“Damn,” I whispered to myself, muffling my cold lips inside my jacket. “Damn … I got a baby. I’m a mother.”

The tears flowed freely from this revelation, and I wasn’t even ashamed at all the people who stared without one parting their lips to ask me what was wrong.

I HAD DONE it. She had felt me, heard me, sensed me—and now loved me without being able to help it. I was closer to winning the debate she didn’t even know she was having. A small nudge of doubt had burrowed inside her head and, more importantly, her heart. It had taken three tries and almost 150 years, but the odds were in my favor that I was about to finally get my chance. And I was ready, no matter what shortcomings or misgivings or circumstances were waiting for me. I had seen enough to know that there was no such thing as the rose-colored life for me, but acceptance had come and now I was ready to face whatever waited. To be ripped and bled out of her this time would be just as bad as what last happened to me.

The last time before this time, it was Harlem, somewhere around 1942. It was Tawana, the first to have a husband and the only one to have the real freedom that gave me hope my birth day would finally arrive.

Before the two small kids she already had, Tawana’s favorite thing to do had been to mount Billy and whisper the things she was supposed to. After the kids, Tawana’s favorite thing to do became taking a bath with her newest baby on top of her breasts. The water added a lightness that motherhood had taken away, and she imagined herself sailing far beyond where she was. A vacation, a sojourn, a holiday with a respite from a cleaning job that gave her little pleasure and even less money. The night before, her husband, my daddy, Billy, was shot in mistaken identity by NYPD looking for an armed liquor store robber. He had come home uncharacteristically early. The sounds of his wife’s strange ritual greeted him: water splashing, slow singing, and occasional bursts of amateur laughter. This vision of his child and its mother in the water excited him; the vision of her husband hovering over her silently startled Tawana.

“Baby—I didn’t even hear you come in,” she said as went to cover herself with her baby’s slick, jelly roll flesh.

“You left the door unlocked, woman,” he told her. “You should know better than that. This Harlem, not Hollywood.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Billy said as he moved in and put his heavy hands on his son’s back. “Just be more careful.” He loosened the top buttons of his garbageman uniform.

“How was it today?” she asked him.