buffet at Denny’s, he kissed me, smiled, then took off into the aisle of the parking lot and did a series of cartwheels on the asphalt. When he somersaulted for me, I fell for him. Hard.
It didn’t take long for us to become exclusive. We never really said we were, either; we just fell into it. He was my first love—the first man I gave myself to emotionally, mentally, physically. I knew he considered me his woman because he was taking me around his friends all the time and we spent quite a bit of time at his house, where his mother always welcomed me with open arms. She liked that I was polite and respectful—that the moment I stepped through that front door, I’d make a beeline to wherever she was, give her a hug, and talk to her politely and with respect. To this day, she’ll say that’s what she always loved about me—that I never acted like any of those hot-tailed girls who’d go over there and ignore her, like her son was the one paying the rent and light bill. That’s not the way I was raised. If there’s grown folk in the room, I speak.
I wanted a forever love with Mark. If that man had said he was ready to have babies and get married, I would have had a pastor and an obstetrician lined up within the hour. Without hesitation, I would have marched right down the aisle with him. I wanted to be married because that’s the one thing I was sure of: that I would make a good wife and a hell of a mother. I wanted Mark to be my husband.
Mark saw things differently.
There was some sense to it: though he was a year older than me, he wasn’t ready for “I dos” and babies. Hell, we were babies ourselves. While I was determined to move forward, Mark was still trying to find his footing in the world. College wasn’t an option; Mark tried it for a semester or two, but he hated school and wasn’t up for juggling classes and work. Of course, without a formal college education, his employment options were limited, and even when he did get hold of a decent job working in the receiving and packaging department at Washington National Airport, he barely made enough to pay rent on his own apartment, keep food in his refrigerator, pay his bills, and have a little left over to enjoy his life. He was trapped. Damn if he was going to get a wife and baby caught up in that web while he was still trying to figure it all out.
In 1987, when I went off to my freshman year at North Carolina A&T, our relationship, in my mind, was solid. Though we would be separated, we were ready to conquer the world together. But by the time I finished up my spring semester, he was already pulling away from me. Chalk it up to inexperience or being drunk in love, but I was too blind to see that we were growing apart and that his heart wasn’t in it like it was in the beginning. In just one short academic year, we were through. He tried to let me down gently, but I was intent on fighting for our love. “You’re better than me,” he said one night while I lay in his arms. “You need to leave me alone.”
His words felt like a punch to my gut. I’d seen enough men in our neighborhood give up, especially after they felt like the world had turned its back on them. Hell, I’d seen it happen with my own family, with my own father, whose temper, fired up from returning home from Vietnam to a country that refused to treat him as an equal, had landed him in jail on one too many occasions. He would get mad, get into an argument with someone, and the next thing we knew, he would be locked up. That was an entrée to his dance with poverty; a black man with a record can’t count on a good job and a paycheck—not when he has to check a box on a job application that identifies him as a former convict. Where there is no job, there is no money, and where there is no money, there is trouble. My father was a good guy, but his demons haunted him, and he struggled to escape their wrath on his own.
In my mind,