There’s a scene near the end, after Tina has escaped. Ike surprises her in a parking lot. “Dammit,” he says through the car window, “I want you to stop all this foolishness, Anna Mae, and come home.”
He doesn’t say Tina, the name he gave her, but appeals to Anna Mae, the little girl who was abandoned.
So it is because of this little or large happenstance in childhood, being abandoned by a parent, through years of abuse, you’ll stay, through rape, the disparagement of your name, acid burning, scars …
Every day, your role is perfected, having been punched, beaten, kicked in the chest, threatened, thrown downstairs. It’s happened so often it becomes a dance or a routine. As seniors, my parents adopted a wild little black cat. They named her Mysti but I’ve nicknamed her Bat Girl. She climbs up walls, shelves, breaking things, she tears the kitchen curtains going after a fly. She is also incredibly sweet and stays with me when I make art. When I’m at my parents’, most of the day is spent with them asking, “Where’s Mysti?” And we collectively search the rooms and under the beds to find her. I’ve nicknamed her Bat Girl because she was so wild as a baby that they kept her in her carrier with the door locked at night, and sometimes during the day, too. Most animals fear or dislike carriers but my mother’s cat returns to it, sleeps there now as an adult willingly because it’s where she finds comfort. She is unaware it’s a cage.
Recently, I read the novel, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. The heroine is a slave named Cora, who survives almost everything, years and years of abuse. To survive she has to kill a man. Cora is also abandoned by her mother, who ran away from slavery and later dies from a snakebite. Cora survives a brutal rape on the Hobb plantation by a group of men. She is stitched up by other women on Hobb. Finally after a lifetime of being on the run, a runaway, she finds love, like the character in Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, where the main female character who saves other girls is also ruined but finds love. Cora’s first instinct is to apologize to her lover about her rape. He says no, it is she who is owed the apology. The scene makes me think of what I have carried, things that I blamed myself for. It reminds me of Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She can’t stop mourning the child she killed to protect from slavery. The child haunts her and then finally disappears. She says to her lover Paul D, with deep regret, “She was my best thing.” Paul D responds with tenderness in the famous lines, “No girl, you your best thing.” “Me?,” she cries and asks. “Me?”
Yaa Gyasi’s historical fiction novel Homegoing starts in Ghana at Cape Coast Castle, and follows generations of slaves, symbolically cursed women and some men, Each of them carries a small stone around their neck, an heirloom passed between generations. Finally, in contemporary times, a young descendant is swimming with her male lover near Cape Coast Castle. They have returned as tourists. She takes off the stone her family has worn for centuries across generations. She tosses it to her lover and says, “Here, you take it.” It makes me cry because finally she is free and no longer needs to wear the stone.
So I stayed with Cheryl, doing drugs and hurting myself. I always carried with me that little voice, like Anna Mae asking in darkness, “But why did she leave me?” Because I had been left by my first adoptive mother, because I had barely seen her again, because nothing was ever explained to me, I couldn’t do to someone what was done to me.
One night while I was working at a bar, I left to buy drugs. Or, as I see it now, I was two people and one took me to buy crack. I went to the Lower East Side. Someone led me into a hallway. It was set-up. They saw I was green, alone. Attempting to get away, we struggled and stumbled out into the street. One said to another group member, “Give me the knife.” Someone planned to stab me. I had a beautiful brown leather knapsack with my poetry from school. I realized in that moment that I couldn’t give it up. Writing and what I had learned in Jane Lazarre’s class was the only reason I had to live, so I fought.
I said, “Here, take the money, take the money,” the hundred dollars or so I had in tips from bartending, but I wouldn’t let go of the knapsack and the poetry inside. I somehow escaped, I don’t remember how I got home. I took a long bath; I tried to scrub off what felt like dirt. I didn’t tell Cheryl about the attack. After that night, and being confronted by Cheryl about drug use, all I could manage to say is, “I want to go home.”
I boarded a bus to Boston, to my parent’s house, but I misunderstood. The home I cried out for was not my parent’s house, but a warm place in me. I was still sick in my heart from the attack, but I sat in my parent’s house under a dull lamp light, reading to heal. I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I got to the place where Sethe, the runaway slave, is found near dead in the woods. It’s winter and she has frostbite. She is numb all over. She is found by a poor young white girl who massages her frost-bitten limbs. It’s agony for Sethe. The young white girl understands and says, “Anything dead coming back to life, hurts.”
From that moment on, like in the classroom at The New School reading Sula,
