High Price

ignored them. In the same way that I reminded Grandmama of our dad, I think my sisters other than Brenda reminded Big Mama of our mom. And that wasn’t good: just as Grandmama saw Carl as abusive and not good enough for her daughter, Big Mama saw MH as irresponsible and unfaithful to her son.
    Consequently, she was cold, even indifferent to my other sisters. When they came around, like all the other kids I knew they would say hello to the adults as they walked in. This was a nonnegotiable sign of respect. But sometimes Big Mama wouldn’t even look up, let alone respond kindly and welcome them. The only reason they wound up going to see her at all was that, later in their teens, they wanted to stay out late and not catch hell from MH. They knew all too well that Big Mama wouldn’t keep track of their comings and goings.
    Big Mama also kept an unusual home. She owned one of the largest houses in Carver Ranches, a black neighborhood in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. The sprawling, three-thousand-square-foot residence had at least six bedrooms. Her husband, my grandfather Gus, had built it for her. It was, in fact, one of the first houses to be built in that community. However, rather than provoking envy, as such a fine, spacious home might otherwise have done, instead her house inspired fear.
    Big Mama’s place was known as the hood’s “haunted house.” It got much of its creepy reputation because essentially, no one had done any maintenance on it—internal or external—since Grandpa Gus died of a brain tumor in 1958. Family stories had it that he’d died slowly and painfully and something in his wife was lost along with him when he finally passed.
    When I moved in, although she had three of her adult children living with her—Ben, Norman, and Millicent—only rarely did anyone lift a hand to clean the house or maintain the yard. Ben had an excuse: he was slow and may not have known what to do.
    Outside, the lawn was brown and dead. In Florida, the sun burns through and destroys anything you don’t diligently tend. On one side, the yard was much bigger than the front lawn, which added to the house’s eerie, off-kilter look. Right in the center of that side yard was a massive sapodilla tree, untrimmed and wild. (It grew large brown fruits that were fuzzy like peaches but tasted like sweet cinnamon pears.)
    Inside the house wasn’t much better. It was infested with scorpions, spiders, and rodents—so much so that no matter how badly you had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you’d hold it because you never knew what kind of scary creature you might encounter. To make matters worse, between the bedroom where I slept and the bathroom was a long, dark corridor. That hallway was definitely a place that you didn’t want to explore at night. After dusk, creepy critters seemed to be everywhere.
    My cousin Louie, who was about a year older than me, lived with Big Mama, too. He was there because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. We both shared a room with twin beds with my grandmother. She’d sleep on one narrow bed; the two of us cousins slept together on the other. Big Mama’s adult children occupied the other bedrooms, while Brenda slept in the front bedroom where my grandfather had died. Since his death, Big Mama had never been able to sleep there again.
    At night, Big Mama fell asleep to some kind of talk radio, which she kept at high volume. Louis and I would just lie there in that overheated room with her, eventually crashing from sheer exhaustion. But the radio’s messages crept in: what we heard over and over was a parade of white guys forecasting doom, predicting complete catastrophe. There was always some world-threatening political, economic, or environmental crisis going on.
    At the time, much of the news centered around the horrors of Vietnam, the Watergate crisis at the White House, and the Arab oil embargo. It scared me at first. I became anxious about the stuff they were predicting, fearing overwhelming disaster of one sort or another. I wondered how we would survive. Soon, however, I got desensitized. I realized that nothing was really changing, that the supposedly imminent apocalypse never really materialized. Our neighborhood was in a process of slow decline, but we weren’t exactly getting nuked or overrun by communists. I began to tune those kinds of thoughts out. Oddly enough, this forced immersion in bad news and doom-mongering ultimately made me