Lincoln
Then there was Nikki. Nikki had thick beautiful lips and walked around with her thumb in her mouth and whatever little bit of hair on her head pulled up into two little pigtails. It wasn’t that she never had no hair now, it had more to do with the assault of chemicals her mother had been putting in her hair since she was a child. Nikki even had a doll she slept with, that she treated like a little baby when nobody was looking. But once, high off blunts (and that pina colada mix the girls had gotten a little too friendly with) she even got comfortable enough to pull it out and fuss with it in the presence of the others.
It was Tasha’s mom, the same woman who kicked Tasha out when she got pregnant with her stepfather’s child, who offered to take care of her only daughter’s little son. Tasha was allowed to name him though—Curtis. She liked the way how each time she said his name the love seemed to fill her mouth up and then was released into the air so that he could, hopefully, be touched by it. Curtis. He was a small baby, small, the nurse had told her scoldingly, because Tasha probably had smoked throughout her pregnancy. But Tasha remembers the way her heart shifted when she looked down at him—like it had been beating in the wrong place all along and finally had found it’s niche. Curtis. He was a black, thin-limbed little thing and Tasha marveled at his beauty. Curtis. She was allowed to hold him and she’d never forget the particular way the smell of his sweat mingled with the smell of baby powder. She had held other babies before and since, but none seemed to capture, precisely the way he smelled that day. She remembers the way her breasts hurt, as if expressing her broken heart, and the way the milk dripped out like the tears she refused to shed. Curtis.
Her mother, clothes all stiff, fresh and proper, took her baby and proceeded to talk as if nothing ever happened.
“Oh, he so cute. Look just like you when you was born.” Tasha’s mother rocked the little, quiet boy with a look of tenderness Tasha had never seen. She wanted to ask her mother so many things like, was your labor anything like mine? Did you rip like I did, all the way from front to back? Did you breastfeed me or use formula? Will you take good care of him? And while we are at it, why did you never do anything to stop it?
Instead she said nothing. She rolled over which caused a pain in her groin. But she would rather look at the lifeless wall than at the spectacle of her mother holding her grandson slash, son. At least the wall, with it’s frigid white was more honest.
Tasha sits in the hotel room now and wonders how she thought she could ever have gotten away with it? Lester loved her sure, and he drove a gray Maxima. She knew he was slingin the moment she saw him in his black velvet jogging suit and gold-out fingers. She knew he’d take care of her too. She was only 17 when they met—Tasha had already had Jasmin, her second child, by then. Jasmin’s father had gotten himself locked up and his mother had agreed to take responsibility for little Jasmin. By this time reality didn’t sit right with Tasha, and all she wanted really, was something to dull this pain that seemed to sit heavy on her heart. Tasha felt that any life would be better than the one she could offer her, right now anyway. And she liked the woman—a kind-hearted Southern woman whose number one priority, Tasha could see, was to love.
But now, Lester was beginning to lose interest. He was paying more attention to his beeper than to her. There were so many hungry little girls walking up and down Ocean. Girls younger than her, prettier than her, lighter than her. Girls hungry for leather bombers, gold earrings, rope chains and little babies. Girls whose breath smell like bubble gum and who slicked their baby hair with Vaseline down onto their foreheads, with tons of white talcum powdered onto their large breasts and neck. Girls with nails chewed all the way down to the cuticles and yellow girls who look like white girls but are prettier cause they Black.
Although Tasha was just 18, she felt old. She remembers, as she lights a menthol, how no body could have ever fucked with her. She could fight. She’d grease her face up with cocoa butter, make it all shiny and slippery so nobody could scratch her face up. She walked with razor blades and felt the puncture of it slicing into a prettier girl’s face. Tasha boosted all the latest gear and made sure she had knee-high Gucci boots and Louis Vutton bags. Once she even had a suit made for Curtis out of an old Gucci handbag. She got his picture took at Sears and even braided his thick hair for the occasion. That was before when her crazy mother would let her visit him.
After she got pregnant with Jasmin though, her mother iced her out. Said that she shamed her and didn’t know how she thought she would ever get into heaven with the way she was behaving. Tasha was like, well, if it the same heaven you trying to get to, then I sure as hell ain’t trying to get there. Her mother was fucked up, that’s all. Tasha took a drag from her cigarette. Her chest hurt. She rested her brown fingers on her thick thighs. Even today, she looked good. She got up and leaned her body against the hotel’s dressing table. She threw the cigarette in the toilet bowl. She moved in to the mirror—her eyebrows were freshly tweezed and her face was smooth. Her weave looked real and her nails, long and burgundy had a little diamond on the pinky.
Lester always told her she looked like Nefertiti—The African Queen. “Queen” he’d call her, and he bought her one of those pendants of her profile from Fulton.
She fingered the pendant with fingers weighed down with rings. Had to, at some point, pawn every one of them. The number one mom ring, the ring that said what sign she was, the 24 karat ring, and so on and so on. Got every one back too though. She was proud about that. That’s how she felt about her babies—up until now.
She never thought them growing up with other people was a permanent solution. She knew she’d get them back, all she needed was a little extra time. She started working at Key Food too. For like 4.50 an hour or some shit like that. She didn’t have to pay rent at the home so she started stashing her money away. She tried to open a bank account at first, but they was like you had to have like five hundred dollars or something. Like she had five hundred dollars? At first she put the cash under her mattress but that wasn’t good enough. It was only a matter of time before someone got wind of it and stole it. She wasn’t even afraid of it being stolen by one of the other girls, it was more of Ms. Lecher, the woman who ran the home. Ms. Lecher was one of those middle-aged women who you couldn’t even imagine doing human things like taking a shit or having sex.
In the end though, Tasha only managed to save one hundred dollars before the supervisor at Key Food decided to paw at her. She kicked him in the balls and palmed his head against the wall. She expected and hoped his head would burst like a watermelon on impact. It never did though. Thinking about it now, Tasha feels as like she should have taken Nikki up on her offer of going back around there and kicking his ass. But she was afraid of getting into trouble, afraid of going to jail if only because jail meant she wouldn’t be able to see her babies.
She ended up giving the money to Angela anyway—she had gotten herself knocked up again by Louis. Angela had a baby already that her aunt back in Puerto Rico took. The way Tasha figured it, Angela and Louis were the types that safeguarded that the human race never died out—between the two of them they were probably responsible for over ten pregnancies. Angela was from the Bronx, wore stone-washed, skin tight jeans and blue contact lenses.
When Tasha and Angela were on their own they always fell into this natural rhythm where their hearts just kind a opened up to the other. Tasha liked the way Angela always spoke up against whatever she felt like. For instance, Angela went on a hunger strike for a week the first time she came to the home. It was because she was a vegetarian, well almost anyway. She only ate chicken and the meatloaf they served just wasn’t cutting it for her and her “special dietry requirements” as she’d like to refer to it herself. Tasha had to smile now thinking about crazy old Angela. Tasha thought it was weird that she only ate chicken, “what’s the reason anyway, they all animals?” Angela stared hard at her with her odd-looking blue eyes and answered, “It’s my perogative, ain’t it?” Tasha couldn’t argue that, especially since they didn’t seem to have much of it.
Angela always defended Tasha when she needed it. Once, Tasha was about to get jumped by a group of girls from Sheepshed Bay and Angela with her Puerto Rican crew, drove the girls away, bullying them down all the way down East 21st Street.
Tasha gave Angela the hundred dollars but made Angela promise to get on the pill.
“But it makes me sick.”
“So do the abortions.” Tasha had said, cause in reality she wasn’t into killing innocent babies. But she understood Angela and knew that it was not easy.
But Tasha always had a picture of getting her babies back. She dreamt of buying one of those big old Lincoln Continentals, strapping her babies down in their car seats and just take off—getting the fuck out of Brooklyn. She had always wanted a Lincoln, ever since she was a little girl. She didn’t really know, just something sounded nice about a car named after some white dude who freed the slaves. But then Ms. Jenkins told her the war wasn’t fought to free no slaves. That Lincoln wasn’t really thinking about no slaves. But even that never really stopped the tap tap, my car she’d utter at the sight of a Lincoln.
But she had already learned about the real histories even before she started going to school. There was Ms. Moore, who although tall, high-cheek boned and had dead straight hair was just as Black as the next one. One day she couldn’t help herself but ask Ms. Moore, “Are you Indian?” Ms. Moore just laughed. “Cherokee, if you must know. And we don’t like being called Indians.” Tasha had always wanted to visit an Indian reservation but never did. She wanted to see if there were really others who had it worse than black folks. Ever since she was young she’d just think, quite out of the blue, whether while jumping double-dutch or playing catch, “They used to be Indians here.” She’d have this vision of Brooklyn before the concrete and think that she wouldn’t mind going somewhere that didn’t have them ghosts, but she couldn’t think of any place.
Maybe Tasha could take her babies to Atlanta or something. Chante had said that Atlanta was good for Black people. Just hit the road with her babies. Then she’d put them in daycare or something and she could get a job somewhere. She could become a manager at some fancy clothes store, you know, one of those places where rich people buy their clothes or something. She always did have a talent with color and fashion. At least that’s what her mother always said. It was the only good thing her mother had ever said to her, “You got an eye for color. I was like that too, when I was young.” Her mother said the “when I was young” part as if to convince Tasha that there was a bit of humanity left in her heart. But anyway, when she started to think about who would take care of her babies in Atlanta, the dream started to burn at the edges, like some old photograph caught in the middle of some burning house.
Whenever she thought about supporting her babies-- cause no matter how she flipped it, she couldn’t afford not to be working all the time. And who would be home with her babies?
She sits on the dressing table and places her chin in the palm of her hand. She eyes the sparse hotel room. She jumps off the dresser and opens the nightstand table. It was there, the obligatory copy of the Bible. She wonders why there are always Bibles in hotel rooms. Was it for moments like this? She remembers Angela telling her that the only way she could have an orgasm was with a book. She had to have a book placed right on her spot, which she would grind right into the hardness of it. One day she and Lewis ended up at a motel and well--. Tasha laughs and shakes her head, you crazy bitch Angela. She places the Bible back and closes the drawer.
Tasha remembers reading about a famous child rapper and his mother in Jet or Ebony or something like that and how his momma was a single mother raising her child alone, before he got famous and how cause of something some genius up in the government called Welfare Reform, she was forced to go to some job training course but the stupid idiots didn’t supply childcare. She had to leave her 3 year-old home alone. Of course the article didn’t say all that, instead it was trying to honor this single mother and all, which Tasha had no problem with.
What she had a problem with was that nobody saw the problem with some woman being put in a situation to her leave her 3 year-old alone, every day. And people got mad about abortion, but they didn’t do anything to help, once the babies got here.
Tasha cringed when she read the article. An uncontrollable dread overwhelmed her that was tantamount to nausea. How that child must have suffered? How that mother must have suffered? And they all happy that the little boy grew up to be some rapper and got all famous—of course he did. Anyone who survived that shit deserved to be fucking president.
Tasha missed her babies and she wanted them. Then Lester got the money. Fufu got shot cause his ass started using and shit started coming up short. Tasha remembers Fufu too, from back in the day. He was a slick brother; the type you know was someone important back in Africa and shit, which was how he got the name Fufu. His real name was Andre. He started slinging mad young and got a reputation as a hard ass when at 13, he started hitting his mother off with his own shit. In fact, Fufu’s whole family got turned out on that shit and Fufu, the hard nigga he was, didn’t even bat an eye.
But the weird thing about Fufu was that he could be real human. Tasha never got all up in his business and asked how he could supply his own mom or whatever, but rumor had it his mom had been strung out on heroin before and well, the rest was history. But Fufu was real good with kids. Whenever he saw Tasha with her kids, he’d come over and play with them for a while. Once, when he got his hands on a Mercedes, he took them all, Tasha and both her kids, to Coney Island. That day he got their picture took and Tasha has it, to this day. He always treated Tasha with respect, his gray eyes soft and searching. It was just crack heads he didn’t like. Once someone got hooked, Fufu was like another one bit the dust--until he tried it. Tasha remembers a night she and Fufu ended up hanging out with each other, back at his place. They rolled blunts and watched Welcome Back Cotter reruns. They drank pineapple soda and Tasha had to ask him. “Yo Fufu why you so hard, anyway?” Tasha was laying on the floor, staring up at the black velvet painting Fufu had on his wall of a naked afro-ed woman. She couldn’t believe he had that shit on his wall. “What you mean hard?” Fufu sat at the glass top dining table. Tasha could see his slippered feet almost touching hers and felt safe. She knew Fufu would never try anything with her. “Well, you know. You know what people be saying…”
“Ah man, fuck what other people be saying. If you listen to that shit man…” Fufu took a drag off the chocolate colored blunt and hard dancehall beats could be heard from his stereo. Fufu laughed at something on Welcome Back Cotter, “That Washington was a smooth ass brother.”
“Yeah, but ain’t you afraid you start to use too—I mean, look at all those motherfuckers who get hooked…”
“Curiousity killed the cat.” Was all he said.
Before he used to say he was successful cause he ain’t never tried it. He said he seen just about every kind of nigga get turned out on it—brothers, teachers, sisters, preachers. Even got a few actors high—famous ones too. Fufu said that that shit was too powerful to fuck with and that God sent it to get rid of all the weak ones cause he needed strong soldiers to fight this war. He said that curiosity killed the cat. Well, his name must’ve been Felix cause his ass got caught.
Lester couldn’t have killed him though. Those two niggas known each other since 152 and Lester, although Tasha knew had killed some niggas before, couldn’t kill Fufu. If he could kill Fufu, he could kill her, right?
Tasha opened up the Louis Vutton bag and flipped through the thick stacks of bills. Whew, Tasha thought, money stinks. She let the bills drop back into the bag. She obeyed the strong urge to wash her hands to get the stink of the money off. All this shit for that—all this shooting and drug-taking and dying for some stinky bills that don’t even look nice and crispy the way they be looking in the movies.
She couldn’t do much now though. Lester was on his way. He didn’t mention anything and she just played it cool. She couldn’t buy a Lincoln anyway cause she couldn’t drive it. She never did get her license. Like you needed one in Brooklyn anyway.
She couldn’t get her babies. Her mama had fixed it that she was banned from seeing them. Something about her being unfit and cavorting with a known drug dealer.
And Lester. He done moved on to someone younger. Already. Besides, Tasha had fucked with his money-- and his gun. She sat on the edge of the bed and started bouncing lightly on the bed. She kept one hand on her lap, the other laying on the bed, on the gun. She tried to pick it up and noticed it was heavy. She had her own gun, a 38 special that Lester had given her for her birthday. But for some reason she had taken his. As she used her feet to bounce the bed, she remembered the sound of the bedsprings and the way her face was held down. She remembers how the springs would dig into her cheeks. She remembers the heat and the blood and the grunts and the stale sticky saliva and semen.
She remembers the silence of the house except for the bedsprings and the labored breathing of her old stepfather. She remembers how sometimes the only noise to disturb this quiet was that of her mother coming home from work and her leaving again, once she was met by that particular stillness they had all, the three of them, come to know and obey. A silence that they carried between them, as if afraid, afraid of the silence being broken, for should it, so too would their hearts, their spirits and their humanity.
Tasha didn’t leave a note. Why should she? There was nothing to say. Except maybe sorry. Sorry to the cleaning woman who would have to clean all this shit up, because in the end, this didn’t really have nothing to do with her, and sorry to her children cuz in the end, it really didn’t have anything to do with them and even sorry to Lester, cause he was just, in the end, being a man. What Tasha felt though, as she bought the gun to her head, was, how come there was no one saying sorry to her? And with that she pulls the trigger, ending as she thinks, this misery that we call life.
