How Do You Survive a Child Meant to Survive You?

Gloria was her name. Everyone called her Glo. But I called her Disco Queen.

She wasn’t the smartest, or flyest, or funniest of my mother’s girlfriends. But to my twelve-year-old self, she was a force that warmed like the sun and wowed like magic. About twice a month, my mother and I trekked down the back stairs of our nineteen-story apartment building in the Bronx and cut across the circular park that separated ours from Glo’s. We’d stroll into building 825 and journey up the elevator to her seventh-floor apartment. As soon as the door slid back, the aroma of fried chicken or fish flowed through the hallway and aimed straight for my nose.

Glo and her southern-bred husband Willie’s Friday-night menu consisted of either fried chicken or fish, collard greens, red rice, and potato salad with a side of lettuce and tomatoes. It was only my grandmother’s constant admonition that I bet not be goin’ to people’s houses eatin’ and drankin’ everything up that always kept my manners in check. So when Glo snatched the door open with sounds of Marvin Gaye or Rick James erupting from her golden-lit apartment and yelled, “Hey, ya’ll, come on in! Terri-Lyn, you want somethin’ to eat?” all that fell from my mouth was a polite, “No, thanks.”

The moment we stepped inside, my preoccupation with what Willie had cheffed up was eclipsed by my excitement for the dance party that was sure to begin. As the night stretched on, liquor shook in red plastic cups while the music boomed louder. Willie, who usually kept his conversation to ten words or less, suddenly couldn’t stop philosophizing. My mother, the ever-overtaxed divorced single mom, turned into the carefree good-time girl. But it was Glo who shone the brightest. She transformed into my song-singing, hip-swinging, finger-snapping Disco Queen. She’d follow my eyes as they drank in her every move—her wonder. To anyone else, she was the kind of Black woman made for overlooking: skin dark, eyes muddy, and a wide nose that took up too much of her face. But I saw a beauty that radiated from inside out: the adoration that rested behind her eyes; the warmth in her touch; the self-assured disregard of what anybody in the world thought of her—a capability I sorely lacked.

“Terri-Lyn! Get on up, chile. Show me what you got. Disco Queen needs her a princess now!”

I’d sink deeper into the couch and hope the cushions would swallow me whole before all the expectant eyes. Especially Kevin’s, Glo’s eighteen-year-old son, whose pictures adorned the living room walls. Just before he’d head out to do the teenage things I’d wish I could, I’d pretend we were in a room filled with girls, and it was me he chose to set his stare upon. Skin smooth, and almost as black as coal, Kevin was my first deep crush. He was the reason I didn’t resist the one year my mother decided to send me to sleepaway camp. She took comfort that Kevin, a counselor, would keep a watchful eye over me. He did. And so did my imagined romantic rival, his girlfriend, Kerry.

I don’t want to wonder how to keep my child alive . . . I don’t want my thoughts besieged by a lifetime of whys, hows.

Those Friday nights, Disco Queen knew deep down I wanted to jump up and dance until my legs gave way. As soon as Kevin walked out the door, Disco Queen would tolerate no more stalling. She’d shimmy over, her lips wide with glee, grab my wrist, and pull me to my feet. Her energy was infectious. I wanted to have fun like her, be free like her. But there was a monster whose shadow haunted me, and had for eight years. The one whose dank fingers rummaged about my insides, leaving them and me feeling dirtied and damaged.

Once Disco Queen finally got me up, I two-stepped and twirled underneath her slender arm outstretched like a tree branch until sweat thickened the roots of my press and curl.

Until I felt free.

*

Three years later, my mother’s moist hand gripped mine as we scurried to 825. She spoke not a word, just stared into nothing, feet marching. The elevator lifted itself past each floor. I studied her face. It was etched with an unease I’d never seen before. When the door slid back, gloom greeted us. There were no aromas wafting through the hallway; there was no music. Just a silence that roared with despair.

My mother hesitated before pushing Glo’s bell. When the door opened, I was surprised to see Willie. He never answered it when we came over. Glo was always the one to fling it open, ready to get the party started. I searched my mother’s face for clues. She took an uncertain step toward Willie, then embraced him.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“She’s in the room,” Wille said, stepping to the side.

My eyes shut tightly when we reached the bedroom’s threshold. This couldn’t be my Disco Queen. Her warm brown skin was overlaid with an ashen gray. Her cotton nightgown left one bony shoulder slumped and bare. She was minus her caterpillar-long eyelashes, brick-colored blush, and vampy Bordeaux lipstick. Not even saliva lent moisture to her cracked lips. Her cropped auburn ’fro was matted and brittle. Little specks of lint matching the color of the bedsheets peppered her hair. Pillows propped her up as she pitifully lay reclined amid a puddle of fabric and grief.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” my mother whispered, leaning into her ear. Glo was there, but my Disco Queen had vanished like a beautiful dream that never was. Her eyes blinked as if they were trying to see their way into a place she was desperate to reach. As Glo sat motionless, my mother rocked and stroked her body as if willing her touch to revive her sister-friend. Low moans and whimpers began their escape from Glo’s lips. Then came woeful sobs.

“He. Killed. My. Baby. He killed my baby! He took my child. Why, God? Help me, Jesus! Please, Lord Jesus, help me.”

Glo buried her face into the curve of my mother’s neck and fell limp in her open arms. I watched her twist and writhe her body as if her soul were trying to break loose in pursuit of her boy, who was racing toward a destination farther out of her reach. A destination from which he’d never return.

That night, after a phone call with Glo’s sister, my mother told me what had happened to Kevin. He was stabbed once in the chest in a Manhattan hotel known for harboring drug users and those who sold to them. My mother sat at our dining room table shaking her head, repeating “such a shame” to describe both the money Kevin supposedly owed his killer and the loss of his twenty-one-year-old life. It didn’t matter to me what they said he’d done. All I knew was he was gone.

Within months, Glo and Willie packed up and moved from New York to Willie’s hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. Glo could no longer continue to make a life in the state where her baby boy was taken from her. That summer had been Disco Queen’s last dance.

Glo unraveled like a worn rope pulled too many times in too many directions over the next few decades. Liquor and dementia battled for control of her mind. She was trapped in a perpetual state of paranoia. She made frantic calls to my mother, a transplanted retiree now also living in Florida, and insisted she needed to come stay with her. Glo alleged Willie was stealing her medicine and trying to kill her. My mother assured her she was welcome, but, of course, Glo never came.

We later learned from Glo’s sister that a tormented mind made Glo wield knives against Willie and wander nighttime streets. After several months of not hearing from Glo, my mother’s worry prompted me to google her. I was anxious about the possibility of happening upon a public record of Glo’s death. Instead, I was led to a missing persons alert issued by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. In the corner of the notice was Glo’s picture. Just as on the day after Kevin’s murder, she was barefaced and ashen. Her once-auburn ’fro was now cotton white. Her brown eyes that once radiated life were now hollow and desolate. Like my Disco Queen decades before, Glo had disappeared.

*

It was October 1968, and a day like any other. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. My mother and father, still newlyweds, desired quiet, a pleasure they rarely enjoyed. They colluded to do something they’d never done before—take the phone off the hook. When my mother placed it back on the next morning, the phone rang. Her eldest brother was on the other end. The worst had happened to their brother.

“I’ve been calling you since last night. Nothing but a damn busy signal. Brucie was killed.”

My mother dropped the phone and crumbled to the floor. Her beloved big brother—the one who teasingly tortured her by tossing dead mice at her; the brother who screened all suitors never good enough for his baby sis; the brother who held her hands in his as he taught her the Bop in the middle of their living room floor. The brother she loved most was dead.

For weeks, my mother remained bedridden and nearly catatonic. Her heart continued to beat while the rest of her body malfunctioned. Sudden incontinence soaked her sheets night after night. New life terminated inside of her body. It was a season of loss.

*

The day an ultrasound shows I’m having a son, I walk out of the doctor’s office with tears streaking my face. Despite the years of miscarriages, painful needles filled with progesterone to make me fertile when I inexplicably wasn’t, the discontinued development of the twin to the baby I’m currently carrying, I don’t want to be the mother of a Black son. A cervix diagnosed as incompetent confines me to bed rest. Week after week, my mind fixates on my son being taken from me. The details of the death of the uncle I never met haunt me.

I think of Brucie in 1968, still a probationary New York City police officer, off duty and in plain clothes, at an after-hours club. A man tires of arguing with his woman and trades angry words for pummeling hands. An armed Brucie runs out of the club to aid the screaming woman—something he doesn’t think twice about as a son, brother, and father of a little girl. Sworn to serve and protect, he has the assailing man spread-eagle at gunpoint outside the club. A New York City Housing police officer, also off duty, sees the man, sees Brucie, sees the gun. This Housing police officer is Black. In the most notorious of stories like these, he’d be white. The officer jumps out of the cab he’s riding in. He trains his eyes and aims upon Brucie. With a gun in hand, Brucie turns toward him. In an instant, the officer tightens the curve of his finger around the trigger. He fires.

The day an ultrasound shows I’m having a son, I walk out of the doctor’s office with tears streaking my face . . . I don't want to be the mother of a Black son.

I don’t want to wonder how to keep my child alive. I don’t want to be like my grandmother, held captive by the stronghold of vodka because knowing that the killing of the son she birthed and grew up is too much to bear with a sober mind. I don’t want my thoughts besieged by a lifetime of whys, hows:

Why’d you take my baby from me?

How could you be so spooked by Black or blinded by blue?

How do I survive a child preordained to survive me?

Why do I still cry, still whisper into the darkness of night—

my baby, my baby, my baby?

How do I piece together the bits of my shattered mind?

How do I mend the deepest of my wounds,

my blood stained black and blues?

*

My five-year-old son and I stroll the aisles of our local supermarket. A white woman stops us. “He’s so adorable,” she says—those big bright eyes, that honey-brown skin, the tightly coiled hair she can’t resist the urge to touch. He delights in the attention. I watch and wonder how many more years before her favor disintegrates into fear.

About another seven, if he’s lucky, I tell myself.

We amble hand in hand to our car. My son boasts, “Mommy, everybody likes me.”

I want to warn him: Don’t get used to that, baby boy.

Instead, I smile and ask, “Who in this world could possibly not like you?”

That January, he tells me he’s learning about a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. in school. He prides himself on also knowing the Pledge of Allegiance.

“You want to hear me say it, Mommy?”

I nod my head to his rhythmic recitation. By the time he reaches “And to the republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” I’m no longer nodding. My mind is years ahead, trying for his sake, or maybe mine, to imagine an America where those cherished ideals hold true even for a little Black boy like mine. I try to see it but am unable. Could it be because the mind can’t fully conceive that which it knows doesn’t exist?

Waving a mini flag decorated with stars and stripes he made in school, my son stares at me in anticipation of praise. I look deeply into his brown eyes. I tell him how adored he is; how smart he is; how magnificent he is.

I tell him all of these things. Because he is.

I tell him all of these things because should the day ever come we are parted as mother and son, this moment, for us and belonging only to us, shall live.

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