It was a little divot of a backyard, with an apartment
building on one side, and a parking lot to the back, but it was mine, so I
planted herbs and lay out in the weak Michigan sun when the weather allowed.
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| Image courtesy of newleaf01 Wikimedia Commons |
They stared. My heart melted: no one had ever taught these
poor children to entertain themselves.
I beckoned. They tumbled to me.
They were four siblings: Omarion, Sweetie, J’neena, and
Buddy. The biggest was about eleven, the little one perhaps five. They were
dark of skin, dark of hair, in faded, baggy clothes and falling-apart sneakers,
and moved with all the energy of popping corn, their dissatisfaction rippling
out through slender limbs in perpetual motion.
“We stuck at Grandma’s,” said Sweetie.
“She got no toys, no video games,” said J’neena.
“No cable,” Omarion added.
They didn’t know what to do with themselves. They had never
seen a dictionary, and examined mine with care. They had, apparently, never
talked to a white woman, and examined my hair and my accent. “Honey,” they
mocked, when I asked J’neena to please not sit on my dictionary. “She say,
‘honey’.”
Lemonade, they were familiar with, and made short work of.
The garden attracted them. “What this?” Buddy asked about
the Miracle Gro.
“Plant food,” I said, “but don’t touch. It’s poison to
people.”
“It look like candy,” said J’neena.
“That’s why you shouldn’t touch it.”
I let them dig the soil with my trowel. Their grandmother
called them up for lunch, and sent them back out twenty minutes later with a
little potted tree, a gift for me. “Thank you,” she called out the window.
“She say ‘thank you’ for watching us,” Sweetie explained. “’cause
she ain’t got nothing to do in there. She don’t walk too good neither.”
Grandma lived in a third-story walk-up. I cared for the
little tree with extravagance.
The next day, I found my trowel halfway up the hill, next to
a hole deep enough to break a man’s ankle. The day after that, they rang my
doorbell, bored. I loaned Sweetie a jump rope, which I later found in a puddle
in the parking lot. They started ringing my doorbell and running away, peeking
in my window and later commenting on my bed sheets.
They never knew what they were talking about. “Your neighbor
gay,” Omarion said, without having any clue what he meant. When Buddy knocked
on my back door and reported, “Sweetie say you make sex with her,” I guided him
back to his grandmother’s.
“It’s not true,” I told him. “When your sister says things
like that, you can tell her you know it’s a lie.”
I worried, but only a little. They had never been inside my
house, had never done anything with me their grandmother couldn’t see from her
window. Even if they had could describe my bed sheets, they were not credible
witnesses. And anyway, I was leaving for study abroad.
Three days after I left, someone tore up my garden,
uprooting all the herbs, pulling plants from their pots, and leaving my trowel
and my watering can in a hole halfway up the hill. The girl taking care of my
house didn’t work up the courage to tell me for three weeks, by which time she
had killed my fish.
The vandals didn’t touch the Miracle Gro. Or the potted
tree.
When I got back, Omarion waved to me from his stoop, his face
hopeful. I nodded and left him alone.
I never saw Omarion or Buddy again, but I saw the girls,
once. They knocked at my back door the week before school started.
“Our daddy taking us away from our mommy,” Sweetie told me,
like a challenge.
Keeping my tone blank, I responded, “And how do you feel
about that?”
“Good,” she said, the word exploding from her mouth like a
cannonball.
“Nah-ah,” J’neena said, jutting her hip into her sister’s.
“I going back to Mommy’s after. We going to Disneyland.”
“Who care?” said Sweetie. “Who care anyway?”
