having earlier been instructed to pick up his mother’s dry cleaning, returned to a crowd in front of her house. He found her hurting, bleeding, as partygoers turned witnesses, testified to the sky that Cuffee had hurt his momma. Cuffee stood firm on Grandma Rachel’s lawn, so confident in his reign of terror he remained at the scene of his own crime.
Cuffee had not been Uncle Bruce’s daddy, so there was no soft tussling, no pleas for him to stop or leave. A young Bruce grabbed the first thing he saw, a clothesline prop, and smashed Cuffee across the head. He then stomped to the side of the house, grabbed the axe he’d earlier used to chop wood for his momma, and chopped Cuffee out of existence.
Soon after, Uncle Bruce was found guilty of murder and sent away. At sixteen, the state released him and he went back to Deep Creek. Then, he suffered as most independent children do. He could not make his childhood home fit around his adult self, so he left for good, but he always came back for his younger brothers and sisters. Just like his mother, he always came back.
He often found them hungry, but he never left them that way. Some nights, he snuck into the farmhouse at the top of Shipyard Road, the one owned by a white man who wasn’t averse to filling Big Boone’s boys with shotgun shells if he found one on his property. Still, Uncle Bruce stole in that farmhouse, pulling breads, cakes, eggs, and potatoes out of sacks that littered the farmhouse floor. In one pass, he could get enough to feed the family for a week.
Some days, he’d send the younger kids, like Momma, from house to house on a borrowing mission. Each child would hit a different house until they could piece together a full meal. That resource never offered enough for true sustenance. Then, Uncle Bruce was forced to be even more resourceful, like the evening that Momma huddled between her sister, Bir’t, and brother, Barry, under the living room window, waiting for their brother to gather food.
Uncle Bruce tightened twine around a long stick. Layer upon layer, tighter with each rotation, his hands moved like legs of a spider. He ran the loose end of twine into the window and placed it in the open space next to his brother. In front of the house, he propped a wooden box with the twine-strangled branch. He took the last crumbs of corn meal from the house and scattered them around the yard, creating a trail that led to the trap. He then placed the remaining pile of cornmeal underneath the box. That morsel, so much less than a meal, no longer edible, was to lure food. Uncle Bruce crawled through the window and sat next to his brother and sisters as they began their silent wait.
An echoing caw, caw pulled their eyes toward the sky. The raven’s wings were so grand they cast a shadow that made Momma cover her head with her arms. The bird swooshed down to the first bits of cornmeal, those farthest from the window and box. With his black and shiny body, eyes, and feet, he looked like a blob of walking oil. He strutted around the yard, pecking at crumbs, sifting through dirt, searching for more of the treat. He pecked, strutted, and occasionally bound toward the smorgasbord under the box. Before entering the dark cavern, the raven scanned the yard, the air above, and the porch. He sensed no danger, probably because his intense wanting obscured any danger he might have felt. He stepped forward, one clawed foot in front of the other, one waddle, then another.
He finally found his way under the box and began partaking in his spoils. Uncle Bruce snatched the twine so hard the branch flew at his face. He moved quickly, placing one hand on the box as the bird cawed and flapped inside. He motioned for his brother to hold the box as he prepared for battle. Per his instruction, his brother tipped the box ever so slightly, while Uncle Bruce stuck his bare hand inside, rooting for a throat or foot. By the way Uncle Bruce gripped his lower lip between his teeth and squinted his eyes so tightly they were almost closed, Momma knew her brother finally had a hold of his prey. Uncle Bruce pulled the bird out of the box by its neck. Its wings beat furiously against his chest and face, but he did not let go. His hands held the bird’s neck like a vise, so tightly its caws sounded like kitten screams. Using his other hand, he squeezed the air out of the bird’s neck, like he was wringing water out of a rag. He squeezed, twisted, until the bird flapped no more, until its clawed feet no longer dug into skin, until its black eyes grew dim. They repeated this process until they had three blackbirds. Then came the plucking, the chopping, and the marriage between what was caught, what was stolen, and what was borrowed.
Momma had covered her ears as each bird cawed, flapped, and clawed inside her brother’s clenched fists. Still she heard those caws, those flapping wings over her rumbling belly as she stared into the pot, inhaling the smell of rice, onion, salt, and pepper intermingling with bird skin, muscle, and bones. It pained her to watch those birds die, to see them strutting, enjoying their last meal and then boiling in a pot of water. So young, their slaughter confused her. Understanding some things have to die so others can live is always a difficult concept for a child to embrace. Momma struggled with this, even as she sucked meat off of the birds’ bones, even as she licked her plate clean. Hunger had led those birds to their demise. In the midst of her fullness, she might have wondered where it would lead her.
The Way It Is Done The Way It Is Done
By the time Momma was fifteen, she was the last Boone child home. Her only reprieve from labor she alone had to complete and her daddy’s watchful eye were visits with her momma. She’d beg, after finishing homework and chores, to escape Deep Creek’s suffocating forest and dusty road so she could find freedom in Portsmouth, with its rows of homes lined like vertebrae and its fast-moving cars cruising the arteries and veins of the growing city. Most days, the answer was “no,” but there were days Big Boone’s “yes” came with strict instructions that she go to her mother’s and stay there until he either picked her up or her momma took her back to Deep Creek.
She usually abided by her daddy’s rules, but like most fifteen-year-olds, she wore his authority like a sweater she could slip out of. If her momma had been drinking, she could slide out of the house and back in unnoticed. That’s how she met Pop, slid right into him before she could stop herself.
She first saw Pop when she was fourteen. Her daddy had temporarily closed shop in Deep Creek in order to housesit for his sister, Lina. Aunt Lina had a beautiful home, everything so immaculate and shiny, Momma spent the first day admiring the furniture, the trinkets, the pictures on the walls, taking a mental note of things she hoped to one day possess in her own home. She went outside for a walk and was met by a honking horn. Behind that horn sat Pop, his “honk” the universal sign that he liked what he saw and wanted to get closer. She was only a young girl then and her daddy was near, so close wasn’t happening that day, but a year later, when she was able to slide out of her momma’s house back to that neighborhood, where her sister now resided, she answered Pop’s call.
Pop, at nineteen, fascinated Momma. He’d just finished high school and had enlisted in the military. At 6’5” with a medium build, most women would consider him a tall drink of water. Since Momma wasn’t a woman, she considered him an ocean. To her, his words were like hot caramel sliding down a sundae, and when he danced, she followed every jerk, every twist of his body like a stenographer, transcribing his movements into something she could later read. He was also a singer, and on weekends he’d take her, her sister, and her sister’s husband to a club in Norfolk to watch him sing. On those nights, she felt grown, sitting in that club, rocking from side-to-side, transfixed on this man who was quickly becoming her everything. Whenever he spoke to her or around her, she straightened her back, pushed out her breasts and leaned into him. Something was happening to Momma then, something she would unwittingly teach me years later. She was learning to fit her existence around a man’s, and being a quick study, she no longer fought to fit into his space; she became his space.
Soon, every motive centered on getting her daddy to let her go to her momma’s so she could sneak to her sister’s and to Pop. He had an actual girlfriend, one his age, but that didn’t stop him from giving her attention, from telling
