Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be Read online

  He had no car, no job, no chain, and he went to a high school where all of that mattered. None of that was important to me. His skin and smile held my attention. And he was funny. He didn’t have a lot of book smarts, but he liked to make me happy. After exchanging numbers at the bowling alley, we talked daily. My mother refused to let me have an official boyfriend until I was sixteen, so I lied about going to the movies with Tanya. Well, Tanya was there, making out with Rocco’s cousin Dante, while Rocco and I made out, too. When school was dismissed for the year, Rocco enrolled in a summer camp a few blocks from where I lived. He’d walk down to my house after it let out, before my mother or sister got home, and we’d hang and kiss some more.

  I liked Rocco. I think by the time summer was in full bloom, we were even telling each other “I love you,” but my family’s history of teen pregnancy loomed. Even my sister had succumbed to it, but she had choices our matriarchs didn’t, so she followed my mother’s rule and brought no babies home.

  But honestly, more than the fear of continuing a family curse, I worried I’d like sex way too much. Here comes that fear of being fast again, but by this age, I wouldn’t be labeled fast. I’d be called a ho. Hoochie. Skank. Skeezer.

  At some point in July, about four months after Rocco and I first met, he finally turned up the heat and began to pressure me. He even offered the tired old sentiment that if I loved him like I said I did, I would go ahead and let it happen. I told Rocco that if that’s what he thought, then maybe we should stop seeing each other. He backpedaled, and we continued our relationship. Then the next month, It happened.

  I still remember the exact date: August 3, 1992. I’m horrible with dates, but this I remember, probably because I wrote a poem1 about it. The poem, recovered from an old hard drive somewhere, is as bad as one can imagine a teenager’s poem about her first time to be. I described his fingers as cinnamon sticks, for Pete’s sake, said he had “melted caramel” skin.

  At the time, my sister, Izzie, a recent college graduate, still lived at home but was asleep in her room. Rocco had come by after his summer camp, and we started making out on the couch. This time, when he slipped his hand into my panties, I didn’t stop him. I’d decided I was finally ready, and I wanted to reward him for staying with me after I’d made him wait.

  At first, he was just rubbing along my skin. I raised my hips to guide him. I’d been masturbating since I was eight or nine, so at fifteen, I knew where and how I liked to be touched. He started to move his fingers in and out but met the resistance of my hymen. I remember holding my breath as he pushed through and broke it. It didn’t hurt, like the books and general gossip had said it would. It felt like that frustrating moment when you get your arm stuck in a too-tight shirt, and as you struggle to correct yourself, one of the seams snaps loose. An internal seam had popped, and I thought, That’s it?

  We fooled around a bit more before he asked if we could go to my bedroom. I lightly called my sister’s name, but based on the snoring coming from her room, I knew she would be asleep for a while. My brother and I had bunk beds, the ubiquitous red metal set, with the bottom bed a full mattress and the top a twin. Because I was older, I got the bottom bunk. The space between my bed and the underside of my brother’s, already snug, grew smaller with Rocco on top of me. I wondered if this was what being in a coffin felt like.

  As Rocco positioned himself more carefully between my thighs, I thought about my mother, then a nurse, and how she’d once described feeling her water break when she was pregnant with me. She had been folding laundry when she heard a soft pop, then felt a trickle of fluid down her leg. She’d told me my father’s reaction, how he started to panic. Rocco, despite his trembling above me, managed to push himself inside, and there was the painful sting I’d been expecting. The condom made a weird slick sound as the air bubble Rocco had left cleared away. He started to move, and this was it. I was finally having sex. It wasn’t so bad.

  Even though I was a teenager when I lost my virginity, I still felt a small victory in waiting as long as I did. It was with someone I loved; it was a decision that wasn’t taken from me; and there was no humiliating scene where everyone in school found out and tried to ruin my reputation. Because my first time was with someone I naïvely thought I would marry, I’d beaten the curse of being fast. I was already a bit of an unfashionable nerd, with horrible hair and terrible teeth, so I had none of the vixen-like characteristics that came with being fast. I had won.

  I didn’t have an orgasm that first time. I faked it, using old Prince songs as my guide, but quietly, since my sister was still asleep in her bedroom. Rocco came, of course, because he was a teenage boy having sex for maybe the second time in his life. He fell on top of me, his elbows going out, and buried his face in the pillow next to my ear, gasping and shaking as if he were dying. I loved it. There was a rush through me—a ticklish thrill I wanted to chase forever. In that moment, I felt powerful.

  In that rush, I felt the real reason people hated “fast girls.” They hated that these girls and young women knew the power of their bodies—and, in some cases, yes, exploited it. They hated that adults could be weak enough to prey on girls learning how to control that power. With Rocco a mess between my thighs, I felt like I could ruin his whole life if I wanted. There was no shame in this moment. No fear. No worry. I felt like a god.

  The elixir of being fast was addictive.

  * * *

  By the time I was with my college boyfriend, DJ, I finally felt like all those romance novels I’d read were true. I would see him, and my stomach would flutter. We’d walk across campus toward each other, smiling the whole way. With my back to the door, I would know when he entered a room. When we had sex, he made me feel as weak as I made him feel. With DJ, I wanted to be a “good girl” to prove I was worthy of marriage, that I wasn’t fast. He didn’t want me to smoke or drink, so I didn’t. I was smack-dab in the middle of New Orleans, throat as dry as death, just to prove I took his wants seriously. We explored many sexual firsts with each other, but they were mostly his firsts. As much as I wanted to do everything that made him think I was The One for him, there was always something in the back of my mind, telling me there was more to my life than being someone’s Build-A-Wife project.

  When I first saw DJ at the freshman welcome mixer, a voice went off in my head: That’s the man you will marry. I was eighteen. That was still the secret expectation of college—get the education your parents couldn’t have, but really, you’re there to find your husband. I thought I had, but it became clear that in the eyes of our friends and classmates, I was not my own. I was simply “DJ’s girl.” Many of them literally called me Lil DJ. It began to chafe. I wanted more for myself, and DJ wanted more out of his life as well.

  I’d spent my high school and college years, from Rocco onward, as a serial monogamist, hoping the shield of exclusivity would protect me from being called fast. Protect me from temptation, from ruining lives. In adulthood, the names for a sexually adventurous woman were worse, but I still wanted to explore the power I felt when men shook in my arms.

  There was so much shame and secrecy about sex and its exploration, but I chose to lean in to the desires pulsing through me, and maybe that’s what saved me.

  Footnotes

  1 I found the poem:

  August 3, 1992

  Hands the color of melted caramel

  pour down my spine

  molding against the tender

  arch of my foot.

  Whispered words of love and persuasion

  part full soft confident

  lips.

  Fingers the length of cinnamon sticks

  gently tease the doubtful

  flesh of my thighs

  while shocked gasps

  are captured by a greedy

  mouth.

  A Woman Who Shouts

  I was mad at God for a long time.

  When I was a tween, I took romance novels to church and read them through sermons. When my mother m
ade me put away those books, I read Song of Solomon in the Bible. There’s no way that was about the love God had for His “bride,” the church, with opening lines like “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! / For your love is better than wine.” Who is asking God to kiss them on the mouth? And why? You’re not even supposed to be able to look at the full glory of God without going insane or blind or something, but we’re supposed to believe Song of Solomon is about God’s love for his congregants and not about a man and a woman falling in love and doing The Nasty. Sure.

  So I’d read Song of Solomon and learned erotic poetry when I should’ve been listening to the Word, which always seemed to be directed at the adults. Sunday school was the same old collection of stories I’d already learned through movies like The Ten Commandments and Noah’s Ark. The boys got cool action stories about Moses parting the Red Sea, David killing Goliath, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walking in fire, but girls were warned not to be bad, like Eve ruining everything, Delilah ruining Samson, or Jezebel…also ruining everything.

  As I got older, church never felt like it was for me. I hated the way my attire was monitored for appropriateness: “You need a slip on.” “You need to put on some stockings.” “Where’s your shawl? You need to cover your shoulders.” “Your skirt is too short.” “Those earrings are too big.” It’s not like I showed up to church in a bikini, but I was a teenager, trying to assert myself in small ways and rebel against doing things just because that’s the way it’s always been.

  Church was almost always the same: getting there early for Sunday school, suffering through one of the ushers who was trying not to fall asleep while teaching us about David and Goliath, then the actual service. The choir marches in. The pastor comes out and opens with a prayer, a reminder of what he hopes we’ll accomplish in church that day. There are some choir selections, an offering, more prayer, more singing, another offering, announcements and recognition of guests, another song, then the pastor preaches something that’s not for me before he opens the doors of the church, metaphorically welcoming anyone who is ready to give their lives over to God but especially to our church so we can have their tithes. After the sermon and call to worship, there’s another song and prayer to seal in the effects, and then you can leave, but only after you’ve hugged everyone and made small talk with a bunch of people who wouldn’t know how to spell your name if God came down and offered them the kingdom of heaven to get it right.

  One of the lessons of Sunday school was that if you follow all of God’s rules and all the instructions for prayers, you can have anything you want. God rewards the faithful. I’d head to the altar, bow my head, and pray according to the guidelines:

  Address God properly. (Heavenly Father…)

  Give thanks. (Thank You for waking me up this morning.)

  Acknowledge His bounty. (I know You didn’t have to. So many others did not see the sun today.)

  Thank Him again for doing what He knows you’re about to ask for. (Thank You for blessing me with the money to pay next month’s rent. I don’t know where it will come from, but You will provide.)

  Share God’s blessings. (I ask that You look out for my sister and bless her with the promotion she needs.)

  Seal the prayer. (In Your son Jesus’s name…)

  Close. (Amen.)

  They say you’re not supposed to ask for the same thing more than once, because it means you don’t trust that God will take care of it. Maybe that’s where I messed up. I repeated prayers, trying to let God know I was serious and to remind Him, in case He forgot about me. I kept asking for God to make my brother “normal,” to make my father stop hitting my mother, to not let Muh’Deah or Gran’mama die. He ignored me, and I was angry.

  I may have chafed against the structure of worship services and battled resentment for God, but I’ve always loved the history of my church. I’m AME—African Methodist Episcopal, a denomination officially founded in 1816 by a Black man named Richard Allen, who was tired of the segregation affecting churches. The unofficial roots go back even further, to 1787 with the Free African Society, which provided mutual aid services to freed Blacks in Philadelphia. I love being connected, however loosely, to people who saw a problem and created a solution that continues to thrive. My pride in the history of my denomination is part of what keeps me Christian. If my people can break away from the boundaries of racism, I can wear a T-shirt dress with tennis shoes and hoop earrings to church. That makes sense to me.

  I did not enjoy the social rituals of church. My family’s home church is small, and it was crucial to speak to and hug everyone after services were over. I’m a little “antisocial,” as my family and childhood friends like to point out. Small talk drives me up the wall. I’m also particular about smells, so having to hug everyone and get their scents on me—ranging from “too much perfume” to “too much cologne”—irritates me. As soon as I got to my messy teenage years, I’d try my best to meet societal expectations by waving to people as I bolted to the car to wait for the rest of my family.

  The best part of church was, of course, the singing. Our church choir wasn’t stellar and was too small to do big gospel numbers with rounds and intricate arrangements, but they did their best and I always paid attention to the selections. If you ask a Black person deep in Black church politics, they’ll tell you AME churches are quiet and “bougie,” which means we don’t do all the hooting and hollering people associate with Black churches, especially Black Baptist churches. We don’t speak in tongues. There won’t be anyone running circles around the pews. No one falls out. Well. People do catch the Holy Spirit, and there is some shouting, a little hot-stepping, maybe some other kind of carrying-on. Usually when people start shouting, an usher will immediately head over to them and start fanning them down. Can’t get too excited in the name of Jesus.

  There was one time I thought I was about to catch the Holy Ghost. The choir was performing with a special guest, someone who frequently stopped by to play the piano and lead the choir. V had a rich, smoky voice that should’ve been backing Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, or Mariah Carey, if not having her own career. When V sang, it made all the clothing criticism I’d get worth it. V always sang like she’d burst if she didn’t release whatever was inside her. People joke that when Anthony Hamilton sings, a pot of greens magically appears in your kitchen. When V sang, it was like nursing a glass of whiskey while a brokenhearted woman let go in a juke joint. In church, even her joy had edges.

  I don’t remember what song she sang, but I had my head down, eyes closed, really listening. A chill started at the back of my neck. Not the kind that makes you say “Someone just walked on my grave.” That’s a fleeting sensation that makes you shake your body to brush it off. No, this tingling sat at the top of my spine, waiting for me to notice it, and when I did, it traveled up until my scalp felt like it was shimmying around my mind. I thought I heard a deep voice, which sounded like it was smiling at me, say “I’m here,” and it scared me so much I opened my eyes and sat up in my seat. I was still a teenager when this happened, and the fear of becoming a woman who shouts made me leave the sanctuary and go outside.

  I hated church, didn’t I? I hated sermons about being a virtuous woman and what a prize one is to her husband. I hated being nice to people who thought my mama was stuck-up and therefore her children were, too. I hated the sermons that never held anything for me and yet I was supposed to praise the pastor. No one could tell me why it had to be that way or why I had to follow certain rules other than tradition.

  I couldn’t become a woman who shouts. God didn’t listen to me. As a child, I prayed all the time with all the passion I had, and still my grandmother was gone. She was my father’s mother and gave me Juicy Fruit chewing gum every time I saw her, and she always smiled at me like she’d been waiting for me her whole life, and she was gone. Even now, I want to call up memories of her, but she is fading, her body a wispy blur moving through the images of her living room, her kitchen, sitting in her bed
when cancer had weakened her. I never even knew she was sick until she was gone. Mama said I was too little to go to her funeral, but my younger cousin went, and I was mad at God for that, too. How could God be real, how could He be a being we should praise without question when He took Gran’mama away before I could seal her voice, her face, to her memories?

  I had so much anger in me toward God, and I couldn’t tell anyone, because if you said you were mad at God, it meant you were the devil—or worse, you had to talk to the pastor. I didn’t want parables about children honoring their parents or the rod or prodigal sons. I wanted my grandmother and my great-grandmother, who raised my mother and hated my father but loved us children with incredible food and soft white bedsheets and heavy pink soaps. I wanted my brother to go back to being “normal” so my mother could catch a break and have one less worry. I wanted us to have a house free from rats and the constant need of repair. I wanted to talk about the fire inside me that made me crave touch and sighs without someone warning me I was going to hell. God said no, no, no, so why was He here, a voice along the curve of my neck and nothing more?

  I stepped into the parking lot, and I was scared. I hoped God wasn’t trying to recruit me. I could not be a preacher. My blood runs too hot, and even though I’d just started having sex when this…spiritual contact happened, I knew I didn’t want to give it up in order to consecrate myself to God’s mission, or whatever it was He might have wanted me to do. I watched clouds move across the sky, hoping to calm down, and hoping for a clearer message about what God wanted from me, because if that was a call to preaching, I had to reject it. Would God be mad at me now for rejecting Him? Would He send more heartache my way?

  I sat on the church sidewalk, asking myself questions like this, and it didn’t really soothe me. I started to worry, until I realized maybe God didn’t want anything from me at all. Maybe He just wanted me to know He knew who I was. As soon as that thought appeared, I felt calmer. Maybe not at peace, like I had divine knowledge, but it seemed like that was the answer and it was enough: I think I needed to know God knew I existed. Church made me feel lonely, but that sprinkle of the Holy Ghost let me know God knew me.