Betty Before X

Prologue

I WAS JUST A BABY WHEN GRANDMA MATILDA took me away from my mother. Not quite one year old, with just a few words forming on my tongue, a few steps wobbling into a walk. I don’t know this because I remember, I know this because my Aunt Fannie Mae told me so.

We lived in Pinehurst, Georgia–the kind of place you find when you’re looking for someplace else. Where the sun shined all day long, and at night, crickets sang song after song. The story goes: Grandma Matilda came for a visit. When she picked me up and held me in her arms, taking a good look at me, like grandmas do, she found a bruise on my neck. She asked my mother,”What happened to this child?” and my mother said she didn’t know. Grandma Matilda suspected that someone must have done something terribly wrong to me, and so she took me away.

After that day, my mother moved to Detroit and I stayed in Pinehurst with my Aunt Fannie Mae, who took care of me like I was all hers. Like I was a gift she had always wanted. She would tell me this story over and over, that my mother was just a baby herself when she had me. “Betty,” she’d say, “she was too young to know what to do with you.? And I think this was my Aunt Fannie Mae’s way of telling me that I should not go disliking my mother, not go blaming her for leaving me, because she didn’t know how to raise a baby on her own.

But Aunt Fannie Mae knew what to do with me. I don’t know how she got so good at loving. How she thought to tell me every day that I was her sweet brown sugar. How she knew just when to take my hand in the heart of her palm, holding me tight like she would never let me go. My Aunt Fannie Mae knew how to make a good day even better. And on bad days, she tried her best to make me feel better. Whenever I was afraid, she knew how to make me believe everything would be just fine. And any question I had she took her time to answer. But there was one day when she couldn’t comfort me, couldn’t answer my questions.

It was the first time my Aunt Fannie Mae looked frightened.
It was the first time I saw a lynching.

We were on our way home from buying groceries at the market. Aunt Fannie Mae was telling me about the cobbler she was going to make. How she was going to mix the brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter with the fruit we’d bought, and then she just stopped talking. She snatched me up real fast with one hand and held me close to her heart. The apples and peaches fell from her left hand and rolled out of the bag. I looked at Aunt Fannie Mae’s face and followed her eyes.

They were looking at one of the magnolia trees down the road. The tree had two bodies-a man’s and a woman’s dangling from the branches like too-heavy Christmas ornaments.

“Close your eyes, baby,” she said to me.

I don’t know how long we stood there, but it was long enough for me to see fear in my Aunt Fannie Mae’s eyes and feel that fear in my heart. My aunt was frozen and silent, and the only sound I could hear was her deep breathing. In, out. In, out.

But I couldn’t look away.
I loved that tree. Just the day before, my friends and I had climbed it. We’d stretched our hands out as far as the tips of our fingers could go, touching the wind, trying to reach heaven. And now Negro bodies were swaying from it, side to side, side to side.

“Close your eyes, Betty,” Aunt Fannie Mae said again. She put me down and we turned around. “We’ll walk the long way home.” She moved fast, pulling me along because my stride was shorter than hers and I could barely keep up. She squeezed my hand, never letting me go.

We left the fruit and the bodies behind. The whole way to our house, I wondered which would rot faster.
When we got home, we were quiet through supper, and when bedtime came, Aunt Fannie Mae kissed me and said, “Don’t you ever forget how much Aunt Fannie loves you, Betty.” But even with all of her love, I still had many questions.

I asked Aunt Fannie Mae, “Who killed that man and woman?”
She said she didn’t know.
I asked Aunt Fannie Mae, “Why do Negro people die that way?”
She said she didn’t know.

Aunt Fannie Mae must’ve known I had more questions that she couldn’t answer, because that’s when she told me, “Baby, some things we just have to take to the Lord. We have to pray for this world and ask God to help us. You know, God is always there to listen, baby. We can take all of our burdens and questions to Him. You hear me?”

So after each day settled into the black sky, my questions rose like the moon, hovering over me all night till I fell asleep. Most nights I asked the same questions over and over:
What did I do to make my momma leave me?
What can I do to make her love me?

—

I lived with my Aunt Fannie Mae until I was six. And when I turned seven, that’s when my Aunt Fannie Mae died.
In just one day, I learned how love can disappear in an instant, like how if you blink you can miss the setting sun. In one day, my Aunt Fannie Mae went to heaven and I moved to Detroit.