His face floats, as if he has no torso. I am on my back, near Kitty Brite and Puppy Brite, on the living room floor. I remember the neatly torn manila envelope and the funny-smelling cigarettes he made with it. The way he can’t stop giggling makes no sense to me; what is so entertaining about my/ my sisters’ toys? Are little rainbow covered dogs and cats funny? The smell of those cigarettes he and my uncle smoked didn’t register to me until I was grown and smoking weed myself. They were high. My uncle is like a big brother to me. His friends are supposed to be that way, too. My barely adult uncle never touches me like that. I don’t understand until I’m about 39 what really happened. How the friend with a name that sounded like a street in Germantown was always after a young girl, how he married the daughter of a Black Mafia guy only after they’d had two kids in her adolescence. He is long dead before I realize what tha floating face means. I never say anything to my family.
She is behind a curtain in her auntie’s basement, where I get my hair permed and shaped into the crispest pineapple waves anyone’s ever seen. She has “a boy name.” I think so highly of her that I’ll do anything to be in her good favor. She asks me if I know what is between my legs, what’s between hers. Do I know what to do with it? She asks me if I want to touch her. I can’t say no; I am compelled by something far beyond me. I want her to like me. She is so pretty. I’m simply cute, nerdy, awkward. The girl with the “boy name” has big old mushroom bangs with her hard press and roller set. She’s at least three years older than I am, allowed to be an outside kid. Allowed to curse. She’s so pretty. I’m bald headed because the perm don’t work, but my mom doesn’t know what else to do. My hair isn’t like my mom’s. It’s nappy. It’s too soft to hold a curl once straightened, unless there’s enough product to sculpt it. The pineapple waves give the illusion that I have nice hair, that the perm isn’t a failure. I don’t know why the girl with the “boy name” is talking to me. She is so pretty. Her skin looks like a brown glass bottle full of sunshine shards. We almost get caught. Barely. By seconds. My ride was there, and I needed to walk upstairs to go home. Around the time we are both in high school, she’s had a baby and is the shame of everyone. Her auntie is so upset, she says loud enough to hear, “Can you believe [boy name] has a baby? Throwing away her life.” She doesn’t exactly greet me in the living room while I wait for my mom/ uncle/ grandfather. I shyly say hi to her, wonder if she remembers me. She’s still sunshine shards, but the light is gone from her eyes. Until recently, I would think about her and wonder if she’d like me now. If she was like me.
By the time we’re in fifth grade, the boy with the name like a candy bar has rubbed himself against me enough that I know the look on his face when he’s about to. The smirk is both invitation and threat to my body and mind. We pass pencil or erasable ink-scrawled messages to each other about what I like him to do. He gets close to my ear sometimes, telling me he knows that I like it. I don’t like none of it. I lie because I want to seem brave and strong. My body seizes up with danger every time. What if we get caught? We don’t even line up near each other. He’s too tall to walk behind me in size order, but still short enough to lay a protrusion against my backside, then make friction. I want it to be over quickly. I never tell anyone, but this one girl tells me I shouldn’t let him do it. That she hits him. She’s taller than all the boys. This girl has the reach and the parental support to whoop the ass of any boy who tries her. I admire this about her, how she doesn’t crumple or cry like I do. She fights. She swings and yells. I am a girl whose “no” gets caught in her throat, sometimes coming out as a broken whisper or drowning warble. It’s been that way for so long, I pass through myself whenever someone hurts or scares me. I find out, ten years later, that he is the cousin of one of my schoolmates. He has that same smirk when he says hi to me at their family’s rickety church. He doesn’t come to our gospel choir concert. I sing with extra sincerity that day.
What do you do with the grief of your adult self’s understanding? How do you talk your grown self through the rage and shame and sorrow of nobody protecting you the way you needed? When someone accuses you of being “funny,” do you think it’s because you “got messed with?” Does your mother know? Did she care? What did she do? Did she have the same experiences? Who cried for her? Who protects her now? Does she ponder her shame like you do?
I am about twenty years old. I learn I have a great aunt who birthed five children, though I only understand her to have four: three daughters and one son. There is a first born son who never grew up in her house. It’s an open mess that nobody discusses; my eldest great aunt’s husband raped her. Their forced son went to live with great aunt and her husband, living as a sibling within their home. Eldest great aunt just died. I learn this in the days surrounding her funeral. I have never liked her. I don’t want to go. I feel relief that she is dead. This aunt looks directly like my great grandmother, who I miss and wish I’d known better. I want to trade her for my great grandmother. Eldest great aunt, she hates most of us for being in “a light skinned clique,” which never ever existed. I learn in my forties that this aunt’s husband hated her for being dark. He abused their kids for, among other things, being darker than paper bags. He always sang the praises of his first wife, the dead light skinned one. He never beat the son he forced into my round faced auntie. Now I understand the sorrowful way this aunt lived. She never meets the great granddaughter who looks just like her.
I am five or six years old. My grandfather’s sister has died suddenly. I remember her funeral program, prepared by Xerox machine and carefully laid typeface. The portrait on the front looks like she is sweet and smells nice all the time. She looks like us. We have slight variations of the same nose. I don’t remember ever meeting or talking to this dead aunt. I am not allowed to attend the funeral, nor are my younger sisters. We are too precious, too innocent to see a dead body lying in state, I guess. I never ask my mom why I wasn’t permitted to attend. I want to be there. Funerals are important. It’s not until I’m in my forties that I get the backstory from my young uncle: teenaged auntie is raped and everyone who knows about it blames her. She is miserable. Suicidal. It breaks her. She always tells my mom, “I’m going to die young and beautiful.” She walks herself to the other side, tired of suffering on this one. I wish I had known her. I hope she can see me where I am, and that she comforts and walks with my mom and uncles. Youngest uncle has unbearable grief and guilt because he kept ripping and running instead of checking on her. He blows her off and says “soon” when she asks him to come visit. She is trying to say her goodbye, but uncle doesn’t know. He will be sixty-three this year and misses her every single day. He will never forgive the family for failing her. He tells your niece, his great niece, “Never be afraid to call me or come get me if somebody hurts you.” I don’t know if he knows about his friend, the man with the same name as a street in Germantown.
I’ve been talking with friends about abuse and children and safety and finding your way when there’s no kind of roadmap. I’m reading A Body Made Home, willing myself to reach through time and space to save Baby Girl from those hands. I feel a kinship with Baby Girl that shouldn’t exist. I weep for all of us while writing this lead weight essay. I reach out to my sister friend group chat and tell them our conversations have moved me. I pray that the children in our lives are aware that, no matter what is done to them in the name of power and control, they are not wrong or bad. They are beautiful and tender and so worthy of goodness. They are love. They are love. They are love manifest.
I recall Kiese Laymon’s narration of Heavy, his grandmama telling him not to give away his blessings. But he did it all the time because he didn’t know he could keep them. He had no idea that he was punishing himself, pre-empting joy and goodness by refusing to hold on even a little bit. That’s what you do, as I understand it, when your mind-body connection has been shattered and you never learn to trust anything about yourself. Your feet live in uncertainty, disconnected from everything until you roll an ankle or trip over nothing. You shake and buzz when certain memories come up, simultaneously drowning and drifting in the loss of reality. Balance evades you, as if it’s a stranger. It takes years, maybe a lifetime, to inventory it all. That’s before you try doing something with it or about it. Love isn’t enough, you gotta dig deep and look at your ugliness in your hands. You have to be in the trenches with your past, present, and future selves. You will travel together on this path.
The only way out is through. I remember riding distractions and fixations down a path that always carries me back to myself. I go to healing circles because I feel called, even when I don’t know what the fuck I’m healing. I drink too much from ages 23 to 30 and keep secrets from everyone so I can “feel safe.” I am unsafe within for so long that I misunderstand the theater of care and nurturing presented by others. Predators. One on one cult dynamic types, who embody everything people podcast about.
I gradually learn the difference between co-created safety and the lies people tell so they can harvest whatever you don’t recognize about yourself. I stop holding my tongue as much. I make impulsive decisions and pay the price. I love people who aren’t worth the spit it takes to cuss them. I miss who I was before all of this, even though I cannot remember that existence. I want to come back to my joke book reading, hyperlexic baby self. I want to remember what it felt like to trust my body to jump rope and dance at youngest uncle’s wedding reception. I want to relax my hips and pelvis so they can melt. I’m tensing them right now, as I sit in my bed and write at 2 or 3 something in the morning, like I don’t gotta get up at 7. Like I don’t need to go outside and hug my friend when we take our morning walk. Maybe it’s a mourning walk, too.
The only way out is through.