Out of the three of us girls, I was the soft one. That made me the first to break down when I saw Mama on the ground with a cop’s knee on her back. Our neighbor was a few feet away, her face bruised a perfect purple.
Mama already had a record for assault dating back to 1998. She beat a woman in a warehouse parking lot so bad, she wore the woman’s blood on her rings. When she came home that night, she had us bury them in the backyard. “Dig a hole,” she said to my older sister. “Put them in there and throw the dirt back over it.” I was only seven years old and thought it was a game. We dug the hole next to the back porch using spoons from the kitchen.
Seven years later, we would have to dig ourselves out of another hole.
We had moved from the north side of Columbus to the Villanova Apartments in the suburbs. We were the only Black family in the complex, just days away from being evicted. A neighbor would choose that dirty day in June to test Mama’s patience. A mistake if ever there was one. Mama had just got off work at the Country Club, where she cleaned and managed the Ladies Locker Room and swallowed all that entitled white women shit for eight hour shifts. She pulled our army green Volkswagon into a parking space just seconds before our neighbor. That set it off. Our Mama calmly got out of the car and it was almost spiritual the way she was able to silence this woman with one look. My sisters and I were staring from the apartment window on the second floor as things heated up and I started to cry well before ten police cars even pulled up on the scene.
“Someone will try you,” Mama told me. We were in the living room and a cigarette dangled from her lips. I was six. “Someone might even try to take this—” She grabbed my private area, forcing tears to bud. “You better learn how to fight and soon. You hear me?” (It was as if she knew that some twenty-five years later my baby’s father would try and strangle me to death in front of our two month old daughter.) My sister arranged for me to fight my friend down the street, an East African girl I walked to school with. I remember the blood on my hands afterwards, the tears down my face. Running home. And then the girl’s mom coming to the house. I had broken her nose. They were immigrants, afraid to go to the hospital. “I ain’t say go looking for a fight. I told you to learn, dammit.” It was my first (and only) Mike Tyson moment and there was the hint of a corner smile on her face as we left to take my friend to the emergency room.
I had seen Mama fight before. I had seen her go toe to toe with our father and men twice her size. She was from Detroit and even if she didn’t win, she always got her hits in. Neighbors in the Villanova Apartments now hollered at Mama to let the woman go. While they weakly considered making a lame ass citizen’s arrest, the woman pleaded for mercy—a mercy that we are routinely denied. She was barely standing and would fall the minute Mama heard the whistle of a police siren in the breeze. We all froze when we heard it—the devil’s cat call, designed especially for us. The only people of color in the complex. Everyone was probably betting we wouldn’t be in Villanova for long. They would be right.
Ten police cars rushed toward our corner of the complex. Ten. When they climbed out their cars, they ordered my mother to put her hands up. The white woman was on the ground. Five officers rushed to Mama and pushed her against the woman’s SUV. When she was face down, another officer tightened the handcuffs, pushing her further onto the pavement until she was almost kissing it. We begged to jump in, but Mama stopped us. “Y’all get y’all asses back in the house!” My older sister, expelled from high school for beating up another girl, refused to listen to Mama. She rushed to help, hurling curses and slurs at the sea of white people who were circling her like an 1896 lynch mob. Only 5’1, my older sister had the voice of God in the Old Testament. She didn’t see badges. She didn’t see blue. She saw only men, white men, and our mother in pain. It took two police officers to restrain my sister. They finally threatened her with a Taser. My little sister and I just stood there, our faces wet.
In hindsight, I knew Mama could have reasoned with our neighbor. She could code switch with the best of them. Words actually saved her life when she was around 13 and narrowly escaped a gang rape in Detroit. We sat at the kitchen table and listened. At that moment, you could hear a rat piss on cotton. “I played it cool, said, hey, let’s make sure we do this right. Let’s go to the store, get something to drink, paper to roll some weed. We drove to the corner store. I was cool, told them to let me go inside. I had them laughing in the car. Calmed them down, took away all that tough shit. After all, I was one of them—a girl from the hood, smoking and drinking already. So, they let me go in with them. Soon as I saw an opening, I split behind the register and out the back door. Ran all the way home. They would have probably killed me that night.” But in the parking lot of Villanova, Mama didn’t try to reason. She didn’t try and use her words. Not after a long day working at the Country Club. Not after trying to stave off yet another eviction. Not when our father was doing 15 to 20 in a federal prison. Instead, she decided to fight. Though she had every reason to defend herself, I wished she had patience enough to remember, we were tired, so tired of moving.
But Mama was sick and tired too.
I listened as one of the officers asked the white woman what happened. My mother was never questioned on the scene. But my sister and I had seen the police in action before. This was nothing new. The school police had grabbed my sister in the lobby and pushed her face up against a concrete wall during a high school fight. I heard her face crack. Two seconds later, they yanked her from the wall and she spit blood from her mouth. I tried to run to her, but the cops told me to stand back. “That’s my sister! She’s bleeding!” One of them suddenly looked at me like I was human and he let me pass so I could follow her to the office. I held a piece of tissue up against the side of her face. We were amongst the poorest Black students in that suburban school. I remember Mama threatening to press charges against the police. I remember her hollering at the school principal on the phone. Then I remember her silence knowing we had no case.
Over the years, I have felt like a coward for not defending my sister, for not running to my mother’s rescue. As the soft one, I would only stand and watch, bear witness. Down the road, the family would label me as the only sane one—the one who would keep us all together when the court threatened to separate us. No matter how many times I fought this label, I have come to take it in stride, risking everything in a legal document to make sense of our life. So, when the sun started to go down in Villanova, and the police officers came to the side of the building where my sisters and I had stood to abide by Mama’s threat, they asked us what happened. I was the one my sisters looked to for the words to fight back. I told the cops exactly what happened as we watched from the window, what happened when we ran out the house and into the street. His blue eyes were focused on his pen and pad as he jotted down notes. A woman officer came over later, asking the same question and I told her the truth as well. I remember wondering if any of the other neighbors who were questioned by the police tried to paint my mother as this loose dog of a woman who beat another woman in the middle of the street?
I had never seen my mother cry before. Not even with so much death around us in our old neighborhood on the north side of Columbus. Not even when my father was sentenced to 15-20 years in prison. But from the back of that police car, her face was wet. She screamed through gritted teeth: “Didn’t I tell y’all, to GET y’all asses in the house!” We scurried towards the apartment door as she was driven away by the police. And a week later, days after Mama returned from the police station, we would find yet another eviction notice stuck to the door when we came home from school.
Starr Davis graduated with a Master's Degree in Fine Arts from The City College of New York. An alumnus of The University of Akron, with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Creative Writing. she tutors marginalized groups of young African American female writers for the nonprofit organization, Seeds of Fortune. She is currently a Writing for Justice Fellow at PEN America 2021-2022. And she teaches poetry classes via Brooklyn Poets.
Aside from literary publications, her performance piece titled, “The Talk” was performed by actress Phyllis Yvonne Stickney at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. She was Editorial Intern and Curator for Black Bride Magazine. She is now working as the current Creative Nonfiction Editor for TriQuarterly Magazine. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her precious baby girl.
