The Darkest Child

by Delores Phillips

“The best way to get them is through education,” Junior countered. “What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred and ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?”

I was baffled by the ambiguities of my mother’s emotions and behavior. She denied and feared God in the same breath. She allowed our actions to shame her, and yet she was void of shame. I truly believed there was something unnatural about her—a madness that only her children could see.

My anger had dissolved; I felt cheated and confused. I ached for the comfort that Velman had offered Martha Jean. She was visibly bruised;my wounds were deeply buried in my soul.

Turning from the window, I picked up my books, and went to sit on the front steps. It was quiet, an ideal time for studying, but I found myself studying the world around me instead of the books on my lap.

Anger is airborne. It can be inhaled, and once it enters a body it becomes a tenacious blob of blues and browns with tiny speckles of red. It settles heavy in the lungs, making breathing ever so difficult.

That was the mother that faded in and out of my memory as I reeled in and out of consciousness.The more I tried to hold onto her, the more my head throbbed. Finally, I had to let her go.

She was just a child, really, who collapsed from pain, only to be hoisted up by her mother. 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.

Laura, Edna, and I were cloaked in heavy mourning, and it had nothing to do with a grandmother we had never known as such. I think we were mourning the loss of stability. The departure of Wallace and Tarabelle brought a bleak finality to all that remained of our family.