Week 7: When Some Things Are Not Enough.

    Detroit in the early 2000’s was everything no one would had imagine it to be. The city was vibrant and undermine corruption was booming. The infamous “Malice at The Palace,” tore the rough off The Palace of Auburn Hills and ushered the Pistons into an NBA Championship after taking down the Los Angeles Lakers. I grew up on the westside of the of the Motor City. My neighborhood was filled with quiet the bustle, and even though majority of us were black, a white or Mexican family would move-in, here and there. I remember this family who had a son name Luke and a daughter name Hannah. They always smelled funny, like wet clothes tangled together and left in the washer for too long without going for another spin, just walking around smelling funny. To be honest, those families never stayed for long, but I never wondered why until now.

 

            My grandmother’s house had become home to me and my eight siblings throughout the years. The second house from the corner stood hers, 14421 Westwood, Detroit, MI, 48313. It is crazy to know that I still remember the address, the grey chipping paint that covered the entire house, the moss that had massed itself through the cracks of cinderblocks of steps and onto the white railing leading you to an eggshell color screen door. It is crazy to recall any of this because it has been many years since I have been back there. Not just to the house, that became a home but back to see the people, the neighborhood and what is left of those cinderblocks, if any. My grandmother’s house was demolished three years after she died. I recall my sister being on the phone with me when it happens. The noise over the phone mimicked that of a construction site. Vehicles backing up and moving in and men yelling weird things to each other, I guess things only construction workers understood because I did not.

 

  My family has always been close-knit with each other. My facetious aunts lived down the street and both of my foolish uncles lived around the corner with their families. My grandmother’s home only had two bedrooms, but somehow nine kids and many others managed to find a place to sleep every night. When the sun came down out of the sky, I sometimes found myself in my uncle George room. My uncle was deaf and never wore hearing aids. No one in my family speaks sound language because there was never a need apparently. My grandmother taught my uncle how to read lips when he was a child because she was not able to send him to a school for the death. She was black, with two children in Alabama during Jim Crow.

My grandmother used to say, “sometimes you just don’t want to hear the shit the world is going through today.”

            I either chuckled or was in shock hearing my grandmother cursed from time to time. Today I understand how it feels not wanting to hear the shit the world is going through. Our house did not have a gate around the yard, but two houses down Marvin the neighbor did. Marvin and his best friend Al lived together, they were those guys who could go to Home Depot or Lowes and buy lumber to build a gate themselves. After their gate was built, my siblings I and would always unbolt the door to pick fruit from their yard. We would jet straight through the opening of the gate after being spotted and run impatiently fast back to our grandmother’s house.

 “Marvin said y’all better come in and washed those fruits off next time,” She holler out the door.

And so, we did.

It never occurred to me as a kid that I was witnessing two men living together and the legislation, judicial and executive branches of our government were not freaking out. Maybe they were, it just never occurred to a child. Al soon fell ill and died. There were rumors about how he died but I had always been told it came and went along with him. No one ever explained what it was that came and went with Al, but it also took a piece of Marvin with him. He never cared if we took a piece of fruit or two anymore, instead he begins inviting us to sit on his porch and listen to the many stories of him dressing up in feathers and glitter eyeshadow for competitions in New York. 

 

            We also lived down the street from Peter Vetal Elementary, where all nine of us attended. School was letting out for the summer and everyone was excited. It was a piping-hot day in June, without a cloud in the sky. I remember watching the news and the weatherman was scrambling eggs in the middle of the street. The school had cut off the air conditioning for the year and even though it was a half-a-day, I could sense my skin melting off into gooey clumps. Finally, the bell rang at 12:15. I quickly exchange numbers with classmates and promised to hang out that summer, even though we never did, while being pushed out of the doors to our freedom for the next few months. I could feel someone pulling and yanking at my backpack.

“Come on let’s go.” my annoying sister Courtney, whose job was to round all of us up to walk home together.

 

            We began walking to the dollar store with our white and navy uniforms on. I did not ask any questions - I was outside melting instead of being inside, with no homework and had the possibility of getting my favorite candy bar, a Babe Ruth. We walked out of the store with a pack of one hundred water balloons, preparing for an epic show down once we got home. We changed into our bathing suits and headed out to the front with the sprinklers on, and two plastic bins fill with what look like enlarged fruit gushers. My grandmother chose teams and since there was so many of us, there was not one worry about having too many or just a few on one side. We ran to the bins picking up our weapons and launching at our opponent. Stuffing as many fruit gushers into our shirts and ducking for cover. The water balloons would go quickly and all of us would be drenched but not enough to cool us off.

 

            The beauty of UV rays reflecting off black and brown skin puts me in a trance. How when wet, our hair bends or how our melanin would collide and cause friction with the gusher rupturing the outer membrane to reveal what we are running from, is the key to living. Not key to winning a water balloon fight but essential to human life. Many children who grow up in the inner city do not have access to clean water or a swimming pool. The narrative of black people not swimming, I would say is not a myth but is rooted in a history lesson many of us may never have. Over sixty years ago, which was not ages ago, many inner-city black families were not allowed to swim in the same quarters as white people. Others believe, black people fear of water dates back as early as The Middle Passage, referring to the transport of Africans across the Atlantic and to the West Indies to be enslave.

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 My grandmother passed in 2009 and so did my mom a year later. We moved to a new house with an above ground pool, out in the suburbs. That house was boring, no chipping paint, no eggshell color screen door and no moss growing between the cinderblocks. My room was in the basement which was always cold and smelled like Davy Jones locker because of the laundry room. My siblings and I barely swam because we missed playing in the sprinklers and hoarding water balloons for ‘sudden death’ but, also the innocence of it all. The water did not roll off our precious brown skin once we entered the pool the way it does the windshield on a car-- stop, pause, fall and repeat until the water has met its final-destination. In all honesty, the thrill was gone so, was grandma and mom. Without them here, to separate all nine of us into teams, we saw no point in pretending we cared about swimming. We wanted our grandma and needed our mom more. Water is said to be the most essential part of life, we had that, and it was not enough.