Black Girls Must Die Exhausted: A Novel for Grown Ups Read online

  I last lived here, in View Park, with my parents. It was a neighborhood of black professionals set off on the southwest side of Los Angeles. We weren’t living large, but we were living “black folks” fancy. This wasn’t all the way ritzy, like the really rich entertainment-types in Bel Air and Malibu, but was especially comfortable. I remember that. Even more than the LA mega-mansions and the Hollywood Hills contemporary showplaces, these were still the kinds of homes I dreamed about most often. Most were ranch layouts, of varying sizes from small to spread out as far as what seemed like a full block. Lawns were always immaculately manicured and palm trees lined most of the streets, some of which gave the perfect view all the way to downtown. We owned our own home with a palm tree and a lemon tree out front, and I had my own room. I hated the color, but my mother picked out what it was supposed to be—a pale sickening pink “for princesses.” I thought it looked like Pepto Bismol. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a princess growing up—sometimes, I thought of myself as a teacher, or a doctor, someone with a career—who put both feet on the ground every morning, got dressed, and fought her own battles. My mom learned her fairytales from her mother and Walt Disney, but I learned mine from Oprah on TV.

  Back then, my friends and my school were all within walking distance and so in the evenings, with just a short walk and no bus ride, I was able to get my homework done quickly and get to indulging one of my favorite hobbies. I was probably a little too old for it then, but I still absolutely loved to play with my collection of Barbie dolls. Their pink world, I didn’t mind. Pink just was never the right color for my reality. For those dolls, I had everything, the dream house, the Corvette, you name it. With them, and their pink, anything was possible from one day to the next. I used their thin Barbie bodies to make my own role models who lived the way I wanted to, with their own cars and their own houses that could be decorated as they saw fit. It was a space that I could control amidst the perfectly organized, designed and implemented perfection that surrounded me in every other aspect of our lives as a family. My mother married my father almost directly after college, and as far as I knew, her career focus was my dad, building a perfect life for him and playing the role that she had always believed that she was best suited for—a beautiful, supportive homemaker, and eventually, mother.

  On our very last evening as a family, the 9 year old me played in my fantasies, sitting on the floor in clothes still wrinkled and dirty from school recess. I was startled in a moment by what sounded like a roiling piecing wail from my mother coming from the kitchen. I had heard the back door close and thought nothing of it because it was the time that my dad usually came home. Or, the time that he used to return, before he started spending nights away on work trips that had been coming up with increasing frequency. Scared for my mother, I rushed into the kitchen to see her sitting at the table with her head in her hands and my dad standing near the door with his jacket over his arm and the strangest look on his face. They seemed lost in their own moment—my mother sobbing and my father standing there, until they finally noticed me when I managed to get some kind of sound out of my mouth.

  “Wha…what’s wrong, Mommy?” I asked. My mother, upon hearing my small voice, took in a sharp breath. I think that she had forgotten that I was in the house. She turned and looked at me—the memory of her usually immaculate makeup running down her eyes today would make me think of a Picasso painting or some real-life version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her glistening eyes searched for and found mine and she said in a frighteningly serious tone, “Your father is leaving us for his other family.” And there it was, as she turned back to sobbing, this time collapsing in heaves on the table.

  “Oh my God Jeanie, I can’t believe that you would say that to her!” my dad shrieked, throwing his briefcase against the kitchen floor. I stood still like a prey animal while my immature mind processed what I had heard. What? My dad, leaving? What other family? Leaving? Where’s he going?

  “Daddy, you’re leaving?” was all I could muster as an echo of what I heard. “When?” I started to cry-talk, questioning with escalating panic and heightening tone. My father came over to me, kneeled down and looked me in my eyes.

  “I’ll never leave you Tabby. There’s some things your mother and I need to discuss. Can you go to your room and I’ll come see you in a bit? I promise I won’t leave. I promise. Ok?” Something about his reassurance bought a temporary calm that allowed me to break from the sight of my sobbing mother and walk back into my room and close the door. I didn’t want to hear any more of whatever that was going on in the kitchen. I tried to resume my scene—my blond Barbie had been teaching her friends about something that we had learned in school that week—but, suddenly those dolls didn’t seem that interesting anymore. In that instant, their world felt as fake and plastic as their slippery rubber legs. I put them away and tried to keep to my routine, washing up, putting on my night clothes and eventually getting into my bed. I laid on my back, with my hands folded across the top of my entirely flat chest, staring at the ceiling, waiting who knows how long until my door eventually opened, and my dad came in. He walked across my pink shag carpeting to my princess pink bed and finally sat on the edge. It was that conversation that turned that day into my very first “D” day—I learned that there was a Diane and that there would be a divorce and that my dad was eventually not going to be living with my mother and I anymore. So indeed, there was another “D” discovered on that day, deception.

  The concept of an “affair,” and the fact that my dad had had one was something I’d learn on a different night—one of the many to follow that my mother sought comfort in the glass after glass of wine that loosened her lips to release the truths I would have rather not known. My mother spoke not one word of it, and neither did my father, but when I finally did meet her, and laid my own eyes on her face smiling to excess, white teeth, rose-colored lips, brown hair and bright blue eyes, it was only then that I realized that Diane was white. It was the stereotypical insult added to injury for my mother. An actual white woman was something that she could imitate, but never be.

  The betrayal of Diane was further stinging to my mother because my father’s mother, my grandmother, the other and original Tabitha Abigail Walker, was also white. When my mother and father got married, my mother was under the impression that she would be my father’s choice for his adult life. And not that there was any friction between my mother and my grandmother, but, until I was born, Granny Tab was the only other woman in the world that my mother had ever had to compete with for my father’s attention. When I was younger, I remember Granny Tab’s bright blue eyes and her box-dye brown hair that always bopped just above her shoulders as the perfect bob, and her schoolteacher glasses that sometimes hung on a metal chain around her neck and sometimes perched on the end of her thin English ski slope nose. She spent her career as a teacher in the LA Unified School District and retired while I was in middle school. It was really Granny Tab who taught me how to read, to write my name in cursive and helped me not fail Algebra. Growing up, I never used to think of my grandmother as “white,” really. She was just my Granny Tab, and “hey Mrs. Walker!” to the rainbow of kids in her classroom when I visited. I knew that she was from West Virginia, but she didn’t talk about it much, and we didn’t spend any time with her side of the family. From my understanding, things didn’t go over so well when she married my grandfather, but my grandfather wasn’t someone we talked about much either. All I knew about him was that he was a black man from the same town as Granny Tab; they were married and then they divorced when my dad was little, only for him to disappear shortly after. Sometimes I wondered what could have happened to make someone as warm as Granny Tab turn away and never look back. Those thoughts never lasted long because she radiated enough love on her own to make up for all the missing folks from her side. So, for her, “family” was the family she chose, the family she made (minus the family she unmade), and the family my dad made af
ter that. Up until Diane, my dad’s end of things was mostly black—my mom, and me. He and my mother met at Howard University for goodness sake.

  Even with a white grandmother, “whiteness” never played any role in my identity. As far as I was concerned, there was no difference between what my dad was and what my mom was, and by extension, no difference between either of them, and me. Thinking about it, I suppose she could have, but Granny Tab never “wore” her whiteness as if it were a badge or some kind of cape, or default setting relative to my “blackness” or “brownness” so to speak. She just simply was, and I was, and together, we all just were. I would have never dared utter the words “mixed” or “bi-racial” if someone asked me my cultural, racial or ethnic identity. And that wouldn’t be because I was making some kind of political statement or a choice of one thing over another. It just would be most accurate to say that it never occurred to me that I had a choice of it at all. Only on thankfully rare occasions would I ever have to take into account that my grandmother and I were in any way different, because to me, ever since I was a little girl, she had always been my much older “twin,” my adult best friend, and the reason that I was proud to be named Tabitha Walker. But once the Diane thing happened, all kinds of lines that had never existed before started to pencil themselves into our lives and all kinds of questions that we’d never thought to ask needed answers.

  With all this upheaval in my childhood, I guess I started brewing my own version of an innocent and loving revenge. It happened unintentionally, almost like the slow seeping of Granny Tab’s summertime “sun tea.” It’s just what happened to the development of my thoughts after my dad’s wedding to his former mistress. It was unpleasantness I never liked to think of, the truth of him leaving my mother and me for his “other” family that grew its own roots in my mind, eventually grafting itself onto other thoughts of insecurity that teenagers develop, making ugly knotty turns. Eventually, those thoughts grew new vines and branches until it became my mind’s interpretation and conclusion that this new family was his “better” family, one that he chose over the one filled with just my mother and me.

  Where in school and studies, I found a near immediate way to channel the loss of the home life and family structure that I had known, it took my mother some time to get there. Living with her in the time just after my father left was a series of dark days. She was never cut out to work or struggle, so having to do both eroded the essence of the dignified beauty that she had always prided herself on being. He had turned us into castaways, on the raft of a life unmoored from its only purpose—my mother was a planet spiraled off into space without the rotational gravity of the sun.

  When stability was lacking, in the midst of all of the tumult and my mother’s challenging window of self-doubt and confusion, Granny Tab was always a safe haven for me. When things got too heated or too cool at home, she was a short bus ride away. On the worst days, especially when I was younger, I would go straight to Granny Tab’s house and climb into bed with her, bury my head in her shoulder crook and cry. If I didn’t have to go to work, that’s exactly what I’d do today. She’d wrap her arms around me with no words, just holding the space for me and for us. She was strong in that way, the quiet way, the way of just being there and not needing to fix what couldn’t be fixed by anything other than tears and time.

  The blaring sound of a horn behind me pulled me out of my reverie and stopped my accompanying hypnotic mascara application at the green light in front of me. I was just five minutes from work now, but the flood of difficult memories and the swirling in my mind had taken my attention off of the flow of cars ahead. I dropped my hand holding the wand to my lap and held the bottom of the steering wheel while I screwed the tube back into a single piece. Pulling my thoughts and my eyes back to my reflection in the mirror, I could see that I was just one lipstick application away from being presentable—except my lipstick, wasn’t in my makeup bag. Crap—it was in my purse—on the seat.

  The sudden acceleration of my car combined simultaneously with a clumsy reach for my purse, catapulting it onto the floor, open side down. Out of the side of my eye, I saw the contents scatter in a Rorschach pattern all over the passenger side floor. Oh crap. I allowed myself a quick glance down and then quickly brought my eyes back to the road and eventually to the rearview mirror. I saw the lights before I heard the siren. That can’t be for me…I thought to myself. But, there it was, the patrol car, behind me, definitely behind me.

  No. No. No. No. No. Not today Lord. I had no idea why he would be stopping me. And in this current climate, wearing brown skin, nothing about seeing the black and white pattern of a police cruiser made me feel safe. Nothing at all. Now, more than ever, it made me feel like my life was in danger.

  Immediately, my heart started racing, creating a throbbing in my ears and lending a hollowness to the sounds all around me. I turned down the radio, and looked for a place to pull over to the right side of the street. I couldn’t help that my hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles looked almost white underneath the usual golden brown of my skin. My breath was now shallow and quick, even though I tried to slow it down to avoid full on panic. Dammit. My purse and all of its contents were on the floor—including my wallet. At some point, if he asked for my ID, I was going to have to reach for it. Oh my God. I don’t want to reach…for anything.

  My cell phone was on the passenger side floor as well. I can’t even record this. Who will be my witness? What if he thinks I’m reaching for a gun and it’s just my cell phone? I’ve never even held a gun…never…not even a toy gun like Tamir Rice, but he still got shot, didn’t he? Of my greatest concerns in the moment, I couldn’t control what or who he saw or thought when he looked at me. There was no good way to explain that I had parents and friends and a whole office of people who were waiting for me. As disjointed and dysfunctional as they may be, I did have a family. I had some kind of a family. I hoped that he understood that whether or not I showed up for work, or for dinner, it would matter to someone. It would. I’d be missed—I knew that much. I couldn’t explain to him that…oh my God, he’s coming. I looked up from the array of lipsticks and loose change scattered around my upside down purse on the floor and into the rearview mirror and saw that the officer was walking toward me. He was tall, with a solid build—close-cropped blonde hair and he was wearing mirrored sunglasses that looked cold and invincible. His hands were at his utility belt as he approached—the belt that carried his weapons, so many weapons. I could only pray that he didn’t use any of them on me today. I had no idea why he would, which was just as scary as the fact that, based on everything I’d seen, I also couldn’t name why he wouldn’t. I just wanted to get to work. How could I know whether or not I would make it there safely today?

  I saw him approach the driver’s side of my car and I was exceedingly careful not to move one inch from my positioning with my hands on the 10 and 2 position on my steering wheel. He motioned for me to roll down the window. I whispered silent prayers as I slowly moved my left hand to the window controls. The window obeyed and descended into the door.

  “Ma’am, can I please see your license and registration?” the Officer asked. I hesitated, near tears. Try to hold it together, Tabby. But you can’t reach, not for anything. You already know what they do to black people who reach. I was petrified. Everything was on the floor, everything. What if he thought…

  “Ma’am—license and registration,” he repeated, a little more insistent this time. I struggled to manage my breath and to find words at the same time.

  “I…I…can’t…I can’t—I don’t want to reach…It’s on the floor…I’m sorry, I’m just really scared right now,” I blurted. The words all came out of me in a blustering hurry of word dribble. My mind was racing, my heart was racing, and my hands were wrapped so tightly around my steering wheel at exactly the 10 and 2 spots that I could imagine that callouses were starting to form. I didn’t want to die and
suddenly I found myself in a situation where I had no idea how to stay alive. The widely-played video of Philando Castile ran through my mind…the sound of the gunshots ringing as he reached for his wallet, seemingly obeying the officer’s command, echoed as a warning that the wrong breath, the wrong move, the wrong anything could end me in a cloud of unwarranted bullets. All I wanted to do was to go to work. All I wanted to do was to make it out of this situation alive.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. Ma’am. Can you please step out of the car?” The officer looked at me with shifting intensity. Oh Lord. Oh my God. This is how it starts. I remembered the video of Breaion King’s traffic stop, where the police threw her tiny doll-like body onto the ground with the shattering force of unexplainable rage. I tensed and held on tighter to the steering wheel. Oh my God. He’s going to hurt me. I felt the stinging in the back of my throat as tears of helplessness threatened and pushed against my eyes. I tried to fight them back. I tried to breathe. I tried to remain calm and maintain clear thinking. My life depended on it. My life depended on everything that I would say and do next.

  “P..p...please…” I struggled with this simple word as my trembling had doubled in intensity and had moved up to my neck and creeped into my jaw. “I’m…I’m on the news—I’m on T.V. I’m just trying to get to work. I don’t want you to hurt me. I just want to go to work,” I pleaded. It felt as if I were begging for my life. I thought of my grandmother—my mother—even my father. But none of them could protect me from this moment. In this moment, I had no right or ability to protect myself. I would become his victim.