“You people don’t know the meaning of responsibility,” he had spat on more than one occasion.
“I am not ‘you people,’ Mr. Reilly.”
“You’re all alike, beggin’ bastards,” he could be heard mumbling as he wrapped her order.
Delores remembered it like yesterday as she trembled with a rage inside her as she read the sign again and her head began
to spin.
Black Owned.
Behind her, people dashed along as broken glass shattered, policemen shouted through bullhorns off in the distance, and sirens
sounded, creating the backdrop for the maddening situation she felt herself in. She looked around on the ground frantically,
the anger mounting by the minute until she found a large rock, so large she needed both hands to lift it. Hoisting the rock
over her head with all the strength she could muster, she threw the rock through the door, shattering the bottom half of the
glass just enough for her to scurry in. Looking around for something to smash, she ran for the cooler where she knew Mr. Reilly
kept all the dairy products and started smashing cartons of eggs. Then she picked up a Snickers bar and bit into it, giggling
like a lunatic. With candy all over her mouth and chin, it was that moment that she knew how it felt to be free.
Looking around for something to drink, her eyes landed on a bottle of charcoal fluid. She stared at the label with the picture
of flaming steaks and she imagined the store burning, in flames. She tore off the cap and doused everything with the entire
bottle of fluid, forgetting about her thirst. Grabbing another bottle, she did the same, until she had emptied every bottle
of charcoal fluid she could find in the store. She looked for matches, finding some behind the counter. She lit the first
match, but the deep breaths she was taking blew it right out. Striking another match, she held it to a paper bag, which she
used as a torch to set small fires in the store. She backed up and staggered through the hole in the door she had come through.
She watched the small fires turn to dark clouds of gray smoke as the flames began to leap and dance higher and higher like
happy slaves on Juneteenth.
Delores found a spot under a large shade tree and sat down with her knees pulled tightly against her chest as she watched
her work. She thought of her mother. She knew she could never go back there. Her mother had raised her in a strict Christian
environment. She had taught Delores respect for people and their property. She had taught her love and, most important, the
moral value of turning the other cheek. But all it had gotten her mother was a maid’s job scrubbing white people’s floors.
Delores decided if she ever turned the other cheek, it would be the one that the world could kiss. She was seventeen years
old.
In 1971, by the time Delores was twenty-one, she had forgotten when she had lost her virginity, but she also had forgotten
the last time she went hungry. She was the talk of the town and every young hustler wanted a chance to have her on his tongue.
If her innocence had died in the ashes of the riot, her pride, beauty, and cunning were born like the Phoenix, the bird of
prey.
Since Delores decided not to go back to her mother’s house, she did decide to go with the next best thing, her mother’s sister,
Gladys, who lived on High Street. Gladys was every bit as wild as her mother was tranquil and as conniving as her mother was
honest. She loved Delores with all the love reserved for her sister, who had rejected her.
Her home was an after-hours spot in Brick Towers Apartments. She sold everything from wine to weed, chicken to pussy, but
never her own.
“Child, these niggas in the street don’t sell enough dope or pimp enough ass to buy out this gold mine I got,” she would say
when the question came up. Not a big woman, but well proportioned and well intact for a woman in her forties, Gladys was admired
as well as respected, and Delores took to her like a magnet. Gladys loved Delores and wasn’t about to shelter her from what
the real world was really about. She didn’t like Delores’s decision to leave home so young. The girl still needed grooming,
still needed a watchful eye, and Gladys was determined to mold Delores. She wanted her only niece to be resilient enough to
survive, yet feminine enough to enjoy what God gave her. So, Gladys didn’t stop Delores from being who she wanted to be. She
only warned her about who she could become.
“Dee Dee, you see her over there?” asked Gladys, calling Delores by her nickname. “Not the one in the green, the one in the
blue. Yeah, her. Honey, let me tell you, child, she was Ms. It just a few months ago ’cause she used to mess with this ol’
fine ass nigga named Man. That nigga coulda’ had the world. He had so much money, it ain’t make no sense. He sold that horse
up and down this block, but he went and got fucked up on his own shit. Before you know it, he robbin’, stealin’, breakin’
in motherfuckers’ shit. Even had Ms. Ol’ It shooting that mess up her arm, and before you know it, he had her out there sellin’
her ass, so he could get that monkey off his back. Then, he go and OD and leave Ms. It with nothin’ but a jones. Now, she
out here trickin’ anything for chump change tryin’ to keep the shakes off.”
Just then a lady carrying a baby with two small children following close behind walked up on the house.
“Hi, Ms. Gladys,” said the girl.
“Hey, baby, how you today?” asked Ms. Gladys as she and Delores sat on the porch catching a breeze.
“I’m fine,” the girl replied, passing by.
“Now that’s Bernadette. Smart girl, just stupid. Every decision that child make, be wrong. And every sour man she mess with
leave her with nothing but sweet-sounding words and a belly filled up. The girl twenty-two years old and she got five kids
and Mr. Sam said he think she pregnant again.”
Delores learned everybody’s mistakes, through gossip. And even though she made a few of her own, her head was on straight.
Straight enough to steer her way clear of life’s misfortunes, thanks to Gladys. Her looks and vivaciousness kept her in all
the latest designs, but her mind kept her out of all the classic pitfalls.
It was the end of August at the yearly summer block party when she first met him. She saw the tall jet-black brother in the
Army-green uniform and she just knew she had him all figured out. The way he watched her, he was just like all the rest of
the gawkers on her long list of admirers, except his suit had him at the bottom. Besides, the last time she had seen a soldier,
Newark was a war zone. So, his first impression drew scorn instead of interest.
Al Green, or Grits, as everyone who knew him jokingly called him, was booming out the DJ’s speakers. When the song ended,
Mr. Army approached her, just as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” began playing.
“Hey there, mama, I say what is really going on?”
Delores looked him up and down with feigned indifference, feigned because despite his uniform, he was one fine ass black man.
“Why? You gonna arrest me or somethin’?” asked Delores with a capital A for attitude.
He flashed a perfect Colgate smile and laughed, giving her a tingle at the base of her spine from the sound of his voice.
“I might, if I can’t get the next dance,” he replied, and as if on cue the DJ played Candi Stanton’s “Victim.” It was her
favorite song, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. Instead, she folded her arms across her breasts and looked away so she
could lie without looking in his soft baby browns.
“I don’t like this song.”
“Come on, sugar. You expect me to believe that when your body is sayin’ something else?”
She shot him a look and let him know he was right but she resented the fact that he saw through her facade so easily.
“You know, I’ve been around the world twice, so any flavor there is, I’ve had a double dip, but ain’t nothing like you ever
come ’cross my plate.”
She looked him up and down again, but the truth was he had her open, just like that, and her heart had already been softened
by his satiny charm. She knew she was being gamed. She wasn’t a dummy. Yet still, she liked it. Her young ego felt appeased
to know she was being judged by worldwide standards, so she couldn’t help but crack a smile at that one.
“Ahh, she smiles. So, now can I have your name?”
“No,” Delores simply stated.
“No?” he questioned her back, wondering who this chick was.
“No, but you can have this dance,” she said, looking into his eyes.
He grabbed her hand and led her to the middle of the street. Her feet never touched the ground. Song after song they moved
as if they were dancing on clouds to a rhythm of one heartbeat. Delores melted, giving in to the sweet sense of security,
wrapped in his strong arms. She didn’t know his name and she didn’t need to. All she knew was that she was ready and willing
to abandon her security net and go full throttle into what was unknown with this man she’d only known a few moments. It wouldn’t
be long after the song ended that he’d know her name and she would moan his passionately… and it all came down like a jones.
The next couple of weeks for Delores were filled with a love only the ghetto could create. A desperate intense feeling of
love that made Delores wake up every morning singing and go to sleep at night humming, enveloped in the arms of her soldier.
She moved into his one-room boardinghouse apartment after convincing the ever-religious, always-nosy landlady, Mrs. Tendrell,
that they were married.
“I don’t know what them other folks do with they homes. They a bunch of whorehouses and gamblin’ dens, but as for me and my
house, I serve the Lord up in here and I don’t want no evil do-mongers up in here,” she said to them the day they were moving
in.
Delores and her soldier shared a secret snicker for their innocent deception, laughing and mocking Mrs. Tendrell many a time.
They were constant companions, gambling at Gladys’s, drinking corn liquor until they came home staggering with laughter, then
falling out on their three-legged bed, which Delores had put a paint can under to hold up the frame. They’d make wild and
passionate love. His wasn’t rough, just hard, long, intense strokes, up and down and kissing, like their lips and tongues
were meant to be in each other’s mouth. As he turned her over on her stomach, he gently placed himself back inside her. He
humped her faster and faster, flowing through her in and out, on his knees, flat again, up and down. Then he turned her back
around, legs clinging to his back as they stimulated one another into an orgasmic bliss.
Everything was perfect.
But the end came as unexpected and abruptly as the beginning. Even as she thought back to the day, in the midst of her present-day
luxury and security, she longed for the cramped boardinghouse room and the love it contained. The tears moistened her cheeks
and it felt like an invisible hand gripped her heart as she remembered that rainy afternoon so long ago.
“Baby, I been thinking,” was how he solemnly began. He stood by the bed looking out the one and only window in the room.
“About me?” she flirted, not yet grasping the gravity of his tone.
Her words made him force a smile.
“Always, you,” he assured her, then cleared his throat and looked back out the window, unable to face the innocent trust and
devotion that represented everything she was to him.
“Baby, you okay?” she asked, beginning to worry.
He didn’t answer that question; only silence filled the room.
“If there was anything I didn’t plan on for this leave, it was to meet someone like you.”
Leave?
She questioned the term, but she recognized in the word a certain prior commitment to another life.
“Leave?” she repeated, asking him for clarity.
“Leave days. My tour of duty ended, and after that you get a thirty-day leave. Most people don’t call it a leave, but I do.”
She couldn’t speak. Her mind spun like a top set loose, whirling and whirling around and around.
He can’t leave me,
she thought as an ache hit her hard.
Please don’t leave me,
she thought,
please don’t be leaving.
And just like that the top stopped spinning and so did she. She sat down real calm, as if his words had left her somewhere
far away. She just sat real still, holding it all in, holding on as the tears warmed her eyes at the sound of his words.
How could he do this to me. I thought he loved me,
she thought as he walked over to her and kneeled before her as if he were about to propose, only he wasn’t and she knew it
by the look on his face.
“I—I… I know it’s hard to hear ’cause this is hard for me to say,” he said with tears in his eyes and a pained look on his
face, as if his world was more torn than hers. “And I know it’ll be even harder to do, but you see, sugar, it’s something
I gotta do,” he tried to explain, almost in a whisper, his voice cracking from the pain he felt trying to explain why it was
time he leave the woman he loved with all his heart.
“Why?” she asked as a single teardrop fell from her eye. She was asking why not only of him for leaving, but of herself for
loving and of God for allowing her to love. However, it seemed that he was the only one with an answer. He stood back up,
his full six-foot-three frame dwarfing her as she sat on the edge of the small, twin-framed bed looking down into her hands
clasped tightly in her lap. He sat back down next to her and began.
“I never told you why I went and joined the Army. I never told nobody, not even my own mama, but I guess this is as good a
time as any.” He chuckled lightly and continued. “I remember the way you looked at me the first time we met, me in my uniform
and all. You looked at me like I was crazy. What’s a black man doing in the Army is what your eyes said to me, and I liked
it. Sound funny me sayin’ that, huh?” he asked her as she nodded, not saying a word, just listening. “But, it’s true, don’t
no black man belong in no white man’s Army, fightin’ and dyin’ for no white man’s war. But, baby, I ain’t join to fight no
war for them. I went over there to fight my own war, to fight the war I knew I could never win over here. The war goin’ on
every day on every black man in America. The war they say don’t exist. But, I know it exist, ’cause I been fightin’ it my
whole life and losin’ a little bit every day, losin’ my respect, losin’ my love, damn near losin’ my goddamn mind.”