no housekeeper. The place was infested with cockroaches and mice that stayed active throughout the day and night. When Clara Jean entered college, she found it hard to study, have a social life and take care of our grandfather. While I was visiting with them one day, she offered to pay me to spend the evening with China on the weekends so she could go out with friends. I jumped on the opportunity to make a few bucks and get away from Mama.

Though being in that filthy house and taking care of a cranky old man was a challenge (I had to help him go to the toilet, dispense medication, clean and dress his stump and prepare meals), it was far better than what I had to put up with at home. Soon a few weekends a month turned into nearly every day when Clara Jean got a boyfriend and began spending more and more time with him.

A home health aide took care of China during the day and I relieved her after school. I slept on a worn-out couch in the living room that harbored a family of mice. China and I spent the evenings watching TV and bickering over his cigarette smoking, which his doctor forbid him. Though I knew it was bad for him, and for me since I had to breathe his secondhand smoke, I knew he’d keep me up all night banging a cup against the frame of his metal hospital bed if I didn’t get him his smokes.

When summer rolled around, Clara rewarded me for helping her out with China by taking me to see a performance of the musical
Dream Girls.
It was the first play I’d ever seen and it inspired me to think about becoming an actress and using acting as my way out of my mother’s house and even out of Oakland. I’d had a bit of experience acting in plays at Laurel Springs, but I knew I’d need more training if I was going to make it as an actress. When I told Clara that I wanted to act, she offered to enroll me in a class at the Young Conservatory, an acting program for young people between eight and nineteen at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

I was the only black person in the class and initially felt uncomfortable, but the experience I had interacting with other races at Laurel Springs made adjusting easier. Like at Laurel Springs, I was embraced by the class and treated just like everyone else by the teacher—a cheery, openly gay man who used huge sweeping motions with his arms whenever he talked. My secret nickname for him was the Human Fly Swatter.

He selected scenes from Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, about the day-to-day happenings in a small American town in the 1930s, as our first group piece. I found the plot and the dialogue extremely boring. The most exciting things going on in the town were people going off to war and eloping, but nothing happened that I thought worthy of having a whole play written about it.

I thought it would be a much better play if it were set in my neighborhood. The play could open with a slumlord getting shot to death in a drug deal gone wrong. There could also be a scene in which a young teenager was arrested for shoplifting and, after a short scuffle with police, was able to break free and outrun the two overweight officers while being cheered on by neighborhood residents. Now that was a play I could have gotten into! Though I would have liked to share my ideas for spicing up Wilder’s play with the teacher, I kept my thoughts to myself.

I was paired with a boy my age to practice a scene. He was kind of nerdy and reminded me of Danny Bonaduce’s character in
The Partridge Family
, with his flaming red hair and annoying personality. He was a talkative fellow who, were he born a decade or two later, would have been a good candidate for Ritalin. After working with him a few times, I got the feeling he had a crush on me. Because he was so nerdy and I’m sure I could have kicked his ass if I had to, I didn’t feel too threatened by his attentions.

Then one day during a break, he sneaked up behind me and grabbed me playfully by the waist. It startled me, and instinctively I turned around and punched him in the chest hard enough to send him pinwheeling backward a few feet. I was so angry I called him a stupid nigger. I was using “nigger” as a generic term, not to describe a black person but in place of a word like “jerk” or “asshole”; the white folks who saw me gave me the oddest looks. Looks that said to me,
“We thought she was different, but it turns out she’s just like the rest.”

I immediately regretted my overreaction. I apologized to my partner and later apologized to the whole class at the behest of the teacher, but they never looked at me quite the same. I didn’t blame them. I knew I was slowly becoming a product of my surroundings. The constant stress and need to protect myself was causing me to have a short fuse. I was having trouble controlling my temper, which could be set off by the slightest insult, eliciting a very violent response. It was a defense mechanism that was necessary for survival in my hood, but I was learning it would serve me ill anywhere else. If I didn’t get away soon, this side of my personality would spread like cancer and take me over, leaving me unfit to live anywhere but places like East Oakland. When the course ended, Clara Jean offered to pay for another course. I declined.

When the summer came around, I decided not to go to Laurel Springs. I was focusing on getting my acting career off the ground. I was sure that if I worked hard at it, in a few months’ or a year’s time I could claw my way to Broadway or even motion pictures. I spent the summer auditioning for plays in Oakland and San Francisco. The first role I got was a small part in a Langston Hughes play. It was in a tiny theater in Oakland with barely enough seating for thirty people. The stage was about the size of a California king-size mattress. It might as well have been Broadway for how proud I felt.