P.S. Be Eleven by Rita Williams-Garcia Page A

night.”
    â€œThey’re children,” I answered. “They’re our age.” Although the oldest Jackson had to be in the eleventh or twelfth grade. And then there was the guitar player. Theone with the eyebrows. He had to be in high school. And the other guitar player, too.
    â€œThat should be against the law,” Big Ma said. “Children singing and dancing on TV late at night.”
    â€œPlease, Big Ma. Please.”
    She wagged her finger at us. “This is your no-mother-of-a-mother’s doing. Y’all come back here as wild as a bunch of untrained, back-talking chimps sneaking around in the night.”
    â€œPlease, Big Ma. We won’t ask for nothing else,” I begged.
    â€œEver,” my sisters chimed in.
    But Big Ma got up out of her chair and turned off the TV set. She picked up her Bible from the end table and sat back down.
    â€œYou seen ’em. Now if those boys have any kind of mother and father, they’ll snatch those children off the stage and get them home to bed. Now y’all get in your beds before your father comes home and sees you’re up.”
    â€œBut it’s not over,” Vonetta wailed.
    â€œWe want Michael,” Fern said.
    â€œMichael? Michael?” Her face was like Cecile’s when we said things that made her think we were Martians, or at the very least, not her children. “What you want is my strap.” It was when Big Ma lifted herself up and out of her comfy chair that we knew she wasn’t just fussing with us, and we scooted back to our rooms.
    I turned out my light and fell into my bed. I had never cried so hard in my life. Not because I couldn’t see the rest of the show, but because I saw him, and he was tall. Taller than me.

At Madison Square Garden
    The front passenger seat in the Wildcat belonged to Big Ma when the whole gang of us piled into the car. If Big Ma stayed home, Uncle Darnell sat up front next to Pa. If it was just us girls with Pa, that seat was mine, and I loved being up front, stealing glances at my pa as he hummed but didn’t whistle to Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and, of course, to “Old Man River”—all songs that suited my old pa. Sometimes he’d pass me the smallest grin and I’d feel wonderful bumping along as the tires hit every pothole on Atlantic or Fulton Avenue on our way to wherever we were going. Vonetta would wail, “Why does she ”—meaning me—“get to sit up front all the time?”
    â€œAnd not us,” Fern would chirp.
    Then Pa always said, “To keep an eye on the road,” as if I was really doing something when all I did was keep Pa company. I’d ride along bubbling up with things to say but I never uttered a one, which suited Pa fine. He just wanted me to be with him. That was how it was between Cecile and me when I was little and she kept me with her while she wrote poems and listened to Sarah Vaughn records on our deluxe stereo while Vonetta howled in her crib.
    When Miss Hendrix bent down and slid her bottom onto the passenger seat, swinging her legs in last, I knew my days of riding up front next to Pa in the Wildcat were numbered.
    â€œCan we go to the RKO after Central Park, Pa?” Vonetta asked.
    Miss Hendrix snickered and gave Pa a playful tap. “Pa. That sounds old. And country.”
    Pa shrugged it off, but I didn’t. I took note of everything she did and said.
    We were close to the Brooklyn Bridge when Vonetta cried, “Look!”
    â€œWhat?” I asked, convinced it was nothing at all. I had been staring off into the blur of Miss Marva Hendrix’s curly Afro.
    â€œLook-look!” she cried out.
    And then I saw it. We all saw what Vonetta could seefrom hundreds of feet away. A billboard of Jackie, Jermaine, Tito, Marlon, and Michael sporting big applejack caps over their even bigger Afros. We screamed. The letters on the billboard