Excerpt from When Did You Stop Loving Me
Love In Plain View
It was 1979 and escape was heavy in the air. Assata Shakur made a daring bust out of a maximum-security prison. And although my father and I did not yet know it, Mommy had also been tunneling her way to freedom. Assata broke out of the Clinton correctional facility, guns blazing and motors running, Jesse James style. No Cleopatra Jones, mine wasn't a gun-toting mama though she was the baddest one chick hit squad to break my heart. Mommy's getaway was as subtle and silent as a magic trick. She simply walked out the door one winter evening and never came home. My father was a magician, but Mommy was a real Houdini.
It was not the way I undertstood grief, the way my father and I responded to the shock of it all. Time moved quickly that year and the day my mother disappeared began to fade from me. A few months after she was gone, I struggled to remember the details of the last day I saw her. What was I wearing? What did I have for lunch that day? What was the last thing she said? Was it “Good-bye sweetheart, be good.” Or was it, “Gotta run baby. Be good.” I remembered the “be good” although by the time she was gone for a year, I hadn't been good at all.
In my mind, my mother's face fills every empty frame. Have you seen her?
Melanie Aisha Brown. She is five feet, ten inches tall. I do not know what she weighs.
She wear a size six dress and a size seven shoe. She has dark skin, and straight hair, which
she wears in a flip. She is beautiful, look-twice-on-the-street gorgeous. She is thirty-four
years old, but can pass for much younger. She likes burgundy lipstick and bright nail polish
and anything made from potatoes: potato chips, mashed potatoes, French fries. She smokes when
my father isn't around and keeps a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, covered by tampons,
in a brown and white plastic cosmetics case in her purse. She is a woman with secrets. 