Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir Read Free Page A

pickling, the backyard gardens filled with collards and tomatoes, and of course, the soul food cooking. The residents on Queenstown Road were neither urban nor rural—they were what I call “country suburban.”
    Once Mommy moved to Severn as the new girl in the neighborhood, Aunt Juanita encouraged her to be social. So my mother quickly made friends and joined her school choir. Mommy absolutely loved to sing, and in those days, opera was considered the proper music. Around the trailer, Aunt Juanita would often hear Mommy singing, opera style, the Motown and gospel songs she loved. Mommy was and still is a gifted vocalist, and she was chosen to be part of the Maryland state choir. Mommy also formed a singing group called the Viewettes, along with her friends Mary, Almeda, and Valorie. They won a few competitions and trophies.
    Within months of moving to Severn, Mom’s social life had fully blossomed. One evening, my mother asked my aunt to let her attend an annual dance at the YMCA. “Aunt Juanita, can I go to the dance?” Mom asked.
    “When is it?”
    “It’s tonight.”
    Aunt Juanita paused. “You can go,” she finally said. Mom dashed right to her bedroom, slipped on her prettiest outfit, and dashed off from the trailer. She met up with her two best friends, Almeda and Juanita (yes, there were a lot of Juanitas back then . . . ). The three of them showed up at the YMCA together.
    That night, a fifteen-year-old young man from Baltimore spotted my mother on the dance floor. Mommy pretended not to notice as he meandered toward her. “Would you like to dance?” the boy asked.
    “I don’t really feel like dancing,” said Mommy, who wasn’t attracted to him.
    “What’s your name?” he asked.
    “I’m Joan,” Mom fibbed. But throughout the event, several of Mom’s friends blew her cover when they yelled out her nickname: “Hey, Ev!”
    Later, the young man made a second attempt to capture Mommy’s attention. “I thought your name was Joan,” he said, grinning. “So why is everyone calling you Evelyn?” he asked.
    “My friends call me that,” Mommy admitted, blushing a little.
    “Well,” he said, “I’ll call you that, too.” That’s how my mother met Michael Conrad Braxton Sr.—my father.
    Race played a role in the arrival of my father’s family to Maryland. Dad’s mom, Eva, was nearly 90 percent Caucasian, yet she was still considered black in this country, thanks to the one-drop rule. Grandma Eva was born in New York, but when her extended family discovered she was partly black, her mother sent her down to Calvert County, Maryland, to be raised by one of her relatives. Eva looked as white as Edith Bunker in All in the Family , yet because she was biracial, she didn’t really fit in anywhere. When the teachers at her boarding school realized she was partly African American, they dipped her strawberry-blond hair into tea to make it darker, then braided her dark strands into plaits to signal her ethnic heritage. After Grandma Eva endured that painful childhood and grew into a young woman, she eventually met my grandfather, Frances Braxton—a descendant of Carter Braxton, the Virginia delegate who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. My grandfather Frances, who was half African-American and half Native American, had a dark beautiful skin tone. In part, Eva chose Frances as her husband because he was so dark—she didn’t want her own children to grow up with any questions or confusion about their racial identity. My father, Michael, was Frances and Eva’s second child and first son.
    Fast-forward to that YMCA dance—which was the night Daddy fell for Mommy from the moment he first saw her. In the months to follow, my father would either hitchhike or take the bus to travel the sixteen miles from his Baltimore home to Mommy’s trailer in Severn. Aunt Juanita liked Michael right away, but she wasn’t all that pleased that Mommy was starting to date—my mother was still pretty