My life in the sunshine season 1 episode 2
MY LIFE IN THE SUNSHINE Season 1:Episode 2
Baby Girl, Don’t You Tell Nobody!
Mar 03, 2026
Chiiile, where was I?
Oh yes. That woman packed us up, put us in a taxi, and took us away from our daddy and everything we knew. I was seven. Lil Louis was barely two. We had two bags and whatever she decided mattered enough to carry.
I want to be fair here. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to be fair about my mother. Some days I’m better at it than others. What I can tell you is that she was a short, dark-skinned girl from Donaldsonville with no money, two children, and nowhere obvious to go. So she went to her sister.
That was her first mistake. Her sister did not want us there.
“Weeze, what are you doing here? You didn’t call or nothing, you just show up at my doe with two churrin?”
My Aunt Anne lived in the Shannon Homes projects. She had three sons of her own and was raising a grandson named Roman. Roman never missed an opportunity to try to get me alone somewhere. We were second cousins, if that helps you process it. It didn’t help me.
My mother stood at that door with her two children and her two bags and said the most honest thing I ever heard her say:
“I didn’t have nowhere else to go. I don’t have no money.”
“Well I’m not going to give you any of mine,” Aunt Anne said. “You should’ve thought about all that before you left.”
And that was that. The three of us slept on her living room floor. There were no cots or soft pillows, just the floor.
Now let me give you some background on why Aunt Anne answered that door with her whole chest full of grievance. There was a seventeen-year gap between her and my mother. Seventeen years. My grandmother — who I had not yet met at this point, but was about to — had left Aunt Anne with someone when she was young, ran off, and married the man who would become my grandfather. My grandmother then proceeded to have ten children, of whom only three survived: my mother, Aunt Anne, and their brother Edward.
So Aunt Anne spent her whole life watching her mother choose everyone else. And when my mother showed up at her door, all she saw was another version of the woman who had left her.
I get it. I do. Family wounds travel. I just wish they hadn’t traveled quite so directly into my seven-year-old spine.
We were barely there two weeks when one afternoon after school, Lil Louis and I were quietly escorted — and I mean that literally, someone walked us there. Down the sidewalk to a much smaller apartment a few minutes away.
My grandmother’s place.
Now. My grandmother.
She had crossed eyes, what folks called “good hair” — meaning softer texture. It was said that she had “Indian or something in her,” which is what Black people say when they don’t have the full story of their own bloodline. And she yelled. Not occasionally. Constantly. At a volume that suggested she believed everyone around her was partially deaf.
Her space was tiny beyond description. A living room where she slept. A bathroom the size of a generous thought. A back area divided from the living room by hopes and prayers and a curtain that had given up. Her son Edward also lived there. He was tall and dark like my mother and had a complicated relationship with bathing, which the visible dirt on his clothes and the atmosphere around him confirmed daily.
My mother tells this part of the story this way:
“I came home from work and found that my children and all our stuff had been dumped at my mother’s place. My sister didn’t want me there so she got rid of us.”
What I remember is standing in my grandmother’s doorway looking at a space that was not built for five people, understanding at seven years old that I had become a problem to be solved rather than a child to be kept.
I decided the best way to handle this was to get us kicked out.
I talked back. I left without permission and came home whenever I felt like it. I antagonized everyone in that apartment with the focused dedication of a child who has decided that if she cannot control where she lands, she can at least control how long she stays. I wanted my daddy. I wanted my room. I wanted my toys. I thought if I made enough trouble, someone would send me back.
Nobody sent me back.
The only peace I had — real peace, real food, real anything — was school. ME Norman Elementary. I loved it there the way you love a place that has no idea what your home looks like. At school I was just a girl. A little loud maybe. A little much. But just a girl.
Eventually my mother stopped working. Up to this point she’d had two part-time jobs. Working as a housekeeper at the Holiday Inn, while cleaning at the city hospital didn’t add up to enough. So she quit and got on government assistance. And a funny thing happened: we went from being five people crammed into my grandmother’s apartment to having our very own one-bedroom unit in the projects. Food stamps. Welfare payments. Clothes for me and Lil Louis. A door that was ours to close. Apparently it made more sense to NOT work because not working qualified you to receive help.
I should have felt relief. I mostly felt my mother’s eyes on me.
Lows in the 80’s
My mother decided that dealing with my hair was too much trouble.
I was seven years old with hair that only needed conditioner and a brush to be pulled into pretty ponytails. She decided that wasn’t easy enough, so she started relaxing it. For those who don’t know what a relaxer does to a seven-year-old scalp that has never had chemicals on it, let me explain. It burns. And because I was seven and no one had explained the no-scratch rule before a relaxer, I scratched. And because I scratched, I had sores. And because I had sores and she put relaxer on them anyway, I had a burning, weeping scalp for most of my childhood.
This is how I learned that my comfort was an inconvenience.
Our neighborhood was full of women. Big, brick-house women with loud laughs and opinions about everything. I used to watch them from the stoop the way I would later learn to watch a subject through a lens, waiting for the moment they forgot someone was looking. Our next-door neighbor Miss Helen had a laugh you could hear through the walls. Full and round, like she meant it every single time. Hers was my favorite. Full and round, head thrown back, nothing withheld. I memorized it. I didn't know yet that I was memorizing it. I just knew it was worth keeping.
These women seemed happy. They seemed to like me. I was offered sweets and hugs regularly.
The one person in my life who did not hug me was my mother.
She was busy calling me whores and sluts. I was seven.
“Go upstairs and get my cigarettes, bitch!”
I want to pause here and let that sentence exist in the air for a moment.
I was. Seven.
“Weeze, don’t talk to that baby like that,” a neighbor would say.
“She’s a fucking ugly bitch and I can’t stand her.”
My tears made her angrier. So I practiced not crying. I got very good at it. I got so good at it that eventually I couldn’t tell the difference between not crying and not feeling, and that distinction matters, but I wouldn’t understand why for decades.
Our neighbor Gwen was a nice lady. She had a son Lil Louis’s age. We called him Foot, don’t ask me why, that’s just what he was called. Miss Gwen was the kind of woman who checked on people, who noticed things. She brought milk and cereal without being asked and didn’t make you feel small for needing it.
One afternoon she stopped by while my mother was in a mood.
“Weeze, I’m going out for a few hours. Do you want anything for the kids?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d bring me back some ham and bread. That lil girl ate all of it with her greedy ass.”
I was sitting right there. I want to be clear about that. I was sitting in the same room.
“All kids eat a lot, Weeze.”
“She’s just greedy. Her ass just wants to eat up everything so nobody else has anything.”
Gwen looked at me the way grown women look at children when they’re trying to communicate something they can’t say out loud. Then she turned back to my mother with a different look entirely.
“Starlet, do you want to come with me to the movies? E.T. is playing. I’m taking Foot and my little sister. You want to come?”
E.T. Everyone at school was talking about E.T. During Scholastic week Gwen had given me two dollars to buy a book and I had chosen the big picture book about the making of that movie. I read it seventeen times. I didn't care much about the alien, I cared about the photographs. How they built the creature. How they lit him so he looked like he had a soul. I didn't know what cinematography was. I just knew someone had decided exactly where to point the camera, and that decision had made me feel something.
“Yes! Yes I wanna go!”
“She ain’t going.” My mother didn’t even look up.
“Why can’t I go?” The words were out before I could stop them.
“Because I said you can’t. Shut the fuck up. Don’t fucking ask me why.”
“Weeze,” Gwen said carefully, “I’ll pay for everything. Her ticket, her popcorn, her Coke. It won’t cost you a thing. That way you just have the baby and you can relax a while—”
“I said no. I don’t have no money to pay you back.”
“You don’t need to pay me back—”
“No.”
I looked at my mother. I am not too proud to tell you I looked at her with the most pleading eyes a seven-year-old has ever assembled.
“Mama. Please. I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be so good.”
Her hand came fast. My face went hot and stinging all at once, that particular burn that lives in your cheek and behind your eye and doesn’t leave for an hour.
“Weeze!” Gwen stepped forward. “Don’t hit that child. She didn’t do anything.”
“Don’t tell me what to do with my fucking children.”
I looked at Gwen. I looked at her with everything I had. Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave me here. I hoped my eyes sent the message in full. She looked back at me with something in her eyes that I now know was helplessness — the particular helplessness of a witness who has no legal authority to do anything but witness.
She sighed. She shook her head. She left.
And I sat there holding my face, watching the door close, understanding something I couldn’t name yet about the difference between people who love you and people who are allowed to keep you.
What I imagined it looked like inside that theater. The dark. The big screen. Elliott and E.T. small against that enormous light. I got the proportions wrong but I got the feeling right. My mother threw it away. I drew it again. I always drew it again.
Life continued as it does. Men came around. Short men, tall men. Some were thin, others were more robust. Mr. C was tall and handsome. He reminded me of a Black Magnum P.I. Whenever he came over I was sent next door to Miss Helen’s or put outside if it was daylight. I didn’t ask why. I had learned not to ask why. Afterwards he’d pat me on the head and smile. He was a nice man.
Several months later my mother’s belly started showing.
“Yo mama pregnant?” a neighborhood girl Tanya asked one day.
“I don’t know.”
“Whatchu mean you don’t know?”
I meant exactly what I said. I had never heard the word pregnant. I thought my mother was getting fat. The women in our neighborhood were all big. I was busy with my dolls.
“You still play with dolls?” Tanya asked.
This was apparently remarkable information. She filed it next to the Christmas tree we still had up in February, which she had also found remarkable.
Every time I thought about voicing an opinion I swallowed it first and checked for danger. Because every time I opened my mouth at home I was slapped, kicked, or beaten. So mostly I said nothing and acted out and swore a lot. That was my language. Profanity as self-expression. My mother taught me that one.
There was a party. I’m not entirely certain whose idea it was to have the whole neighborhood crammed into our tiny one-bedroom project apartment, but that’s what happened. My cousin Easton was spending the night with me. I loved having her there. She was funny and smart and had beautiful slanted eyes and absolutely no fear of confrontation on my behalf. She had appointed herself my protector and she took the job seriously.
I don’t recall what started it that night. I rarely do with my mother. The thing that started it was almost never the real reason. The real reason was something older and deeper and had nothing to do with me, though she aimed it at me with precision.
What I know is this: she came upstairs to where Easton and I were. She dragged me from the bedroom. She threw my body — and I want you to understand that I was a small child, that throwing me was not difficult — hard against the staircase. Those stairs were lined and raised in texture, which is what gave me the particular scars under my chin that I still carry today.
Then she began to kick me. My sides. My head. The music downstairs was loud enough to swallow the sounds.
I begged her to stop. That always made it worse. If you can picture yourself throwing a rag doll to the floor and then deciding the doll deserved more — that is the closest image I can give you.
She pinned me to the top of the stairs and punched my face. Then kicked my head again. Then punched. She was pregnant. I want you to hold that alongside everything else.
I managed to roll away. Limped back into the bedroom, then collapsed on the hard wood floor.
“You stupid, ugly bitch. I wish you were dead. You’re a worthless mother fucking piece of shit.”
She sat on my back and kept hitting me until she was winded. I struggled to breathe under her weight. Afterwards, her belly made it hard to stand up straight, which was the only thing that stopped her. Not mercy. Exhaustion. And probably the baby in distress.
When she finally went back downstairs to her party, Easton ran to me. She picked up what was left of me and rocked me and cried over me, which was more than my mother had ever done with me under good circumstances.
“The next time that bitch hits you,” Easton said, “I’m going to beat that baby out of her.”
I believed her. Sort of. Mostly I just wanted to sleep. I was so tired. Not just from that night. From all of it. From the whole accumulated weight of being a child that someone had decided was a problem.
I closed my eyes and let Easton hold me and I slept.
And then there were three
My second brother Keith was born in May of 1983.
He was one of the most beautiful babies I’d ever seen. The whole projects talked about how pretty he was. Lil Louis and I stayed at Miss Helen’s while my mother was at the hospital, and when she came home with this small perfect boy, something in the apartment shifted. For a while, things were quieter. Even I behaved. It is hard to be angry in the same room as a beautiful baby.
That lasted a little while.
It was a Saturday morning. I know because Lil Louis and I were watching cartoons. Tom and Jerry for him, Voltron: Defender of the Universe for me. I loved those lions. I had asked for one once at Kroger’s.
“You don’t deserve anything,” my mother had said. “So don’t ask.”
I thought about those lions while I watched the show.
Lil Louis started crying about something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something small and Saturday morning and nothing. The next thing I knew my mother was hitting me with a metal table leg.
Let me explain what that means. My daddy had sent over many of my toys by taxi after we left. One of them was a heavy play set from the late seventies. The kind built to last, with real metal legs, not the hollow plastic things they make now. My mother had taken the table apart.
She was holding Keith with one arm. She was hitting me with the other.
When she made contact with my back I went down. When I was down she hit harder. My back. My legs. Over and over. Miss Gwen heard me screaming and ran in from next door.
“Girl, what is WRONG with you? You can’t be beating that child like this!”
Like this. As opposed to some other way that would have been acceptable. I noted that.
“What are you hitting her for?” Miss Gwen demanded.
“She made her little brother cry.”
“No I didn’t,” I said from the floor. “I didn’t do anything. She hits me for no reason.”
Miss Gwen looked at my mother the way you look at someone you are trying very hard not to say the wrong thing to. She took the table leg out of her hand. She crouched down next to me.
“Weeze,” she said quietly, “you can’t send this girl to school like this. They are going to call the state on you.”
That was the concern. Not the child on the floor. The state finding out about the child on the floor.
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
Not because I’m angry — I mean, I’m angry, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is how it worked. This is the ecosystem I grew up inside. The problem was not the violence. The problem was the visibility of the violence. Keep it hidden and it wasn’t a problem. Let someone official see it and now we had a situation.
Miss Gwen moved away a few weeks later. Took her kindness and her Kroger runs and her two dollars for Scholastic books with her. I didn’t blame her. I missed her so much it felt like a hole in the building.
Miss Deb moved into her apartment. She was a tall redbone with red hair to match. And she was nice to me. Told me I was a pretty little thing while my mother rolled her eyes and told me to go outside. Miss Deb had her own chaos: sons who drank bleach and came home with creatures living in their bodies. She handled each emergency with the same breathless energy.
“Weeze! You got tweezers? This boy got a worm in his ass!”
I am not making that up.
Lows In The Mid 80’s
It was 1985. We Are The World was at the top of the music charts. Back to the Future was the must see movie in theaters. I didn’t get to go. No reason given. Just told no.
This was also the year a man moved in with us. He’d just gotten out of the state penitentiary.
I found that out when I was sixteen. At the time I just knew everyone called him Peanut and my mother seemed happy when he was around and happy meant the beatings stopped, so I was cautiously, provisionally, carefully glad he was there.
That lasted less than a week.
He waited until the house was quiet and I was sleeping. His hand moved under my nightgown, under my underwear, and found me.
I want to tell you I screamed. I want to tell you I told my mother. I want to tell you that I did the thing you’re supposed to do when someone does that to you.
I didn’t do any of those things. I had already spent years learning what secrets cost and that telling them costs more. I lay there, pretending to stir, and he ran out of the room. I added that first violation by him to the room inside me that was getting full.
After that he would walk around the apartment naked when my mother wasn’t home. Or wear a robe and stand in front of me and open it, revealing his nudity. Every time I would get up and leave the room. I never ran. Running would have meant something. I just left. Quietly. Deliberately. Found my book and went outside. Found Kayla across the way. Found Tiffany next door, who had become my angel of escape. Miss Helen had moved away and now Tiffany and her family were there. We were the same age, her apartment was where I spent every minute I could.
One day our neighbor Miss Ofelia came to visit. She was a gorgeous woman and she got the full Peanut treatment. He staged a fall down the stairs, robe open, everything on display.
“Oh my God, Louise! Where are you?”
He lay there like he expected applause.
Miss Ofelia looked at me. I looked at Miss Ofelia. In that look passed everything that we both knew and neither of us was going to say. She left as quickly as she’d come.
I went and found my book.
I want to say something about books. They were not a hobby. They were not enrichment. They were oxygen. I read everything I could get my hands on because inside a book was the only place I existed without anyone’s hands on me or voice in my ear telling me what I was worth. Inside a book I was just a mind. No body. No mother. No brothers. No Peanut. No project apartment. Just words and the world they made.
Books were not the only thing. There was also whatever I could draw on or take a mental snapshot. Notebook margins. Grocery bags. One time the inside cover of a library book, which cost me a fine I didn't have. I drew and made those mental snapshots of what I saw because drawing it meant I had really looked at it, and nothing in my life felt like mine until I had looked at it that way. Looked at it long enough to own it.
I carried that with me everywhere. It is probably why I’m writing this now.
My books were my world
When I turned eleven, my period arrived during a game of four square outside.
I looked at Tiffany with wide eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Something is happening.”
I ran inside and straight to the bathroom. I stood there looking at my underwear drenched in blood and understood with complete certainty that I was dying.
“Mama! I’m dying!”
She came in. Looked at the situation, then looked at me.
She rolled her eyes, then disappeared for a moment behind the door.
Upon her return, she threw a tampon at my head.
“Put that on and go back outside.”
I stood there looking down at a tampon I didn’t know how to use, in a body I didn’t understand, bleeding into my eleven-year-old underwear.
New tears began to fall. I picked up the tampon and went next door to talk to Tiffany and her mom Miss Linda. Miss Linda gave me a large maxi pad, new underwear, and told me all about the joys of becoming a woman. The rest of it, I figured it out myself.
Like I figured out everything else.
