Chapter 1: PATRICE
It just doesn't feel
right. It feels strange. Here we are, stretched out on my living room floor,
humming and kicking our sandaled feet to the rhythm of Roberta Flack singing
"Killing Me Softly with His Song," and trying to compose a wedding invitation.
An engraved if you please formal wedding invitation. Cherry and me. Veterans
of Snick, CORE, and God alone knows how many H. Rap Brown Black Power rallies.
"Hey, Patrice, remember
the Chant?"
Who could forget
it? We sang it, clapped it, stomped it, and kicked it at every rally.
The tune of "Land of a Thousand Dancers," by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs.
And by Wilson Pickett: E, DEDE, DEDE DBD BAB AG DEDE. It meant nothing.
It meant everything: black unity, energy, the confidence that comes from
knowing you are right, and a challenge flung down to the Establishment.
Later for that cool
wailing dirge on the radio. These days, we have enough public mourners
and freelance pallbearers as it is. More than enough premature eulogies
and obituaries. The Death of the Black Family. The Endangered African
American Male. The Pathology of the African American Community. The Self-Destruction
of Black Youth. At least we'd done, were doing, our part to offset all
of that. I turn off Miss Flack and launch into three choruses of the Chant,
followed by our cheer:
"Umgawa!"
"Black Power!" Cherry
responds.
"Umgawa!"
"Black Power!"
"UMGAWA!"
"BLACK POWER!"
We follow it up with
screams and a Black Power handshake: (1) my fingers grasping her thumb;
(2) reversed--her fingers, my thumb; (3) fingers grasping fingers, palms
up; (4) palms slapping. "There," I say, collapsing happily on the floor.
"That always makes me feel better."
Cherry gives me a
critical look. "There's a rip in the seam under your right arm. Patrice,
do you realize we might soon be grandmothers?"
I check my Saturday
caftan, black mud cloth to appease Saturn on his day. I pride myself on
having the most fabulous collection of caftans on the East Coast. Just
because I'm a big woman doesn't mean I can't be ravishing and gorgeously
attired. Sure enough, she's right. A depressing rip under the right armpit,
and no seam allowance for repairing it. That's the second time I've regretted
buying something from Chic Afrique. Sometimes I think we've overromanticized
these Africans. All they do is come over here and rip us off. But then
I chide myself for having ungenerous and xenophobic thoughts that are
probably not even my own but the result of media manipulation.
Something Cherry
just said suddenly gets through to me.
"Cheryl, are you
trying to tell me something? Is Aisha--"
"No, no, nothing
like that. Just thinking about the probable consequences of all this,
a year or two from now."
"Well, that would
be wonderful, wouldn't it? Still, I'm glad there's no hurry--"
"No hurry! Patrice,
do you realize how boojy you sound? We weren't worried about legitimizing
our offspring."
We sure weren't.
We, Cherry and I and the rest of our circle of fine, brilliant, achieving,
liberated sisters, went to great lengths to arrange the opposite. We were
determined to go against tradition in every way possible. Premeditated
single motherhood was one of the principal ways we chose, because marriage
would bring legal and property issues into our personal choices.
"It won't be wonderful,"
Cherry says in her smallest voice. "We thought we were going to be young
forever. Remember?" I look and see two big tears rolling down her copper
cheeks.
Cheryl Hopkins is
a trip. She has a mouth full of razor blades disguised as pretty teeth,
and she'll bare them and cut you up into person julienne in a minute.
Downtown she has a reputation for being the meanest loan officer in East
Coast banking. But come to her with the right sob story, especially one
that features oppression, and she'll give you the entire bank--real estate,
deed and all. And when she is hurt, she is all the disappointed little
five-year-old girls in the world rolled into one. I give her the hug her
sobs call for, but can't help noticing that she has more gray hairs on
top than I can count.
"Remind me to introduce
you to my friend Miss Clairol," I say when her shoulders have stopped
heaving.
We are both a trip,
really. One shriveling up, the other ballooning past size 20, and both
middle-aged, to put it generously. A pair of grandmotherly ex-revolutionaries.
Only we don't feel grandmotherly or ex-anything. Inside, we are still
the same young women who dedicated themselves to the Movement, and who
didn't want to come near anything bourgeois, legal, formal, or sanctioned
by society. Sororities? Tea sipping? No, thank you. Hair straightening?
Get outta here. Marriage? Are you outta your mind? We came of age in the
sixties. We thought all rules were made to be broken. We wanted nothing
to do with churches or ceremonies. Now here we are, trying to compose
some la-de-da wedding invitations, and we can't even get the words right.
"How's this sound?"
I say, ignoring Cherry's angry expression and her furtive inspection of
her cornrows in a compact mirror. "Ms. Patrice Lumumba Barber and Ms.
Cheryl Mandela Hopkins invite you--"
"Request the honour
of your presence," she corrects me.
"Do you spell 'honor,'
O-R or O-U-R?" I ask.
"O-U-R," she replies
without hesitation. "And my middle name is Ann."
I write dutifully,
trying to refrain from political comment. But it sneaks out. "Honour with
a U is British spelling. Do we want to be that traditional?"
"It's what Aisha
wants," she replies.
Oh, boy. We spent
our youth and young adulthood kicking over traces, shaking off shackles,
and brandishing our fists in our elders' faces. Sometimes I feel bad about
that part, thinking of the pain I brought to the faces of Mama and Daddy
and Nana, the extra wrinkles I put there. But retribution is coming, sure
as rain follows thunder. Oh, yeah. We are about to be elders ourselves.
Retribution is already
being visited on Cheryl, I think--in the form of a prissy, proper daughter
who wants everything done by the rule book.
"British tradition
is not our tradition," I cannot resist rebuking her.
"It's the only tradition
we've got in America. Do you want to invite people to come and watch our
kids jump the broom?"
I refrain from asking
Why not? and read,
"... REQUEST THE
HONOUR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT THE WEDDING OF THEIR CHILDREN--
"MISS AISHA G. HOPKINS
AND
MR. TOUSSAINT D.
BARBER--"
My reading is interrupted
by a howl of pain from Cherry. "These days my daughter goes by Eliza,"
she says.
I let that pass because
it doesn't deserve my attention. But when I ask Cherry what the G in her
daughter's name stands for, something I've always wondered about, she
only howls louder. Deep down beneath my navel I feel a funny flutter.
I know what that flutter means. Something is deeply wrong.
Excerpted from Kinfolks © Copyright 2009 by Jane Haddem. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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