Excerpt
Have You Met Miss Jones?
INTRODUCTION
From my earliest memory, nothing I did was ever right, so there came a time when I silenced myself and listened. Listened, and then believed everything the world told me about myself. I just shut the fuck up, and allowed people to treat me as if I had no value. No sense in arguing. They must be right. After all, most of them were older. And I loved them and depended on them to guide me in the ways of the world.
Every time I’ve tried to wear glass slippers, somebody has deliberately knocked them off of my feet. Because of that, I have walked the earth emotionally barefoot. And expressed my lack of self-esteem and rage in ways that clouded my judgment. I was a participant in a lot of drama. Didn’t mean to be . . . it was never my intention.
The beat-downs came so often, I had to stop running and turn around and fight. Had to speak for myself. Had to fight for myself. Had to start swinging. And tell myself and the world that I have worth, I am valuable.
And though I still fight, there is a difference in my swagger. Instead of remaining silent . . . now I am talking. And I’m asking you:
Have You Met Miss Jones?
ONE
BACK IN DA DAY
I almost killed my mother more times than I can remember. I didn’t mean to. It just turned out that way.
Time after time, I watched her convulse, her body jerk, and her jaws flap like a hummingbird’s wing, as she fell in and out of consciousness.
And I did nothing to help her.
“Get a spoon!” my stepdad, Sonny, would yell.
Chaos and radio static from the police and paramedics’ walkie-talkies sounded throughout apartment 5G in the Astoria Projects, where we made our home. Uniformed men hovered over my mother’s flailing body, attaching metal objects, trying to fix what I had done to her—again. My older sister Marcia screamed, “Momma is having a stroke!” My eldest sister, Audrey, ordered, “Get back in your bed! And don’t move!” before disappearing into our parents’ bedroom.
I sat on the edge of the twin bed with my spine reaching toward the ceiling. Alone. I was scared that my momma was really going to die this time, ’cause my dolls and games had been all over the floor when she called me for dinner. And she flipped. Sitting at the dinner table, my father scolded, “I done told you to stop aggravating your mother.”
But I didn’t listen. I got a hard head.
I didn’t want to hasten her death by disobeying Audrey. Different, louder voices now reassured one another that my mother had stabilized. Cheating fate, I tiptoed toward my parents’ bedroom, just as my mother groaned softly.
“Momma,” I whispered to her. The uniformed adults ignored me—a nine-year-old little girl. My mother looked like a fragile china doll. “Momma, it’s me, Tarsha,” I said, gulping back tears. She didn’t recognize anyone, as her gaze darted to each strange face in the bedroom.
A paramedic advised my stepdad, “Keep talkin’ to her. Tell her who you are.” My mother responded with double takes to anyone who spoke. Then slowly, the glaze over her eyes changed from stoicism to embarrassment. My mother cried from shame. And I cried too, wiping my tears with the sleeve of the fuzzy pink sweater my stepdad had recently bought for me. That morning, my mother had proudly escorted me to the school bus as I wore my sweater. On payday, my stepdad always bought me new outfits. My favorite was a white rabbit jacket with a matching muff and brown boots. My two older sisters were jealous because they had to wear hand-me-downs. Sonny would take pictures with his old instant Polaroid camera, as I posed in front of the hallway door with the lead-filled chipped white paint.
My mother whimpered, “My tongue . . . I bit my tongue.”
“It’s okay, Mommy.” Audrey and Marcia tried to console her.
While the paramedics and the police gathered their equipment I reminded myself: I better not do anything bad. Bring home good grades. Do all of my chores without being asked. Or my mommy might die. And it’ll be my fault.
My stepdad told me, “You aggravate her, that’s why she has the seizures.”
I was a bad little girl. I did bad things. I knew this because my stepdad repeatedly told me. And my bad things were sure to make my mother, whom I loved more than anything, leave me alone in this world. Alone because soon Audrey, at eighteen, was leaving for a place called college, and Marcia, who was nine months younger than Audrey, was wrapped up in following behind her. And Sonny, as I grew older, just became wrapped up in whatever. Whatever it was, it did not include me.
When my mother’s seizures first happened, no one knew what to do about it. Later, she would be diagnosed with epilepsy.
My mother, Alyce Scott Jones, was the love of Sonny Tharpe’s life. They met when she was twenty-four years old with two little girls and pregnant with me by my biological father, Billy Leon Jones. My mom had graduated number one in her high school class and was on her way to Spelman when she became pregnant with Audrey.
Even though Alyce didn’t love Billy, they were forced by their parents to marry. My grandmother had gotten pregnant before she married and wanted to make sure that situation didn’t happen with her only daughter.
Despite good intentions, Billy and Alyce were not prepared for the responsibilities of marriage and raising a family. Billy became involved with drugs and couldn’t keep a job. My mom, being the bright woman she was, sized up the situation and divorced Billy.
Sonny and Alyce married after I was born. Sonny was Daddy. He gave me the Easters and Christmases that my sisters never got when they were my age.
“Goddamn it! Don’t make me kill you!” my mother would scream. “I told you to stop!”
“Alyce, you better stop!” Sonny warned.
I would hear silence and then BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Friday evenings would always begin with laughter, but then alcohol would give way to harsh, violent words, which would merge with Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” or whatever music my parents had been dancing to just an hour earlier. Even now, it’s difficult for me to trust laughter, because I never know what emotion may follow. Apartment 5G was a place for my parents to unleash their internal demons that they couldn’t show to the public. My home life hinged on the intersection of dysfunctional contradictions.
From the other side of my bedroom door, it always sounded like my mother would instigate physical fights with my stepdad. And then if he grabbed her wrists in an attempt to protect himself, and she got bruised, the fight would escalate. I didn’t know what my stepfather had done, but my mother’s threats would launch weekend-long beer-and-vodka-laced battles. The alcohol gave them both the courage to say things they would never utter sober.
Their fights frightened me. Rocking in my bed with a blanket over my head did not shield me from the tremendous fear that shook my body. No one called Alyce and Sonny’s volatile relationship domestic violence back then. Our neighbors and family members sanctioned the violence with their silence. What you did in your house was your business. And you kept what family did to family behind closed doors. It was considered normal that Alyce used her fists on Sonny to relieve the depression she felt about her own life. Beneath her normally calm exterior, my mom was furious about her situation. She never expected her life to turn out the way that it did. And to wind up like the girls who hung out smoking in the bathroom, while she was the “good girl” who devoted herself to her studies in hopes of a better life, devastated her. This was not supposed to be her future—on welfare, with three kids, and a volatile relationship with her man. Sonny was a tortured man who retired after dinner to the bedroom to find a sense of peace before he returned to a daily life that heaped disrespect on him with low wages and long hours. Apartment 5G was the only place where his behavior didn’t have any consequences.
Often my sisters and I were forced to take sides in their conflicts. If my stepdad spoke up for us and his doing so was the cause of the fight, my mother would stare at us and say, “This is all y’all fault. You think you getting away with this? I am not done with you.” Or if we chuckled when my stepdad said something slick to her, she would later burst into our bedroom to punish us. Clicking on the lights, she’d wake us up by yelling, “Y’all think something is funny? Get out the fucking bed now and do some chores! We are gonna strip the paint right now!” our mother would scream with her hands on her hips.
“But it’s midnight.”
“You got energy to laugh, you got energy to pick up a fucking paintbrush!”
By Monday morning, everything returned to normal, as if nothing had happened.
