“If you girls want breakfast, go’n down to the People’s Center.”
We said all together, “The People’s Center?”
Without skipping a beat Cecile said, “Next to the library on Orchard. Just keep walking till you see kids and old people lined up.”
“You’re not going to take us?” I didn’t mean it to worm out as a question and was mad at myself for asking instead of stating.
“You don’t need me to walk down the street. The park is on the other side. Y’all can run around after breakfast or stay for the program at the Center. It don’t make me no difference.”
Cecile pointed a fountain pen at me. Two more pens were stuck in her hair. “You the oldest. You can read street signs.”
Vonetta, indignant, said, “I can read street signs too.”
“Me too.”
Instead of saying “I didn’t ask for all of that” like I expected, Cecile smacked her palm against her thigh and said, “Then that settles it. Step out this door, cross the street, keep going a block till you get to Orchard. If you can read, you can’t miss the
O
in ‘Orchard.’ Turn left. Keep walking till you see the library. Center’s on the same block. Can’t miss it. Nothing but black folks in black clothes rapping revolution and a line of hungry black kids.”
Then she cut herself off from us, tapped her fountain pen, and repeated, “Black folks, in black clothes, rapping revolution.”
We had Black Panthers in Brooklyn. Black Panther posters with
SEIZE THE TIME
stapled onto telephone poles. We just never had any Black Panthers marching down Herkimer Street, knocking on our door demanding that we give to the cause or calling us some kind of Sister name we had never heard of.
My sisters and I didn’t make a move toward the door. We couldn’t believe our ears. Our crazy mother was sending us outside to find militant strangers if we wanted to eat.
She said, “Wait.” I hoped she had changed her mind
about us going to the Center. She went into the kitchen and came out with a cardboard box, a little smaller than the shoe box for Papa’s work boots. “Here,” she said. “Take this to the Center. Give it to the Panthers. Tell them it’s from Inzilla.” That’s what I thought she said. Inzilla.
She put the box in my hands.
“Who do I—”
“Just find a black beret. Any black beret will do. Make sure you tell them I gave to the cause. You tell them, ‘Don’t come knocking on my door asking for my materials.’”
I knew I wouldn’t be telling no Black Panthers what Cecile said. That she gave to the cause and not to come knocking on her door for her stuff. I just took the box and nodded, because that’s how you treat crazy people. You nod and count down twenty-seven days for crazy to come to an end.
Vonetta and Fern looked to me for what to do next, and Cecile noticed this. There was no lip smile from Cecile, but her eyes found it funny that they always looked to me first.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
We were about to leave, but Fern stopped cold. Her eyes bugged out and she balled her fists. “Wait! Wait!”
Vonetta and I waited while she ran into the back room, her steps all buffalo stomps. I didn’t mind Fern’s stomping because it annoyed Cecile that her house had been invaded
by our mouths, wants, and feet. It served her right.
Both Vonetta and I knew why Fern ran back to the room. We’d been seeing this go on for years. Fern returned with Miss Patty Cake in tow. From her look of disgust, I believed Cecile would have spat on her own floor if she wouldn’t have had to clean it up.
“Aren’t you too big to be dragging that thing with you?”
As far as I was concerned, Cecile had nothing to say about Fern and Miss Patty Cake. Miss Patty Cake was there when Cecile wasn’t.
Now I smiled. I’d understood that Fern and Miss Patty Cake were like that Nat King Cole song “Unforgettable.” When I’d first heard his satiny smooth voice sing “Like a song of love that clings to me,” I knew Miss Patty Cake was like that song of love to Fern.
Cecile thought Fern would buckle under a seven-year-old’s shame. When Fern didn’t answer, she asked again, “Aren’t you too big for alla that?”
Fern shook four braids and barrettes and said, “No,” taking delight in answering no for no’s sake. No, because Cecile didn’t have a hug and a kiss that Fern expected. No, because Cecile didn’t leap up and get that cold glass of water. No, because Cecile had yet to call Fern, Fern.
Vonetta groaned. She had fought enough name-callers on behalf of Miss Patty Cake. I had fought my share too, but so what. It was for Fern and her doll. Except for going to school and church, Fern and Miss Patty Cake had
been inseparable for as long as Fern or anyone else could remember.
Cecile shook like we had given her the willies. She probably asked herself,
Who are these kids?
There was no use in standing around for a long farewell and a list of dos and don’ts. We weren’t leaving Big Ma. We were leaving Cecile with her kitchen and her palm tree. And just as I felt we had gotten the last lick by turning and going, Cecile said, “Don’t kill yourself to get back here. Stay out till sundown.”
We walked along the street, a moving triangle. Me in the front. Vonetta and Fern with Miss Patty Cake behind me at both sides.
“I wanna go home.”
“Me too.”
I knew which home they meant. I said, “We’re going back home in twenty-seven days.”
“Let’s call Papa,” Vonetta said.
“And Big Ma.”
I said, “Not yet. Big Ma hasn’t gotten over the collect call from yesterday. We gotta get up enough dimes to make a real call across the country.”
Vonetta said, “We should call Papa. Tell him she’s mean.”
“And she don’t want us.”
“And she won’t cook or let us in the kitchen.”
“To get a cold glass of water.”
“In her kitchen.”
“In her house.”
I said, “We will. Just not yet.”
Vonetta said, “If Big Ma knew…”
“And Papa.”
“They’d be here lightning quick to get us.”
“Yeah. Quick like lightning.”
I said, “We’ll need a lot of dimes.”
We found the Center like Cecile said we would. A line of hungry kids waited for breakfast, except they weren’t all black. There were older teens in mostly black clothes and Afros posted like soldiers guarding the outside. That hardly seemed necessary when a white-and-black police car circled around the block.
Vonetta was already smiling and showing anyone who’d look her way that she was worth a smile back. She had picked out three girls who looked alike enough to be sisters, each one as thick as my sisters and I were lanky. They wore white boots and daisy dresses with flared sleeves. They might as well have been going to a go-go, not to a free breakfast.
I kept Fern near, my arms crossed before me. I was here to make sure my sisters and I ate breakfast, and to stay out of Cecile’s hair. If Vonetta wanted to get her feelings hurt chasing after smiles and go-go boots, that was on her.
The Panthers opened the doors and we trailed inside, the three of us sticking close together. As we entered, I did what Cecile said. I handed the box to the first Black Panther I saw and said, “This is from Cecile.” I wasn’t about to call her some name I didn’t know or tell them she said to leave her alone. The Black Panther guy opened the box. He took out a sheet from a stack of paper—a flyer with a crouching black panther and some writing on it—and held it up to examine it. He nodded, said, “Thank you, Sister,” and took the box with him.
The three girls in the flower dresses were standing on line looking at us. Vonetta tried to steer me over to them, but I didn’t want to go chasing after them. Their dresses looked so nice and new. We wore shorts and sun tops, although Oakland wasn’t as sunny as we’d imagined California would be. I found us a place on line behind Puerto Ricans who didn’t look Puerto Rican but who spoke Spanish. Then I remembered our study of the fifty states. They were probably Mexicans.
I thought Black Panthers would only look out for black people, but there were the two Mexicans, a little white boy, and a boy who looked both black and Chinese. Everyone else was black. I’d never seen the Black Panthers making
breakfast on the news. But then, beating eggs never makes the evening news.
As we stood on line, a guy who should have kept walking stopped right in front of us. He crossed his arms and looked down at Fern.
I recognized the beakish nose on that narrow face. He was the one in the telephone booth who had turned his back to us, like he didn’t want to be seen. For all I knew, he was one of those in the black berets and Afros who’d come knocking on Cecile’s door last night. Now he stood across from Fern, his legs apart and his arms folded.
“What is wrong with this picture,” he stated instead of asked. He knew the answer, all right. I was pretty good at reading faces.
He didn’t have a leather jacket, but he was one of them. On his black T-shirt was a dead white pig with flies buzzing around it and the words
OFF THE PIG
in white letters. His hair was a big loose Afro because it was a little stringy. Stringy like Lucy Raleigh’s, who bragged about being part Chickasaw in the fourth grade but by fifth grade was singing “I’m Black and I’m Proud” louder than loud because James Brown’s song had made it the thing to do.
The stringy-Afro-wearing beak man wasn’t Papa-grown or Cecile-grown. Probably all of nineteen or twenty, but he thought he was something. He was putting on a show for all the other black beret wearers.
When none of us spoke, he pointed and asked again the
question whose answer he already knew. “What is wrong with this picture?”
Fern pointed back at him and said, “I don’t know. What’s wrong with this picture?”
The other Black Panthers laughed and told Fern, “That’s right, Li’l Sis. Don’t take nothing from no one.” And they slapped palms and said stuff like “These are Sister Inzilla’s, all right. Look at them.”
Beak Man tried to stand up to his humiliation. Shake it off.
“Li’l Sis, are you a white girl or a black girl?”
Fern said, “I’m a colored girl.”
He didn’t like the sound of “colored girl.” He said, “Black girl.”
Fern said, “Colored.”
“Black girl.”
Vonetta and I threw our “colored” on top of Fern’s like we were ringtossing at Coney Island. This was bigger than
Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud
. If one of us said “colored,” we all said “colored.” Unless we were fighting among ourselves.
“All right, then. ‘Cullid’ girls,” Big Beak said, “why are you carrying that self-hatred around in your arms?”
An older teenage girl in a Cal State T-shirt said, “Kelvin, you’re crazy. Leave those colored girls alone.”
Big-beaked, stringy-haired Kelvin looked pleased with himself.
I said, “That’s not self-hatred. That’s her doll.”
“Yeah. A doll baby.”
“Miss Patty Cake.”
In spite of the Cal State girl and the other Black Panthers saying leave those girls alone, he went on.
“Are your eyes blue like hers? Is your hair blond like hers? Is your skin white like hers?”
The girl said again, “Crazy Kelvin, stop it. Just stop it.”
Crazy Kelvin turned to a lady who wore an African-print dress and a matching cloth wrapped around her head. “Sister Mukumbu. Our ‘colored’ girls here need some reeducation.” And he walked away, one of those pimp walks, like
How you like me now
?
Sister Mukumbu just smiled at him like she didn’t take Crazy Kelvin seriously. She and the Cal State girl exchanged a look.
The Cal State girl turned toward me and said, “Don’t mind Crazy Kelvin. That’s what we call him. He’s a little wild.”
For all of that, the eggs were cold, but we ate them, along with the buttered toast and orange slices. It was better than eating air sandwiches at Cecile’s.
Fern hugged Miss Patty Cake but refrained from putting a piece of toast to her doll’s lips like she would have done at home. Still, the other kids laughed at her and called her White Baby Lover and Big Baby, except for the boy who
looked both colored and Chinese. I told them to shut up. And that went for the three sisters in flower dresses. Even the tallest sister. No one could call Fern White Baby Lover even though Miss Patty Cake was a white baby and Fern loved her. No one could call Fern a Big Baby but Vonetta and me. Vonetta ate her toast silently. We had cost Vonetta her summer friends with the white go-go boots and happening dresses. But I didn’t care. Fern could love Miss Patty Cake all she wanted. We could call ourselves Vanilla Wafers, Chocolate Chips, or Oreo Cookies for all I cared about black girls and colored girls.
And even though Cecile didn’t bother to bring us here or stick up for Fern, the Black Panthers had slapped palms and said, “Those are Sister Inzilla’s, all right.”
Once breakfast was over, most of the kids left, except for a dozen who stayed behind, including us. I told my sisters we might as well stick around for the summer camp program. Cecile had made it clear she didn’t want to see us anytime soon, so we told Sister Mukumbu our names and followed her and Sister Pat, the young woman in the Cal State T-shirt, into a classroom.
I felt silly and wrong calling a grown person Brother So-and-So or Sister Such-and-Such, but thanks to Cecile, we now had brothers and sisters we had never before laid eyes on. Sure, they said “brutha” and “sistah” in Brooklyn, but here it was more of a title and not like you were saying “him” or “her.” As far as I could tell, none of the grown
people at the Center went by Mr., Mrs., or Miss. If Big Ma could see how quickly our home training had flown out the window, she would have had us on the next Boeing 727 back to New York.
There was something welcoming about Sister Mukumbu, whom I liked right away. If Sister Mukumbu had met us at the airport, we would have felt welcomed as she stepped forward to claim us. She would have wrapped us up in her green, purple, and orange African print dress and begged our forgiveness for having left us.
We sat at one of the two long tables. The classroom was unlike any I had ever been in. Instead of pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and President Johnson, there was a picture of Huey Newton sitting in a big wicker chair with a rifle at his side. There were other pictures of mostly black men and a few women hung up around the room. I expected to find Dr. Martin Luther King’s photograph hanging on the wall, but I was disappointed. Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali were the only faces I could name. I didn’t know any of the women, although one woman looked just like Big Ma. Next to her picture were the words “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
On the walls were big sheets of lined-ruled paper written in teacher’s neat handwriting. The first one said “What We Want” in green letters. On the other side of the wall, another said “What We Believe.”
Vonetta didn’t seem to care that we were in some sort of Black Panther summer camp, learning to become Black Panthers. Her attention was fixed on the three sisters with the flared-sleeve dresses and their round, curly Afros. I knew I would hear all about it later. How it was time for her to have a new hairstyle and that our clothes were baby clothes.
Sister Mukumbu said, “Hirohito Woods.”
A boy from the other table with dark spiky hair, brown coppery skin, and slanted eyes groaned. He was probably my age.
Sister Mukumbu smiled in spite of his groaning. She beckoned him to her side, her many bracelets jangling as she waved him forward. “Hirohito will help with my demonstration.”
I didn’t have to turn to see Vonetta’s mile-long pout. It was just like Vonetta to be envious of someone else being in the spotlight. Hirohito didn’t seem thrilled. He pushed his chair backward, scraping the floor, and went sullenly up to the front. It was only from the back of his spiky head that I recognized him as the flying T board rider who’d nearly mowed us down yesterday. I had half a mind to sock him good.
Sister Mukumbu said, “I’m going to be the sun, and Hirohito will be the earth.” She leaned and whispered something in his ear. He heaved a big sigh, like he didn’t want to do whatever it was she told him but would do it
anyway. The sighing was for us kids so he didn’t come off as some kind of teacher’s pet.
Sister Mukumbu nodded and said firmly, “Now, Hirohito.”
He heaved another sigh and began to turn around slowly, each time taking a step to travel around Sister Mukumbu, who stood still and smiled. This was better than socking him in the arm. Watching him turn around and around in his black and silver Raiders jersey. He looked down and probably felt silly. All the kids in the program, including my sisters and me, giggled. Sister Mukumbu wasn’t bothered by our giggling or by Hirohito’s sighing. She said, “The earth turns slowly on its axis, while also spinning around the sun. Day wouldn’t change to night if the earth didn’t spin on its axis. The seasons wouldn’t change if the earth didn’t travel around the sun. This means vegetation wouldn’t grow, which means poor farmers couldn’t harvest, and poor people couldn’t eat if the earth didn’t spin on its axis and travel around the sun. That one body spinning in motion affects everyone’s lives. Does anyone know another word for the earth’s constant spinning?”
That was how I knew Sister Mukumbu was a real teacher, aside from her welcoming smile and her blackboard penmanship. She asked a teacher’s type of question. The kind that says: Join in.
Thanks to my time spent with Merriam Webster, I had a few words in mind.
Rotating. Orbiting. Turning. Circling.
I wanted to join in, but I felt silly, being one of the older kids. Not as silly as Hirohito spinning around but too old to wave my hand frantically as all the younger kids around me were doing. The older sister of the three girls also sat on her answer. She probably knew too but left it up to her sisters, who wanted to be called on.
When one of the kids called out “Revolving,” Sister Mukumbu clapped her hands. Her bangles jangled. “Yes! All of your words are right, but ‘revolving’ is right on!” Sister Pat then gave the boy a cookie.
Sister Mukumbu said, “Revolving. Revolution. Revolutionary. Constant turning. Making things change.”
Sister Pat said, “Huey Newton is a revolutionary. Huey makes change.”
And Sister Mukumbu continued, saying, “Che Guevara was a revolutionary. Che made change.”
As they named all of the revolutionaries who made change, Hirohito came to a complete stop. He held out his hands, a dizzy Frankenstein, and staggered to his chair. The boy who won the cookie said, “Nice spinning, Twinkle Toes.” Hirohito rested his head on the table and closed his eyes.
I just thought, Serves you right.
Sister Mukumbu announced, “Today we’re going to be like the earth, spinning around and affecting many. Today we’re going to think about our part in the revolution.”
Vonetta’s hand shot up. I kicked her under the table,
but she was determined to have everyone look at her, which meant have everyone look at us. I forgot all about Hirohito and was now afraid of what Vonetta would say next; and sure enough, Vonetta said, “We didn’t come for the revolution. We came for breakfast.” Then Fern added, “And to meet our mother in Oakland.”
If Hirohito’s spinning made us giggle, Vonetta’s declaration made everyone—except my sisters and me, and the still-dizzy Hirohito—full-out laugh. The group of girls whom Vonetta had been winking at were the main cacklers. Even Sister Mukumbu, caught off guard by Vonetta’s and Fern’s outbursts, allowed herself a chuckle.
I blamed Vonetta and not Fern, since I didn’t want the world to learn we didn’t rightfully know our mother. Fern wouldn’t have uttered a word if Vonetta hadn’t raised her hand to speak. Even worse, Vonetta had thrown a king-sized monkey wrench into my plans. I had hoped to ask Sister Mukumbu about the name the Black Panthers called Cecile and why they called her that. I didn’t know exactly how I would have asked her, but something made me believe she would know and that she wouldn’t make me feel bad for asking. She certainly wouldn’t have given me that “Oh, you poor motherless girl” pity look. Or the snooty “Don’t you even know your own mother’s name?” Sister Mukumbu would have given me the plain, pure, teacherly truth.
Then Vonetta raised her hand and opened her mouth
and had the world looking and laughing at us. Except for the boy who was too dizzy to laugh. I wasn’t about to add fuel to the fire by asking questions about things that I should know, like my mother’s name.