The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (4 page)

Within a week my mother enrolled me in the closest elementary school near our home. I was bored by the activities that involved writing the alphabet in cursive over and over again until it perfectly resembled the chart on the wall above the blackboard. Science class was devoid of animals or field trips or outdoor exploration. The course was strictly book-based and involved reading and discussion only. The kids in public school were different too. As the new kid, I got picked on for being a Panther. Many people in the community viewed the Panthers as little more than power-hungry thugs. The girls, who all wore their hair relaxed, made fun of my afro and my secondhand clothes. The boys wouldn’t play with me.

I made connections with my teachers, who seemed more interested in my background as a Panther than the kids did. I was known as a teacher’s pet, preferring to spend my recess time cleaning blackboards, doing extra credit assignments and reading. I was constantly inadvertently offending some kid at school and had to sneak out early or stay late in order to avoid being jumped on the way home.

I went from being extremely independent and outgoing to a virtual recluse. When I could not avoid the bullies, I’d cut school until things calmed down. Despite my absences, I still managed to do well in school. It was around this time that I became obsessed with small spaces. I’d see a cabinet or a box and wonder if I was small enough to fit into it. I’d crawl in and out of cabinets at school and home. I found it peaceful folding myself into these tight dark spaces that released me from having to think about the things that were falling apart around me. My favorite place to hide was an attic crawl space in our house. The darkness, the cobwebs and the stifling heat did little to deter me from seeking this place out when I needed comfort. I began to bring up my favorite things. A diary, polished stones, my favorite books. Things I wanted protected should something catastrophic happen.

I wasn’t just imagining the worst. There was very bad tension building in the house from the most unlikely of sources. Deborah, my mother’s golden child, was in full rebellion. Now fifteen, she and Mama were fighting more and more, verbal confrontations that would end with Deborah leaving the house and not returning for days. Mama began to drink more and more. Eventually, my mother heard a rumor that Deborah was working as a prostitute. My mother told my father. The last time I’d see my parents in the same room was when Deborah returned home after more than a week on the street. She plopped down on a chair and I climbed into her lap. My mother secretly telephoned my father.

Deborah tried to leave when she saw him standing in the doorway. My parents argued with her, and the argument became a beating. My father chased her outside and continued beating her in the street. My mother did not interfere. Deborah eventually slipped free and ran into the night. Mama told us not to let her in the house if she were to return. But it would be nearly a year before I’d see her again.

Deborah’s absence from our family was like suddenly realizing that our once sturdy home was really little more than a lean-to in a storm. There was nothing and no one who could hold us up or keep us together. Things got even worse when a knee injury caused Mama to lose her welding job, making her dependent on disability checks and welfare. She also cozied up to more alcohol and drugs. She grew distant from us. Family activities ended. She was sad all the time and started drinking heavily. She’d sit on the couch for hours with her chin on her chest, listening to blues records and weeping. All she would say is, “I’m tired. I’m tired.”

Nothing would cheer her. Daddy stopped coming around. My older sisters seemed to close up as much as our mother. Although I did not want to admit it, I was on my own.

•   •   •

My adjustment to public school was long and difficult. Though my new school was just a few blocks from the Panther school, it might as well have been another continent. I simply didn’t know how to interact in the community outside of the Panthers. The disequilibrium I experienced upon entering public school was not unlike culture shock.

I was proud of my family’s involvement in the Party and took any opportunity to inform my new teachers and classmates that my father spent time in Soledad as a revolutionary prisoner. Instead of being impressed, the teachers looked at me with pity in their eyes and my classmates teased me for being the daughter of a jailbird. What was once a badge of honor became a liability. I’d lived a sheltered life in the Party. I did not know the Black Panther Party had deteriorated as an organization and, in the process, lost respect in the eyes of the community it originally sought to serve.

By the time I entered public school, many people in the community viewed the Panthers as a violent and corrupt group. The accomplishments of the Party began to be overshadowed by what many thought was its corruption of young black males, manifested in an alarming increase in black-on-black violence in Oakland and across the nation. Some blamed the Party for creating a “gang mentality” and a “romance with the gun” in young black males.

It was in this climate that I entered public school. I went from being loved by my teachers and respected by my classmates to being bullied. I was bullied for being a Panther and also bullied by a group of “well-off” kids because I didn’t have nice clothes. While my Goodwill ensembles served me well at the Panther school, they drew negative attention from the kids in public school. I quickly became the target of a group of popular girls. Their leader coolly informed me that if I came to school the next day wearing my blue jeans or tan pants or my white or striped shirt, she and her friends were going to beat me up after school. They’d basically described every article of clothing I owned.

I was scared because I knew it would be tough to get my siblings to lend me anything of their clothing, as we were all very protective of the few things we owned. So it wasn’t surprising when both Teresa and Louise refused to let me borrow their clothes. In order to avoid getting beat up, I had to resort to plan B. I got up in the middle of the night and stole a pair of one sister’s pants and another’s shirt. I got up extra early the next day and went to school before they saw me. The plan worked and I avoided getting beat up by the cool kids that day. But my sister caught me at school in one of her shirts and got so angry she demanded I take it off on the spot. So though I pilfered clothes to avoid getting in a fight with the cool kids, I ended up in a fight with my sister.

The kids also made fun of my mother whenever she came to the school. If there were papers she needed to sign or a teacher to see, she came dressed in her old welding clothes—a beanie, heavy boots, a man’s jacket and baggy pants. The kids made fun, saying my mother was a bull dyke. They refused to believe me when I told them she dressed like that because she had been a welder. It was the first time I was ever ashamed of her.

They also accused me of being lesbian because I didn’t wear dresses and I wore my hair in an afro when most of the girls wore their hair pressed straight. There was one instance when a substitute teacher mistook me for a boy, which sent the entire class into hysterics and me to the restroom in order to keep the kids from seeing me cry.

Another big adjustment was the indifference of the teachers toward the well-being of students. I was used to being coddled by my teachers at the Panther school. In public school I felt like I was tolerated. The teachers ignored the bullying that was an everyday occurrence and even turned a blind eye to fights that took place in the parking lot after school almost every day. After leaving the relative security of the Panther school, I found myself the target of male sexual predatory behavior that seemed rampant in the wider community.

Despite my difficulty fitting in socially, I enjoyed learning. I was especially fond of science and English. In junior high I joined the school newspaper and helped work on the school yearbook. I avoided group sports and other social clubs like death itself. It was difficult for me to make friends and so I spent my free time with my siblings and Panther friends after school, especially Neome. But more than anything I began to enjoy my solitude. I spent most of my free time between the pages of a book, usually Stephen King.

•   •   •

Every neighborhood has at least one weird family. On one of the many streets on which we lived it was the Taylors. They were a mother and father with a teenaged son and two daughters about the same age as the youngest girls in my family. They lived in a house whose backyard abutted the back of our apartment building. A tall wooden fence obscured by high, thick brush separated the two properties.

The Taylors initially came to my attention when their house burned down in an electrical fire. When we saw the flames leaping high into the air over the back fence, my sister Louise and I hightailed it around the block to see what was burning. We arrived in front of the burning house just as the fire engines arrived. It was a large, pretty house with two stories and large windows. I thought it a pity that such a house was engulfed in flames, with smoke pouring out of its windows and up the branches of an old oak in the front yard.

We, along with a street full of neighbors, watched as the firemen put the fire out but not before part of the roof caved in and a section of siding burned away. What was left looked like a torched dollhouse, in that part of the exterior wall was gone and one could easily see a cross section of the house. With most of the excitement extinguished with the fire and it growing dark out, we rushed home to tell our family everything we saw.

We went back a few weeks later to see if the house had fallen down. To our dismay it was still standing. A man with a pot belly and a wreath of kinky hair circling his otherwise bald pate was out front with a boy of about fourteen. The boy was light-skinned, lanky, with a big afro. We knew him as a boy our older sister had a crush on. With hammer and nails they were sealing up the busted-out windows with plywood. We could see that they’d already covered the holes in the roof with large tarps. We stood across the street and watched them work.

When they took a break, we walked across the street and up to the curb, where the man and his son sat drinking colas, and started talking to the boy. We wanted to know why they were boarding up a burnt-up house. The boy had nice white teeth. He was shirtless and skinny, but you could see he had a few muscles. The father sat a short distance away but was staring at us with obvious interest. We knew the father to be one of many neighborhood perverts who cruised around in their cars looking to pick up fast girls. He was well known because when he cruised around, he did it in an old van that we saw parked in the driveway.

We were ignoring the old man, so he left us with his son and went back to work on the house. After a few minutes of our annoying inquiries, the boy called out some names and two girls about our age came around from the back of the house. They were his sisters. They asked us if we wanted to come play in their backyard.

We left the boy and father to their work and followed the girls back down the driveway past the van, which was a funky throwback to the heyday of the hippie era. Their father was known to host prostitutes inside that van.

The girls told us since the fire the family had been living in various makeshift shelters in the backyard. The Taylors had a big backyard that was blanketed in weeds and years’ worth of dead leaves that had fallen from several large trees. In the back there also stood a large garage with peeling sky-blue paint and dirty beige trim that was probably white in another life. It looked more like a barn than a garage, with its two large swinging doors and pitched roof. We asked if we could look inside.

When the girls brought us into the garage, Mrs. Taylor asked who we were, but her daughters told her to mind her business. They ignored her follow-up questions, too, and told us to do likewise, so we did. I was a bit shocked. I’d never seen anyone get away with talking to their mother like that.

The garage was crammed full of the items they’d managed to salvage from the fire: a couple of chairs, garbage bags spilling over with clothing, photo albums, stacks of papers, board games, an old trunk. There were also lots of pots and pans and dishes, two sets of bunk beds, a card table with four metal folding chairs near another trunk that held a hot plate and acted as a makeshift kitchen. The electric hot plate was connected to a series of extension cords that ran along the floor and out the door and eventually connected to an outlet in a helpful neighbor’s house.

There were also several large plastic coolers and a large wooden bookshelf holding lots of canned food and several cases of generic soda pop. One of the sisters peeled off a couple of colas and offered them to us. They were warm but we drank them anyway. I asked about several kerosene-burning lanterns I saw lying about. They, along with flashlights, were used by the family to get around at night.

There was a corner of the garage that was separated from the rest by an old army blanket folded over a piece of cord nailed to the wall. Behind it was a single mattress on a folding metal frame dressed neatly with decorative pillows and a pretty handmade crocheted blanket with red roses. The night table was two stacked milk crates covered with a piece of white lace. That’s where the mother slept. It was behind the curtain that Mrs. Taylor fled when her daughters ignored her.

The garage was poorly ventilated because there were only two small windows. There was a horrible stench of unwashed bodies and rotting food. I saw a plate of what looked like half-eaten ravioli crawling with maggots. Roaches were everywhere. They used a corner of the yard where Mr. Taylor had dug a trench as a toilet, and they washed their clothes and bathed in a big metal tub behind plastic sheeting hung from a line. Far from being repulsed, I was fascinated by the Taylors. They were like an inner-city Swiss Family Robinson.

I became quite close with one of the sisters and played with her in the backyard nearly every day after school. The only hazard was Mr. Taylor. His hands had a way of creeping over me if I was caught unawares. One afternoon I was climbing up to join my friend on the top bunk when Mr. Taylor came over and grabbed me from behind, putting one hand between my legs and the other one on one of my breasts. When I slapped his hands away and gave him a dirty look, he looked back at me sheepishly, ensuring me he was just trying to help me up.