Diamond Doris by Doris Payne

Author:Doris Payne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Going International

THE ASSASSINATIONS OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy put the nation into a state of collective mourning. Nothing made sense anymore. And I was still missing Babe.

It was 1968. Rhonda was sixteen, the age when she really needed a mother. She didn’t want to be living alone at her father’s without a woman around, and after Babe died, I didn’t want to be living alone at my house, so I picked up my daughter from her father’s home in West Virginia. Ronny had just turned twenty. He would soon be sent to Vietnam. I now knew how my mother had felt, sitting at her kitchen table talking to herself when the military took Albert, Clarence, and David to fight a war for a country that could just as easily lynch them. I couldn’t get Mom’s words and frustrations about my brothers out of my mind—because we knew so much more about the war now—and I carried mother’s worry about what would happen to Ronald.

When I arrived in West Virginia to pick up Rhonda, I found myself wanting to just be home. I remembered the smells and the sounds of the birds, and the lack of stress felt comforting. I went to Keystone, West Virginia, the small predominantly Black town where Rhonda lived with her father, in the middle of the night, when the fog hangs in the valley the way it does. I hadn’t seen Rhonda in a couple of years. I walked into her bedroom and called her name. She sat up in the bed, and all I could see was her grown-looking shadow, but her voice still sounded like my little girl. “Mama?”

When she climbed the stairs to her new room at my house, I followed behind her, hoping I had done good. She put her hands over her mouth. “Ooo, Mama!” and jumped onto the white pillows. It was the room of a princess.

Things went really well for the first couple of weeks. Then I enrolled her at Shaker Heights High School, and the stress of living in a city and trying to fit in really got to her. One night she came into my room and didn’t ask me but told me, “I’m going out with some friends.”

I sounded like Mom. “It’s nighttime. You’re not going anywhere.”

She wasn’t a sassy teenager, but she sure slammed my door and yelled, “I’m going back to live with Daddy!”

I drove her right to the bus station the next morning. A young woman has got to have some control over her own life and make up her own mind. If that’s what she wanted, I was going to give her a hug, some money, and let her go. A few days later, she asked me to come get her again, and that was that. She settled into her Shaker Heights life, and my life felt grounded again with her there, and with Mom a stone’s throw away.

* * *

I DIDN’T HAVE Babe as a

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