By Michael R. Ormand

Her hair is black with sparse patches of white, as if she fell into a bag of flour. Her sepia skin is well worn from living the life of a black American. Her body is fat from years of beans and government cheese.

She sits at her dining table, in her pea-green kitchen with peeling wall paper and linoleum. She sorts through butter beans bought with her coveted Lone Star Card.

Her stomach grumbles with hunger because she has not eaten in days. She only gets a good meal at the beginning of the month when her precious red, white and blue card is loaded.

She works all day and all night, but never seems to get ahead. She is a victim of destiny and the concubine of circumstance.

She chops the fat-back to flavor her butter-beans while humming “That Old Rugged Cross” to herself.

She puts the butterbeans and fatback into an old slow cooker she bought down at the Goodwill Thrift Store. She then starts working on the pie.

She takes a large pink plastic mixing bowl and fills it with sweet potatoes then grabs her trusty dull peeling knife. She takes the potatoes to the living room, where she watches reruns of “Goodtimes” on her 19” black and white television.

She thinks back on her life through the soothing repetitive motion of her peeling. Over the years the memories faded from vibrant living color to dull dead shades of gray. They are more like a flip book made of stills than a live action movie.

She remembers back to her teenage years in the 1960s. She used to walk to the library at Texas State University for Negroes and read books in the library.

On one particular day she was reading, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. A young man sat at her table. He was tall with skin the color of burnt barley cakes which contrasted against his ivory white teeth. He looked like your average young Negro scholar.

They talked for a little while and she never caught his name. She noticed it was getting late and said she had to get home. He offered to walk her home. She didn’t make it home the same. That evening he robbed her of her most cherished possession.

She went into the police station to file a report, but was not taken serious because she was just another “nigger”. She got pregnant from this encounter and was thrown out of her house. Having barely started the ninth grade, she didn’t know what to do. So she took to the streets.

With each trick she turned, a piece of her soul died. A mother without a soul isn’t much of a mother at all. At night she would leave her baby all alone in their apartment at Cuney Homes, while she cruised up and down Main Street looking for her next client.

To ease her pain, she would stick the needle in her arm. Every day she would pull the plunger up and watch her blood lead the dance with Lady H before it flushed back down into her veins. She didn’t have to worry about rocking her baby; she shook enough to lull him to sleep.

Her son was a teenager when the gangs came into Houston. He was instantly snatched up by the Bloods. When he was 16 years old, he killed a rival gang member in a drive-by shooting. A neighbor of the victim was able to positively identify him to the police. He is now sitting on death row in Huntsville.

When she found out her son’s girlfriend was pregnant, she convinced the girl not to get an abortion. She cleaned herself up and raised that child the best she could. To make ends meet she worked during the day at McDonald’s on Cullen Blvd by University of Houston. At night, she was a busser at an all-night diner.

A loud pop snaps her out of her daydream. She drops her bowl and the potatoes and knife fall on the floor. As the potatoes thud, she runs out the door and sees her grandson on the sidewalk with blood and brain matter pouring out of his head. She takes his red bandana, just like his father wore, out of his pocket and wraps it around his head tightly to try to stop the bleeding.

She holds him in her arms and sings Happy Birthday, for right down to the exact minute he just turned 14. His eyes roll back into his head and he stops breathing.

This has been another verse in the Third Ward Rhapsody. There is no use in naming names because the song still remains the same. Maybe someday this song of violence and pain will become a song of peace and joy. The shackles of poverty and brutality will break, and the people’s wings will spread; causing them to fly from the cold damp ghetto into the warm beautiful sun.