Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [34]
Even though dreams may come true, there’s no guarantee that they will last. Rhonda’s family dream began to disintegrate the day the police kicked in their door.
In the community in which Rhonda grew up, every family fell on hard times sooner or later. Some father lost his job. Some mother got sick. Some family’s car broke down when the rent was due. Hard times were nothing new to a working-class community. Back then, you learned to deal with it by helping the family out any way you could. But when hard times turned into tragedy, things got frightening for everyone. That’s what happened to Rhonda the day her daddy got arrested.
It was one thing to have a daddy in jail. It was quite another thing to have your daddy arrested right in front of you, and in full view of everyone on the block. A few of the kids in the neighborhood had daddies, uncles, cousins, or older brothers who had been in jail or were in jail. People were okay about that. You didn’t get a “rep” or stigmatized if someone in your family was in jail or had been to jail. But Rhonda’s case was different. Her father got arrested right in front of everyone!
Nett was in the bathroom. Rhonda and Ray were watching television. Daddy and Mr. Johnny were sitting at the kitchen table, working on the morning’s numbers pick up. They all heard the knock at the door. Daddy got up to get it. He half whispered and half hissed the s word as he ran back into the kitchen. The next knock was much louder.
“Get the door!” Nett hollered from the bathroom. Daddy and Mr. Johnny were frantically gathering the numbers slips from the table. The knocking became banging. Nett was coming up the hallway, mumbling to herself, when she collided with Mr. Johnny. At that very moment, the door to the apartment came crashing in. Daddy and Mr. Johnny were both trying to run up the hallway and away from the police officers who had crawled through the wreckage of the front door.
By the time Rhonda and Ray got to the kitchen, several white officers were rummaging through the garbage, the cabinets, and the refrigerator. Others were jumping over Nett, who was trying to get up off the floor. White men in the kitchen! They were big! They were white! They had guns, and they were tearing up the kitchen. It didn’t matter that they were policemen. The only other white man who had ever been in the kitchen was the landlord. He came when the rent was late.
In a matter of minutes, things really got crazy. One of the policemen was holding Nett by her hair. In the struggle, either she slipped, or he slammed her into the wall. Two policemen were holding on to Mr. Johnny, who was halfway out the second-floor bathroom window. Rhonda was holding on and trying to bite the ankle of the policeman who had hurt Nett. Somebody swooped her up from behind, took her out of the apartment, and deposited her in the hallway, where Ray already stood.
Miss Brooks, their neighbor across the hall, took the children into her apartment. They could hear knocking and banging on the wall coming from their apartment. They could also hear Nett screaming and crying, “Please! Wait! Don’t take him!” Miss Brooks made tea for the two terrorized children and gave them cookies. She patted them on their heads, hugged them, and ran back and forth to her front door to look out the peephole. On one of her trips back from the peephole, after what seemed like hours since they’d first sat down, Miss Brooks was accompanied into the kitchen by Nett.
Thanking Miss Brooks and hugging Rhonda and Ray, who clung to her for dear life, Nett tried to explain what had happened. Daddy