Growing up, my brother 'Nard and I often thought our mom had some kinda special powers. Still do. Powers a few steps up from having a bunch of telescopic eyes in the back of her head. Most mothers have those. She sometimes saw things coming our way that other people didn't. Thank God, I dodged her vivid fish dreams when she would wake up looking at me all side eyed, wondering who was pregnant. Almost always accurately predicted that deaths usually comes in threes. Seems like she was almost never wrong with that one either.
My brother came home one day, let his voice accidentally slip into tenor mode, and asked her for one of those leather 8 Ball jackets that everyone was wearing in high school back then. Her answer was a loud and emphatic, "NO!'
A "NO" so loud it almost seemed to echo from 149th and Sutphin all the way up to Linden and Guy Brewer Boulevard.
"But, why, mom?" he asked.
"Young man, that jacket ain't but a whole lotta problems. Problems that we surely don't need and hardly can afford right now. That thousand dollars can buy food for the month, plus pay Con Ed and the phone bill!"
"I could work, Mom. I could get a part time job after school and save up enough money to buy it myself!"
" 'Nard, you need to go upstairs and work on them books like you working on my nerves right now. Bring up your grades so you can graduate on time and stop bothering me about some doggone jacket!"
The argument went off and on a few more days. 'Nard even tried to enlist other family members like Uncle Rad in his losing campaign.
"Son, Imma tell you right now," advised uncle Rad, "your momma don't take no tea for fever. Everybody needs more money. But that's probably not the point. And you might not want to ask her why again though. I'm almost certain she must have a damn good reason for you to not start working right now."
‘Nard even tried to involve me, as if I could somehow change her mind. Not sure exactly how he put it cuz as soon as I heard, "Sissy, please..."
I turned my headphones up to full blast and broke eye contact.
'Nard never got the jacket. And he never brought it up again. At least not to us.
About a month after the argument ended, I was looking through ‘Nard’s bookbag for something or other, when I came across a folded-up newspaper article that told a story about a 21-year-old man named Waldrine Ewool, who lived in the Bronx. According to Ewool's younger brother, Twaji, "My older brother worked overtime for weeks just to get the eight-ball jacket, which he bought on Friday--two days before his murder.”
Melissa Thomas is the first of her family to be born in the United States. Her parents, Sylvia Dolores Mitchell and Joseph Thomas, emigrated from the Republic of Panama with ancestry from Grenada and Dominique. Melissa showed an intense interest in multiple art disciplines at an early age including but not limited to writing, dance and literature. She studied ballet at Gloria Jackson’s, African Interpretive Dance with LaRocque Bey and Dinizulu, and a Masters Jazz Tap Class with Marion Coles. A Jazz enthusiast she regularly attends concerts and plays several musical instruments including the fife, glockenspiel, recorder and conga. Her Classical music studies at Jacques-Dalcroze lead her to acceptance in the music program at Music and Art High School playing piano and cello and graduating in the class of 1972. Her love of writing and literature was ever present with her earliest influences of Claude Brown, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. It was her return to Queens College CUNY in later years that afforded her the opportunity to hone her writing skills.
