“Ya Honor, these kids been messin’ with my children for a long time now! I had to do somethin’.”
—MAE ALICE DAVIS
128 continued to deteriorate. People continued to move in. It wasn’t until our last few months there that we were the only ones left in that death trap. But, at this point, in came the Thompsons.
You know, when you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them. We’ve been stripped clean of social protocol. There’s an understanding that everyone is trying to survive and who is going to get in the way of that? The Thompsons were a perfect example.
They were a family of eight kids, mostly girls. Their parents or guardians were two women we called bullfrogs. Why? They wore glasses that made their eyes bulge out and they both had underbites. They had these huge bottom teeth that came over their top lip. They were also meaner than mean. They would always scream at the kids and beat the shit out of them. Once again, no one cared. My father would beat us and beat the hell out of my mom, so we were in the same company. But the kids, who were all around our age or older, were especially violent. The boys would start fires in the basement. The girls waited in a group for one of us to come out of school to terrorize us. We all went to different schools at the time, so we all arrived home alone.
If I saw them lurking in the yard, I simply would hide out until they went inside. The “Bullfrogs” would carry a belt around and herd them inside like animals. We would hear their screams from outside.
One day getting out of school, they saw me from yards away. The two boys whispered to each other and pointed. They got on their bikes and started pedaling fast toward me and I ran. They caught up real fast. I was seven and so terrified I couldn’t speak. I ran and screamed! I knew they planned to run over me.
As soon as they got überclose and it was obvious I wasn’t going to outrun them, I screamed. They had me cornered. I lost it. I grabbed the front wheel of one of their bikes and started screaming and going crazy! I lifted the bike off the ground and just pulled, trying everything in my power to shake this bastard off his bike!
“Stop! Stop!” He and his brother were screaming.
“Leave me the fuck alone or I’ll kill you,” I shouted like a madwoman.
They finally turned back around and left me alone, plotting for their next torturous shenanigans. And there would be many. My sister Anita smashed a brick on a car and made herself drool to get the five girls off her one day. She literally acted crazy. A technique my father taught her. Deloris was slapped a couple of times by them.
One day, my mom was done. Four Thompsons girls were blocking my sister Deloris’s path to get inside the apartment building. They finally hit her and she ran upstairs. My mom went into an alternate reality. In other words, she lost her mind. She came running down the stairs to the door of the building. I ran behind her. I absolutely loved to witness any kind of fight outside of our apartment. It was better than prime-time television.
My mom raised her fist. “Y’all need to stop messin’ with my children!
You understand me? Keep it up and I’ll beat yo’ ass myself!”
I was beyond impressed. My mom turned around after she made her point to come back upstairs. I looked at them as if to say, My mama told you!
Well, as my mom turned to walk up, the meanest of the mean girls, Lisa, said, “You bald-headed Black bitch.”
The best comparison I can make to what happened next is that boulder coming after Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If he didn’t run, it most definitely would’ve flattened his ass. Well, my mom was that boulder. She leapt down the one flight of stairs she was on and said, “What did you call me?” But it really wasn’t a question because she proceeded to slap Lisa so hard her entire body raised up off the ground and she fell flat on the dirty floor of our apartment building entryway. Her sisters were frozen. She
didn’t stop there. While Lisa was on the ground, my mom pointed her finger and finished her historic “cuss out.”
“Don’t you ever call me any names! I’ll slap the piss out of you again!
You understand me! And leave my children alone!”
She turned around and walked up the remaining stairs to our apartment cussing the whole time. “C’mon, Vahla!”
I was impressed and looked back at Lisa crying on the ground. “That’s right! My mom beat yo’ ass!” Then all hell broke loose.
The Bullfrogs were informed and decided to press charges. We were all terrified. We were sure my mom would go to jail. Words were exchanged. There was a lot of back-and-forth, cussing, fists raised. The strangest part of all of it was that the Bullfrog family would disappear for weeks, even months at a time and then suddenly appear in their car and stay for a while before disappearing again. And one of them always had a wad of cash in an apron pocket.
Every day my dad would pace back and forth and chain-smoke. “You done it now, Mae Alice. Oh man! The judge may send you to jail or give you a fine.”
My mom would only say, “I’m gon’ tell the man the truth.” She was still hot. Still mad.
The day came when my mom finally went to court. My dad went with her. It’s funny that there were moments within all the fighting, horrific abuse, and alcoholism that they had real moments as a united front, a team. But also in the presence of authority, my dad took the passive back seat and my mom dominated.
My dad prepared MaMama. “Mae Alice! What evah the judge say, you listen to. Don’t say nothin’. Don’t talk back. Don’t do nothin’. I been through this Mae Alice. I know,” he whispered nervously.
“Dan! I know how to talk!”
“But Mae Alice, you gotta say ‘yes ya honor, no ya honor.’ I’m tellin’ you.”
He should’ve kept talking to her. Because apparently when the judge called on them, my mom went off.
“Ya honor! These muthafucking kids keep messin’ with my children! Every time my children come home from school, they outside blocking they way in, hitting them, trying to beat them up! I got tired of it! And yeah, I slapped the shit outta her cuz she called me a bald-headed Black bitch! And
yeah, I call they so-call ‘parents’ bullfrogs cuz that’s what they are. They eggin’ they kids on.”
My dad kept tugging my mom’s arm, saying softly, “Mae Alice! You can’t say that.”
“Dan, stop tuggin’ on my arm! I’m trying to talk to the man! I’m tellin’ him the truth about these common bastards.”
The judge interrupted her. “But Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Davis! You cannot hit other people’s children. It’s illegal.”
“Ya honor, I’m tryin’ to tell you, I had enough! They somethin’ wrong with those people. I had to protect my children!”
My father kept trying to both shush her and show his exasperation. “Mae Alice. Sit down! Be quiet, Mae Alice!”
“Dan! Stop trying to shush me! I’m tryin’ to tell the man what the situashin’ is.”
As unlikely as it may seem, the judge understood. MaMama was and always has been a charmer, even when she’s out of control. He let her go. And for the next several weeks, epic jabs were traded between our families. From our third-floor porch, we would see them across the street in a parking lot. The two Bullfrogs would shout, “You do it again, you see what you get.”
“I ain’t gon’ get nothing. But I’ll slap the piss out of them again if they call me a bald-headed Black bitch,” my mom yelled back, laughing. “I knocked her little ass down.”
“Don’t you touch my kids,” the Bullfrogs responded.
They’d yell and yell, trading jabs. It built up resentment and made us more afraid to be cornered outside. However, something else was happening. As the adults were yelling, the kids, all of us, were subdued. It’s as if we were saying it was too much. They knew that they had crossed the line and we just wanted it to stop. But the vitriol of our “protectors” was overriding our renewed feelings of wanting to, dare I say, bond? Be friends? The catalyst of friendship would come days later. We were in the backyard playing softball. The Thompson kids suddenly came out and Lisa picked up the bat. She started circling the yard ominously. The others were behind her silently egging her on. My sister Deloris ran upstairs to get my parents. Only, my dad came downstairs. The Closer. The big dog. The one who cannot be named. Lord Voldemort. The HNIC. There was no stopping
him and there was no buildup. He came out like a category 5 storm.
He grabbed the baseball bat. “Stop this muthafucking shit right now! You want to mess with me, muthafuckers?” He began waving the bat at them, beating the side of the house, the ground, the air. I believe even the Bullfrogs came out.
“Come at me, you Bullfrog muthafuckers! Mess with my kids one more time and I’ll beat all you muthafuckers! You hear me?” Then he dropped the bat and went inside the house.
There was dead silence. No one moved. My father, when he got mad, was a man of his word. He would keep various “toys” by his bed throughout our childhood. A pitchfork, a machete, an ax. And he used every last one of them. He chased Porky with the pitchfork; Porky was one of his friends who was about five feet tall, dressed like Elvis, and had a car with no backs to the seats. It was just a bunch of tattered foam. He came to the house demanding money for fixing my dad’s car. My dad showed him the pitchfork instead. I’ve never seen a man run with so much terror. My dad chased him by foot with his pitchfork and Porky was in his car. Dad came back home, started boiling a pot of water, and sat by the window waiting for him to come back. As for the ax and the machete? Well, those events would come much later.
Dad’s confrontation with the Thompsons and the baseball bat was effective. After that, believe it or not, we became friends. Good friends. There were smiles, protectiveness, laughs. We were all just figuring out how to love and connect. We were just ensnared in the trap of abuse. The constantly being beaten down so much makes you begin to feel that you’re wrong. Not that you did wrong, but you were wrong. It makes you so angry at your abuser, the one that you’re too afraid to confront, so you confront the easiest target. Those you can. Until your heart gets tired. No one ever, up until that point, talked to us, asked us what our dreams were, asked us how we were feeling. It was on us to figure it out.
There is an emotional abandonment that comes with poverty and being Black. The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anything else. You just believe you’re the leftovers.
Many years later, my mom saw Lisa, the meanest of the mean ones, and Lisa apologized. She told my mom, “Mrs. Davis, I’m so sorry for how I acted back in the day, but I missed my mom. They had taken me from her. They took all of us and were committing welfare fraud. That’s why we had
two different homes. All those girls were not my sisters, and the boys weren’t my brothers. Plus, those women were sexually and physically abusing us. They even accused you of burning John’s arm. We all knew that was a lie. I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis.”
Then came James, Bobby, and Frank. They were my best friends next door. They had a mom and dad who called them in for dinner and lunch. Their father, Tommy, even built them a little partitioned play area behind the house. They were rough-and-tumble boys, but kind, funny, and I felt, well, that I had some power over them. They’d listen to me. I was nine or ten at the time but the wise Seer who would bring information from my older brother and sisters.
Tommy was a man with a temper. The boys’ mother had cerebral palsy and the father constantly abused her. I didn’t know it at first because I was too busy admiring the fact that they had food and dinnertime, and a nice apartment. Also, I was too busy sanitizing the character flaws of people in general. There was just a basic understanding that they (everyone else) were better. They were victims of unfortunate circumstances and needed love and healing. I, however, was just born bad.
Everyone knew that Tommy abused his wife. The worst part of it is, my sisters and I found him sneaking out of his apartment around 9 p.m. at night to fool around with his next-door neighbor, Rhonda. We would see it because we always pushed our curfew by a few minutes and started snooping around like Sherlock Holmes. We all wanted to be secret detectives and, voilà, we uncovered the best-kept secret.
Tommy and Rhonda would sit on the stairway leading to her apartment and hold hands and kiss. We would watch, hidden, and then at an opportune time would jump out and scream, “Cheater!”
It pissed him off so bad. He would chase after us.
Now, we also had the world’s best pet at that time, our dog, Coley. Coley was a collie. My father brought him for us from the racetrack. He was a trained dog, very smart, and he absolutely loved us.
He was so loyal that my mom took him to City Hall with her one day. She finished her business but went out the back door instead of the front door where she came in. She kept calling Coley and wondered where he was. He was gone. She was in a panic so we all combed the city. We found him hours later at the front door of City Hall where my mom went in. He was whimpering and still waiting for her to come out.
One day, I got the epic idea of seeing the ghost of a girl who had died at Cogswell Tower. Cogswell Tower was in Jenks Park, our favorite after Washington Street Park closed down. During the summer we were involved in recreational competitions. At night, Cogswell Tower was as ominous as they come. It looked like a tower of terror. I had heard a very blurry story of a girl who committed suicide there. She morphed into an unsettled spirit whose only purpose was to roam the tower minaciously.
I told James, Bobby, and Frank the story. Like always, I had their attention and they were as fascinated as me. That night, I told them that I would help them sneak out of their apartment and we would walk to the park. Well, as soon as it got dark, around 8:30 p.m. or so, I went to their first-floor apartment and knocked on their bedroom window. I slowly helped all of them climb out. We were pumped, but scared and tired. “We’re going to see a ghost! But soon as we see her, we should run,” I instructed my crew. We started off walking toward the park. James, the youngest, was absolutely exhausted and I could tell that all they wanted was to go back home. We were in over our heads.
“Bobby! James! Frank!” A booming voice shouted behind us.
Holy shit! It was their father. He was carrying a belt and running. He started whipping them. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get back home! What’re you doing with my kids?” His last shouted words were directed at me.
I said, “They wanted to come.”
“You can’t play with them anymore! Find some other friends.” They walked off, the boys wailing and crying. I felt like shit and was a little jealous that their father came running out with a belt to find them. No one came running looking for me.
The next day Tommy, livid, approached my father and told him what happened. He ranted. He screamed, “She’s a bad influence on my kids! I don’t want her around them!”
My father kept saying it was a mistake, but Tommy started directing his anger at my dad for not controlling me. He was inches away from my dad. It occurred to me that these were two men who had similar anger issues. Finally, my dad grabbed his neck, “You white muthafucker! Don’t ever get in my face talking ’bout my children being a bad influence. You messin’ around on your wife, and yo’ kids are just as bad!”
He was choking him. Then he just pushed him away and told him to never get in his face again. Tommy walked off gasping for air, terrified, and humiliated.
The following day, Coley became gravely ill. He stopped eating and drinking, developed foam around his mouth, and had discharge in his eyes. Our neighbors, the Weigners, lived nearby, and their father, a local animal shelter worker, came over to assess the situation. He determined that Coley had ingested rat poison. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do but put him to sleep. He was in excruciating pain, and dementia had set in.
The last time we saw him, we said our goodbyes. He was in the kitchen, wagging his tail, showing his affection for us. I clung to my mother in utter despair. The loss of a pet is always difficult, but it is especially painful when they fulfill a deep emotional need for loyalty and love.
My father suspected that Tommy was responsible for poisoning the dog. He claimed to have seen Tommy in the yard.
Central Falls was my home, but it felt like a battleground. It was a small town where you were constantly navigating a landscape fraught with emotional and social hazards while trying to establish your place. The turmoil at home only compounded the struggle. I didn’t understand boundaries and often acted out in damaging ways, seeking any form of recognition and control to feel alive. Amid this chaos, a darker part of me constantly whispered, “You’re not good enough,” while the resilient part fought back fiercely, insisting, “No!”
