MY FIRST WHIPPING! (C) 2022

AND I NEVER SAID, "THANK YOU, MOMMA!"

A Message of Ingratitude

(c) 2022 Wayne D. Lewis, Sr.

MY FIRST WHIPPING! (subject to editing)

The night that I arrived home on Louisiana Ave. (Now named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), it was most likely after midnight. I was running home knowing that I had not only stayed out after dark, I was essentially missing. It was not my intent. I knew that momma was going be mad! Madder than she had ever been. Which is saying a lot, because I had never seen momma mad.

I had fallen asleep at the Grogan's family home. The three kids there that I had often played with when I would run the streets of Patterson, LA were perhaps my closest friends.

We had fallen asleep on the living room floor watching the floor model tv, with the large antenna on the top, and the antenna that ran outside, on the side of the house and reached way into the sky.

As I had awaken during the night, the room where we had all fallen asleep, was dark. Like, no-other-lights-were-on-in-the-house, dark. What little light that came into the house, came through the living room door because it came from the streetlight on the corner, across the street, Louisiana and Cherry Street.

It was just enough light for me to quickly gather myself together, find the lock on the door, and sneak out quickly and as quietly as I could without waking everyone else up in the house.

I stepped out onto porch, and unlatched the screened door, and tipped into the darkness of their front yard. My house where my mother lived with Uncle Anderson and Uncle Frank was less than a block away. A country block if you will. I don't know how long I paused before I broke out into the fast run my little 5-year-old legs could carry me, but run I did.

The distance to our home didn't bother me as much as the darkness between the light on the street where I hesitated and the big shadow of darkness to the light where I had to run to. I don't know to this day, that if a light was out, or that was how the lights were spaced. But the fear of what was waiting for me at home, was greater than the half a block of darkness that stood in my way.

I believed that I reached the front porch in mere seconds, but that time was not going to be deducted in my favor as I reached the right side of the double house that my mother shared with Uncle Anderson and Uncle Frank.

I ran through the muddy front yard, where a single pipe stood up out of the ground at the front of our house, as the main source of water to the shanty-type home. I was where I shared a bedroom with Uncle Frank in the left rear room off of the kitchen; where Uncle Anderson slept in the front room on the left side of the house, and my mother slept in the front room on the right-side house. None of those things matter as much in terms of who slept where, or what pluming came out of the ground, or nothing else, I was home, more terrified for what was about to come.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!!" It was a question that came more as a chorus rather than from one single person.

Sadly, there were no hugs of fulfillment, or glad that I was safe. Instead, I was being verbally subjected to what was the beginning of a punishment that I would never forget.

Uncle Anderson, and Uncle Frank seemed to roar with the most outraged. I don't recall hearing my mother, but I know that she was saying something as she sat on her big warm quilted bed, across from a fireplace that was not burning. She may have been cursing, or praying, I'm not sure. But the outcome for me was yet to come. I was about to get my first whipping, from Uncle Anderson.