Soaked With No Umbrella

            I am used to storms.  I can’t recall the age exactly; I may have been seven or eight, which would have made my brother nine or ten years old.  All I remember was a violent encounter between my mother and her male friend, which caused us to journey directly to the Ida B. Wells Project Towers that once highlighted the Bronzeville area.  They are no longer there; neither am I.  On that stormy night, I remember riding in a huge checkered cab.  The thunderous evening seemed to coincide with the rage shared between my mother and every man she shared relations.  We exited the cab; my mother said we were to go upstairs to a friend’s apartment.  I remember crying and asking her to come with us.  “Skull (her affectionate name for her young son), I will be back baby.”  You couldn’t tell I was crying except for the loud hisses and gasping breaths that came between my asthmatic wheezing and stuttering words.  The rain that night covered my tears in droves.  No one could decipher my teardrops from a raindrop on that inclement night.  My brother, as strong as ever, grabbed my hand and led me into the building.  We slowly walked to the apartment of a family that we only knew because we went to the same school with their children.  We were alone.  Mother was gone.  We slept on a cold project floor with no blankets that night.  We clutched each other with a sheet and semi-damp underwear.  We needed each other more than ever.  Mother never came back; strangers didn’t want us; we were soaked with no umbrella.

            With mother, we lived for a while at 4500 S. Greenwood Ave. in Chicago.  During that time, in Chicago, individual rooms were rented in one big house.  It was a communal place, where we shared a kitchen and two bathrooms.  I can’t recall the type of house it was.  I remember it had a front porch that extended the full width of the house which kids were not allowed to play on.  We shared the first floor with two other rooms, a large kitchen and a bathroom.  The top floor had three rooms but the owner, we were told, had the biggest room.  He was a nice man that looked like a cowboy.  He wore the coolest Texas hat with some serious boots and a huge brown or bronze buckle.  We never took baths or showers in this place and never used the public restroom.  Mother kept two white buckets in the room, one with fresh water that we used to wash our face and bodies.  The other we used as our indoor-outhouse.  The stench from the bucket still lingers in my nostrils today.  When mother left, at times for longevity, she or Sam, her man, would leave us locked inside the room.  If there were ever a fire, we would have perished.  My brother and I enjoyed the house because it had a park next door with a beautiful garden, maintained by some older people on the block.  On occasion they would offer us candy to pick up paper from around the yard.  My brother would do this happily, but after I was stung by a bumblebee (that I was trying to catch and put in an insect jar), I never took on the task again. Therefore I remained without candy.