I was ready.
I smiled—calm, steady. The kind of smile that should have warned them.
“You’re right, Leah,” I said. “Something is going to drop at midnight, but we’re all going to watch it together on this screen.”
I pointed to the television—the big one, the 75-inch screen my son Benjamin had insisted I didn’t need because I probably couldn’t even work the remote.
Leah’s smile faltered for just a second.
“What are you talking about?” Benjamin asked.
He looked tired. He always looked tired these days.
“You’ll see,” I said. “Everyone will see at midnight.”
But what brought me to that moment—what they’d done to get me there—would make that New Year’s Eve confrontation look like mercy.
Let me tell you how I got here.
I came to Chicago in 1979, 26 years old, with nothing in my pockets but a bus ticket stub and my mama’s pearls wrapped in newspaper.
I left Mississippi because there was nothing there for me but dirt roads and men who thought a Black woman’s only worth was what she could cook or clean or birth.
My mama walked me to the Greyhound station. She pressed those pearls into my hand, the only thing of value she’d ever owned, and she said:
“Baby, when you get where you’re going, you protect what’s yours. Don’t matter if it’s blood asking. You protect what’s yours.”
I didn’t understand then.
I do now.
Chicago was cold—colder than anything I’d known. The wind came off Lake Michigan like it had teeth.
