YOUNG & FREE/ Beauty Reals

I attended the memorial service for my good friend's brother. People were standing shoulder to shoulder, in front and behind one another. The crowd appeared as a visible halo surrounding a temporary stage where friends, co-workers, and family members gave tribute to a man’s life and legacy. And though each intimate tale was as exciting and heartfelt as the next, the sight of his children and his grieving widow sat heaviest on my heart. Yet as I stood at the center of this final moment honoring a loved one, I couldn’t help but think of my father.

I was five the day my father died. Outside, orange and yellow oak leaves mixed with vibrant red maples, crispy, irresistible piles of Autumn. Halloween was fast approaching, and my mother had allowed my brothers and me to stay up late. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown aired that night. Though typically, eight o’clock meant children in bed, my mother with a cigarette at the ready, and my father out on the town. I didn’t realize it then, but my life would never be the same after Charlie Brown ended. 

Sally and Linus are waiting on the great pumpkin when the phone rings.  A lit cigarette in hand, and her thick mane tied up in a man’s t-shirt, my mother instructs me to answer the phone and to tell whoever’s calling that she’s busy. 

I answer the phone and say, “Hello, Granderson residence, Crystal speaking.” Phone etiquette mattered in my house.

“Put your mom on the phone!” screamed cousin Sylvia.

Cousin Sylvia never came with good news. Cousin Sylvia was one of many family members my mother taught my brothers and me to avoid. A call from her meant two things: she needed to borrow money, or worse, she owed somebody money.

So I yell, “Mommy, it’s cousin Sylvia. She wants to talk to you.”

Annoyed, my mother replied, “Tell her I’ll call her back!”

“Mommy will call you back,” I say, but before I can hang up, cousin Sylvia insists, “Put your mother on the phone. It’s important!”

The desperation in her voice frightened me, just as Charlie Brown struck up a conversation with Linus in the pumpkin patch (my favorite part, and I brought the phone to my mother. She grabbed the phone, gritted her teeth, and whispered,

“When I say I’ll call her back, I mean it,” her face rosy and glowing from the hot bath.

The rest of the night passes in a blur. I vaguely remember a hospital waiting room, random strangers crying, and someone consoling my mother. It's funny what the mind shuts out and discloses. Anyway, I woke to a chilly, rainy morning. My mother was nowhere to be found. My youngest aunt was there to bring my brothers and me to school, then shuttle us to my grandmother’s house after school. But because my routine was how I measured time and space as a child, I sensed something was wrong.

At my grandmother's house, a wood fire burned as warmth emanated from every corner. My grandmother's house was my home away from home most weekends, but never during the week. Before I knew it, one afternoon turned into many afternoons. I hadn’t considered the number of breakfasts and dinners I’d consumed without my parents until my mother showed up in the foyer. Eyes, red and swollen, skin paler than usual, wearing a trench coat and minimal mascara. My mother never left home without mascara. Also, she was smaller somehow, shrunken, like a pillow without filling or a tire with no air. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I saw her face. At that moment, I understand the attachment to our mothers; it's visceral and inexplicable. She leads my brothers and me to the upstairs bathroom and says,

“Cousin Sylvia called to say Daddy was in the hospital. He’d hit his head on the sidewalk after leaving the barbershop and had an aneurysm.”

After that conversation with my mother, I faced life without a father. For years, I'd picture my father tripping and falling and hitting his head until learning the truth (more on this in another post). Suddenly I'd become a girl bound to grieve his death, a child whose narrative will always include my father died when I was five and whose forthcoming memoir will chronicle life after his death. I'd become a little girl whose childhood memories now had a funeral.

At the funeral parlor, mourners gathered in head-to-toe black. The funeral parlor director spoke a few words before opening the casket.  My father lay stiff and peaceful inside a shiny, black box. Thinner and flatter than I remembered. His skin had a greenish hue. While walking toward the casket, I studied my father’s dead face from afar and then again up close. It appeared to have had makeup on, a chalky concoction. His lips forever configured funnily, a faux smirk of sorts. Except my father would have never smiled halfway. He was a full-smile kind of guy. And they’d dressed him in a suit. He was too cool for any stuffy suit, pinstripe, or tight-neck collar. But at least his Afro looked good. He loved a coiffed Afro and would spend hours perfecting it. I know because I partook in picking his Afro with a pick that had metal teeth sharp enough to prick a finger, and a black, plastic handle in the shape of a fist, a sign he stood for something.

Many mourners stood idly by during the wake while my infantile eyes saw people dressed in witch and warlock costumes. Faces painted red and black, black stripes dripping down the faces of every woman. I thought to myself, Halloween party. But childish reverie aside, my father was gone, and this was his funeral. The realization stung something awful, but I did not cry. Instead, I touched his face for the last time while my mother and older brother sobbed uncontrollably. I stood there looming over his corpse like an enthusiast at an exhibit, shocked by what I saw yet mildly relaxed by the peacefulness his body exuded as I whispered, “I love you, daddy.” 

Years later, in junior high school, I found a small black box atop a shelf. Inside the box laid two rubber ties, the kind doctors used to draw blood from a patient, an amber-colored glass vial, and a gun. The gun hung heavy in my hand while I swung it back and forth. A red and gray bullet rested inside a disembodied chamber, which made a clicking noise like chains on a bike. Sheer innocence kept me from locking the gun's barrel into place and sealing my fate. Apart from the box, a green leather jacket, several silk shirts, and a pair of worn-out jeans hung in the hall closet. Tucked inside the jacket pocket was a piece of yellow-lined paper folded into squares. He'd written a letter to me, outlining his love and protection, describing a near future where I become a heartbreaker: prophetic words of a protective father no longer at my side. The hall closet had exposed a side of my father to which I had limited access, a caged, tormented individual suffering an unrelenting battle with a malevolent demon that eventually claimed his life. That said, the side I did see embodied an intense love I only wish he'd had for himself.

One of my first memories is sitting on my father's shoulders while walking down Mamaroneck Avenue, the air hitting my face, peering at a night sky dotted with diamonds. I was young and free and untouchable, a short-lived sensation in the absence of my feral protector. If not for his entire face: nose, lips, eyes, including a lone dimple high on my right cheek, this photo is all I'd have left. Someone had taken it days before he passed; he was twenty-seven. Although he died too young, my heart tells me he's finally free.