time hanging out and talking to kids. I was very surprised when Sharon angrily told me that her father had decided that my brother Spurgeon and I would be the only kids allowed in the house while he was not there. Sharon largely ignored his directive; Ritchie and Mary Jane stopped by often to hang out with her, puffing cigarettes and blowing smoke out the windows of Sharon’s bedroom.
Once, Sharon and I spent Thanksgiving night and the following day visiting our mutual relatives and babysitting while the parents worked. We got into a long, rambling conversation about how our race was perceived, which turned into a verbal example of the Stockholm Syndrome, and I blush when I recall the conversation. We tongue-lashed our people like a couple of crackers at a Klan meeting, egging each other on as we recalled loud, unruly public behavior, messy restaurant counters left behind, boisterous classroom behavior, fighting instead of studying in school, and all manner of missing decorum when it came to the behavior of Negroes. If we wanted to be treated better—and I can only hope we used the inclusive term “we”—we would have to learn how to conduct ourselves in polite society, instead of showing the ignorant side of ourselves that was so often on display. Something possessed me to write all this down.
When my cousin’s wife, Sharon’s aunt, came in from work, we proudly shared our dissertation. As proof of the damage racism inflicts on the self, she agreed with us. So did the president of the local youth chapter of the NAACP, who invited us to read our work at the next meeting at the Lakeside Community Center. Sharon was a no-show, but since I had shot off my mouth, my mother made me go. Eleven years old and still wearing lace-trimmed socks with my black patent-leather church pumps, I stepped to the front of the room and proudly read my excoriation of all of us for being the cause of much of the treatment we received from the white world. I sat down to a thunderous ovation that may have been further proof that racism drives people out of their minds.
As the hip organ music of Ray Charles’s “One Mint Julep” signaled the start of the partying that most of the teenage audience had come for, I thought, Wow, Sharon is so stupid. She missed it. Savoring the spotlight and the rare privilege of being present at a teenage social gathering, I watched from the edge of the stage as one of the neighborhood’s best dancers swung his partner onto the dance floor. Whirling past, he shot me a smile that was icing on the cake of my evening as the Lakeside projects’ official social activist smarty-pants. By the time I was twelve, I realized that Sharon, in skipping out on that celebration of self-hatred, had made a wise decision.
My mother’s first meeting with Sharon’s father was so cute that it became a favorite family story. As she was hurrying to her job as a church secretary one morning, Al Munson appeared at his front door and called out to her: “Miss Deloris, can I speak to you for a moment?”
She wondered what we kids had done now that required a neighbor to talk to her. “Can I stop by when I get off work? I’m running late.”
He agreed; she went to work and worried off and on all day about what had happened. She knocked on his door as soon as she came home from work.
He came to the door and quickly started talking: “Thanks for stopping by. Um . . . listen, what I wanted to talk to you about . . . I heard that you broke up with Don.”
Don had been my mother’s boyfriend for a couple of years. He was a decent guy who turned ugly when he drank alcohol. Don was never mean to us kids, but one night after a few drinks, he made the mistake of hitting my mother. He promptly found himself without a girlfriend. My beautiful mother would not lack for replacement suitors, and Al Munson hoped to be one of them.
“I don’t know if you heard, but I broke up with my girlfriend too. I was wondering if maybe we could go out sometime?”
My mother, shivering on the doorstep, said, “Well, maybe you could ask me to step inside. It’s cold out here.” She walked into his living room and he walked into our lives.
The first time I heard my mother call Mr. Munson “honey,” I felt a shock pulse through me. I had answered the phone, so I knew who she was talking to. Mama and Mr. Munson had gone out on a couple of dates by this point. One time, they went to a music club and stopped for Chinese takeout on the way home. This was cool with me; I loved the spicy jumbo shrimp Mama brought home from their date. I was hoping for more dates and exotic leftovers. But “honey”? When did Mr. Munson turn into “honey”?
Before Don, there had certainly been men buzzing around my mother: Emmett, a friend of our Detroit cousins, used to come by. Captain B., an army officer who had been Mama’s teenage boyfriend, took her to the movies while visiting Pontiac one summer, provoking no end to my fantasies about life as the captain’s daughter. The owner of the local record store, whose name I forget, came by one Christmas Eve to personally deliver the console hi-fi my mother had purchased. He brought Ahmad Jamal’s new jazz album as a present and hung around for a holiday eggnog.
Guys hitting on my mother were nothing new. “Honey” was. I was right to think this relationship was different. Mama and Mr. Munson grew closer and their relationship grew more serious. After making dinner and feeding us, Mama would now spend most evenings next door at Mr. Munson’s watching his Zenith remote-controlled television, the first I had ever seen. He began to be included in family gatherings and we started meeting other members of the Munson clan. Increasingly, we traveled in his used but freshly painted black-cherry Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight. If he were around on hot days when the ice cream truck came jingling through the neighborhood, he would give us money for frozen treats, and on cold winter mornings, if we were ready, he would drop us at school on his way to work. Riding in the car, cozy and warm, listening to Jackie Wilson crooning “Lonely Teardrops” or Howlin’ Wolf wailing “Smokestack Lightning” from Mr. Munson’s state-of-the-art mobile record player, I thought that if only he liked Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Smokey, life with Mr. Munson in it would be pretty cool. Later, when he and Mama decided to marry and become a family with four teenagers who had little in common, I changed my mind.
Actually, their wedding was pretty cool. After I had thrown a heroic tantrum, cried myself weak, and made an empty threat to move in with my father—“Go ahead,” was my mother’s knowing response—I accepted the inevitable and hoped for the best. Mama’s maternal grandmother, Allie Williams of West Blocton, Alabama, whom we called Mama Allie, came up for the wedding at my great-grandparents’ house on Houston Street. My mother wore a bright fuchsia two-piece silk sheath dress for the occasion, which scandalized her grandmother. “So, they’re marrying in red, now?” Nevertheless, Mama looked gorgeous and Mr. Munson was beaming.
After the ceremony there was a big family party of my favorite kind, where nobody paid attention to us teenagers and we hopped in and out of family cars that went on seemingly endless trips to the store for more ice, beer, and ginger ale. The highlight of the evening was when we rode with a couple of older cousins to roust their husbands from a local bar. One cousin’s wife, the instigator of the expedition, was a big-boned, outspoken Southern belle from Macon, Georgia. She had a personality as large as the shapely hips that had attracted my cousin in the first place, and was always the source of some manner of outrageous good time. The guy cousins had sought refuge from our too-tame family gathering at the notorious Club 88, steps from the infamous corner of Bagley and Wesson streets where gamblers and bums hung out. We kids didn’t get past the bar’s blue neon sign, but watching my bad-boy cousins make a hasty, shamefaced exit was worth the trip. Their indignant wives chattered all the way back to Houston Street.
“Did you hear Henry trying to say he wasn’t sitting with that cheap floozy?”
“Well, James couldn’t even try that. He was sitting there big as life with his arm around some little hussy.”
Neither of these women was worried about losing her man; they just weren’t about to be disrespected in front of the whole family. For us teenage girls, the incident was a fun sidebar to a memorable evening. No two ways about it, my mother’s wedding was fun. While it lasted.
Maybe Mama and Mr. Munson had been watching too much TV. What was their vision? A perfect family where the motherless kids and the fatherless kids lived happily as one united crew? In fact, my fifteen-year-old brother Spurgeon had become too much the man of the house to accept a father figure whose