There was sibling rivalry among us. We jockeyed for the attention of our mother and father, the way sisters and brothers sometimes
do. There was a little jealousy on the part of the others whenever the next one was born.
Bernice, whom we called Bunny, was the baby, four going on fifty-two in ’67, precocious, but quietly so. She never experienced
jealousy pangs, but she had her own cross to bear. It wasn’t so much that she was tomboyish—that was fine by Marty and me.
We’d throw her in there if we needed to round out a side, or boost her up into trees, and she’d try her best to keep up. Occasionally
she might bark a shin, earn a bruise some other way. Marty was the world’s foremost tattletale, the one who’d say, “I’m gon’
tell Mama,” if a boy happened not to be quick enough to break his baby sister’s fall. After spankings delivered by Mother,
or, worse, Grand-daddy’s leather belt or ham hands, we still had a backyard in which to retire and ruminate.
Martin seemed to always know the trouble would blow over. He and Yolanda were such amiable children. Bernice was more pragmatic,
or so it seemed at the time. She’d look at me and in her quiet baby talk take up for Martin. So even when we had falling outs,
soon we all were as thick as thieves again, welcoming the neighborhood children into our domain.
Our home at 234 Sunset was kind of home central, the neighborhood headquarters. All the kids came by to play. My mom treated
them like hers, which wasn’t always reassuring for them. Coretta Scott King was a disciplinarian, took no guff from hers or
any others. Froze you with a look. “Time out” was a call we made in football, not what fell from her lips in our direction.
Under her eye or not, we’d play “hide-and-go-seek,” as we called it, football, softball, kickball, tag, marbles in the red
clay; we’d spin tops, ride homemade skateboards, “pull” friends along by pedaling bikes standing up as the friend rode on
the passenger seat. We had a swing set, seesaw, and slide. I loved the slide. I loved playing on the gym set. I loved it all,
really. We had a hoop too. Ours was, in these regards, a typical family home—or so I thought back then.
This area in northwest Atlanta known as Vine City got its name from the heavy kudzu vines that grew all over the place; Vine
City was a “Negro” enclave, in the era of segregation into which we were born. The Magnolia Ballroom was on the corner. James
Brown and popular “Negro” entertainers would come to perform there. Often we’d pretend to be James or the Famous Flames, his
backup singers, doing choreography, hitting spins and splits, feigning fainting spells with an old bedspread thrown over our
shoulders.
That apartment building over there? Former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson’s family had lived there. Next door were Reverend
and Mrs. Hall and their children. Across the street from our house were the Davis children. We played with them all the time.
Miss Toomer lived over there. Next to her were the Martins. Julian Bond’s family lived next to the Martins. We grew up with
his kids, Phyllis, Michael, Cookie, Jeffrey, and Horace Mann Bond III, otherwise known as Manny, who got his name from his
grandfather. A block over was the new John F. Kennedy Middle School, where we played, and where I later went to summer school.
The whole area was known as lower Vine City—cheek by jowl with the AU Center of Morehouse College, Spelman College, Morris
Brown College (it stood closest; we could almost read the football-field scoreboard from our driveway), Clark College, and
Atlanta University. Vine City became the “ ’hood” later, after Daddy was killed and integration patterns became widespread
and “Negroes,” black people, could move, if not to where our hearts desired, then to where our purses allowed. Many did move,
leaving memories, the luckless, the Aftermath… leaving only a few committed to their memories, or bound by lowering prospects
in Vine City. The pendulum swings both ways, though, if you can last, if you can hold on, hang in—if you can remember.
My brother, my sisters, and I would walk down to Sunset and Simpson to a parlor we called Flavor Palace. Flavor Palace had
the best ice cream anywhere—outside of the deep country, a place with which we were familiar, where ice cream was rarer but
homemade, hand-cranked, tastiest with a little vanilla extract and lemon juice added. At Flavor Palace it was almost as good
as homemade. They also made Polish sausage sandwiches with onions and jalapeño peppers. I salivate now just thinking about
them. We stopped there often. The proprietor, Mr. Patterson, a brown-skinned man with the thin, sculpted mustache favored
in those days, often gave us a free taste. I never made a correlation between his generosity and my father’s being in jail,
but there may have been one. Jalapeños and onions on top of a Polish. He fixed one up and handed it to me. I fished for my
meager coins and he said, “No, no, you do good for your fahdah, now…”
Egan Homes was around the corner. If you heard somebody lived in the Egan Homes, you felt he was trouble. “Don’t mess with
them niggas what live over there in them Egan Homes,” was often said or implied by the very same Negroes who lived in Egan
Homes! They were talking about themselves, to be agreeable; those were accepted words in the better homes in our gardens.
But I knew people who lived in Egan Homes. After people said don’t mess with them, I asked why. I knew you had to go by there
to get to Washington Park unless you took the long way. You had to learn to suppress your fear. If you did, you found that
while some Egan Homes people might be trouble, some might not be. Some might help you out.
Egan Homes is long gone now. Razed, and replaced by a new mixed-income development, part of urban renewal.
My father would take us down to the Ollie Street YMCA all the time. Everything in Atlanta is renamed by people who live near
it. “Booker T.” was Booker T. Washington High School, where Dad went. It’s right over there. Everything in Atlanta was “right
over there.” We stayed in our communities. The Ollie Street Y was where my father took us for recreation. I learned to swim
there. He taught me. He was good at it and enjoyed it. And the YMCA is still there today.
At Washington Park, we had cookouts. As children, we didn’t know we were “Negroes,” or if we did, we didn’t know exactly what
that meant. We didn’t realize we lived in “segregation,” didn’t know there were better pools than the one we crowded into
at the Y, or that we and our friends would be considered “have-nots” if our father wasn’t the co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist
Church. We weren’t aware that we could and would be turned away from public accommodations, educational institutions, or turned
away from desirable living spaces by the real estate restrictive covenants. We weren’t aware that we were shunned by society,
murdered over mere glances, made to feel less than human. We were children, and children are more than human; we were blessed,
but sooner or later we’d grow up and have to face this prison of segregation, unless Daddy won his struggle. There was this
great social upheaval, this “great getting-up morning” going on that would redefine our lives and existences, and those of
the people around us.
Like I said. We were rehearsing Yoki’s play as the alley and our friends beckoned to us. In a nearby house, Lou Rawls’s “St.
James Infirmary” wafted up from a “record player.” Yoki also had a “record player,” on which spun large-mouthed 45s filled
by yellow prong adapters; “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Temptations, Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” My father
preferred Mahalia Jackson singing “Amazing Grace,” or Aretha Franklin singing “O Mary Don’t You Weep.” He often tapped his
foot and bobbed his head to secular music, and he didn’t deny it to us—he couldn’t, not in Vine City. Music was everywhere.
Like Yoki.
Yoki was five years older than me and forever putting on plays and musicals. We were her troupe. It was not often that anyone
else got a starring role with Yoki around. At my shoulder was Martin III, Marty then; he was restless, sighing heavily, looking
away, mumbling. Yoki was telling me what I must do to make things right before we could leave.
“You’re supposed to lean over and kiss her. On the lips.”
My face continued to betray me, and my lack of enthusiasm.
Bernice was lying with lips chapped, eyelids closed, then fluttering. She was pleased to be Sleeping Beauty. Usually her role
was Yoki’s handmaiden, subject to taunting. Yoki was a stern taskmaster, particularly for Bunny. We often teased Bernice,
saying she’d been left on our doorstep by mistake, or was adopted. Now I was in Yoki’s sights, subject to her derision—but
it wasn’t enough to make me kiss a girl, particularly my little sister, for no good reason at all.
“Why do you want me?” I whined.
“Why?” Yoki repeated. “Why do you always ask why? Because I said so, that’s why. Because that’s the way the play goes. You’re
supposed to kiss Sleeping Beauty; that will break the spell cast by an evil witch and everyone will live happily ever after.
Don’t you want to live happily ever afterward, you stupid boy? Don’t you know anything?”
“But she isn’t Sleeping Beauty. She’s Bunny.”
“Not right now. She’s Sleeping Beauty right now,” Yoki countered.
“Well… why can’t Martin kiss her? Why does it have to be me?”
Yoki’s voice dripped with venom. “Because I said so.”
“… But it don’t make no sense,” I whispered.
“Don’t make any sense,” Martin said. He was trying to get back to playing. If we were lucky, once Dad got home he might take
us over to the Ollie Street Y. If we were really lucky, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Jean’s children would go with us too. But we
had to get past Yoki first.
“Go on, get it over with,” Martin whispered, smiling at Yoki when she looked daggers at him. So I leaned over and kissed Bernice.
On the cheek. I still feel her tiny cheekbone rise beneath my lips. “Don’t smile too quick, Bunny,” Yoki chided. “Let the
kiss take effect.”
Martin and I made our escape into the alley and whatever devilment we were up to. As we ran, the scent of honeysuckle mixed
with the occasional open garbage can to sweeten and make pungent the late summer air; gravel secured our feet to the red clay;
we raced by kudzu-choked fences in varying states of repair.
Yoki didn’t bother calling after us. The play was given the following evening at home for our parents and a few of our aunts
and uncles; so it was, and always has been. But even long after we grew up, we kept doing plays under her direction, the last
time when she turned forty. She wanted to do what she loved, what was in her blood, and to make Daddy proud of her. We all
wanted that.
I was born worried. I was born anxious. I was born on January 30, 1961, in the Hughes-Spaulding Hospital, a private hospital
for “Negroes” in Atlanta. My father was in Chicago at the time, but rushed home as soon as he got the word. “Negroes” was
then the term for Americans of discernible African descent. What to call us, what to do with us—these questions were not for
children but rather for their parents who wanted the best for them one day. “Negro” households in Atlanta not on public assistance
utilized that one hospital, Hughes-Spaulding.
Atlanta has always held a special spot. At one time it was called Terminus; railways began and ended here and ran throughout
the South, so it’s always had a pivotal position. But it was basically a big old landlocked town, and still is. It’s also
a cliquish, insular town, and it can be hard for outsiders coming in. It can be difficult for insiders who don’t conform.
Atlanta remains a difficult town to crack the code on.
In terms of the black/white so-called race relations, Atlanta has always been just smart enough to be smarter than most. I
don’t know if it’s because of what happened during the Civil War, General Sherman burning it down. Since then Atlanta had
the sense to recognize it needs to be peaceful, though there have been lynchings of blacks and bombings of Jewish synagogues
here and there; there have also been efforts to stem the tide of hatred by being civil in that southern, intimate way, by
being “down home.” The raw, murderous violence of Alabama and Mississippi didn’t seem to cloak Atlanta. But in my youth, it
was rigidly, bitterly segregated.
Before the ’60s, before the Civil Rights Movement and social reformation, “Negroes” in Atlanta—never “blacks,” not then; calling
somebody “black” back then would get you a look, maybe even a punch in the nose—weren’t as affected by the segregation dooming
the poor in other places; in Atlanta, “Negroes” had infrastructure. It was by comparison small and circumscribed, but it was
there, not rich compared to the Augusta Country Club and the riches that spawned it. But “Negroes” did have social clubs,
financial institutions, schools, churches, some land, so in that respect there was hesitation with change; there was a risk
of losing what little you had. You felt like you finally had acquired something you didn’t want to lose.
Blacks in Atlanta weren’t as downtrodden as in the Mississippi Delta, or in Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago, or in the
rice paddies of the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast, or in the black belt of south-central Alabama, where my mother’s parents
lived, or other places South and North. “Negroes” in Atlanta were not as anxious as they were in other places, where people
were trying to gain access, rights, a crust of life, because they didn’t have anything to lose, they were trying to get a
little something. In Atlanta, “Negroes” already had a little something; in some cases they had nice somethings. This made
it more impressive to me, later, to realize that my father, in spite of his privileged position, would take up the civil rights
struggle, battle against the system of segregation. Because he really would have had it made, relatively, in old Atlanta.
Could’ve gone with the flow, succeeded Granddaddy as pastor at Ebenezer, conducted weddings, funerals, encouraged generosity
from the Ebenezer flock, attended National Baptist conventions, risen to be an H.N.I.C.—Head Negro In Charge of what little
we had, and we had a nice if not an idyllic life.