The Darkest Child

by Delores Phillips

I thought she was beautiful, despite my acquaintance with the demon that hibernated beneath her elegant surface.

She did that several times, changing the pitch and depth of each moan, before it dawned on me that she was rehearsing her suffering, exaggerating her misery.

I loved her with all my heart, but if she did not die by Monday morning, I was determined to discover from the pages of my schoolbooks, how to break the chains that bound me to my mother.

Nature had tried to cure it by embracing the rear frame with herbs, roots, and a jumble of foliage which spilled over from the surrounding woodland. Nature had failed, and in frustration she sought to destroy the house by eroding the very foundation on which it stood.

I had never seen the eyes of a dead person— in fact, I had never seen a poker game—but I had heard that poker faces were expressionless, and I knew that dead people showed no emotion. That was Tarabelle.

My next eldest sibling, Martha Jean, was a defective replica of our mother. She could not hear and had never spoken one coherent sentence in her life. There but by the grace of God went I, for only eleven months separated her silent beauty from my articulate homeliness.

We work as a silent, defeated army, beaten down by our mother, tending our wounded. We do not retaliate for our victory is inconceivable.

Probably the only person who did not know he was colored was our mother. She took pleasure in categorizing her children by race. Mushy, Harvey, Sam, and Martha Jean were her white children. Tarabelle, Wallace, and Laura were Indians—Cherokee, no less. Edna and I were Negroes.

I felt sorry for him. He had put on a suit on a Saturday, and had come all the way down from Plymouth to the outskirts of town to pray for a woman who was not dying after all. God was surely frowning down on the whole lot of us,

Her back was stooped to an angle so that she appeared to be searching for something on the floor, and when she held her head up, she resembled a turkey in the act of gobbling.

Satan is not going to leave.The only way to get him out is to invite God in, and God is not welcome in my mother’s house.

I sat on my pallet and held Judy while trying to determine my mother’s mood by the style of her hair. It was hanging loose down her back, and I figured, Keep quiet, stay out of her way, we’ll be all right.

I felt neither sympathy nor contempt for my brother. He was just there, in the way, and out of control.

If there was one thing certain about my mother’s children, it was our resilience.

Night after night the men came, and the gentle ones were the worst, for they assumed they could coax life into a girl who died each night before they even touched her.

“Tan, you don’t read them books all the time no mo’. How come?” “They made me dream.” “Bad dreams?” I shrugged.“Just dreams.”

It came to me that women are just like that lake.They do everything to it, but it’s still beautiful. I wish you could see it, Tan. They fish from it, throw garbage in it, and sail boats in it, but it’s still just as wide and beautiful as ever.That’s what women are like, and we ain’t gon’ run dry. Sell a bit, and five minutes later we just as deep and wet and full as we was before.

tears in their eyes or anger in their voices, Edith and the others gave horrific accounts of their experiences, until anger—that had no place in God’s house— would burn in my head, smothering me for lack of an outlet.