Paris wanted to rush down the steps and chase him, but she could barely open her left eye, and her right eye was flooded with blood. It would take more than a few stitches to close the gash her teeth had made when the stranger split her lip, and her broken nose made breathing terribly painful.
Instead she slammed the door closed. This time she locked it. Once again she’d been beaten and brutalized and no doubt she looked like a bat out of hell, but this time she felt damned good. She’d finally stood up for herself and somehow she felt stronger. She felt brand-new.
Shit, she told herself. If I can jack that giant motherfucker up, then William better watch his ass. The next somebody to pass a goddamn lick up in here will be me! For years she’d been sexually degraded and physically abused, but now emotionally and mentally, Paris was free. There would be no more rape or torment in the house where she paid the mortgage. Never again would William put his hands around her neck, his knife to her throat, or his dick in her face!
Or anywhere else on her body, for that matter.
There are gonna be some changes around here, she vowed. Some big-time changes! For one thing, she was moving her art studio back upstairs to the spare room. Today. And if William didn’t like it he could let the doorknob hit him in the ass on the way out. And as for dinner tonight, his mama could wait on that nana puddin’ until the cows came home.
Paris commanded her body to move and limped into the bathroom. She scrubbed the stranger’s blood from her hands using some Clorox she found under the sink. In the medicine cabinet she saw the makeup kit she used to camouflage the black eyes, busted lips, and the random assortment of bruises that were always impossible to explain to her friends. Concealer, pressed powder, foundation, rouge, all of it got flung into the trashcan. She was too pretty for makeup anyway. Or at least she used to be. Paris raised her eyes to meet her battered reflection in the mirror but she did not flinch. Blood continued to trickle from her right nostril, and there was a dry film coating her swollen lips. A shudder of revulsion ran down the small of her back.
He stuck his dirty dick in my mouth!
Without hesitation she diluted a half a cap of bleach with a cup of warm water and sloshed it around in her mouth, then rinsed with cold water. She splashed a final handful of water over her face and neck, and dabbed at her wound with a soft pink towel.
Every muscle in her body screamed as Paris crept into her kitchen and opened the freezer. She stood there silently; fighting her emotions as the cold air washed over her. Reaching inside, Paris grabbed a frozen bag of vegetables. Her tears melted the ice crystals as she pressed the frozen peas gingerly to her broken nose. What the hell am I crying about? She admonished herself. For once, I fought back! I even came out on top!
Yeah. There were gonna be some real changes around here.
Paris flung the frozen vegetables back into the freezer and bent down to retrieve the kitchen knives from their hiding place under the sink. Discarding the plastic bags, she tore the tape from the shoebox and, one by one, she stuck the knives into the wooden holder, then slid it over next to the toaster. That done, she shoved her husband’s high-backed armchair out of its position and replaced it with her smaller low-backed version, and then she sat down at the head of her kitchen table and smoked one of William’s cigarettes as she waited for the police to arrive.
Tracy Price-Thompson is the Essence bestselling author of
Black Coffee
(Random House, 2002),
Chocolate Sangria
(Random House, 2003),
A Woman’s Worth
(Random House, 2004), and
Knockin’ Boots
(Random House, 2005). A Brooklyn, New York native, Tracy holds undergraduate degrees in business administration and social work, and a masters degree in social work. In addition to her novels, Tracy is also the co-editor of the major anthology,
Proverbs for the People
(Kensington, 2003). She can be reached at [email protected].
T
HE
L
ONELY
E
CHOES
O
F
MY YOUTH
D.V. B
ERNARD
It wasn’t until about two days after the murder that the police finally found the body—and then, only after a pack of stray dogs was seen outside the building, fighting over the left arm and gorging themselves on the entrails. In the basement of the abandoned building the police found the corpse still tied to the chair—half-eaten, disemboweled and rotting in the late summer heat. Given the fact that the corpse was found in a crack house, the murder was presumed to be a drug killing. Some dazed, hapless crackheads they found on the second floor were rounded up and questioned, but only we kids had known how the body had come to be there.
… We had all been children back then. Even our parents had been childish—in their inability to see and in their determination to remain blind. Now that I think about it, even the wisdom of our old ones had been nothing but a finely tuned acceptance of pain and disappointment. It was only many years later, when I held my newborn daughter in my arms, that the reality of the crime we had committed—and of the crime that had been committed against us—finally began to register in my mind. New life, with all its potential for accomplishment and disappointment, had suddenly terrified me. Having a child compels you to consider all the things you hated about your childhood: all the things you swore you’d do differently when you became a parent. At the same time, this is not a story about the horrors of the ghetto: about a lamentable underclass, with which we all empathize, but for whom we’ve come to believe that nothing can be done. This is not a story for tears and recriminations—nor is it one of those “feel good” stories about “the triumph of the human will.” This is simply the story of our youth—of a time that has passed, but which is always with us, regardless of if we loved it or hated it: regardless of whether we triumphed over it or became its silent victims…
It’s strange how a child’s mind works. I took the vacant lot a few blocks from our slum for a park. I made an obstacle course out of broken bottles and piles of garbage. I constructed mounds of rubble into pirate forts and jungle gyms. Also, the abandoned buildings beside the lot, within which crackheads bought drugs (and sometimes sold their bodies and souls to low-level drug dealers) became for me Aztec temples to be explored. Drug dealers forging fiefdoms out of America’s social blight became for me knights in shining armor—not because I idealized them, but because they were subsumed within my world of fantasy, co-opted by my imagination. Besides, as I was only six, they all left me alone. I would wander through rooms where people were having sex, and where people had guns held to their heads. I passed overdosed crackheads frothing at the mouth; I came upon drug dealers haggling with corrupt police officers, and white crackheads that had come all the way from the suburbs to share in the black man’s misery. All this and more I saw during my daily explorations of the neighborhood.
One of the earliest memories I have is of my mother kissing me goodbye—not forever, but so that she could start her job as a live-in nanny for a family out on Long Island. My mother tried her best, but she was one of those people who grew enraged when she was sad; she lashed out at those around her when her inability to make headway in life—and to make herself happy—crushed her spirit. I must have been crying at her leaving, because she yelled at me for “being a baby.” Then, with a look in her eyes full of bewilderment and shame, she kissed me quickly on the cheek and left. I was six; my mother was 23; my father (who I learned later was one of those unfortunate drug dealers that began to abuse his own product) would have been 25 if he had still been alive.
My mother’s little sister was staying with us. Both sisters had been castoffs from their family—disowned by their religious parents. My aunt had a six-month-old daughter whose constant crying seemed to provide the soundtrack of our lives. After my mother closed the door behind her, I joined my aunt in the living room—where she was watching TV. She was in an old bathrobe, breastfeeding her child. The weight she had gained during pregnancy had drooped disconcertingly on her small frame. She hadn’t combed her hair for the day; and as she sat there, staring meditatively at the convoluted soap opera, it was as though the child suckling at her breast were draining the life out of her. Her face always seemed drawn. Her movements were slow and deliberate; and because of all this, I was always on my best behavior around her—the way a child was on his best behavior when visiting a sick relative. On some level, I thought that I would break her if I accidentally bumped into her. I found myself whispering when I talked to her, as if fearful that I would shatter her if I spoke too loudly.
It was only when her boyfriend came over, and they disappeared into her room to bring forth the frightful sounds of rattling bed springs and hushed screams, that I would sense any stirrings of life in her; but even then, those stirrings would seem empty somehow—and would always be gone by the time she emerged from the room. I began to think of her room as a magical place; I entered it furtively when she wasn’t looking, expecting some new dimension to appear. However, all I would see was the same room, with its bed piled high with soiled linen and dirty clothes, and with its pervasive stench of baby shit and stale urine. Only in retrospect do I understand why her boyfriend’s face had always worn a look of bewilderment when he left the room—and why, after a while, he stopped coming entirely.
When summer came and the long, hot vacation days stretched out like a cruel punishment, the neighborhood streets became my refuge. The hotter it got, the deeper my aunt seemed to seep into her strange lassitude. After a while, her sepulchral form began to occupy a place of horror in my imagination, so I stayed out on the streets merely to avoid her—and the sense of panic that rose in me when I watched her. One humid night, when the prickly heat made me toss and turn in bed, I shuffled over to the living room to watch some TV. My aunt had gone to bed by then—it must have been past midnight…
The Exorcist
was on. That must have been the longest two hours of my life. I lay on the couch trembling. I wanted to turn off the TV, but these were the days before remote controls, and I was too terrified to walk from the couch to the TV. I was convinced that the demon that had possessed the girl in the movie would get me if my feet touched the floor. The demon was hiding beneath the couch, getting ready to pounce on me the moment I ventured from the sanctuary on top of the couch. Also, it occurred to me that if I walked over to the TV and turned it off, then I would have to walk back to the couch in the dark! All of these factors combined to paralyze me. I lay trembling on the couch as the demon girl’s head spun around and she threw up green vomit and her body levitated before being “compelled by the body of Christ.” Even when I turned my eyes away, I shuddered and cried at the sounds—and the frightful thoughts—that now seemed somehow inescapable. When the movie was over, I lay staring at the TV but seeing only my projected fears. Eventually sleep did seize me, but I had the most fantastical dreams, in which the demon from the movie chased me through dark ghetto streets. Every crevice in the dream seemed to be a hiding place for the demon and every noise seemed to be a prelude to death.
I awoke the next morning with body aches—as though I had been fighting with the demon all night and had barely escaped. I didn’t awake screaming or anything like that, but with an awareness—a surety—that somehow my aunt had been possessed by a demon. These thoughts circulated through my mind for days—like a virus infecting my mind, my ability to think and make sense of the world. I watched my aunt from around corners. I remember that since she was breastfeeding, her nipples were chewed up and sore. I doubt she made enough milk, because the baby was always crying and seemed frustrated. However my aunt would hardly seem to notice; she would just sit staring at TV, or whatever the case was, while the child cried or chewed at her nipples until they bled. I remembered my aunt as she used to be. In my mind, I had an image of her as playful and loving—flittering about the world like a butterfly. I couldn’t trust these memories, of course, as they came from the deepest recesses of my childhood—where memories didn’t come in the form of images, but sensations. I knew only that my aunt, in some earlier incarnation, had been for me a feeling of joy and carefree youth. Even though she was now only 18, she seemed beyond customary classifications of age—or at least beyond my six-year-old understanding of it. My inability to make sense of things, combined with what seemed to be my aunt’s obvious unhappiness, left me convinced that something evil had happened to her. Moreover, I figured that whatever sorrows she had, had to have their source in supernatural evil (not only the earthly kind I saw daily on the streets). A life and death battle was going on within my aunt—a struggle for her soul; and while this battle raged I couldn’t even sleep, for fear that if the evil won out I would be the next victim.
I had always liked walking through the neighborhood in the early morning, but when my fears for my aunt—and my own soul—began to drive me from the house, I found that early mornings were magical. As night turned into day I connected the banishing of darkness in the outside world to a similar victory within me. Also, the early morning streets were mine. Few people would be on the streets; no loud music or quarrels would invade my thoughts… and I would be free for a few moments.
As many a bewildered parent will tell you, childhood desperation, coupled with an active imagination, can often lead to extremely bizarre choices. There was a voodoo shop in my neighborhood—I don’t know what else to call it. People went there to commune with the forces of good and evil—to soothe heartbreak and find guidance for lives that seemed pointless. The shop was in a dusty, roach-infested storefront; the two-story slum that housed it was on a block where most of the other buildings had been demolished—and where these few standing buildings seemed like rotten teeth in a diseased mouth. In a strange way, I thought of this block as the crossroads of our neighborhood, the nexus of all the good and evil potentialities of our community.
Either way, that morning, terrified by the encroachment of evil into my home, I went to see the proprietress of the shop. Rather, I walked up and down the block hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Madame Evangeline was her name, and the faded sign above the shop advertised palm readings and “spiritual consultations.” The lights of the store were never on and in the dusty display case there were several exotic statuettes of deities, demigods, saints and demons. Like I said before, it was a two-story building. From what I could tell, Madame Evangeline lived in the shop; on the second floor, there was a wizened old man who continually muttered to himself and scratched the same spot on his chest. The talk in the neighborhood was that Evangeline had cast a spell on him for some transgression that no one could name, but which everyone presumed to involve spurned love and/or cheating ways. I never saw anyone visiting her establishment, and before deciding to seek her out, I had only seen her once. It had been about six months before, when I was on my way to school. I think I was late, because I was rushing along, heedless of the shop that had always triggered an eerie feeling in my gut. Evangeline suddenly emerged from the darkness of the shop to throw out her garbage; at the sight of her, a shudder went though me, so that I almost toppled to the ground. Nobody else was around; I stood there helplessly. Of course, I figured that taking out the garbage was too trivial a task for one whom communed with mystical forces. With the occult forces she had at her command, I figured that she could easily disintegrate her trash in hellfire—or levitate it to the curb. Thus, I figured that her foray to the garbage can had to be a pretext whose ultimate design was my mortal soul. Madame Evangeline was a huge black woman of indefinite age. She came out in a discolored (mostly purple) nightgown. Her stockings were rolled down to the middle of her massive thighs and her pink, fluffy slippers clapped indecorously as she sauntered to the curb. I had frozen about five steps from her. Children always imagine such people to be cannibals; as I looked at her, it occurred to me that nothing but the sweet, tender flesh of six-year-olds could account for Madame Evangeline’s huge gut. I watched that gut anxiously, as though paying homage to my unfortunate predecessors. When I looked up, I realized that the occult mistress was smiling at me (and I swear to this day that she licked her lips hungrily!) I turned on my heels and ran!
However, six months later, driven to the brink by the double curse of an active imagination and unnamable terrors, I found myself willing to risk adding girth to Madame Evangeline’s gut. That morning, I walked down the blocks with a peculiar single-mindedness—a feeling that only Madame Evangeline had the power to battle my aunt’s demon and restore her soul. I passed the Arab deli that was our neighborhood’s version of a supermarket (and which had that shelf of porno magazines in the back that the neighborhood boys were always lurking around). I passed the God’s Heavenly Assembly church, whose sign had a missing section and now actually read, “God’s Heavenly Ass.” I passed Won-Dolla-Fong’s fruit stand, where everything cost one dollar and where people would purposely ask him how much something cost, just so that he would scream, in that strange way of his that negated all the consonants, “won dolla!”
Just as I neared Madame Evangeline’s shop the door opened and she emerged with another bag of garbage. She saw me and smiled again. I forced myself to continue walking toward her. She was dressed just as she had been the last time I saw her, so that it was as though no time had passed.
“You gonna run away again?” she asked me. She had a heavy accent—Haitian.
When she addressed me, I stopped walking, but nodded my head to answer her question. My eyes were already beginning to tear up; and when I could no longer hold it in, I blurted out that I needed her help.