Dawne, 22, Tacoma
>>The prompt: 400-word autobiography
A woman can only stay on the pill for five years before doctors caution she may be causing damage to her body. So five years after my mother had my brother, seven years after she had my sister, her clock was up and I was born in Inglewood, California. The morning I was born my father was hit by a phenol gas that almost cost him his life; so it was said by Auntie Lynn, Ester, Jay and Rita that having babies at thirty-five might kill your husband. But it was the ‘80s, crack was in full effect and hit hard on the block, so we left for Seattle in a burgundy Lincoln Continental, settled on a hill, and kept the same friends for fifteen years. I went to college, forgot about the block, figured out I loved to write and started making stories about the family like I was Jon Boy Walton. When we moved to Seattle my father gave up welding to be a chef, like he was when he was twenty before we were all born and he lived in Hamilton, Ohio, and bought his own restaurant with hustling money. He was forty-eight when he decided to be a chef; he’d been with mom for thirty years and had three grandkids at his graduation screaming, “Ouch Papa, we like your hat!” I have no kids. A fear of commitment. I’m close to my mother and black girls say I talk white. I’m twenty-two now. I finished school in June, with a Bachelors’ in Creative Writing, and half the people that were supposed to come to my barbeque didn’t show. I’ve spent the last two months looking for a job and when I go to the club men call me Beyonce. So I do the “Uh-Oh.” I don’t tell them that I write or that I was breast-fed until I was two, that my family eats Sunday dinner together, and that I have two best friends that make me tea. We’ve left California and we’ve built a circle here; both my siblings have two kids and everyone in town knows my parents live on the hill where the grass is never cut, the children are in the yard Harlem Shaking to Hilary Duff, and my siblings and I are inside making plates to go, leaving to do something, but always coming back for more.
Dawne – Age 22 – Tacoma, WA
from 400 Words, Issue 1–Autobiographies
page 32
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