The Ephemera Collector

By any means necessary. Freedom, justice, equality. Then. As a student, Mama wasn’t sure how to square the reality of by any means. The perpetuation of violence, the taking of justice. Was by any means inevitable? What or should by any means mean in my mama’s life? She told me back then she hadn’t quite figured out what side of the issue she would be supporting. Employment? Decent housing? Mama had several male cousins who joined the Nation of Islam while incarcerated after years struggling with dope withdrawals, dope dealing, both/and.

From all accounts, the Nation provided her cousins a blueprint for discipline. The NOI was one way forward beyond Agent Orange and napalm. If there was another way, no one in the older generation said anything (out loud) against Black resistance. After the riots, Auntie Dahlia moved to Oakland and eventually joined the Black Panther Party as a community worker and artist assisting the Minister of Culture on pamphlets and posters. Clear-eyed. All power to the people. This was the BPP’s antidote to the blood of Jesus. Props to Auntie. Gotta respect.

Whenever Mama talked to Auntie Dahlia about her poster projects, her own studies in fashion design seemed irrelevant, insignificant. So much so that she started questioning her aspirations and professional goals in life. Wearable art was what she wanted to make, even before her FIDM matriculation, which was squarely affirmed and supported by a scholarship, student loans, and a Cal Grant. Mama wanted to create statement pieces. Sly Stone and Elton John. Like Bob Mackie and Cher. Playful decadence. Big. Impactful. Truthfully, a path forward into big bang bucks was how she described it. Drawing and sewing. Mama and her favorite cousin were both creatives, a bond they shared as children. They were closer to each other than to their own sisters. But as adults, it was becoming clearer in their conversations that Auntie Dahlia considered Mama’s career choice meaningless, trifling.

Standing in line to buy snap fasteners, eyelets, and pliers, Mama told me more than once she was unsure. I can relate, although we are very different people with significantly different interests. She wondered if she should have been making affordable clothes for the community or serving hot breakfasts to low-income kids like Auntie Dahlia did. Political activism seemed steps away from her doorstep: gigantic steps, big doors. Initially, Mama took offense to Auntie Dahlia’s air of condescendence. Maybe she could take a semester off from school as a trial run, experience realness, whatever that meant, and go visit Auntie Dahlia in Oakland, she thought. Right on, right on, but later on for that type of heroism, she decided. One day she was hungry; Fatburger and her friends were calling her name. I think that’s so funny. The way she said calling my name; a synonym for making a decision.

Mama preferred Fatburger, but she didn’t have a car. In her words, she had become a more conscious consumer. Fatburger was founded by a Black woman and that was Black power if there ever was. She was outvoted three to one as her girlfriends and best friend, Ezra, gleefully drove west to Beverly and Rampart instead of Western Avenue looking for more than a bite to eat. “Girl, the men at Tommy’s are fine,” one of her friends said with an edge of pity. To you. Dating wasn’t a priority. I can relate to that. Everyone she hung out with had an inkling, based on her singular focus on craft, that dating might never happen for her. She was set on succeeding, on creating meaning, perhaps more than the act of clothing construction deserved. Men, as far as she was concerned, were a distraction. That’s the way she put it.

When the person of her dreams showed up, man or woman, she would know it and that was all there was to it. There was no need to put on some flamboyant chase, in her mind. Besides, when she met her person, she didn’t want Tommy Burger chili oozing out onto her lap in the back seat of the car, or worse, while standing at the joint’s backwall trying to dab away drippings with sheer white rectangles pretending to be napkins. “Why don’t they get some real napkins up in here,” she complained. “Miss Harmoni, lighten up,” Ezra said. To most curbside-joint burger people, a messy burger was part of the fun. I wouldn’t know. I don’t eat meat.

The car caught her attention first. Then she noticed its driver. A classic Chevrolet Bel Air, maroon or ruby or burgundy or dark cherry red. It was my father. She couldn’t exactly pinpoint it, not just yet. Whatever the color, the driver was, well, she thought, maybe this could be her person. How could anyone think something like that by looking at someone from a street corner? She swears it happened. My father rolled by slow enough in traffic to catch her inspection of him in a sly up and down, hood to trunk, fender to bumper, steering wheel to back seat, grille to taillight kind of way. She caught herself, her chili leaking down her wrists.

“I told you. Harmoni, did you see that car full of . . .” “Hmmpf.” The way Mama tells the story, she responded to one of her friends with her signature grunt. Apparently, as my father parked the car in the lot, Harmoni, Ezra, and her girlfriends refused to take their collective gaze away from the Bel Air pulling forward between the diagonal white lines. The car doors opened in exhilarating slow motion. The passengers got out and shut the doors in near unison, strolled on long legs to the back of Original Tommy’s growing line, dressed in identical tracksuits.

Her friends had long been done; their burgers scarfed. She was slow, always. Everybody knew it and had settled in accordingly. Mama anticipated what was coming next, her friends were so predictable. What she didn’t anticipate was that she would fall in line like a lemming, take the longest way possible back to the car, in an instinctive walk-the-cat-walk sashay in front of the guys who didn’t know they were at Original Tommy’s for more than just burgers and fries.

I can see it in my mind’s eye. Mama poured it on, or at least wanted to, until she pulled it back, or at least tried to, billowing paisley culottes with faux velvet blue platform shoes, tight six-and-a-half-inch afro expertly picked and patted, plastic rainbow bangles bangling. She tripped (“Idiot,” she said, but I don’t think that kind of self-loathing is appropriate). Mama recalled my father reached out with his dark sienna hands, long muscular arms, and caught her midflight.

“You good?” he asked, eyes deep brown and sparkling. She knew it. At first sight, their future was bright.