High Price

known it was going to be a bad night when my oldest sister, Jackie, left to go home. Then thirteen, Jackie was the child of my mother’s previous partner, born when my mother was eighteen, before my parents had met and gotten married. She lived with Grandmama, as we called our maternal grandmother, but during her frequent visits with us, she was sometimes able to prevent my parents from attacking each other.
    Not this time. Maybe she had sensed what was coming. It was worse than ever—even worse than some of the other times when the neighbors had called the police. In 1972—long before Farrah Fawcett’s The Burning Bed and O.J. and Nicole—the courts were reluctant to prosecute domestic violence cases, in part because they didn’t want to incarcerate the family’s primary wage earner, which might have left the wife and children destitute. As a result, domestic violence was a tolerated behavior and was not limited to black families. The police would eventually come and they would talk to my father. Sometimes they would tell him to go away for a bit to cool off, but they never arrested him. They saw it as private, something between a man and his woman. I felt relieved when they broke things up, but I didn’t understand why the fights never stopped.
    My sisters whispered to each other for a split second, then took the youngest ones by the hand and pulled us through the living room into the yard. Patricia, then nine years old, stayed behind. She often tried to play peacemaker like her big sister Jackie. The terrifying screams and crashes continued. Ten-year-old Beverly and seven-year-old Joyce tried to get me out as quickly as possible but I still saw my father hit my mother with a hammer. The glass coffee table that was usually in front of the couch was shattered. Shards of glass were everywhere. The ceramic lion that I once got grounded for accidentally dropping wielded its claws in empty menace by the front door.
    I froze but my sisters dragged me along. The poster-sized photos of Martin Luther King and JFK on the living room wall looked dead in their frames. As we ran out, I looked back to see my mother collapse, bleeding, at the door that opened from the living room into the yard. What I remember most is horror. The memories themselves are disjointed, as if reflected in the splintered glass.
    “My mama’s dead!” one of the girls screamed. “My mama’s dead!”
    “Carl done killed my mama,” another sister said. In my family, we never called our father Dad or Daddy, just used his first name, for reasons now lost to family history.
    “Carl done caught her in the head with a hammer!” Beverly, my third-oldest sister, shrieked.
    Someone, probably our next-door neighbor who’d made these types of calls before, dialed 911. An ambulance arrived and took my mother away to the hospital. At some point, her father, whom we called Pop, came to collect us and took us to our maternal grandmother’s house. But no one told me how my mother was or anything about what was going on. And it didn’t occur to me to ask: in our family, you didn’t really raise those kinds of questions. I learned that she was alive only when she turned up a few days later, with blackened eyes and a bandage on one arm.
    No crack cocaine was involved in my family life. That drug would not appear on the scene until the 1980s and I was born in 1966. There wasn’t any powder cocaine or heroin, either. Alcohol, however, was definitely part of the chaos. My father never drank during the week. But weekends were his time to let go, to make up for the social and cultural isolation of his work as a warehouse manager. At the time, he was one of two black employees at his company and the only one in management. His whiskey with Coke chasers were his reward—and Friday nights were his time to hang out on the corner with his friends.

    My brother Ray (right) and me on Easter Sunday 1972.
    All of my parents’ worst fights took place on weekends. Most were either Friday or Saturday night when he was drunk, or Sunday when he was hung over. As a result, unlike typical school-age children, my siblings and I dreaded weekends. My mom, Mary, would drink when people around her drank, but drinking wasn’t a specific pursuit for her the way it was for my father. She imbibed for social reasons while he drank to get intoxicated and experience the disinhibiting effects of alcohol.
    But although alcohol was involved, I now know it wasn’t the real root of our