Coal to Diamonds (5 page)

But the baseball. I couldn’t get rid of that baseball. It wasn’t the baseball’s fault my bio-dad was a worm.

Not long after Mike moved in, my brothers moved out. Soon Mike left too, in a choppy fashion. Back and forth, coming and going, their on-again, off-again romance making me cry each time he slammed the front door out of our life. Mom thought I was crying because I’d become attached to him, but I was only scared about how my mother was going to pay the bills without him around. Mike and his extra money stabilized the household. Spaghetti dinners and snacks in the cupboard, milk in the fridge. I cried at the memory of Akasha looking for milk in the Arkansas summer. Then Mike came back long enough for baby number six to be on the way.

When Kendra—I got to name her—was born, Mom’s household was at its weirdest and most tumultuous. Shortly after the baby’s birth I found Akasha sitting on the porch, right where I had sat years before, rocking a different screaming baby, waiting for my big sister to return with his milk. Now she was rocking, a slight, pained rock, back and forth, her hands in her hair. I felt scared for her, tilting back and forth like that, anguished. I walked up to her, hesitant. Akasha and I were never warm or affectionate
with each other, even though we were close. I was never her little sister or kid sister, just her sister.

“Akasha, what’s wrong?” I almost didn’t want to know.

“I can’t believe Mom had another baby.” Her long hair stuck to her wet face. She’d already lost most of her childhood to raising Mom’s kids. Her summers weren’t for friends or leisure, but for maintaining the crazy household of needy, hungry kids. Akasha had already given up sleepovers and her summer vacations to help raise Mom’s kids. She was a little mom herself. That premature responsibility made Akasha into a really tough person, with a steel exterior she has to this day. She comes off as hard to get along with, but I understand her. Akasha is ready to go to the mat over any little thing anyone says to her. If you’d been through everything we had, you’d understand.

Under normal circumstances, a kid would be excited if her mother found happiness and stability, but Tom’s entrance into our lives was not something that we kids were excited about. We didn’t trust him.

Despite my mother’s best efforts to be an accommodating wife and mother, my siblings and I weren’t going to buy into her act. There were only four of us at home by then, and we’d been fending for ourselves for a while; we weren’t looking for anyone to come in and start laying down laws.

After two weeks of my mother knowing Tom, he became her full-time
live-in-sin friend
, to put it in her words. It didn’t take long to tell that Tom and I wouldn’t see eye to eye.

Out of all the men in my life, there are some I love and some I loathe, and my worst fear was that I’d loathe Tom. Unfortunately that fear came true. I was afraid for my family, especially my younger brother and sister. I didn’t want Kendra to turn eight and get a surprise visit from a stranger saying,
Hi, I’m your dad
. Not cool.

With Tom in the house, I felt like it was my time to leave. My mother wanted me to stay, even if I hated coming home. I found other places to stay as often as I could.

Sometime after Tom drove me out, my sister Akasha overheard him talking shit to my mother through their closed bedroom door:
She’s your daughter but she has to go
.

Akasha fought with Tom and then left. She left proud because that’s Akasha, but she was really thrown out by Tom, and Mom let it happen. Akasha went to live with her dad, Homer, out in Georgetown, and eventually got a place with our brothers.

Georgetown is located in a little nook in the bend of a river. There is one dusty road in and it’s the same dusty road you take out. My grandmothers lived out there; one of them didn’t get an inside toilet until the ’80s, and the other continues to pump her own water. Up until the ’90s, the town shared a single party phone line. You’d pick up the telephone and be smack in the middle of your neighbor’s conversation. That town that hadn’t budged since 1956 was where my sister was exiled to. Like my brothers, Akasha was a genius at math and science, always winning awards. She could do trigonometry stoned, with her eyes closed. Once she got sent away to Georgetown she started smoking a bunch of pot and skipping school. She still got straight A’s, but something was different. There was no way Akasha was going to be satisfied stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way out.

Luckily, even though she was stuck in Georgetown, Akasha quickly learned to be resourceful. She hornswoggled my father into buying her a car so she could have her independence. I moved out to Georgetown with my dad and sister for a little while, but I was still fifteen with no license and no job—and too young to get either—so eventually I left and went to the only
better situation I could find that was closer to home. However macabre it may sound, it was lucky for me that my Aunt Jannie had fallen ill, because it provided a serious enough reason for me to stay out of my mom’s house without being exiled to Georgetown.

The time I spent living with my dad and sister was brief but hilarious. We watched the same VHS tape—no cable in Georgetown—of
The Simpsons
over and over until we could recite it by heart. Akasha and I smoked cigarettes and wrote excuses for each other to stay home from school. I was sad to say goodbye to my dad’s place, but the bright lights of Judsonia beckoned.

So I moved in with my aunt, who, due to her neglected diabetes and the deplorable state of her home—the conditions there were perfect for a thriving disease—grew a huge staph infection on her ankle, leaving an opening for a free full-time nurse, a position I gratefully accepted. At the time, I was just looking for a way back to civilization, but I wasn’t prepared to deal with everything I signed up for.

My little cousins—the three A’s—were subjected to daily punishments that my aunt doled out. One of those young cousins, who had the misfortune of being the only boy, had to stand with his nose literally to the corner from the moment he got home from school until bedtime, with only a short break to eat. Since he was
stuck in the corner most of his childhood you would never have known what a funny, likable kid he was. All the things he might enjoy were deemed bad for him and taken away one by one. He wasn’t allowed sugar because he was “hyperactive.” The cruelty he endured at home created an unmanageable monster in the eyes of his ill-informed caretakers, so his teachers took playtime at school away and class time became his only free time. Imagine if the only time you could relax was when you were able to sit at a desk and turn your head from side to side. I can’t prove it, but there was suspicion that he wasn’t getting his Ritalin. I lived in that house for two years and I only saw him get his medicine twice. With everything that was happening, he built up so much energy and anger. How could he have sat still in school? He needed an outlet.

That said, I think Aunt Jannie genuinely didn’t understand what was going on. She was damaged, frustrated, and confused. None of that ever excused her behavior, but it does help to explain how she could be a hero and a villain at the same time.

At Aunt Jannie’s I always had to clean up the dinner mess and try to keep the chaos under control. By that time, Aunt Jannie’s sicknesses were getting the best of her body. Every evening, after we finished eating, she went to the couch to lie down while my cousin stood in the corner. He’d be there for so long that he couldn’t help shifting from leg to leg. There was always fear in the air, and while I wanted my cousin out of the corner, I also wanted him to escape any worse punishment. I never knew how to help, or what to do. Aunt Jannie might have gotten up from the couch, and I didn’t want her to see him disobeying, so I felt like I couldn’t chance letting him roam free. The few times that I dared to speak up for him, we both wound up in serious trouble. That’s just the way it was at Aunt Jannie’s. I was so confused.

The fights with Tom at my mom’s house were still fresh in my mind, and staying in Georgetown—as fun as it could be—didn’t work for me. I found myself stuck in a bad situation that felt like a slightly better alternative to the other things I was running from.
Though Aunt Jannie had never laid a hand on me, she would holler and shut me out if I didn’t do what she said. Her way of punishing me was to withhold her love and companionship, two things I was desperately seeking at the time.

My immediate family was extremely disconnected. My brother Benny was doing well. He was on tour, playing music all over the country. My other brother Robbie was living on his own and taking care of himself, and Akasha was trying to be the first high school graduate in our family. I was lost in the shuffle.

One night Aunt Jannie gave my cousin a whupping for putting too much water in the tub for his bath. He was only allowed one inch. I heard her yelling in the bathroom. I told myself it was just a spanking. Lots of kids got spanked, although how many kids do you know who were only allowed one inch of bathwater? It was becoming clearer and clearer that Aunt Jannie just had it out for him. I felt a creepy, no-good feeling coming on me, the awful feeling of something bad being true sinking in like a stone: Aunt Jannie was sabotaging my cousin.

Eventually, it became obvious that I couldn’t stay much longer. All of us kids were scared of Aunt Jannie for different reasons—physically afraid or emotionally afraid—and I couldn’t take it anymore. She was intimidating, incredibly smart, and, for Arkansas, she was a liberated, independent woman, which was both inspiring and frightening.

I really do believe my aunt started out a good person. If Aunt Jannie at twenty-one saw herself at forty-seven she wouldn’t recognize that person. She had a lot to give, but maybe all the years of Aunt Jannie never getting to stop and think about herself made her twisted up inside. How long can a person tuck herself away like she’s nothing, needing nothing, before she loses it? It seemed like everyone in my family was shelving bad secrets in the back of their minds. Aunt Jannie probably had hers; I’m sure she had hers. There must have been some memory that turned her into a monster, slowly polluting her heart.

Before I left Aunt Jannie’s there was a string of curious incidents. While my younger cousin was wild, he wasn’t violent. Always affectionate, he was a sweet little boy by nature. So it came as a surprise when Dean’s bed had been slashed more than thirty times with a steak knife and there was only one person who was capable of doing it: that sweet little boy. But no one knew what could have motivated him. There were enough sources of anger and resentment, but until then nothing had pushed my little cousin that far. We all just thought he’d had enough.

And then there was the ring—a shining example, literally, of the hierarchy among my cousins. If it had been the dark ages my little cousin wouldn’t have been more than a serf and Dean was definitely a king, so when Dean’s ring disappeared we all heard about it. Big gold rings were in, and someone’s credit card had purchased a nice shiny one for Dean. Then the ring went missing—or that was the story anyway. We never knew exactly how it happened, but it wound up with a little girl in my younger cousin’s class. You can imagine what her mother thought when she came home with a 24-karat gold nugget ring. Her mother called Jane Ann, and Dean went ballistic. Things were tense before, but they seriously escalated after that call.

In hindsight, I can now say that what happened to my little cousin in that house was abuse, absolute abuse. At the time, I thought that “abuse” would be more violent, that there would be more bruises, more welts, that it would be like an ’80s after-school special. The abuse in Aunt Jannie’s house just felt like a constant low-level hum, like the buzz of a refrigerator that you didn’t even notice because you’d adjusted to the sound so long ago. Growing up with spankings, I just didn’t see that behavior as abuse. Even today, I still feel like spankings aren’t so bad, that they aren’t really beatings. I’m numbed out to it. But that’s the result of being exposed to such constant, mundane abuse for so long.

The adults around me did nothing about the situation. Some who tried to intervene watched it blow up in their faces, with Aunt
Jannie’s rage and intensified punishments for my cousin. As for social services, I didn’t even think about turning to the system for help. The system had demonized my mother when she was only twelve for looking to get rescued from her abusive father. After that, she didn’t believe any child would be better off in the system, and I couldn’t argue.

Needless to say, the situation at Aunt Jannie’s was mentally and physically exhausting. Aunt Jannie went to the hospital frequently, and she also had routine trips to the doctor, so there was a little more peace in the house, but I missed her company and affection. On top of that, Jane Ann had taken to introducing me to people as her live-in babysitter maid instead of her relative. I had to ask her to stop. Feeling homeless and unwanted was rotten enough; to think that my family had stopped seeing me as family and had started thinking of me as some girl who cleaned up after them was terrible.

Even though staying at Mom’s house sucked once she married Tom, sometimes I needed to go back and be with my mother. One of the things keeping me at Aunt Jannie’s was literally dying, and the other three—the little A’s—were too painful to watch anymore; my little cousin and his sisters only made me feel more helpless. So I stopped staying at Aunt Jannie’s all the time and gave my mom’s house another shot.

I was staying at Mom’s when the phone rang one morning. It was one of my younger cousins, calling to tell us Aunt Jannie had died. I covered my mouth and looked at my mom, who instantly knew what I’d been told. We were shocked. Everything happened so quickly after Aunt Jannie got sick. The staph infection kept her in the hospital long enough for the doctors to figure out that she had cancer, and then Aunt Jannie was gone in what felt like a matter of weeks. It was my earliest lesson in real loss. There was nothing I could do. No amount of Crystal Light or chocolate-covered cherries could bring her back.