Raising Mama

            It was a thoroughly pleasant and memorable experience. It reinforced my knowledge that blacks were accepting of whites usually, unlike the reverse. I found that out when we got home. She got fired for letting me experience black religion.

            Life was thud-like for months. I was at the Y wrestling with an older and larger boy, and I got him in a scissors lock. He basically said he let me do it ’cause I needed a break. Great, the world knows what kinda life I got. As Christmas nears I got a mixed blessing. Mama shows up with the darkest tan I’ve ever seen. She’s dressed head to toe in buckskin. She wore beautiful, braided, deerskin clothes. Merry Christmas.

            I went to their bedroom upon awakening that first morning. The bed was rumpled and empty. Both parents were in the kitchen, but my mom was not whistling as she stood by the stove and Daddy was not smoking a briar pipe reading the morning paper and waxing eloquent. Tension was in the air already. I didn’t know on a conscious level but my inner self, my survival instinct, told me to show my Mama that there was no depravity I was incapable of committing as long as she would just take me when she made her escape again. I think the only one of the four of us, Mama, Me, my sister, and Daddy, who didn’t sense Mama would be leaving again was my poor sister. She thought the world was perfect again.

            The four of us existed as a nuclear unit again. The house on Sydney Road was in a subdivision with less than fifty houses. To say we were the center of gossip was an understatement. My best friend was Dickie Greene. He started calling me Sulls and Sully. I hate those names. I like Ballinger better. My real name. My real father was “another man I ran off ,” according to Mama. I have to be perfect. Kids blame themselves

for parental breakups. I knew I had to be perfect so Mama would want to take me with her next time.

            With Mama back home, I felt my life was a test. I had to show her, 24-7, that I was an asset to the ship. I realized that I now had to be able to switch allegiances, turn my love on and off like she did, in order to be called when the next train left. I realized that something, the trip to the Keys or living in L.A. and Tucson, had given her wanderlust to the nth degree. I’d be living a life involving highways if I worked hard enough and was lucky enough.

            Our abandonment by my Mama had triggered some emotions of past events in me. I could not remember the house on Atlantic. I was a baby and asleep when my father, Bob Ballinger, saw me in person for the only time. I had been a baby, but the second brief marriage, and then the introduction of Mike Sullivan as my father when I was four

years old, left thoughts and emotions I was incapable of saying. Even though I was too young to say the words, I felt subconsciously afraid of being left behind by those who made me feel secure. When Mama left, I knew I was the only thing and the only one I could count on. I was alone. Totally and absolutely alone. The enormity of the thought is

just too frightening and too depressing. I shut down emotionally. The

lights are on, but no one is home.