Bismillahi Rahmani RAHIM

My earliest memory is riding on the back of my mother’s bicycle to the park nearby our house in Compton.

I remember being lifted and carefully placed into this baby seat that had enough attached to the back of her ten-speed.

My sister had her own little bicycle.

My father had the men’s version of my mother’s ten-speed.

And off we would go.

Like them but BLACK

I remember playing with a neighbor at the park with with bits of broken tinted blue glass.

In retrospect they were probably evidence from a car robbery.

But in his vivid storytelling and my rapt attention, they were actually DIAMONDS!

LOL!

My sister and I would often find ourselves at this park unattended though we were very young.

In those days it was still safe to do so.

She taught me how to make magnets from regular pieces of metal by using sand.

I am convinced that what we call magnet school is supposed to be MAGNATE School.

Peep the definitions!

magnate

noun

mag·​nate ˈmag-ˌnāt  

-nət

Synonyms of magnate

: a person of rank, power, influence, or distinction often in a specified area

a railroad magnate

magnet

1 of 2

noun

mag·​net ˈmag-nət 

Synonyms of magnet

1

a

: lodestone

b

: a body having the property of attracting iron and producing a magnetic field external to itself

specifically : a mass of iron, steel, or alloy that has this property artificially imparted

2

: something that attracts

a box-office magnet

Seeing as how all magnate schools have a specific area of study likely intended to produce magnates in that same field, I would wholly have to conclude that the public school system is a joke.

BACK TO CAMPTOWN 🥰

Other memories are of playing on the front porch.

From the day I was born, my mother never liked me.

My childhood is filled with examples of her schemes to relieve herself from my presence.

Here is what I have gathered concerning the event of my birth.

I was born on Saturday, the nineteenth day of the sixth month in the year one thousand nine hundred and seventy one.

My older sister’s birthday is the eighteenth day of the sixth month of the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty seven.

Thus it was on this same Saturday, my mother had planned a birthday party for her firstborn who had turned four years old the day before.

When I was about eight or nine years old, after we had moved near Adams Boulevard and Crenshaw Boulevard in Central Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time alone.

My older sister was a teenager and doing teenager stuff and my little brother was a baby and doing baby stuff.

Thus, the middle child had no one to play with.

We had photo albums.

I would spend hours studying these photographs from before I was born up to the present.

The photographs that I could not understand, a very enigmatic depiction of a birthday party that troubled me mostly because I could not figure out WHY?

At that young age it was beyond my understanding.

But there was definitely something unusual about the photographs from my sister’s fourth birthday party.

Neither one of us, my sister, my brother nor myself was given a birthday party after that one.

I nor my little brother ever had a birthday party.

We never celebrated our birthdays.

With the following exceptions:

When I turned twelve I had begged importunately for this new development in the Barbie franchise. It consisted of just her head and shoulders with the idea of being able to style her hair and make her up like a cosmetology student, I suppose.

I received the gift.

That morning of my birthday as I was having a cup of hot chocolate somehow the scalding hot beverage spilled on the mannequins hair and it proceeded to melt into an unmanageable mess effectively ely ending any hope I had of further enjoying the toy.

The other exception was there used to be a fried chicken place called GOLDEN BIRD and on your birthday children could get a leg from free.

So for my birthday, I got to hear mother beg the employees to give me my leg on my sister’s birthday because we were not coming back tomorrow on my birthday 😒🥳

They fry their food in cornstarch.

If you are about to starve for lack of nutritional food in Vegas, support a B.O.B.

GET SOME F.I.S.H. not shrimp!

It is delicious and will keep you alive until you can get to your own cooked food!

Sometimes I wonder how come nobody ever asked “How come you never have a birthday party?”

I guess they had too much sense to know that I could not plan my own birthday party.

And asking my parents would probably most likely just get me a whipping.

So thanks childhood friends for never asking.

It sure used to pain me Everytime someone usually my cousins who mother was in competition with their mother would have a birthday party and we would have to tag along while mother selected the perfect gift for somebody else’s child.

I never got any leg warmers when they were en vogue.

But my sister had some pink ones and my cousin got a pair for her birthday from “us.”

I did finally get a pair from Sister Gyasi Imhotep, my Leimert Park Ukhti who used to crochet while I was slanging Bean Soup and Pie and BOOKS. AL HAMDULILLAH!

I used to LOVE those bad boys and the beautiful thing is that I was styling them after everybody else had discarded theirs due to them being worn out also the ever-changing sartorial dictates.

BACK IN COMPTON, although we had a gigantic backyard, where my parents and their friends would play a sort of lawn tennis known as BADMINTON, a lemon tree and space enough to accommodate a large Great Dane, I was usually abandoned on the FRONTporch, probably with the hope that mother would come to retrieve me and find she had been forever relieved of her maternal responsibility towards me.

I would usually be left with a large piece of paper on top of newspaper and some finger paints.

I also had a milk crate with several brightly colored plastic “jars” of milk.

That tells you how old I am.

Later, when we moved to Leimert there was an old ice box on the back porch where the ice man used to leave the days block of ice for refrigeration and the milkman would leave milk. 😊🥰

I had some kind of toy beans game, pick-up sticks and other amusements that I can hardly remember now.

There was a family across the street with many children. Eight if I remember correctly. The Parkers.

Their dog and our dog would reproduce and the puppies would be sold.

Pure-bred Great Danes were prized at one time. I would Google them but I am Muslimah now and we don’t fancy dogs.

We had the girl and I only remember what they thought must have been her last litter because we moved after the last one had been sold.

I still feel sorrow having grown attached particularly to a solid black puppy of hers and being told that we could not keep even one.

She had had eight.

Street games Sally Walker

Miss Mary Mack