Chocolate City: The Best African American Blog

She now sits, the heaviness of her back propped up against a wooden dining room chair that my daddy found in somebody else’s alley. Her hair, closely cropped into a short afro, trimmed close enough to expose the curl of the "good hair" that she brags about. “You got that nappy shit like your daddy’s folks; you didn’t get that from me,” she told me once, and then turned to me in a sultry pose with one hand on her hip and the other on the back of her head like she was Mae West or somebody. I was not impressed. Her other irregularities could not be overlooked or avoided. When it rained, her right eye puffed up, and the bone that was taken from her hip to put in her right eye to make her look normal caused her to limp. Contrary to her Virgo beliefs, she wasn’t perfect. When it wasn’t raining, she was just regular. Except for the narrowing of her right eye on ordinary days, which always made her look suspicious of anyone, the dark purple color of her lips, and the scars on her body, she looked average. 

She has a lot of scars and assorted marks that never made sense to me. These made her look "not pretty" to me. As a child, I would sit on the edge of her bed, a snaggle-toothed little girl with pony-tails and wide eyes, giggling incessantly at her body. “Show me again Mama,” I would ask. She would lift her large left breast up, exposing the green and purple veins that looked like trails and waterways beneath it. “It look like a map!” I would point to her breast, curious but not wanting to stare too long. “It’s the United States!” she would respond proudly, as if she really did have the entire United States under her one tit. I believed that she could have had it, too. She also had a keloid scar down the center of her stomach. My little brother called it a worm. My mother would move her stomach in and out, saying, “Whatever Mama do, worm do. Whatever worm do, Mama do,” tantalizing her two children with the rhythms of her worm, like an Arabian snake charmer. My little brother always wanted to touch it. He would jump up and down, barely at my mother’s waist, jabbing his fingers into my mother’s blubbery stomach, never actually touching the thing. She always amazed me as a child. 

As we got older, she changed a lot. She developed another series of marks. The upper part of her cheeks darkened just below the base of her eyes like the faces of aged church women. She looked old, and it was true that drugs had worn out my mother’s system. Her nose was always runny, and as I wisened and put the pieces together, I had to admit that my mother was, in fact, a drug addict. As I got older and needed her, I don’t remember seeing her in any other way. A drug addict, just recovering from her addiction. I haven’t thought of her as being my mother in a long time. For the past five years, it seems as if she is just another one of those people involuntarily in my life. I don’t remember coming to her for any advice about the boy who had done me wrong, the teacher that called me ignorant, or the people who’d made fun of my stutter. She couldn’t talk to me. She couldn’t remember words. She couldn’t put sentences together. I didn’t believe the words that did come out of her mouth because she was a liar. I never came home from school, throwing my books down at the door and running to be comforted by her bosom. I was so disgusted by her ways, her mannerisms, that she had become just a being, with no motivation. She smoked so much that her teeth turned yellow and brown at the root and her mouth excreted the familiar smell of halitosis covered with peppermint. I hated the way that her mouth shaped words. It was really her mouth that I hated. I could sometimes see the skin coming off of her full lavender lips with bright, tangerine orange lipstick in its crevices. She began to remind me off a low-class whore. Her mouth would skin a chicken bone like a dog, and she would suck ham-hocks, bar-b-que, or neck bones, wrapping her mouth around the entire thing, pushing it farther into her mouth and then pulling it out while making an unceasing sucking sound. Her mouth was the basis for her creation of the "bitch character" she had perfected and never came out of. It was all that she had, and she had managed to perfect how to wound others with words. Very, very hurtful words. 

She is a rude woman, born from a long line of cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, sailor cussing women. They love you then cuss you out, cuss you out then love you. She especially loved with her hands. I think the way that they balled up into perfect fists, or arched out in an exact angle ready to slap someone, anyone, especially me, delighted her. She could find power in it. She could control things. She could finally create something, other than dead babies. Unlike a hardcore prostitute who always had her pussy, my mother’s quick mouth and heavy hands were really all that she had going for herself. She had a high school diploma, words that hurt, hands that hit and a drug habit.

I detested the way her mouth lied to me, the way the silent threatening of her fists made me drive her to various “locations” that were unfamiliar to both of us, the way she let her weaknesses rule over her family, over me. All the while, I felt like a motherless child.

On a bad trip one time, the only one that I witnessed, she unplugged all the phones in the house and retreated to the closet for a day. My daddy’s face looked so sad when he came to my room. He looked so ashamed, like a little boy in church who just found out that he was a sinner. “Your mama’s ‘sick.’ I want you to stay in here,” he said and closed my door. I obeyed. There was no dinner. My mother was in her closet like a child building a fort out of blankets and chairs. She finally came to my room, paranoid, in darkness. “Don’t go by the window, or they’ll get you!” she demanded.

“Okay,” I said, my voice reduced ten years to that of a little girl. She closed my door and I cried, glad that I was in the dark and didn’t have to see her face, scared at what was happening to my mother and what she was capable of doing. I don’t know how long I stayed in my room. I would have rather peed on myself than go outside that door. I was too afraid to see her. I was too afraid to see that woman. She wasn’t my mother, sitting in a cramped closet, kicking high-heeled shoes out into our hallway, trying to close a broken closet door that my mother knew wouldn’t close.

I sat propped up in a corner on my bed with night only looking like blue light to me, staring at the outlines of my bedroom furniture, in my room, in my house, listening for the footsteps of a woman that I didn’t know.

That’s when I lost it. I lost all respect for my mother. She was dead to me. All the lies and abuse could not compare to how she looked and acted that night. There were no essays written about how great a role model she was. No cards on Mother’s Day. Barely signs of our relationship.

When I was seventeen, I wrote a four-paged letter to my mother telling her how much more of a woman I was than she, telling her how one night I was going to kill her, but I prayed to God, and the evil and the resentment that I felt that night were released. I told her about how she couldn’t hit me anymore for no reason or call me out of my name. I would finally tell my family what was happening when no one was around, and that I couldn’t wait to go to college and get the hell away from her, because she had singly hurt me more than anyone in this entire world, and I wasn’t going to deal with her anymore. I could choose not to put substances into my body. I didn’t have to drink or do drugs or beat people up in order to function. I was able to show feelings. I left the letter on the dining room table next to a bowl of fruit, and she never mentioned it. Three years later, with my baby in my womb I managed to physically fight her back.

There is a shame that accompanies being an abused child. More burdensome than the silent tip-toe through life are the loss of a parent and the uncertainty of a parent’s love.

The other day, I was sitting in my living room with the baby, a little boy, still in my womb, and I felt so lonely. I felt like the motherless child that I’ve always thought I was. I felt like I was in the belly of a machine, and I wanted my mama. My arms felt so fragile, like they needed to wrap themselves around her or either fall off. I cried… holding my own baby in my belly because he is all that I have. I don’t know if I will ever get along with my mother. She doesn’t want to admit what she did to me, and I can’t forget about it. All I can picture is her weapon, in the shape of her foot, hitting my stomach with my baby inside. I don’t know if she will ever learn to get along with herself, but I know how to love. I have spent years trying to uncondition my mind from her ways, trying to get her off of my back. My baby will always have me and we will learn together. I have been to that deep dark place, and I refuse to go back.

 About The Author:
 

From Chicago, Keli Stewart’s writing travels across regions in an exploration of women’s issues, often focusing on mothering, childhood, and class. She is the recipient of the Douglas Turner Ward/Alice Childress Scriptwriting Award for her play ‘House of Forks and Knives’ and has one chapbook titled ‘Womanish’. Her work has been published in numerous journals and books including Calyx’, ‘Warpland’, ‘South Loop Review’, ‘Letters to Fathers from Daughters’, ‘Meridians’. Her current work, a collection of short stories and poems, are first person narratives exploring race, class and gender, inspired by her life as a single mother in the PioneerValley.

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