Previously…
“Humph—he was as good as dead, I knew it—I knew it and I couldn’t do shit about it, but watch. I watched them hit him with that crowbar, they kept yellin’, ‘Where is it! Where’s the money!’ Leroy ain’t answer, just kept beggin’ me with his eyes to go inside, and I couldn’t..” A single attempted to run off her face but she wiped it away. “POW! POW! Them shots startled me, his brain halfway across the sidewalk scared me, but that fuckin’ man still haunts my dreams. He seen me standin’ there, scared shitless, and he kneels down next to whats left of Leroy’s face, opens his mouth and cuts his tongue out. He never took is god dam eyes of me. He walks over and sets it on the step in front of me, looks at me, and squeezes my cheeks. He says, ‘you open ya mouth, that will be you,’ and jerks my head towards Leroy.” She paused, “I still see his eyes today, feel his disgusting hands rub down my leg, said, ‘you a cute lil bitch, you get a lil’ older—i might make you mine,’ flips my dress up and walks away. I can never forget that moment, and dammit I’ve tried. No one did nothin’—it was more than me that saw—not momma, Mrs. Percy, nobody. They all told me forget about it. How you forget some shit like that! Just ain’t seem right—i felt alone, have ever since. Thought maybe if I wrote, I could give description to that shit, save a lil’ girl from it down the road. Turned out writing was my only friend, my lonely confidante.”
Her eyes welled up as she looked at me. It seemed the dam that’d hid her emotions my whole life was suddenly crumbling under the weight of her past. I understood the power of memory, but never seen it in effect like that. I knew as a journalist, I would, but never imagined that my first experience would be iron-casted Ms. Upshaw. She held herself and looked at me appearing comforted by her rolling tears and my quiet listening. For a few minutes, neither of us spoke.
PT 5
Six minutes passed and, in my head, I tight-roped two differing ideas. Do I break the silence? Or let her come to reconciliation with the memory in her own time? I looked at my watch, then choose the leader.
“What turned you on to words and creative expression was ugly—I’m sorry you had to go through that—it makes me curious, though, where did you go from there? I imagine that your initial musings were squared on that traumatic event, but what about after that? What did you choose to write about to uplift, when you yourself were still stuck in that place?”
“Ha, I dreamed,” she smirked, “It’s as simple as that. I dreamed of ways out of that life. I used to ask myself all the time—what would it take? You know what I’m sayin’? I found everything that happened, or was, in life, had a lesson hidden in it. I wrote those lessons down, and shit, turned out, people wanted to read them.”
“People? What people?”
She leaned forward and looked me dead in the eye. “Nina Rogers for one.”
“Nina Rogers!? The poet and social activist, Nina Rogers?”
The twinkle of her gold tooth matched that in her eyes as she cackled at my astonishment, “Yes boy—Nina Rogers.”
She was a staple in the Chicago literary and political scene. An activist for the underdog, her work garnered her worldwide respect and a platform to continually reach youth. I was one of them. I’d grown up reading Nina Rogers. If you asked me what sparked my interest in the creative arts, I’d tell you that her poem Good in the Ghetto changed the way I saw the world. I followed her work incessantly and struggled to find the unique voice she had. She worked with the Tribune sometimes. I longed to meet her. She mentored select and incredibly gifted young writers. I prayed one day, I’d meet those qualifications. At that moment, I just wanted Ms. Upshaw to explain her vague and intriguing statement. How did Nina Rogers’ eyes pass over her work? And even more enticing, what did she think about it?
“I was sixteen, down on my luck, and without a god damn dollar. My momma was locked up that year, so I had to pick up a job at this dry-cleaners in Inglewood. I used to ride the L after school and work till maybe 11pm, then ride back. 14 hour days ain’t nothin’ new.
“Anyway, there was one day I was running particularly late—you know them days—I’d gotten in an argument with my boyfriend, lost my math book and been soaked in the rain. I hopped the gate and as soon as I sat down, I buried my head in my shit. You know? I had to lose my stress in that writing…I think I wrote a poem.”
“Yea.” She sat back and her eyes bounced around the room, recounting the rhythm. It was as if those distant words still danced past her irises, jogged between her ears, and leaped back into the forefront of her mind once again. I could see her putting stanzas back in order.
“It was a poem,” She burst out, “I kinda remember how that shit went. It was somethn’ like…”
In the Ghetto good is graciously sparse
and bad sinks in between
hard times define lives
and good people seem to lose cling
Of morality and culturally substantive things
A’int nothin’ good in the ghetto
Or somethin’ like that.”
I snapped my fingers repeatedly. Short of a bongo playing in the background, Ms. Upshaw captured a moment. A speak-easy like aura shrouded her words, and dressed me in her feelings. It felt much like the seductive poignancy at poetry lounges of that time. I used to sit on my grandmother’s bed and listen to all the greats. Nina Rogers, Pat Mallory, Eric Jackson, they all passed through the House of Blues and read. In imagination, I was there. In reality, I sat in a flimsy woven chair, listening to the vague recollections of a lifetime drug addict, finding my intrigue tickled by her prose. Good in the Ghetto rang like that stanza—or that stanza like it—it didnt matter, the fact was Ms. Upshaw could write. Though her memory had been ground dull. That snippet of lines she’d just upchucked, was sharp. My seat rocked forward as, Ms. Upshaw, grabbed my attention by the neck.
“You like it?” She grinned.
“That was pretty dope.”
“Ha-ha, thank you. You know that’s the first time in decades I’ve even attempted to remember my shit. I forgot my writing sounded like that.”
“You ever read Good in the Ghetto? I…”
“Let me finish my fuckin’ story boy,” her smile broke wider. It was contagious, and interviewer or not, I understood that when it was her turn to speak, I didn’t interrupt. That would never change.
“So anyway, I get to my stop and I’m already like 15 minutes late. I scramble to get my shit together—I knew Mr. Yi’s chink ass was ‘bout to be trippin’. So, you know, I get there and he is, ha-ha. He standin’ there lookin’ at his watch, bitchin’ in broken English. Then all the sudden the door chimes. Ding-Dong. I look up and there is this woman standing there soaked with my notebook in her hand. I knew it was mines ‘cause I wrote IRENE UPSHAW across the front, like that would stop a nigga from stealin’ it, ha-ha. Mr. Yi goes ‘how can help you’ but I knew, she was there for me. She was like, ‘Does this young woman work for you,’ and Yi nodded. She asked if she could speak with me for a moment and gave him a $20. He agreed and me and her went to the break room in the back.”
My mouth was almost salivating with boyish giddy. She caught it out of the corner of her eye and continued to recount her own excitement. “We sat down and she calmly takes off her coat and hat, fluffs her hair a little bit. She looked like she could’ve been on the cover of Ebony Magazine and fought with the black panthers at the same time. I remember that,” She pointed her finger, “There was this aura of strength that surrounded her, like she wasn’t scared of nothin’, like the world couldn’t get to her. I admired that.”
“She looks at me with those strong eyes, and plops the journal down on the table between us. ‘Ain’t no good in the ghetto’ she says, and just looks. I didn’t know what to say, shit, she was so confident—I was intimidated. I thought she was ‘bout to scold me or somethin’, but instead she goes ‘You don’t even know what you have, do you?’ I didn’t. I sat there and shook my head, too nervous to say shit out loud. She was like, ‘you’re brilliant baby girl—I’ve read every word, every sentence—you have an extraordinary ability to write.’ What do you say to that?”
She glanced at me momentarily, but continued before I could offer an answer, continued. “I was pissed to be honest. How the hell was she just gonna read my shit without my permission. Who the hell did she think she was?”
“She’s Nina Rogers,” I vomited out. Ms. Upshaw looked up. Her eyes took me back to childhood, as they dared me to interrupt again. I let out a meek, “sorry,” and she continued.
“I ain’t know who she was, hell. All I knew was that my journal held my deepest thoughts; I’d never shared it with anyone. So to have some woman walk in and tell me she read it…that shit pissed me off.” She leaned back in her chair, “It was somethin’ about her though. It was comforting—like her eyes told me everything was gonna be alright. Humph, I guess believed her. She said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ and, of course, I shook my head no. She filled me in and told me she wanted to take me on as a protégé, talkin’ ‘bout, I had rare natural ability. I was still too scared to say a word, but that was all she needed to say. Nobody ever told me I was good at nothin’. I was on board…It was this look in her eyes…like I said, I just knew as long as she was around, I was ok.”
She stared off, lost in a moment I longed to feel. I studied her expression in a valiant attempt to describe her deepest emotion. But I knew the impossibility of that task. It was like trying to pen a father’s feelings after the birth of his first son, or a lover’s when they know they’ve met Mr. Right. It was as if Ms. Upshaw knew then, at 16, that a rain-soaked woman named Nina Rogers would change her life. How did she? And how did Ms. Upshaw still end up in the Douglas Court Projects? The longer we interviewed the more vague and perplexing the answer to that question became.
“Where did you go from there? What type of interaction did you and Ms. Rogers have in the following days? Months? Years? What impact would you say she had on you as an author?”
“Impact?” She smiled halfway. “Nina Rogers was like the mother I never had. I was with her everyday, starting that night. She offered me a job filling at her office, and I accepted. Walked out on Mr. Yi right then and there. Ha-ha, shiiid you know greener grass when you see it right?”
Her gold tooth and eyes shone as brightly as I’d ever seen. Her confidence grew. It peaked like my curiosity, and we both struggled to reign in our elations. My assumption coming in was that her song was sadly syndicated, that the commonality of her plight would be the driving motif. I was mistaken. Ms. Upshaw’s cinematic storyline was unique to her and her only. She rose as high as Nina Rogers, but I knew there had to be a fall.
“I would go up there and we would work. I only filed for an hour or two, the rest of the time we worked on my writing. Nina taught me shit that I woulda never figured out on my own, or in one of them dusty city schools. I valued her critique—valued it waaaay more than any teacher I ever had. She used to make me read all the classic literature. Shit, I would have that finished before my English homework, if I even did my English homework, ha-ha. It paid off though. After a few months of workin’ wit Nina, The Tribune deemed me a prodigy—ha-ha, imagine me, a prodigy—they gave me a bi-weekly column and everything, said I was a literary star in the making. I was seventeen with nothin’ but success in my future. God damn, that seems like yesterday.”
“What changed?”
“Ha-ha-ha,” She leaned back and shook her head. The beer was still on the floor, but mentally she was sipping one, collecting her thoughts and shaking her own disbeliefs about her rise and fall. I could see her eyes searching for the reason, toying with what to say to me.
“What changed,” She tilted her grin towards me, “My real momma came home Chris—My real momma came home.” She sighed, “Fairytales never last.”
© Chris Hampton 2012
Chris Hampton 