It was no secret Mira’s mother didn’t care for Jesse. While she didn’t think much of Celine either, the mere mention of Jesse’s name put her in a fit. In Jesse she saw the image of every man who’d hurt her, exemplified by Mira’s father. Both of them in their forties when they met, she’d believed he was serious about a relationship, but pregnancy showed her how wrong she’d been in her assumption. When she decided she wanted to keep it he decided he didn’t want her. After he was gone, she convinced herself another man wouldn’t want her, a single black woman with a young baby, and she soon gave up on finding anyone else.

Jesse was a black boy who’d grow up to become a black man, and since it was a black man who’d hurt her, she figured Jesse would hurt Mira too. “That boy, Lord, that boy,” she’d say whenever Mira talked about him. “Why can’t you stay away from him? At least with Celine, she’s a girl, but Jesse? God, with all the work I do—I’m trying to get you somewhere, don’t you see that? I’m trying to get you to a life worth more than this.”

For her mother, this had meant Mira living a life of constrained, dictated action. It meant straightening her hair, sitting on the hard floor between her mother’s thighs as she parted and greased her scalp before taking the flat comb to its kink, and later, when she’d finally gotten tired of the soreness of her arms from dealing with it, it meant relaxers, Mira suffering through the burn of her scalp as the cream tamed her hair. It meant boxy-shaped clothes that hid her figure. It meant clean, trimmed fingernails, never biting them, maybe painted with a pastel color on Sundays. It meant jewelry but no gold hoops or statement necklaces, no makeup until she was sixteen, and even then, no red lipstick. Lord, no red. Mira’s mother hated the women she saw during church service, their lips stained red—nigger red. “You will not be like that,” her mother would tell her, “if it’s one thing I do in this life, it’s going to be to make sure you’ll not be like them.” Mira knew what her mother meant, as if that was all it would take to alter her life’s trajectory, as if as long as she did these things—lived a life of yes and no ma’am pleasantries, of never speaking beyond the answer to a question, of being watchful of her tone, even when upset, of never asking, never challenging, of being polite, respectable—somehow, in some way, she would be saved.

“He’s going to be trouble, I know it. He’ll drag you down. Black boys like that always do.”