My earliest memories were of a day in early November of 1947. I had just turned four years old, and already I knew the sound of trouble. When Mama and Daddy started in on each other the hollering, the cursing, the kind of fighting that filled up every corner of a small house me and my sister Loretta would find ourselves behind the furniture. That was just what you did. You made yourself small, and you waited for the quiet.
When the hollering stopped, that was our signal to come out.
I remember walking out and finding Mama lying across the bed, both hands pressed against her stomach. Her face and hands were black dirty or bruised, I couldn’t rightly tell at four years old. She was crying, but soft. The kind of crying that’s more tired than sad. She looked completely worn through.
I stood there looking at her and I said, plain as anything: Mama, you look just like a black person.
Now I had never seen a black person in my life up to that point. To this day I couldn’t tell you why those words came out of my mouth. I was four. I just said what I saw.
Mama never forgot that. She’d bring it up years later and laugh about it, the way you laugh at things that weren’t funny at the time but somehow become part of the family story.
About a week after that, Mama’s sister came to visit. That was Aunt Clara. The two of them would get to talking quiet conversations, the kind where the words never quite reached the next room. Me and Loretta could feel there was something being kept from us. Every time we’d wander in, the talking would stop. Just like that. Two women sitting there looking at us like we’d walked in on something we weren’t supposed to see.
There was a secret in that house. We didn’t know what it was. But even at four years old, you know when the grown-ups are carrying something heavy.
We just didn’t know yet what it was going to cost all of us.
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