The People vs. Cashmere
Page 22
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes, Cashmere. Always.”
I don’t think I’ve ever cried and laughed at the same time, but that’s what I did at that moment. Then he lifted me off my feet and kissed me.
Epilogue
Yeah, I said I forgave Mama, but if she thought it was gonna be that easy, she was a damn fool. Now since all wounds were healed, she thought it was all good. Naw! I wanted some answers.
Me and Mama sat down on her couch. She bit her bottom lip. “Now we have managed to become cool, Cashmere, I’d hate for what I’m about to tell you to change the way things are with us.”
I shook my head. “Mama, it won’t.”
We had both been going to therapy to salvage our sanity and relationship, meaning that we were both going crazy. Every time I thought I was cool with Mama, another memory was coming up of the scandalous shit she had done, and I’d find myelf being mad at her again. And she’d find herself crying again, and refusing to eat or leave her house. The therapist said that my mom wasn’t being as open as she should be about everything, and that as soon as she opened up, we could put all this bad stuff to rest.
“Desiree wasn’t Desmond’s daughter, Cashmere.”
My eyes bulged. “But you named her after Daddy!”
“Listen before you judge me, baby. We had an uncle named Douglas. He would come around and give all of us candy and ribbons for our hair, say how pretty we are. Talked about the people made of the good stuff and those made of the bad. Asked us which one we were. I always said, ‘I’m made of the good stuff.’ And my sister would always find reasons to tell me that I wasn’t. Even then your Aunt Ruby was envious of me. We were both beautiful ladies, none prettier than the other. But I had a way of being so animated, I guess, having this presence like you got. Baby, that caused them to want to be around me. I was popular in school, knew how to entertain, and your aunt hated me for this.
“Anyhow . . . our uncle came to visit us all through our childhood. And he liked to visit me in my bed while I was ‘sleep, and he did some things to me that I still have a hard time forgetting about, Cash. Touching me and kissing me. Stuff that filled me with shame, baby, real shame. A shame I feel to this very day.”
Mama’s hands were shaking, and her lips trembled. “I use to go to church with Daddy just to pray that he never came back. And he didn’t. He went off to the armed services for a long time, so I didn’t have to deal with him sneaking in my room and touching me any damn more. But my sister always reminded me that he did what he did ’cause he knew I was made of the bad stuff and he never did it to her ’cause she was made of the good. And that the only reason that people liked me more than her was because other people knew—Even God knew—and everyone pitied me. And I believed her. Those thoughts was still in here, Cash, always fucking with me, so I dealt with it by partying, getting drunk, and smoking weed with my girlfriends. But I never had the urge to have sex. The thought of being with a man sexually made me sick, after what my uncle had done to me all those years.” She paused then shuddered.
“I continued that way for years into my teens. Then one night I snuck out to go to this party. Usually your aunt would wait for me at twelve and unlock the back door for me. My payment to her was the allowance our Daddy gave us.
“I waited in the backyard for the longest, and she never came out. Someone was in the backyard.” Mama pulled her lips in. “Our uncle had came back, to my surprise, and was smoking out there. He asked me if I had forgotten all the things he taught me. I said yes and tried to run, but I couldn’t do much running in my heels, so he caught me easily and raped me out there. Cash, that bastard raped me on the ground in my parents’ backyard.” Mama shook her head, her eyes closed, as if she was still reliving the memory.
My eyes widened.
“But that ain’t the worse. The worse was looking up in the window and seeing Ruby watching the whole thing while I begged her to help me. She didn’t help me. She just watched the whole time with a smirk on her face. And shortly after the rape I found out I was pregnant.”
I gasped.
“This made your aunt happy now ’cause I wasn’t seen the way I used to be seen. I was now damaged, and she was the one going to get married to a decent man. Now even more she drilled in my head day and night that I was made of the bad, and I believed it. Believed I wasn’t shit. Shortly after that incident we had new neighbors, and my sister was twenty and in nursing school now, and ready to get married. She was in love with our neighbor’s son, Desmond.”
I smiled at the mention of Daddy.
“But as much as she tried bringing him goodies, ’cause your auntie sure could cook, and bragging about going to nursing school, when he laid eyes on me, it was over for her. He went after me viciously, even though I had a baby growing in my stomach. He would take me to the movies, buy gifts for a baby that hadn’t even arrived yet, even take me for my hospital visits. And once I hit eighteen he said he was going to take me to the movies, but instead he hit the freeway straight for Vegas and married me, Cash, baby and all. And I was huge as a house. And, Cash, he loved my baby like he himself created her.
“I knew I was young, but Mama had already passed away, and Daddy was getting old, so I thought I needed someone to take care of me ’cause I thought I was too weak to take care of myself, let alone an innocent child.
“When we came back from getting married and your aunt saw my ring, she went crazy. Said she hated me and I was nothing, and that he was a damn fool for marrying me, that I was weak and dumb and could never survive without a man, and that my kids would be cursed. That I was soiled goods because I was carrying another man’s baby. And I believed her, Cash. I believed her. As good as your Daddy saw me, I never saw myself the same ’cause I thought I was flawed ’cause of all those years that man molested me then raped me.
“I thought I was weak, ugly, damaged. That’s why I was so into buying things for myself to make me feel good, why I was so quick to give my panties to the first man who gave me a compliment, Cash. Why I always had to have a man even when your Daddy wasn’t around.
The only blessing out of what my uncle did was my precious baby girl, Desiree.
“Anyway she ran out the house, yelling, ‘I might as well be a slut too, if it could get me a man like him. That bitch don’t deserve him.’ Word had it that she went to a bar, partied and was so drunk, she went home with some dude and ended up getting pregnant by him. She figured she wouldn’t be lucky like me to land someone she loved with a baby in her stomach, so she gave up and married the fool she got pregnant by. Your uncle. But he made her miserable. He never doted on her the way your Daddy doted on me. He cheated on her, left her alone at night. Then food became her comfort. She has hated me and blamed me for her being miserable ever since, Cashmere.”
“Why did she hate me so much, Mama?”
“Because, Cash, even though I told you Desiree was just like me, it wasn’t the full truth. You are the most like me. You have something that sets you apart from other women, makes people gravitate toward you. And, most of all, you are the child of the man she was madly in love with. Whenever she looks at you, she sees him and the life she felt she should have had. ’Cause she never fell in love with your uncle and never fell out of love with your Daddy.”
I sat back on the couch blown away. Desiree was only my half-sister. She wasn’t Daddy’s child. Wow! That explained so much. Why my aunt was the way she was and why my mom was the way that she was. Damn! I wondered if Desiree ever knew.
“But, Cash, there was one part of that saying about ‘people with the good stuff versus the bad’—God’s favorites are the ones who often have a hard time.”
I nodded. Then I held Mama’s hand, and she smiled at me. I guess her confession was like weight being lifted off her chest.
I thought about what Ms. Hope often said, “So the past was now open and like a book. We had no choice but to now close it.” It made more sense now than ever. What else was we gonna do
? It wasn’t like we could change the stuff that happened. So once you realize you can’t, you do the only thing you can. You move on. So, me and Mama, we did.
Now I know I wasn’t graduating from Harvard, and I wasn’t getting a doctorate degree, but when I stood on that stage and accepted my certificate for graduating from cosmetology school, shit, it felt just as good.
And there staring back at me was some amazing shit. The woman I thought I’d never see, or want to see again, Mama, was clapping and screaming out so loud, her voice was cracking. “That’s my baby! That’s my baby!”
I didn’t tell her to shut up though. I just shook my head and laughed.
Then somebody else caught my eye. It was Demarco. After all of this, that man was still by my side. That has to stand for something. It did. My heart. He had it, and I was never going to take it back.
As I stood there and those cameras flashed, and Mama kept saying, “Smile, Cash,” I reflected on my life. I had been through the fire, hell, and back, and here I was still standing with a smile on my face.
Man, what I’d give for Ms. Hope and Daddy to be here to see this. Then I remembered they were there, and they’d always be. My heart got enough room for them both.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cashmere. I’m twenty years old. I was a prostitute, I used to do drugs, I’ve been raped, and through a freak accident, I killed my sister. All this shit I went through, were trials’ and tribulations’ tests. But I’m also a survivor, and I know I could handle anything that came my way. ’Cause I was made of the good stuff. One of God’s favorites.
Urban Books, LLC
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The People vs Cashmere Copyright © 2009 Karen Williams
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ISBN: 978-1-6228-6116-3
This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people, living, or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is entirely coincidental.
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