Granny raised me on mustard greens, hot water cornbread, and a super-sized portion of Jesus. You could say that it all started with my teenage neighbor Bobby. When I was a kid, I let Bobby paint my fingernails red. I knew it was a sin by Pentecostal standards, but my nails looked so pretty and shiny in the sunlight.
A few days later, our street had our annual block party. Everyone had moved their cars off our Brooklyn street that morning; one end was blocked off with a Cutlass Supreme and the other with a Nissan Maxima.
We played in the street all day until late into the night—volleyball, tag, double Dutch, hide-and-seek. As I played across the street from my house, Bobby barreled into me on his bike. His front wheel and handlebars collided with my groin and stomach, sending me flying several feet away. I limped home to tell Granny what happened. She suddenly noticed my red fingernails for the first time.
Anything red was considered to be a special kind of sinful—carnality of the whorish variety. Instead of consoling me, Granny whipped me with an extension cord. I learned to keep quiet when people hurt me, or else risk punishment for revealing something far worse—something sinful.
And so I never told Granny about our teenage neighbor Michael who always climbed on top of me in my bed whenever he babysat me. For Granny, faith was her salvation. It had given her a new life when she moved from Florida to New York in the s to work as a live-in domestic for a white family in Jericho, Long Island. With no family or friends in her new city, fellow church members became her surrogate family. When my mother was born, Granny was twenty-three and unmarried—circumstances that were still taboo in The doctors said I had a tumor or some kind of growth.
