Girlz 'n the Hood by Mary Hill-Wagner

Author:Mary Hill-Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

THE SUMMER OF THE FATHERS

Things were about as bad as they’d ever been when my mother decided to call in the fathers. Bobby called it the Summer of the Fathers, with Napoleon Boykin, father of the twins, Mark and Mariah; Willie Wright Sr., the father of Teresa and Little Willie; Morris Dolphin Sr., father of Morris; Edward Lee Hill, my father; Jesse Cotton, father of Bobby and Cynthia; and Roy Randolph, father of Yvonne and Steven.

I barely remembered most of the fathers. They paraded through our house in order of recent involvement. It probably would have been less confusing for the schools if we had all been given her last name and not those of our fathers. But my mother said “Then, you wouldn’t be entitled to nothin’, if one of those good-for-nothin’ motherfuckahs ever made somethin’ out of theyselves.”

That summer, Napoleon (Nicky) Boykin decided to become involved in the twins’ lives and took them to visit him and his new wife. Jesse Cotton—my least favorite stepfather—visited with Cynthia and Bobby but ignored the rest of us. One of my earliest memories was of Jesse Cotton blackening my mother’s eye in a fistfight.

Years later I asked my mother what the fight had been about.

Jesse Cotton had come home from work one day, she said, and told her he’d gotten a second job so he could support his “other family” down the street.

“My mama told me not to marry that shit heel,” she said of Jesse Cotton. “But I didn’t listen. She said no redheaded fool that gambles and chases women would make me happy, and she was right.”

When Jesse Cotton visited during the Summer of the Fathers, he had the same red hair and freckles that I remembered. I disliked freckles, especially on Black people. It looked like some kind of disease, I thought. But during the Summer of the Fathers, I noticed something else about Jesse Cotton. The left side of his face looked as if it were melting away, and he had a large hearing aid in his left ear.

“What happened to you?” I asked him.

“Ask yo’ mama,” he said.

My mother refused to tell me the story, so I asked Uncle Lo’.

“Yo’ mama and Jesse sent they kids to stay with us for a few days, so they could talk about their relationship. You know they needed some grown-folk time together without a bunch of kids runnin’ in and out,” Uncle Lo’ explained. “That weekend, Jesse Cotton had come home drunk and confessed that he had impregnated a neighbor lady. And yo’ mama started in on him, and he threw her up against the kitchen table. The table damn near split in two, and she was knocked out cold. Yo’ mama told us that Jesse was such a fool that he went to sleep in they bed after he had beat on her.”

He continued, clearly enjoying this part of the story: “Now we was raised country and your mama knows a thing or two about how to get the hair off a hog.

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