A HOT GIRL SUMMER
Prologue
July 23, 1984
It hit 98 degrees. The hottest damn day of the year.
I popped out of my Mama’s coochie screaming, like the world already owed me something.
Temple Hospital was an oven that day. The air conditioners broke down hours ago.
The old fans whistling in every corner but barely moving the thick Philly heat.
The heat wasn’t playing with nobody that day.
Nurses fanned themselves with clipboards.
Doctors wiped sweat from their necks. The whole maternity ward smelled of antiseptic and exhaustion. But none of that mattered.
Mama’s voice ripped through the hallway. One long, raw scream that echoed down the hall. Then silence. And here comes me. Wailing. Mama later told me it wasn’t a cry; it was a warning.
Philly heat ain’t regular heat. It climbs inside your lungs. Clings to you. Sticks in your throat. Makes the air thick, like Philly soup. That summer had already been brutal. But this Thursday wasn’t a regular hot day. The city was being pushed past what it was used to, and the block felt it.
Mama’s water had broke right before dawn.
She was barely twenty-one, on baby number two.
Still squeezing into Lee jeans that barely buttoned over her belly.
Gold hoop earrings, lip liner dark as midnight, sweat curling the edges of her pressing comb work.
My Aunt Dee used to say Mama dressed too fly to be about to deliver; like she was about to hit the club instead of Temple Hospital.
The ride to Temple Hospital was chaotic.
Aunt Dee’s busted Crown Vic wheezed down Broad Street.
Windows rolled all the way down wasn’t no breeze coming through. Mama was cussing the whole way.
“Damn air don’t work, Dee! We gon’ melt before we get there.”
She shifted in her seat, hand clutching her belly.
“Fuck!!! Dis baby tryna claw her way out.”
Aunt Dee smacked her gum, with one hand resting on the wheel, the other fiddling with the radio. The dial landed on WDAS, Frankie Beverly & Maze, pouring smooth through the static.
“Relax, Niecy. You gon’ be fine. Jus’ breathe.”
“Breathe?” Mama shot back,
“You ain’t got no baby pushin’ out ya coochie right now. Don’t tell me ta breathe!”
When they pulled up to Temple Hospital, Mama was yelling, laughing, cursing God and thanking Him all in the same breath.
Forty minutes later, I arrived. Small and loud. The nurses said I came out swinging. My little fists balled up, like I was already pushing back against a force I couldn’t see yet. Told Mama like it was cute, like it was just a funny story to tell later. But in West Philadelphia, that meant more.
See, babies don’t know nothing about the world they coming into. And still, some of us arrive and we already feel it. We understand, deep in us, that life ain’t about to come smooth. And if you want anything out of it, you better be ready to fight for it from the very start.
I had beautiful brown skin, shiny like a new penny, hair curling tight against my scalp, eyes wide open. I was peeping game before I could even talk. Mama named me Summer. Because of the day. Because of the heat. Because she swore I was gonna shine brighter than anything, even the sun.
“Summer Lynn Drake,” she whispered, kissing my forehead.
“My baby girl. You gon’ change everythang.”
Big Mama said the heatwave was a bad omen. Said that babies born on hot days grew up to be hot-headed, chasing trouble.
“She gon be fire, jus’ like you.” Big Mama said.
Mama laughed and told her,
“Nah, this one gon’ be different.”
She didn’t know how right she was. I started in the fire, but I wasn’t meant to be consumed by it. I was meant to carry it.
In West Philadelphia, heat was survival. It made hustlers hustle harder. Made babies cry louder. Made arguments spill out the windows and drift down the block. Heat was in the rhythms blasting from open car windows. In the sweat rolling down Mama’s back as she cradled me.
My Daddy wasn’t there. Folks said he was, ‘In the streets,’ which was code for hustling, high, or locked up.
Truth was, he was all three at different times.
By ’84, he was chasing highs more than he was chasing family.
Mama used to say he had charm for days, brown-skinned with sexy eyes, a grin that could sell water to a whale, but the block ate him alive.
On that day, the day his daughter was born, he was probably leaning against the hood of a car, high off the pipe, counting crumpled bills with dirty fingers.
Mama didn’t cry about it, at least not in front of folks. She was too proud. But I know inside, it cut her deep, birthing a daughter on the sweatiest day of the year with no man by her side.