Friends: A Love Story (3 page)

Mommy and Teddy got married on a Saturday. The next day she sent us up to Winston-Salem for our annual summer vacation. Seven days later she called to tell us she was getting her marriage annulled.

This is the story she told me about the annulment. It had been raining “cats and dogs” in St. Pete's one night that week. My mother went to her girlfriend Mattie's house. They were
picking out patterns and sewing. When Mommy came home, Teddy asked, “Where have you been?”

“That's for me to know and you to find out,” she answered. It was very much like my mother to say things with a lot of attitude. (“It ain't what you say, it's how you say it,” she would tell us.) Well, a little altercation ensued. All of a sudden he's beating and slapping her and whatnot. Now, my mama done talked “smack” before they were married, she done talked and said whatever she had to say, and he never raised a hand to her. But here it was a week after getting married and he was beating her up. I guess maybe it was his idea about what being husband and wife meant. My mother told us she had rollers in her hair and that every roller got knocked out, save one. In the process of beating her, he fractured her nose. Afterward, he took her to the hospital.

Now, to get to this one particular hospital you had to go down a cobblestone road that ran by a little crick. I don't know the actual name of it but we called it Bugga Crick. It was dark there, with overhanging trees—mossy, swampy, spooky. Well, Mama says that while they were driving by Bugga Crick, Teddy told her, “And somebody's gonna kick Angela's ass, too, 'cause she's just like you!”

Now why he would want to speak that destiny on a sixteen-year-old girl, I will never know—I never did anything to him. When I found out about it, it hurt my feelings. Mama told me, “I wanted to defend you, baby, but we were going down Bugga Crick and it was dark. I thought if I said something he would run off the road and kill us both. I told myself, ‘Just let me shut up until I can get to the hospital and away from him.'”

When Mama got to the hospital, she got taken care of and then called us up to tell us the deal. She also filed charges against Teddy. Of course, D'nette was upset because she had always wanted a daddy.

When we came back from North Carolina a few weeks later,
we thought, “Where we gonna live now? Oh, God, I guess it's back to the projects.” But the preacher at Stewart Memorial, where we had gone to church for all these years, had a parson-age he didn't live in on the other side of town. He let us live there for a while. But even after we moved in, my mother just lay on the couch, crying. She just couldn't do anything. You had to bring her water and everything. Now that I think back on it, I'm sure she was crushed, but, of course, being dramatic, Mama milked every moment out of it.

Apparently Teddy tried to reconcile—or at least reason with my mother to drop the charges against him. I remember Aunt Viola, who owned the beer garden, coming over to talk to Mama while she was lying on the couch.

“Betty, now, Hiram has hit me, too, you know,” Aunt Viola told Mom. “But we're still together. It's no big deal. Forgive and forget it.”

“Heck, no, no, no, no, no,” my mother said to Viola. “If Hiram beat you, that's on you. With all due respect to you, I'm not going through that. No, no, no, no!”

Then Teddy wrote my mother a letter—“Please, Betty, forgive me. I'm sorry,” he wrote—blah, blah, blah, blah. He made the mistake of writing it in red ink. I saw it and thought, “Oh, no, here she goes.”

“He wrote the letter in red ink,” my mother shouted. “That's my
blood!
His name is Teddy Slaughter and he tried to slaughter me. His last name isn't Slaughter for nothing!”

Being a teenager, after a while I thought, “Get up! Get up! I'm tired of being your slave. Just stop crying and being all sad. You don't want to go back to him but you won't get up.”

Now, for some reason, around that same time my father came to St. Pete's for the first time. He came for the weekend and spent time with us. My mother gave him her bedroom and she slept on the couch. He said, “Why don't you sleep in here?”

She said, “Hell, no! Them days are over. You are here to see your children.”

Well, one evening while Daddy was visiting, Teddy came by the house. My mother told him, “I don't know you. Just keep driving by.”

I peeked out at him from the front picture window as he walked back to his car. I saw him reach in and start to pull out something long and dark.

“Oh, my God!” I said. “He's got a shotgun.” I figured he was about to shoot the picture window.

“Get away from there!” my mother shouted.

D'nette ran and hid in the closet. I thought, “My daddy's here and he's going to kick his behind!” and kept on peeking out the window. But Daddy went and stood over by the closet next to D'nette. Teddy's outside and Daddy's inside, but there was no protection nowhere! Fortunately, it was just the long part of a car-jack that Teddy pulled out of the car. Did he throw it? It's now been so long, I can't remember.

 

That fall I was bussed to Boca Ciega High School. Race relations at Boca Ciega were a whole different story from Disston and Azalea. The black kids and white kids there had been having altercations so Mr. Kreiver, the former sergeant, was transferred to Boca Ciega. The school paired him with a black vice principal, Mr. Anders. They squashed the race problems from day one and won the respect of all students because they were fair. No one felt unjustly treated. My mother got tight with Mr. Anders. He was like a father figure to everyone. Between Mama and Mr. Anders they had their eye on me. “You make sure she's doing what she's supposed to,” my mother told Mr. Anders and he stayed on the case. He would tell Mama, “Miss Betty, Angela can be this. Angela can be that. Angela can go to college.”

In the meantime, my mother was laying down the law: “A is
excellent, B is above average and C is average. I don't have no average children. Don't bring home no Cs,” she'd say in her usual melodramatic way. Mess up academically, and you'll be off of cheerleading, off of this, off of that.

“I ain't average,” I started thinking. I hadn't considered this before. “I'm above average—excellent!” My mother implanted such high academic expectations in me that I began to believe her. It was a real turning point. She had prepared me to be independent. “You're going to college,” she would say. She thought fly, fly, fly, little bird. Drop the eaglet out of the nest and she'll flap her wings before—splat!—she hits the ground. And then she'll pick herself up and try to fly again. I think that was her intention from the beginning.

So I did well in school—I was the first black person in my high school to be admitted to the National Honor Society. But I didn't work too hard—I did my academics enough to impress the teachers and Mr. Anders. I was popular and hung out with everybody. When I got off the bus in the morning at school I'd go to Bible study with the good, straight Bible kids. Then I'd hang out in the dining room with the nerdy kids. When I started reading poetry and performing monologues and doing little plays, I'd hang out with that crowd. I also hung out with the cool kids—I was a cheerleader until I pulled a hamstring and couldn't do the splits anymore. I hung out with all different groups of people. I wanted to be good, but I also wanted to hang.

But all this monitoring by Mom, Mr. Anders and even Mr. Kreiver made me feel like, “Ugh, I can't do
anything!
” Unlike D'nette, who back then was a goody-goody, a drag—she's the life of the party now—I was the kind of kid who wanted to get my foot up to the edge, hang it over and then come back before it got too dangerous. My mother smoked, so I would steal her cigarettes and hide them in the tears in the sofa cushions. When D'nette wasn't home, I'd smoke my mother's Winstons. My head would be swimming. Mom didn't have any liquor
around so I didn't drink. I wouldn't try reefer even though I was around it a lot because of something my mother told me.

“Do you know what grass is?” my mother would ask.

“Noooo,” I'd answer, knowing full well I did.

“Grass is not the stuff outside. It's called marijuana and kids smoke it,” she'd say. “Once my cousin Connie gave me some and I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground.”

I thought that was amazing—that she didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground. What did it do to you? I wondered. But then she'd go on this long talking jag with you—it could be for hours—about smoking marijuana. She'd be in the kitchen cooking and you just had to sit there at the table and listen. I didn't want to try grass after that.

At parties I'd be around people smoking reefer, which most of the kids were doing at the time. D'nette, who my mother made me take everywhere, would sit there with both hands over her nose and mouth—at the party!—trying not to breathe.

“They're smoking reefers in here!”

“Yes, they are, but we're not,” I'd whisper. “Why do you have to act like that? Can't you be cool? You're gonna embarrass me.”

I also started to straddle Mama's rules concerning boys. In tenth grade I got a new boyfriend, David, and we liked each other a lot. During this time my mother, who had always told me not to get pregnant, tried to be close to me. She started talking to me about men. I remember that she'd warn me, “The ones you don't love will love you, and the ones you love won't love you.” She also started talking about the first time I'd have sex.

“Angela, I want to know. I want to be there,” she'd say to me.

“Really, Ma—physically?”

“No, not physically. But I want to be there for you.”

The morning after I lost my virginity I told my mother about it.

“Ma, I did it,” I said while we were at the breakfast table.

“You had sexual intercourse! With who, David?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?
Why?
” she demanded. “Did he threaten to break up with you?”

“
No,
Mama!”

“Come on, let's go for a ride.”

“Ma, can I come?” D'nette asked.

“No, D'nette, you stay home,” my mother told my little sister.

Then we drove around and she talked to me for what must have been seven or eight hours—until I was blue in the face. All that openness up front, then after it happened, “Oh, no!”

After that I decided having sex was not worth braving my mother's tirades. I thought, “Forget this. I'll wait and have sex when I go to college!”

In eleventh grade there was a little college boy who liked me. I'd tell my mother that I had to go to rehearsal for a play I was in. I'd go to rehearsal and do my four lines then my boyfriend would pick me up. We'd go back to his dorm room and start kissing, kissing and hugging and rubbing and kissing. Oh, I could kiss like crazy, but there was no way I was having sex! Each night it would be kiss, kiss, hug, hug, rub, rub and then, “Stop! Take me home.” This went on for night after night. The young man was nice. He wouldn't push and he always took me home when I asked him to.

 

When I was in high school, I also participated in Upward Bound, an academic and cultural enrichment program for underprivileged kids. We didn't see ourselves as underprivileged. In fact, in St. Pete's we were the cool kids. David Davidson was captain of the football team and very smart. He wanted to be a lawyer. Kenny Leon had a mom and a stepdaddy and he was in the program. Today he's a Broadway director. He directed the version of
A Raisin in the Sun
with P. Diddy in it. In Upward Bound, I got to meet kids from around the city and different high schools. We did African studies, little plays, read poetry,
got tutored—that kind of thing. When I was fifteen, George Langhorne, the program's director, informed me that he had handpicked and submitted me for a special program. I was being invited to attend the Presidential Classroom for Young Americans. It was supposed to be a great honor, and it was a total surprise! Mama and Miss Mattie got my wardrobe together, bought me a coat and sent me up to Washington, D.C. I lived in a fancy hotel room for a week with three white kids from around the country and around the world. I had never been away on my own, I had never stayed in a hotel and, other than going to North Carolina, I had never really gone anywhere. It was a rite of passage of sorts.

The Presidential Classroom program was about government, government, government. “When there's a war, inflation goes up, down or whatever….” “I have a question, Mr. Senator….” Political, political. Well, I didn't have any questions. I was just sitting there thinking, What the heck are we talking about? This is boring. Are we gonna see some monuments? Then we'd go look at monuments. I took a lot of pictures. Later, I showed them to Mama, who has a way of describing things that could hurt your feelings if you took it that way. “It looks like a stick in the ground,” she said about the Washington Monument.

One night they took us to the Kennedy Center to see a play,
Of Mice and Men,
starring James Earl Jones. I was touched and moved by the play, and James Earl Jones, who played his character so beautifully. It was just great! And when he, as the character Lenny, got shot on that stage, I cried. The theater had emptied, the people were gone and I was just sitting there, boo-hooing. “How can these people just leave?” It was like a spark had gone off inside me. If I could make people feel as passionately as I feel right now, I thought, that would be a wonderful thing!