Calling Me Home (27 page)

I shook my head and growled low in my throat. “Somebody needed to say it.”

I signaled to get back on the road, feeling paranoia tighten my chest like it always did right after a cop pulled you over, like there was a hidden camera on the car, watching your every move to be sure you were doing it right—even worse when you didn’t fit the system’s ideal picture of a good citizen. And why did I open my mouth just then? No telling. “Only reason that cop didn’t take me to jail was because I had a white woman sitting next to me, Miss Isabelle. I guarantee.”

Miss Isabelle looked at me. All she did was look at me. But her look spoke those words uttered too many times before, by too many people, in too many places:
You people. Always thinking we’re out to get you.

I thought I might lose it again. I knew if I didn’t leave the car, I might do something I’d really regret later. I pulled over, and Miss Isabelle gaped as I grabbed my purse from the console and bolted out, slamming the car door behind me as hard as I could slam the heavy hunk of metal. I walked off along the breakdown lane, dragging my cigarette pack and lighter from my purse as I went. I couldn’t fire up that thing fast enough, and I took a big drag as soon as the flame caught. I threw my purse over my shoulder and kept walking until the Buick’s license plate was a tiny dot behind me. Then I walked some more, replaying those unspoken words over and over in my mind.

When I was a kid, this one security guard worked late afternoons or evenings at the public housing project where my mother and I lived—an off-duty Texarkana police officer who’d grown up in my little town and still lived there. He befriended the kids in the complex—the ones who didn’t already mistrust the cops, who hadn’t already had run-ins with the law for stupid stuff like graffiti on trash bins or keying cars. Or much worse. I liked him. I trusted him. He’d stop me when I trudged back in from school, my backpack dragging at my shoulder. I was always wondering what shape my mother would be in when I walked through the door. Happy and in love? Depressed and asleep? Or cooking dinner for the first time in a week?

“How was school, young lady?” he’d ask. “Got a lot of studying to do today? Your teachers working you hard enough?” He asked questions a parent would, though more often than not these would have been the last thing on my mother’s mind. She was usually concerned with whether I had a plan to meet up with a friend to do homework—not whether I actually
had
homework, but whether I’d be preoccupied so she could go out. Hoping the friend’s mother would offer me supper.

“I’ve always got homework,” I’d say.

He’d nod. “What’s your favorite? I hated science, but I was a whiz at math.”

I groaned. Math was never my specialty. “You’re crazy. I guess I like social studies. I like to learn about how other people live in other places?” I made it a question, then checked his reaction. Most of the men I knew—except the few at school, who were mostly gym teachers or administrators—were my mother’s boyfriends or the other losers who hung around the single women in our complex. They weren’t much interested in me before that year, when suddenly I’d sprouted breasts and curvy hips like my mother’s, and now I mostly wanted to get away from them as fast as I could find an excuse.

But Officer Kevin wasn’t like that. He seemed genuinely interested in what I thought. And I never caught him looking me up and down, judging my chest and hips like I was a berry ripe for picking. “Social studies was fun. Now, when you get to high school and start really learning history, it gets trickier. You have to study hard then. You planning to study hard in high school, Miss Dorrie?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, not in the way I said “Yes, sir” to get the stalker managers at the dollar store off my back—the ones who followed me around, asked if I was doing okay, looked at me as if I already had merchandise stuffed down the back of my jeans. I said it to Officer Kevin like I meant it. Yes, sir, I planned to study hard. Yes, sir, I planned to get the heck out of my hometown at the earliest opportunity. And yes, sir, if studying hard would get me there, I was on it. Like all the other girls in my complex when we were ten, eleven, twelve. Until the boys started playing with our hearts. I’d held out longer than some so far.

Officer Kevin told me once how he was saving the extra money he made doing security to make a down payment on a nicer house for him and his wife and kids. I liked picturing that. They lived over on the white side of town, of course, but the house was just a crummy little starter thing. He had four kids of his own, and I imagined they were spilling out the windows with all their toys and activity. He wanted to build them a nice big place in the country—where they’d have room to play, maybe even a real swimming pool instead of the little molded plastic or blow-up things they bought every summer at Wal-Mart. I kind of wished I’d had one of those, but I didn’t say so out loud. Officer Kevin was nice and I liked that he talked to me—like I was a real person, not a delinquent in training. I suspected he didn’t like whiners.

But then one afternoon, I came home from school, and he was standing next to a local police cruiser. My mom sat in the backseat. I ran to the car, dropping my backpack on the sidewalk.

“See what your so-called friend went and did?” my mother screamed through the window of the police car as I approached. “See what happens when you trust white people?”

Officer Kevin leaned up against the car while the local cop took his statement, his back to me, hands deep in his pockets, like he was embarrassed for me. And maybe for him, too.

Momma kept ranting, and I hushed her. “Momma, please don’t yell.” All the neighbors gawked over their railings. This kind of thing was nothing new around our complex, but she had never been the source of entertainment before. She kept her nose fairly clean when it came to the law, even if she wasn’t the most attentive parent. “What happened?” I asked.

“Officer Kevin, here,” she said, nodding toward the man I thought had been my friend all this time but who now acted like he didn’t even know me, “he called the cops on me—said I was in possession of an illegal substance. I told him it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine, Dorrie. I promise.”

“Marijuana smoke comes drifting from your windows, it’s as good as yours, ma’am,” the local officer said, and my mother snorted through her nose.

“It was my boyfriend’s. What was I going to do? I can’t control what he does.”

“Oh, Momma, I told you not to let him do that in the house.” I wasn’t sure which of them to be angrier with—my mother, for letting another idiot come in our house and do something stupid, or Officer Kevin. Sure, it was his job, but what was I supposed to do if they carted my mom off to jail? How was I going to study hard if I had no idea what was going to happen next? I had visions of foster homes. My mom was probably telling the truth—the pot probably
was
her boyfriend’s. She couldn’t afford it. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d taken a hit off it, too.

And where was that boyfriend now? “Where’s Tyrone?”

“Gone. Lit out not five minutes before Deputy Dog here called the police and they came for me. Wouldn’t be surprised if your Officer Kevin timed it that way. He’s just been looking for a reason to get me in trouble, get me kicked out of this place. He’s been using you to watch me. Trust me.”

I couldn’t believe it. Why had Officer Kevin blown the whistle on my mom, of all people, not even giving her a chance to explain? There was illegal drug activity in our complex every single day, and it wasn’t like my mom was wandering outside in a heroin daze. So maybe she took a little hit of reefer. A rule is a rule, sure, but why
my
mother and not one of the real criminals? Maybe he needed brownie points that day and she was an easy target.

My mother pleaded down to a minor offense. She spent three nights in jail because she couldn’t pay the fine. But we were also booted out of public housing for a year. You couldn’t live on government hospitality with a documented drug problem. Momma had to attend a supervised rehab program, and we had to live with her drunk old pop—my grandfather, though I never really thought of him that way, because there wasn’t much affection wasted between us—in a falling-down shack on the edge of town until we got our eligibility back.

The day she got out of jail, Momma told me Officer Kevin had waited until Tyrone left, then knocked on the door and said he’d trade a little something for not turning her in. She refused and he called the police.

My face burned like fire. My Officer Kevin? The one I’d trusted? The one who’d left me alone when the other creepy men leered at me? The one I’d pictured at home with his nice wife and four cute kids?

I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. But she was my mother. There had to be at least a grain of truth in what she said. I learned this: not to trust someone just because they treated me nice. They were probably waiting like a snake in the grass to strike me down. That was the year I started studying only enough to get by.

So okay, maybe I lied when I said I never judged someone based on the color of their skin. I tried not to—most days, I convinced myself I couldn’t judge a whole race by one person’s actions. But sometimes, something triggered that old memory. It came bubbling up, and suddenly, all I saw was Officer Kevin when I looked at another white face. My heart told me to watch it. My heart told me that white face would go only so far for me. My heart told me I couldn’t trust men or people with white faces.

And now I took all the hurt I’d balled up and hidden in the very back of my heart for so many years and spewed it into a million pieces behind me, at Miss Isabelle, as I walked.

Finally, when my cigarette had burned down to a nub, I headed back. Angry as I still felt, I also felt cruel when I arrived at the car. Miss Isabelle sat there, her face pale, her heart beating so hard, it fluttered her blouse like a little bird hidden beneath the fabric.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I pulled away from the shoulder. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone here. I just needed to get out so I wouldn’t do something stupid.
Say
something stupid.”

“I didn’t think you’d leave me alone. I knew you needed a minute. But why were you so angry with me?”

“You thought I was just saying that, Miss Isabelle. About being guilty just by existing—DWB, you know, driving while black. You have no idea what it’s like sometimes, always living under this cloud of suspicion, someone always ready to string you up for the least little thing, like you just proved what they thought to begin with.”

“I didn’t think that, Dorrie. But you’re right. I don’t know what it’s like. And it makes me sad that in this world we still do this to each other.”

My face burned again, all these years later. I thought back and pictured her look. I’d jumped the gun. Assumed. I was probably right about the cop, but maybe I’d misjudged Miss Isabelle. Maybe I really had.

My shoulders finally began to relax again. We were thirty miles outside the town where we’d eaten, had skirted Louisville on a loop and passed a sign that said it was about a hundred miles to Cincinnati. A little more than an hour and we’d be there.

Except …

A clang and a squeal erupted from the front of the car; then a thumping started up and the steering column started to tremble like an earthquake in my hands.

“Good Lord, what’s that noise? You’d better pull over,” Miss Isabelle said.

I ignored my impulse to throw a sarcastic “Oh, really?” her way. I gingerly steered the car to the shoulder, shut the engine off, sniffed, listened, and watched for smoke or flames to erupt from beneath the hood.

Nothing. At least we weren’t about to explode.

I turned to her. “Now what?”

27

Isabelle, 1940

I
WAS FURIOUS
with my mother—for the obvious reasons, but even more for watching so carefully to see if I was bleeding. I lied about needing the napkins. I carefully counted off days, timing my requests for supplies at the proper intervals. Each time I made a trip to the bathroom I held my breath—certain I’d see what I didn’t want to see—then released it, both joyful and terrified. I wrapped the napkins carefully in toilet tissue, as though they really were soiled with the blood my mother believed would save her.

The road would be perilous when she discovered the truth. But I was ecstatic to have one souvenir of my time with Robert. One tiny piece of him I could cradle in my soul, and eventually—when my abdomen refused to give easily—in my hands. One living, growing reminder that I had once freely loved the man I would carry in my heart always, whether we were ever together again.

Mother informed me my marriage had been annulled. It was easy enough to prove I was underage, didn’t have permission to marry, and came from a place that wouldn’t recognize our marriage anyway.

At first, I felt dead inside at her news. But she couldn’t steal my marriage, even if the paperwork had been destroyed. We’d made our vows. It was enough.

And now I had something else she couldn’t undo. When the baby came, she would send me away. She would have no desire to keep me in her house, no wish to see the daily reminder of her failure. She would turn me out. Then I would find Robert, and we would begin again, this time with the precious product of our union to bind us together.

Eventually, of course, she confronted me. Then the nausea I fought was less from my pregnancy and more from the thought of her examining the contents of the wastepaper basket. I said nothing, waiting, expressionless, for her wrath.

Instead, she left.

Later, they argued in the hallway, their voices hushed, but flowing under my door like oil and water, my mother’s rising, my father’s low.

“You know people who can help us, John. People who will keep things quiet.”

“I won’t do it, Marg. It’s no use beating me over the head.”

“What will we do, then? What about when it’s time for her to deliver? This can’t continue.”

My father paused at the bathroom door and shushed her. The door frame creaked in the same old spot it always creaked, and I pictured him leaning against it, waiting for my mother to leave him to his nighttime ritual. She sighed, and her shoes scraped the floor as she continued to their room, as though she had no inclination to lift her feet in complete steps.