By Kalisha Buckhanon

MA AND I fought before I got pregnant; I left because I knew it would get much worse once she found out. I never planned on getting pregnant when I was fifteen; it just happened. But isn’t that just how it always is? At least if you’re young and Black, or old and Black for that matter. Planning pregnancy was for White women; every woman I had ever known just got caught—caught up in some man to the point where she was foolish enough to drop a load for him, believe all that “carry my seed I’m gonna love you and my child” sweet talk. You can keep foolishness and stupidity a secret, but a belly swelled will always tell the truth even if it isn’t a whole one. The whole truth is that the child was an even bigger accident than the relationship. And a pregnant woman or one who already has kids by a man who’s no longer thinking about her never, ever tells that truth—not even to herself.

I knew the story well. I had seen it, heard about it, been warned about it; my own father left so I was a victim of it. Any gathering of two or more women made me a silent witness to the deep wounds men left behind. Later I was guaranteed to be kept up well into a night listening to my hardened mother, still young, who vowed a crowbar couldn’t get her stiff legs open again—let alone a man.

The story was always the same. At first he cooks her breakfast in the mornings, rubs her feet at night, pinches her cheeks like she’s his child herself, and rubs her belly every time she walks by. He stands outside with his chest stuck out and brags to the neighborhood regulars that he “got a shorty coming.” He buys her ice cream, comfortable walking shoes, and a thick pink robe to sit on soft skin he rubs down with the real baby lotion, after she takes the Calgon bubble bath he ran. When he makes love to her, he’s soft and careful. They lay tight like two spoons in a squeaky bed, listening to Luther or the Isley Brothers or Chaka Khan when she was still with Rufus, and when she starts crying because she’s turned away from him and she thinks he won’t know, he can tell she’s scared he’ll leave her just from the tension stiff in her back. So he massages her spine and her doubt, wipes away her tears, and whispers, “Baby, I promise, I ain’t going nowhere.”

He might mean it… until she swells so much from both water and baby that she couldn’t pull her grouchy lips in if she tried. Or until she has it and her wrinkled, dark, sagging stomach won’t snap back to that smoothness he used to love to bump up against. I’ve seen them stay until the baby’s first blown-out-of-proportion birthday party or maybe even later, but something about being called “Daddy”—never mind husband—seems to choke men these days. They shove off their women and kids like suffocating pillows smashed against their faces, cutting off not only their air and vision but the rest of their lives.

At least when somebody’s suffocating, you can tell: you see their faces turn blue, their lips quiver, their eyes buck, and their throats jerk. But when a man is mentally packing his bags, the suitcase is never out until he’s already standing on the other side of the door. He suddenly gets shy whenever they have a little time alone, silently fusses with the food on his plate much more, if he’s even still eating her cooking at all. Then his nights at the corner bar start dragging on longer than they used to, well into the hours they used to be shattering headboards and calling each other’s names. Suddenly the mama he complained about when they first got together becomes strangely needy, and she starts hearing the excuse a man gives a woman he wants to have sex with without having to spend the night: “I gotta do something for my mama.” Exactly what is never explained, but she looks at him with puppy-dog eyes anyway and says, “Okay, baby, take your time.” It’s all over by the time she starts first dropping hints, then actually saying, “You need to start bringing some more money into this house.” If the kids are lucky (and I wasn’t), they’ll be too young to remember the arguments filled in by the swish sound of flying objects, the lightning-bolt crack of slammed doors, and of course the face slaps. Finally the story ends when a Greyhound bus or loaded-down car hits the highway, and the woman is left staring into a window rather than out of it.

I know the exact moment my baby came inside me: it was on October 11, 1992.

That was the night I met Rasul, and the night Renelle Washington came home early from work with a new surprise birthday cake for her husband Leroy. An Entenmann’s German chocolate cake, thirty-six candles standing up sharp and wicked like pitchforks. The whole sixth-floor apartment still held on to the burnt stink from Renelle’s earlier attempt at “homemade” cooking.

Three months into another birth, she had tortured a Duncan Hines chocolate box mix into volcanic rock that morning; its nasty failure predicted the baby’s fate.

Leroy and I whispered about the cake while he lay on top of me on their black leather living-room couch, finding his way, unprotected, into my silky
young softness for the second time that night. We had been doing this behind his wife’s back for months. He made my heart beat fast and my blood
race through my body so strong and hard my baby’s heart started beating too. My baby screamed and glowed red when it roared to life inside me, but Leroy and I didn’t see or hear or know.

“Forget that burnt cake… this all the chocolate I need right here,” Leroy whispered to me, and I didn’t know how to respond. I was just fifteen then, still spoke only when spoken to, tried not to curse in front of grown folks or wear clothes that hugged my shape too tight. I still wanted to be a child, but my body just wasn’t having it. So I said nothing at all. I just lay there in a slick mist of our sweat.