Flip Side of the Game by Tu-Shonda L. Whitaker

Author:Tu-Shonda L. Whitaker [Whitaker, Tu-Shonda L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2015-03-09T04:00:00+00:00

For most of my life, Aunt Cookie would never let me forget who my mother was, which was why she didn’t allow me to call her Mommy. Even when she would refer to me as her daughter, and she knew that I loved her like a mother, she would always say, “I don’t want you to forget Rowanda. You’re with me because she loved you.”

Then she would say, “Your mother is as much a part of you as you are a part of you.”

I would always cry and feel like I was never good enough for anybody to be my mother, and then, much like I am now, I would think about Lincoln Street and about the time when Grandma’s man held me down, the same man that was there when she died.

He came in the bedroom, walked over to me, twirled my braids, and told me how pretty I looked with my “fat ass” and “chubby li’l pussy.” Nobody said a word.

“You gonna have to wear this one,” he said. “Nobody told you to be coming in here looking at me like that.”

“But I ain’t seen you today. I been in here looking out the window.”

“You been in the other room looking at me,” he said. “Lay down or I’ll kill ya.”

Shortly after that, Rowanda tried to kill Grandma’s man. When Rowanda came home from jail, I saw her sitting on the bench in the middle of the courtyard.

“Where you been, Rowanda?” I yelled, while doing a summersault across the bench that sat in front of Building 251A.

“I been gone,” she said.

“Gone where?”

“To jail, baby.”

“I ain’t no baby.”

“You my baby,” she insisted.

“Yo’ baby? I ain’t got no mama. You ain’t my mama. You’se a crackhead.”

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