lois was the first delicate black girl i ever met in new york city.
on the first day of junior high school, me and my best friend crystal sauntered down the street, already late, in our acid washed jeans and reeboks, patting down our baby hairs in crystal's compact mirror and talking about the kids who had one pair of cross colors jeans and wore them all the time. lois was already at our bus stop, standing at attention in a stiff white shirt buttoned up to her neck, a straight black skirt that ended severely at her knee, and saddle shoes. worst of all, her hair was in two thick cornbraids, the way we wore our hair, tied tight under a scarf, as we crept to the beauty parlor on saturday mornings, or sat in a kitchen chair, shades drawn, getting our hair pressed for church. lois came to school dressed like the prayers of our grandmothers who ironed our clothes and burned our hair and said, go on to school and do well and maybe you can be a schoolteacher. and at that age, we were ashamed of the grandmothers with their thinning hair that smelled like smoke and the starched collars of their dresses that still hadn't saved them from a lifetime of hard work, and when we saw lois we were reminded of those grandmothers and we laughed at her.
crystal said, saddle shoes! this aint 1952!
i said, cornbraids—like she in the color purple.
we noticed a black bow tie and screamed, bowtie! at the same time and laughed harder, right in her face, because we wanted to see her crumple, and instead of shrinking, she straightened her shoulders even more and smiled a little and that made our laughter taper off. didn’t she know she should be ashamed, coming to school that way? this was 1990 and you needed at least one pair of jeans to survive. we felt sorry for her, confused and unfashionable as she was. we didn't know that lois in her saddle shoes and bowtie had access to more money and resources than we did at that time and would have for years to come.
her mother was a nurse and her father was the foreman for a construction company and even that day at the bus stop, her parents owned three houses, one in our neighborhood and two more in neighborhoods where there were only a few houses on each block and no attached walls, and there were tenants in both of those. they had land and houses in the caribbean, some full with family and others with more tenants, and her father repaired buildings at a discount for landlords he knew, and when more family and friends came from overseas, he directed them to one of his landlord friends who put a room or apartment to the side and didn’t ask for a credit check or the first month’s rent, and as soon as one person left, someone else from their network filled the spot, and the agreement made with each new arrival was the same: to always work, attend school if possible, to be christian clean and quiet, and to commit to the biggest tithe- saving money for a house.
lois was the first protected black girl i ever met in new york city. soon after we all met at the bus stop, crystal met a boy named allan, and her whole life became standing in front of the school gate smoking with him and the wild girls and getting felt up on the back staircases and running to catch the afternoon bus with her shirt buttoned-up wrong. there was no space in her life for me, so lois and i began to gravitate towards each other. lois was a storyteller, and while the other kids were hollering and cracking on each other and fighting on the bus, lois and i were huddled in the front seat as she talksang childhood stories to me.
goaty ling-ling. did you tell one boy me name?
no no, benacrubena, me no tell him benacrubena, lie lie, benacrubena, no tell one boy your name.
she made metaphors between people and nature that most folks our age and even some adults didn't understand, and many of them didn't bother to listen beyond her accent. and because she was soft-spoken and self-conscious about her english, lois didn't repeat herself. i kept all her delicious comparisons for myself: the bus driver with the eyes of a jackrabbit, the mean girl with a weave ponytail like a cowtail, the lightskin girl who thought she was so cute and whose face was splotched like roti. i didn't even know what a roti was and it was still funny. so lois and i pulled tight, and she invited me to her house.
such a house i had never seen. it was a few blocks from where i lived with my grandmother, mother, and rotating crew of cousins. just lois and her family lived in the house and she had a father, a boisterous spirit who shouted- hey american! - whenever i walked through the door. i didn't have any close friends who had fathers in their houses and even though lois and i spent most of our time in her room (her own, which was another revelation) or in the backyard with our books pretending to study while i taught her the dirty lyrics to rap songs and the slang names for sex and various body parts, i still watched her father from the corner of my eye. what did such a creature do? wasn't he supposed to sit in a big chair and read a newspaper while kids and dogs and women brought him slippers and a pipe and a steak and a leather belt to beat the children when they misbehaved?
apparently, lois's father was unaware of this script. i don't believe i ever saw him sit down. he was a loud-talking whirlwind who worked all day and clomped home in construction boots just as lois and i were in our second hour of deciphering big daddy kane lyrics with science textbooks in our laps. he drank two beers straight from the fridge, grabbed his wrapped dinner on the stove, and slammed back out the door on the way to his second job, singing. he wouldn't return until midnight. on the few weekends i saw him around the house, he was fixing something in the backyard or talking loud as he made plans on the phone and then soon enough he was gone in his rambling truck, tools rattling behind him.
while he was away, i got to be in a house of caribbean women. when i first came to the house, we sat in the front room on a couch-sized piece of furniture that was not a couch but something a little smaller and lot harder, and we had some tea in cups and saucers and some hard cookies called biscuits that weren't at all like the chips ahoy my grandmother kept on top of the fridge. but after my visits became frequent and her parents saw that i was a nerdy round girl who carried a backpack full of books everywhere, they knew i wouldn't lead their daughter into teenage sex with dangerous american boys with strange haircuts, and i stopped being a guest. then we had tamarind juice from mugs and i hung around as the women of the house cooked and washed clothes and scrubbed floors and joined hands in prayer before i went home.
and lois's mother had things. i'm sure her parents had discussions about money, but i never saw her mother wear old brown shoes or the same coat all the time, the way my mother and grandmother did. lois's mother had pearls and a fur coat and pictures of herself on the wall in evening dresses like the award shows on tv. sometimes a few aunts came over and talked about husbands and children over cups of tea and if they noticed me and lois hanging around too long, her mother gave us something to do, but they seemed to be adult women in a way that my own mother wasn't, sleeping in a twin bed in the back room of my grandmother's house.
in my own bathroom at home, there were baggy beige bras and baggy pink polyester underwear and baggy brown stockings freshly washed and hanging up over the shower railing. in lois's bathroom, there was a whole rack of drying lace bras and silky panties. when lois and i changed clothes in gym class, i noticed that she also wore delicate lacy bras and underwear. i wore sturdy cotton bras my grandmother bought from the hospital workers uniform store where she got a discount, and big cotton underwear with the name printed on the waistband. inside the dresser my mother and grandmother shared were a few stiff girdles that i couldn't stretch even when i tried with both hands, a few jars of tiger's balm, my grandmother's hospital scrubs, and my mother's long-sleeved church dresses. they were both at full-time jobs by eight every morning and by third grade i was wearing a key on a shoestring around my neck and coming home alone to an empty house. on weekends they hauled laundry and grocery bags, took out the garbage, and divided up money and bills for the week. when a bill was late, a workman came out, demanded access to the meter, and dug up a hole in the front yard with orange cones around it so the whole block knew our service was disconnected. then my mother or grandmother went down to the office in a church dress and made payment arrangements to have service turned back on. at night, they made sure the windows and doors were locked and shut and if they heard strange noises at night, we all got up to check, steak knives in hand.
at lois's house, her mother and sisters threw trash into a huge garbage can that her father emptied when it was full. even on the nights he worked late, no one checked doors or windows or listened for strange noises because they knew when the clock struck midnight, the man of the house would be home, stomping down ghosts and would be burglars in his heavy boots, hauling out trash for early morning pick-up and checking the doors and windows, keeping his womenfolks safe from the outdoors.
as soon as i got used to the rhythm of lois's house and began looking forward to the warm smell of curry blooming in her kitchen on the weekends, a sudden shift happened in our friendship—lois met craig. he was crystal's cousin from some distant state with a face like a bulldog, and i wished they would give him a bag of treats and put him back on the bus to wherever he came from, because craig instantly fell in love with lois, and crystal was in love with allan, and all of a sudden they were a foursome that did not include me.
soon enough, lois began to straighten her hair. the bowties and white shirts disappeared, replaced by jeans. she stopped comparing people to animals and she told no more stories- instead she sang patra and buju banton and boys asked for her number. crystal's appearance also began to change. she wore gold eyeshadow and purple lipstick. she got a nose ring, knee-high leather boots, and wore cherry-n-berry perfume from the dollar store that anyone could smell from miles away. i didn't ask crystal or lois if they were having sex, but something was blooming in them that everyone could see.
one afternoon we went to lois's house, crystal and the leather boots, me and the bag of books, and lois's mother came and stood in the doorway. there was something beautiful and powerful about her that called people to attention, but didn't encourage familiarity. i could never stroll through her gate without knocking like i did at crystal's, whose grandmother was forever cooking a huge pot of collards in a flowered house dress, while her mother, who also had a nose ring and wore acid-washed jeans, slept on a twin bed in a corner of the living room. lois's mother seemed to be surrounded by her things—her pearls and her house and her husband wrapped around her as securely as her fur coat. lois once told me that her mother was a teenager when she was born, and i wondered how she turned teenage motherhood in a faraway country into pearls and fur coats and houses in america, when my family had been in america for centuries and could barely keep the lights and gas on in just one house.
on the day lois's mother answered the door, the french bun and pearls combined in a way that made me and crystal feel the weight of our mothers singleness and twin beds in the family house. she spoke to me first.
you may come here and study with lois because you bring books.
and then she turned to crystal.
but you bring nothing! and you cannot come here anymore.
we stood on the doorstep, stunned. lois was standing behind her mother with her head down, and she never moved. her mother spoke again.
we have a family activity and lois cannot have company today. good afternoon.
the pearls closed the door in our faces.
when we saw lois at school the next day, she cried and asked us to come to her house next week when we had a holiday and her mother was at work, and we did. she fried plantains and gave crystal a double portion and asked questions about allan and crystal's hair and the berry perfume while i sat there and thought about the chapter i wanted to finish reading.
crystal answered all the questions with a word or two, her arms and legs crossed at the table. she rolled her eyes at the plantains and asked, why you gave me all these plantains, i'm gonna get fat!
lois glanced quickly at me, kicked crystal under the table and said, it doesn't matter. i weigh 125 lbs and craig said he like it.
i weigh 125 lbs too! crystal smiled then, and lois smiled back.
i went shopping yesterday, come and try some things on, lois said, and they got up from the kitchen table and walked upstairs talking and laughing. maybe they expected that i would follow them as usual, but i felt the shift. i felt it when crystal and lois giggled over allan and craig and i munched my snacks and remained silent. i felt it when lois's mother banned crystal and her leather boots- i hadn't been banned, because i was safe. and now this last thing was the weight and the clothes and the berry perfume and the boys that liked it all. i grabbed my backpack full of books. we all lived so close to each other that it was common for one of us to dash home for something and return.
i'll be back! i called out.
from upstairs, i heard laughter and the radio, and male voices blaring from the speakerphone. i heard a boy ask, can i come over? and there was more laughter.
i'm going! i shouted again.
see you later! someone shouted back, and i couldn't tell who.
Contributor Notes
Radhiyah Ayobami was born in Brooklyn by way of the South. She is an Africana Studies graduate of Brooklyn College and a prose MFA graduate of Mills College in Oakland, CA. She has been published in several journals including Kweli, Agni, and Tayo Literary Magazine, and has facilitated writing workshops with pregnant teens, inmates and elders. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sustainable Arts Foundation and Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is a Reiki Master, an herbal tea blender, a listener of the trees, and Mama to a beautiful son. She is also the author of The Long Amen. You can find her at radhiyahayobami.com
