The Sisters

As a young girl, I made regular weekend visits to my paternal grandmother’s home. Grandma Queenie, whose birth name was Queen Ester King, was a sturdy Black woman with dark deep-set features. Her sense of femininity was more brawny than nurturing. She was rather masculine, actually, in spite of her consistent use of pink sponge rollers to curl her bangs and maintain a flip in the back of her head like hairdo’s I saw worn by White ladies in 1950s movies. She never donned jewelry or makeup, and she always ran her errands wearing modest cotton housedresses. People feared my grandmother. She did not smile or laugh much with us kids. She was old school, and made us pluck our own switches when she decided we needed to be taught a lesson. We loved her. We were devastated when she died three years ago.

She gained custody of three of my cousins in the late 1960s, taking them out of foster care as toddlers to raise until adulthood. Five years later, she took in one of my prepubescent cousins who showed up and Grandma Queenie’s when she ran away from home. Then in the 80s, she boarded a neighborhood teen girl and her newborn. Those who lived with her called her “Mama,” as she was the only mother some kids knew.

Grandma Queenie was a daycare provider until she was in her 70s, so her home was a place of comfort for those of us who loved our trinkets at home, but believed her place was the ultimate refuge for snacks and games. Her humungous house was brown—then mint green, four-stories high with a basement, and contained ten bedrooms and one bathroom. She and her husband, a man I knew as “Granpop,” slept in separate rooms, and a very elderly man named Mr. Coco rented a room on the second floor.

During one weekend at Grandma Queenie’s when I was seven years old, my cousin Darryl told me about three girls who had just moved into the corner house on my grandmother’s street. He said they were sisters close to my age who I might enjoy getting to know. He warned me that they were “funny” and that I had better watch out for anything freaky they might do to me. It was rumored that the sisters kissed and touched each other. The prospect of them wanting to kiss me was exhilarating. I did not let on that I was tickled about meeting them, though. I was not sure what “funny” people looked like. But I knew I wanted to experience it for myself.

Darryl walked me across the street to their house, which was a huge nefarious looking cocoa brown building with wood slats for a porch that spread across three quarters of the structure. From the outside, it looked somewhat like my grandmother’s ginormous house, but clearly, with so many doors on its front side, it was an apartment building. The eldest sister, a girl of about ten who already had B-cup breasts, came to the door in a Wonder Woman terrycloth robe and mismatched belt hanging down toward stained yellow house shoes.

“Where your sisters at?” Darryl inquired, sounding more like an incessant boss than a curious neighbor.

“They’re watching TV. Why?!” She gave him a version of ‘tude I was used to seeing among girls in my around my way. At the tail end of rolling her eyes at him, she managed to glance tenderly at me.

“My cousin wanna meet y’all,” he said.

I gazed at the peeling rubber at the toe of my right shoe, and then rocked on my tiptoes while she studied me. I wanted to tug Darryl’s shirt and whisper to him that she looked normal to me. Anxiety forced my lips tightly together as I waited to see how out-of-the-ordinary her sisters were.

“Wait one minute,” she muttered. Then she erupted, turning toward the paneled living room, “Scooooobaaaay! Monaaaaaaa!”

As the three of us stood soundlessly amid the cool air waiting for her little sisters to appear, Darryl said, “Ay, don’t y’all be doing nuffin’ freaky to my cousin. Do not touch her. Alright?” Darryl is four years older than I am, but tossed out that command as if he were my daddy.

The large-breasted girl offered a flirtatious smile in my direction and then remarked, “Ain’t nobody gon’ do nuffin’ to her.”

Scooby and Mona, who were seven and nine years old, arrived at the door. Peering intrusively, they said almost in unison, “Darryl, who’s that?”

He replied, “This here is my cousin. She wanna hang out with y’all. Don’t be doing none of that dyke-y girl stuff around her. Hear me?”

The older girl pulled me into the house, sucked her teeth at him, then slammed the door before he could fully turn and walk away. All three girls were wearing pajamas, and there seemed to be no adults at home. Following them to the far back bedroom, I could hear the distinct sounds of my favorite cartoon. We were in their mother’s room; I assumed this because of the velvety, black-light poster of sex poses that my own mother had hanging up in her room. I sank down in a tattered corduroy chair and fixated on the television. We spent the better part of 20 minutes not saying much, lost in Looney Tunes and intermittent commercials for Strawberry Shortcake dolls and Happy Meals.

When the show ended, I pierced the awkward stillness with a bevy of questions: “Where y’all from? What school y’all go to? Where y’all’s mama at? What did Darryl mean when he said y’all was funny?” In response to my last question, they looked at each other and giggled.

Scooby, the seven year old said, “You ever let a girl touch you?”

I was almost sure she meant ‘down there’ so I shook my head, “Uhn uhn.” I paused, to be certain, then I asked, “Touch me where?”

Just then, she pulled the left side of her pajama top down past her shoulder and revealed a smooth honey-colored nipple that looked a lot like mine. I was nervous, but treasured the peek.

Mona added, “You never kissed a girl before?”

I responded, “No.”

The two older girls then began kissing each other in a way I had seen grownups do. Wet sounds. Heads bobbing side to side. Hands grasping each other’s backsides. As they pulled apart, they laughed and laughed.

As abruptly as this playful incestuous affair began, it ended when Scooby said, “Let’s go outside.” The three of them ran to their bedroom, as I stood near the doorway peeping around the edges of a psychedelic curtain, hoping to catch a glance.

I wasn’t interested in outside. I wanted one of the girls to offer an invitation, a dare, anything that would lead to my lips pressed against theirs.

Moments later, they reappeared dressed for playtime in the streets. As Mona dragged me by my wrist through the kitchen and out the backdoor, they all acted as if nothing had happened. For them, that display was amusing. For me, it was serious—although I felt neither violated nor afraid.

Once outside, I saw Darryl and his big sister zooming across the black tar on their metal skates, oblivious to my new fascination. Darryl’s insistence that the sisters show me a good time without all that “dyke-y girl stuff” had been delightfully marred by a slightly raised nipple and soap opera-quality kiss. He would never know that his summons for me to befriend the neighbors was the lead-in I needed to learn that a girl touching other girls is not bizarre. That they were sisters touching and kissing one another was only mildly peculiar to me because I had, at that time played “house” with other boy cousins, rubbed pants with them a little, and flirted with the tang of their tongues inside my cheeks. At five, six, and seven, you explore with people you know and trust.

Scooby and her sisters moved from the neighborhood not long after they arrived. I had not been to my grandmother’s home for a few weeks, so I had no idea they planned or packed to leave. I had, however, thought much about other parts of ourselves we could explore together someday. As a little girl, years before I came to know the meaning of “lesbian,” “bisexual,” queer-identified,” and “sexual politics,” I searched for girls like them at school and in my own neighborhood. Months after new tenants moved into that brooding brown building cattycorner to my grandmother’s house, I still hoped the sisters had forgotten something and were on their way back to retrieve it—or me. Alas, I would never see them again. I would also never explore sexual pleasure with girls until I was a senior in college. Before age 21, there would only be peeks across locker rooms during gym or between costume changes at the theater.

On the day of my grandmother’s funeral in 2006, the procession rode down her street to glance one last time at the mint green house where my cousins and I amused ourselves with tar-packed soda tops and makeshift checkerboards. As our cars approached her street, my cousins were undoubtedly reflecting on how Grandma Queenie provided them with the freedom to just be kids. I glimpsed over to the dispirited cocoa-colored apartment building on the corner, now charred and forsaken—and I smiled a half invigorating smile—thinking about innocence lost there and how much of myself I found the day the sisters invited me in.