I

by Toi Derricotte

  VIII.

  I am trying to get as close as possible to the place in me where the change occurred: I had to take that voice in, become my father, the judge referred to before any dangerous self-assertion, any thought or feeling. I happened in reverse: my body took in the pummeling actions, which went down into my core. I ask myself first, before any love or joy or passion, anything that might grow from me: “Who do you think you are?” I suppress the possibilities.

  IX.

  My mother used the small inheritance she received from her mother to put my father through embalming school. He moved to Chicago for the few months of training at Worsham, the college for black undertakers. She hoped to raise us up—her mother had been a cook—to become an undertaker’s wife, one of the highest positions of black society. But when he came back from the school, my father wouldn’t take the mean $5 a week his stepfather offered him to apprentice. He wouldn’t swallow his pride. He also wouldn’t take jobs offered by his stepfather’s competitors. That, too, was a matter of pride, not to sell out the family name.

  My father never did practice undertaking for a living. Though, sometimes, when I was young, friends would ask him to embalm someone they loved and my father would acquiesce. He would enter the embalming room at Webster’s Funeral Home, put on the robe, take up the tools, and his stepfather would step back. His reputation grew in this way. People who saw the bodies he had worked on—especially the body of the beautiful and wealthy Elsie Roxborough, who died by her own hand and was buried in a head-to-foot glass casket like Sleeping Beauty—marveled at his art and agreed he had the best touch of anyone.

  People praised him for conducting the most elegant service; for knowing exactly what to say to comfort the bereaved, for holding their arms and escorting them to the first funeral car, for convincing those who needed to cry that it was all right; yet knowing too how to quiet them so there were no embarrassing “shows.”

  My father knew the workings of the heart; that’s why so many people—my grandmother; his stepfather; and even his best friend Rad, whose heart he had crushed—loved him even after he let them down completely and many times, even after he abandoned them or did the meanest things. My father was with each of them, holding their hands, when they died. My handsome, charming father, the ultimate lover, the ultimate knower of the heart.

  X.

  My father knew all about the body. He had learned in embalming school. For a while after his mother died, he stopped smoking and drinking and came home at night. He’d get out the huge leather-bound dictionary (Webster’s—the same as our last name!) that my grandmother had given him when he graduated. He would open it to a picture of the bones in the middle of the book, which had three see-through overlays: on the first, the blue muscles; on the second, the red blood vessels; and, finally, on the third, the white nerves.

  He loved the body, loved knowing how things worked. He taught me the longest name of a muscle, the sternocleidomastoid, a cradle or hammock that was strung between the sternum and mastoid. He’d amaze me with long, multisyllabic words; then he’d test me on the spelling.

  My father always explained. He always showed me the little smear on the plate that I had set to drain before he’d make me do all the dishes over again. He’d explain how he had studied hard so he knew where to hit me and not leave a single mark. He’d brag about it. He wanted me to appreciate the quality of his work. Like any good teacher, he wanted to pass it down.

  XI.

  During the summer when my mother and aunt were cleaning and wanted me out of the house, I would go out to the side of the house with a flyswatter and command the flies not to land on my wall. There were hundreds of flies, and though I told them not to, they continued to land. I don’t think I said it out loud. I think I said it—screamed it, really—in my mind. Sometimes, I believed that the things in the world heard your thoughts, the way God heard your prayers. When I was very young, not even out of my crib, I’d ask the shades to blow a certain way to prove they had heard me.

  The flies were disobeying me. Whenever one landed, I would go after it with the flyswatter. I was furious that they would do what I had commanded them not to. I knew they understood, or would understand finally. I killed tens, hundreds—didn’t they see?—but they wouldn’t stop.

  I knew I was murderous, and yet, was it murder to kill flies? My aunt and mother never stopped me.

  XII.

  Before my grandmother died when I was ten, she had three dogs. Each had a short life. Patsy was the “good” dog who died of a chicken bone in her stomach, and Smokey was the “bad” dog who growled at people and would jump over the second-story banister on the porch and walk around on the outside of the rail. When my grandmother and grandfather were downstairs in the undertaking parlor, they would leave me alone with Smokey. I was about seven and I had learned the voice the nuns used to say cruel things to the children who were slow. Sometimes, the nuns hit those children over the knuckles with a ruler, but mostly they just humiliated them, made them sit in the back and never called on them to do errands. I tried to teach Smokey to stay behind the gate to the pantry. I would open the gate and tell him to stay, and when he went out in the kitchen, I’d hit him with his leash. I believe I hit him hard, maybe as hard as my father hit me. I wanted to feel that power.

  I did this two, three, or four times and, though it seems impossible that my grandparents didn’t know, no one stopped me. One time I came over, and my grandmother said Smokey had run away, jumped over the second-story banister to the street and didn’t die. He was never seen again. Was he that desperate to get away? I felt sad and responsible. I felt glad.

  XIII.

  I was nine when we moved to a bigger apartment on the first floor. Now, my father had only one flight to carry me up by my hair. He didn’t mind going public—the stairs were right in the lobby—but he refused to allow me to scream in terror when he grabbed me. Not because he was afraid people would see. My screaming made him furious because I knew he was only going to carry me up the stairs and scream at me, only beat me on the thighs and calves (where it wouldn’t show), and only until I made every look of pain, confusion, and fury disappear. He knew I knew that. So what was all that broadcasting, as if something really bad was going to happen, as if he was going to kill me?

  XIV.

  Life is something you have to get used to: what is normal in a house, the bottom line, what is taken for granted. I always had good food. Our house was clean. My mother was tired and sad most of the time. My mother spent most of her day cleaning.

  We had a kitchen with a little dining space, a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom and two halls, one that led to the bathroom and the bedroom, and one that led to the front door. There was a linen closet in the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom. My books and toys all went into a drawer that I had to straighten every Saturday. There was a closet in the bedroom for my mother’s clothes, a closet in the front hall for my father’s, and a closet off the living room that held my mother’s bed.

  It was a huge metal apparatus that somehow swept out on a hinge. I can’t imagine how my mother and I, as small as we were, brought it out and put it back every night and every morning, for my father was hardly ever there. We just grabbed on, exerted a little force, and pulled it straight toward us. It seemed to glide by itself, swinging outward around the corner; then it would stand up, rocking, balancing, until we pulled it down.

  XV.

  My father and I shared the small bedroom, and my mother slept on the pullout in the living room so that she wouldn’t wake us when she got dressed in the morning to go to her new job. We slept in twin beds she had bought us, pushed up close together.

  I had special things given to me, special things she paid for: the expensive toys I got for Christmas that took a whole year to pay for and the clothes I wore from Himelhoch’s while my mother wore an old plaid coat for eleven years. Now I was a big girl moving from a little cot in the kitchen to my own bed in a bedroom. My father and I alway
s got the best.

  XVI.

  My mother shopped after work every Thursday, so my father would come home and fix dinner for me. He’d stop at Fadell’s Market and get a big steak with a bone in it. He’d bring it home and unwrap the brown paper, slowly, savoring one corner at a time, like someone doing a striptease or opening a trove of stolen diamonds. He’d brag about how much money he had spent. He’d broil it right up next to the flame, spattering grease, fire, and smoke, only a couple of minutes on each side, cooked still bloody, nearly raw, the way we liked it, he said—different from my mother. He’d say he liked it just knocked over the head with a hammer and dragged over a hot skillet. His eyebrows would go wild, and he’d rub his hands together like a fly.

  XVII.

  Once, my father took me to the movies. We walked downtown to the Fox Theater on one unusually warm Thursday evening during my Christmas vacation to see Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary. My father frequently promised things he didn’t deliver, like the time he promised to come home and pray the family rosary every night for a week when I carried the huge statue of the Virgin home in a box as big as a violin case. He never came home once. When I turned the Virgin back in at school, I had to lie to the nun. After that, I rarely asked for anthing. But going to the movies was his idea.

  I was never happier than when I was with my father and he was in a good mood. He liked to tease me and make me laugh. He was so handsome that I felt proud when people noticed us. I thought they were thinking that my father really enjoyed me, that I was a very special girl. I acted like a special girl, happy and pretty, until I almost believed it. I had dressed up, and we stopped for a Coney Island and caramel corn, which were his favorites.

  XVIII.

  By this time, my father didn’t come home most nights. Sometimes, he and my mother wouldn’t speak to each other for months. Sometimes, they wouldn’t speak even to me when we were in the house together, as if we had to be quiet, like in church, and respect their hatred for each other.

  My father thought I hated him like my mother did or else he didn’t think I was worth talking to, for he’d often go months without speaking even when we were in the house alone.

  I tried to make him change. I’d make up special names like “D-dats.” “Hi D-dats,” I’d meet him at the door when he came home at night. I knew he liked to feel young and hip. I’d make my voice happy, as if I weren’t afraid he’d find a shoe or book out of place and beat me. I actually was happy when I was with him—I had to be! He could see inside me. He could tell my moods. My unhappiness blamed him.

  Maybe all that silence and beating was because he thought nobody loved him, not my mother and not his mother. He told me how his mother had knocked him down when he was a grown man. He told me how my mother always picked up his ashtrays to wash them as soon as he put his cigarette out. I tried to make him feel loved. Sometimes, we played “Step on a crack you break your mother’s back” when we were coming home from his mother’s house, as if the two of us were in cahoots.

  XIX.

  Once, when I was ten or eleven, he came home for lunch, and I asked him if I could dance for him. I had seen Rita Hayworth dance the Dance of the Seven Veils. I had stayed home sick and practiced. I liked to dance on the bed so I could see myself in my mother’s dressing table mirror.

  I wore old see-through curtains and my mother’s jewelry on my head like a crown. I must have had something underneath for I knew some things mustn’t show. I thought, maybe, if he saw I was almost a woman and could do what beautiful women do, he might find a reason to love me.

  At the end, I spun around and around until most of the drapes, towels, and my mother’s nightgown fell to the floor. I don’t remember what remained to cover me.

  XX.

  Sometimes, on the nights he came home, I’d sneak up on him while he was reading the newspaper and pull off his slipper.

  He’d put the paper down very deliberately, put on his “mean” play-face and say, “Oh, you want to play, huh?” And he’d grab me up like an ogre. He’d hold me down and jab his fingers into my ribs.

  “No,” I’d scream, “I’m sorry,” and I’d plead that I would pee if he didn’t let me up.

  Finally, he’d relent. “You’re not going to do it again?” And he’d tickle me more.

  “Never, never,” I’d scream.

  “Are you sure?”

  As soon as he picked up the paper again and seemed to turn his attention away, I’d go back.

  My father could make me laugh. He knew just where to hit the funny bone. Always, my father was the only one who could make me swallow pills or sit still while he administered burning iodine. When I fell or took the wrong step over a picket fence, I’d come to him, crying. “I’m going to have a big scar and nobody will love me.” And he’d tease, “Oh, my poor little baby, all the boys are going to call her ‘old scar leg,’ and she’s going to be alone for the rest of her life”; but he’d do what had to be done, hold the leg in place, put the iodine on the raw spot, right where it was needed, direct and quick, without flinching, never afraid to cause the necessary pain.

  XXI.

  On Saturday mornings, my mother and I would have toast and coffee in her bed. She let me lie there while she planned our day. She’d get up barefoot and put the coffee on and make me sugar toast. I loved those Saturday mornings near her: her big bed, her cold cream smell.

  I had always thought my mother was frightened of my father. She never seemed to fight straight. She got him by going the back route, like the look on her face when she got in the orange and yellow truck that he bought when he started the egg business. She sat on the orange crate—he called it the passenger seat—and never laughed, never joined in on the fun as he took us around Belle Isle. He had been so happy when he jingled the keys, but you could tell she thought that old truck was nothing to be proud of, as if even a joke about such a poor thing was in bad taste.

  Then one Saturday morning, I spotted a big roach, a water-bug, on the living room floor. I jumped up on the bed and started screaming; she came from the kitchen, grabbed her house shoe and got down on all fours. The thing charged her from under the chair like a warrior. I was screaming like crazy. I realized she was my last protection. And she started punching at the thing, punching the floor, anywhere she could punch. She didn’t stop until it was flattened.

  I had never seen my mother brave. I had never seen that she would fight to the death. It was a part of her she never showed. I had thought she didn’t stop my father from beating me because she was afraid. I was confused by her braveness.

  XXII.

  My mother was sad. She didn’t feel appreciated. I didn’t do enough to help. She hurt inside. Her body suffered. Her feet swelled black with poison. She had a dead baby. She had womb problems. They had to take the knotted thing out. The doctor rubbed her stomach for hours until she went to the bathroom. She got TB. She got a goiter. She shouldn’t clean so hard; she should rest, at least late in the afternoon. But she wouldn’t. She had to keep doing what hurt her.

  My mother and father were at war; whoever loved the other first would lose.

  XXIII.

  Nobody thought the little marks were worth looking at. I cried and showed how they went up my arm all the way to my elbow, ran all over my ankles and the tops of my feet, even up my thighs. I could see them, but when anyone else looked, the marks disappeared.

  Maybe they didn’t itch. Maybe they weren’t serious. Maybe I was causing trouble. (I had an active imagination, my mother and father said.) I couldn’t sleep because something was happening in my bed—a misery—and everybody acted as if it wasn’t. It didn’t hurt after a while. I could take my mind off it and put it somewhere else.

  I think the only reason my mother finally believed me was because I kept showing her that Monday mornings, after I had spent the weekend with my aunt, I didn’t have the marks, but Tuesdays, after I had slept in my own bed, I had the marks again.

  In an instant of recognition, she
raced into the bedroom, flipped my covers off the bed and saw the little bits of blood. She turned over the mattress, and there, in the corners, were the nests of a thousand bedbugs, lethargic or crawling. She looked close. They had gotten so far inside that the room had to be sealed with tape, a bomb put in.

  He had been sleeping with another woman. He had brought her dirt into his own home (though he said the bugs came in egg crates).

  Bedbugs were what poor women had, women who couldn’t do better, women who didn’t matter. Some other woman’s bedbugs were making my mother the same as that woman.

  He had brought in everything she hated, everything she couldn’t control: the helplessness of slavery, bad births, poverty, illness, death. Everything she had risked her life to clean out of our apartment.

  My mother had reason for outrage.

  I only had reason to itch.

  XXIV.

  The living room was off limits. There was too much that might get messed up or broken. I guess he chose rooms to beat me in honor of the sacrifices my mother had made to make our home beautiful.

  In the bedroom, where could I go when I fell? I wouldn’t fall on the wooden footboards. There was an aisle between my mother’s closet and my father’s bed. That was too narrow. On the left side of the doorway was my mother’s dressing table, where I’d sit and put on necklaces, earrings, and nail polish and look in the mirror. There wasn’t room for me to flail around, so my father had to be very specific about the direction in which his blows would aim me.

  If my cousin was visiting, he would inform her, his voice sincere but matter-of-fact—”I’m going to have to take Toi to the bathroom.” He preferred the bathroom when she was visiting, except when my mother was in on it, and then we needed a bigger space. If, for example, my mother had told him I talked back, he’d say, “We’re going to have to speak to Toi in the kitchen.” He’d pull me by my arm and close the kitchen door, which had glass panes so that my cousin could see.