A Ship of Fools
By Adrienne Christian
The Ship of Fools, painting (oil on wood) by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1490-1500)
I was 19; he was 32. We’d met in September 1997 at the Med-Inn hotel, where both of us worked – me as the afternoon front desk clerk, him as the daytime bellhop. We found out we were pregnant on Thanksgiving Day, after I’d eaten at his mom’s, eaten at my mom’s, eaten at his friend’s house, and was still hungry.
I knew right away that I wanted an abortion. It was only my first semester of my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, and I knew I wanted to finish school. But this was 1998, the year Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” came out.
I imagine everyone here knows Lauryn’s classic album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But if you don’t remember the lyrics to “To Zion” she says,
But everybody told me to be smart
Look at your career they said
Lauryn, baby use your head
But instead, I chose to use my heart
Now the joy of my world is in Zion
Now the joy of my world is in Zion
Inspired, and brought to my knees by these lyrics, I did what any expectant mother would do – I started planning. Here was my plan: I would keep the baby, but my family wouldn’t know about it. Because I’d gotten pregnant in October, I would certainly be showing by May when the semester ended. So I would tell my mom I had a summer internship in New York, where my best friend Tamika was a student at Columbia. I’d tell her I was staying at Tamika’s while I worked my internship. When I needed to call home, I would first call Tamika and she’d call my mom so that her # showed up on the caller id. (These were the days before ubiquitous cell phones.) And, when my mom called me, Tamika would say I wasn’t home, but she could take a message. This would work because my mom and I didn’t talk that much on the phone. Usually just on Sundays. I’d deliver the baby in July, and the baby would stay with Eric, my boyfriend and the father of the child, during my junior and senior years, while I still lived in the dorms.
AFTER I graduated in May of 2001, THEN I’d tell my mom about the baby. That way, she wouldn’t have any concerns about me not finishing school because of the baby. I’d have my degree and be well on my way to having a career. I’d also have my baby. Lauryn would be proud.
By the time I got pregnant, I’d changed jobs. I waited tables during the 3-11 shift at Chili’s. Before my shift, I used the Chili’s payphone to call Eric and tell him my plan. He was ecstatic! He brought flowers to my job that evening. And what followed was more planning – the baby’s name, the baby’s room, the books I’d read to baby.
But one day, as Eric and I lay in bed dreaming about little Evan if it was a boy, or little Ebony if it was a girl, Eric started disgusting me with some of the things he was saying — reading to the baby while he or she was in the womb was stupid. The baby couldn’t hear it after all; that was white people stuff. And, the baby wouldn’t have to go to college; he hadn’t gone to college himself, and had turned out just fine. When I protested, saying, “But if the baby wants to get a good job, he’s going to have to go to college,” to which Eric said, “It don’t matter what job he got. So long as he work hard at what he do, it don’t matter.” I countered with, “So, if our son is, say, a drug dealer, that’s fine with you, so long as he’s the best drug dealer in the city?” He said, “Yes.” It occurred to me then that Eric was a fool.
For a while, I stayed in bed cuddled with him, but I started really thinking about things, really thinking about us. I began to see him in a different light. And I began to see all the many “romantic” things he’d been doing for me in a different light:
As I said, Eric worked the day shift, 7-3. And I worked the afternoon shift, 3-11. After he got off, he’d go home and shower, eat, change clothes, and then come to my job and hang out with me from about 5 until 11. I’d been looking at this as romantic. Now I began to see it as ridiculous.
I also began to see it as ridiculous that Eric didn’t have a car. In fact, he was often driving mine. He still lived in an apartment, too.
It occurred to me that he was interested in a 19-year-old because he was mentally a teenager himself.
Fueled by disgust and disdain for him all of a sudden, I made a very impulsive decision. I popped out of bed and told Eric I wanted an abortion. I called my sister, Tasha, and asked her to please make me an appointment for ASAP. I got dressed, got in my car, and sped down to Detroit to the abortion clinic.
Again, this was before everyone had cell phones, but I had a pager, and Eric was beeping me 911. He was even calling my voicemail at my dorm room in case I checked the messages remotely. “Please don’t abort Evan,” he cried. But it was too late.
*
Did I regret my impulsive decision? Yes. The way the doctor vacuumed out my baby and then darted from the room like some sort of weird scientist, like he was getting a few hundred dollars on the black market for every dead fetus he produced, the thought of it gave me the creeps.
I also regretted it because of the pain I experienced afterwards – I had to take Motrin by the handful. The Tetracycline made me sick to my stomach. The giant maxi pad, I called it a mattress, was still not large enough to hold all the blood and clumps of stuff coming out of my vagina.
And, much later, there was the pain of What If? What if my husband and I were having trouble conceiving in 2012 because God was punishing me for having had an abortion?
There was also the terror of knowing that abortion was a tradition in my family – my mother had tried to abort my sister, but was already 5 months along when she’d found out she was pregnant. Then she’d tried to have a “backyard abortion” but it hadn’t worked. My sister, too, had had half a dozen abortions herself.
But then, more than 23 years later, I reconnected with Eric when he found me on Facebook, and I rediscovered that he was indeed the biggest fucking idiot I’d ever met.
In 1998, he was working at the Med-Inn Hotel. Guess where he was working in 2018? Yes, the Med-Inn Hotel.
In 1999, he was a bellman at the Med-Inn hotel. Guess what he was working as in 2018? Yes, a bellman.
In 1999, he didn’t see anything wrong with a 32-year-old man dating a teen girl, and in 2018, he didn’t see anything wrong with posting and promoting R. Kelly jokes and memes on his Facebook page:
1. Did you know R Kelly had a chance to be a professional basketball player? Only problem was he never wanted to score after the first period.
2. I can't resist peeing on women. It's my R. Kelly's heel.
3. All this rubbish about R. Kelly allegedly marrying a fifteen-year-old are ridiculous. Everyone knows he prefers twenty nine year-olds. Mostly because there are twenty of them.
4. What's the difference between greyhound racing and R. Kelly? The greyhounds wait for the hare.
On one of his posts I responded, “I’m surprised you’re laughing at what these young women have endured – especially since you have a daughter and granddaughter.”
He wrote, “It’s just a joke, Adrienne.”
I responded, “No, jokes are funny. This is not.”
We went back and forth about it for several posts. Then he unfriended and blocked me.
*
In preparation for this essay, I read women’s abortion stories online. One woman said, “Having an abortion was the best decision I ever made.” I was shocked. And to be honest, I was a little bit disturbed. (The best decision?) But her statement probably had such an impression on me because having that abortion at 19 really was the best decision I ever made, because hitching your wagon to a fool is not without consequences. A ship of fools drowns.
When Eric and I were dating in the late 90s, I knew he had a daughter, Erica. She was seven. She was my homegirl. When she would visit, I’d take her to get hamburgers and ice cream, and race her in the long halls of Bursley Residence Hall where I lived. But when Eric and I became reacquainted in 2018, he had a confession: he had not only his daughter, Erica, but Erica had a big brother. A son he’d never mentioned, Eric Jr.
“You have a son?” I gasped.
“Yeah. I kept it from you because I was embarrassed. Because his mother is a crackhead.”
So, in our household — on our ship — would have been:
Me, an impulsive 19-year-old kid foolish enough to think she could hide a pregnancy and baby for three years.
Eric, who thought little girls getting pissed on by grown men, on video, was just the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Eric’s first baby mama, a crackhead
Eric Junior, a crack baby, and,
Eric’s second baby mama, Jeanette, who hated that her daughter loved me, and had once tried to physically fight me over that fact.
As an African-American woman, I know the stories about enslaved women who drowned their newborns to save them from the terror of slavery. They did it not out of hatred, but out of mercy. I feel strongly that I am in this same category of women. My baby is in heaven now. Not at the bottom of the sea.
Dr. Adrienne Christian (she/her) is a writer and fine art photographer. She is the author of three poetry collections: Worn (2021), A Proper Lover (2017), and 12023 Woodmont Avenue (2013). Common themes in her work are family, love, and African-American life.