My mother hummed and smiled all day. She swept, mopped, went to the grocery store, dusted, baked biscuits, and swept some more. She made us take baths and put on clean clothes while she curled her hair and sprayed perfume and picked out a dress that “put color in her cheeks.”
At the airport that afternoon, Mama stood Gary in one of the airport’s long windows to watch the planes, keeping one hand on his back to make sure he didn’t fall. I rocked up on my toes to see over the ledge.
“There’s one. Look!”
“Hey, there’s another one.”
Each time a plane landed, Mama murmured, “That’s not it. That’s not it.” In between landings she glanced at the crowds rolling down the concourse until she glimpsed a familiar face.
“Wait. There he is. There’s David.”
She pulled Gary from the window and started to tell me to watch him. She was gone before she finished her sentence, moving like a homing device through the throng. I kept my eye on her back for as long as I could, then lost her in the ocean of elbows, chests, shoulders, and hundreds of unfamiliar faces. We stood apart from the crowd until it swelled and widened and engulfed us too. Gary tried to twist his hand free and I tightened my grip.
“Ouch. That hurts.”
I backed us against the wall and we stayed put. Eventually the crowd thinned and there was enough space between the bodies that I could look for my mom.
“Do you see her?”
“Not yet.”
And then I did. My mother and Brother Terrell stood at the top of the concourse, so close they almost touched. She looked up at him and they began to walk toward us. The closer they came, the more awkward I felt. To see them together like that, without Pam or Betty Ann or Randall or even the baby around, was odd, a bit like coming upon the tent in someone’s living room. Out of context, out of place, wrong. Gary must have felt it, too, because by the time they reached us, neither of us could think of a thing to say. Mama asked us if we were going to say hello. We didn’t answer.
“I brought y’all something.” Brother Terrell reached into a bag and pulled out a pilot’s cap with wings pinned to the front for Gary and a purse for me. I looked inside the purse and asked about Pam and Randall.
He stuck both hands in his pockets and shifted from side to side. “They couldn’t come this time. Maybe next time.”
“Okay. Just wondering.” I slipped the purse over my shoulder and Gary slapped on his cap and we ran ahead of the grown-ups.
That night when my mother tucked us in, I asked the question that had nagged at me all through dinner: Where would Brother Terrell sleep?
“Right there on the couch. Why?”
I couldn’t think of a single reason why I had asked the question or why I did not quite believe her answer.
I tiptoed into the living room the next morning before anyone was awake, determined to find out what was going on. There was Brother Terrell, curled up on the couch with the pillow over his head and the blanket pulled and twisted around him. He was there every night when I went to bed and every morning when I woke up. That arrangement began to shift as his visits became more regular. I often stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water late at night to find only a blanket and a pillow on the couch. When I asked my mother where Brother Terrell went at night, she said he was probably walking around outside praying, like he did at the tent. I almost believed her until she introduced him to our neighbor Nila as her brother, her
real
brother. It wasn’t a lie, she explained, because she had a brother named Dave, after all. And by the way, it would be better if we called Brother Terrell Uncle David in front of the neighbors.
“Why?”
“It just would. Don’t back-talk.”
It worked out okay, until Gary and I slipped and called him Brother Terrell in front of Nila from time to time. She cocked her head and looked at us funny. We kept playing and pretended not to notice. We also pretended not to notice when Brother Terrell/Uncle David eventually went missing from the couch altogether and reappeared from our mother’s bedroom in the mornings.
Whenever Brother Terrell left, Mama moved through the house like a ghost. Her sighs were long and labored, and her face was vacant. She didn’t talk unless we asked her a question, and sometimes even then she forgot to answer. It took a few days for her to find her way back to us. First Nila would come through the hedge that separated our houses to tell Mama she had a call from her brother. (We didn’t have a phone.) It was always Brother Terrell, of course. These calls had a positive effect on my mother. Afterward, she stumbled into our room and told us we were going to Big Boy’s for burgers and shakes. Everything was on its way back to our version of normal.
I don’t know how long the three of us lived in Houston. My mother’s memory is vague and my brother prefers to forget rather than to remember, so I am on my own when reconstructing this period of our past. My best estimate is three months. Despite my initial resistance to happiness, the end of it took me by surprise.
A plague of dead crickets littered the porches and sidewalks of our neighborhood and the sun flattened everything with its white light. Gary and I had just taken our place at the picture window to watch the smallest and most unremarkable of planes make their way across a washed-out sky. We were just tuning up for the I’m-bored chorus when two black women glided up the cracked sidewalk to our house. They shimmered in the heat and humidity of the Houston summer, a mirage of leopard-skin pillbox hats and matching fur stoles. They pulled something big behind them, a console TV that sat high on a primitive wooden sled. There was something of the ancient caravan in their slow, rhythmic progress. They didn’t stress or strain or stop to wipe a brow. Gary and I watched, arms and legs swimming against the glass. The women parked the TV at the bottom of our porch and climbed the steps.
“Mama, Mama, come quick.”
Our mother opened the door before they could knock and there stood Rita, a long, inky black line, and Queenie, round as a butterscotch with skin the color to match.
“Mrs. Johnson? We talked to you on the phone t’other day, about your ad? These must be the children.”
Cars slowed to a crawl as they passed our house that day and the long, white-stemmed necks in them turned like lazy Susans. It was 1963 and people of color did not live in, work in, or visit our bluecollar, all-white neighborhood. We should have seen those cars as a sign, a warning of what was to come, but Gary and I were too young to parse their meaning and our mother too naïve or too desperate to figure out what must have been common knowledge for most people.
We were not blind to Queenie’s and Rita’s skin color, but it surprised my brother and me far less than their leopard spots and television. I had sat with black women under the tent, hugged their necks, and draped white cotton cloths over their stout legs when they fell out in the spirit after a long shout. But those were holiness women, and they dressed like the white holiness women we knew. Plain, shapeless dresses. Dull, flat shoes chosen because they were on sale and good for navigating the uneven ground under the tent. Queenie and Rita were a different species. From their furs to their candy-colored lips (how did they get so red?) and the scent of Topaz and stale smoke that followed them into our house, they reeked glamour, youth, and sensuality. But even they could not compete with the lure of their television. Gary and I fidgeted our way through introductions, anxious to slip past the women and ponder the big box of sin left at the bottom of our steps.
Mama called TV “hellevision” and said she wouldn’t have one in her house, which worked out well since we usually did not have a house. Brother Terrell had said television was a tool of the devil, another way the world would seduce us.
“First, you need Walter Cronkite to tell you what’s going on in the world. Next thing you know you’re missing church to watch
Bonanza
and Ed Sullivan. If God spoke to you, you couldn’t hear him. You’re too busy watching television.”
He must have been right, because when Gary and I played in our neighbor Nila’s living room, we could not take our eyes off her TV. Furtive glances lengthened into glazed stares, and when the other kids wandered outside to play, we stayed put, hypnotized by flickering images of the Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Hercules.
While Queenie and Rita sat inside drinking iced tea with our mother, we perched on the porch steps for what seemed an eternity, trying to figure out what it meant to have a TV right outside our door.
Please, God. We’ll say our prayers and think of you all of the time—okay, most of the time. Please. Let the TV stay.
For once my prayer was answered. Mama came out and told me to cut through the hedge to Nila’s house and ask her husband to help us get the TV up the steps and into the house.
I took off running.
The adults moved the TV inside, Nila’s husband on one end, Mama and Rita on the other, and situated it catty-cornered to the picture window. Mama asked everyone to stay for dinner, but Nila had already cooked and Queenie and Rita said they needed to go. They had so much to do before they came back for good. My head snapped in their direction.
“What do you mean, for good?”
“Your mama will tell you, honey. Bye, you all.”
The door closed and my mouth opened in a long, dry wail.
“Why are they coming back? Are you leaving?”
“Kids, I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Come sit on the couch with me.”
Gary crawled on the couch. I kept my distance.
“I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too, but there are people who have never heard of Jesus. I’m going to travel with Brother Terrell and help him tell the world about Christ.”
I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to help anyone. I don’t want to hear anything you say.” I ran into my room and crawled under my bed.
Mama followed me and sat on the bed. Her voice rose and fell and rose and fell, saying all the things I already knew about Jesus and God and sacrifice. I couldn’t bear to hear her talk. I wanted her to go, just go. My brother bawled like a baby calf in the living room. I would have felt better if I could have cried, but I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear. The bed creaked and I watched the back of her heels shuffle away. I slid out from under the bed and headed for the front door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother and mother sitting on the couch. She held him in her lap and rocked him like a baby.
“Donna? Donna?”
The crack in her voice made me want to turn around, but I slammed through the door and headed to the brown, crunchy field across the street. Just a few weeks earlier, the tall green thicket of leafy weeds provided a jungle in which we played for hours. Now it was a bunch of tall sticks with a few gray leaves twirling in the hot wind. I picked up a long stick and began to walk and slash the dried stalks around me. With every step I repeated the same phrase: “I will never forget this.”
Gary cried every night after our mother left and refused to eat much for weeks. He looked like a baby bird: big head, big eyes, bony little body. I busied myself practicing my letters and learning to read short, simple words. I wanted to be ready when I started first grade that fall. I took all my shots without crying. Then at the last minute, Queenie and Rita found out that because my birthday fell too late in the month of September, I would have to wait until the next year to start school.
I busied myself again, this time stealing candy from the store and change from Nila’s counter. When Queenie and Rita asked me about the money, I told them I had found it in the yard. They believed me the first time, but the second time, they marched me through the hedge and made me give the money back. Nila said we were still friends, but I stopped going to her house to play.
With the other kids in school, Gary and I spent most of our days indoors watching Queenie and Rita’s television. We stared at soap operas all day and Ed Sullivan and
Bonanza
on Sundays, just as Brother Terrell had predicted. We fell asleep in the living room almost every night watching newsreels and old movies and anything else that moved across the screen. Cigarette butts piled up in bowls. Lipsticks, bottles of nail polish, and plates of old food covered the end tables and the TV trays. I often woke early, poured myself a bowl of cereal, and turned the channel knob until I found a cartoon. On mornings when there was no milk, I took bills from Queenie’s wallet and went to the nearby store. One morning as I handed a carton of milk and a fistful of money to my favorite cashier, a man I had nicknamed Mr. Whipple, he said something that shocked me.
“Honey, you need to go home and tell someone to put some clothes on you.”
His voice was stern, but his eyes were traced with something that looked like sadness, only different. In that moment, I saw myself as he saw me: a skinny, dirty kid in baggy white cotton panties and nothing else. He said something else to me, but his words sounded thick and muffled. I stood there caught, not knowing what to do or say. Finally, a hand reached across the counter with my change. I took it and ran from the store. On my way home I played step-on-a-crack, breakyour-mother’s-back, and stepped on every crack I could.
Life flickered between triumph and tragedy that fall. News reports showed thousands of people, black and white, marching to Washington, DC, to hear about Doctor King’s dream. When he spoke, the crowd went quiet and Queenie and Rita wept. Everyone locked arms and sang together and I was reminded of the revivals. I told Queenie and Rita about how blacks and whites sat together under the tent and how the Klan had beaten Brother Terrell. Less than a month later, four young black girls were killed in a Sunday-school bombing in Birmingham.
“
In church
, they killed them in church,” Rita said. Two other people were killed in the riots that followed. The stations replayed scenes filmed just a few months earlier of Bull Connor turning fire hoses and dogs—
dogs—
on black kids. I worried about my mother and all the people who traveled with the tent, but the hatred and violence we saw on TV was much closer at hand.