Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [5]
But Pop ain’t giving me no whupping.
Pop is saying, “That’s my girl. She just told the truth, that’s all she did. You can’t go off on no one for telling the truth.” And with that he’d pat me on the head and have me go with him down the street to fix someone’s washing machine.
KEN AND BARBIE
Sheila was Barbie.
I was Ken. I was five, maybe six years old.
We were playing house.
Sheila had golden brown hair. Her body was developing faster than the other girls’. She already had a little booty.
“You the mommy,” I said. “I’m the daddy. I just got home from work. How ’bout a kiss?”
Sheila kissed me on the cheek.
“You make dinner,” I said. “I gotta go back to work.”
“Where you work?” she asked.
“On the streets,” I answered.
“What you do?”
“Woman,” I said, acting like Pop, “I do what I need to do. I take care of you, that’s what I do.”
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Ken loves Barbie and Barbie loves Ken. That’s how it go.”
“We gonna have babies?”
“You want babies?”
“Three,” she said. “Two girls and one boy.”
“Okay, we’ll have babies.”
“You know how to make babies?” Sheila wanted to know.
“Well,” I hesitated. I really didn’t know, but I said, “We just kinda rub together.”
We kept our clothes on and just kinda rubbed together.
“Okay,” I said, “you wait awhile and then the babies come.”
That was our game, and we played it for months.
Sheila was my first girlfriend. Our song was LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.”
That song had me falling in love with slow jams. Funny to think of me as a little girl dreaming of being the man of the family.
But that’s who I was.
Another girl, this one a little older, would sometimes have me sleep over at her house. She’d call it a pajama party. She also liked to play LL’s “I Need Love.” She also liked to play house.
When we got into bed, she played like she was asleep, and she let me do sneaky shit to her. But I knew she was awake and loving it. She just didn’t want to admit it. That was my first experience being with a girl who liked to pretend she wasn’t liking it. As time went on, I learned that she wasn’t the only one.
I learned that lots of girls have different sexual feelings. The honest ones will admit to it. They’ll even talk about it. Sometimes they like a boy. Sometimes they like a girl. Sometimes they like a girl who acts like a boy. I never had problems talking about those different feelings. I did what felt good and natural. Never had no guilt. Never felt like I was doing nothing wrong.
But I’d soon learn that not everyone has an easy attitude about sex. Sex gets people confused, guilty, and crazy. If you’re open about your feelings, and those feelings are different from everyone else’s, you might be laughed at or even beaten down. You might be secure about your sex life, but the more secure you are, the more insecure you’ll make others—especially folks who hate the different sex feelings running through their heads and heating up their hearts.
They say your life is secure long as you got a roof over your head.
When I was eight, the roof blew off our house—just like that—and water started flooding in. We ran down to the basement. I thought we’d drown, but we made it through. In 1988, some kind of crazy storm hit Baltimore real hard and nearly did us in.
Next day, though, Pop was up there banging on a new roof.
“Anyone wanna help?” he asked everyone. Mama had some relatives living there that I didn’t even know.
No one wanted to help—except me.
“She’ll fall off,” said a woman I called my aunt.
I paid her no mind, climbed up there and started hammering.
From the streets, a guy looked up and saw me.
“Hey, Levi,” he yelled at Pop, “ain’t that child labor?”
“This child,” Pop yelled back down, “ain’t no child. She’s smart as a whip and twice as strong as any two boys on this block.”
“Well, you keep her close to you, Levi, ’cause this block’s getting worse every day. This here is the Wild West.”
Pop knew the neighborhood well as anyone.