Arriving in Mississippi a very familiar face comes into view. It's my mother waiting for Alarah and me to get off the train. Like an African queen, she stands tall and dark, skin as smooth as butter with long glistening jet black hair. Her keen Egyptian features and slender sloping nose, usually beguile people. Blacks and whites often presume she is not black. Although we mirror one another, I was not destined to inherit her ebony skin color. I am light skinned, caramel colored, like my father. Alarah, with twinkling dark eyes, curly nut brown hair and an oval face, is a shade darker, mahogany, like her Jamaican father.
After my first year at Yale, my mother returned to the South. She hated the North, its winters, and the fast pace of life. It had been two years since we last saw one another.
Seeing my mother, I lengthened my strides. I ran toward her, closing the distance between us. Ma stands with outstretched arms reaching over her walker. Her face beams with happiness as she embraces both me and Alarah in a bear hug like grip.
"Torah, welcome home...you look good. This can't be my little grandbaby?" Ma asked, kissing Alarah's chubby cheeks.
"She's grown so big. The only picture I have of her is when she was a few weeks old."
"Sorry, Ma. I wanted to have some made, but my money was tight. And Morris. That prick..."
Alarah let out a shriek, gurgles, and proceeds to climb up my body as if I were Mt. Everest.
"Torah, she looks just like you when you were a baby."
My smile widens in joy as I gaze up at my bright eyed, fully alert, baby girl. Alarah twists herself around in my arms to get a better view of the unfamiliar stranger. Her eyes and attention are intensely focused on my mother's voice and face.
"So how was the ride?"
"Long and tiring, but Alarah seemed to enjoy it."
"How are you?" Ma asked.
"I'm Ok. What's wrong with me will heal in time. What about you? I didn't know you were still on a walker."
We slowly move away from the train heading toward the baggage claim area.
"Torah, I'm fine. The doctor said in a few more months, I should be able to walk with a cane. I'm just happy to be alive and kicking," Ma said with a smile. "Now, let's go get your things."
I arrive in Mississippi and travel home in an old car name Betsy. Betsy is a two door, gray, Ford Cougar with matching leather interior trimmed in silver. She has spoke rims, and tires as bald as a baboon's ass. Seven years ago, Betsy was a "clean ride." Although time has been kind to her, the newer models of automobiles are compact and sleek with an array of stylish body types. When measured against those models, Betsy is just another oversized, obsolete, ghetto chariot.
As old Betsy slowly moves down the narrow, pot-holed street on may-pop tires in the direction of my mother's house, I suddenly realized the true state of her financial situation.
Home. If you could call it that, is on the West side of town, in the ghetto, a small two bedroom "shotgun house", a boxcar on stilts. Fire a shotgun from the front door and the slug would travel unimpeded through the house to the back door as the saying goes. Shotgun houses are like cotton fields, row after row after row, approximately 5 to 6 feet apart. The yards are barren of grass, trees and any aesthetic beauty. They are identical in size, shape and color except for a splash of blue or yellow paint every tenth or so house to brighten up the neighborhood. These houses are common throughout the South and located in black neighborhoods. To me, shotgun houses are like slave quarters just slightly modernized with no central air or heat.
