MA AND I fought before I got pregnant; I left because I knew it would get much worse once she found out. I never planned on getting pregnant when I was fifteen; it just happened. But isn’t that just how it always is? At least if you’re young and Black, or old and Black for that matter. Planning pregnancy was for White women; every woman I had ever known just got caught—caught up in some man to the point where she was foolish enough to drop a load for him, believe all that “carry my seed I’m gonna love you and my child” sweet talk. You can keep foolishness and stupidity a secret, but a belly swelled will always tell the truth even if it isn’t a whole one. The whole truth is that the child was an even bigger accident than the relationship. And a pregnant woman or one who already has kids by a man who’s no longer thinking about her never, ever tells that truth—not even to herself.

I knew the story well. I had seen it, heard about it, been warned about it; my own father left so I was a victim of it. Any gathering of two or more women made me a silent witness to the deep wounds men left behind. Later I was guaranteed to be kept up well into a night listening to my hardened mother, still young, who vowed a crowbar couldn’t get her stiff legs open again—let alone a man.

The story was always the same. At first he cooks her breakfast in the mornings, rubs her feet at night, pinches her cheeks like she’s his child herself, and rubs her belly every time she walks by. He stands outside with his chest stuck out and brags to the neighborhood regulars that he “got a shorty coming.” He buys her ice cream, comfortable walking shoes, and a thick pink robe to sit on soft skin he rubs down with the real baby lotion, after she takes the Calgon bubble bath he ran. When he makes love to her, he’s soft and careful. They lay tight like two spoons in a squeaky bed, listening to Luther or the Isley Brothers or Chaka Khan when she was still with Rufus, and when she starts crying because she’s turned away from him and she thinks he won’t know, he can tell she’s scared he’ll leave her just from the tension stiff in her back. So he massages her spine and her doubt, wipes away her tears, and whispers, “Baby, I promise, I ain’t going nowhere.”