P.S. Be Eleven (3 page)

Traffic on the Belt Parkway kept us in Queens longer than Pa had planned. The drive to Brooklyn seemed to go better if no one spoke. We all took the hint, including Big Ma, but we were all thinking about something.

A white woman had spoken to Big Ma about me. I resigned myself to seeing lightning in the whipping of a lifetime. A whipping that would outdo my last whipping at age nine for letting Vonetta and Fern get into the grape jelly. They dropped and broke the glass jar and had grape jelly and glass everywhere, when I should have been watching them.

At least the short brunette stewardess didn't show up to report how we ran away from her.

The Wildcat crouched, leapt, then sat along the Belt Parkway in spurts. Silence had given way to yawning, and then Big Ma, Vonetta, and Fern napped. They slept hard and didn't stir when the quiet got broken up by the Temptations. Not the singers in matching suits, spinning and
snapping fingers into one loud pop from the radio. Just one of the Temptations' tunes whistling clear-water cool through Pa's lips. I heard all the words and instruments, complete with stereo highs and bass lows to “My Girl,” fluting out of his long but happy face.

I felt like a thief trying to steal a good look at my father's face through the rearview mirror. He caught me and winked. For a second it was like having Uncle Darnell with me. Uncle D. Always happy, singing, and still doing the Watusi when that dance had been long gone.

I shuddered as a picture flashed before me. Would my father pick up dancing? The last thing I wanted was a father who danced and carried on like he was fresh out of high school.

As soon as that shudder passed, another overtook it. The gymnasium in June. The sixth-grade dance. The happening no sixth grader could avoid, unless her parents forbade her to go. That wasn't likely. All the PTA mothers
looked forward to sewing dresses, teaching their sons to do the box step, and giving assemblies on how sixth graders are expected to behave at the dance. For us it meant bowing. Curtsying. Dancing boy-girl with hands touching. Sweaty, cookie-crumby hands. I shuddered.

For me, the sixth-grade dance meant trying to match steps with boys I'd slugged. Boys I'd said “Your mama” to in the school yard because they'd said it to me first in a battle of the Dozens. For me, and me alone, it meant waiting to be asked to dance when no one would ask because they'd have to look
way
up at me and now I was even taller than when I'd left for Oakland.

I surely didn't want to be the girl no one asked to dance. I didn't want to be the girl who swayed by the punch bowl and cookie table, pretending to enjoy watching everyone else dance. I didn't want to be Miss Merriam Webster's definition of a sixth-grade wallflower.

Those thoughts and pictures kept flashing before me.

Then Big Ma snorted. I remembered where I was. Sitting in the backseat of the Wildcat, awaiting a whipping. Only then did the pictures of the sixth-grade dance cloud and fade. June was far, far away.

Driving down Atlantic Avenue was almost as good as being home. When I was younger than Fern, I worried the Atlantic Avenue El train above us would come crashing down—trains, tracks, and all. Now I looked up and saw
steel as strong as it was old. I heard and saw the sturdy old El, the train shooting across Brooklyn. The sounds above felt familiar. A few sparks jumped out beneath the train as it roared and rumbled overhead, and I made a wish on those lucky train sparks.

We were back in Bed-Stuy. The redbrick armory stood in the distance on Bedford and Atlantic Avenues like a fortress, or as Uncle Darnell would tell us, like a princess's castle. The Wildcat turned down Schenectady and again on Herkimer Street. It all looked good and welcoming. St. John's Hospital, Friendship Baptist, our elementary school, the big old softball stadium. We passed by the People's Bank—which was nothing at all like the People's Center in Oakland. We passed by burned-out buildings and weedy, littered vacant lots. Although the neighborhood begged for
Change, Positive Change
on every other election billboard after the riots, I was glad to find everything where we had left it. Even neighbors sat on their stoops as if they hadn't moved since we had gone.

Herkimer Street. Good old Herkimer Street. I was glad to be home, but I dreaded it all the same. Big Ma wasn't the kind to fall back on a promise, and she had promised me a whipping. I'd have to yelp and cry to satisfy Big Ma that I had learned my lesson. Worst of all, I'd have to put up with Vonetta's and Fern's teasing afterward. Maybe there'd still be some Oakland left in us, and my sisters
would show me some solidarity, like when they gathered around me and Fern held my hand at the airport.

Pa stopped whistling “My Girl.” We pulled into our driveway, and when Pa hit the brakes, the Wildcat lurched forward sharply enough to wake the nappers. Among rows of brown-brick homes, all standing together like gingerbread houses surrounded by black, spiked, iron fencing, I knew our house was odd. Not odd in the way Cecile's green, prickly stucco house was odd in Oakland. Our house was odd because the gingerbread houses stood in their own brown-brick solidarity, and our house stood apart, made from brick, stone, and siding. Whatever Pa could turn into a house. With Uncle D's help, he'd nearly built it from scratch. If anything broke down or needed fixing, he'd sigh and talk about the house like it was some old soul he'd been knowing over the years. He'd tell me how he was barely twenty and could have bought a two-year-old Thunderbird that ran like the wind, but ended up getting the lot with the burned-out frame of a house at the city auction. He'd tell me—but not Vonetta and Fern—“I was thinking of you and your sisters before I knew you'd be born.”

When we got the suitcases in the house, Pa put his arms around Big Ma and spoke low in her ear. She pushed him away, saying, “This is the ruin of all things.”

Pa, who had been sweet, became firm and said, “Ma.
Not on their first day home.”

“Ruin,” Big Ma said, although clearly Pa had won. Big Ma creaked along into the recesses of the house. She peeled off her hat and wig as she went. “Spare not. Spoil not.”

“Beat not,” Vonetta said as soon as Big Ma was safely out of earshot.

“Surely not.”

“We should let Cecile know we're here,” I said.

“Back in Brooklyn,” Vonetta said.

“On Herkimer Street,” Fern said.

“Too bad she doesn't have a phone,” I reminded my sisters.

“Or a television,” Fern said.

“Or a deluxe stereo like ours, with a record player,” Vonetta said. “Too, too bad.”

Then it came to me, and I rapped my knuckles on top of the largest suitcase. “We've got something.” I pushed open the suitcase latches while the two of them bounced on Fern's bed and asked, “What? What?” I made a mess of our folded summer clothes until I found it. A Chinatown
postcard of a parade dragon from our San Francisco excursion. “We can drop it in the mailbox.”

“But that's our souvenir,” Vonetta protested.

“For show-and-tell.”

Vonetta's arms folded. “We don't want to send it.”

Fern also folded her arms. “Surely don't.”

I didn't entirely blame them. Cecile didn't wrap her arms around us when we first arrived, but when we hugged her good-bye, she hugged us back like she didn't want to let go. That was reason enough to send her our only souvenir, whether Vonetta and Fern liked it or not.

“She'll worry about us,” I told them.

“She will not,” Vonetta said.

“Yes, she will,” Fern decided, and that was all I needed. To have one sister on my side. I would've sent the postcard anyway, but things went better when both thought they had an equal say.

“You know she'll worry,” I told Vonetta. Truthfully I
hoped
she'd worry about us. With Cecile, you just didn't know for sure.

Vonetta gave in.

“Before we send it,” I said, “we should work out what we're going to write. How about, ‘Dear Cecile . . .'” I left room for my sisters to join in.

“No,” Vonetta said, cutting off our rat-a-tat-tat flow before we could get it going. “We should start it with, ‘Dear Mom.'”

Fern went, “P-tooey, p-tooey, p-tooey.”

I agreed with Fern's fake spitting. Cecile was our mother but she wasn't a “Mom” or “Mommy.” She wasn't even a “Ma” or “Mama.”

“Okay, okay.” Vonetta was hurt by our rejection but deep down she knew Cecile wouldn't like that “Mom” stuff. “Mom” was a TV mom, and Cecile wasn't like any mom on television.

Vonetta cleared her throat as if she were onstage at the Black Panther rally. “How about ‘Dear Sister Nzila'? Yeah! ‘Dear Sister Nzila, Poet of . . .'”

“The people! The people,” Fern cried. “‘Dear Sister Nzila, poet
to
the people.'”

“That's good!” Vonetta said. “
Poet
to the people instead of
power
to the people.”

Vonetta and Fern were back in the flow of things, but I refused to write. My best handwriting was fine but large lettered. I'd never fit all of their Heckle and Jeckling on the back of our small postcard.

“Equal say” hit a pothole. How could “equal say” work when there were three of us and one small postcard? So I did what I always do. I took over.

“She knows who she is,” I said in Papa's firm voice. “Instead we'll write, ‘Dear Cecile,' because that's what we call her. ‘We're back in Brooklyn, safe and sound on Herkimer Street. Sincerely, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern.' That says it all and there's enough room for her
address and our return address.”

“Boring,” Vonetta said, adding a yawn to make her point. “It should be, ‘We're back in Brooklyn, safe and sound . . .”

“Not in the lost-and-found,” Fern added.

Heckle rolled her eyes and shook her head. “It's ‘safe and sound on the ground.'”

Then it was Jeckle's turn to yawn and say, “Boring. ‘Lost-and-found' is better than ‘safe and sound.'” Ever since the Black Panther rally, Fern was becoming a regular wordster, finding rhymes and soundalikes every chance she got. Miss Merriam Webster would have been proud.

“We weren't lost,” Vonetta argued.

“But Big Ma found us.”

“Nuh-unh. We found her. Then Delphine knocked the white man down.”

“I didn't knock that man down,” I said. “I bumped into him by accident, and his newspaper flew out of his hands.”

Fern's eyes became big. “We should say, ‘and Big Ma slapped Delphine.'”

“No, we shouldn't,” I said.

“We surely should,” Fern said.

Finally, we agreed to keep our postcard to our mother simple. No rhyming. No telling about the white man and his newspaper in the airport. No telling our scary, crazy mother about Big Ma's quick right hand. And to myself I
said, No telling about finding a brand-new Pa who whistled Temptations songs and smelled like a Christmas tree. Heckle and Jeckle hadn't noticed anything new about Pa. They were just glad to sugar him up.

I wrote:

I made the mistake of handing over the pen to let them sign their own names. Vonetta wrote as large as she could, then Fern decided to go back to “Little Girl,” the name she wouldn't answer to in Oakland. Jeckle thought that was funny.

We raced to the mailbox, although it wasn't much of a contest. I came in first, long-legged as I am, and Vonetta second. She kangaroo-hopped and waved her fists above her head like she had won a prize fight. Vonetta and I waited for Fern, who held the postcard. I'd put it in her hand for that reason. We couldn't do a thing without that postcard. All this to soothe Fern's wounded feelings from always coming in dead last. She panted hard when she reached us.

“Let me put it in,” Vonetta said.

“No,” Fern said between gulps of air. “I'm the mail carrier, so I get to put it in the mailbox.”

“But I beat you to the mailbox.”

I swiped the postcard clean from Fern's hand and gave it to Vonetta. Fern balled her fist and socked me, and I said, “Ow,” just to say “ow.” Vonetta dropped the postcard into the mailbox, then hopped and danced until Fern yelled, “Quit it!” I'm usually good at staying one step ahead of a major squabble, but my sisters seemed to have gotten better at keeping things stirred up between them.

We started back to our house in time to see Pa shuffling down the steps—and Papa's no shuffler. Vonetta and Fern ran to him like nipping puppies. I lagged behind.

“Where you going, Pa?”

“Yeah, Papa. Where?”

Pa gave both a pat on the head and said, “Out.”

“Out where?” Fern asked. Only Fern could get away with tugging on Pa like that, although I also wanted to know. We had been gone from him for so long. Why was he leaving us?

This was the part where Pa was supposed to scold Fern for getting into grown folk's business. Instead, he let out a sigh and said, “Sit down, girls. Sit here on this stoop.”

We sat. Each of us folded our hands in our laps, eager for whatever he was going to tell us. It was a treat to see our father on a weekday with the sun still shining. Even though we all lived under the same roof, we treasured every minute spent with Papa.

“My darling daughters,” he began as if he were running for president. But that was all he said.

I was used to my father's quiet ways. He was as quiet as Vonetta was chatty. When he needed to say something he'd pour it out as warm as tap water. He sometimes spoke in stories when I sat with him late in the night as he ate his supper. I loved my times with Papa more than I loved the stories he told. Truth be told, Uncle Darnell was the real storyteller.