Tell It Like Mama James

by Corey Habbas

I rap against the door with tight knuckles. "Mama James," I call through the double-bolted wood. Even something as mild as the trickle of water from the dripping faucet drowns my voice. I hope that she hears me. Mama James is nearly deaf.

She unlatches her door and lets me pass. Something has changed between us now. She meets me with her eyes gleaming with new hope that I see even though I don't believe in it. But behind the gleam, I see that she still has her doubts about me.

I think she sees herself in me. I’m all the hope that she lost and had to get back. I’m the young girl who grew up with Social Services instead of a mother. I’m the girl who lives alone by the liquor store that’s gets held up every two weeks, and I’m her neighbor.

People living here work hard and long for almost nothing. Little desperate mistakes trap them. We’re all trying to run fast under water, except for Mama James. Even though Mama James never got out of the neighborhood, she’s the only one in this place who seems free. She’s like a diving bird that plunges down so deep that you won’t think she’ll resurface, but she manages to catch something because she’s been so low.

Last night, her words flew right past me. She can't blame it on my age, even though I'm only sixteen. She could blame it on that I live alone in the apartment above her and nobody looks out for me. I'll blame it on something else though, because I'm being pulled out by an undertow in this slum that's almost ten blocks from the ocean.

Last night, I turned out the lights and leaned my elbows out the window into the salty night-fog, no screen, just my arms hanging over the chipped paint on the ledge, wondering how I was going to pay the rent. How would I get out of here? In the empty lot around the way street kids like I could've been, like I could still become, huddled near a dirt pile.

A string of shots broke through the silence. I heard metal ricochet off of metal: not a careless accident between cars and nothing romantic like knight-swords clashing in a fight to win over some lady. But I saw Dante's car, stalled at the intersection, engine humming and two of his friends hauling around the corner so they could make it out before the sirens came looking for them, guilt left behind in the skid marks of his tires.

As I watched Dante speed away, one of our conversations kept playing back in my mind over and over again.

That day, we had sat in his car; not going anywhere. I wasn't supposed to be there, but no one is here to tell me those things.

Dante had come to show me the nitrous-oxide he installed to boost his engine. He wore his colors. A group of girls in our neighborhood wore those colors, the subtle doomed spectrum that you could paint your face with on Halloween, even though I don't celebrate it.

"If a cop pulls you over, you've had it. It's illegal," I said, pointing to the nitro tank.

"Everything's illegal that's worth anything," he said in an 'I'm such a rebel' attitude that I usually rolled my eyes at. "Me being with you, now that's illegal." He threw me a demonic look, reaching over with his hand. Dante was twenty-three, and I knew his thrill would be gone once I reached a legal age, but that wasn’t the only reason I was holding out. I was holding out like a man overboard as he holds his head above the water, ears submerged with just his mouth taking air from the surface, because he still believes that something from the sky will come and throw him a rope.

"It's only illegal if we do something," I said as I folded my arms across my chest, closing my fists. "and we're not doing nothing, so hands off."

"Those girls are angry that I got your attention," said Dante.

"Who's got whose attention, Dante? It’s more like I got your attention," I said.

"They say I should be with one of them," he said as he got way up in my face.

Part of me agreed, but I wasn’t sure how to give up the dream of him yet. I used to love that Dante was willing to take risks for his mom, unrolling stolen fifties just so that he could buy her a new dress or take her out for breakfast on Sunday. I suppose he felt like he had to take the place of his father, who left when Dante was young. It made Dante angry, and I liked seeing that anger, for the sake of his mother, because some part of me always thought I would be a mother someday.

Dante cranked the side handle and shoved his foot to the floor reeling himself as far back from the wheel as he could get. He was getting nowhere and I could see that it made him mad. I was beyond fear, beyond anger. At once, I felt the power- me in control, and him- so out of it. It was as if I were riding a moment, my body shooting through the curl, shoring up, and given back.

"They talk about initiating you if you plan to spend time in their territory," he said as he hurled his arms like steel poles toward his chest.

"Is that a threat?" I asked, staring off past the shoes that had been tied and thrown over the telephone line to mark the end of his territory. I remember hearing about one girl who never made it past initiation. I pictured myself lying there, like that girl, pummeled with gang tattoos and bruises. It’d be the typical place to end up after switching from Foster Care to Independent Living.

"You don't own me," I said without knowing where it came from, "and neither do they."

Around Dante I got good at pretending but I didn't want to pretend anymore and ignore the path I was going down if I followed Dante. I just wanted him away from me, but it's not so much Dante that scares me. It’s the tide of men and what they want from me – what they want from us all.

It’s as if the water had risen to the window’s ledge. It feels like I'm floating out here alone with no life raft. I'm stressed about the waves of others that could come after Dante. I worry that their insides will look like his, and their outsides could lure me out of myself like a riptide. What if I can't get away?

Last night, after Dante's car split the fog in half and the cop-car floated down the street flashing its red and blue lights, no siren, I ran downstairs to Mama James. Now, she knows last night I couldn't pay attention, so she tells it to me again. Her words come at me like a wave that's swelling. I get scared before it even hits me.

"You have to tell it like Mama James," she says, rolling her sleeves above her elbows like she's going to reach into some deep dirt. "You have to tell it like it really happened to you, because a lot a times we don't think we have our own stories to tell."

"And we really do," I answer, a little dazed and not sure where we're going. She wants me to learn a story older than anyone she has ever known. I lean in, trying to feel it in the tightening of my throat; the lump that bunches up like a girl who has had the wind knocked out of her.

As I sit under a date palm, washing after gutting their fish, one of their daughters comes near and rests her new silk band on the clothesline above me. I see a kite keep diving like a hawk chasing a mouse, but I can't see the flyer who must be out of control. Too soon, I feel a heat around me that fools me into thinking that I'm in a crowded tent, but I can still see the blue sky, so I know I'm not. 'The slave took it. She's got it somewhere,' one of the men calls out. I feel a thousand hands grab me. They're searching me and it feels like they're tearing me apart, and then I hit the floor like I just fell from a cliff. "She doesn't have it," one man scowls. No one says sorry. I stay kneeling and try to sift the remnants of my clothes from the burning sand. I fled that day and thanked Allah for the kite that stole away her silk band. Then I ran to some people who didn't believe in owning me.

Mama James bends over her yarns, her sleeves still rolled up from telling the story. I try not to look at the scar pokes within the upsides of her elbows that we never seem to have talked about. That must be part of her story.

Something quiet about the night scares me, like life pausing for me; life waiting for my next move. Mama James must feel it too. She tells me to fly with it. I'll shake the weight of the water off my wings, I tell her. I'm running in the water though: The thickness of it won't let me get anywhere.

When the time comes I'll know, she says. We all know when to take our chance at freedom. It happens when we stop caring that it could kill us, and when we realize that if we don't take it, life could lose us anyway.

Corey Elizabeth Habbas, born in 1974, grew up in Southern California. She began her freelance writing career in her late twenties, after she graduated with her B.S. degree in Information Systems from the University of Redlands. In 2004 she completed her certificate from the Institute of Children’s Literature and won Second Prize in Children’s Writers’ 2004 Sports and Recreation contest. Her work has been published in Azizah Magazine, Newtopia Magazine, The Milli Gazette, Skipping Stones Magazine, Learning Through History Magazine and others. She currently lives in Minnesota with her husband and two children.