Rabbit by Patricia Williams

Author:Patricia Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Dre was the one who found her. He went by her place and discovered she’d died in her sleep. Then he came over to my place and told me the news with tears in his eyes. I drove to the hospital to identify her body, and called the funeral home to pick her up. Afterward, I went back to my apartment, sat on my white sofa, and tried to make myself cry.

Mama’s dead, I thought. Dead. Dead and gone. Dead as a doorknob . . .

I blinked hard. But my eyes stayed dry, which made me feel even worse. What kind of child doesn’t cry for their own dead mama? I thought maybe some music might help me get into my emotions, so I put Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” on repeat, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

“Didn’t we almost have it ALLLLLLLLL!” I sang, getting swept up by the beauty of Whitney’s voice. Then I caught myself. This ain’t a damn sing-along, I thought. You need to get to grieving.

I tried picturing Mama’s face. But the only image that popped into my brain was of Mama throwing her head back and gulping down her gin, which didn’t bring tears to my eyes, either.

A memory came to me. I was back in third grade, in Miss Thompson’s class, and we were getting ready for the school’s annual Black History Month show. Every kid in the show had to dress up like a famous black person we admired. My enemy Mercedes was going as Diana Ross; her homegirl, Porsha, was Aretha. Those two bitches thought they had the best parts, but I knew I was really someone special: I was Corretta Scott King; my granddaddy would have been proud. I made a costume out of Mama’s winter coat with the fake fur collar, and a big black pocketbook that Dre stole from the Goodwill. Miss Troup helped me write a speech. “My name is Missus Corretta Scott King,” it began. “I am the loving wife of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior.” I practiced my lines every afternoon with Miss Troup for a week and then, the day before the show, I stood in the living room and begged Mama to come.

“There’s a Black History show at my school,” I said, handing her the flyer.

Mama was sitting on her dirty sofa, which was also where she sometimes slept, a tangle of bed sheets beside her. On TV, my favorite McDonald’s commercial was playing, the one with the black girls double Dutching and rhyming about Big Macs and Fillet-O-fish. “Shuckin’ and jivin’,” Mama said, nodding at the set. “You see the way these crackers got our babies dancing for them?”

I glanced at the TV and back at Mama. “So can you come to my show?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

The next afternoon I sat on the makeshift stage in the school cafeteria with the rest of my class, sweating under the weight of Mama’s ratty coat, my heart pounding from nerves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.