Should Have Known Better

“I couldn’t come back here,” I said. “I promised myself I’d go anywhere, but I couldn’t come back here. That’s the only thing I wanted. That was all I thought of when I left. That I couldn’t come back.”

My mother turned around to me.

“When I met Reginald, that was his promise,” I said. “He was going to take me away. Take me away from here.”

The day we met, Reginald said my dress reminded him of a flower bed. I was just nineteen, as skinny as a stick man and still stuffing my bra. I didn’t know how to take his compliment. Flowers were pretty. They were all over my dress and even springing up on the sleeves of my sweater. But did I want to look like a flower bed? A whole flower bed?

I was standing in front of my old dorm, an ancient sweat box with tiny bedrooms and prison-like windows.

&nbs

p; He was wearing a huge sand-colored hat with sweat permeating the brim. Standing in a bed of flowers near the steps.

“You like flowers?” I asked, hoping he’d say yes at least and maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about looking like a whole flower bed. I was on my way to class, and while Spelman is an all-girls school, I had a few guys from Morehouse in my classes and I didn’t want them snickering at my fashion choice when I walked in the door.

Reginald looked up from the flower bed and smiled. He was young. A little older than me. Had nice teeth and dark brown skin.

“I wouldn’t have told you if it was all that bad. Now would I?” he said. He plucked a purple flower from the soil and handed it to me.

I kept our first date a secret. I’d just pledged my sorority and I was learning fast that there were rules to being a sorority woman. More rules than there were to being a Spelman woman—and that was certainly enough. I had to watch whom I dated and where we went. Watch what I wore and what we said. I had to watch everything. And if I wasn’t watching, they were.

“How could someone as sweet as you end up pledging a sorority?” Reginald asked on our third date at a dinky hero shop in the West End. He’d gotten a huge sandwich with onions and ketchup gushing out of the sides. I thought it was gross, but he pointed to the sign out front: “Gutbusters!”

By then, I already knew how much Reginald hated the sorority, and anything to do with it. He found all of us pretentious and shady. Said we were actually the “Negro problem”—a bunch of black folks who thought they were white and measured success by money and names.

While I didn’t necessarily see these things or have a problem with my Spelman or sorority sisters, he was saying all of the right things to me at the right time. See, I wasn’t exactly Spelman or Alpha pledge material. Who someone was, what her family name meant when we lined up to become women of the school, meant that she could be shot right to the front. The daughter of a dignitary, a family of graduates, contributors, the list went on. They all had their own sections in the sun, clubs and traditions. The next set was the second generations and daughters of faculty or staff members; their parents had a little money or status. Maybe a feature in Ebony magazine. And last were the sisters there on scholarship. The ones who were first generation to the school. Who knew better than to say who their parents were or what they weren’t doing.

I fit somewhere between the second and third lists of sisters. I was never mysteriously shut out of activities or told “no” to my face like some other girls I knew. My father was a pastor and many people had heard of our church, so my matriculation into the circle wasn’t so difficult. I was kind. I was smart. But I knew not to ever tell anyone that my mother scrubbed floors. And then she started working for one of my Spelman sisters.

“They’re not so bad,” I told Reginald. “We do community service. We try to make the world better.”

“If you believe that nonsense, you’ve already sipped the punch,” he joked. “Do I need to save you from the cult of the Alpha sisters?”

“No,” I laughed. “It’s not a cult.”

But it was. Or maybe it just felt like one once they all figured out that I was dating Reginald. My big sisters just stopped talking to me. My line sisters, the women I pledged with, said I couldn’t date him. “He didn’t go to college,” someone said. “You can do better. He’s beneath you.”

This only made me love Reginald more. I snuck out. I lied. I had late-night kisses and tight hugs. We were rebels. We were in love. When I was about to graduate, he asked me to marry him. He said he wanted to take me home and build a life with me. That was everything I wanted. To leave Atlanta.

I knew I couldn’t have both him and my sisters. I chose him.

The judge suspended my driver’s license. I couldn’t drive a car on my own for a year, unless I took a driving course.

My mother had to drive me to Sasha’s house on Saturday to see the children.

I fought it. I called the lawyer. I called the courthouse. I cried and tried to make threats, but in the end it was clear that for a long while, the only way I could see my children was on Reginald’s terms. And after over a week of being away from two people I hadn’t gone so much as ten hours without in ten years, I had to break.

My mother prayed through the entire ride. Begged me not to say anything to Sasha. Not to break anything. Said she understood my anger, but that if I wanted the twins back, I had to prove I wasn’t losing my mind.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured her, but I wasn’t sure about that. Riding in the little car down the wide streets with freshly manicured lawns and white people staring at us from every front step, I felt myself unraveling and I held on to my gut to stop from vomiting.

On Lover’s Lane, the grass was so green, it looked like it had been spray-painted. Perfectly pruned flowers seemed to sneak up on towering home fronts that somehow were both intimidating and friendly with their matching mahogany French doors and latticed windows. The houses were so big, they looked like offices or community centers. I wondered what kinds of people lived in those houses. What they did. How they’d gotten so wealthy. How they saw my children. How they saw my husband. And how he, a man who claimed for so long to hate these people, saw them.

My mother pointed to a house tucked so far back behind bushes and rows of tulips you could hardly see it.

“This is it,” she said, stopping the car in the middle of the street.

“You sure?” I asked. I looked down at the address that had once been written on my hand.