My brother continued pleading to attend the sports camp.
Two days prior to his fellow teammates and coach leaving for the summer sports camp, my brother made a final plea for my mother to allow him to go.
Irate and frustrated, my mother held her ground, offered as in the past month, a flat, “No,” adding, “If you think I’m going to let you go over to East Carolina University, run around and jump in a pool and drown, I’m not. You don’t know how to swim.”
“But I’m not going over there to swim or jump in the pool. I want to play baseball,” my brother pleaded.
My mother shook her head and again said, “No! I’ll beat you and kill you myself before I’ll let you die on me!”
This last statement from my mother is no stranger to the African American community.
Many African-American parents had stated and determined that white Americans and the authority they dominate will not kill their children. Before that can happen parents will, like the protagonist, Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, kill their children.
The fears of these African-American parents, as did those of my mother, border on the hold apocalyptic not unlike those held by Branch Davidian parents and those parents, who under the tutelage of Jim Jones, forced their children to drink, and then they drank the deadly punch given them.
Regarding my mother, the deadly punch consisted of the corporal punishment she asserted upon me and my brother. That he had grown taller than me and her, put my mother edge.
Unlike me, my brother was verbally resisting my mother’s need to keep us near and control our actions as dictated by her fears.
Twice he had left home, escaping through his bedroom window and made his way to a field some miles away where soldiers from Fort Bragg conducted military exercises.
(to be continued …)