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Soon enough she would be, when Johnny walked into Eiband’s department store—the Bergdorf of Galveston—and put a fox-fur stole on layaway. He paid for that fur for a year, and it would be legendary in our family. “Selena has a real fur coat,” we’d all whisper so she could hear, her feet not touching the ground.
I was sensitive about it because I’d always been one for making cards, and if I had a piece of paper as a little kid, I’d end up drawing hearts on it and try to spell out “I love you.” My mama would make a big old fuss over reading them, even counting the hearts, but my daddy would kind of look at the note quick and throw it on the table.
That is annoying
“I know he’s not really that gruff,” I said. “But it’s so rude.” Flo didn’t answer, and acted like washing the dinner forks to have them for cake was a job of the most importance. I started drying and stacking them. “I mean, I don’t have money, but he just tossed my card and didn’t even read the poem.” “Girl, please,” she said, as brusque as anything. “Daddy can’t read or write.”
Omg
I turned my head as if I’d heard my name, then made a show of drying one last fork. I turned and walked out the front door to sit on the porch.
I sat in shock, watching a neighbor walking by like the world was still turning.
“I love you,” I said. “I have the best daddy in the world.” “Okay, Tenie,” he said, slightly softer, but not too soft. “Now get.”
“I don’t know what he’s thinking,” I told my best girlfriend Vernell. “I bet it’s all just a bunch of well-trained Negroes there.” That’s what we called the kids who went out of their way to be pleasing to white people to get ahead.
They won’t want a nobody like me, I’ll tell you that.” “Oh, I don’t know, Tina,” Vernell said. I thought she was going to say I wasn’t a nobody, but she kept going. “Maybe it’s just not a bad thing at all.
There was one Black police officer in the group, and when every white cop ignored her, my mother focused on him. “Please,” she said, crying so much her sweet voice was thick. She sank to her knees before this cop. “Please don’t let them kill my son.” She said it over and over, a sobbing prayer. “Please don’t let them kill my son.” The Black cop would not look at her. He would not acknowledge my mother’s existence or anything that they shared in common.
SMFH
My mother was still on her knees as each car took off in a squeal of tires but no sirens and no lights. She changed the mantra of her prayer to one of grief. “They’re gonna kill my son,” and then, over and over so I worried she too would die: “They are killing my son.”
My finger hovered over the Play button on the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You.”
As much as I was obsessed with the group—rehearsing every day, turning my front porch into a stage, making all the dresses, saving up to buy music—she was obsessed with her boyfriend.
I didn’t understand why anyone would give up something you loved for a boy, but Harrette would say that’s because I’d never been in love. She knew that would bug me.
“You know,” I said, “round here guys like those really curvy girls.” Gail looked down at the two of us and laughed. “You’re plenty fine, Gail,” I said. “But we need a thicker, fine girl.”
The spring evening goes like this: I wait for Lydia on the porch because I don’t want her to come in and visit with my parents. I want it to be like the movies I love, where the hero girl answers this call to adventure when it rolls up.
We take off for Houston, her grabbing the radio dial to careen through the stations, not settling until she finds a song she likes. When she does, she gasps like she’s found a friend who gets her.
Because I know now I have to leave.
As summer started, I had the biggest crush on Robert Fulton and would stare at him like he owed me money.
My mom got to cooking, and I got to smelling that food. “Put some on for me, Mama,” I said. I matched Skip almost bite for bite and went to bed so full I slept like a chubby angel.
She continued, “If you finish high school and you get a good job, like at the post office or at the hospital—” “What do you mean, if I finish school?” “Tenie, you are a very attractive girl. I mean, some man would be so happy to take care of you.”
“I think I could be a singer,” I said again, softer this time. Unsure.
I came home one night from being out with Johnny. Skip was at the kitchen table. My parents stopped talking when I walked in, so I knew it was bad. Skip looked lost, the world closing in around him. His girlfriend was pregnant. From my room, I could hear my parents. “You gotta do the right thing,” my dad said. “This girl is going to have a baby, and you gotta marry her.” Skip would have to stay in Galveston, all the different lives he might have had evaporating before his and our eyes.
OMG
You could spend all day there waiting, and I’d been there enough to see the treatment of Black and white patients blur as they made poor white families wait too. The ones who I had seen wait the longest were the Hispanic people.
As the main doctor started a pelvic exam, I started to cry, saying “no.” I begged them to stop—the pain was awful, the humiliation worse. The other doctors leaned in to watch. The doctor did not stop or show any bit of concern, and they acted as if I were some experiment. I begged them to stop, and they did not.
Aw come on
Something had changed in all of them, even the main doctor. They got quiet, and the doctor spoke softer. They realized, Oh shit, she wasn’t lying. But I read their guilt, their shame at what they’d done, and their realization that I was very ill.
Stupid ass hoe
Right then, a wall closed between me and my mother. I had been violated, but her immediate assumption was that I had been lying to her about sex.
Sea-Arama was a newish water park with aspirations to be an aquatic Disney World but was still country enough to have alligator wrestling shows.
She was deeply in love with him, but he had other girls having babies for him, too.
HUHHH
“We should go then, Tina,” Johnny said. “You know, the office.” “Yes,” I said, gravely. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Tenie, you know, them boys went up there,” he said, “but they ain’t never come down. Just those girls.” We laughed a long time about that one.
I told everyone I was leaving on the next thing smokin’ right after my Class of ’72 graduation.
My plan was to have enough to afford the flight in September. When people asked what I was going to do for work out there, I said, “Do hair, or something.”
In her ’64 Central High yearbook, every senior had to choose a meaningful quote. Linda’s read: “Being a woman is a difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men.”
“What’s San Diego like?” I asked. “Is it far from L.A.?” Los Angeles and Oakland were all I knew of California—the land of stars and Panthers. “Three hours up the coast,” he said. The way Ronnie said “the coast” sounded so glamorous.
Ronnie and Nap went out to let San Diego get another look at them, while Linda and I drove west to watch the sunset.
Anyone who’s worked at a nonprofit knows you do ten jobs and there’s still more to do.
The Urban League was known for recruiting white corporate America into investing in Black communities, and often those checks came after a company had gotten bad press for job discrimination and needed to show it was “learning.” Very much like it is today.
We would go out on the town, getting real cute. Linda had an incredible body, and like me, she sewed her own clothes. We would get all glammed out and put on the little midriff tops we made, pairing them with miniskirts and boots because we were women of the seventies. My color palette was whites and creams, or my favorite color, orange. Never boring black.
Then I met her mother, and she was nothing like mine. “Your hair looks awful,” she told her daughter as a greeting, then she complimented me on some random thing. I don’t even remember any nicety she said because it was so weird. This became a routine, and my friend would be left deflated when her mom finally skittered out.
She opened up to me, talking about how her mom was so prone to jealousy that she’d even slept with her boyfriend. It shocked me.
Ewww
“Mama, did something happen to you? Because you were so scared of what boys might do to me. What happened to you?” “Oh, Tenie,” she said. I felt a door closing again between us. She didn’t answer me, and she would never answer me.
I wanted to be in L.A., but I didn’t pressure Linda. So the second she said, “Maybe we just move here,” I said “Yes” before she even got to the “since we’re here so much.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but there’s a Japanese company named Shiseido running a counter here and they’re looking.
Interesting
I could see the rhythms of her personality. She could be the warmest person in the world, and then a little switch would go off and she’d withdraw. Some people do that when the cup runs dry, and she would sometimes do it when the cup was full.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m looking for some lip gloss.” “Oh,” I said, like nobody had ever asked for lip gloss and I happened to have some here waiting in case. “Try this one.” She had no makeup on but didn’t even need any to be glamorous. She just exuded it. There’s all kinds of people, and then there’s Tina Turner.
(Paula, if you’re out there, DM me.)
All my siblings had their own families to take care of, and it was the age-old story that a dutiful unmarried daughter is supposed to care for her parents.
Gumbo became part of my game as I started dating in Galveston, making this intricate pot for a handsome guy and his friends, who thought I was this incredible cook. They were like, “Man, she’s pretty but she can throw down.” Not knowing I’d started at the top but ended there—gumbo was the only thing I knew how to cook.
“Where are your fine brothers?” one with really dark eyeliner asked. There was a little naughtiness to her voice, but it was wrapped in complete kindness. I looked up and she smiled.
Mills ran the oldest law firm in Texas and was the great-grandson of the first Texan to be issued a law license.
