After the program ended for the day, we stayed out as long as we could. By six o’clock we were hungry. Whether she liked it or not, Cecile had to let us inside her green stucco house. When she opened the door, all she said was “Ya back?” Then she spread the tablecloth on the floor and brought out shrimp lo mein and egg rolls from the kitchen. She had probably gone out to Mean Lady Ming’s while we were at the Center.
We washed up and sat Indian-style around the food. I said the blessing and then I asked, “Why the Black Panthers call you Inzilla?” No use letting my curiosity go itching. If I had to ask someone, I might as well go straight to the mountain. The crazy mother mountain.
She gave me a blank stare. Like I said something wrong. Then she corrected me.
“Nzila.”
In place of shrugs, my sisters and I shot one another glances. That was not a Brooklyn sound. Or an Alabama sound. It was probably not even an honest-to-goodness Oakland sound.
Instead of trying it out I said, “Why they call you that?”
My sisters followed.
“Isn’t your name Cecile?”
“Yeah. Cecile.”
She said, “My name is Nzila. Nzila is a poet’s name. My poems blow the dust off surfaces to make clear and true paths. Nzila.”
I gave her a plain stare. Plain and blank. It might as well have been an eye roll. She probably hated my father’s plain face on me. That the plain way about him was the plain way about me. I didn’t know about blowing dust and clearing paths. I knew about hot-combing thick heads of hair and ironing pleated wool skirts for school.
She said, “It’s Yoruba for ‘the path.’”
I knew better than to roll my eyes at her “so-called” name and where she said it came from. Instead I asked her where Your Ruba was. She quickly told me it was a people. A nation. In the land of our ancestors.
Vonetta asked, “You mean Prattville, Alabama?”
This time I wouldn’t kick Vonetta. Good old Vonetta. Prattville was where Papa and Big Ma were originally from. They weren’t from big-city Mobile, Montgomery, or Selma, but from Prattville. And truth be told, my daddy and my grandmama came from a one-cow town rubbing next to Prattville. They just said Prattville because it was more known.
I asked, “So you can change your name any time you want to?”
Vonetta: “To anything you want to?”
Fern: “To anything you can spell?”
Cecile said, “It’s my name. My self. I can name my self. And if I’m not the one I was but am now a new self, why would I call my self by an old name?”
Then I said, “If you keep changing your name, how will people know you or your poems?” When my sisters and I speak, one right after the other, it’s like a song we sing, a game we play. We never need to pass signals. We just fire off rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Delphine. Vonetta. Fern.
Me: “S’pose you got famous. For writing poems?”
Vonetta: “Then everyone knew your name.”
Fern: “And you couldn’t hide.”
She said, “My poems aren’t about that. Fame-seeking poems. They’re the people’s art,” although yesterday she didn’t want to have anything to do with “the people.”
I said, “What if all the people could recite all of your poems?”
Vonetta: “And they said them on the radio.”
Fern: “And you became famous.”
Me: “You couldn’t hide then.”
Fern: “Surely couldn’t.”
She said, “Who you all working for? I think y’all working for the Man undercover. The FBI. The COINTELPRO.”
I knew about the FBI from the Sunday night show and from the news, but who were the COINTELPRO? Cecile knew she had us baffled and took control of the talk like she had grabbed both the ball and the jacks.
“Oh, they’re slick, all right,” she said. “The feds hire midgets to front as kids. They infiltrate families with long-lost cousins who don’t look a thing like you, but you take them in because that’s how colored folks do; and before you can say “Way down home,” your long-lost kin are documenting your every move for their weekly secret meetings with the Man.”
“Family don’t tell on family,” I said.
“Not real family.”
“Surely don’t.”
“That’s what you think,” Cecile said. She went after Vonetta first because Vonetta was needy in a way that Fern and I weren’t. Her eyes stayed wide and fearful. “They get you alone. Alone and scared. They say, ‘Vonetta Gaither. Do you love your country? Do you love your father? Your sisters? Your uncle Darnell in Vietnam and Big Ma in Brooklyn?’” At Fern, she aimed, “‘Little Girl, do you love
your doll baby? Do you love Captain Kangaroo? Your kinnygarden teacher, graham crackers, and story time? Well, if you want to keep all that safe, tell us all you know about the person named Cecile Johnson, also known as your mother.’”
Fern said her name was not Little Girl. That she was going into the second grade and that she watched
Mighty Mouse
and not
Captain Kangaroo.
Before Cecile got to me I said, “They don’t ask kids nothing. No one listens to kids.”
“If this was Red China they would. The Red Chinese Communist Party don’t play. Kids younger than that Little Girl turn their mother and father over to the Reds for treason and reeducation.”
“We’re not in Red China,” I told her.
To that she only grunted, like “That’s what you think.”
I didn’t care what Cecile called her new self or how much dust she blew off paths with her poems. She was Cecile Johnson to me, and I didn’t appreciate her so-called new self or her new name.
A name is important. It isn’t something you drop in the litter basket or on the ground. Your name is how people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind, whether it’s a picture of clashing fists or a mighty mountain that can’t be knocked down. Your name is who you are and how you’re known even when you do something great or something dumb.
Cecile had no trouble dreaming up names for us. I’ll bet ours were names she meant for us to keep and not
throw away when we decided we had had enough of our old selves. According to Uncle Darnell and Big Ma, she had had a name ready for Fern, but Papa said, “No more of those made-up, different names.” So Cecile gave Fern some of her milk, put her in her crib, stood over her for a while, and was gone.
Although no one thinks I can, I remember a time when smoke filled the house. Not coughing smoke but smoke from a woman’s smooth-voiced singing, with piano, bass, and drums. All together these sounds made smoke. Uncle Darnell would say, “You can’t remember that. You were two. Three, maybe.” But I do. I still see, hear, and feel bits and flashes. The sounds of musical smoke. My head on Cecile’s big belly. Uncle Darnell said the “Von” in “Vonetta” came from the “Vaughan” in the singer Sarah Vaughan’s name. And when Uncle played the albums Cecile had left behind—the ones with piano, bass, drums, and smooth-voiced Sarah Vaughan—in my mind, smoke still filled the house.
Cecile could go changing her name at the sight of rain, but I was going to stay Delphine. Even after I learned the truth about my name. Even that wasn’t enough to make me drop my name. My name was the one thing I didn’t have to share with another soul in my school. In my last class, three Debras, two Lindas, two Jameses, three Michaels, and two Moniques shared their names. There was also one Anthony, whose mama could spell, and one Antnee, whose
mama couldn’t. It was no secret they, too, shared a name. If you hollered “Anthony,” “Antnee,” or “Ant,” both boys’ heads turned.
My name was my own, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone else had it in all of Brooklyn. No matter where we went: Coney Island, Prospect Park, or Shiloh Baptist Church. There was only one Delphine.
I never thought about what Delphine meant or if it had a meaning at all. It was just my name. Delphine had a grown sound like it was waiting for me to slide into it, like a grown woman slides into a mink coat and clips on ruby earrings. I figured since Cecile didn’t have a mink coat or ruby earrings to give me when I grew up, she had dreamed up a name that I would grow into. It was one thing Cecile got right. There was no slice or drop of it that I had to share with my sisters.
Then that stupid show had come on television. The one about the dolphin that saves everyone’s lives and corrals the bad guys until the sheriff arrives. At recess or on the school bus, especially on Wednesdays, the day after the TV show came on, the boys would all sing, “They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning,” or something like that. Then they’d start pushing at me to speak in dolphin.
Ellis Carter had been the chief Flipper singer and whistler on one particular Wednesday. I’d beaten him up real good. I’d made sure it was as unforgettable a beating as I could give him so it would burn in the minds of all the
other Flipper singers and whistlers.
When I got home from school, my knuckles still sore from Ellis Carter’s jaw, I’d told Vonetta and Fern to change their clothes. Hang them up neatly. That would save me from ironing them that night. I’d told them to start their homework and I’d be back in exactly twenty minutes to help them if they needed it. I’d told Big Ma I had to get a book from the library and I would be right back. Then I’d marched to that library to find out for myself. I’d gone straight to the biggest dictionary in the reference section. This was a dictionary so huge you needed both hands to manage turning the pages and making the book stay put.
Good old Merriam Webster. I trusted Merriam because I thought, instead of having children she didn’t want, she wrote the dictionary. She didn’t have anything else better to do, probably didn’t have sisters and brothers to see after, which was why she knew every word in the world. Big Ma would have said Merriam might as well be useful.
I’d turned to the back section, turned past the Z words, past the phases of the moon and the metric system, and finally to the Given Names. I flipped a few pages to get to the female
D
names. Then I turned and thumbed past “Daisy.” “Daphne.” “Deanna.” “Deborah.” “Della.” “Delores.”
And there it was. The name I had been sure Cecile had dreamed up while she stared out the window as musical smoke blew through the house. There it was. In a book. Broken down into two syllables. Spelled exactly the same.
There it was. My name. Delphine.
My nostrils had flared. My breathing raced. My heart pounded not only in my chest but throughout my body.
This changed everything. My mother hadn’t reached into her poetic soul and dreamt me up a name. My mother had given me a name that already was, which meant she hadn’t given me a thing. Not one thing.
How could this be, when a woman’s deep, smoky voice planted Vonetta’s name in Cecile’s mind? How could this be, when Cecile dreamed up a name for Fern so marvelous that the idea of not being able to give it caused her to up and leave us?
I didn’t need to ask any further. The proof was right there. I shared my name with some other Delphine. And she, just like I, according to Miss Merriam Webster, had been named for a dolphin under the sea.
All this time I’d been holding my head up, feeling superior to Ellis, Willy, Robert, James, James, the Michaels, Anthony, and Antnee because they were stupid boys. My knuckle still smarted from socking Ellis Carter in the jaw while he had been telling the truth. I had been named for a dolphin. A big fishy mammal with a wide grin.
Learning the full truth about my name had been more than I could bear. The librarian got up from her desk and put a Kleenex in my hand. I hadn’t even known I’d been making a grand Negro spectacle out of myself, bawling over a word in the dictionary.
The following week when
Flipper
came on, I’d gotten up and turned the television set off. Vonetta and Fern bleated like billy goats, but I’d done what I always did and distracted them. I’d said, “Tonight is game and cookie night.” I brought out the Candy Land game, poured the milk, and piled a nice stack of Oreos on a plate. I hadn’t cared if I never saw that grinning mammal again.
The next morning, Vonetta, Fern—clutching Miss Patty Cake—and I left the green stucco house and went to the Center, where we stood on line until the doors opened for breakfast because Cecile wouldn’t cook for us in her kitchen. While we ate hot oatmeal and sliced bananas, a truck from a local store pulled up and dropped off loaves of bread and crates of orange juice. Within minutes the smell of toasted bread filled the Center and small cartons of orange juice were placed on our trays.
The young white guys who delivered the bread and orange juice knew the Panthers. They stayed awhile and chatted with them. I had my eyes on them the whole time, waiting for something to happen. I felt silly once I realized
all I was watching was talking and laughing. When Sister Pat came around with a basketful of toast, I grabbed two pieces, one for me and one for Fern. Vonetta, who was buddying up to one of the three sisters, could get her own toast.
It wasn’t at all the way the television showed militants—that’s what they called the Black Panthers. Militants, who from the newspapers were angry fist wavers with their mouths wide-open and their rifles ready for shooting. They never showed anyone like Sister Mukumbu or Sister Pat, passing out toast and teaching in classrooms.
I started to think, This place is all right. I watched the white guys leave unharmed, laughing even. I couldn’t wait to tell Big Ma all about it. Then I heard Crazy Kelvin say, “That’s the least that the racist dogs can do,” and just like that, he spoiled what I thought I knew.
When we entered the classroom, we found the chairs and tables had been pushed to one side of the room. In the middle of the floor were white posters covered with outlines of wavy writing. We stood on the edges of the room surrounding the posters, like we were on dry land and the posters were floating out to sea.
Sister Mukumbu motioned us in. “Sisters and brothers, find a poster to color in. You can work alone or you can work with a partner.”
I looked out to sea. The letters outlined in black marker
said things like:
JUSTICE FOR ALL
ALL POWER TO ALL OF THE PEOPLE
REMEMBER LI’L BOBBY
FREE HUEY
I had seen Huey Newton on the evening news, wearing his black beret and using his big words. Big Ma called him “the main trouble stirrer” because he was the leader of the Black Panthers. The only famous Bobby I knew was Bobby Kennedy. Even though Bobby Kennedy had been killed, I didn’t think the Black Panthers wanted us to remember Bobby Kennedy. They were talking about some other Bobby. A “little” Bobby. And I wondered if he had been killed like Bobby Kennedy. Why else would they want us to remember him if he were still alive?
Sister Mukumbu said, “Yesterday we learned
revolution
means ‘change’ and that we can all be revolutionaries.” As she spoke, we stepped carefully between the posters, choosing one and then plopping down next to it. Sister Pat passed around a bucket of Magic Markers and crayons.
Part of me felt like repeating Vonetta’s words: “We didn’t come for the revolution. We came for breakfast.” But part of me wanted to see what it was all about. That part reached into the bucket for a thick Magic Marker. Vonetta and Fern each took crayons. Fern took an extra crayon for Miss Patty Cake.
I decided on the
FREE HUEY
poster since I didn’t know
who Li’l Bobby was. Fern and I squatted down by our poster. Next to Fern sat Miss Patty Cake with her arms reaching out. I chose the right poster. Fern colors small and snaillike. There was no need to grab the sign with a lot of letters, since it would be just the two of us coloring. Instead of sticking with us, Vonetta ran over to the middle Ankton girl—that was their last name, Ankton—and began coloring with her and her younger sister. I couldn’t say I was surprised.
Then I heard the middle Ankton girl say, “What’s wrong with your little sister?”
Vonetta tried to act like she hadn’t heard and kept coloring the
P
in
Power
.
“Why she run around with her dolly?”
Vonetta, who is loud and showy, showy and crowy, had to swallow her words. “She likes it. That’s all.” Vonetta now sounded low and small, and it served her right.
I watched Fern move her crayon in small black circles. I could hear her singing “La-la-la” to herself. I recognized the tune. It was the “la-la-la” part in a song that used to come on the radio. When Brenda and the Tabulations sang “Dry Your Eyes,” my sisters and I imagined they sang about a mother who had to leave her children. It was the only real indulgence we allowed ourselves in missing having a mother. Brenda and the Tabulations, Vonetta, Fern, and I sang “Dry Your Eyes” whenever the disc jockey played it on WWRL. So I sang the la-la-la part with Fern, making a
nice wall around us, to keep that laughing Ankton girl on the outside.
We all have our la-la-la song. The thing we do when the world isn’t singing a nice tune to us. We sing our own nice tune to drown out ugly. Fern and I colored and sang, but the middle Ankton girl was determined to break through our la-la-la wall. She had her own song and made sure we heard it.
“Your sister is a baby. Your sister is a baby.”
I expected Vonetta to do what we always do. Fight back. Talk back. Pick up her crayon and scoot over near Fern and me.
Vonetta sat in a small heap of herself, looking smaller and smaller, letting that Ankton girl sing “Your sister is a baby” merrily, merrily, merrily.
I stopped filling in “Free Huey.” I turned and said, “Shut up,” to Vonetta’s friend.
She stopped singing. That was all it took. And that made me even angrier at Vonetta. She could have done that much for her own sister.
The oldest Ankton girl rose up from her
JUSTICE FOR ALL
sign. She said to me, “You can’t tell my sister to shut up.”
I gave her a full-out neck roll. “I just did.”
It didn’t matter that she was almost as tall as I was, and could have been a seventh grader. It was too late to take anything back even if I wanted to.
Sister Mukumbu was right there and ended it before
it grew into anything to stop. She reminded us we had greater causes to fight for than to fight with each other.
“Sister Eunice, Sister Delphine. Shake hands.”
We begrudgingly shook hands, then returned to our posters. I felt some shame, but I wasn’t about to wear it. I was still too mad at Vonetta to be thoroughly ashamed.
On the way to Cecile’s green stucco house, I said, “You’re supposed to take up for Fern.”
“Yeah,” Fern said.
Vonetta said, “I’m tired of taking up for Fern.”
Fern said, just to have something to say back, “I’m tired of taking up for you.”
Vonetta said, “You don’t take up for me.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Too.”
“Not.”
“I do too.”
“Like when?”
“When you broke the little blue teacup. I could’ve told.”
“Big deal,” Vonetta said. Then she added the Ankton girl’s word to let us know who she sided with. “Big deal, baby.”
Fern banged her fists at her sides and was set to leap on Vonetta, but I grabbed her in midjump. “Y’all just stop it.”
Fern was near tears mad. “I’m gonna tell.”
“Who you gonna tell? Cecile? She don’t care about a blue teacup. Big Ma? Papa? They’re miles and miles away, and we don’t have enough dimes. Who you gonna tell?”
I said, “Shut up, Vonetta.”
And she shut up. That was all it took.
I had planned for us to kill time playing in the park until Cecile would let us in the house, but playing in the park meant playing together. Vonetta and Fern weren’t ready to play together. I had to keep my sisters apart, so instead we went to the library. Vonetta read her books at one table, and Fern and I read
Henry and Ribsy
at the next table.
When we got to Cecile’s, we put our things, including Miss Patty Cake, away in our room. I asked Cecile for some money for dinner, and Fern and I went out to pick up chop suey from Ming’s.
Vonetta didn’t want to go, she said. And that was fine with Fern and me.
We came back from Mean Lady Ming’s, who wasn’t really so mean but we’d gotten used to calling her that. I kept the two dimes from the change to save up for our phone call. I was sure we’d need at least a dollar in change. Cecile wouldn’t miss two dimes. If she asked for them, I’d give them to her, although I didn’t think she’d ask.
We spread out the tablecloth on the floor and loaded up our plates. I said the blessing and we ate. Vonetta suddenly became Chatty Cathy all through dinner. I figured she’d
had enough of being apart from Fern and me and was now glad we were all together. But it was too much Chatty Cathy for Cecile, who told Vonetta to stop disturbing the silence and that quiet was a good thing. To that Vonetta started humming that song on the radio that goes “Silence is golden, but my eyes still see.” Cecile couldn’t figure out how Vonetta was hers. Before Cecile did something crazy, I gave Vonetta the look and she stopped humming.
After dinner we headed for our room while Cecile put everything away. For once I didn’t care that she wouldn’t let us in the kitchen where her papers hung like wings. I didn’t mind not having to wash dishes or mop the kitchen floor.
This was the order that we entered the room: Fern first, me next, and Vonetta last. I should have known something was amiss by the way Vonetta lagged behind. Fern and I soon learned why.
Chatty Cathy hadn’t missed the company of her sisters. Chatty Cathy had been up to dirty tricks. A black Magic Marker lay on the floor. The same kind I used to color in “Free Huey.”
Vonetta had gone over Miss Patty Cake with the black Magic Marker, leaving pink lips and pink rouge circles peeking out on a once-white face. To tell the truth, Miss Patty Cake was never as white as the day Fern got her. After enough biting, dragging around, and loving up, Miss Patty Cake was off-white, or “light skinned,” as Fern would
say. As it was, Miss Patty Cake was a long way from her pinkish white self.
Fern screamed. Louder than she’d screamed on the Coney Island Ferris wheel. Louder and longer than she’d screamed when the dentist stuck her with the novocaine needle. Fern’s fists never made it to a ball. She screamed and threw her body into Vonetta like a missile flying into outer space. Vonetta and Fern fought all the time but not like this.
Cecile burst into the room and pulled them apart. That was the first time she’d touched either one of them.
She turned to me. “Why’d you let them fight like this?”
I didn’t say anything. I just wanted her to come in here and act like a mother. A real one.
“Answer me, Delphine.”
I raised my shoulders up and set them back down. That was my answer.
“And you, Vonetta! What do you call this?” She held up her black-scrawled grandbaby to Vonetta’s face. “No wonder you couldn’t stop lip flapping.” To Fern she said, “You’re too big for this anyway.”
But Cecile still didn’t offer Fern a hug. She didn’t bend down and wipe Fern’s tears. She still didn’t call Fern by her name.