A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (8 page)

Reflecting on the truth of the matter years later, Mom explained that she controlled the relationship at the start, but when Big Dwyane began to grow up and have more control, even distancing himself, she was lost. “Without control in the marriage, well, I didn’t know what to do anymore,” she recalled. “My ground fell out. So now here’s this guy who I don’t know anymore and I thought if I had another baby it’d bring us together.” That baby turned out to be me. They did come together to celebrate my arrival. But by then they had grown too far apart, according to my mother. She felt that she was the one to blame, that she didn’t do enough to keep him from pulling away. She didn’t see any option but divorce.

Daddy disagreed and even fought the breakup. Mom didn’t want to be the needy one, she would say. She wanted to be the independent woman her mother raised her to be, one who didn’t need a man. So she left with all four of us. Daddy tried to get her to come back and almost succeeded. But something stopped her, possibly pride, or just not wanting to have to put up with the challenges of his ways.

Whatever it was, Mom remembered that “when I stepped back in the house again I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ There was a chance my marriage could have got back, but, no, I was selfish. I wasn’t thinking about y’all. That was your only father. I wasn’t thinking about my babies. I was thinking about me. And when I left, my life went to hell.”

THE WORST OF THE NEXT FOUR YEARS OF OUR MOTHER’S DESCENT into addiction didn’t register as deeply with me as it did with Tragil. For one thing, I was a toddler and preschooler, protected from the specifics. For another, unlike my sister, who went from five years old to nine in this phase, I had no earlier memories of having that stable household, with enough to eat and two parents together at home at night.

But Tragil had something that kept her going: the same intensity of purpose that our mother managed to reinforce in both of us. Just as I was later told to follow my sister and report back on her, Mom laid down the law as soon as I was born that all my sisters were to watch and care for me. Tragil wouldn’t let the other two come near. She would insist, “He’s my baby,” holding me, cradling me in her arms, spoiling me as much as our mother did. In hindsight, Tragil admitted, “I went into nurturing way before my time.”

In the past, Mom had partied mostly to escape loneliness and disappointment, to forget her shame and numb the pain of loss. But now drugs were like self-punishment—and never strong enough to wipe out the part of Jolinda that was in that place called failure, wearing the big
F.
That was when she graduated to snorting and smoking crack, eventually moving toward heroin. Part of it may have been the attempt to make some money to support us and then dipping into the stash. There was an unwritten law against sampling your own wares that even little kids knew you had to obey. The slippery slope.

This was that time period when we lived with friends of our mom’s and other relatives who took us in. Tragil had a third-grade teacher who helped. And then there was Grandma. She would tell my sister, “Now, you take care of Little Dwyane. Momma’s gonna get on her feet. Don’t you worry. But I don’t want you to be no kinda trouble to other people.”

Tragil listened and taught me, young as I was, not to be no kinda trouble.

Being the proud woman Willie Mae Morris was, she also insisted that we learn to hold our heads high, not to be ashamed of our situation, and especially not to tell on Mom. On her own, Grandma probably fussed at our mother to no end. But with Tragil and me the message was that the instability was temporary. Even if it was difficult or uncomfortable, the rule was “Don’t embarrass your mother.”

Tragil once asked if I remembered us living with our uncle Eddie, not far from Fifty-Ninth and Prairie. I didn’t. Apparently he had nothing, just a lower bunk bed where we could sleep. She said that he didn’t even have a toilet, only a hole in the floor and a hose. But he knew we needed shelter and was able to provide it.

Grandma would coach my sister on how to keep herself and me bathed, how to use an old-fashioned scrub board, and how to patch my jeans, which I kept ripping because of my numerous falls. Meanwhile, we had enough clothing to wear. Grandma had a close friend who happened to work at the local Laundromat and would call Grandma to come pick out the nicer children’s clothes whenever people left laundry unclaimed. By example, Willie Mae was teaching Tragil how to be resourceful, how to keep the two of us from looking raggedy and untended, how to carry ourselves with self-respect.

No matter where we stayed, my sister could remember Grandma showing up at some point with a bag of food, just checking in. That was true even when we moved into her building with Mom. Grandma would always check on us. Her first question would be “You children hungry?”

Seemed to me like our grandmother was so much better off than us. But Willie Mae just had the knack for stretching the little that she did have into just enough. When she wasn’t doing a paid job, she’d volunteer at various church food drives, and come away with groceries for us.

At those moments when she became desperate over the fact that no one could locate our mother, Grandma would tell Tragil to put out the word that I was sick. However the grapevine worked, very quickly the news would reach Mom and she would rush to find us to make sure nothing was seriously wrong. Those occasions were often followed by stretches when we’d be back with Mom—staying with other people—and she’d be fighting to get herself back on track, to be able to support her children under one roof. Dad wanted that, obviously, and would have been willing to help. But Mom had her own issues with pride that kept her from admitting how badly she needed help.

And that was a problem that would haunt me, too. Not only was I overly proud but, being born a Capricorn, I was also extra stubborn. Even when better days were upon us, with all four kids back with Mom and living in the apartment at 5901 Prairie, that didn’t change. By the time the hardest period really kicked in, a couple of years later, I was already set in my prideful ways.

“BOY, GET BACK IN THE HOUSE!” TRAGIL YELLED AT ME ON A gloomy Saturday morning in the fall, a few months after the start of second grade at Betsy Ross Elementary.

Moments earlier I had been inside our apartment and realized she had managed to slip out the front door—she had cleverly left it open so as not to alert me to the fact that she was going somewhere. That’s when I took off after her. With no jacket, I galloped through the hall, out of the building, and down the steps, scanning to the right and left for any sign of her or her friends.

Right then she called to me from across the street. Thirteen-year-old Tragil was waiting there alone, arms folded across her chest, ready to put up a fight if I refused to go back inside.

Hanging my head, I trudged back up the steps. For a minute, I paused before going back inside to decide whether I should go see Grandma or not. In those days, my older sisters, already about seventeen and sixteen years old, were rarely around. Mom was at home. But so too were her boyfriend and a couple of other men.

That was par for the course when a drop was going to happen soon. If there were drugs for sale in the apartment or the vicinity, any extra people hanging around would be an indication of business transactions—an excuse for a police raid. No matter what was happening, Tragil and I had been taught that when we heard that knock at the door and the bellowing voice of “Police! Open up!” we should always answer, “My mother’s not home!”

Somehow, whenever that happened, the time it took to answer was enough stalling for the boyfriend and his guys to be out the back door and gone, taking all the drugs and paraphernalia with them.

Feeling sad because I wanted to be with my sister and not stuck in the house on a Saturday, I comforted myself with the thought that Mom was at least safe in the house. Just knowing where she was helped ease my mind a lot—although, to be honest, I was less concerned about my mind at the moment than I was about the empty pit in my stomach.

Hunger was starting to get old.

Obviously, by this time I couldn’t avoid making the comparison between how we were living and how most normal kids were. Not having the new clothes or new shoes was tough. But not getting to eat when I was hungry: that was almost as terrible as the times when I didn’t know where Mom was. What was really messed up was the fact that sometimes I didn’t eat when food was available—all because of pride and stubbornness.

Case in point: There I stood downstairs on the front stoop, famished, and Grandma was up on the third floor with a stocked kitchen so she could start to cook for Sunday’s meal. All I had to do was to go knock at her door and say, “Grandma, I’m starving,” and she would have put down a huge spread just for me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Afterward, if my grandmother found out that I was hungry and hadn’t told her, she’d get mad and say, “I’m gonna call you every day to come up here and eat, you hear me?”

Seriously, she would scream my name out her window until I came upstairs, but I was tormented inside: relieved that I’d get to eat but feeling guilty for doing so. The real issue was that I didn’t want Grandma to even think that Mom wasn’t feeding us. That was my mother and I didn’t want her to look bad in my grandmother’s eyes.

The dilemma had me starting to think about asking for a job as a watch-out boy. I’d seen how kids younger than me in the neighborhood would get tipped now and then with a few dollars just for watching—something I did anyway. The thought of the candy that a couple of bucks could buy made my mouth water so much I could taste the sweetness. But here too, sugar fiend though I was, the fear of Grandma finding out how I came by that money had always kept me from going outside the law. A healthy fear.

Besides, if I could hold out, Tragil might come home later with something for me to eat. Maybe even a glazed doughnut or two that she knew I craved. If not that, tomorrow was Sunday, and after church, there would be open house at Grandma’s—with her country cooking and as many helpings as I wanted of Willie Mae’s soul food.

With the comfort of those thoughts, I ran back into our apartment, leaving the door open for Mom’s boyfriend and his guys, who seemed like they were getting ready to leave in a hurry. Not sure where my mother was just then, I checked first in her bedroom.

Not there. Thinking maybe I heard the water running in the bathroom—sometimes a clue that Mom was in there, possibly getting high—I decided not to think about it but just to sit down on the floor next to her bed, turn on the TV, and watch some Saturday-morning cartoons.

No more than three or four minutes later, I recognized police radio sounds that didn’t seem to be coming from the TV show. Before I had a second to stand and run to the back of the apartment and get up to Grandma’s, the police raid was under way—with as many as three officers coming in my direction.

In my nightmares, I had witnessed this moment in a kind of slow motion. But now it was happening in real time: my heart pounding in my throat, heavy footfalls approaching, and the shiny metallic glint of a gun coming through the bedroom doorway.

At that same split second of seeing the silver gun and two policemen stepping into the room with it, I try to slide underneath the bed. Not fast enough! They spot me and in SWAT team speed the two rush to drag me from under the bed, grabbing my shaking body and putting the gun to my head. One of them says in a heavy whisper, “Don’t say anything. You walk and take me to where your mom is.” The other one pushes me, the one with the gun at my head, whispering next to my ear, “Now.”

Aware for sure that Mom’s in the bathroom doing drugs, I’m not thinking about the gun to my head. I’m thinking about how I can possibly warn her that the police are here, so she can flush the drugs down the toilet. So I’m walking slow, real slow, hoping she heard the radios and the police and the footsteps into the apartment. There’s three policemen behind me, one holding the gun at the back of my head, and I stop at the bathroom. I knock on the door.

No answer.

“Mom?” I try to make my voice express alarm that something isn’t right.

“Yeah, what you need?”

“Mom, open the door.”

“No, boy, leave me alone.”

I can tell by her answer that she’s picked up on my warning.

One of the police, not Robocop, but another officer who used to wear shades a lot, too, is about to push in the door but just then my mother opens it. No drugs or signs of drug use. Even if the toilet has apparently just been flushed, nobody can prove that there has been drugs.

The police abruptly move me out of the way and then grab Mom, putting the gun on her, demanding that she tell them where the drugs and the guns are hidden.

They tell my mother that someone called the station and complained that a person was in our building with a gun and was waving it out the window, threatening people who were walking by. Mom assures them there has been a mistake. When they search the apartment, unfortunately, they find measuring scales that supposedly have drug residue on them.

For a second time, I had to watch my mother be put in handcuffs, jammed into the back of a police car, and taken down to the station. Out on the porch, fighting back the tears, too proud for anyone to see me cry, feeling anger starting to fill up that hole in my stomach, I picked up the little rubber ball and started to hit it as hard as I could against the building.

Just then, Tragil came running, out of breath. She knew what had happened. After she told me to go back inside, she’d seen the police creeping up to the house from their stakeout. But it was too late for her to come and get me.

“I’m sorry,” my sister said, breaking down. “I’m so sorry.”

Of course, there was nothing for Tragil to be sorry about. And I told her so.

In hindsight, I was probably still in shock, not to mention frantic about when Mom would come home. Fortunately, she was not forced to stay overnight, returning to the house even before the sun went down, to my great relief.

Out on the stoop with Grandma, I saw Mom walking up to the house, looking like she’d just been on an errand or something. Before she could get halfway up the walk, I was at her side, bouncing up and down, so happy to have her home.