you need anything?”
Momma shook her head, “No,” even though she required much in that moment—an understanding, an apology, an admonition it was not her fault—but she asked for none of those things. She accepted, “This is the way it’s done,” even as she shook her head from side to side and cried.
“This is the way it’s done,” her sister had said, which meant it might have been done to her. Maybe it had been done to her other sisters too, maybe even her mother. “This is the way it’s done” played repeatedly in her mind. What happened, she knew, was wrong, but this is the way it’s done.
She repeated those words as she cleaned herself. She heard them as she returned to the living room where her brother-in-law, alone, stood. She searched the room for Pop, but he was gone. She searched for her sister, but she, too, could not be found. Her brother-in-law had been charged with taking her back to her mother’s on the handlebars of his bike.
As they rode, she clenched the handlebars, rocking from side to side, working to gain balance. She sat, ankles crossed against the stinging between her legs. Her brother-in-law whispered in her ear as the wind whipped across her face. He said many things, but all she heard was, “Don’t tell your daddy.” This is the way it’s done.
She did not tell the first time it happened, so she couldn’t tell each time that followed, each wrestling match in the bedroom, each ride on the handlebars of her brother-in-law’s bike.
The first time, she had not wanted it. This she knew for certain. But the second, the third, and each time that followed, she couldn’t be so sure. It didn’t take much for her to agree to that house, to that bedroom, to that bike. It was the way things were done.
Each time, she screamed. Each time, she cried, but those moments under Pop’s gaze seemed fair trade for tears that would later fall. With each encounter, Momma learned something all women eventually come to know. Loving a man means sacrifice, giving. The act of receiving, of taking, that is the gift he gives her. This is the way it is done.
After the first encounter with Pop, the home Momma had with her daddy no longer fit. Secrets, even the ones we keep from ourselves, have a way of making the familiar unfamiliar. After each rape, she tiptoed throughout her daddy’s house even when he wasn’t there. When he was home, she hid in her room, door ajar because no doors could be closed in Big Boone’s house.
Her period was a week late. Then two. Then three. After a month, she’d stopped counting. She feared something had broken inside her, like Pop’s mishandling had thrown her off track. At night, she lay on her back, surveying her body. Her breasts, always big and soft, had grown as hard as grapefruits. Her stomach, which used to be flat, had rounded into a hill under her sheet. Throughout the day, she suffered bouts of nausea, vomiting, then dry heaving when there was nothing left to expel. At night, there was the stabbing hunger, so severe she could not be still. Living in Deep Creek with so many brothers and sisters, hunger had rocked her to sleep many nights, but it had never gripped her as it did when her insides churned and groaned as if she’d forever be empty. She drank water, rubbed her stomach, tried to sleep. Nothing helped. The hunger, unwilling to be silenced, prompted her to smuggle slices of bologna into her room and nibble quietly as she listened for her daddy’s footsteps.
She soon decided the problem wasn’t her body, but her daddy’s home. Its rules had tightened around her like a shoe she’d outgrown. She was newly sixteen, but the time had come for her to travel that same road her brothers, sisters, and mother had traveled. She devised a plan. With only a week to set it in motion, she had little time to be afraid.
That morning, she stood at the living room threshold, her body bent, hovering over the line that separated her from her daddy. She knocked, though there was no door. He didn’t look at her when he belted, “What you want, Pretty?” The syllables collided as he leaned back in his chair, his legs propped on the coffee table, his eyes turned to the window. His belly, visible from behind the arm of the chair, looked like a sack of laundry. His plaid shirt was splattered with splotches of paint and weld burns that had singed through parts of the material. The legs of his pants were rolled, revealing shins and ankles that resembled swollen pork loins bulging through lines of butcher twine.
She walked to his chair and stood in front of him, careful not to obscure his view of the window. She held the paper in her hand, the one that announced she was one of a few students, a sophomore no less, chosen to attend the summer Upward Bound Program at Norfolk State University. She inched the paper toward him as he shooed her. His voice, booming, shook her and the paper she held. “What you want, girl?”
She wanted to turn away, letting what had once been celebratory news die within her, yet she did not move. Everything around her grew quiet. She stood alone in that room, even though her daddy sat in front of her.
“Daddy,” she said to the floor. “I got accepted to Upward Bound. I wrote one of the best essays in class and I was one of the only girls they chose.”
He grunted, wiped his nose, and leaned back, never turning his head her way.
“What the hell is Upward Bound? And who told you to do some essay without my permission?”
“It was an assignment in school, Daddy,” she responded. “They made us do it. I didn’t even know it was a contest.”
She prayed he wouldn’t smell the lie on her lips. She’d known they would choose the best ones in the school. That’s why she had written an outline and sharpened her pencils for a whole minute before she began writing. She’d never liked writing before, but she wrote as if she loved words, as if her need to escape could be funneled from mind through pencil to paper.
“They said mine was one of the best, Daddy. That’s why they want me to go, even though I’m so young.”
He looked at her then, his stare so sharp one would think he was whipping her in his mind.
“Don’t no-damn-body at no-damn-school got the right to say where you can go and when. Who the hell they think they are and who the hell you think you are?”
She had no answer, as that question never required one. She was nobody next to her daddy, no more than a portrait nailed to a wall. Whatever opinions she had she’d stolen from him, and she could tell his opinion concerning Norfolk State was not one she wished to possess. She considered retreating before dismissal, but she’d learned earlier in life never to turn head or back to her daddy. He could get from one side of the room to another with one jolt of his body.
Big Boone stared at Momma, saying with his eyes what he did not want to say with his mouth. He noticed her long, thin body growing fast. The curls enveloping her face were the same ones she’d worn as a baby. She was auburn brown, the color of sky right before the sun hits the horizon, and she was pretty, true to the nickname given to her years before. She was the baby of the family, but she had never been his baby. Toward her, he had never been soft; so many parts of him hardened before she was born.
He expected her to turn, to run before he became what she’d always known him to be: heavy, pressing, crowding out anything that did not please him. But she stood limp, head down, without confrontation, just standing. He waited for her to plead, for her to say something that would cue him to scream, to order her away, maybe even slap her for talking back. But, she just stood. He had skills when responding to talking, to those working to convince him, but standing, silence was different; he found it difficult to reply when conversation had not begun.
He’d not often had that problem, but something in him wanted to wait for her, to see what she would say, what she would do in order to capture what she desired. One thing was certain: he did not want her to go. He’d already lost so many: her momma, his sons, his other daughters. Out of them all, she was the one left. Who would he be without someone to lean his power on? She, the coffee table of