ISAIAH’S FAMILY

A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty

of

California State University, East Bay

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in English

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By

Darlene Martinez

March 2018 ISAIAH'S FAMILY

By

Darlene Martinez

Approved: Date:

r >

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Table of Contents

Prologue ...... 1

I. Charlotte the Liar—The beginning ...... 2

Persephone Unbound ...... 6

Elaine’s House ...... 15

Momma’s New House ...... 17

Charlotte at Stanley’s House ...... 21

Aunt Helen ...... 23

II. Isaiah the Pedophile ...... 26

III. Betty Anne ...... 43

The house on 5912 East 43rd Street...... 54

IV. Candace’s Shame ...... 55

V. Jane...... 62

VI. Charles ...... 69

VII. Charlotte - The Middle Years ...... 71

VIII. Wade Jr...... 77

IX. Charlotte Part 2 – The End ...... 78

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For every ending there is a beginning that paves the way into the future.

Prologue

Charlotte’s losses are so many that she thinks them irrelevant to her life. Bhere are always a few people, and a dream that lingers. Even when it is thought that all hope has been siphoned away like oil from a car. And when those few people face threat or when that dream is knocked on its hinges, and the threat of everything potentially being lost happens, the rift in a life either mends or tears apart becoming a caricature of what it could have been. In a literature class, Charlotte reads Pecola Breedlove’s story and her fabrication of a sunshine and roses life unwinds into a breakdown. She has been locked into a delusion that everyone could see but her. It is in reading this story she understands that some fiction holds universal truths because she feels secrets in her life have been written but she’s never told the story.

Reading and writing are the graces Charlotte thought she received from God, because everything else in her life comes from hell. And the fear of losing her dream of writing leaves her reeling in a room where blood runs down the uterus walls of her body and the four walls close in on her as sticky wet blood clots her panties. She remembers her life and its beginnings at 5912 E. 43rd Street, and it cripples her.

It is a way station for poor colored folks trying to come up in this world with little or no education. For this community of folks, it is a slice of heaven and a step up from outhouse-living on former plantations. Their dreams of ownership fulfilled in the small rural town of MacAlmont, which is not shown on the map. A town rose between Little

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Rock and Jacksonville built around factories and itinerant workers eking out a living; but

the setting is idyllic on the unpaved road and dirt sidewalks. Rose trees in some front

yards, with borders of honeysuckle flowers, strawberries, cherries, and blackberries

perfume the long summer days. Days playing in the woods, digging bait for fishing, and

watching butterflies and dragonflies speak the language of nature as children play horse

in the dirt with pocket knives.

Inside PawPaw’s house lives are filled with fear, shame, embarrassment, and

human self-perceptions of nothingness. Human identities are forged in beatings, sex,

mental illness, and ignorance. We are the living dead, dependent on nourishment from

the head of the family like an embryo gestating in its mother’s womb and feeding from

her lifeblood as this family feeds off his malevolence.

Here is the family that lives in the house: PawPaw Isaiah, Great Grandma Emma,

Grandma Betty Anne, two boys Wade Jr., and Charles, and two girls, Charlotte and Jane.

Inside this house there is fear, shame, embarrassment, and the self-perception of nothingness that each inhabitant characterizes.

***

I. Charlotte the Liar—The beginning

My earliest memories are of Wade Jr., my older brother, being tied to an iron

chair in the kitchen and whipped with a leather belt by PawPaw, as my grandma begs,

“Isaiah stop.” Wade Jr. sits in the chair, cursing PawPaw as the belt strikes him in no particular pattern, a sliver of blood curdling around his mouth where PawPaw has hit

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him. Tears pool in the blood on his mouth and run into his blue T-shirt. That night I am about four or five years old when my Grandma washes and perfumes me in baby lotion.

She dresses me in new polka dot baby doll pajamas and allows me to go on the front porch when the lights go out in the neighborhood. Batteries are found for the radio. The radio announcer warns that a tornado is passing over the area. The sky turns pitch black, and the full moon provides a dull orange glow that shows a smattering of distant stars against quickening flashes of lightening and the crackling roar of thunder. Sitting on their front porches, all the families living on the street holler from one neighbor to the next, and conversations pass back and forth from one end of the dirt road to the other. I sneak in the alleyway between our house and Old Lady Hobson’s to show off my new clothes to the children playing volleyball in the semi-dark night of lightning and thunder.

My grandma calls to me from the porch “come comb your PawPaw’s hair.”

Happy in my new baby-doll pajamas, I slip through the hole in the screen door and feel my way through the living room into the darkened bedroom. PawPaw fresh from a bath, is dressed in a robe sitting on the side of the bed smoking a cigarette. Later, I would believe that it had all been a set-up, because why else would I be sent into a dark bedroom to comb PawPaw’s hair? This is why I did not tell. The smell of Murray pomade grease, Camel cigarettes, and Aqua Velva aftershave assail my senses in his room, and a wave of dizziness passes through me as what feels like a thousand fingers hurt, stretch me. He is the monster in my dreams.

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In the sixth grade, we are alone in the house. It is here on my 11th birthday that

PawPaw brings me a used white baby doll and gives me five dollars. Heart beating, I ask to go and play. But he pushes me down and positions me on the living room sofa. I began to cry as he laps up the tears with his tongue. The stench of bad breath and cigarettes are nauseating. Pants at his ankles, PawPaw hikes my dress up to the waist, my eyes closed, kicking, he enters me as the eyes on the wall witness the rape. I am paralyzed. That moment is seared in my memory, as he finishes and guides my mouth to his penis. My mind splits into parts before, after, and during the rape. On television

Martin Luther King Jr. marches on Selma. Inside the pain, I want to be the little white girl who sings “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Later, I would know there had been no blood, the hymen long broken with age spotted fingers.

I start ditching school, hiding out in the woods behind the house and reading my grandma’s romance novels. Afraid to go home in daylight, I would wait into the night.

The warm soothing woods of day become a frightening place of critter noises and shadowy figures blowing in the moonlight. Great Grandma Emma dies.

The funeral is like a family reunion with Emma’s five surviving children which includes Grandma Betty Anne, and their children and their children’s children, and their children’s children claiming use of PawPaw’s house right after the burial. For once,

PawPaw stands in the background, afraid to show his true self to other adults. While guests are in the house there is no sticking Grandma’s head in the window sill and threatening to let if fall, there is no threatening to shoot her with one of his hunting guns.

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There is no begging by Grandma to PawPaw, “Isaiah please stop” as he delivers sharp, slow blows to her body and stinging slaps to her face in front of the family.

After the funeral, everyone is hanging out at the house: in the front yard, the kitchen, the children’s bedroom, the living room, and the backyard. In desperation, I take

Candace, my mother, back behind the pig pen and grandma’s garden to talk. Scared but determined, I tell Candace, my mother that “PawPaw touches me. He has sex with me.”

And the wail is long and the silence that follows profound. Immediately, Candace tells

Grandma Betty Anne, and her two brothers and two sisters—great-Uncle John Henry and

Amos, and great Aunt Lovey and Louise about the abuse. I hear their conversation.

“Ain’t nothing happen to that girl. She’s just like her momma wanting attention.

Isaiah ain’t done no shit like that.” Great Uncle Amos yells loudly.

“How do you know? Great Aunt Odie May says, “What if it’s true?”

“What it comes down to is if she can’t stay here, where she gone go. Her momma can barely take care of herself.” Great Uncle Amos points out. Everybody murmurs under their breath, but mine is not the kind of family to reach out a helping hand. They always strike me as being the kind of family that looks for what they can salvage from anybody else’s sorrow. To her credit Grandma Betty Anne doesn’t deny it, but says she has no idea. My great Uncle Amos labels me a liar and the rest of the elders follow his lead. My aunts seem to hang their heads in shame, because even if it were true, what could they do?

***

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Persephone Unbound

Uncle Hades came to visit and watched me and my friends play.

Curiosity formed as we giggled, and watched the man who watched us play.

With company in the house, best behaviors’ we did display. Folded napkins at the table, and silverware placed just so. We all ate together like that 70s television show.

Secrets start in strange ways and they become like friends — growing inside you

until they crawl out of your skin. Uncle Hades took me fishing in his new

Cadillac. At the edge of grandma’s garden — in the center of the woods

— in the hub of nature’s bounty: birds, bees, butterflies, crickets and frogs,

chirped in harmony.

Surrounded by honeysuckles, flowers and trees — the blues captured me.

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Uncle Hades plucked a blooming narcissus and said to me, “ it’s budding — just like you.”

Feeling uncomfortable, I asked to leave.

He touched me, we struggled, and I did not win.

The pain was intense—split into— I wished for a father that cared. I wanted mama but was to ashamed to tell. I told grandma, and she labeled me liar. It was grandma’s fear of Hades and his financial goodwill that made her a prisoner

inside her own skin. “It’s a man’s, man’s world but / it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl”

—James Brown said.

To be a woman in a man’s world is a frightening thing, you never know what tomorrow will bring. “So, I hover between two worlds —locked in the loss of what could have been —and knowing what is;

— I cannot find myself.

***

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I remember the first time we went to stay in California with momma and her

second husband, Meleake, an army sergeant. I had been six. Things had been good. We

lived in a house on 55th and Holloway streets. It was a nicely furnished house in a

neighborhood where some elderly white folks who could not afford to move still lived.

Meleake is stationed in Vietnam so momma gets money from his army allotment

to pay the rent. She works as a motel maid to pay the other bills. Life seems idyllic. We

attend Whittier Elementary school off 63rd Avenue. It is the first time I attend a multiracial school. We are a happy family on Holloway Street. Although, Wade Jr. and

Charles make go carts and ride them in the streets causing the neighbors to complain to

momma.

Mr. Jenkins the landlord comes to the house and threatens momma with eviction.

He tells Candace, “the neighbors are complaining about your oldest son running

homemade go-carts in the street. Mr. Heller who lives in the yellow house on the corner

said your oldest boy has almost caused an accident, and mouthed of, in that contraption

of his on more than one occasion. It has got to stop now.” Momma cries that night. The

next week my stepdaddy comes home on leave. It is the first time we live together as a

family. But we heard the fights at night when they thought us kids sleep. Mostly it was

about momma’s lack of discipline with us. Then the divorce happens, and we go back to

the house on 5912 East 43rd Street. Of that time I remember a shy, quiet, and content

child not afraid to live. When I am eight years old the abuse starts again.

***

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Candace, my mother, is having a difficult life, but she scraps up enough money to

take us girls to California after the funeral, but not enough for the boys so they stay at

PawPaw’s house. On the three-thousand-mile bus ride to California, the stress brings on my first menstrual cycle. Clotted and thick, the blood is like red paint and the cramps severe. Candace explains to me “now you can make a baby if you have sex because you’re bleeding. That’s why I got married at 15, so I wouldn’t get pregnant by my father.” I am glad we’re going to California, but I cannot forget the label of liar, and the refrain cements itself with my identity, growing like a crescendo in my mind liar, liar, liar, liar, liar, liar…

***

Memories follow me in my dreams. Of sleeping in the bed with my brothers and sister; of Charles peeing in the bed; of early dawn mornings just before daylight when

PawPaw made me eat breakfast with him in the kitchen; of going to the bathroom at night and stepping on roaches; of feeling the crunch of a slimy snail beneath my feet, the shell pricking skin as I run barefoot to the bathroom. And of his touch that would not wash away in the living room, bedrooms with the smell of him everywhere. I awaken with the memory of being named liar. I have learned that the truth doesn’t matter. People believe what they have to in order to survive and feel good about their lives, just like Grandma

Betty Anne.

Finally, I realize that my family is different, weird, and just plain fucked up. We had been one of two very poor families on our dirt road with financial problems that

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everyone could see. Our neighbor, Old Lady Hobson and her two grandchildren are poorer, but they don’t give a damn about how folks talk about them. I always feel sad, but filled with laughter, when Ms. Hobson fights with her boyfriend Old Man Ben. He is married to Robby’s mother who lives on top of the hill behind the church and across the street from the cemetery. Their fights would begin as an argument loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Then Ms. Hobson would pull out her shotgun and Ben’s feet would hit the door running. She would curse and scream in the streets while shooting the gun as

Ben ran flat out up the hill. Reloading the shotgun, she would give chase across the school yard in a see-through robe. Everybody knew Old Man Ben stole Ms. Hobson’s money when she got her social security check. Once Ben ran out butt naked to escape, and the whole neighborhood came out to see the spectacle. She would rant and rave, at what seemed like the least little thing, and sometimes she came outside in the yard and flipped her dress up showing her bare ass for folks who thought to judge her.

I wonder why my grandma is always so scared when Ms. Hobson won’t take shit from anybody. I wonder why one is considered as respectable and normal and the other crazy because she speaks her mind. I remember when Ms. Hobson almost shot the insurance man as he ran from her house because he hadn’t turned in several payments to the company, although he had stamped her book. The letter she received from the insurance company about the missing payments told the truth. The insurance man fled to his car yelling out help to anyone listening. Ms. Hobson is nice most of the time and

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never ever afraid to speak her truth. She is an independent black woman, and the only

role-model I remember as a child, her and Great Grandma Emma.

Great Grandma Emma had never been afraid either. When PawPaw pulled his gun

out she would dare him to shoot her. She has always been strange, and people have been

afraid of her because she practices voodoo. These are my thoughts on the long ride to

California. Anything to forget the pain of liar, liar, liar…

***

Changing Houses

The first time Jane and I remember owning store bought clothes outside of socks,

panties, and bras is when Candace takes us shopping where she works at Montgomery

Ward on Fruitvale Avenue and East 14th Street. We also shopped at the Mexican stores

that line the street. I like the new school. I am on my way to becoming teacher’s pet

because I enjoy talking about the books we read for class. My accent, willingness to

learn, and shyness make me different to my classmates. I want to make friends, but I am

afraid to talk to other students; so, I read romance novels on lunch and recess at Elmhurst

Jr. High School. Jane attends Cox Elementary school six blocks down the street.

Three months in at the new school, a girl name Doretha picks a fight with me. I

am scared shitless. Doretha is plain about 5’6 inches tall, with dark blotchy skin, and a

deep husky male sounding voice. She has long, thick, black hair, nice brown eyes, and a

humongous nose that gives her face the appearances of lopsidedness. She plays

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basketball like a dude, and she is a school bully. So when she begins smack talking me, I

cry.

“Why you so stuck up, you think you better than everybody else cause you wear

new clothes every day, crybaby?” Doretha asks.

“No, my momma works at Montgomery Ward’s store, and gets an employee

discount.”

“So fucking what, ain’t nobody ask you about that.” Doretha hauls off and hits

me in the face. Without thinking I pick up a large rock from the nearby flowerbed and hit

her, again, and again, and again, until the teachers break the fight up. Doretha, blood

running down her face yells, steadily, “You gotta walk home after school bitch. I’ll be

waiting.” Ms. Smith walks me to the office and Mr. Green walks Doretha. Parents are

called. The teachers are upset at the amount of violence I displayed, although provoked.

Both of us are suspended for a week. Because I whipped Doretha’s ass, everybody at

school wants to be my friend.

I start ditching school again and catching the bus to different libraries in Oakland.

The downtown Oakland Public Library is my favorite place. While checking out a book

of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I am questioned by a librarian that has noticed me hanging out at

the library. “Young lady, shouldn’t you be in school? Do you have a library card?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“May I see it?”

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I hand over my library card. Soon after my talk with the librarian, a truant officer

knocks on Candace’s door and reveals my complete lack of school attendance. A

monitoring system is set up that lasts for about two months and stops when the funds dry

up.

I start skipping school again, this time hanging out at the San Leandro Library.

Sometimes stealing romance books from the Long’s Drug Store next door on East 14th

and Davis Street. Soon Jane quits school with me, and we begin walking to the San

Leandro Library from our house on 92nd Avenue and Cherry Street to hang out until after

school let out. Lemons and oranges from the fruit filled yards in San Leandro stave off

hunger for our cash strapped family. Reading acts as a sedative and allows me to pretend

the void in my life doesn’t exist. So much so that I am reading every waking moment

that I can, which causes me to neglect my sister Jane’s problems. Jane starts hanging out

with a girl name Michelle. At the same time Candace loses her job at Montgomery Ward

because of an undiagnosed mental illness.

***

The family is in bad circumstances when Wade Jr. comes to stay because he has

gotten into serious trouble in Arkansas. He attends Castlemont High School where he

meets Freddie, a dope dealer. In the midst of her sickness, Candace finds a quart size bag

of white powder under Wade’s rollout bed. She pours it down the toilet, never realizing

its loss could be a matter of life and death for him. “You ain’t my momma” Wade Jr.

said speaking to momma. “You just had us and left us in hell” Wade yells as he hits her.

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Jane and I jump on Wade Jr. and he leaves. That night he tries to set the house on fire.

Nobody pretends anymore. I lay up all day reading books. Jane hangs out with her friends who do drugs. And Candace talks to the stereo.

Three days later Wade comes back, because he owes the drug man for the dope

Candice pour down the toilet. Hungry, he goes to the kitchen where there’s nothing much to eat, but a half box of cereal and a carton of milk. Wade pours all the cereal in a bowl and spits in it, so nobody would eat the cereal while he takes a shower. After he eats and changes clothes, Wade leaves. Candace looks for the welfare check money to send me out for food. Wade has taken the money. We survive off free food and government cheese provided through the neighborhood church. We also steal fruit off trees in the neighborhood. I begin stealing from Food King Grocery Store on 90th Avenue and East

14th Street. Jane is picked up for stealing at the Sears in downtown Oakland.

First, men come to repossess the washer and dryer, the refrigerator is next, and

finally the eviction notice is posted. Candace works within her illness to find someone to

take us in, instead of allowing us to become part of the system. She finds room and board

for us by turning over the welfare check to her friend Elaine. When Jane and I move into

Elaine’s house, I feel responsible for taking care of Jane. Our mother wanders the streets

talking to the voices she hears and sleeping in neighborhood parks. In the day time, mean

kids trail behind her chucking rocks. Jane and I feel helpless to help momma

***

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Elaine’s House

“She’s the good girl.” Elaine tells her girlfriend Patrice about me. “Never gives

me a bit of trouble, and she cooks and cleans real good. She does what she’s told. But

that Jane is a different story, boy crazy she is.” Elaine didn’t care that Jane and I

wouldn’t go to school on a regular basis. She had done her part by enrolling us into school.

Jane’s addiction is like a mother’s need to bond with her newborn child constant

and loving towards crack cocaine. The girls Jane hangout with are older than her. They

are 16 like me. They dress like hoochie mamas, in thigh high boots and see through shirts

that just barely cover their asses. They walk up and down 90th and MacArthur Avenue

selling their bodies to feed their drug use. Michelle runs the crew Jane hangs out with.

Afraid for my sister Jane, I speak to Michelle’s mother, a decent woman, about the situation. The mother has no idea that her daughter uses drugs and stays out all night, because she works as a night shift nurse and sleeps during the day. For a little while things get better.

***

Elaine works overtime a lot, so I babysit. One evening I leave 10-year-old Jacob in charge of his seven-year-old baby sister Vicky while I go to the hoe stroll to find Jane.

Jane and Michelle, and their boyfriends Gerald and Derek are in front of the store on 90th

Avenue hanging around on the sidewalk.

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“Why do you have to sell your body Jane? What do you need money for? It’s

drugs, I know it is, but you have to stop. Please stop Jane, please,” I beg her through

burning eyes and a snot-clogged nose.

“Leave her the fuck alone and go home bitch.” Gerald says. “Just get the fuck

outta here!”

“Fuck you motherfucker,” I respond. “You two-bit piece of nigger shit living off of my sister’s body just to get a fix. You ain’t shit but a junkie.”

“Michelle beat this bitch’s ass, she out here trying to mess with our money.”

Derek jumps in the fray. They fuck me up, a black eye, bruised ribs and a broken fibula.

I still wonder if Jane helps beat me while I lay huddled in the fetal position.

***

Jane stays less than a month in Elaine’s house. Elaine completes a runaway

report, but she still collects the welfare check. On the surface everything resembles

normal, but my mind can’t let go of Jane’s problem. I worry about how to help her. I

start pinching just a little bit of weed from Elaine’s stash to take the edge off of my fears

for Jane and the emptiness of my daily routine. I am scared that Elaine will notice and

put me out of her house, and I am afraid of the way her boyfriend flirts with me: He is

fond of saying “Charlotte you keep a pretty good house, you better be careful some

young man don’t come by and snatch you up. Hell if it what’n for Elaine I’d take you

myself.” I start to bleed from the stress. I buy food for Jane with the $25 a week Elaine

gives me for babysitting.

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Living in Elaine’s house is easy for me. I get to read books and listen to Millie

Jackson music most of the day. I try to help Jane with her addiction, but the addiction is to strong. Days turn into almost a year of depression. My routine is to fix breakfast, clean the house, read, and cook. Almost a year passes this way.

***

Momma’s New House

When I am almost 17 three things happen: momma is diagnosed with schizophrenia and prescribed mind numbing drugs by a medical doctor working at the free clinic; momma’s name is pulled from the Lockwood Garden’s Housing Project’s waiting list; and Jane and I move into the housing project with momma. Numbed by the drugs, momma allows Jane and me to run her household because she is unable to control us. Jane tries to fight her addiction and loses because drugs are as accessible as water in the projects.

The Oakland Unified School District sends a letter to momma about my student status, and they threaten to cut the family’s government assistance if I don’t attend school. At the welfare office, Ms. Elwood speaks with momma.

“Candace, you’re going to have to get control over Ms. Anne here because

Charlotte has to attend school. If she misses more than three classes a semester, your welfare check can be cut 30%. If she misses more than that, the state can elect to remove her from the family or terminate all funds to your family. Do you understand?”

“Yes ma’am”

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“I need you to initial here and here. Sign here.”

I am processed into Castlemont High School where I feel like an alien. So I attend

school infrequently for about two months. Finally, I am enrolled in Dewey High, a

continuation school. There I flourish with the help of a young, motivated, white, blond,

female teacher, Ms. Elm, who takes the time to pull me into the realities of my situation.

I have no job, no income, no future, and a limited education. Eight months at Dewey

High School with a steady diet of science, liberal studies, and math, I pass the GED. But

the most important part of Dewey High School for me is when I learn to journal. Fantasy

writing is my escape.

***

I am never short of boys dogging my footsteps, but liking boys is out of my

wheelhouse. I remember that back home in Arkansas, I had a crush on a light-skinned,

hazel-eyed, slender built boy name George. He is a Jehovah Witness. He is the only boy

I ever knew that grew up like the Beaver on television, except his family went to church

all day on Saturday and Sunday. His mother stayed at home to take care of the family

and his dad worked. They ate dinner every day at the same time. They seemed a happy

family, when I watched them through a window as I perched atop a tree branch in the

woods hiding from PawPaw. Somewhere in my mind I had begun to believe that lighter

skinned blacks had to be better than dark skinned blacks who were bad like PawPaw.

In the projects, my sister and I make friends with two boys, Dilbert Sugerman

Whitfield, and John Whitfield. They are raising themselves like Jane and me. Mostly

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Jane hangs out at Sugerman’s house to hang around John because she has a crush on him.

Their house is the hang-out house away from prying parent eyes. Occasionally, I would

hang out with them smoking weed and drinking 40 ounces of Olde English 800, but I

preferred reading. It was at Sugerman’s house that I first meet Karen and Natasha, and

their older brother. They are raised in a two-parent middle-income home, and when they

visited Sugerman’s house they thought themselves slumming. I found myself taking

them shopping at Sears. Old habits die hard, because it wasn’t the first or the last time

that I would try and buy friendship because I felt worthless. I remember first acting on

the feelings of being nothing by stealing from Great Grandma Emma’s purse at 10 years

old. Lonely, I stole the money so that I could hang around with Sharon Glasper, a

slender, high yellow skinned girl, with long curly hair. She was 13 and all the kids in the

neighborhood wanted to play with her, especially the boys. If I had money, I could hang

around on the fringe of Sharon’s world. Now like then I would spend money on clothes

for Natasha or Karen each month. That became the basis of our friendship. Although we

had some happy times together. I remember the party where I met Brother, Karen and

Natasha’s brother, and Henry and Jonathan their cousins all trying to move on, me, the

new girl in the neighborhood. I shined them on, but I danced my butt off at the party. I

was dressed to impress in an all-white pants suit and a red-white-and blue polka dot blouse. I felt important dancing to the Commodores “Brick House,” when I dropped to my knees in a shimmy my menstrual cycle started. Brother offers me a ride home.

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Cars would honk at me down the street and men holler from their cars, and my

cheeks would burn and my legs shake. Fear is my first reaction at male attention. At 17,

I have my first boyfriend or rather Brother takes me for his first young girlfriend. He

says, “You my type, young and innocent,” although he doesn’t say dumb, I feel the word

hovering in the air. After being around me a couple of times, he decided he would be my

boyfriend. Brother is a good-looking caramel skinned brother, 5’ 6,” tall with deep set

dark brown eyes and long thick eyelashes most girls would envy. He is a high school

dropout who earns his money by selling dope and sleeping with older women. At first, I

don’t really like him. But I allow him to name our relationship boyfriend and girlfriend.

Mostly, because there is no one present in my life that can stop him.

In bed with a drunken Brother, I remember PawPaw placing my hands upon his flaccid dick just like Brothers. I awake crying. The nightmares return and I bleed for several days at a time. I become Brother’s pet, and a prisoner inside the four walls of momma’s apartment inside the projects. Brother has his boys watch when I leave the house and they can follow me everywhere. I can’t eat, sleep, concentrate on reading, watching television or go outside because his boys are always there. I badly burn the back of my hand on the gas stove while frying chicken because my hands developed a fine tremor from the stress of feeling caged. I drink coffee late into the night afraid of the nightmares sleep would bring.

I quit going to the Martin Luther King Jr. Branch of the Oakland Public Library because I don’t want to be bothered by Brother’s posse following me there. Brother

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exists in my life although I don’t have sex with him. The one time he tried having sex

with me he couldn’t get it up. So he uses me to pretend to his friends that drugs and

alcohol didn’t affect his life or his fucking. He and his friends always talk about how

he’s “tapping that pussy.” They don’t know he needs a pill, supplied by his old lady

girlfriend, to get and stay hard. In my mind I pretend everything is okay because he takes

me out to eat and to the movies, where he tells me about his problems.

“I don’t really need a girlfriend, but I like you.” He tells me. “I just need a friend

to talk to. Someone to hang out with that has no expectations; is that cool with you?”

“Sure. Just no more attempts at fucking. Okay?”

“Only if you want to,” he laughs. “You know I can do much better than I did

before. What’s your problem anyhow? You act like sex is gonna kill you. Never mind

it’s not my business. But my boys think you’re my lady. So they gone protect you.”

I am reminded of Grandma Betty Anne and Old Lady Hobson, and I wonder why

I’m letting fear rule my life. I justify why to myself. I think of my grandmother. After all Brother doesn’t physically abuse me. He just controls my life, and he threatens my ability to go to school, to be independent. But I still remember liar, liar, liar, and now I wonder why I am so afraid that I lie to myself.

***

Charlotte at Stanley’s House

Unable to find a job after high school, I move back to Little Rock Arkansas. I stay with my momma’s first husband Stanley and his second wife Helen. Stanley is

22

about 5’4” tall, a roly-poly 275-pound man with smooth blue/black skin, red lips, squinty

eyes, and a round moon shaped face. He has a fourth-grade education, and can barely

read, write, or comprehend basic vocabulary or arithmetic. He has a good paying job with

Safeway as a truck driver because Helen filled out the application and his boss is a drinking buddy. He’s a nosey man always gossiping about other people. He’s a mean drunk, a wife-beater, and as it turns out a dirty old man. I live in Stanley’s house for almost a year before he comes home drunk one late afternoon and begins a conversation by saying, “You know who yor daddy is? You know I ain’t yor daddy, don’t ya?” He’s fumbling with his jeans as he speaks. He pulls out his penis and begins masturbating.

“You’re my daddy” I answer understanding that the wrong response could have physical consequence. Never having met my biological father it is easy to pretend. He ejaculates and goes back into his bedroom. Knowing it is time to leave Stanley’s house and finding the money to do so is another story.

Helen is 5’7” tall, built up sturdy, dark complexioned with freckles and light brown eyes with specks of hazel. Whenever she’s away from Stanley, she is laughing and happy. Helen loves me. She helps me find a job at Minute Man Hamburger’s in

Little Rock, and she helps me through the enrollment process at a government-sponsored trade school to learn office work.

I have a dual role in Stanley’s house as his pretend daughter and housekeeper.

Helen works long hours in a laundry, but she finds time to take me shopping, fishing and

23

to the movies. Sometimes we spend the whole day on the Arkansas riverbank catching

trout, catfish, perch, and buffalo fish.

“How do you know when to use bait, minnows, crickets or a lure?” I ask Helen as she chooses a dark colored lure.

“If its dawn, a foggy day, or late evening use a dark lure, but if it’s a clear sunny day use a light lure. You can use bait, minnows or crickets any time” She responds, “but use bait with your bamboo rod.” On Sundays we’d have a big breakfast before going to church. In church, the tranquility on Helen’s face rivals the times we spend on the banks of the Arkansas River or in the motor boat on the lake. She loved singing songs of praise to the Lord.

***

I knew I couldn’t tell Helen that Stanley had felt himself up in front of me because it would hurt her too much, and maybe I was just a little afraid she wouldn’t believe me. Late at night, I heard her crying as he hit her. “Please stop,” she would whisper to him totally submissive to his will afraid of the violence he often performed on her person. And on her paydays, he would take most of her money. Through all of her problems, Helen still made time to love and guide me. It was Helen’s idea that I join the

Marine Corps.

Aunt Helen

I felt the slap that knocked you across the room. I heard the whispering tears you choked at night, so I wouldn’t hear him

24

take you against your will. I felt the shame you hid when he took your rent money. I remember sweat rolling down your weary body from all the extra shifts you had to work at the drycleaners. You didn’t take the churches charity, when everyone we knew did. You protected the pride of a man who could barely read or write not only from the world but from your sharp tongue of truth that could have left him reeling

—like how you felt —with his knife held against your throat.

I hear the humming silence of peace, as you prepare your tackle box for fishing. Wiry hooks, colored lures small and large have their spot in your tackle box, but you prefer live cold bait and wiggly minnows. On the water you are the most happy holding your pole slouched in the seat sipping bottled water now and then. Tactile pleasure written on your face as your fly rod rises and falls into the water.

I never knew another person so fearless on the water when they couldn’t swim like you. It scared me, but you purred like a cat sopping milk. You always had two poles hanging from trees into the lake as you sang thanks to God for his miracles and goodness

25

to you. I didn’t understand, but I loved you that much more.

On golden banks is how I think of you.

***

Boot camp had been hell for me. The physical activity strained my abilities to the

max and standing at attention in the hot sun with fire ants swarming all around you is the

pits. I was an average Marine that first year of boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina

and administrative school at Camp Pendleton. I am stationed at Alameda Naval Air

Force Base, which is in Oakland’s backyard. On weekends I visited momma, until I made friends with Morgan, Heard, and Stevens. Our thing was gambling on the weekends. It started out as fun, but I soon developed a gambling problem. I found myself driving or catching the bus to Reno on my days off and losing most or all my paycheck. I finally figured out that I missed the stress that comes from living with sexual abuse. Gambling filled that hole until the night I found out what falling over the edge really meant. Having lost all my money at the tables, I went to wait on the bus. When the bus came, I discovered that I had lost my return ticket. Broke, tired, and feeling that I had no one to call, I cried. That’s when a shriveled up old man approached me and asked about my problems. He was about 5 feet tall, dark brown skin, and had a cheerful attitude. He asked me if I wanted a bite to eat. I said yes. We went back to his place.

That night I experienced sex again as a one-sided exchanged having bartered my body for a bus ticket home.

26

II. Isaiah the Pedophile

Impulses to touch young children first came to me at an early age, I prayed almost

every day for God to take the images that ran through my mind away. They felt wrong.

But the images and desires grew into inescapable fantasies. I think, everybody needs

affection and physical touches. It’s just the world that makes you lie about who you are

and hide in dark places.

I remember how it all started sitting outside Pastor Dunne’s office, waiting, just

waiting, and waiting to be called into his office for acting out in Sunday school. The

final straw for Pastor Dunne had been when I pushed Sally Mae down for laughing at me

because I couldn’t read well. The first time I got into trouble, Pastor Dunne had explained

to me why I needed to be a good boy in Sunday school. He had been gentle and kind.

But because I tended to act out, again and again, Pastor Dunne had punished me by

having me play with his “hot dog,” which is what he called the penis. He said, “If you

ever tell anybody you’ll be whipped good by your poppa.” I learn to love Pastor Dunne.

So I never tell. Pastor Dunne teaches me many things most of all how to grow into a

man. Now, I think that maybe he took away my childhood as I have taken it away from

so many young children.

***

Jonathan had been my first initiate. As we lay inside the coat closet hidden inside the vestibule of the church, I break into a cold sweat, when I hear “Jonathan” called by his sister from the Sunday school room. Then, she calls my name “Isaiah.” I quickly

27

arrange Jonathan’s clothes and hands him a duster while pushing him out into the vestibule. I grab the broom and dustpan following right behind him.

“In here,” I yell to Jonathan’s sister.

“Are you guys leaving now?” I ask.

“Not yet, but momma wanted to know what Jonathan is doing.”

“He was just helping me clean the vestibule.”

“Okay, I’ll tell momma.”

“Ask her if it’s okay if I give him an ice cream cone. There’s plenty in the

fridge.”

“Okay, I’ll take one two.”

“Sure thing, meet us in the kitchen.”

Close, so close I think, the adrenaline running through my body in a cold sweat.

As we walk towards the kitchen I make small talk with Jonathan trying to prepare him for

that next stage of acceptance, and to instill a little bit of fear, just enough to keep him

quiet. As we pass the pastor’s office, I see two youngsters waiting outside for him.

“Are you alright, Jonathan?”

“Yes”

“Do you want a quarter for helping me clean the vestibule and the cloak room? If

you don’t tell anybody about the game we played. I’ll give you two. The game will be our little secret. Okay.”

“Okay.”

28

***

I grew up the second of five children. It is a time when poor Negro children

began work at the early age of six or seven years old in the cotton fields of Arkansas as I

did. My eldest brother is in charge of the household because my parents work in the

cotton fields from sun up till sun down. The children work half days.

My mind is most active when the cotton pickers sing songs of Moses in the fields; and I rethink the sermons of Pastor Dunne: “Children are obedient to their elders in all things, and wives are obedient to their husbands.” My mother obeys my father, and we children obey our parents and my brother. The story of Moses awoke a kind of kinship in me. Like him I resided in a family that represented enemy values to me because I knew they would not approve of Pastor Dunne, the only man who made me feel special.

At first I thought Moses to be real; or at least the idea of being free real. But the

lust for tender young flesh supersedes right, wrong, or morality in me. Sometimes the

need is so bad that I can barely crawl out of bed to work. I feel as though God made me

incomplete. I don’t feel free. I am compelled by lust, and I like how Pastor Dunne played

with me very much. But, I like girls too. I become very excited when I am appointed an

usher in the church, and Sunday school teacher for children two to eight years old at 16.

“Good morning Isaiah” the children call out to me in Sunday school. I am their

favorite teacher. I praise the children with sly touches and belly button kisses on bare

skin to ease the itch of lust. I am the poster-child of a respectable young gentleman. But immoral thoughts and images erode my will.

29

I remember like yesterday, the first time I babysit 18-month-old Jean and I taught

her how to suckle my penis like a bottle. Her head lying between my crotch and thighs,

sublime. The last shackles of convention released at the pleasure I discover in her young

toddler’s body. Sometimes, dreams wake me in a cold sweat at the thought of my naked

desires being unveiled to the world. What would happen when Jean grew old enough to tell? Hell, she probably wouldn’t tell, I never did. I even grew to like it.

***

I notice Tod a rambunctious young boy is being eyed in that way by Pastor

Dunne. It is the third time in a month he has been sitting on the pew outside of his office.

I feel sorry for the young boy, knowing that his life will be changed forever. I feel jealous because Pastor Dunne likes younger boys and I miss the gifts. I both hate and love Pastor Dunne, but most of all I blame him for my dark desires that if known would make me an outcast in society. I imagine myself like Moses stumbling in the wilderness of desire. I like the taste of young girls and boys. I like their touch. Their mouths are small and tight. Sometimes I can go for months without a stolen touch, but when the urge reaches a peak and I succumb, I make perilous choices. Six-year-old Jonathan might have been a mistake, although I have been grooming him for some time.

Jonathan’s parent’s work long hours and his 13-year-old sister, Tabitha, often, babysit. As one of the youth leaders, I take Jonathan’s Sunday school class to the park. I exposed myself to Jonathan in the public bathroom gently moving his hands back and forth on my penis. The thrill has me wanting much more. I want to fuck Jonathan soon,

30

but I’m scared. I am anxious, always conscious that this time could be the last time.

Really, I think it is the tentative gestures of the young child, a kind of crafty guilelessness

they enact as they look to me for gifts of candy, money, or a toy. It is the thrill of

newness, it is the thievery of innocence that I enjoy and the sudden slow creeping fear

that each child succumbs to. I remember those feelings and they are the only feelings

that stimulate me. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of being different, of being

caught, and of being bad all roil around inside me. Fear makes me crazy. I need help,

but who can I ask? It seems like God has placed my prayers on hold.

***

I learned well from Pastor Dunne to only pick the bad children, those who

continually act up in class; children who would likely not be believed if they told their

story. Just the thought of easing myself into Jonathan’s ass makes me feel hot, sweaty,

anxious, and hard like no women or man of my own age can. But I know it’s too soon. I

remember Pastor Dunne taking all of us boys to his house to help mow his yard and work

in his garden. Each boy would get a 20-minute break, by age first, to have pie and borrow one of Pastor Dunne’s books. The first time he fucked me, the pain had been bad, but his gift of two novels by Zane Grey, made it okay. I still have the collection of Zane

Grey books he gave me. When I became too old for him the hurt was unbearable. Pastor

Dunne had a way of talking to me like I was a man. But that final conversation he had with me broke me into pieces. “You’ve grown into quite a big boy Isaiah” Pastor Dunne

31

had begun the conversation. “Big boys don’t have time-outs because they’ve learned all of Pastor Dunne’s lessons.”

Ironically, he had shown me how to act like a good boy and sowed the seeds of badness. I became a better reader in church. But I can’t help feeling that this emptiness, of always wanting, never feeling whole began with my father who never saw me as anything other than another mouth to feed. Pastor Dunne saw me, and he wanted me.

Our relationship set me free to believe in fantasies that would enter my mind unexpectedly. Like a drug the act of sex pervades my life. Young children are my

Achilles heel. Tormented, I wonder is this weakness one that God will forgive. I want a place in heaven, but I want the touch of innocence. I want a child’s friendship, their fear, and their love and respect. I want it all, and I fear the cost of having it all, of living in a world that labels me bad. I wonder if these bits and pieces of stolen moments will ever make me feel whole. I pray.

“Dear God. Please God. Take this appetite away from me. Let my desires be normal. I live in fear of my actions that take innocence from children’s eyes. I beg of you God, if this pleasure is a sin to take away the desire.” The question of faith eats at the moral fiber of my belief. I often prayed for a special place in my parent’s lives, to feel normal, but I felt unwanted like an interloper in my father’s house. In fulfilling my desire for children, I almost feel whole. I think of how Moses grew to feel alienated from the

Pharaohs household as he grew into manhood, and this is how I feel. Alone.

***

32

When I meet Betty Anne, I realize she is the perfect wife for me. She is young,

tall, and light-skinned, with long black hair. She is God’s gift to me that will make me

normal. My body has a flicker of desire towards her. But most of all she will make me

the envy men in our neighborhood. She is a Sunday school teacher, babysitter, and maid.

She is 19 and trainable. My mind whispers that she will be an asset in delivering small

children unto me. Like most of the Negro people in the backwoods of Arkansas, Betty

Anne is looking for a way off the plantation she has been born on. At 20, I am a catch

because I have a good job at the timber mill. I belong to Mount Zion Baptist Church, and

I own my car.

My job at the timber mill gives me a sense of purpose and self-worth. I have a sense of gratification that I had never known as one of five children in my parent’s house.

My oldest brother’s word as appointed caretaker of the children had been law in my parent’s house, but even they had been proud when I moved from the cotton field to the timber mill. It is the first time I feel like an equal in the family instead of like a failure in their eyes.

When I put on the deacon’s cloak at work of congeniality and reason, I am

quickly promoted to head logger, a position of some responsibility. I imagine it is how

my brother felt being my father’s stand in. Unlike my brother, I would be fair and not

make one child do all the work. In this work at the mill, I feel normal, and I almost feel normal within my marriage, as a son of the church, and as a provider for my family.

33

I feel like a man, like my older brother and father. I don’t focus as much on the

touch of a child. I am hopeful.

After marriage, we rent a five-room fixer upper in MacAlmont Arkansas, a little town between two big cities Little Rock and Jacksonville. Sure the place needs a lot of work, but the rent is cheap because of the repairs needed. We are happy. Betty Anne spits out two babies back-to-back before I hurt my back at work. After the injury, the arguments start. I feel less than a man and more like my father’s loser second son whose weak knees wouldn’t allow him to pick cotton as fast as his brothers or sisters. I want something to ease the void of being less than in the eyes of my wife, and in my own eyes.

I feel nothing but sadness. I have no hope. I beseech God to help me, but I receive no answer. I feel like a thousand-pound weight has fallen on me when the fantasies return in

Technicolor. Like Moses who smashes the Ten Commandments because he loses hope, I lose hope and plot out how to act on my fantasies. My wife’s nagging turns me into a monster.

“Isaiah the septic tank needs fixing.”

“I’ll get to it.”

“When? At least talk to the owner about it.”

My favorite method of control is to place her head between the window-sill and threaten to snap her neck. She begs me, “Isaiah, not in front of the children.” Her words activate pictures of my daughter, naked, lotion, and smelling of baby powder. Fights in our house become dark and dangerous expressions of lives with no real anchor in Christ.

34

I am a man who has no financial stability in the world. My wife supports me. I am

reminded of how I had been the lowest paid cotton worker in my family. I beat Betty

Anne because of my pride. Still, I must be careful. How would the congregation react if

I hurt her bad? It’s not as if I would be the only husband who punishes their wife, but as

a deacon mine is the face of concerned friendship. Fear is an aphrodisiac and memories

of Betty Anne on all fours begging me to stop beating her or fucking her make me feel

powerful. After the fights, I feel ashamed of my actions, but I am too proud to ask for

forgiveness. So I pay the PG&E bill or a smaller bill for the month. She is always

grateful for any small kindness that I show.

Betty Anne is high school educated. I completed 5th grade. She wants to go to

college, but I won’t allow it. I am not interested in her having an education. It is my

house and I own everything in it. Her job is to cook, clean, and give me access to what I

need: financial stability and children. Since we moved 40 miles from our church Betty

Anne has become a member of the neighborhood church where we live, and I continue to drive the 40 miles every Sunday because I am a deacon in the church and the pastor’s assistant. Now there are two flocks of Sunday school children for me to graze in. Just as my desires grow stronger with each conquest, I struggle with the fear of being wrong

about acting on my sexual obsessions.

When I am allowed to preach to the congregation, I preach to the women. I

remind the men that their responsibility is to listen to their wives and provide guidance to

their family in a just manner. I preach to the congregation that wives working in both the

35

home and outside the home need time for themselves to catch their breath between

working and housework. I preach that “husbands should practice humility and wives

should practice tolerance in their marriages.” As I say these words, I know I am a fraud,

because I do neither in my home. So I pray. I ask God to teach me tolerance and

humility and to take away my desires. But there is always another fight and another

temptation. So I justify myself. After all Lott’s daughters engage in incest with their

father. At seven years old my daughter Candace has been nurtured in the ways of

pleasing me. She comes to daddy’s room every night to comb my hair. Every orifice of

her body has been stretched to suit my needs. At first, she would cry as I manipulated my

fingers inside her, but for every pain, there is the pleasure of a doll, rolling hoop, or game

that helps her adjust easily to the manipulations. But I still hear the pain.

“hurt daddy, hurt” she would say as I squeezed two then three fingers into her pussy.

“sshhh baby, it’s alright, sshhh” I would both scold and comfort her.

“Squeeze daddy here. Tighter. Like this. Yes.”

My son is different. Born slow-witted, he looks at me with empty eyes that seem to say the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. His blank expression challenges my sense of right and wrong. His eyes are not like the others that ask why. His eyes are empty to the truth of what is happening. I have no thrill at his lack of fear. I realize that I am damaged goods in the eyes of man, but I believe that God has a purpose in giving me these fantasies. Every day I ask God to stop me if I’m wrong. He never does, which is

36

why I pretend to myself that this uncontrollable lust is not a sin in the eyes of God. He

made me, and He doesn’t make mistakes? But I worry.

***

When I hurt my back at the mill, they retire me with benefits. I start my own yard work business. The business makes enough money to meet my needs and pay for my hobbies like fishing, diddling with children, and my old trucks. I raise hogs, fish and hunt for the meat we eat, and my wife grows a vegetable garden. But when things are desperate, I pick cotton for extra money my knees having grown stronger with age.

***

It has been a slow crumbling way of life that I built for myself. My daughter

Candace gets pregnant at 15 by some young punk name Stanley. She is the wife of my

heart and the seed of my loin. They run off and get married. My boy John gets a job at

St. Peters hospital as a kitchen boy. For three years, I take half his pay for rent money.

He leaves home at 18. Betty Anne still works as a maid part-time, so she has plenty of time to lie around the house reading romance novels all day. My life is boring with no kids around the house. I haven’t had a satisfying moment with a child since Betty Anne quit her church two years back over some fuss. I never knew the whole of it. I am a lonely man so I pray to God for relief. Fear of hell scorches my mind with despair. The thought occurs that maybe I have been wrong, wrong, wrong, and that this temptation for children is a test from God that I have failed.

***

37

The world is changing. Just last week, Phillip, a boy I have been grooming from my church, asks me: “why do you like little boys?”

“Why do you think I like little boys?”

“Cause Jonathan said so.”

“When did he say so?”

“When he was talking to Deacon Lovely.”

“What else did you hear?”

“Nothing.”

So now I am in constant dread of whispers. What will Jonathan say next? Do I

confront this strapping young man or let it be to fester and grow? A little voice whispers,

you knew all along it had been wrong, and another voice whispers, but God made you

this way. I cannot decide what to do. I wonder if Pastor Dunne ever faced this kind of

threat. I’ll never know since he abruptly retired and moved to Florida. He left no

forwarding address. In the midst of my doubt, the good Lord is good to me. He takes

away one prize and gives me free access to four more children with Candace gone. My

kids love their PawPaw. But the voice in my head asks me, should I love them back?

***

Candace’s second husband is an army sergeant stationed in California. There is a

big stink when Charlotte won’t leave her Momma Betty Anne. Then Jane follows

Charlotte’s lead, and they both cling to Betty Anne. They won’t be separated from their

Momma Bett. Finally, her new husband suggests they leave the girls with us until the

38

summer and take the boys for now. Candace screams “no. I want give him the chance to damage my kids like he did me.”

“What did I ever do but love you?” I respond.

“Fuck you.” She cries. Then they are gone leaving all the children behind.

Candace sobs and begs her momma and Grandma Emma “to protect my kids,” as the car

pulls off. I feel good. The only fly in the ointment is Emma and the voice growing

louder in my mind. Emma lurks around the house all day, rarely leaving except to visit

Pearl, Mr. Arthur’s wife three houses up alongside the cemetery. When she’s gone, I work on getting close to the kids. The oldest boy Wade Jr. is a tough nut to crack. When

I touch his hand to my penis, he jumps up and pulls a kitchen knife on me. But the twins are malleable, and I ply them with toys and candy. For every touch, they are obedient.

Betty Anne baths the children in the evening. She lathers them with Johnson and

Johnson’s baby lotion and baby powder, scents that make me hard, and like Moses I wander in the wilderness of temptation.

After my bath, I call Charlotte into my bedroom to comb my hair. She doesn’t

like it, but she does what she’s told. Betty Anne and Emma sit on the porch talking to the

neighbors. That first evening a tornado watch hangs over the neighborhood. The sky

darkens into a midnight black, and there is an eerie silence that surrounds me as she

enters the room. I like breathing in the scent of her. I like how she looks in her baby doll

pajamas. I like putting my fingers inside her, stretching her. When the time comes, she

39

will be ready. I remember sodomizing her momma at eight years old in the cotton field.

Now I teach Charlotte and Charles how to please me.

Maybe Candace had been too young, which is why she hates me now or maybe I

should have begun loving her earlier like I did with Charlotte and Charles. Or maybe you

have sinned; the silent voice inside my head speaks. I need to slowly bring Charles and

Charlotte along. I want their love. I want to love my youngest child Jane, but Emma and

Charlotte are always watching. Just as I am ready to penetrate Charlotte more intimately,

Candace and Meleake return for the children. I am heartbroken. Two long years the children live in California.

When Candace’s second marriage to the Army guy doesn’t work out, she moves

back from California into the house with our four kids. The eldest is 10, the twins eight,

and the youngest six years old. I am in heaven. So now the house is full. One room

sleeps six people. Candace tries to keep me away from the kids, but she has returned to

work as maid six days a week. Everything would have been fine if it had not been for that

old biddy Emma watching everything I do. As I get to know my kids, I realize that I am

different. I am afraid. Unable to find work, Candace decides to return to her job in

California. The children are all mine.

***

I am 62 years old when Betty Anne’s mother Emma dies, and the house is overrun

with her relatives. Charlotte has accused me of having sex with her. It is gratifying to me

that everyone but Candace dismisses the truth as a lie. No one dares approach me

40

directly and ask whether I had sex with my grandchild. So it is a truth or lie dependent

upon what one chooses to believe. The allegation hovers like a cloud in the house. The

upshot of it all is that the girls go back to California with their mother. I only have

Charles left. Wade Jr., is a hellion that I can’t control.

***

When one door closes, the good Lord opens another. Betty Anne’s best friend

Maddie Sue lives in the big house upon the hill. Her grandchildren have come to live

with her. I have a hesitant eye on Maddie Sue’s six-year-old grandson Terence. Like my boy, he’s a little slow, and that empty vacant look scares me just a little. Still, I use him immediately. Hungry, after a month of getting to know him, I ease my penis into his mouth. While he’s hesitant at first, after a few tries, he adjusts quickly. Afterwards, we walk to Martin’s Five and Dime for a bologna sandwich and some penny candy because it’ll take his mind off things. I dream about taking him fishing like I did in the good old days. I remember it well, sneaking off into the tree lines of the Arkansas River chaperoning a group of four or five children. I pay special attention to one young boy or girl each trip. I ply the older children with sandwiches, chips, cookies, and soda pop and station them just far enough away to have my way with the youngest child. They loved being with Deacon Isaiah. Sadly, I have only Terence to teach now. Charles has grown too old. Soon, Maddie Sue’s grandchildren come to enjoy playing at my house because

41

I take them fishing and to the store. Tasha is an eight-year-old little lady. Smart as a tack, too smart to be used and not tell, but I want her. She reminds me of my wife,

Candace. Tasha’s mom, Julia, is a single parent, who has trouble making ends meet. She wears her hair in an afro with big hoop earrings. I’ve heard her say “Black power has to be fought for,” which is why she believes in a man called Stokely Carmichael. A while back, she had been arrested at a Black power rally. Maddie Sue had borrowed money from Betty Anne to get her out of jail. Julia is addicted to crack cocaine.

***

Tasha finds out about Terence. She threatens to tell, but I can tell she wants something.

“Tell. Who will believe you?” I say. “Your grades are failing in school. You sass your grandma. You do all of this because your momma is using drugs. So who you think they’re going to believe? You or me?” She starts crying.

“I’ll tell you what lets you and me go for some ice cream.”

“I want a bologna sandwich too.”

“Okay.”

“I can teach you what Terence does, and maybe put a little money in your pockets. Think you’d be interested?

“No, it’s nasty.”

“Okay.”

“How much money?” Tasha rushes out nervously.

42

“How much you want?”

“$50?”

“No, that’s too much”

“How about $25 every two weeks? That’s $50 a month.” I offer her and asks,

“Where you going to hide the money at? I mean if you don’t hide the money Maddie Sue or somebody is going to want to know where you got it. What you going to say then?”

“Tell the truth.” She says slyly.

“Alright then let’s forget about it.”

“Okay, I’ll find a good hiding place. And I want tell.”

“Alright then go ask Maddie Sue, if you can walk to the store with me. Bring

Terence.”

***

Three things happen the year I turn 65 that brings my world crashing down: I am

diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer; 11-year-old Tasha is pregnant with my baby;

and I understand that God has damned my soul. I often prayed for God to abolish the

lusts of my body, because I couldn’t control them. Now I believe that sex with children

is wrong in God’s eyes. Why else would God give me, his faithful son the disease of

cancer throughout my body?

A sheriff’s car and the paramedic’s vehicle pull quietly into my yard. A yard

now layered with oil from old car motors. Against one side of the house is an old row

boat and paddles lying against the wall. On the other side, stacks of can paint reside

43

against the wall. A dying rose bush scents the yard in a cloying smell of perfume and rot.

I know that my house is a blight on the neighborhood. Then again, I am the only tenant

renter on the block. My neighbors are all homeowners. I like to think I’d take care of

what’s mine.

The district attorney sent the sheriff and EMT to my house so they could test my

blood against Tasha’s baby. “Mr. Isaiah can you make a fist? You have moving veins?”

The paramedic said, “You will receive a letter informing you of the DNA test.” Two

weeks later the letter arrived. It read you are the father.

***

III. Betty Anne

I fall in love with Isaiah at our first meeting. I am 19 to his 20. He is dark and just that bit taller than my 5’7.” He has a good job, and he courts me right off the bat.

Our courtship is nice and quick. Our dates are nice because Isaiah has a car. We drive into the city for dinner: fried chicken, red beans and rice, corn bread and collard greens with sweet tea. But my favorite memory of the date is of Isaiah pushing me on the swing in the park. Isaiah pushes me higher and higher in the swing and like a child I soar into the sun, laughing.

I say yes to marriage because I love him. I say yes because I want off the Lawson

plantation in Scotts Arkansas where I live. It is a world of the past, a place of cotton

picking, kerosene lamps, and outhouse living. Sure my marriage hadn’t turned out to be

the best in the world, but it resembled my momma’s marriage except for the fights. My

44

dad never fought momma. He had simply been a friendly drunk who couldn’t hold a job.

He set me and my brothers and sisters to work in the fields soon after the diapers came off. But that’s what it had been like for poor Negroes, back then. Children five and six years old, on stubby legs, learn how to pick cotton with Kroger sacks. In one-way Isaiah is like my daddy, because he couldn’t hold a job.

Isaiah has always loved children. So we have a child almost nine months to the day of our marriage, and then nine months later. After the birth of our babies, he’s nice to me for a short time. But his life is taken up with the church. First, he had become a youth minister at 16, and then a deacon in the church just before our marriage. I work as a maid at an all-White Grace Lutheran church, and it is a three-hour ride and four bus changes. This church is big like the plantation house where I was born. Some rooms are five and six times the size of my daddy’s house. And the room of worship is like a little piece of heaven, with stained glass windows of angels and God. The mahogany stained wood is sturdy, and behind the pews is an attached wooden bin for bibles and sheet music. This church is a house built for angels. It is a place where I am most myself without Isaiah around to tell me who I am, and how I am to act. It’s where I first began to read romance novels.

I am an usher in our four room Baptist church. Isaiah encourages me to become the church’s babysitter. So I do. I work a lot, and its hard work. It’s hard to manage the babysitting jobs, but Isaiah helps a lot by spending time with the children. He takes them

45

fishing, to the movies, and the parks. It’s like Isaiah is two different men. He is

affectionate with the children and frozen with me.

I dream that Isaiah will turn into the man of my dreams and become like men I

read about in the romance novels. In these books the heroine’s every dream comes true.

They teach me of the unfamiliar, a kind touch. Making love to Isaiah resembles a wrestling match where the goal is for me to pat out, because he can’t get it up, and when he does he’s never satisfied. My one pleasure in life is dreaming that love will happen to me like in the books I read. But it has all been make-believe, a hoax I’ve played upon myself. I remember when I had choices, when young men chased me like bees pollinating honey. In me, Isaiah gets the best of the crop of marriageable young women in my neighborhood. I can read. I am pretty, light skinned, with long hair and fit. I receive two marriage proposals before Isaiah. In retrospect, I might have made a better choice.

At first, I could not believe the somewhat reserved, yet fun-loving, young man I

married could act so violently towards me. This man who had promised to love, honor,

and cherish me. I can’t remember why he beat me the first time, but it had never been

about anything consequential. Mostly it had been about him taking control of the money

I earned. He could never just ask for the money. There had to be a scene. I remember

once asking him about missing money from my purse. He hits me several times in the

face never responding to the question. In shock, my body shuts down. Mentally, I am a

mess, unable to think through the abuse for a way out so soon after the marriage.

46

I find myself sleeping a lot, ignoring calls from friends, and working more. I

experience headaches and loss of time where I can’t account for what I’ve done. The

humiliation of being ‘a beaten woman’ makes me fall deep into my own psyche. In my

head, I go over all my actions and reactions to Isaiah before a fight. I try to understand

why, but there’s never an answer. I remember begging him on my knees, hysterically

clinging to his legs to prevent him kicking me “Isaiah, please stop. No more, I cry” as he

pommels my body with blows. I curve into a protective ball quivering in shame. He

kicks me and I whimper like a dog. I hope the neighbors won’t hear, but I am

embarrassed in front of them and my family.

The worst times are when he sticks my head in the window and threatens to let the

window drop upon my neck. My neighbor watches from her house. My son begs his

father to let me go, and Charlotte cries silently while Charles begs his PawPaw to stop.

The looks of pity from my family hurt more than a blow from his fist. To escape, I attend

church, sew, and read. All activities approved by Isaiah, except for reading. He

sometimes criticizes the reading like he criticizes my friends. He is fond of saying, “you a

married woman, Betty Anne with children. Ain’t no place in your life for single women

friends and going out. Your place is in the house.” I am too tired to argue with Isaiah.

So my friends all fall by the wayside, except for my best friend Doreen. She simply

laughs and ignores Isaiah. I don’t know why I couldn’t leave. I think it is the thought of letting go of the dream of marriage. It had been both an idea of love and fear I suppose.

47

An idea of love because of his charm and conquer the world attitude. He wooed

me with big dreams of owning a home, vacationing every year, and making pretty babies.

But he seemed to have this fear of being alone that made me love him. After a fight, he

would beg me to stay. He would say, “I need you. Without you I have nothing.” At

first, I feared being alone like he did, later I learned to pray for it. Sex had become an

embarrassment for both of us. The thought that I had no value often intruded upon my

thoughts. The fear that I couldn’t do any better played tic tack toe in my brain. And

finally there had been the fear that everything Isaiah said about me had some truth to it.

So I stayed. The dream of a little white house with a white picket fence and a big yard slowly recede over time. In the end, there would be no happily ever after, but a kind of desperate getting by in a house not fit for human living. A house shared with all kinds of vermin: roaches, rats, snails, spiders, and a few snakes from time to time.

I had kept hope alive that he would change, if I just gave him enough time, space,

and love. Somewhere in my mind, I experience a tender Isaiah, but he only exists in my

imagination. Isaiah never changes, right up till the time he is accused of fathering a baby

with my neighbor Maddie Sue’s 11-year-old granddaughter Tasha. There is fear and a

beseeching look in his eyes asking for a kind of help that only God could give him when

the paramedics, accompanied by the cops, come to take his DNA. He is bedridden with cancer. Sure there had been signs of Isaiah not being quite right like his obsessive fear of my independence and his demands to know every action I take.

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I am tied to him because I love him, but the thought of my independence both

thrills and frightens me. Isaiah has been my anchor. Because I have to work to meet

Isaiah’s needs, it helps me with my depression. Otherwise, I would sleep all day. I could

be independent because I earn the money that takes care of the house, bills, and

children’s care, but I am always frightened. I try to be involved in my children’s lives,

but they are independent. Candace is withdrawn. I treat her like a little princess,

dressing her in frilly dresses, Mary Jane shoes, and pretty barrettes in her hair. But

Candace is a tomboy and squirms at signs of affection. She fights any boy or girl who

picks on her baby brother John because he is a slow learner. As a family we are active in

the church, participate in school activities, and the children are active in the girl and boy

scouts. As a family, we do not talk much. Our time consumed with school and church activities.

In our house the children are in Isaiah’s care more than mine, because I can’t

drive. Isaiah hadn’t thought I needed to learn. Sadly, I can’t remember much about their

childhoods, because I was always at work. Candace became the caretaker of the house,

and she earns an adult wage as a cotton picker. Isaiah takes half her pay. I don’t think it

is right, but there is nothing I can do about it. Candace is very proud of the fact that she

can fill two or three sacks of cotton a day. She is bright in school like I had once been.

She wants to be a nurse. I am proud of her ambition. I wanted to go to college, Isaiah

said no. I remember the discussion about my going to school; “Isaiah I’d like to sign up

for some college classes at the University. I’d take night classes to become a secretary.”

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“No, the hell you want. You have too much to do already with work and your

babysitting jobs that bring bill money into the house. I don’t want a wife that goes to

school getting all kinds of bullshit planted in her head. The answer is no. Let this be the

end of it now.”

Doreen still tries to maintain a relationship with me, but she has seen the bruises

on my body from Isaiah’s anger and that shames me. It is in the church’s bathroom that

she confronts me. She asks, “Betty Anne, why are you always wearing long sleeve

blouses and pants all the time? Her voice has a knowing undertone. “And why are you

wearing such a dark shade of foundation? Why don’t you leave him Betty Anne, he ain’t

no damn good. People are starting to talk.”

“You don’t understand Doreen, he needs me.”

“Yeah he does to pick up the pieces from the messes he makes.”

“Please Doreen, if you were ever my friend, just let it be.”

Soon after that conversation, I move to the church nearest our house. Why should I continue to travel forty miles from the house to attend church is how I rationalize the change.

I thought my grandchildren happy, until my mother’s funeral when my

granddaughter accuses Isaiah of having sex with her. I could barely listen to her story let

alone accept it. In truth I didn’t believe it. I would have known. I would have. What

kind of mother or grandmother lets incest happen in her house? My daughter Candace’s

words to me hurt, “I know it’s true because it happened to me.” I hurt for them, and I

50

hurt for our family, because I still don’t believe them, and I am afraid to leave him. Who am I, if not Isaiah’s wife? I can’t imagine what my life would be like without him.

Finally, I could only say, “I don’t know” as my oldest brother Amos asks the question and the eyes of my family repeat it.

I remember when the children were left with me the first time. It had all been

Charlotte’s fault. She hadn’t wanted to leave with her mother and new stepfather in their move to California. In fact, she down right refused to get in the car. She held on to me and screamed “I want to stay with Momma Bett, I want to stay with Momma Bett” until she sank tiredly to the ground. Only to start the whole process over when threatened with having to get in the car. So I suggested they stay until Candace and her new husband got settled in at the new army base in California. They came for the children a year later and they stayed in California for two years. Those two years were the loneliest of my life. It was just me and Isaiah. Momma went to stay with my brother Amos in California. She would return when our grandchildren came back home.

At church Isaiah is the picture of the friendly, concerned, deacon. Filling in for

the pastor, he delivers sermons to the congregation and provides counseling to church

members. Everybody loves Deacon Isaiah, especially the churchwomen who trail him

like a puppy searching for its mother’s tit. Even the men are drawn to his charismatic

manner. He couldn’t have done those things, somebody would have known. He beats

you and nobody really knows, for sure, but the children and Mrs. Payne, our next-door

neighbor, is a conscious thought. I speak aloud, “You should have known.” But I am

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Deacon Isaiah’s wife, the quiet, amiable, young woman always seeking to please Isaiah, the church members, and my employers. I had a problem saying no, particularly when I knew it would reflect badly on my marriage. I remember the times that Isaiah put me out of the house, after the children were grown. I had to stay with my son John until he relented and let me come back so I could pay the rent. Still I stayed. My son would tell me “don’t pay the rent momma. Come and stay with me.” I always told him “no marriage is sacred.”

When the grandchildren come back from California, I am glad. When they left, I thought the loneliness would go away but it didn’t. Sometimes I ask myself if I knew about Isaiah’s proclivities, but my memory remains hazy. After his death, Charlotte asks me, “Why did you send me, a child, into you and your grown-ass husband’s bedroom to comb his hair while he only wore a bath robe? What kind of woman wouldn’t ask questions? What kind of woman does that?” I had no answers. Was I so afraid that I closed my eyes to the truth? What I know for sure is that it simply didn’t cross my mind that something so vile could happen. Still I ask myself, “why didn’t I know?” I wonder if I didn’t ask questions so he wouldn’t bother with me. I grew numb over the years, just hoping to be ignored. Hours, days, weeks, and months, tumble into years of working, watching television and reading romance novels. I wonder now how I could think it had been love, but what else did I know? What else could I think? I had watched my mother all our lives do her husband’s biddings without question. I should have known better,

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been less afraid. After all who could trust a mother who pours rooster blood around the

house to protect against bad voodoo?

Charlotte tells me, “As long as I can remember, you have suffered from low self esteem that’s why you lay in bed reading make-believe shit. That’s why you allowed your husband to abuse you, Candace and me.” And I am ashamed. There had been so many things over the years that I hadn’t been allowed to do. I hadn’t been allowed to choose my employer, practice my religion in my own way, or raise my children properly.

It had all been Isaiah’s way or no way at all right down to the fucking: doggy style or nothing. Truth be told, I preferred nothing.

Still there had been gentle moments with Isaiah. After a beating he would be so kind. He would talk to me about his dreams that had turned into nothing after he hurt his back at the timber mill. He would promise to try harder in a voice choked with emotion.

With his head in my lap, he would repeat his dreams. He wanted to buy a house in the city. He wanted his back to heal so that he could get a better paying job. His back never seemed to get better, and he could never manage to get a down-payment together or stay at one place of employment long enough to qualify for a house. He would say his sin was in being himself. I never quite understood what he meant until now. His desires and his act upon those desires were sins. I can’t believe Isaiah would rape our children. And I didn’t want to believe he would have sex with Tasha but the paternity test came back positive. Is that a lie too? Is the only reason I believe it is because they tested his blood?

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Would I have found a reason to justify Tasha’s pregnancy if a paternity test hadn’t proved it? I prayed: “Lord please forgive my blindness that allowed me to bring innocent children into our home.”

When the pastor of my new church first approached me with rumors of Isaiah’s

bad behavior, there had been doubt in his voice. But then there had been three and then

four children who had told their parents about Isaiah’s inappropriate touching. I chalked

it all up to children making-up bogie man stories. It had been hard walking away from

the church, from Sunday service acquaintances, parents that I babysit for, and especially

worship in God’s house. But I did it, again, for Isaiah.

When I think about how I turned my life over to him without even a token protest,

I am embarrassed. The kind man who courted me only existed in my mind, but it had felt

so real. I know he needed me, but that need was malignant. I keep thinking why? What

has made me who I am? Why have I been so trapped inside myself, inside a one-sided

relationship? I have children who pity me, and I feel self-hate at the person I am, which

is not the person I believed myself to be. I feared going to live with Candace. I thought

she’d be hateful, but she loved me instead. My family has forgiven me, but it is hard to

forgive myself. I care for Isaiah as he lies dying of prostate cancer, and I pray for his

soul. Upon his death, I cremate his body. The final truth of Isaiah’s state of mind is

revealed when he names our daughter as his wife and leaves her his $10,000 life

insurance policy. The hope that Isaiah would be proven righteous has fallen away. I

once was blind, but now I see.

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The house on 5912 East 43rd Street i remember footsteps treading like worn tires on potholed roads in this house that had once been young but never strong, subject to the wiles of the architect’s plans, blueprints of

DNA’s design display hidden chambers of mystery. floor plans scout

interior walls of darkness. i remember playing jacks on splintered floors, as she lay

inside the walls of her mind. can i? can we go somewhere, do something? can you play

with me? rooms captured in the light of a muted sun, and blinds diffuse the warmth of

sunlight, could not

penetrate this unknown mystery. i remember rooms speak in anxiety of hushed lives and battered dreams chairs miss legs upheld by decayed two ply wood, duality of mind undefined. electric circuits fire out of control dopamine drifts on an anchorless high,— as we baked, and shopped, and did strange things, like chop off heads of chickens fresh, a touch of hair, and secret spices, make spells of voodoo, inside the walls of highs and lows. alienation of life came to pass. i remember moonlight fell

55

against pulled down shades, and streetlights intruded on melancholy blues. in the shadows on the shade, the bogie man danced. creeping anxiety fractured glass in window panes, shattered into tiny pieces of the mind, hidden by darkness.

i remember potholes in corridors on the way to grandma’s house.

***

IV. Candace’s Shame

At Charlotte’s words, “he has sex with me,” I am flooded with guilt and shame. I

remember the first time my daddy took me in the cotton fields uncaring of who might

see. That morning daddy had an argument with the overseer about the weight of his bags.

That morning the sun burned my skin and drenched me in sweat. It had been lunch time,

and we had been one of the last to take our cotton to the scale. My daddy tossed me to

the ground covering my backside with his. Sweat and dirt laden hands covered the

scream from the explosion of pain in my ass. His dick felt like an out of control freight

train ramming into my body. I was eight years old. What I remember now is the feeling

of being suspended above the act of his sodomy, watching the little girl with no power.

A bad girl is what the neighbors thought of me always running around with one

boy or another. Mrs. Payne told momma, “she’s gonna wind up pregnant the way she

chases after boys.” That was my fear to become pregnant by my father. Still, I felt like

momma knew of the abuse, and that it was a family secret. In my ignorance, I thought

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marrying a man to take me away was the only way out. The truth would have destroyed the family. So I was easy with my body. I believed marriage or having a man to live with would be my escape. I married at 15 and had a child at 16. My marriage was like my mother’s mentally and physically abusive, except I fought back. We were equally yoked in our violence towards one another. In that final fight between us, I broke a beer bottle and slashed his right cheek. Although the marriage is abusive, I still thought another man would be the way out. So, I had an affair and became pregnant with twins.

Now sitting on a bench with the stench of hog shit in the air, I see the pain in my daughter’s eyes. I hear it in her puffed breaths and watch as her chest rises and falls quickly. I feel her pain. I know it intimately like a pair of well-worn panties unraveling at the waist with every step threatening to fall and expose a family’s horror. Her horror, my horror, our horror, we cry.

When Charlotte told me her truth and I realize that I had been living inside a lie, the truth ripped into me like a knife to the heart. Uneducated, with a job in retail sales, I hadn’t been able to afford to care for my children when I left Arkansas, and things never got much better is the kind of justifications I gave myself for leaving them twice and never looking back. I settled for a kind of pseudo-independence with false justifications that led to the destruction of my children. I became my mother. I remember the first time I left the kids with momma. Charlotte had refused to leave with Meleake and me to

California. She pleaded to stay with her Momma Bett, so I left all the children not wanting to separate them. A year later when Meleake was stationed overseas, the

57

children came to live with me in California. I watched them and they seemed normal and

healthy. For the first time we acted like a real family who sat down at the table together

and shared our lives. But things didn’t last. When Meleake came home from Viet Nam,

we argued a lot about how I disciplined the children. So we divorced. Unable to care for

the kids, they went back to stay with my parents in Arkansas while I tried to make a

living in retail sales in California. Just like the first time my kids stayed with their

grandparents, I didn’t let myself think of what happened to me.

On the bus ride to California from the funeral, I am frightened of what will

become of us. I didn’t consider that my sons could be as vulnerable as my daughters. I

hadn’t told my momma about the abuse, but my panties had been bloody. I had hobbled

around for a week, and momma never asked why? I can forgive my mother for not being

strong, and now I understand the desire to turn a blind eye to the truth right in front of

you. Now I wonder if my daughter will forgive me. I slip down memory lane into bad

memories on the three-thousand-mile ride to California. The peanut butter and jelly is

almost gone. How will I feed my daughters?

***

When I left my first husband, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri where I met the

twins Charles and Charlotte’s father. I didn’t know until after the pregnancy that he was

a married man. So after they were born, I returned to my first husband and gave the

twins his name. Once again, I am caught up in a bad marriage of fighting and infidelity

on both sides. I eventually become pregnant by my first husband again. So my oldest

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and youngest children, Wade Jr. and Jane, are children from my first marriage. My

middle children, Charles and Charlotte, are labeled inside the family as the bastards of a

married man.

I sent clothes and money home when I could, but it wasn’t much. I didn’t earn

much, barely enough to keep a roof over my own head. When I thought about my

children, I thought about them as being okay. Now, I wonder how to move forward with

our lives.

At 13, Charlotte is shy and closed off. I try to get her to talk to me, but she is

resentful even-though she remembers clinging and begging to stay with Momma Bett that

first time. She argues, “You were the adult and should not have allowed us to stay.” Of

that second stay with my parents I am guilty too and helpless in how to respond. I want

to tell her that situations are never as black and white as they seem. I had chosen to

escape with the idea of freeing us all, but that her demand to stay and mine for freedom

had clashed. I hadn’t been strong enough to do the right thing the first time. I had been

worried about starting a new marriage with four small children. Maybe Charlotte had

given me an excuse to ride off into the sunset with only my new husband the first time,

but the second time I chose them instead of my second husband. But in choosing them, I

had nowhere left to turn but to the devil my parents.

***

I observe that Charlotte has an inability to trust people. She finds escape from her

fears in make-believe like her grandmother. At school, she doesn’t make friends easily

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having become one of the teacher’s pets. She tells me about a girl at her school picking

on her name Doretha. I don’t take it too seriously, until she hits her in the head with a

huge rock. I know my daughter needs help, but I can’t afford it. I watch her drift

inwardly reading books of make-believe seemingly hating me. Unlike me, Charlotte leans away from male intimacy because of the abuse. She is protective of her sister as I had been towards my brother. This desire to protect others comes from the abuse. I am guilty of not protecting my children which makes me want to crawl inside myself and die.

Eleven-year-old Jane is withdrawn and anxious at home, but she makes friends easily in sixth grade at Cox Elementary School. So I am surprised when I learn of her friendship with Michelle, who lives down the street from us. “How old are you

Michelle,” I ask.

“Thirteen ma’am" she replies.

“So you attend Elmhurst Jr. High with Charlotte?”

“Where did you and Jane meet?”

“We just started talking to each other at the corner store, momma,” Jane interrupts. “We want to go to the skating rink on 73rd Avenue tonight. Can I go please?”

“No.” I told her.

That night Jane sneaks out of the house and doesn’t come back until the next morning.

After getting away with that, she’d go off and stay for days and then weeks. When she is arrested for prostitution, and sent to Juvenile Hall, I am not surprised, until I learn that

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she is on crack cocaine. I began to hear voices. At first, I believe that I can control the voices that talk to me but, like my mother, I get lost in my mind.

When my son Wade Jr. comes out to stay with us in California after getting into

trouble in Arkansas, the stress on me is bad. He is a handful that I can’t manage. He

makes friend with a boy name Freddie, who turns out to be a dope dealer. It was like a

dream when I found a quart size bag of white powder under my son’s roll away bed. I

dump the drugs down the toilet. Wade Jr. and I argue. “Why did you dump my shit in

the toilet?” he asks me. “Why did you bring drugs into my house” I ask right back. He

hits me in anger. I kick him out of the house. Later that night, he tries to set fire to the

apartment. I hear voices that speak to me everywhere: on television and the stereo. On

welfare day, Wade Jr. comes into the house and steals the money from the cashed welfare

check while I’m sleeping. He leaves no money for food so we live on church handouts

for the month.

The voices speaking to me take over my life. They speak to me in bed and at

work. Once a top commission earner in the jewelry department at Montgomery Wards, I

am fired for poor performance. I can’t trust my own thinking. I didn’t trust anyone,

including Clay my boyfriend so we split up. They repossess the washer and dryer first,

then came the eviction notice. Elaine my best friend agrees to take the kids, and I

become homeless wandering the streets during the day and sleeping in San Antonio Park at night. I can’t remember much of those dark days, but I do remember children, lots of

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children taunting and throwing rocks at me as I wander the streets on 23rd Avenue in

Oakland. My daughter Jane cries as she watches the children taunt me.

Finally, I am committed to John George Psychiatric Hospital in San Leandro where I get the help I need. The doctor’s there medicate the voices, and they help get me off the streets into low income housing in the Lockwood Gardens Project. When

Charlotte graduates from high school, she moves back to Arkansas to stay with her

“stepfather” and Helen. She tells me how good Helen treats her, and I am grateful. I am surprised when she joins the Marine Corps, but proud to. After boot camp she is stationed at Camp Pendleton and then Alameda Naval base where she meets Jose. I didn’t like him when she brought him home. He was arrogant. I tried to get her to wait awhile before marriage, but she wouldn’t listen to nothing.

***

I have watched the patterns of abuse become generational in my family. Charlotte becomes a punching bag for her husband, and Jane prostitutes for hers. When Charlotte finally leaves the marriage, my grandchild is 13 years old and maturing. Charlotte tells me, “I don’t feel comfortable with the way her father looks at her.” Jane uses drugs into her 50’s and there is no sign of her stopping. But it is the letter I receive from Patton

State Hospital that wounds me to the bone. It is a letter from my son Charles. In the letter he rambles but is clear when he writes and I read, “Why did you allow PawPaw to sodomize me?” There are no words for the pain I feel at having left both my sons in harm’s way. I had only thought his abuse ran to prepubescent and young teenage girls.

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And it hurts to know that again I have no answer for how I let life evolve for my children and myself. I can only think that because I didn’t love myself, I couldn’t love my kids.

***

V. Jane

I was 10 years old when I first used crack cocaine with Carolyn Hobson our next

door neighbor. She was 14. It was the year Carolyn’s mother drank bleach to give

herself an abortion and died. A week after her mother’s funeral, I had gone to Old

Lady Hobson’s house to play with her granddaughter Carolyn.

“You wanna see something?” She asks me.

“I dunno what is it?” I ask.

“This” she said reaching her hand out to me.

“What is it” I ask her again.

“It’s a pipe.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Momma smoked this with it,” she said holding out a funny white pebble, a dirty

brownish white.

“You wanna try it?”

“No thanks. I wanna play jacks. Will you play with me?”

“If you do this with me, I’ll play jacks with you.”

“Okay.”

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“Let’s go on the other side of the house by the hedges?” Carolyn said. So I

followed her.

“What do you do with it?”

“You smoke it.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“I saw momma do it lots of times”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Let’s just play jacks.”

“Come on and try it scaredy pants” she said as she placed the rock in the whole

on the pipe and lit it.

“Here” she said placing the pipe in my mouth. Take in a deep breath. I start

coughing. “Do it again. You feel anything.”

“Yeah dizzy.”

“We smoked the pebble up,” and I felt funny but good.

The year my Great Grandma Emma dies, I am hooked on crack cocaine, and nobody knows. Something happens at the funeral that causes us to move from Arkansas to

California. Years later I learn about PawPaw. I guess I am lucky nothing happened to me. I barely remember the first time we moved to California, but the second time is hell.

I am sick the whole trip. Momma and Charlotte thought I had allergies. I had withdrawals, and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made me sick.

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Momma has a nice apartment. We have a color TV, stereo system with disco

lights, and two bedrooms. Charlotte and I share a room. Everything in my life is brand

new, but all I can think about is getting through the withdrawals. While momma is at

work, and Charlotte reads her books, I walk the streets looking for crack. I scope out

people hanging out on the streets and ask them if they knew where I could buy the drug.

I soon learn from 82nd Avenue and MacArthur to 106th and MacArthur is where

the hoes did business. The strip is lined with liquor stores and motels. I meet Michelle

there. I walk right up to her and said, “Excuse me Miss, I’m looking to buy an ounce of

crack cocaine. Can you help me?” At first, she tells me to get lost, but when I show her

the stash of stolen money I brought from Arkansas, she told me to meet her later in the

day. She sold me short of an ounce, having chipped of a piece for herself. I didn’t argue

with her, I want the drug too much. I smoked the crack behind our apartment complex

while Charlotte reads in the house. I buy drugs from Michelle for about five months,

until my money runs out. Michelle and I become friends. She introduces me to the crew

of girls she hung out with Alice, Maria and Jennifer, and her boyfriend Derek and his best

friend Gerald. They watch out for our crew when we work the hoe stroll and in exchange

they got high for free. They also buy our drugs from the 69th Village. We dabble at

selling weed and crack but we use too much to make any real money.

Seven months after moving to California, I am tricking with the crew. They think

I’m new to the game, but Carolyn and I had started giving blow jobs to the Henderson brothers for crack and sometimes a pussy fuck. Lying on my back and pretending to like

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sex is the price I have to pay to get high. The crew rented two connecting rooms at the

Sunset Motel on 90th and MacArthur where we all hang out and conduct business. I never had much money it all went on freebasing. Sometimes I’d quit for two or three months but the cravings pulled me back into the game. I hated to look in a mirror and see my sunken cheeks, dark rings around the eyes, and a kind of ashy black skin tone.

Wade Jr. came to stay with momma around the same time she began to go crazy.

She heard voices. When momma loses her job at Montgomery Wards, Charlotte starts to

notice something is wrong with me. Having no experience with drugs, she couldn’t guess

how bad my situation had become. Wade Jr. noticed right away that I am on drugs, and I

knew right away that he is trying to sell them. I found his stash under the mattress and

took enough to make a big ass rock. Then momma finds the cocaine and threw it in the

toilet making me wish I had stolen more. When he hit momma, Charlotte and I jump on

him, and he said “get off me crack whore” because I had him by the neck. Charlotte

didn’t pay much attention to his words, but my heart sank. We are sleeping on the floor

when the manager posts the eviction notice. Momma sold the furniture that hadn’t been

repossessed. Momma’s friend Elaine took us in, but I couldn’t stay. She wouldn’t allow

me to be in and out of her house like momma.

The first time I am arrested for hoeing, momma and Charlotte learn I am addicted

to crack cocaine. I am 14 years old. The first week inside juvenile hall I am anxious,

paranoid, and can’t sleep. I feel bugs crawling all over my body. I can’t shake the feeling

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something bad is going to happen to me inside the cell. When I get clean inside Juvie, I

want to stop using. I stay in Juvie for two months before being shipped off to Mrs.

Shephard’s group home on 105th Avenue. I run away the next day. I go back to

Michelle’s crew because it is the only place I can get the money for crack.

Charlotte asks me all sorts of question about PawPaw. Did he ever touch me or try to have sex with me? I tell her no, and she starts crying. “What happened to you?

Why did you let Michelle start you on drugs?” I am surprised she thinks it was Michelle, but I didn’t tell her the truth. I thought it would hurt her more to know that it happened in

Arkansas where she and Great Grandma Emma always looked after me.

When Charlotte goes back to Arkansas, I move back into momma’s house in the

Lockwood Garden’s Project. At 17, I have my son Julian. He is born addicted to crack.

With a welfare check, I get my first low-income apartment. Julian cries all the time, and

Derek, his father, treats him badly. With a steady check, the drugs take over. First

momma raises Julian and then Charlotte takes over. I don’t like to say it but I guess you

can say I’ve become a lifetime user.

***

White Rock

I challenge you to prove yourself tougher than me, whom you can think of as mirroring a white dissolving pebble, in a tropical fish tank, with a mélange of rainbow, guppy, and livebearer fish playing tag in their

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caged aquarium. Sooth yourself, but please remember,

I always win.

Still, the innocent, the arrogant, and the foolish come to me, seduced by false perceptions of their invulnerability, and I make my move. Delivering the greatest orgasm incarnate, a burst of pink, yellow, orange, purple, and blue, exploding hues in a mystical realm, rushing to

the edge of windowed glass, a fleeting euphoria that ends at this sentence. In that moment, you became mine. See how quick I can be? Courting with dopamine, a dancing eroticism, an adrenaline high inside the aquarium of your brain, where

memory is forever wanting to recapture our first time. I stroke your ego, subtly seducing, then pounce upon your morals like a mind eating piranha, destroying concern for all but me.

Spawning empires of bubble nest builders of bettas and gouramis1 who go forth from protein skimmers1 touting my legend because

1 Tropical Fish

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I always win; and

for just one hit, you would murder your family and sell your child. —Wounded and dying, splattered blood ensues from fish’s head ramming against glass tank. —Soon all that remains is decaying flesh, an empty vessel, depleted of its natural brilliance — imprisoned by my substance;

soul less you lie on streets of gravel, in a sea of sharks, predator and prey. Broken and misshapen, by a white rock funneled through a glass pipe that has become your cage

in idolization, whisper my name

—crack cocaine as I waft through your membranes; you are my slave forsaking all others, you beg for me.

—I always win.

1 A device that removes aquarium waste before it is broken down by the action of bacteria.

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***

VI. Charles

Clouded memories shade my life with before and after the diagnosis of

schizophrenia at 15. I remember Charlotte and I were the peacekeepers in PawPaw’s

house. In the early morning hours, he would wake Charlotte or me to eat breakfast with

him. The smell and feel of him made my skin crawl, but I play a game of pretend with

myself and with him that I liked touching and being touched. I cannot remember a time

when the touch and feel of him did not exist or the clouds in space and time did not

submerge into nightmare visions of reality.

When I am six, the family leave PawPaw’s house with momma’s second husband

Meleake to California and those two years are the best of my life. I remember always laughing with my brother Wade Jr. We build go-carts and race them in the streets. We

play hide and go seek and dodge ball with kids who live in the neighborhood. We have

fun. When we return to PawPaw’s house I am alone. I couldn’t laugh, or play, or believe

in God because of PawPaw’s touch.

Before we leave for California as a family, Wade Jr. joins Big Willie Henderson’s

gang, and I am left to deal with PawPaw. When we return to Arkansas he picks up with

the gang like he had never left. With no one to talk to, I crawl inside myself to survive

those early years of being PawPaw’s bitch. I am Momma Bett’s baby boy whose very

existence stops much of the physical trauma PawPaw wished to impose upon her by my

being the placating child. I understand that acquiescence to adult male authority in the

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home is a matter of self-preservation. In school, I become an A student not only for the positive attention I receive, but because studying offers me a reason to be away from home. Studying allows me to escape the threat of physical violence that always looms inside PawPaw’s house.

It is the voices that tell me PawPaw is hurting Charlotte like he hurts me and there is nothing I can do. I try talking to Charlotte, but like me she pretends too. However, it is obvious that she is unhappy. She would spend hours alone in the woods behind the hog pens reading a book, but mostly sleeping. Something happens at Great Grandma Emma’s funeral that causes Charlotte and Jane to go back to California with momma. When they leave, PawPaw tries to beat Grandma Betty Anne and it is the first time in my life that I attempt to fight him. My hands around his throat cutting off his vocal chords is a pleasure I’ll always remember as Momma Bett screams for me to stop she pulls on my shirt. I lose the fight, but things change. PawPaw would never step to me again, and he would think twice about hurting Momma Bett.

I am 14 when the voices tell me to do horrible things, to hurt myself and to kill

PawPaw. I tell my high school math teacher about hearing voices that told me to do bad things, but I never tell about the touches. The shame of it keeps me silent. The high school guidance counselor helps Momma Bett find me a doctor. The doctor prescribes medicines to stop the voices, but most of the time in our house it is a choice between medicine and groceries; besides, the pills flat-line my emotions.

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I think bad boys, bad boys, what you gone do when they come for you? I am a loner for most of my childhood, until I become part of the Henderson’s gang. I start using cocaine and then I graduate to crack cocaine as a substitute for my prescription meds. I shed all fear of PawPaw, and it is like swatting a mosquito flying around my ear.

PawPaw is a nuisance but nothing more. He now fears me and with good reason.

Without meds reality and delusion blend into an alternate surreal world where I can’t distinguish a lie from the truth. Scenes from my past bleed into the present, and my tomorrows turn back to yesterdays, I am a stranger in my own life. They say I took a hammer to my probation officer, but I can’t remember it. I was high on crack cocaine.

Now I live in Patton State Hospital for the mentally insane. I am controlled by medication that makes my hands tremble and shake. It is where I die at 40.

VII. Charlotte - The Middle Years

One of the most thought-provoking questions I have ever been asked is addressed to me by a 14-year-old girl where I work at juvenile hall. Out of the blue after dinner one evening, she tells me her story of sexual abuse by her father. She asks me, “Mrs. Garcia why did my father do me like that,” and I answered, “because he had a problem, but you were not the cause.” Somewhere inside me there is recognition that I had not been the problem. I finally understand it is how the family works together that makes the character of a child. But the shadows from such a tragedy never go away.

I watch my daughter as her body spills out of the one-piece swimsuit, shiny and brand new as she plays Marco Polo with her ninth-grade school friends. Parents in the

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complex are lolling around the pool watching their children play when my husband’s

words catch my attention as I prepare snacks to take to the pool. He says, “our

daughter’s breasts are huge” and I think what does that mean. There is something in his

voice that disturbs me, and I began to pay attention to their father daughter relationship.

At 13 Kenya is short and top heavy with an athletic body, built like a gymnast. She plays

baseball, wrestles, and is on the cross country middle school team.

Sure, I knew I had trust issues, but there were reasons not to trust Jose Garcia. He

had wooed me for six -months before I gave in to his flirting. He had been the only boy

on the Navy base who kept coming back. So, I couldn’t see the false image he presented

in the guise of a good man. I thought him prince charming. I had always wanted a high

yellow light skinned man, and the hazel flecks in his eyes didn’t hurt, to make pretty

babies with and he fit the bill. His 5 feet 7-inch frame didn’t hurt. So, I married him on

March 10, 1979 in the Navy Chapel. It is said you can judge a man by his friends. Jose

only had one. His name is Ruben Hernandez. He is approximately 5 feet 3 inches tall,

140 pounds with pockmarked skin, and squinty eyes. They came into the Marine Corps

on the buddy system. He is Ruben’s best man. Since I didn’t know how to drive, Jose

asks Ruben to give me a ride from our townhouse on Lincoln Street in Alameda to the

Navy Chapel on our wedding day. Jose didn’t get off duty until 1330 hours and the wedding is scheduled for 1500 hours. The drive to the chapel is awkward because a stoned Ruben masturbates while I sit beside him in the front seat of Jose’s 1967 Monte

Carlo. Secrets keep growing in my life because I never tell Jose how Ruben behaved on

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our wedding day. In part because I had become numb to sexual abuse, and in part because I thought Ruben a pitiful man. It became obvious that to be independent I had to learn how to drive.

Five days after my marriage, on March 15, 1979, I receive my first ass whipping.

But it is the third time he beats me that I leave. Five months later I go to the doctor for

the flu and learn that I am pregnant. So, I stay married. At this time, Jose is discharged

from the Marine Corps with an ineligible reenlistment code, which is why Kenya and I

moved to Texas with him. I think back to when the 1st Sergeant called me into his office

and talked to me about marriage in a vague way. He hinted that marriage between Jose

and I might not be in my best interest. But being me, I couldn’t read between the lines.

Now I get it.

Most of the barracks had known about his Methamphetamine use but no one

wanted to come out and say it to me. Four years into the marriage, my daughter goes to stay with my mother for both financial reasons and because I couldn’t keep lying about where all mommy’s bruises came from. What I remember most about those years in

Texas is that there is no such thing as women bonding to protect each other. While Jose’s mother didn’t approve of the abuse, she supports her son in the abuse. We live in the duplex next door to hers which she owns, and she intervened only once, but never called the cops. Not even when he abused her. Her only act of involvement was to tell me to try and not upset him, which was laughable. If he had a bad day, if somebody made him feel insecure, he took it out on me either mentally or physically. I remember lying in the

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churchyard on the cold asphalt at midnight in the rain because Jose had locked me out of

the house. He had been replaced as the number one welder in his section. Tired I fall

asleep in the corridor leading to the church’s pulpit because it is the only dry place

unlocked. Embarrassed I am awakened in the early morning by the janitor. Humiliated, I

return to Jose’s home to beg for entrance into the house I paid rent own. His mother had

refused to let me inside her home in fear that he would attack her. As he had tossed a

chair through her window, the one and only time she intervened in his abuse of me. As a

woman and a mother, I know that I would not allow or condone such behavior by my

child. Hospitalized after having my head split open because Jose rammed it into the

living room wall, I finally decide to leave. I had not seen my daughter in two years.

Homeless I stay in a women’s shelter. There I feel lost, but after listening to the

other women share their stories of abuse, I feel a kind of comradery and share my story.

The upshot of this tale is that I fall back into old patterns of attempting to buy friendship.

I loan Cynthia Sheldon $400, which of course she promises to pay back but never does.

Finally, I catch a break and get a job with the housing authority. It is a good city job.

My family, momma, Kenya, and I are living well when Jose reenters our lives.

My first realization that Jose has moved back to California is a notice for me to appear in family court for a custody hearing for our seven-year-old daughter. I am blindsided when the court grants Jose joint custody of our child. Afraid that he will take his temper out on

Kenya, I go back to him. Shortly thereafter, the abuse begins again. Only this time he is careful about the abuse. He doesn’t hit or kick me with his steel-toed boots where the

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bruises will show because he doesn’t want me to lose my job. It is my job that affords him the luxury of going from job to job.

I don’t know whether it is real or imagined, but I feel the threat of Jose to our child after his remarks one afternoon about her breast at the pool; “Kenya has melons like a woman now” he said to me “she’s already eying the boys like a woman.” He began to display too much interest in Kenya. He starts wanting to go shopping with us to pick her clothes, and he makes odd comments about her and boys: “all the boys and men at the pool are checking out Kenya. I don’t want her swimming in the pool unless I’m around” he tells me.

“Don’t worry, the children are only allowed in the pool with adult supervision.”

“How do you know you can trust the adults?”

“Be serious Jose, her babysitter Jennifer has proven trustworthy.” But Jose remains stubbornly opposed to Kenya swimming without his supervision. Three months after Kenya’s 13th birthday, my doubt and lack of trust cement my decision to leave Jose for good.

Kenya, Momma, and I experience the good life. We move into a good neighborhood with quality resident amenities: a gym, washer and dryer in the unit, a kitchen with a large dining room area, and three bedrooms. I write a letter to the judge with pictures of my injuries, documents of doctor’s visits, and my hospital stays. The court grants me full custody, and Jose receives supervised visits. The family belongs to a bowling league and work is good, but I began to feel alienated from my life and alone.

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Still, it is the one of the happiest times of my life. It reminds me of those years the family

resided at 55th and Holloway in Oakland, where for a brief time my family life had been

happy.

Overwhelmed with physical symptoms of aching joints, carpal tunnel syndrome

and tendonitis, I am finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Extreme high and low mood

swings, loss of time and memory episodes, and severe depression hamper my ability to

parent, work, and live a happy life after my divorce. Promoted at work, I soon began to

fall short of expectations. I didn’t realize until I was mired in a workload that

overwhelmed me that I had not received the proper training. To compensate for my

inadequacies, I would stay at work sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning to meet deadlines, because I wanted to be accepted and liked. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I remember the night I stayed into the wee hours of the morning, and then walked the dangerous route to the West Oakland Bart station without realizing that I had driven to work that morning. When I leave that job, everything I feel about myself has been confirmed: I am nothing. I am inadequate, and I am dumb. I didn’t deserve a good life.

For a time, I wallow in misery, watching television mindlessly and eating myself into oblivion. I have always lived my life on the edge of crisis without understanding why I couldn’t break the chain of self-hate that envelopes me. After ten years of therapy, I am diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The medication clears the fog from my mind, but I still feel fear of everything. The past sneaks into my tomorrows and has a presence in my todays.

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VIII. Wade Jr.

I remember daddy hitting momma over and over again. I remember moving into

PawPaw’s house. I remember being scared all the time. I remember being tied to an iron chair in the kitchen of PawPaw’s house and beaten for not letting him touch me. I remember being hungry. I remember the savagery of PawPaw’s words to me, “you a worthless piece of shit. Ain’t nobody will ever won’t you.” I remember the rage of wanting to kill. I remember leaving that house at nine years old and joining Big Willie

Henderson’s gang. He raises me up just fine, teaching me how to grow weed, where to buy the good coke for snorting and the cheap stuff to make crack. I learned how to cook crystal meth. At 16, I have a brand new red Pontiac Firebird. At 17, I am an accomplice to murder having been a participant in the beating death of Solomon Pierce, one of Big

Willie’s suppliers that had cheated him on product. Big Willie told us “to beat him bad but let him live.” We beat him to the ground and stomp him, then his body goes limp.

He is dead. It is the first murder I participated in. But stories of other murders circulate in the gang, so I knew that Doug and Sam would brag to somebody. I moved to

California with momma. I didn’t tell none of the old gang where I was moving to, because I didn’t want to end up in jail.

In California I start selling dope for my high school guidance counselor until my

mother flushes a quart size bag of cocaine down the toilet. After Candace flushed the

dope, I become a marked man at Castlemont High School. I become just another thug

who owes the dope man money with no ability to pay. I am in too deep in California, so I

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steal my mother’s welfare money and take the Greyhound bus to Chicago, and then to

Michigan. For 12 years or so, I become a traveling medicine man for what ails the drug

addict. Want drugs call (000-000-0000) guaranteed delivery. When I finally return home

to visit my dad, there is no chatter about the murder, but both Doug and Sam are in prison

for trafficking cocaine.

I meet Denise Brown in 1982 and we become a couple, but her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t leave her alone. He runs me over with his car and my life changes forever. My right leg requires several pins to hold the kneecap in place. During that time, I become addicted to crack cocaine and my life spirals out of control. It has become a lifelong addiction. My glory days of making money selling cocaine are long since over. I am homeless and survive on a disability check. When things become too difficult in one state, I move to another state where I have family. But I am never really a welcome family member when

I visit. I am alone.

IX. Charlotte Part 2 – The End

Momma and I sit in the living room of our two-bedroom apartment numbed by

our first honest discussion of incest in the family. She is now an old woman and I am

middle age. She shares the letter from my twin brother Charles with me. The letter asks

her why she had let PawPaw sodomize him. Momma cries because she had not known

the extent of her father’s depravity.

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While trying to write a thesis on Pecola Breedlove’s character in The Bluest Eye I have a psychotic break. I lose the ability to read, write, and understand literature. Unable to focus my mind takes me on a journey through literature from Lott’s daughters to

Persephone, to The Color Purple, and other tales of sexual abuse. My writing is disjointed, and I am broken. Studying and discussing Pecola Breedlove’s story with my mother provides a perspective that offers relief from the feelings of guilt, shame, and bitterness that sometimes occupy our minds.

I realize that my mother and I have been living inside the delusion that everything is okay in our lives. Suppressed memories have hidden inside us for too long, teaching us how to not embrace life but to bow down to life with no expectations. It’s sort of like how we suppressed our mental anguish at the sexual abuse. How we hid bruises and hospital visits received in our traumatic male/female relationships because it is what we understood and had come to think of as the behavior of a good girl/wife. In our shame we learned how to protect the men instead of learning how to become women that protect ourselves. My daughter has been taught how to leave, and we are learning how to love and live with our past.

Momma is in the hospital near death. Doctors want to perform a tracheal intubation on her, which would require her to live in a nursing home for the rest of her life. It is time to call my siblings and our elderly family members. I dread this call because Momma and I have isolated ourselves from the family for almost 30 years. Still it is like a family reunion when everyone turns out to support momma or to see and be

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seen. They all act as if they have a say in what they consider the best care for momma. I

refuse them that right, because it is entirely momma’s decision; although I know she

doesn’t want to breathe through a tube having discussed it with her upon the diagnosis.

Jane my sister is, now, a crystal meth user who comes in and out of momma’s house. She has bouts of extreme paranoia, usually when she is coming down from a drug high. She has a tendency towards acts of violence in her paranoia, but I sometimes use her to help me take care of my momma and uncle from time to time. She resents me because I am in charge of momma and Uncle Jodie’s care. I pay her for her work, but she is often cruel towards me: “You fat ass bitch, why you going to school, ain't nobody gone hire your fat ass” is a popular refrain she repeats when she is broke or unhappy. It is how my family learned to act by example in our formative years. Her addictions keep her unsettled, and she refuses to acknowledge her mental illness by declining to take her doctor prescribed medications. She lives from shelter to shelter or on the streets.

In her paranoia, Jane will accuse me of stealing from her. Mostly, it would be her phone that she has lost or can’t find in the moment. She never seems to ask herself why I would steal her phone, since I had my own more expensive phone. Once, she awakened me in bed saying “I know you took my phone bitch I want it back.” Since I had not taken the phone, I was at a loss as to how to deal with the drama because she believes the lies she tells herself. This inability to deal with life and its realities has been part of her makeup for a long time, but no one in the family thought it could be a mental illness. I remember when her son Julian is 8 years old and she steals his Nintendo from Momma’s

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house. Even as she walks down the street carrying the Nintendo, she is in denial of the theft. Momma and I trail behind her asking for the Nintendo back. Almost 30 years later, she still denies her actions.

I first see Wade Jr. at the hospital and he is an affable character, no longer the

ruthless person I had perceived him as all these years. Still he wants to be involved in

momma’s decision, and I want concede his right to share in the decision-making process.

It may be unfair because momma and I closed off our relationship with him due to his

selfishness, drug use and violent tendencies. Over breakfast, Jane, Wade Jr. and I talk

about momma and the best course of action as the doctor’s advocate intubation. Momma

declines intubation and recovers enough to be sent to a rehabilitation facility. Suffering

from severe sleep apnea, death still lurks in the near future for momma because of her

weak lungs. I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place as I have to depend on family to watch my blind and deaf uncle while I go to doctor’s appointments with momma. The rehabilitation facility (a nursing home) requires a family member to go on each doctor’s appointment offsite.

While visiting momma, who suffers from mild dementia, as well as schizophrenia, my brother Wade cosigns momma’s belief that somebody is causing her illness with voodoo or black magic. Wade Jr. says, “I know what you mean the government is listening to my cell phone calls” and I realize that he has delusions of his own. So I ask him “why do you think somebody is listening in on your phone calls?” He responds, “don’t you know. They have been listening for years.” But when I ask him

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again why they are listening, he cannot provide a clear answer to the question. That is

the first red flag. On another visit to momma, Wade Jr. tells us he is going on a visit to

Arkansas to see about the property his daddy left him. He is serious. However, when his

daddy died there was no money for his burial because Aunt Mary, his sister, called me

and momma to ask for money. He left nothing having lived in a rented shack at the end

of his life. Still my brother seems to believe his delusions. Denial for me and my siblings

began at a very early age. It began by suppressing a great deal of traumatizing events.

When I see how my siblings change reality to make it fit their perspective, I realize that I

do the same thing.

Recently diagnosed with bipolar illness, my mind tries to deny that reality. After

being on medication for a while I start thinking that my diagnosis is all a mistake. But in

observing my siblings, I realize that I am just like them in wanting to think myself

“normal.” When the reality is that what is normal for me (us) is coping with mental illness by taking a combination of medications that will allow me (us) to leave without the highs, lows, and ever-present fear and depression. I realize that my family’s DNA is predisposed to mental illness and that being raised in a hostile environment without love and security inevitably brings out the illness. So, I will not act arrogant or live in a pretend world that denies my life’s realities. I will stay focused in the present. I will believe in myself.