Out of the Madness (19 page)

After my brother said I too could qualify for the three-week security guard training program, I went all over town collecting
the necessary paperwork. I enrolled in the same program he had.

Meanwhile, Tammie was approaching her fifth month and didn’t know how much longer she could keep the pregnancy hidden. She
was ready to leave. Since the matter was urgent, I asked my mother if she could move in. “I’ve been meaning to ask you if
Tammie could come and live with us for a while, until I can find somewhere else for us,” I said.

My mother stood over the stove. “Yeah, she can come. But you need to do your part, pay your room and board. I’m getting tired
of you grown niggers in my business.” It was back to that, back to her being tired of children who had always been a burden.

After I had put my life in danger for her, suddenly I was a grown nigger in her business. After all the money I had given
her, she wanted to charge me room and board. I swelled with anger when I responded, “It’s your fault. I could have been on
my own by now if you’d done your job as a mother, instead of spending every dime we ever got on dope.”

She turned angrily away from the stove and faced me. “Well, I tell you what. You can just get out now!”

To let things cool down, I walked out the door and down the street. I wasn’t in a position to rebel, so I would just do what
I had learned to do while living with relatives. However, I did regret my words because I really felt that it wasn’t her fault.
She was still on dope, so everything else still came second. She wasn’t responsible. Before night fell on the same evening,
we talked about the argument.

“Baby, I’m sorry about what I said. Momma didn’t mean it.” I apologized, too.

On a school day in the fall of 1988, Tammie packed all her clothes and moved in with me at the wooden duplex on Trunk, down
by Catfish Charlie’s. We were given the bedroom in the middle of the duplex, closer to the kitchen and bathroom. My mother
slept in the front room on a couch bed.

I finished the three-week training and quickly found a job doing security work. The pay was five bucks an hour, and the job
required that I have a car. I lied and was luckily assigned a post on a bus route. I worked twelve-hour shifts and all the
extra hours I could. Since my fevers had returned, and since I often stood out in the cold at work, I came home many evenings
very sick, where I would sweat all night next to Tammie. Before long, with the exception of paying my mother’s rent and Tammie’s
doctor bills at the nearby women’s clinic, I was able to save some money. I bought a put-put car from Fahim, who had many
old cars, and continued to work.

At the duplex, Tammie was miserable from day one. After I left early in the mornings, she would stay in the house all day
and deal with my mother. Some evenings, when I wasn’t too tired, she and I would talk, go walking, or go to my sister’s house
in Pleasant Grove. But Tammie was used to going to football games, malls, and movies.

Perhaps the only pleasant times we shared were the boom-bam hours. Each evening around seven, the baby would go happily crazy,
paddling her mother’s stomach like a toddler in water and balling up in tight knots. She was developing. The more the baby
grew, the more Tammie bulged and warmed from the new life. I became attached to both of them. There was nothing I wasn’t ready
to sacrifice, even if it meant busting rocks for eternity.

Still, Tammie and I fussed constantly. Her emotions seemed so fragile, and I was so ignorant about how much patience was necessary.
Even though I cast most of the blame on myself, some things she did drove me up the wall—like refusing to eat properly, since
she was “so used to junk food.” She wouldn’t eat vegetables. She wouldn’t drink milk, not until I told her the baby would
come out deformed if she didn’t change. Then she accused me of caring more for the baby than I did for her.

And in the background, my mother disliked Tammie and what she saw as a snobbish, spoiled attitude. Tammie said my mother had
told her she should be trying to help more, maybe get on Medicaid instead of having me pay for everything. My mother also
kept us under pressure by saying we needed to hurry up and move. So one day I called Tammie’s grandmother and told her Tammie
was pregnant. Afterward Tammie herself called and was relieved to find out how concerned her family was. In a few days she
moved back home, which was the best place for her.

Our relationship continued to fail as she lived at her house, for there Tammie was back under the guidance of her mother and
the influence of her loose cousin. I later learned that her mother even was encouraging her to get an abortion.

As the months went by, we barely saw each other. Maybe once a week, when she had time, she would come by and spend a few hours
with me. I would walk to her grandmother’s to see her. Tammie did get on Medicaid and began having appointments at the Martin
Luther King Clinic. I had been switched to a night shift, from six
P.M.
until six the next morning, so on the days of her appointments, and since she demanded so, I would get off work and sit up
there with her all day. By the time I left, usually late evening, it was time to go back to work. I was a walking zombie.

During the final months of the pregnancy, our relationship was reduced to name calling. I no longer felt her mood swings were
just the pregnancy. The last time she visited the house on Trunk, we sat in the kitchen and talked, then argued. Suddenly
Tammie blurted out, “I’e been thinking lately. I really am too young to have a baby. I’m gonna get an abortion. My mom said
she would pay for it.”

As I stood there, all the emotion I had in me, all the fervor I had for that unborn child, came up. As hardened as I was,
having faced so many challenges in my life, no starving, no misery, and no sweaty nights, nothing, had struck me harder than
her burning words. That baby was my whole reason for living, my only remaining source of encouragement. I had to be something,
be somebody, for her. Now she would be taken, and I was powerless to intervene. Before Tammie, there in that bare kitchen,
I wept openly.

I wasn’t making any sounds, and if not for the tears, my expression probably would have appeared normal. But the tears were
flowing like a river as I looked blankly at her. “Please don’t cry,” she said. “I’ll have this baby because you love it so
much.”

My relationship with Tammie never was the same. She would still threaten me with the abortion when she got angry, even though
she was seven months pregnant.

Around then, from out of the darkness, my real mother came again with her infallible wisdom. “Jerrold, whatever you do, leave
that girl alone. She has too much to learn about the world. She will never be right for you…. You are a good man. You deserve
much better. Put all your love into that baby. You hear me? Don’t let her keep you from your baby, who’ll be here soon.”

On March 5, 1989, Tammie’s grandmother called. “It’s time,” she said. I went outdoors. Dallas, Texas, was under an ice storm.
Icy snow was falling hard. Everything was snowy white: houses, streets, and cars.

“Leave me alone!” Tammie screamed to the old lady from across the street who was trying to be helpful, as I stood in the screen
door. I walked to where she had slumped to the floor and, as gently as I could, took her night clothes off and helped her
into her maternity gown. She took several steps toward the door, then confessed she would never make it. I picked her up and
carried her to the car, trying not to slip on the ice. Her cousin and aunt jumped inside, and I drove fifteen miles an hour
to the hospital.

In the delivery room, her aunt and I took turns by Tammie’s side. Labor pains would awaken her, then the painkillers would
eventually make her go back to sleep. Her stomach was bulging with life.

Suddenly she announced, “Judy, tell the doctor it’s time. Jerrold, go and get ready.”

The midwife told her aunt to stay right there and that we were going to deliver the baby right now. I felt that this was the
appropriate omen, since all along her family had intervened. After a few gasps for air, and with the midwife snatching the
strangling, crisis-causing umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck, it was over.

It wasn’t long before I stood watching my daughter through a glass window. I couldn’t leave, even though I had to go to work,
even though fatigue had overtaken me. Vanessa Jacqua Ladd had barely made it and still had a long life ahead of her. I visited
Tammie every day the week that minor complications kept her in the hospital. I changed three flat tires in that cold, biting
winter storm. In her room, she and I took turns holding Vanessa. One day the black nurse asked Tammie my age. “He’s only eighteen!
Girl, you better keep him.”

Shortly after she was released, Tammie told me the expected. “I’m too young to be a full-time mother. … I want my teenage
life. … to see other guys.” Her mom had kept her so sheltered. And after she turned sixteen, I had come along and gotten her
pregnant. I understood her need to explore.

But over the next three months, it was hard letting go for both of us. We had become so attached. She would leave, come back,
go out, see other guys, feel guilty, and come back again. I was extremely jealous, and this burned me to the core. My mother
spoke again amid this tribulation: “Do you want to get Tammie back? Then you’re gonna have to pretend like you don’t care.
Even act like you’re seeing someone else. When you go see the baby, even if she has company, act like you’re doing fine. She’ll
straighten up.”

I followed my mother’s advice, and it worked. I asked Tammie if she still wanted me. After she said no, I told her a final
goodbye. During the two weeks that followed, I ate and slept little. She finally called to say she was so unhappy without
me and could we try again. We did, but the same problems came back, mainly her wanting me to understand her seeing other men.

She used the baby, too, not allowing me to see her unless she was in a good mood or didn’t have plans. I kissed up for a while,
until it all became intolerable. So one day I called her from a phone booth. I said, “Tammie, are you sure this is what you
want? I haven’t been serious about this in the past, but this time I won’t be calling you back. I’ll only see my daughter,
nothing more.”

On that day, as I walked home from the phone booth, it began to rain. But I didn’t rush. I had no idea how I was going to
live without my daughter and without Tammie. I had taken all I could handle. One more major disappointment, and I knew I would
give up. But Vanessa had survived. She was here. She would need me. I understood this more than anything else.

D
riving down Trunk Street, my old car hesitated. Suddenly a puff of white smoke came from under the hood, followed by jumping
flames. I killed the ignition and popped the hood. It was the faulty fuel pump, spewing gas on the hot engine. I tried to
put the flames out with an old rag. Unsuccessful, I jogged to the nearest apartment, hoping I could get the fire department
out here in time. At the same time my brother was leaving the duplex, so he drove up to see what was wrong.

Minutes later, as the fireman poked through the wreckage of the motor and dash, I realized the car was a total loss. I still
owed Fahim one hundred dollars.

“Don’t worry about it, man,” my brother said, knowing I would lose my job without a car. I sat on the curb and put my hands
in my head. “I’ll tell the man about you at the apartment complex. Maybe he’ll let you work, too.”

At length, the man at the apartment complex agreed to give me and my brother four hundred dollars each, every month, and a
free apartment for working rotating, twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. He also supplied our equipment, including two
pump shotguns. Even though this was obvious exploitation to me, it came right on time. I didn’t want to move to Pleasant Grove,
though, because it was far away from my daughter. But I went anyway. It was the best decision I ever made.

On the day we moved in, my brother and I stopped by Fahim’s house first, so that I could pay him. As he worked on an automobile,
he told me he’d look for another car for me. Before leaving, I asked Fahim a question. “Hey you got any good books to read?”
He stopped for a moment, very randomly selected a book from a nearby shelf, then tossed it to me. He stuck his head back under
the hood.

I held a weathered paperback in front of my face. On the cover was a picture of a black man wearing glasses. In all my readings
I hadn’t read anything on a black man before, except for Martin Luther King and his home boys getting beat upside the head
and a lady who got really pissed when she had to stand up for a white man, things I remembered from the school textbooks.
I recalled, also, a mere paragraph on somebody named W.E.B. Du Bois, who worked for a civil rights group. I looked at the
cover again. The man’s eyes were on fire. He looked fierce and determined, as if he could call fire from the heavens if so
moved. He doesn’t look like the type of man who should have worn glasses, I thought. I promised to read the book one day.
Before we drove away, Fahim ran to the car and handed me another book. It was a book about the legal rights of a father.

When we first drove up to the new apartments, dealers were standing around. I jumped out of the car with my pump shotgun and
made the small congregation of young wanna-be dope dealers leave—they weren’t the problem ones. I had decided that no one
would sell dope where my sister was trying to live decently, trying to have a family, trying to raise her little girl.

We were given a two-bedroom apartment and were assigned to the black manager, who also received a free apartment. Through
the manager, our sister, and other residents, we quickly learned that everyone lived in fear. The manager was glad to see
us.

The apartments were some thirty years old, adjacent to each other, and barely occupied. The hundreds of units were filthy
and semidemolished. It was a hornet’s nest for drug dealers.