RELATIONSHIPS

Mama Said, “Never Let Them Know You Know They Are Skanky”

My job was to hit him in the head if he moved

“The wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever” — Luc de Clapiers

Safe and Sound

I grew up in the urban wilds of Chicago, Illinois. My mom had me at fifteen and lived with her mom on the West Side. How bad was it, I’m a grown woman with grandchildren, and I can tell you what my mom and grandfather told me about “Stranger Danger.” I still know my old address: 1505 West Adams Street; if a man or woman picks me up, who I don’t know, scream, kick and holler. I must have been five. No one could pick me up or touch me if my mother did not tell me it was ok.

My mom met my father when they were nineteen. I sat with them on the steps while they hung out with their friends. I was the only kid I ate as much BBQ, pop, and French fries as the adults were willing to give me. The number of adults watching over me in my life made me feel safe despite that real danger all around me. It was against this background that our mother needed to teach us about dreadful people.

When my parents had the wherewithal to purchase a house on the South Side of Chicago, it was heaven. Although they had six children, none of us had our own room. Extended family would stay with us as few in my mom’s family whose residences were larger than a small apartment.

When I was twelve, my mom started our education on “skanky” people. These were people of questionable morals and tendencies toward criminal behavior. As we came across wicked people, my mother’s first rule was: Don’t let them know you know they are terrible.” She said those who would harm another enjoy pretending they were not evil. Her rule was for her children to ‘be nice until it was time to not be nice.’

Someone Wicked This Way Comes

My first distressing experience with appalling behavior was with the boyfriend of my cousin, who was staying with us. I was asleep when my mom woke me up to help her. That time in the morning, our house was usually quiet. I heard someone crying in my mother’s bedroom. It was my cousin’s boyfriend. My cousin was hanging onto my mother, begging and pleading with her. She cried out, “Please don’t kill him.” She called my mom: Natal. “Natal, please don’t kill him,” she said.

This foolish man had crawled into my mother’s room hoping to steal money from her, or worse. He was unlucky. My mom recognized he was no good from the start. She was up waiting for him in her room with her gun in her lap. When he showed up, my mom hit him in the head with a glass pop bottle, knocked him out, and went to get her cousin. She woke me up to hold the pop bottle over his head as he laid on the floor. If he moved, I was supposed to hit him in the head with the Coke bottle again. I remember the weight of the heavy green glass bottle in my hands.

Mom set a trap for the man by ordering food, then sending one of us “upstairs to her room” to get the money out of her bedroom dresser. She said, “He licked his lips like he was hungry at the mention of money,” she knew what he was; she just needed to prove it.

He was one of the prettiest men I had ever seen, medium brown, incredible skin, his permed hair was straight like James Brown’s. The first time I saw him, he dressed in bright green: suit, shirt, shoes, and hat. I suspect his underwear was green. He talked fast and counted his money faster. He smelled like lilacs.

He took his time earning our trust. At first, he visited to see my cousin for a few hours, making himself useful. Then he was at our house day and night. Finally, after asking a thousand times, our cousin got permission from my mom for him to stay overnight. My Ma acted as if she trusted him, but she did not. That is when he made his move and got popped in the head with a coke bottle.

Hit Him In The Head

My job was to hold the Coke bottle and hit him in the head if he moved again. I hit him once when he coughed. I was sorry I hit him, but if I let him get up and Ma told me not to, that would have been my ass on the line, and I was not risking my butt for him.

We put that man out. (Now, I am forced to admit, due to full disclosure, that later in life, when I was a rebellious teenager, I ignored my mother’s teachings when I met my own extremely handsome, wicked man. But that is a story for another day.)

When he woke up, my mother put him and my cousin out. It was like a scene from a movie, me and Ma throwing stuff off our front porch onto the lawn, my cousin crying and begging, the man dizzy and sitting on the grass with his hands holding his head. When he saw us standing on the porch over his shoulder, I waved the Coke bottle at him. He turned away and slowly lowered his head back into his hands.

Scenes like this in my real life are why I love it when people, who have only known me as a corporate executive, assume that I had a middle-class upbringing. They believe I had an upbringing similar to their own. They don’t even know. Fooled you again.

The next day, my mother explained to all the smaller kids that we were not to allow my cousin or her wicked boyfriend in our house again because they were skanky. She told us it was like head lice. It was a disease that could spread to you if you were not careful. I kept that coke bottle under my bed for years until I left my mother’s house. The people's lesson stuck with me. I pay more attention to more than the physical appearance. I watch their lips and eyes to gain clues to what is on the inside.

Toni Crowe retired as the Vice President of Operations to pursue her dream of being a writer. Toni has written six books, two of which won the 2019 Reader’s Choice Gold Awards. Her bestselling business book, “Bullets and Bosses Don’t Have Friends: How Do You Manage A Man Sitting With His Dick in His Hand?” was one of the winners. Her first book, “Never a $7 Whore” was the other.

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