My granddaddy is the only black man I’ve ever met who was never broke a day in his life. He ran an illegal liquor house in Decatur, Georgia, selling moonshine for fifty cents a shot from behind a bar he built himself out of plywood and old scraps of carpet and red leather. Granddaddy’s real name was George Walker, but folks called him Bear Cat or .38 for the two pistols he kept in his front pockets. Granddaddy didn’t believe in banks and didn’t trust anybody, either. He stored his jugs of corn liquor in the living room in a beat-up old refrigerator the color of baby-shit yellow, which he locked up with a thick metal chain. And he stashed his money in a dingy white athletic sock he pinned to the inside of his pants. My brother Dre, who would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, used to say he’d be one rich muthafucka if he could only get his hands on that sock full of paper. But Dre didn’t want to swipe anything that hung so close to Granddaddy’s mangy old balls.
Most folks were scared to death of my grandfather, not just because he was built like somebody put a human head on a gorilla body, but also because he didn’t take shit from anybody. I remember one night my uncle Skeet was acting a fool while Granddaddy was trying to watch Walter Cronkite on the evening news. The news was serious business to Granddaddy. He liked to talk back to Mr. Cronkite like the two of them were having a real conversation: “What’s wrong with these dumb-ass honkeys?” he’d yell at the TV. “They finna elect a movie star to run this whole gotdamn country. This why a nigga don’t vote!” Or, “Them Iranians some mean muthafuckas. That’s why I don’t go nowhere!” Granddaddy said other than Jesus Christ, Walter Cronkite was the only white man he could trust. Yet here was Uncle Skeet, drunk as Cooter Brown, bouncing on the balls of his feet and shadowboxing right in Granddaddy’s face in the middle of the news.
Granddaddy waited till the commercial break, then he grabbed an old golf club he kept behind his bar and smashed Uncle Skeet right across the jaw, knocking out his front teeth. When the news came back, Granddaddy stopped swinging and sat back down in front of his little black-and-white set, cool as a cucumber, like nothing happened. After that, when the news came on, nobody made a sound.
Back then there were nine of us living with Granddaddy in his big yellow house on Arkwright Place: me, my mama Mildred, Mama’s boyfriend Curtis, my sister Sweetie, and my three brothers. Also, Uncle Skeet who broke into houses and stole shit for a living, and Uncle Stanley who was crippled and slow in the head and had to go to a special-needs school. The bedrooms were in the back of the house and the bar was in the living room, up front. Granddaddy had decorated it with old bedsheets nailed above the windows like curtains, and pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus Christ hanging on the wall. The main difference between a regular bar and a bootleg house is that a regular place closes at night and everybody goes home. At Granddaddy’s, folks drank, played spades, shot craps, and hollered at each other until they passed out. On the weekend, it was like a sleepover with the neighborhood drunks. I hated all the noise and commotion. At night I’d go to sleep hoping that I’d wake up and find myself magically living in a clean house where nobody punched each other, no matter how mad they got. But instead I’d get up and find some stranger passed out cold on the living room floor, covered in their own piss and puke. That’s the mess I grew up in. When I was six years old, I thought everybody lived that way.
“Mildred Baby Girl!” Granddaddy called for me one morning, his voice booming through the house. Mama had five children, to this day I am not sure if Granddaddy knew any of our real names. When he wanted us, he’d call us by the order we were born. “Mildred First Boy!” was my oldest brother, Jeffro; “Mildred Baby Girl!” was me. Everybody knew I was Granddaddy’s favorite. When he hollered, I’d come running.
“Help me fix these grits,” he said, when I found him in the kitchen that morning. He was holding a thick metal chain in his hands, because the same way Granddaddy kept his moonshine and guns locked up tight in a fridge in the living room, he also padlocked the fridge in the kitchen. Other kids knew it was mealtime when their mama called them to the table. We knew we were gonna eat when we heard that chain hit the floor.
Granddaddy pushed a chair to the stove and lifted me up so I could stir the pot while he fried up eggs and fatback in the pan beside me. “That’s real good,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Baby girl, you a natural in the kitchen, musta got it from me.”
Granddaddy’s specialty was homemade cat head biscuits, which were the biggest, fluffiest biscuits you could ever eat, and came the size of an actual cat’s head. He also cooked chicken back, which is 90 percent skin and bones, except for the piece at the end that covers the chicken’s asshole. That piece is 100 percent fat. Granddaddy would cook it in the skillet, drain it on some newspaper, and set it on the table with a bottle of Trappy’s hot sauce. Sometimes I’d pick up a piece of chicken and it would have the news of the day printed all over it.
Everybody used to joke that I stayed up under Granddaddy like a baby chick to a hen, holding onto his pant leg and following him around wherever he went. It’s true. I loved that man with every inch of my whole little heart. Granddaddy made me feel safe. But my mama—she was a whole different story.
“Move out the way so the kids can cut a rug!” Mama hollered, pushing me and my sister Sweetie into the middle of the living room. It was Saturday night and the place was jumping. Anita Ward was singing about somebody ringing her bell on Granddaddy’s little record player, while Mama, drunk as a skunk, yelled for everybody to clear the floor so her two little girls could dance.
Mama was an alcoholic. She drank Schlitz Malt Liquor and Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin, which she called Bumpy Face because of the bumpy texture of the glass bottle. Mama’s drinking was the main reason she didn’t act like any of the mothers I saw on TV. She didn’t help with homework or give us kids advice. She didn’t care about bedtimes, or even where we slept. There weren’t enough mattresses for all the people who lived at the liquor house and it was nothing for Mama to stumble over one of her children sleeping on the floor. She’d just step right over us and keep moving. I don’t remember ever hearing Mama say, “I love you” or “You did good.” In fact, she barely took the time to name her own kids. I have three brothers; one is named Andre and another is named Dre. That’s the same gotdamn name, and those two aren’t even twins.
In the living room, Mama turned up the music.
You can ring my beeeeeeell, ring my bell
Ring my bell, ring-a-ling-a-ling