I danced around the small living room to the hits on a local TV dance-party show. As usual, my dreams came mostly from books and television. In particular, Darrin Stephens of Bewitched piqued my interest. His fun job as an advertising professional seemed right up my alley, and like a surprising number of amateurs, I assumed that I could easily write great commercials. By that time, Bill Cosby’s uber-cool character, Scottie, was traveling the world playing tennis and fighting international bad guys on I Spy. I resolved to have a job that involved travel. Marlo Thomas’s character on That Girl, making her way in the big city of New York, where I hoped to live someday, was a female role model. Somewhere along the way, I began to have more positive feelings about the child I would have. I always envisioned my baby as a boy, and I began to talk to him about the life we would make together. I daydreamed the afternoons away, picturing myself and my baby in a cool modern apartment in a metropolis far away. While I still had the occasional self-pitying phone conversation with Ronnie, and sometimes cried myself to sleep at night, the last two months of my pregnancy were mostly a time of calm and reflection.
Nine months pregnant and weighing a whopping 129 pounds, I arrived at Pontiac General Hospital late one Wednesday night, a child about to give birth to a baby. Thirty-seven and a half miserable hours later, I was finally wheeled into delivery. I sucked in the anesthetic as if it were life-giving oxygen. “Take it easy,” the anesthesiologist warned. I ignored her; I didn’t care if the anesthesia killed me, as long as it stopped the pain. On Friday, April 1, while I was unconscious, my son Brian was born. It was quite an April Fool’s Day.
A family friend, the pianist from our church, worked in the hospital nursery. She came out and told my mother, “Deloris, you have a really beautiful grandson.” Mama’s pride was my first inkling that a cute baby could ease the sting of an illegitimate pregnancy. I think Daddy’s plan had been to ignore my infant, but it was an abject failure. The day after I brought the baby home, I began to run a fever as my breasts turned rock-hard and were engorged with milk. Mama took the baby into the living room so that I could get some rest. I was surprised to hear Daddy chuckle as Mama baby-talked to my infant son. By the next day, Daddy was phoning home from work to make sure that the baby was all right. His affection only grew deeper and lasted until the day he died. Daddy’s sister Mabel stopped by with shopping bags full of gowns, diapers, and baby undershirts she had bought at a local department store, a kindness I have never forgotten. Baby gifts poured in from other relatives, and even Les Jeunes Filles sent over a bassinet. For the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel so isolated and alienated from my previous life.
April was a perfect time to have had the baby. I had spring and summer to adjust to the demands of motherhood and plan my return to school. A baby was a lot of work, but I took pride in being a good mother to my infant. I washed and folded baby clothes and diapers, sterilized bottles, and did household chores whenever Brian slept. My grandfather’s eldest sister urged me to breastfeed him, and once I did, I loved the unfamiliar experience. I held my son close and breathed in his sweet baby smell. As he began to respond to the sound of my voice, to look into my eyes and make soft cooing sounds, I fell completely in love with my baby boy. We were alone in the house together all day, and as the touch of my hands and the sound of my voice became the source of his comfort and the answer to his every need, I also clung ferociously to him. He was completely dependent on me and I found in him a love, conditional only on my presence, which filled a need deep in my soul. The closeness of those first intertwined months of Brian’s life has resurfaced again and again and helped carry us through trying, potentially estranging times.
My girlfriends made the trip across town to visit and get a look at Brian. Word of my “pretty” baby, with his handsome features and desirable high-yellow complexion got around. I had expected the baby to be medium brown like myself, but I secretly thanked God that Brian shared soldier Ronnie’s mother’s color.
Then, just as my friend Ruth Ann was preparing for college, she suddenly got married instead. Not surprisingly, the marriage was motivated by an unplanned pregnancy. That situation turned out to be a godsend for me when Ruth Ann volunteered to watch Brian so that I could return to school in the fall. I could hardly believe such a huge problem would be so easily solved, but soon enough I was dropping off the baby at her house and returning to the classroom.
To my surprise, Daddy had expected that I would be going to work, not back to school. I thought he must be crazy if he expected me to be a high school dropout. Predictably, things around the house got tense. One night, after Daddy seemed to want me to simultaneously do the dinner dishes and quiet my squalling baby, things erupted into a screaming argument and I stormed out of the house with Brian and little else. A friend’s mother paid for the cab I took to their home, where I remained for weeks, much to my mother’s dismay.
I was a big fan of my friend’s mother, Shirley B., who had taken me in. Shirley was a tall, fierce black beauty with a big heart, a talent for drama, and a soft spot for slightly dangerous streetwise guys. Shirley, a daddy’s girl from an old Pontiac family, took no stuff from her man or anyone else. She had juice; her dad was in local law enforcement and her brother was a pro football player. When Shirley stepped out the door, with an attitude as sharp as her fur-collared walking suit, the world had better watch out. Living at Shirley’s was a crash course in the power of female sex appeal and the proper exercise of feminine wiles. Shirley was the sort of woman who left exes wondering what had hit them and how they could get back into her good graces. She schooled us girls—with limited success—in how to command the treatment we deserved. Of the guys who came by to visit us, she pointed out which ones were worth our time and which of them were a waste. Even twenty years later, when she met my handsome journalist husband, she gave an approving nod to his looks and social profile, granting him the Shirley B. seal of approval: “Well, it looks like I raised you right.”
While I lived with her, I went on a couple of dates with a guy who, when he came to Shirley’s house, immediately picked up Brian and began to play with him. “Hey, little man! What’s goin’ on?” After he left, Shirley said, “Now that’s a man right there. If you want to know how a man will treat you, watch how he treats kids, and watch how he treats his mama.” Since I wasn’t seriously interested in the guy, I didn’t bother to share that his mother lived with him in a house that he owned.
Life at Shirley’s was exciting and cool, but I had absolutely no money. My mother stopped by regularly with milk and baby food for Brian, but it was clear that if I wanted to be provided for, I would have to apologize to Daddy and move back home, something I was too willful to do. I would never wish on anyone the shame of abject poverty, but I think it must strike most deeply the souls of runaway children who have never provided for themselves. I was accustomed to having a roof over my head because someone loved me, to having nice clothes and trips to the movies and being entitled to raid the refrigerator because someone cared if I was fed. Now that the roof was far from assured and groceries not a given, I also felt bereft of love. Like an underage dark-skinned Blanche DuBois, my fortunes depended on the kindness of people whose generosity was sure to dwindle. When the family I lived with went out for burgers or ice cream, I was wrenched between the longing for a treat and the indignity of not being able to buy myself a twenty-five cent White Castle hamburger or a meager ice-cream cone.
I sometimes pretended not to want anything when my stomach was doing somersaults and my mouth literally watered. Most of the time, Shirley ignored my protestations and bought me whatever she was getting for her own kids, which made me feel like even more of a loser. What was becoming of my life?
The burden of my situation was plainly taking a toll on my mother, who was caught in the middle between Daddy’s and my battling egos. After Mama, fed up with my being a charity case, came and took Brian to her house, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay with Shirley much longer. It was one thing for my friend’s mother to keep an innocent baby out of the street. Adopting a teenage girl was a whole other proposition. Sure enough, when Shirley bought a new house, she advised me to call my mother and work things out. The thought of asking my real father for help never entered my mind. Even now, everything I know of him says that would have been a fool’s demeaning errand. Reluctantly, I returned to Seward Street for my feast of crow. After that, I bit my tongue and got along better with Daddy.
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