Firstborn Girls

PROLOGUE

Prelude to a Life

Some women are lost in the fire; some women are built from it. —Michelle K.

The first thing I want to tell you is that on September 27, 1967, I died.

I was two years and one day old.

Two days before my death, my mother, Vivan, and I flew from New York to Cleveland, Ohio, to visit James Forest and his wife, Julia. I was a little bald-headed toddler, and my mother was twenty-four years old with cover-girl good looks.

When Vivan was a child, her mother, Thelma, had been romantically involved in a relationship with James Forest that was as passionate as it was violent. It was a vicious cycle, one that Vivian would relive in her own marriage.

However, by 1967, James and Thelma's turbulent history was like water under the bridge. The former lovers were friendly now, telephoning each other on birthdays and holidays to share news about some person they'd both known who'd hit the number, got married, had a baby, gone to jail, or died. I suppose they stayed connected because they had history. History, if you don't know, is a hard thing to shake because it's as bonding as glue. They'd stayed connected because of their viscid history, but also because James had been like a father to Vivian, who had never had one.

When James learned that Vivan had married and had had a child, he sent for the two of us to come to Cleveland so that he could wrap his arms around us both. "Bring that baby up here so I can smell her head!"

That's how I ended up celebrating my second birthday in Cleveland, Ohio, with Thelma's old flame, his wife, and my mother. On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, everyone gathered around the white Formica kitchen table. I was seated in Vivan's lap, dressed in a pink frilly dress and colorful party hat. After they sang "Happy Birthday," Vivan held me at a safe distance from the flame dancing atop the white candle shaped in the form of the number 2.

"Blow, Bernice, blow!"

The flame buckled and died, and then I plunged my hands into the cake and shoveled the creamy sweetness into my moth. There was a lot of joy in that room, but there was sadness too. We should have been celebrating at home with my father, Robert, as a family. I suspect that our trip to Cleveland was more than just a visit to catch up with old friends and family, I suspect this was one of my mother's early prison breaks.

*

James and his wife lived just a few short hours away from Detroit, Michigan. Vivan hadn't been back to that city since she and Thelma had moved to Brooklyn back in the fifties.

She had planned to take a bus from Cleveland to detroit to visit her great-uncle Richard, great-aunt Lula Mae, and their children. When James hear her plans, he scoffed. "I can't let you take my grandbaby on no filthy goddamn bus." James's concern was less about the cleanliness of the bus and more about whether Vivan and I would have an easy egress from the city should tempers erupt.

*

Two months earlier, on July 23, 1967, Detroit exploded in one of the deadliest and most destructive race rebellions the country had ever seen. Over five days and nights forty-three people were killed, thirty-three of whom were Black. More than 7,200 people were arrested—most of them were Black too.

The last time Detroit tempers flared to that degree was in 1943, the year Vivan was born. During that unrest, nine whites and twenty-five Blacks were killed. Of those twenty-five, seventeen were murdered by the police.

America was and remains a powder keg, and often the match that lights the fuse is racism.

In 1967, Detroit was just one of nearly 160 uprisings that erupted across the nation that summer. The terror disrupted whole families, including my own.

On July 12, John W. Smith, my maternal first cousin, twice removed, was pulled over in his taxicab in Newark, New Jersey, by two white police officers. AFter some back-and-forth, the officers ripped John from the car, arrested him,a nd then beat him within an inch of his life.

Residents in the area saw the officers drag his limp body from the cruiser into the police station. The spectators assuemd he was dead, and the notion spread like fever. Soon, the police station was surrounded by a mass of angry people chanting, "Show us John Smith! Show us John Smith!"

Police officers dressed in riot gear rushed the crowd with billy clubs. In retaliation, rocks and bottles were pelted, and melee ensued. Over five nights, businesses were looted, fires were set, twenty-six people were killed, and seven hundred people were injured, including a twelve-year-old boy named Joe Bass Jr., whom police shot down in the street for stealing a twelve-pack of beer.

Life magazine put Bass's image on the cover of their July 28 issue.

In the photo, Joe lies crumpled on the blacktop, bleeding from his neck and leg wounds. One arm is folded beneath him, the other bent as if in an embrace. His fingers on both hands are touching. The scene is heartbreaking, hard to shake from my memory, but for some reason I cannot articulate, it's his white Converse sneakers—gray with filth—that dog me.

A week ahead of Joe Bass Jr., my cousin John Smith, called J. W., graced the cover of Time magazine. Unkempt Afro, cheeks covered in five-o'clock shadow, mustache and soul patch in need of a trim, he is looking away from the camera, eyes focused on something or someone just out of frame.

When he made the cover, phones jangled in houses and apartments of my family members all across the country.

Hey. y'all know J. W. is on the cover of Time magazine?
Mary Emma's boy is on the cover of Time magazine!
Rosie May's grandson is on Time magazine!

Thelma bought a copy from the newspaper stand outside the Manhattan office building where she worked as a cleaning woman. She made it a point to tell the white man behind the counter that the Black man on the cover was her cousin. In the building, she showed the magazine to her coworkers and the white hedge fund managers who were readying themselves to leave for the evening.

"That there is my cousin," she said, smiling proudly as the magazine passed from one set of hands to the next.

"Really, Thelma?"

"Yep."

In the morning, when she returned home from emptying wastebaskets, scrubbing toilets, and polishing the chrome panel insets of the elevators, she tossed the magazine on the dining room table where her four stepchildren were eating cereal before heading off to school.

"Look," she spat. "Time magazine done gone and put the devil on their cover."

She had her reasons for calling him that, reasons I'll get to soon.

*

The previous year, the city of Celeveland experienced its own bout of civil unrest when a Black customer walked into the Seventy-Niners Cafe on Hough Avenue, ordered a take-out meal, and, as he waited for his food, asked if he could have a glass of water. When the white waiter refused, hot words were exchanged, and then all hell broke loose.

By September 1967, residents in both Celeveland and Detroit were still simmering with rage, even as icy autumn air swept down from neighboring Canada.

*

So, with all of that in mind, James handed my mother the keys to his brand-new 1967 Cadillac. "Go 'head, take my car," he'd said, and then added with a wink and a chuckle, "Make sure you bring it back in one piece."

Famous last words.

On that chilly autumn evening, with his wife, Julia, in the passenger seat and me in the back, Vivan aimed that shiny black Cadillac toward Detroit, and we set off on a journey that would end in smoke and flames.

Infant car seats did not exist in 1967. In 1967, you held your children in your lap, and if they were big enough, you just sat them in the seat like any other grown passenger. And maybe you used the seat belts, but you probably didn't, because although they were provided, you weren't required by law to wear them.

On the dashboard under the glow of the radio was a metal ashtray hidden behind a door with a lip. A light tug to the lip and the silver ashtray popped out like a Murphy bed from a wall. Alongside that ashtray was a cigarette lighter. All one had to do was press the cylinder-shaped lighter into the opening and wait a few seconds. Once it was heated, the lighter would pop up. The smoker could then pluck the lighter from the opening, bring the underside of red-hot coils to the tip of the cigarette, and voila!

Most cars had ashtrays and lighters in the armrests too. The Cadillac was no exception. It was those ashtrays that got me haulted into the front seat, because I was opening and closing the lids, and the clacking sound was raking Vivian's nerves. Keeping her eyes on the road and hands on the steering wheel, Vivan said to Julia, "Please bring that child up here."

Julia reached back and pulled me into her lap, wehre I squirmed and squirmed until she finally set me down betwixt the two of them.

Had the car not had ashtrays, I would ahve been left in that back seat, and I surely would have died on impact.

It was late, the night sky was scattered with clouds, and Interstate 94 was dark. Vivian and Julia bounced their heads to aretha Franklin's "Respect" flowing out of the speakers. When Vivan approached West Road, she squinted at the sign, unsure if that was the right exit.

"Is this it?" she whispered, easing up on the gas.

"Yeah," Julia confirmed.

Headlights flashed in her sideview mirror as she engaged turn signal and then BAM... a car plowed right into the back of the Cadillac. The impact was so hard the rear end crumpled like paper and then promptly burst into flames.

Vivian has recounted this story as many times as I have asked to hear it. And I have asked many, many times. I ask because I want to remember—I need to remember—this horrible thing that happened to us. I've asked so many times I know the story backward and forward and inside and out.

The fire was hot. It was like being in an oven. It was like being in hell. Red and yellow flames charged through that ruined Cadillac, roaring like a pride of lions. There was so much thick black smoke. It burned our eyes and seared our throats.

My little ankles were caught in the slither of space that separated the driver and passenger seats. Vivan tugged to free me, but I was stuck as tight as a cork in a bottle.

Meanwhile, the flames had devoured her feet and were making a meal of her calves, licking at her thighs, melting her skin like the waxed candle on my birthday cake.

Unable to take another second of the pain, she turned me loose, jumped out of the burning vehicle, and streaked away, desperately trying to outrun the flesh-eating fire. But that made things worse because the wind became an accelerant. She might have run until her entire body was engulfed in flame, but a voice in her head shouted: Vivan, stop running! Vivian, drop and roll!

And Vivian did exactly that. She rolled and rolled on that black asphalt until the flames were dead.

I used to wonder who the voice belonged to. But now I believe that the voice my mother heard was not just one voice but a chorus of voices belonging to a legion of ancestors, whom I call angelcestors.

An angelcestor is a divine ancestor who serves as a guide and protector of the living. Mine stretch all the way back to Louisa Vicey Wilson, who is my four-times great-grandmother, but also our Eve, because to date she is the earliest documented woman of my maternal family line.

Flesh smoldering, Vivan limped back to the burning Cadillac, reached in, grabbed hold of me, summoned all of her strength, and yanked me free—tearing the skin around my ankles in the process.

The feat was nothing short of a miracle. Indeed, it was the phenomenon known as hysterical strength, which is a miracly of extreme physical power that occurs in some human beings who find themselves in a life-or-death situation. The part of your brain that is assoicated with fear releases stress hormones like cortisol, which gives you extra energy and adrenaline, sending more oxygen to your muscles, boosting your strength. Adrenaline also heightens your vision and hearing. As part of the fight-or-flight response, the body releases endorphins. If a person is injured while in fight-or-flight mode, those endorphins will mask the pain.

I still bear the scars from the stitches it took to seal the wounds. I received third-degree burns on my face, stomach, and right hand. Vivian received second-degree burns on her face and third-degree burns on her left thigh, both feed, and ankles. She had to learn how to walk again, and years in teh future, on those ruined feet, she would endeavor a foot race with her youngest children and win.

After I was pulled to safety, she tried to coas Julia from the car, but Julia was in shock and would not move. A good Samaritan came along and tugged her from the vehicle just seconds before the second explosion.

"That woman," Vivan says, each time she retells the story, always with a shake of her head. "That woman did not get a scratch on her. Not a burn or a cut, or nothing."

I find it hard to believe that Julia walked away from that inferno unblemished. But this has been Vivan's claim, and she has never wavered from it.

*

The transported Vivian and Julia by ambulance to Wyandotte Hospital, located in the city of the same name. I was whisked away ahead of them. The first police officers on the scene bundled me in a blanket and sped off to Seaway Hospital in Trenton, Michigan.

It is unclear if my heart stopped beating in the police cruiser or in the hospital, but at some point, I was clinically dead for a few seconds or minutes before I was resuscitated and placed on a ventilator.

In the hospital, the doctors, nurses, and the police officers who drove there all circled my bed, silently watching my tiny chest rise and fall with the forced air.

"I don't think she's going to make it," the doctore mumbled. "Where did you say they took the mother?"

The doctor phoned Wyandotte Hospital. "You have a Negro woman there who came in by ambulance who was involved in a car wreck, right? I need to speak to her."

Vivan was in the emergency room, propped up in the bed, staring at her feet, which looked like raw meat.

They'd given her morphine for the pain but couldn't do much about uthe shock, so when the nurse appeared at her bedside with the black rotary telephone, saying, "It's the doctor in the emergency room at Seaway Hospital calling about your little gir," Vivian just gave her a slow blink.

The nurse pressed the receiver to her ear. "Say hello," she urged.

Vivian's hello was thick and muddy.

The doctor told her that he was going to do all he could do to save her baby girl. He told her to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

The nurse placed the receiver in the cradle and patted Vivan's shoulder.

But we both survived, and that is a marvel because, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 1967 there were 50,724 motor vehicle fatalities—and we were not among them.