Roberts - The love prison made and unmade: my story

To Sekou,

for reminding me that love is

the greatest healer

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences,
penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

MAYA ANGELOU

Contents

I looked up to the Black couples I read about. Like Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. Like Ossie and Ruby Dee. Like Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver and Winnie and Nelson Mandela. Theirs was a love rooted in the Black struggle for liberation. A love that had purpose. I wanted to have what I called a Black power fairy tale. So when I found Shaka, a brother who reminded me of Malcolm and Eldridge and Mandela, I fell in love. Never mind he was locked up.

But, this story started long before I met Shaka. It started in the cradle of my parents marriage. It is there that I learned what women must do for the sake of having love and what we must do to keep it.

I grew up fantasizing about my knight in shining armor. There were white knights and white horses and white picket fences in the books I read and I bought into the hype. But my knight was a Black boy.

I was a Black girl trying to find my way in a world that assaults Black girlhood before we even become women, that tells us the fairy tales we read arent for us. I longed to be saved by a boy who would love me, who would fight for me, who needed me as much as I needed him. A boy who would give me happily-ever-after.

I didnt know any Black girls with real-life Black fairy tales and happily-ever-after endings. Not even the Black girls on TV had happy endings. But that didnt stop me from dreaming. Then The Cosby Show aired, giving my nine-year-old self a peek into a Black world that was abundant.

The Cosby Show was as far from reality for me as white horses and white knights, and I was captivated. The Huxtables werent poor like the Evans family, and the children werent adopted like Arnold and Willis. Cliff and Claire Huxtable were idyllic parents and the perfect couple, living the American dream. I envied Theo and Vanessa and Rudy, who had everything I didnt have. I wanted their scripted lives.

I even envied J.J. and Thelma and Michael. Though their project apartment was worlds away from the Huxtables Brooklyn brownstone, their parents clearly loved each other.

Sometimes I couldnt tell if my parents even liked each other.

At home one day, sitting in the living room pretending to watch television, half listening to my mama and daddy argue in the dining room, I heard my mama say calmly, Bill, put that away. I turned from the TV to see my daddy pointing a gun at my mama, her eyes wide with fear.

It wasnt the first time Id seen Daddys pistol, but it was the first time Id seen it pointed at anyone. Mama looked at the gun and then back up at him. He stared right through her. I aint putting shit away, he snapped, tightening his grip on the .357 Magnum as he planted his 5'5" body firmly into the floor. His eyes were red with rage and his already pale skin looked more pallid. He grinned at her as she pleaded.

Please, dont do this, Mama cried, inching backward toward the front door, her eyes locked on the gun. Fear rose in my chest. My twelve-year-old eyes watched, my mouth wide open, as Daddy lifted the pistol more. Higher and higher the mouth of the gun rose, meeting Mamas eyes.

Without a word, she turned and bolted toward the door. He followed behind her, chasing her out of the house.

I jumped up and ran behind him, screaming, Daddy, dont! I screamed and screamed some more, then fell to the vestibule floor as he pushed opened the screen door, pleading with him, Please dont! Noooo...

He ignored my cries. His anger, or maybe it was the vodka, made me invisible to him.

And then, Boom! The gun exploded with gunfire.

The sudden sound of the bullet leaving the guns chamber echoed in my ear. I rushed outside. Time slowed as my eyes scanned the front yard, frantically searching for my mama. When my eyes finally found her, she was halfway across the street running toward our neighbors house, her bare feet slapping against the hard concrete. The bullet had missed her. My daddy stood on the porch watching her run to safety, still cursing her. I stood beside him, tears streaming down my face.

That day, I retreated further into my shell. I found sanctuary in books and Black family sitcoms and vowed to find a love I didnt have to run from.

My parents were high school sweethearts. She was fourteen, he fifteen when they met at the Graystone Ballroom, one of Detroits most storied musical landmarks. Teenagers gathered there every Sunday afternoon to dance to the Motown sounds of The Supremes, The Temptations, and The Miracles. It was my uncle, Sherman, my daddys younger brother, who introduced them.

I wish you had a taller, older brother, my mama joked with Sherman.

He didnt say a word. He disappeared into the crowd of dancing teenagers, and moments later returned with Daddy. Mama says she wasnt impressed. Daddy was older, but he was short and almost white with straight, dark hair. A pretty boy. Mama didnt like pretty boys but she smiled and told him her name. Im Carolyn, she said over the music.

Names Bobby, he lied.

They talked and danced and then exchanged numbers. Daddy called her the next day and they made plans for him to come over on Wednesday. They sat on the tattered sofa in her familys front room and gabbed about school and music, her mama in the next room within earshot. He visited every week and charmed his way into her mamas, my grandmothers, good graces, bringing her a strawberry Faygo, her favorite soda, every time.

Each week Daddy showed up in a different car he had stolen pretending to be a valet at Joe Muer Seafood, an exclusive whites-only restaurant near downtown Detroit. He would lie to Mama whenever she asked about the stolen cars. Thats my cousins car, or Thats my friends car, hed say with a straight face.

Over time, he grew on her, cracking jokes and spoiling her with gifts hed stolen from his mamas Avon orders. Later that year when Mamas mama died, Daddy was right by her side. What you want to do? hed ask, and then take her wherever she wanted to go.

They started talking marriage after Mama finished school. Thats what young couples did in the sixtiesgraduated high school and got married. But after asking her fathers permission, Daddy found reasons why they werent ready, so Mama broke things off and moved to North Carolina.

Daddy called her almost every day, trying to get her back, and by the following June, they were married. It was 1967 and the United States was two years into the Vietnam War. Daddy was drafted months later and sent across the country to an army base in Tacoma, Washington, with Mama by his side. He ended up being one of the lucky few who never went to Vietnam.

Daddy strayed early and often. Mama knew about the other women, but she stayed. Shed grown up in a big, loving family and wanted what her parents had. They had raised eleven children togethersix girls and five boysand were married until my grandmothers death. My grandfather worked on the assembly line at Ford, a good factory job that took care of his family. Hed fled the racial terror of the South in the 1920s like many Black men, first moving to Chicago, and then Detroit. Whatever he ran from, he never spoke of and he forbade his children from going south. But Mama didnt heed his warnings. Once she and Daddy married, she went with him to Mississippi nearly every year to visit his people.

I loved when Mama told me stories about her childhood. She told me about the chili my grandfather cooked every Saturday. She told me how my grandmother loved it when she greased her scalp, how my grandparents loved her, their baby girl, and her siblings with a gentle hand. She told me how my aunts, who were nine years older than her or more, gave her whatever my grandparents could not. She told me how, when my daddy asked for her hand in marriage, my grandfather asked him if he cared about my mama, his daughter, and Daddy said, No, I love her. That was the wrong answer, Mama told me. After forty years of marriage, my grandfather knew love wasnt enough.