We must have looked like one of those illustrated familiesdepicted in surreal storybooks, riding in an impossibly rendered car—a vehicle as tall as two adjacent city apartment buildings,with themy father both superintendent and mechanic.There were clotheslines between the tall standing bricksand candles, flower pots, and foreign forearmsresting on every other windowsill.At the bottom a crushed engine, a deformed steering wheel,a cracked windshield and a whole family. Mine.Back then, we all carried so much.I, the sister with a sibling and two parents of the Silent Generation—my father, hand drawn in high yellow—forever fixing and molding things,gripped and reshaped the steering wheel, remade the engine.His eyes big and thoughtful like Harlem hub caps and Riverdale rims.My mother, colored in warm, brown ink, holding onto an empty birdcage,a nurse with a Sunday School teacher smile slashed in calypsonian pastelacross her sweet, small island face.My brother, a thin, solemn, sepia stick of silence, looking out the window,a Kangol cap on his head, a Walkman in his lap,gold teeth, girls and ganja among his dreams.And me, in tawdry technicolor, straddling culturesand coming of age, in the winter of heat, a kissable kerosene lamplanguishing between a hot comb and a curling ironand listening to the side streets sing a song called dark and empty.We of the illustration were on our way to Corvettes Department Store,where a man, drawn as an evil white rabbit,introduced me as a child to the first, firm, fragile eggs of Easter,while showing me Eartha Kitt—who he claimed wanted to be evil—as a bamboozled black and white Catwoman, performingon the small, unbought department store’s colorless and for-sale TV set.
