Xola & Elani

When I was a little girl, I knew many things. For starters, I knew my mama was a gold digger. I didn’t know what the term meant back then but, when I got older and heard the song by Kanye West, I knew immediately in my mind that that was the perfect word to describe Beverly. My mama had me when she was 16 years old and when you think about it, she was still a baby herself. But the actions that she committed in conceiving me made her a grown woman at an early age.

When Beverly was 14, she was introduced to my grandma Lena Mae’s boyfriend, who she had been dating for a couple of years. Still till this day, Beverly says she doesn’t even know how long Jermaine and Lena Mae had been dating. Just one day out the blue, Lena Mae introduced Jermaine and Beverly to each other and said he was moving in. After Jermaine had been staying there for a while, Beverly says that she noticed he started looking at her a certain way and would even give her compliments or say little racy and flirtatious things. Things like, “You look really pretty in that dress, Bev.” or he would wink his eye at her when Lena Mae wasn’t looking. At first, my mama said she tried not to pay it any attention and it made her a little uncomfortable at first. But then, she found herself liking the attention that Jermaine showed her and she eventually started flirting back with him. Before you know it, my mama and Jermaine began sleeping with each other, behind Lena Mae’s back.

My grandma loved to play bingo. Every Tuesday and Thursday, from 6pm-8pm. She’d leave out to go over to one of her girlfriend’s houses and play a couple of games. While she was away, Beverly and Jermaine would sneak and fool around. Mama says that was just enough time for them to make love, shower and clean up before grandma got home so she wouldn’t suspect anything. My mama was 15 when she found out she was pregnant with me and the following year, a week after she turned 16, she gave birth to me. Mama says that grandma questioned her for the longest on who was her baby daddy. She lied and told her that it was some boy she met after school and that she didn’t even know where he stayed or where he was from.

In reality, my dad was also my grandfather. Or step-grandfather, considering the fact that Lena Mae and Jermaine are now married. But back then, they were still dating. Mama says that grandma went along with the story but, low key, she knew she didn’t believe her.

“Mothers know their children. They know when they’re lying and they know when they’re telling the truth.”, mama said to me once.

Well, eventually, grandma did find out the truth. Even with Jermaine knowing he was my biological father, that still didn’t stop him and Beverly from sneaking around. One day, my grandma had left to go play bingo. But on this day, mama says that she thinks she may have forgotten her coin purse or her markers or something but she had been gone for about 30 minutes before she turned back around and came home. When she came back, she ended up walking in on my mama and Jermaine having sex. Mama said she didn’t even hear grandma open the door to her room or anything. She just heard grandma screaming and instantly felt her pulling on her hair and snatching her down to the floor. It wasn’t until mama turned around and was yelling at grandma to stop before she realized that it was her own daughter that she was about to beat up.

Grandma released mama and screamed, “GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY GODDAMN HOUSE NOW! THE BOTH OF YOU!”

Mama said I was 2 years old when this happened and that she was scared for her life. She didn’t know where to go or what to do, so she grabbed whatever she could and left. She couch surfed for a couple of weeks, bouncing around from one friend’s house to another until one day, she heard that Jermaine was back staying with Lena Mae. Mama decided to go and confront Lena Mae, in hopes of her letting her come back to stay since her and Jermaine seemed like they had rekindled their relationship. Instead, mama got the total opposite: an absolute wake up call. Lena Mae opened up the door for her and stood in the doorway, while talking to mama.

“She didn’t even look happy or relieved to see me. I asked her how she was doing and she said she was fine. It was quiet for a moment between us and then she asked me why was I at her house? As if I was some stranger… I told her that I just wanted to know if I could come back home. I told her how I had been staying with a couple of friends here and there and how it had been so uncomfortable to be around people that you barely know. I told her that I wanted to be back home and that I was sorry for what happened with Jermaine. But she wasn’t hearing it. She told me that you and I weren’t welcome in her home anymore. She said that when I stayed there, I was a child. The moment I decided to lay down and open my legs to her man was the day that I became a grown woman. The last thing she said to me was to get off of her fucking property. And she slammed the door in my face and locked it. That’s the last time I ever spoke to my mother.”

For the next 3 years, my mother and I lived in a homeless shelter. My mother was 18, a high school dropout and a single mother. It was hard for her for a while, too. She applied for jobs and would hold them down, in hopes of saving enough money to get us an apartment but, sometimes she would get fired because she didn’t have a babysitter or she’d be running late. By the time I had turned 5, it seemed like things were looking up. My mama had met my stepdad, Jeremiah, around this time. She said it happened very organically. What started out as two strangers having a conversation turned into them dating and before I knew it, we went from sleeping together in a room, on a hard plastic cot, with 10 other women and their children to moving into a new town home.

Finally! I had my own room, with my own clothes that were designer and new. I had my own toys that I didn’t have to share with anybody. And I had something that I had always wanted for myself and for my mom: a dad and a man to take care of her. When I was 7, mama and Jeremiah got married. It was a very small and intimate wedding. It was just me, mama, Jeremiah, Jeremiah’s parents; his dad was the pastor and his mom was a part of the audience; a couple of Jeremiah’s coworkers and college friends. A couple of weeks after they got married, we moved from the townhome we had been staying in into a mini-mansion: a 5 bedroom, 4 & ½ bathroom home. Every time we drove into the driveway, I would stare in amazement at this house because I really couldn’t believe that I stayed there. With my mom and stepdad.

Three years later, mama got pregnant with my twin sisters, Summyr and Wynter. We literally were living this storybook dream. Until the following year. My twin sisters had just turned 1 and I was going on 11 when my step dad had suddenly passed away. He was on his way to a business trip in Hawaii when his plane crashed just an hour after takeoff. I was sad for a multitude of reasons; one, the only dad that I ever knew had just died. Two, I felt for my mother because she had just lost her husband after being married for almost 5 years. Three, for my baby twin sisters because they had absolutely no idea what was happening. And four, what was going to happen to us?

Before Jeremiah and mama got married, my mama had worked odd jobs here and there but, after they had been dating for a while, Jeremiah had told her that she didn’t need to work. He owned his own limo service and his business had started off slow but, eventually it got better and before you know it, it became successful. Once they got married and made it official, mama stopped working all together. She was literally a stay at home mom. All she did was cook, clean, pick us up from school and occasionally, have brunch with her friends. When Jeremiah passed, one of the things I immediately worried about was were we going to have to go back to staying in a homeless shelter? At this point, I was old enough to know better and I definitely didn’t want my baby sisters to have to experience that life.

We were at the hospital after hearing the news that Jeremiah passed away and I expected to see my mother in tears. You know, distraught or showing some type of hurt emotion. She had just lost her husband. On our way there, we rode in the car in silence. No radio or nothing. Just the sound of the rain hitting the windows and windshield wipers going in a rhythm. When we arrived, we went straight to the emergency room area. Mama had left the twins with one of our neighbors and she wanted to leave me, too, but I asked to go because I wanted to see Jeremiah. I wanted to know if he was really gone. Mama had told me to go sit in the waiting room while she went to see Jeremiah. She had told me that I wasn’t going to see him because it would’ve been too traumatic for me to witness something like that at a young age. So, I sat and waited. As I sat in the waiting room, I remember watching my mama walk through the doors of the emergency room area and I didn’t even see her go into Jeremiah’s room. I could see her through the small glass windows, talking to a short, bald, old white man that had a black suit on. He was also holding a black suitcase and pulling out papers, having her sign them.

I remember thinking to myself, is she not going to go into the room to see him? Is she going to cry? Is she going to show any sign of emotion? The only sign of emotion I saw was her finishing signing the papers that the old white man was giving to her and then afterwards, she hugged him. Then, they both took a deep breath together. They said some words to each other and then, shortly, the old white man walked out from behind the emergency room doors. He saw me sitting in the lobby and walked over to me.

“You must be Xola. My, my. You are a very beautiful young lady.” , he stated in a Southern drawl, as he stood with one hand in his pocket and the other hand on his suitcase.

Then, he sat down in the empty seat next to me and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, baby doll. Jeremiah was a great man. He really cared about you girls and your mom.” I just looked at him and looked back to see if my mama was still standing outside of Jeremiah’s room. She wasn’t. So, she did go into his room and see him. Then, old white man stood up, took a lollipop out of his front jacket pocket and gave it to me. “Thank you.”, I whispered as I looked back to see if I saw my mama. She was about to walk out into the waiting area. When she walked out, I noticed she was smiling. Then, she looked at me and asked if I was ready to go. I remember being confused, thinking why was she smiling so hard but, I got up and stood next to her. She grabbed my hand with her left hand and shook the old white man’s hand with her right.

“Thanks Jerry, for everything,” she said and she kept smiling. Not one tear in her eye or nothing.

“No problem, honey. Anything you need, give me a holler, alright?” , Jerry said to my mama. She shook her head yes, looked at me and said, “Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”

Jeremiah’s funeral was the biggest funeral I had ever been to in my life. I mean, this man was well-known. Family, friends, business associates, even some of his workers at the limo service had come to pay their respects. It was after the funeral, when we were at the repast, that I overheard my mama talking to some of her girlfriends when she thought I wasn’t listening.

“I didn’t think he would pass away so suddenly the way he did. I mean, I thought he would’ve keeled over in one of those big ass buckets of chicken legs he loved to get from Big Bertha’s Chicken Shack,” Beverly joked and laughed. Her other friends joined in laughter, too. “But he’s gone now. Thank God I signed that prenup in the beginning because now, I get everything.”

“Everything, girl?!”, said one friend with this huge ass mole over her left eye. I swear I saw a hair sticking out of it.

Beverly nodded her head yes in agreement and said, “Everything, chile. He left me the limo service, the house that we stay in, which is also paid off, by the way,” she bragged. The friend with the mole exclaimed in excitement when she said this, while the other friend exclaimed, “Won’t he do it?!”

“Yes girl! I also got the town home that we were originally staying in when we started dating. That’s paid off, too, chile.”, Beverly stated.

I remember where I was standing at, as I listened to her go on and on and I immediately felt disgusted, almost sick to the stomach with my mother. Like, how could she just sit here and brag about these material things as if they were trophies? As if she had hit the lottery. I guess you could say she did because I also overheard her say that Jeremiah had left her $5 million, half was supposed to be for us and the twins and the other half was in a trust fund for the twins for when they turned 18 and decided if they wanted to go off to college or not. Jeremiah also had a couple of cars that he had purchased and paid off that was immediately switched into her name once he passed, due to the prenup she signed.

It was then that I realized that not only was my mama a gold digger but that I never wanted to be like her. I always loved her and had all the respect in the world for her. Until that day. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always love her. She’s my mom. But respect? It diminished on the day of my dad’s funeral.

I hail from the greatest city in the United States: ATL. I was born at Grady Memorial Hospital and we lived in Techwood and the Downtown Atlanta area. Lena Mae’s house is on Ted Turner Boulevard and the women’s shelter we stayed in was on Pine Street. It wasn’t until Beverly started dating Jeremiah that I began to see the nice side of Atlanta. Our town home was in Buckhead and the house that we currently stay at is in Sandy Springs. I am a 20 year-old, sophomore student at SCAD, or better known as Savannah College of Art and Design. I’m a Drama major, English minor. One day I’d like to be a screenwriter or maybe even an author. I don’t know, I’m still undecided. But one thing I do know is that SCAD was the perfect choice for me. Not only because of my love for the arts but also because I was in the heart of the city and had begun to experience things that I always wanted to do.

One of those things was testing out my sexuality. I started liking girls when I was in middle school. There was this one girl that I met when I tried out for the school chorus. Her name was Kelsi and to me at that time, I thought she was the sexiest girl I had ever seen. She had long, curly sandy brown hair that she always wore pressed out or in a high bun, hazel eyes that sometimes turned green in the sunlight and was skinny but had really big boobs. I believe she was a DD & we were only 13 at the time. Kelsi was a cheerleader and the class president for 7th grade and 8th grade. She was also in the closet.

So, it took me by surprise the first time she ever flirted with me. Before I knew it, we would always find ourselves meeting up behind school before chorus practice would start and all we would do was just make out and feel each other up. It was fun for a while, sneaking around with Kelsi. Until her parents found out that her and I were more than just friends. Instead of them telling my mama about us and getting her involved, they made us break up and the following school year, they moved to College Park. Kelsi and I had always talked about going to high school together and how one day, she would come out to her parents and introduce me as her girlfriend. In a way, I guess you can say that happened but, not in the way we expected.

Beverly doesn’t know that I’m a lesbian and I’d honestly like to keep it that way. I wouldn’t consider myself to be closeted. It’s just Beverly can be very judgmental at times. All she’s ever talked about is the day she’ll get to plan me or my twin sisters weddings. Mind you, the twins are only 10. 10! Why are you even thinking about weddings for them right now? Or for me, even? I definitely didn’t have any plans on settling down. Until I met Elani.

The day I met Elani was a day I’ll never forget. It was during the fall semester of my sophomore year. I was on my way to my last class of the day and I remember being dog tired. I had been up since 7 a.m. that morning, had 4 classes that I went to earlier that day and I had just left from the cafe, after eating for the first time that day. I wasn’t even paying attention to where I was going but, I know I was already running like, 5 minutes late for that last class.

I opened the double doors to the building of my class and as I was walking, I could feel my shoelace coming loose on my tennis shoe. I squatted down directly in the entrance of the door to tie my shoe when all of a sudden, I felt someone almost trip over me. I popped up immediately and said, “My bad, I’m sorry.” and then I paused. It literally felt like I was in a movie for about 5 seconds. At that moment, she was just a stranger to me. A beautiful stranger.

Elani stood before me and all I could do was stare at her face and her appearance. She had a navy blue beanie on that was covering 2 dark brown braids that went all the way down past her breasts. She had a white and navy blue Polo Ralph Lauren shirt on with a pair of khaki shorts. On her feet, she had on a pair of navy blue Vans with white bottoms. Her eyes were a dark brown color and her skin was a smooth chocolate brown, almost like a Snicker’s bar. I was attracted to her immediately but, at the moment, I couldn’t find the words to say it to her. I didn’t even know if she went to my school or not. We were just strangers in that small moment of time.

She smiled at me and I saw how pretty, white and straight her teeth were. “Don’t worry, love. It’s all good,” she chuckled and continued to walk down the hallway. I smiled back at her and followed behind her. When we got to the trophy case, at the end of the hall, I went to the left and she went to the right. I walked to my class and knocked on the door and waited for Dr. Johns to let me in. As I walked into class and went to sit in my seat, all I could think about was her. I don’t know if you could say it was love or maybe even infatuation, at first sight. But I silently prayed and hoped that that wasn’t my last time seeing her.