The Waterbearers

1

50 10

My grandmother Betty Jean had a dream about the water when her daughter was pregnant with me. And she had that same dream when I was pregnant with my daughter. One afternoon in May we were packed tightly in my grandmother’s home. There was something stirring in the living room. It was an unusual afternoon when you could clearly hear the tune of the ice-cream truck pass outside, more still, the children didn’t beg for a dollar or run out to the street in pursuit of sweetness. There was, of course, the savory stewing smell coming from the kitchen. I sat on the floor with my weight resting on my palms beside my cousins while the grown folks took the seats. The solemn aunties’ arms didn’t graze but their hips kissed across the length of the sofa, shapeshifting women who spread upon being seated. Sometimes that living room felt consecrated. Other times tribunal. That day it was peculiar, and I couldn’t place it. Betty Jean didn’t even look away from her crossword when she said she’d been dreaming about the fish and the water. A room full of wombs and I knew she was talking about mine. After I gave birth, before going home alone with my baby, I stopped first at my grandmother’s house so that she could hold her great-granddaughter. So she could bless her. My mother and I sat on either side of Betty Jean while she told my daughter that she was the one she’d been dreaming of, as if she had willed her here. And hadn’t she? From that day onward, I didn’t sit on the floor anymore. The women moved over now, making space for me on the sofa.

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We are deep. I am in the middle of about three dozen cousins. Not among the oldest, not among the youngest. As a child, I felt inconsequential at 5010 Chennault Road. The older cousins caused trouble, and the younger ones needed help with most things. I was merely a silent witness. This left me both excited to be there, because it felt like theater, and terrified because of the sheer size of the ever-expanding group. I was content if I got no attention at all. I would take a deep breath before entering because after putting my arms around my grandmother’s neck, my mother expected me and my younger brother, Shannon, to greet every auntie with an embrace, and on rare occasions, an uncle with acknowledgment. Worsening my angst by confirming along the way, “You speak?” It was imperative that my mother’s children be regarded as having home training. My heart would race as I pressed myself into them, becoming one. Each of them commenting on my body in some way. My hair was good, but why was it so short? I was getting tall, but why were my thighs giving my jeans hell? My hips were spreading, but I better be keeping my legs closed. My body belonged to the tribe, and they projected their insecurities onto me, and I held to them tightly. After all, this was my inheritance. It is from those closest to us that we learn how to love and how to hate ourselves too.

50 10 was our haven. Our well. A place for gestation. A place where big-legged women gathered with their troubles and sorrows tucked in their bosoms. The women came parched in search of answers and approval. They didn’t concern themselves with justice, fairness, or peace, for those were never promised. But what they did receive between those walls would help them stand more erect along the way. Where the women spoke emphatically, and the men knew to keep quiet or stay away altogether. A realm that contradicted everything learned beyond its threshold. A place where nothing grew but the children, and they did so quietly as to be seen and not heard. Markings on the wall outside the bathroom charted their progress. Making a monument of Black children blooming, because this too was never promised. The living room was center stage for the women stuck between life’s torments and the imminent threat of death, both of which kept them from wasting their time with the frivolity of dreams.

But despite it all, joy was at home there. The house, which never felt structurally rooted, would vibrate with the eruption of a chorus of laughter. The women’s bodies would lean into one another, waving from top to bottom with their heads rolling back. Substantial women who breathed deeply in laughter, otherwise their bodies were clenched like fists, sipping only the air necessary to survive. Never taking more than their share. Yet still stepping through the world full-footed, like they had a right to be there. You can’t erupt like this if you’re not intimate with tragedy. If you haven’t lain beside her and closed your eyes as she fondled your jugular. If you can’t smell the blood before you taste it, you’ll never know laughter like this. This joy was the kind you earned.

Conflict was not uncommon in the modern-day Greek tragedies that unfolded in the living room at 50 10. Where both betrayal and forgiveness were exercised regularly, and everyone agrees to forget. The walls hold records and keep the score. The water lines ring the discolored walls and baseboards, marking the rise and descent of flood waters. The punctures formed from a release with nowhere else to land. The sticky ribbons that hold petrified pests. And Betty Jean reigned over it all, maintaining an order that only they understood to be true. She sat as a guardian in her chair near the door, a tower of photographs of her kids, and their kids, and their kids in the corner beside her like a shrine, the hum of the AC unit in one ear and her girls’ stories ringing in the other. Listening and only speaking when she needed to be heard. It is here, and only here, that she feels most divine.

My grandmother’s home is a small single-story structure with sky-blue siding punctuated with white shutters. The porch is a concrete slab extending from the foundation. The air conditioner pokes out over the porch from the living-room window and slouches toward hell, which is precisely what sweltering summers in Houston resemble. The wide yard holds a sole grand live oak tree in the middle that shields the children playing outside from the relentless Texas sun. Most of the time the door is not closed, but the screen door must always be shut. The latch is stripped, but no one bothers to repair it because people pass through endlessly. Dropping kids, grabbing mail, taking naps. Recharging in the only place on the planet where they were always welcome.

Kids weren’t allowed to run in and out of the house, else the humid heat seized the cool air inside. We chose the outside, as to not hear the women shout in unison, “Quit slamming the screen door.” With the cicadas singing our favorite summer song, we felt most free out there. We listened to Screw tapes that seemed to embody the slow-motion rhythm of the heat waves we saw in the distance. If we were doing something we weren’t supposed to, we just needed to get out of the view of that front window, but if we got too quiet, somebody’s mama would peek her head out in suspicion: Y’all must be doing something y’all ain’t got no business. When we weren’t playing basketball across the yard’s hardened dirt, shooting anything round we could find into a milk crate that we’d tied to the trunk of the live oak, or picking and peeling switches from the tree’s limbs for Granny to welt our own, should we transgress, we were being embraced by its shade.

If you pull up to 50 10 and there is a car in the yard, then someone is there. Someone is always there. It is rare for less than half a dozen cars to be in the wide yard at a time. There was no driveway, just a path that led to the lip of the porch. A well-worn engraving that says we’ve been here, and we’ll be right back.

I never knew when we might end up at Granny’s house. We could be going out for groceries, leaving a doctor’s appointment, leaving church, killing time, or just escaping the tension of our own home when my mother would say, “Let’s stop by Mama’s.” Sometimes she wouldn’t even tell us, but when we took the MLK exit off of 610, and made that right at Calais Road, and a quick left at Burma, I knew where we were headed.

The kids always outnumbered the adults. Where your grandmama stays is a social signifier that says you come from someplace, that you were raised according to a certain set of principles. Many of my cousins have lived with Betty Jean at some point in their lives. Everyone had their mail routed there. My driver’s license had always listed 50 10 as my residence, I was registered to vote there, my passport was mailed there. Legally, it has always been my permanent residence. The phone number is everyone’s emergency contact. It’s the number used when someone was arrested and needed to call collect. It’s the place where people slept off hangovers, of love and substances. The place where one healed and recovered from life’s wounds. The place where the kids went after school and where they went when they were sick and their mama had to go to work. For the troubled kids and the ones that were a bit touched. It was the only place we could run to that would always be there to catch us.

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Betty Jean’s affection was not always visible to the uninitiated, but it was evident in the unspoken, in the gestures. Go in there and git you summ’n to eat, she’d tell me tenderly. I feared offending her. But the dimly lit kitchen terrified me. Anything you overturned would reveal an army of roaches. Like motion detectors. They even survived the chill of the refrigerator, they were in the microwave, the faucet, the cupboards. There were hot days when I wanted a popsicle so desperately from the freezer but abstained. Or I discreetly asked my older cousin to grab one for me, only for him to raise his voice and say, What, you too scared? We learned young how to swat the roaches for our share. If you allowed them to swarm your plate, you would be shamed for your passivity. We exploited each other’s fears to make ourselves seem brave.

I am tempted to recount these memories in the we. My younger brother, Shannon, and I, two years apart, were often treated as one. As twins. Although we couldn’t be more different, everyone assumed we possessed the same interiority, perhaps because we shared an identical balance of the feminine and the masculine. Strangers squint in search of resemblance when we tell them we are siblings. Quick to ask if we have the same father. At 50 10 Shannon made everyone laugh with the timing of his absurdities. A naturally outgoing and charming Gemini with a slight, round, brown frame; everyone adored him. Anyone who has ever met him recalls that he gives the best hug they’ve ever received. I believe he acquired this skill in the living room of 50 10. Where many lessons were learned. I learned how to repress my discomfort and smile through angst in a room full of people. If I was in trouble at school, my mother would force me to recount the story to the living room of 50 10 as punishment. A shaming device that would later prove useful for public speaking. It was at 50 10 that I learned about the complexities of relationships, that you can openly despise someone and still love them hopelessly. My aunts would talk about their lovers and husbands with such vitriol, reducing them to filth, and shortly after, the very topic of the conversation would walk through the door, and he would be greeted with lukewarm cordiality and the offering of a plate. Niggas and flies, they’d nudge one another and whisper. It would be many years before I understood that they meant that all men are maggots, feasting on you until they’ve satiated themselves enough to sprout wings and fly away. But I wondered if that would make the woman the corpse. The unalive. The sense of loss was ever-present. Someone was always losing something or someone, but somehow these women found ways to keep carrying on. It was heartbreaking to witness, even as a girl. It was in opposition to the tragedies I heard at 50 10 that I began to construct my dreams. I didn’t want to become a woman whose life was a sequence of unfortunate events.

I learned about finances at 50 10 while I witnessed one of my aunties lose everything when her husband became addicted to crack cocaine. “He smoked up the whole house,” my mother said, “and she sat there and let him.” No one except Betty Jean would dare challenge my mother. When my mother spoke in the living room, everyone listened. Because she had a mortgage, and a husband, and three children who weren’t illegitimate, she was always right. Even if they didn’t necessarily believe in her message, her ideas were always considered. Rarely did her sisters take her advice. This frustrated her and created a tension that shifted between disappointment and disgust among them. These conversations led to monologues from my mother on the long drive home from the inner city to the suburbs where we lived. “Never give a man your all,” she’d say while peering at me through the rearview mirror. I sat with her lessons and burdens in the backseat of our Mercedes-Benz. “Always keep something for yourself tucked away. These men will strip you to the bone if you let ’em. Just look at my sister, back in the poor house.” And everything she said to me in the car, she had already said to her sisters in the living room. Some shaming, Betty Jean allowed. At least for a while, until she deaded it. All she had to mutter was, “Aht aht aht.”