The first day that DeShawn sold her for sex to another man for money, he convinced her that because she was having sex already, there could be no easier and better way to become financially successful than to make money doing what she was already doing for free. Slowly DeShawn changed the game. Ciarra had slipped into the trap and he began to season her. Cocaine wasn’t the only addiction that had a hold over her. His intermittent reinforcement did too. Compliments were replaced by insults. Now he was nice to her only if she did exactly what he wanted. He used violence to threaten her when she wouldn’t comply. He collected whatever money he could from what she made, to deprive her of it. He deprived her to create dependency and used the giving or withholding of her material needs to motivate or to punish her. Before she even knew what happened, she had slipped under the tyranny of rules, quotas and performance incentives. Now, if she wanted the bills to be paid or wanted to eat or if Aston needed anything, she would have to go out and make him more money.
When he was working, DeShawn went by the name of Ghostbuster. But he required his women to call him Daddy. It was a tradition in the community he grew up in, which was saturated with prostitutes, including his mom and sister. Becoming a pimp was simply a normal and achievable way of making money. It was a road to glitz and glamor as opposed to the squalor of welfare.
DeShawn preferred to recruit and manage white girls because he found them easier to manage. They could blend into a variety of environments, from rich to poor. And the younger they were, the easier they were to manipulate, the harder they worked to earn their money and the easier they were to sell.
But now Ciarra had become a liability. In the years since he recruited her, he had rethought his stance on using drugs as a way to keep his dames dependent. His women who were addicted were unreliable and a danger to themselves. He worried that it could threaten earnings if a woman was willing to charge a lower rate behind his back in exchange for narcotics. It was this unreliability that had led him to the car lot, looking for Ciarra.
“Look at this here. You’s supposed to be with a date.” DeShawn tried to impede her path toward the purple van. His “bottom girl” (the most experienced woman in his lot, who had been given the job of training new girls, keeping the peace and monitoring what he could not) had called DeShawn to report Ciarra’s recent lax behavior.
“I just need to sleep. I’m sick, just let me sleep it off and I’ll go out tomorrow, I promise,” Ciarra said, trying to pull Aston past him. “Plus, I got no one to watch him right now. My dad’s supposed to be here, but he isn’t.” She kept her eyes averted just like he expected, but waited for him to grant her permission.
“You know what I’m gon’ have to do? I’m gon’ trade you down,” DeShawn said bluntly. “I can’t have no bitches actin’ this unprofessional. Fuck you. I don’t need you, don’t no one need a low bitch like you.” He expected his threat to trade her to another pimp to motivate her to comply. But instead she managed to get by him.
He yelled out after her. “You know dat money you need for the abortion? You ain’t gon’ get it now. Not from me and not from nobody. I’m gonna give it to another girl in the stable. I’m gonna give it to Carley. You out on your own now, you a renegade … You out of pocket. Watch and see how far ya get wit’out me! You wanna be a lot lizard or you gonna get the fuck back out on the track?”
DeShawn was the only person Ciarra had told that she was pregnant. Though DeShawn made sure his “bottom” took all his girls to a clinic to get on birth control pills, he couldn’t be there to make sure each one of them remembered to take them every day. Even though he expected the men hiring his women to use a condom, he couldn’t take any chances. Sometimes, due to the irregular hours she worked, Ciarra had taken the pills randomly. With a few of her johns, she had allowed them to pay her more to fuck her without a condom.
It was a decision that had come back to haunt her. She was just over two months’ pregnant, a reality that threatened her livelihood. Out of the money Ciarra made, DeShawn had allowed her a smaller share, with the understanding that he was saving up that money until she had earned enough for the bottom to take her to an abortion clinic and deal with her “little problem.” It was just another
