“Willie Son was here. He took them home, he said. He said to tell Aunt Inez he wanted to talk to her and to come home and tend to them if she wants to.”
My mother gave out a shrill cry and collapsed, sobbing, “Bring my babies back. I want my babies! God have mercy and don’t let him hurt my babies. Somebody help me to get my babies back!” She got up and lunged for the door. Some of the men restrained her and told her they were going to my daddy’s house to get us back.
Several possible plans of action were being entertained and debated when Great-Grandmama Laura Mae came out of her room. No one had really noticed when she left the front room to go to her room and get her pistol. She emerged and said, “I’m goin’ to get my great-grandbabies. I’ll be back.” Of course, the rest of the family followed her down the street.
As they approached my old home, everyone could see my daddy standing at the top of the porch looking at them defiantly. He was holding my brother and me, restraining us from running to jump into my mother’s arms.
“Give me my babies,” my mother screamed. “Please don’t hurt my babies. I’ll do anything you want, just let my babies go!”
“I want you to come home and be my wife again, Inez. I love you very much, and I’m sorry for what I did. Cain’t you give me another chance?” Willie Son pleaded.
“You done had plenty enough chance,” Great-Grandmama Laura Mae responded. “I’m not goin’ to let you do to my grandchile what you did before. Let my great-grandbabies come home now. I’m not goin’ to play with you, Willie Son. If’n you don’ let my babies go, Willie Son, I’m goin’ to shoot you.”
“Aw, shut up, you meddlin’ ol’ lady. Why don’t you mind your own business and leave my wife to me?” my daddy said.
“If’n you had treated Inez like a wife, she would still be with you. But you forgot who you were—just a man—and had to attack my baby for some stupid jealousy. I’m not going to stand for it. If’n you don’t let my great-grandbabies go, I’m goin’ to kill you, Willie Son, and I mean it. Let those babies go!” She was furious.
Then Great-Grandmama Laura Mae reached for her pistol and the crowd fell away. She aimed and shot one round that hit my daddy square in his shoulder, and he collapsed on the porch, releasing my brother and me.
Great-Grandmama Laura Mae walked slowly up the steps, her gun pointed at him the whole time. She looked at him and said, “I’m not goin’ kill ya, ’cause you my babies’ daddy, but I want you to know dat if you ever come ’round my house again and messes wid my babies, I’ll kill ya. I’m bound on dat and ya haves my word.”
Great-Grandmama Laura Mae stared at the wounded Willie Son and turned away. She put her pistol back in her bosom and descended the stairs.
A siren could be heard in the distance. Someone had reported the shooting. In just a short while, my daddy would be recuperating in the same hospital as a year ago, looking at the same four walls and asking himself the same question, “Why me, O Lord?”
THE NEXT DAY, GREAT-GRANDMAMA LAURA MAE SENT the men to purchase tickets for the first contingent to take the train to Ohio. That group was to include my mother, my brother, my little sisters, and me. We were to leave immediately. Great-Grandmama would come along later, she said.
In Youngstown, Ohio, the cars were faster, and the noise was louder. There were a lot more people around, and I wasn’t allowed to go out alone. I was enrolled in kindergarten. I didn’t have any friends, nor was I looking for any. At school, they didn’t think I could talk, or at least, not well. I chose to be silent. I had my own world of rules and regulations: success with no failure. In my mind, I spent my time with Granddaddy Saul, singing and minding his cane and letting the world go by. I moved away from the pain I carried from Alabama—the violence and the hurt.
I HAD BEEN SHELTERED ALL MY LIFE AND WARNED TO BE wary of strangers. Now the rules were different. My daddy had been considered a friend, indeed, an intimate family member. He was someone I knew, yet he had proven to be very dangerous. I now had recurring nightmares of my parents fighting. My dreams conjured up the dangerous kitchen knife that my mother used in her fight against my daddy, and gradually it took on a life of its own. The knife would fly through the air, and the rising blood would be everywhere, threatening to drown me. I would wake up in a cold sweat, struggling to breathe. Sometimes my mother would wake me up and sit with me to hold and calm me. She said that I was howling and singing “nonsense songs,” thrashing about. Because of those dreams and memories, even to this day, I’m wary of knives. As a child, I would insist on breaking my food into pieces with my hands, or with a fork, but never with a knife. My mother knew why and didn’t insist. Sometimes she would cut up my food for me. Some people thought she was spoiling me. But she and I both knew that she was making it possible for me to relax and behave in a normal way. When I had to do chores, like cleaning up the kitchen, she would always wash the knives herself. I was in my late teens before I reached a point where I could peel potatoes and cut up vegetables without starting to shake. Today, it would be called PTSD, but back then it had no name—it was just something I had to manage and overcome.
DESPITE MY ROUGH BEGINNINGS, YOUNGSTOWN—A bustling, dirty steel town of 150,000 people—started to feel like home fairly quickly. The streets were a combination of cobblestone and pavement, generally well kept. Streetlights worked, and the garbage was picked up regularly. It was easy to find out which neighborhoods were safe for a black boy at night. I knew exactly which churches welcomed me and my music. Even the movie theaters had a section for black people upstairs and white people downstairs. Though this was supposed to be the North, I learned about racial segregation well above the Mason-Dixon Line. One of the black neighborhoods in Youngstown was called The Bottom, and it went under the Oak Street Bridge as far as the East Side, on past McGuffey Boulevard. If I stayed in those areas, I was safe. We eventually wound up on Meadow Street, which was centrally located in The Bottom. There were lots of other kids to play with and a playground nearby where end-of-summer concerts were hosted. Even at my tender age, I was given a prominent part and sang and danced in all of them.
IF THINGS HAD CONTINUED LIKE THAT, I PROBABLY would have been a very happy preteen, but my mother met and started dating Warren Boswell. His effect on all of us was noticeable immediately. I wish I could say that he was ugly and old, and loud and raucous. He was none of these things. He was an introvert, whose worst qualities came out when he drank too much, which, unfortunately, was too often. He was what you call an ugly drunk. When he was sober, you hardly knew he was in the house, except that he played a harmonica. You could hear it all over the house, gently playing what to me sounded like country and western tunes. He was not a well-educated man, but he took pride in reading the newspaper daily and watching the news on television every evening. Right from the beginning, my mother spent a lot of time doting on him: cooking for him, dressing him, and kissing him.
He was of average height, with black wavy hair and about my complexion. In many ways, he looked just like Daddy. We had such high hopes and expected him to be the presence that our real father never was. But we had one idea, and my mother had another. Looking back, I think she was trying to make up for the loss of my daddy. With him, her dreams had never come true. Maybe she would have a second chance with this man, who eventually became my stepfather.
Before long, my mother announced she was pregnant with my baby sister, Lawanna, and that Warren was going to come and live with us. I was jealous. Nobody had asked me how I felt about him. Nobody had asked me if she should marry him or get pregnant. It was all stated as a fact. I probably would have been fine with the whole thing, but nobody had asked.