Hey Homegirl. Lashell Rivers
Stop, Look, and Listen
And I listened, all right, to all the parties my family would have, especially since my mom could cook her ass off; and between her and my dad the family was big. The people that would come over, between all my uncles and their friends, would fill up that apartment living room, singing, drinking, and dancing. My father was the DJ and was so into technical stuff. The albums would play all that real good music from when they were growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. I watched them play spades, standing out on the balcony, smoking refa’, and eating whatever my mom had laid out beautifully, for she was a caterer for weddings sometimes and other events. I remember being a little girl and going along to help her cater with my dad and uncles. It was how she made extra money while going to school to become a professional at it. As for Pops, he mainly did construction work, and on those breaks in between jobs, he would have me to watch, along with keeping an eye on my brother and sister. We had our family moments where my dad would record us on the microphone, with my mom and us three children acting silly and singing to different songs; and back then my mom could sing her ass off! Everyone would always try to get her to sing at the house parties we’d have. My dad loved to record her and show her off as his woman, and they would just dance and groove, get drunk, and make their moves.
Of course a lot of the times all the children would be in the room playing while the adults were doing “grown-up” things as they would say it, and all my cousins and I would either be playing with our Barbie dolls or that husband-and-wifey roleplay we would see our parents doing. There was always that drunk uncle in the mix that someone would play, and I would draw pictures to sneak out there with all the adults to show off and be nosey at the same time. I remember drawing a naked woman when I was five and taking it to my mom while they were partying. “Aw, Shell, that’s so beautiful. Now let’s give her a fur coat.” And she scribbled over the tits and coochie to cover that part up while others laughed. Sometimes it was crab season at our dinner table, and we would eat bushels of crabs that sometimes lasted for days. And so many of the family members would come eat them while the kids ate the leftovers. Those were the fun times.
I always had an uncle sleeping on the couch—either he had nowhere to go, he and his lady were arguing, or they were just fucked up, period. These were my mom’s li’l brothers. There was the oldest one, Uncle Ron, who loved women and would spoil the hell out of me. He and mom had the same father, and Ron was a taxicab driver. I guess that’s how he picked up so many women, and I would ride with him sometimes in the front seat while he worked and drove all over DC. He would give me anything I wanted. He would rub my legs, and I didn’t know that was wrong. For some reason, as a little girl, I would become so jealous when he had a girlfriend; I guess that meant less time for me. But he made up for it when he bought me my first kitten, and I named her Cindy after the singer. The whole family was gathered around when he surprised me with her from behind his back and onto my lap, not to mention one of his girlfriends was there, lol.
Another uncle was Troy, who had this gorgeous dark-skinned girlfriend named Monique with the pretty hair, and they had my cousin Tiffany, who was dark-skinned like the both of them…just darker (shrug). I guess because her grandfather was African—hell, that’s how he looked to me. He died when I was very young, and I always remembered him sitting in a chair looking out of the window. He was old and looked very sick. Tiffany’s grandmother took care of him, and Tiffany and I were always together. She had soooooo much that I was like, wow! Any Barbie doll you could think of, she would have it—from the cars, the houses, dresses, oh my goodness; and she loved to do their hair. Whenever I was at her house, we played Barbie with the cousins on her mom’s side, and she did all the Barbies’ hair. Monique and her family lived a walking distance away in the nice houses, so I always loved being at her place because it was a nice house! That grandma played piano for the church, so we’d play on the piano, making noise. There was a large yard with their own playground for us kids. I mean, she had other aunts and uncles with their children; it was so much fun. I lived in a NW apartment. That was cool, but I would always love my cousin Tiffany’s house. And she was only older than me by two years, so we grew up together and went back and forth between each other’s crib while growing up. I mean, after all her father was one of my many uncles, and I believed she saw a lot while we were growing. So much that there were times when I would spend the night over her house, and of course with us being two little girls, we slept in the room and in the same bed. “Shell, go get some toilet paper,” she would tell me sometimes, and she would shove it into her underwear and hump me between my legs. Hell, sometimes she would have me do it to her, and I didn’t know what we were doing. She must have saw something, I mean she knew more than me. We would even have Barbie and Ken hump when we played with them. She was six when I was four, so I paid it no mind and simply looked at it as a fun thing to do.
However, eventually some drug-addicted skank came into my uncle Troy’s life. Maybe he sold some crack to her a couple times. I mean he did do jail time for something. I only saw pictures of him in there holding Tiffany, but later on, he was called out to be the woman’s baby father—a little boy. Now, my grandmother said that boy wasn’t his. Hell, everybody did, but drugs were a motherfucker back then, and between Monique and this woman, all hell broke loose. Ms. Betty, as I would call her, already had a drug habit; and then my uncle Troy got into that habit with her. And as the old saying goes, “Crack killed Apple Jack.” That woman destroyed everything. Hell, the drug crack destroyed so much of my family that it was unbelievable.
My uncle Troy began to deny Tiffany as his because of the crackhead in his life he fell in love with and left aunt Moe for.
My father’s brother Pat became so addicted that he began buying drugs from his little brother Walter, and he was on PCP so hard that when his own brother Patrick kept coming up with excuses on not paying him the money, the hustler he was working for told him to handle it. And he killed his own big brother while high—shot him to death.
I had another uncle that I never met. I heard he was killed in some gang/hustler incident. And his little brother, my uncle Lenny, found out who the man was that killed him years later one night, while listening to an addict speak of it to another. He knew and found that man and beat him to death. He shot him and dragged his body onto the train tracks to be ran over. I think my uncle Len only did three years in jail for that. I mean, hell, he did the police a favor.
And these three men were my father’s little brothers. His sister, Annie, was the only girl, and she was so strung out on drugs that it was unbelievable. She was so beautiful and had one boy—my cousin Kareem, who was like another big brother to me. But boy, she could not stand me for some reason. I was the second grandchild and a girl. Hell, I don’t think she could stand my mother. I remember her with another little girl. I was five years old. She had to have been four because I remember her being younger than I was. I guess Dad didn’t know she was getting high yet, and I did not want to be with her. But she had us one day and sat us under a bridge on the curb while buying drugs from a dude. I remember seeing them argue while she was giving him all the money and getting slapped in the face, then she came back, telling me, “I can’t wait to take you to your father” while grabbing the both of us and taking us to a bus home. She was sober when she had Kareem, but when she gave birth to my other two girl cousins, she was so heavy on that crack and heroin that she threw one in child the trash when she was a baby because of the crying and left the other in the hospital.
My grandma Joan used to love having her grandchildren over. We were there all the time and would go places, having fun. Just playing outside her apartment was fun. My cousin Kareem would always ride his bike to her, and little Pat (named after his father) was a crybaby. He used to be there with us. My uncle Walter was the only one living with grandma, and of course that was before the murder of little Pat’s father—his older brother.
I never really got to know my grandfather, maybe because my father was not his biological son. All the other children were, so only he knows the abuse taken from that. He knew that there was a chance my dad wasn’t his, but he didn’t care. He wanted to marry Grandma Joan and raise dad as his own. It just didn’t work out that way. But by the time I came into the world, he and Grandma Joan had already gone their separate ways so Mr. Bernard took his place. Yes, him I remember for, he treated my grandmother like a queen And they were