Excerpt
Matriarch: Oprah's Book Club
Chapter 1Badass Tenie BJune 1959I was three steps out the door by the time my mama realized I’d pulled my disappearing act again. She’d turned her head in the kitchen, and I was running out the house to my sister Selena’s.
“You need to let me comb your hair,” my mother called from the door. “And brush your teeth!”
“Okay, Mama,” I said, aiming to fall between pleasing and pleading as I kept my pace. I could not stop. A perfect summer day—like this one at age five—could last you forever if you started it early enough.
“Or else I’m not gonna let you go over there, Tenie,” she said, her voice farther from me now. She would not get louder than that, I knew. She had what people on the island called a “sweet demeaneh” and I could outrun the sound of her disapproval even if it followed me on the breeze off the water behind me.
In Galveston, the wind off the Gulf is a constant reminder that you are on an island. The city is a skinny strip of beach town two miles off the coast of Texas. Now the wind was at my back, and the gray pavement of the lane was already warmed by the morning Texas sun. I was barefoot, which was the only way to live in June. Wearing shoes just meant keeping track of them when you took them off at Galveston Beach or climbed a tree. And Selena’s house wasn’t more than a slim eighth of a block around the corner. Otherwise, my overprotective, fearful mother would never have let me go on my own.
When you’re little, you don’t know how small your world is. Mine was contained in my neighborhood, and the four points of my compass were set: There was the east and west daily back and forth between my house and Selena’s. Then Holy Rosary Catholic Church to the north, so close we could see into my siblings’ Catholic school directly from our front door. And just a few blocks south was the small strip of segregated beach that we were allowed onto. They took thirty miles of coastline and only allowed us access to three blocks’ worth of sand and water between 29th Street and 32nd Street. As kids on the tiny island of Galveston, our lives centered around that bit of beach—but I still loved being at Selena’s house best of all.
My oldest sister, Selena, was twenty-seven years old when I was born, and she and her husband, John, had eight kids by the time she was thirty. My nieces and nephews were closer in age to me than my siblings, and they were my very best friends.
I ran faster in the lane, racing with myself as I passed the little houses tucked tight next to each other. I spotted a yellow buttercup in the grass I had not seen yesterday, but by the time I had decided to stop to pick it, my legs had kept moving until I found myself at the steps to the little porch of Selena’s duplex without the flower. This happened all the time—my body moving and my brain catching up.
Now I could finally stand still, and my heart beat so fast from the run, like a tiny bird fluttering in my skinny chest. Not fluttering, more like hurling itself against the cage of my ribs, trying to escape. Sometimes that heart felt like it was leading me, making me run faster, outrunning boys with my long legs. And me, always following it, never going as fast as it wanted. A heart threatening to burst out and fly away from any tether—me, my family, Galveston.
I gave myself a second to calm down outside Selena’s house. It looked big, but they only lived in the downstairs of the duplex and had no yard to really speak of. Suddenly, I moved, trying to jump the first two steps of her porch like the big kids did. A high jump in my mind, a prize I was always chasing as the baby of the family. I fell just short, having to do the stutter-step compromise of taking two steps like a normal five-year-old. Next time, I told myself, marching through the open door to my sister’s house, a finish line into the living room.
Immediately the music of all that life in Selena’s house enveloped me, excited me, held me. The sounds of her three sons and five daughters: Deanne, Linda, Leslie, Elouise, and Elena, Tommie, and of course Ronnie and Johnny. Don’t try to keep track of all of them—even Selena couldn’t.
And there she was, my big sister, turning to see me as she exhaled the smoke of a cigarette. The way Selena Mae Rittenhouse smoked her Salem Menthols was something out of a movie, the two manicured fingers holding the cigarette, rolling the smoke around her tongue and then blowing it out as a glamorous verdict on any situation. You could not meet my sister and not think of the word “spitfire”—a spark taking the trim shape of a woman who swore by the power of dark red lipstick and wearing a girdle and sleeping in a bra to stay tight through having all those kids.
Selena, who her kids called M’dear, kept her house as streamlined, occasionally doling out a “get your stuff together because we don’t have time for that,” to keep everyone in line. Her husband was a trucker, often doing long drives as she did her seamstress work while looking after the kids. You can’t be so tender when you have eight stair-step kids—it would be hard to be soft and still keep ahold of things, so she was no-nonsense in a sisterly way. I was starting to realize that everyone in the neighborhood saw her as the big sister they wished they had, and as I put my arm around her waist as a greeting, I had the sense to be grateful that this beautiful, funny woman was mine.
Deanne—Denie—turned the radio up and grabbed Elouise to twirl a circle around me. They were dancing to Jackie Wilson, “Mr. Excitement,” singing “Lonely Teardrops.” Galveston was a radio town. I did a quick dip with them as the beat dropped on Jackie’s second “say you will,” but then I kept walking through the house.
I was looking, of course, for Johnny.
I homed in on him standing outside on the side staircase, the sunlight falling on his face. Johnny’s head was slightly bowed, always looking like he was listening to—or for—something only he could hear. My nephew Johnny was nine, four years older than me, and he was my very best friend. If you asked me what my earliest memory is of him, you might as well ask me about how I knew I needed air to breathe or water to drink. Johnny was just there. My mother put our inseparable closeness less delicately: “When Johnny farts, you gotta be there to catch it.”
Now we smiled at each other, best friends reunited, and I was at the door to him when his brother Ronnie jumped into the doorway to scare me. I jumped back just as fast.
“I got you!” Ronnie yelled. “I got you, Tenie. I saw you coming. Didn’t I, Johnny? And I said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get her.’ Right?”
I rolled my eyes in the way my mother said might freeze someday and moved to stand on the balls of my feet. At five I was already taller than seven-year-old Ronnie—but back then I was taller than everybody. I knew Ronnie could not stand that I was taller because he was such a competitive athlete about everything. I raised my chin to look down my nose at him.
“You didn’t get me,” I said.
“I did scare you, Tenie,” Ronnie said. “Your face!”
I pulled back a hand, ready for another of our knock-down, drag-out fights. Once a week Ronnie and I would have to have at least one—real fistfights, always squaring off. But Johnny cut in.
“It was funny, Tenie,” said Johnny, his soft voice conspiratorial, trying to get me to see the humor. And maybe it was funny, I thought, but only because Johnny said so. I unclenched my fist to push my hair behind my ear, then faked going left to do a twirl to the right around Ronnie, a half-turn pirouette to stand next to Johnny. So close to him that my left foot almost stepped on his right one.
Ronnie reached down to pick up a ball, pretending I hadn’t just fooled him. “We’re gonna play kickball in the lane.”
“I think we should go to the beach,” I said.
“Naw, kickball,” Ronnie said. But that’s how it was with me and Ronnie. I would say the sky was blue and he would say the sky is not blue. The sky would be anything but blue.
I shrugged a no and Ronnie got on his tiptoes. “Tenie, why do you have to try to be a boss?”
“I’m not trying to be a boss,” I said. “I am the boss.”
Johnny laughed. Ronnie didn’t. “We’ll decide on the way,” Johnny said, and that meant we would end up doing whatever he wanted to do. Because, really, Johnny was the boss, and we all knew it. Even at nine years old, he ran everything. Now he walked from the back steps into the house, stopping only to give a wiggle with the girls to the end of “Little Bitty Pretty One.” Without a word, our whole crew, almost all my nieces and nephews, walked in step with Johnny out the front door.
Outside we moved the singular way children do, crisscrossing and meandering. Some of us marched backwards if we had to, just to keep a conversation, falling and laughing. I saw the buttercup flower again and stopped now to pick it. I breathed in the flower’s scent and resisted the urge to smear the yellow on someone’s face or chin. Instead, I tucked it over Johnny’s ear, and we smiled at each other.
