As a little girl, my world was filled with both innocence and hidden darkness, where the echoes of a haunting past intertwined with the unsettling presence of a ghostly neighbor watching my every move. When I was around 10 years old, my parents both worked, so my 3 younger brothers and I had to go to different babysitters—on my mother’s side and one on my father’s side. A family member on my mother’s side, my teenage girl cousin, thought it was okay to touch me inappropriately. I was much younger and didn’t understand as much as she did. I was raised differently.
One morning around 1 a.m., she woke me up to go downtown and stand in front of the movie theater. I always worried that being with her would get me into trouble. When we arrived, a policeman on his motorcycle approached us. He asked why we were out so late, and my cousin came up with a weak story that didn’t seem believable. He told us to meet him in the alley, and we had to do whatever he wanted. Just then, he received a call on his radio and had to leave. We ran away, but that wasn’t the end of it. One night, she took me to a nightclub, and I was so nervous because I really didn’t want to be caught in that smoky, smelly place. I eventually shared everything with my mother, and she stopped taking us to their home.
Our babysitter, Mae, is nice to us. When I would come home from school, I often see a woman with white skin standing by the window, looking into my bedroom. She smiles at me, and I smile back. After that, I jump onto my bed, the sheets lift as if air is blowing between them and the mattress. My three little brothers saw her too, but my youngest brother got scared and tried to run away. In his hurry, his finger got caught in my hoop earring and almost tore my ear. Soon after, my lips started to swell, followed by my fingers and feet. The doctor said they didn’t know why I might be allergic to my sheets or my bed. That’s when our parents told us that the bed I had been sleeping on belonged to an old white man who died in it. I was upset because I didn’t understand why they hadn’t told me sooner. They got me a new bedroom set, and now there’s no more swelling, and the woman at the window is gone.
Weeks later after I returned home from school, I was so excited to go home to sew. I used to sew clothes because my parents got me a sewing machine for Christmas and a movie projector with the large projection screen. When I got home, I went to the room where the movie projector and sewing machine were stored. They were gone and the first thing that I assumed is that we had a break in, so I sat on the floor and began to cry because it was a dream that was deferred. It was not a break in it was my father Alfred Lee Lawler Sr. he entered the room and began to cry with me and apologized. He told me that he pawned them, and he promised to retrieve them, but never did he take his life instead.
After that day, everything changed. The house felt emptier, and the silence was heavy. I missed the sound of the sewing machine humming, and the flickering light of the projector casting images on the wall. Every corner of the room reminded me of my father and the dreams we shared.
I tried to focus on school, but my mind kept drifting back to those moments of joy—when I would sew late into the night, creating outfits that made me feel alive. The loss of my tools felt like the loss of my creativity and a part of myself. I wanted to express my feelings through sewing, but without my machine, I felt lost.
As the days went by, I found myself searching for ways to cope. I began sketching designs in a notebook, pouring my emotions onto the pages. Each drawing was a way to keep my dreams alive, even if I couldn’t bring them to life just yet. I started to realize that while I had lost my tools, I still had my passion and my creativity.
Years later, I cherish the gift of writing, and no one can take that away from me. Now, back to Mae—she had a baby by none other than Alfred Lee Lawler Sr. I’ll share more about this in my next piece, as I ended up moving to Atlanta for four and a half years. During that time, God revealed many secrets about my father, politics, and the entertainment industry.
Leave a Reply