Goldie Taylor - The Love You Save

Praise for Goldie Taylors The Love You Save

A deeply inspiring, must-read memoir about the transformative power of books to heal and unite us.

Gabrielle Union

A powerful coming-of-age story about a little Black girls determination to love and survive. This is a memoir about the pain and joy of being the first, with all of the sacrifices that come with opportunity.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, National Book Awardnominated author of Thick

Harrowing, transcendent and written with singular grace, The Love You Save will stick with you forever.

Tamron Hall

Goldie Taylors story will console and inspire countless people in crisis struggling with their own traumas. But it should also give hope, comfort and confirmation to everyone who believes in the singular power of books.

J.R. Moehringer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tender Bar

Writing with clarity and elegance, Goldie Taylor has crafted a memoir about finding peace, hope, and love after surviving unspeakable violence. This book will stay with me a long, long time.

Jaquira Daz, author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir

Goldie Taylor writes of her childhood in East St. Louis with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality and, somehow, unwavering compassion that put me in mind of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn .

Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyers English

Also by Goldie Taylor

Paper Gods

The January Girl

In My Fathers House

The Love You Save

A MEMOIR

Goldie Taylor

In memory of the women who made me

Willow weep for me, willow weep for me

Bend your branches down along the ground and cover me

Listen to my plea, hear me willow and weep for me

Billie Holiday

Remember the rain that made your corn grow

Haitian Proverb

Contents

She stood in the backyard, looking up that sky with her fists planted on her hips, shaking her head at the rain she knowed was coming. The sun was up, though the clouds were scant and it was hot out. But her big toe was aching, she said, and that was proof enough of a storm not yet on the horizon.

The knees that used to climb dead oak trees were ringed in soft pillows of fat now and stiffened by what she claimed was early-onset rheumatoid arthritis.

Her skin reddened and glistened in the heat. Heavy beads of sweat dripped off her chin and her sleeveless polyester blouse wetted at her deeply creased bosom. She was duck-footed with meaty calf muscles, and her short dark hair was still done up in pink foam rollers and covered with a floral scarf.

She could smell the river, Auntie said, sniffing the air.

Stubborn as a stiff-necked mule and with the temperament of a meat ax, Auntie Gerald never did believe in letting somebody else take your laundry. She was deeply distrustful when it came to other peoples food and, for a good long while, she believed store-bought cakes were the work of the Devil. She wouldnt so much as take a piss in a strangers house.

I watched her pull the still-damp wash from the clothesline, unpinning the bleached white sheets and pillowcases and tossing them into a basket. Shed run the dryer, I knew, something she typically avoided in the summer months to save on the electric bills.

Carry this on back in there, she said. You take a bath last night?

Yes, maam.

She eyed me with a whiff of suspicion. I was eight, maybe, give or take a year, and reeking like a pot of congealed chitlins.

You caint smell yaself?

I followed Auntie up the wood plank steps, lugging the basket through the screen door and into the kitchen where Grandma Alice was rummaging through the cabinets, rooting around for a cast-iron skillet. She discovered it in the oven, right where shed left it to dry after browning pork chops and flour gravy to go with fried okra and boiled white rice the night before. She was my mama and Aunties mother, old, maybe seventy-five, and forgetful. By then, her eyesight was failing, and her ropy veins snaked along her leathery brown hands.

Cut that fire down, Mama, Auntie said. Yont need all that heat.

Auntie hauled the wash down to the basement. Grandma Alice slipped on her eyeglasses, studied the flame, and let the skillet warm up. She went about frying thin strips of bacon to go with her butter-and-sugar-laced grits and toasted two slices of white bread in the oven.

You ate yet?

No, maam.

Here, take some of this bacon and get yourself some milk. Its some grits left in there.

I helped myself to a dollop of grits, mixing in a pad of butter and sprinkling on a full teaspoon of granulated sugar. As usual, the bacon was cooked hard and broke up like days-old crackers between my teeth.

Bless your food, child, Grandma Alice said.

I quickly said grace and shoveled more grits into my mouth.

My mothers mother thought that if you looked at anything long enough, good, bad, or otherwise, you could see God in it. And, I suppose, I always did believe that. Though, I still dont know what He had to do with burnt bacon.

The rain came and went.

At some point late that morning, Grandma Alice and Auntie Gerald settled down in upholstered chairs in the front room to watch The Price Is Right. I sat on the floor between them, while Auntie folded the last of the laundry.

Itll rain again, she said. Just watch and see what I tell you.

SOMEONE TO
WATCH OVER ME

In the fall of 1974, Mama packed us up and moved to St. Ann, Missouri.

I suppose that little, painted frame house on St. Christopher Lane was my mothers way of proclaiming her self-sufficiency. Despite its pea green wood siding, splotches of sun-scorched grass and unpaved driveway, with Daddy dead and resting in Greenwood, it was tangible proof that she could lead a neat and orderly life and raise three productive, law-abiding children on her own.

It was twenty miles and a world away from East St. Louis, where most of our family still lived. In 1971, despite having been back from living in Chicago only a few weeks, with a bit of finagling, Mamas name landed at the top of the waiting list for a new public housing project. As it turns out, Auntie Gerald and cousin Dot Brown were both on the East St. Louis housing authority board.

For the little while that we lived there, our two-story townhouse on Duck Hill was Mamas refuge. Whatever little bit we had seemed to be more than everybody else. Mama had a Zenith television and stereo console. The wood encasement, which looked more like a piece of fine furniture, housed a record player and an eight-track tape deck. The green plaid couches she bought off the showroom floor in Wellston were zipped up in custom plastic slipcovers. Mama hung up pretty curtains, affixed an oversize faux oil painting of a ship to the living room wall, dressed our beds in colorful linens and kept the living room furniture wiped down with Pledge.

It wasnt long, though, before things on Duck Hill went from sugar to shit.

What used to be a working-class town started to crack and the projects were the first to crumble. My older brother, Donnie, was beaten and left for dead. He was only fourteen when somebody found him unconscious with his pockets turned inside out in a ditch next to the railroad tracks.

Then Daddy died. And Mama decided shed had enough. She wanted something better for herself, someplace where dead bodies didnt turn up in the alley and the paint didnt peel off the school building walls.