“I need you, Mama.” My voice comes out mumbled and I wonder if she can hear me at all.
Mama coughs. “Whatchu need, child?” That gravel voice fills up with her pride and I know my call satisfied all her hoping.
“I don’t know what I’m doing out here.”
“Don’t know nobody who does.” Mama doesn’t speak for a moment. I think maybe I should talk again. Or just hang up and forget I ever called her in the first place. Then her voice comes back and I let myself sink into it. “I’ve been thinking about you. Was telling one of the girls in here last week about how you used to draw those pictures for me, remember? The ones that you’d always do in the same damn color and I told you they must got more than just a red marker in that school of yours but you kept on saying you liked the red.”
“Yeah.” I don’t remember much about the actual pictures, but I remember how my teacher used to hide the red markers from me so I didn’t make another one like that, how I had to get one of the other kids to let me have theirs in exchange for some other prize I don’t remember giving.
“Your brother taking good care of you?” Mama asks.
“He quit his job today.”
“Why don’t you get one, then? I know I didn’t raise no incompetent child.” Mama dares to heighten her voice into that same octave she used to use pre-lecture.
“It ain’t that easy,” I say. “Got a gig but it don’t pay much and they raising our rent.”
Mama laughs.
“What?”
Her voice is too bright. “It just makes more sense why my girl decided to call for the first time now. Baby needs some money.”
“I’m not stupid, I know you ain’t got no money,” I spit back.
“Don’t mean I don’t know people who do.”
I scoff. “I don’t want none of your prison friends’ cash.”
“You know your uncle got money.”
“Also know he left the minute you did.”
“I still got his number,” she says, and I can feel the grin pasted on her face. “Family keeps each other safe, yeah?”
Ironic how she keeps on preaching family values, like she did not destroy this one. Our family started and ended with Mama, with the same voice that’s telling me how we keep each other safe when she never could. Sometimes it feels like Daddy was the only one she ever loved.
There’s nothing coincidental about their love story.
For someone so fixated on destiny and God’s plan, Mama always knew how to get up in everybody’s business and make something happen. Daddy had just joined the Panthers in 1977, late to the movement at nineteen but still in a honeymoon phase with the revolution, used comrade in every sentence, and wore black even in ninety-degree weather. He mostly just sold the party newspaper and helped out with filing, but every chance he had to get in on the action, he took.
A fight had broken out on Seventh Street in West Oakland. Daddy was on his way to work with a couple friends, rifles resting on their shoulders, berets on. Covered in leather. Daddy always described it as an attack; cops just sauntered up and started berating them. Pretty soon, Daddy was cuffed and in the backseat of a patrol car, charged with resisting arrest.
Daddy said his friend Willie was the one who started it, wrote a letter about Daddy and his case and released it to every chapter of the Panthers in the country. Got everyone in every city on the streets, signs up, fists pointed. Daddy never said it, but I think he was proud of the arrest; of having Elaine Brown’s right-hand man say his name and visit him in jail.
Mama was living in Boston with her cousin Loretta that summer. Loretta said she had some business to attend to out in California and thirteen-year-old Mama came right along with her. When they hit Oakland streets, Mama saw Daddy’s face plastered on signs and posters all over town. Said he looked like Louisiana bayous tasted: rich and overgrown; that skin a whole muggy river. Scrawny and prepubescent girl that she was, she said she was gonna make that man hers, make him show her where the water flowed in Oakland.
The Oakland Police Department decided not to press charges once The New York Times picked up the story, and Daddy was released two weeks post-arrest. Some of the Panthers threw him a release party in the streets, then had a barbecue at a West Oakland park. It was Mama’s last day in town and she begged her cousin to take her.
Mama went straight up to Daddy and said, “Hi. I’m Cheyenne, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Daddy didn’t pay her no mind, but Mama watched him all day. Watched the way he spread out his arms when he laughed. Watched him sing with that perfect mouth oval. Watched him dance with a pretty woman twice her age when the jazz came on.