Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Read Online Free PDF Page B

masterpiece, with columns on the front porch and a veranda above it. Coral vines crept gently up its sides, and although it was only four bedrooms inside, at the time I thought of it as a mansion: it could have contained at least three town houses the size of the one I lived in back in Camden. The driver removed my bags from the trunk and walked me up the stairs to the front door. Instinctively, I held his hand as he rang the bell, and squeezed it tighter as the door opened to reveal my grandmother behind it, squinting at me as if her eyes were playing tricks on her.
    But for the expression on her face, the way her eyes went from startled to angry as she said Unbelievable, she looked remarkably like my mother. They had the same delicate upturned nose and wide brown eyes, and the same fine blond hair, though my mother generally wore hers loose, and my grandmother’s was held back in an immaculate twist, and threaded with fine streaks of gray. She stepped out of the doorway and gestured toward the driver with one hand, motioning for him to take my suitcase up the spiral staircase. She ushered me into the house, shutting the door behind me. She gave me a perfunctory kiss on the top of the forehead and reached a hand out to tentatively touch one of my cornrows. She shook her head. “Did your mother do this to you?”
    “My hair?” I asked. I looked down at the polished hardwood of the floor beneath me. My mother could barely do my hair herself, and knew I’d never manage to keep it untangled on my own. It was one of those things white mothers of black children learn the hard way once and then tend to remember. Just before I’d left, she had gotten one of her undergraduates to braid my hair in tight pink-lotioned cornrows, so recent they still itched and pulled at my scalp.
    “Mommy can’t do my hair,” I said. “A girl from her school did it for her.”
    “I swear, even on a different continent, that woman—When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you here looking like a little hoodlum.”
    “I’m wearing pink,” I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s. I had dressed myself, and Aunt Claire had driven me to the airport: my parents had left for Rio the day before. My grandmother considered my argument, evaluated my hot-pink shorts as if prepared to object to them as well, but before she could, my cousin Allison came bounding down the stairs to hug me, blond pigtails flying behind her. When she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, she smelled strongly of sour-apple Jolly Ranchers and women’s perfume that she later confessed she’d stolen from her mother.
    “I think you look nice,” whispered Allison. She took me upstairs to the room we were sharing for the summer, and then spent the next half-hour helping me undo each braid, my hair spiraling out into tight, disheveled curls. Allison had been my parent’s ace in the hole, the only thing that kept me from trying to secretly squeeze myself into one of their suitcases so they’d have to take me to Brazil with them. Her parents were spending the summer on a Caribbean cruise, and my uncle had suggested to my mother that since she’d be at my grandmother’s all summer anyway, it might be nice for us to spend some time together. Allison was my playmate at awkward family gatherings, the person I made faces at across the table at Christmas dinner the one year we’d all gathered at her parents’ house in Orlando. (It was the last holiday my mother had agreed to spend with her own mother. I’d heard her on the phone last Christmas a year later, saying almost angrily, No, we’re not coming. Last year she said she was dying, and then she didn’t. )
    Allison made those first few weeks at my grandmother’s house bearable, almost pleasant. I’d never had a backyard before, but at my grandmother’s we had an acre of greenery. There was a lawn of impossibly