The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (5 page)

“You’re nasty!” I screamed.

“What’s going on?” Mrs. Taylor asked, pulling the hanging blanket aside to see out. She was a pudgy, soft-bodied woman who was bullied just as badly by her husband as her children.

“Nothin’s happening,” Mr. Taylor said, still staring up at me feigning innocence.

“Nnh-uhn!” I said. “He was putting his nasty hands on my coochie!”

“No! I was just helping her up,” he said as he walked out.

I wanted Mrs. Taylor to hit him with her shoe, or cuss him out at the very least. Instead she just let the blanket fall back into place, sealing herself away from her family.

My friend then whispered to me, “Just watch where he is at all times. That way you have time to get away.”

My fascination with the Taylors quickly waned after that incident. The novelty of their unconventional living situation had worn off. I would have remained friends with the girls but the neighborhood kids bullied them because of their father and how they lived, so they never wanted to play anywhere but in their backyard, which for me was too close to their father for comfort.

It was at this point that fear crept into my life like a goblin that lived in the pit of my stomach promising ruin. I knew my childhood was coming to an end. The end of childhood for girls in my community meant being vulnerable to the predatory advances of men who saw young girls, especially girls without the benefit of stable homes, as fair game. I’d seen it many times. Girls in my school and in my own family who were strong and vital and curious became suddenly cowed, abused and abandoned soon after puberty. Many were saddled with children and adult responsibility before finishing junior high school.

It happened to Deborah and my sister Donna. At just ten, it had begun to happen to me. For most of my childhood I looked like a boy, dressed like a boy, played like a boy. This gender bending allowed me the freedom to explore my community with ease. But my body began to betray me, tiny, swollen boobs began to grow and blow my cover. Teachers and shopkeepers and neighborhood men took notice. Men old enough to be my grandfather started offering me sweets in exchange for sexual favors. I became adept at fending off their groping hands and unwanted attention. I didn’t know to tell anyone. Snitching was not allowed, even if you were the victim. I knew it was up to me to stay out of harm’s way.

I went from a child who loved being outside to one who spent as little time outside as possible. The most risky part of the day was the two-block trip to the bus stop to go to school. There were always a few perverts who liked to hang around there waiting for girls traveling on their own. We learned there was safety in numbers and made arrangements beforehand to arrive at the stop at roughly the same time. In the chill of early morning on any given weekday it was common to see girls huddled together at bus stops emboldened by their numbers, hurling insults at the perverts as they slowly glided by in their cars looking to give a girl “a ride” to school. The trip home was equally harrowing.

It was during this time that I developed a slight stutter and began seeking out hiding places that only I knew about. The attic space at home. The crawl space under the stage at school. Places where I could stash food and my favorite things. Places where I could ride out the coming apocalypse that was puberty. I also turned heavily to books to escape. I was particularly attracted to horror fiction and sci-fi:
The Hobbit
,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and lots and lots of Stephen King novels. They read like survival manuals, teaching me how not to fall victim to monsters. I also learned from some members of my family and people in the community how abuse of drugs and alcohol, partying and running the streets could ruin a person. I vowed from a very young age that I would never drink, smoke, do drugs or have sex.

My mother had no problem letting us watch films that had graphic sex scenes and she certainly had no problem talking about sex with her friends within hearing distance of us, but when it came to educating her kids about sex and the changes our bodies would go through, she never broached the subject. It left me thinking that sex and the female body were shameful and only good for crass jokes and secret conversations. Open educational sex talk didn’t happen in our home despite the fact that my mother was raising five girls. Most of what I knew came from afterschool specials, books, gossip and a sex education class at school.

The sex ed class was a bit more helpful. It was taught by an old white woman who seemed overly excited about the subject. She had long white hair with scraggly ends that hung down past her butt. She was too old to be a hippie but she dressed like one, in her peasant blouse and bell-bottom jeans that even then were a bit out of style. Her skin was as sun-ravaged as the dashboard of an old car. Her face was tan and cracked and would not have looked out of place on a shar-pei puppy, but her eyes were young. They were clear, blue, jovial and landed on each of us with the intensity of a searchlight.

As she began to unpack her teaching aids from a big duffel bag, all I could think about was her being somebody’s granny. Somebody’s granny who was handling a cross section of an erect penis. There were nervous snickers as she unpacked a bag that also contained a cross section of a female pelvis.

She began her lecture with a slide show. The first slide was of the male reproductive system with the various parts labeled. We were instructed to repeat back to her each part: “Head.” “Head!” “Shaft.” “Shaft!” “Testes.” “Testes!” “Anus.” “Anus!” She encouraged us to say each word loud and clear. It was exhilarating. It felt like Teacher was giving us permission to say dirty words in class. She repeated the exercise for the female reproductive system.

Then she showed us a short movie of sperm swimming toward the egg. She described the fertilization of the egg as the world’s tiniest footrace, with millions of sperm racing to reach the finish line. This part of the lecture was like listening to a synopsis of a movie. Each sperm released was full of ambition and hope. They raced along like spawning salmon to fulfill their destiny. Many would lose their way and Teacher pointed out deformed sperm with crooked tails that swam in circles, sperm that had two heads or two tails that couldn’t swim at all. Then there were the star sperm. They were the Sidney Poitiers and John Waynes in the story of reproduction, who raced along like little minnows, each as hale and hardy as the next; but only one was destined to win the grand prize and have its genetic material incorporated into a fertilized egg.

This whole sex thing was exciting and as interesting as an episode of
Wild Kingdom
. So later when Teacher asked for volunteers, I threw my hand up and was selected along with another girl and a boy. We shuffled to the front of the class. Then Teacher reached into her bag and presented each of us with a condom and a cucumber. When she told us to put the condoms on the cucumber, the class erupted into a chorus of raucous laughter, elbow jabbing and crude jokes. I was mortified. Even more so when I tore the condom trying to get it on. Teacher just laughed and said, “It happens.” As awkward as sex ed turned out to be, it filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge of the subject.

My mother would not discuss sex but she was not averse to having lots of it. From a young age I knew what the banging headboard and grunting noises that were still audible over the music blaring in her bedroom meant. It meant Mama and her boyfriend were doing the nasty.

Growing up in a sexually ignorant home had its consequences. One day, at age fifteen, Donna began asking us younger siblings to walk on her stomach.

“What for?” I asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

She told me her stomach hurt and walking on it would help.

“Why don’t you tell Mama you don’t feel good?” Louise asked.

“It don’t feel bad enough for the doctor. I just need you to walk on it. And don’t tell Mama.”

When I was convinced there would be no repercussions, I was more than happy to walk on my big sister, which she asked me to do several times a day for weeks. Then one evening she woke up the whole house screaming as if she were about to die. Mama rushed her to the hospital, leaving the rest of us alone at home to speculate about what was happening. We all knew she’d been complaining of bellyaches for months and I thought maybe I’d hurt her by walking on her belly. Mama returned a few hours later to inform us that Donna had had a baby. She’d managed to hide her pregnancy from all of us for seven months, then gave birth to a baby girl two months premature. How she managed to hide her pregnancy in a house in which true privacy was only achieved in REM sleep was beyond us all.

When we went to the hospital to see Donna, she lay in her bed crying, refusing to look at us as she was so ashamed. Mama told us that all the way to the hospital Donna denied she was pregnant right up until she delivered her baby. I felt sick when I realized that the reason she’d asked us to walk on her stomach was because she was trying to miscarry.

We left Donna and went to the NICU to see the baby that Donna named Latasha. She was just two pounds, incredibly small, lying there in an incubator too premature to regulate her own body temperature or breathe on her own. She was hooked up to an impossible number of tubes and doodads. I’d never seen a baby so small. She looked like an ugly old man but I loved her on sight. The nurses called her a miracle baby because she thrived despite the lack of prenatal care and being born way too early. If only they knew that Latasha also had to contend with her mother actively trying to end the pregnancy too. She was indeed a miracle. She came home to us a few months later healthy and hearty and became the center of my world. It was like having the baby sister I’d always wanted. I helped with her feeding, as Donna did not breast-feed, as well as with diaper changes and cuddling. I loved to stick my nose in the space at the base of her neck where the sweet smell of baby was most concentrated.

She grew into an active and inquisitive toddler. She loved to scribble on paper with markers. One afternoon when she was left alone, we discovered that she’d gone around the apartment marking walls, doors and furniture with a little slash of purple. While I believed most kids would have found a spot and scribbled the pen dry, I thought it evidence of Tasha’s brilliance that she chose to mark many spots as if to convey “Tasha was here!” For weeks we’d run across undiscovered slashes of purple in odd locations, like on the underside of tables and one even inside the refrigerator.

The stress of helping to raise Tasha put a strain on my mother and sister’s relationship. They began to argue frequently. Mama threatened to kick her out. In order to get away, Donna got a new boyfriend and moved to Texas, taking Tasha with her. I missed my niece but just like with Deborah, we simply had to cope with the loss on our own. After they left I had to go on as if my heart wasn’t missing. Instead of feeling sad it was much easier for me to feel angry. My anger began to replace the love I once had for my mother, who I viewed as responsible for my sister’s leaving. Along with anger there was also fear. Fear that getting on my mother’s bad side would get me put out too. Instead of whippings, her new form of punishment became threats of putting us out on the street—threats that I knew weren’t idle.

It was around this time that Mama really checked out. She was drunk nearly every day. I did my best to stay out of her way. We all did. My sister Teresa used academics as a way out. She managed to get a scholarship that included early college admission with student housing. Sometimes she’d invite Louise and me to the UC Berkeley campus to visit her. We’d play video games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in the student lounge. But eventually we had to return home.

IT’D BEEN ABOUT A YEAR
since I’d last seen Deborah the night she fought with Daddy. After she ran away, Mama told us not to let her in the house if she came by. Deborah was deep into her crack addiction and Mama feared she’d steal things if she got into the house when she wasn’t there. I could tell my mother missed her because after she left, that’s when she started drinking more than ever. But once Deborah left, it was like she was erased from our family. Aside from the caution not to let her in the house, her name was rarely mentioned. Overnight my big sister was out of my life, but it would be because of her that I would learn sooner than later that being female was a scary, helpless thing to be.

The first lesson came one weekend afternoon while I was home sitting on the porch. A man pulled into our driveway in a slick blue car thumping loud music. He rolled down his window and waved me over with a hand laden with thick gold rings. Even as he sat in his car I could see he was a big man, broad-shouldered and light-skinned. He was handsome and flashed a smile at me before he turned his music down and asked if Deborah was home.

“She ain’t here,” I told him.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked, looking me up and down. I knew the look. Every girl over ten knew that look. Although he hadn’t laid a hand on me, that look made me want to run and hide. But I knew the worst thing I could do was show fear. Instinctively I crossed my arms over my tiny bosom and gave him my dirtiest look. The man pouted, tilted his head to the side, and looked up at me with puppy eyes. He knew he’d spooked me, but that Mr. Innocent look he gave me only made him look even creepier.

“If she ain’t here, can you tell me where she at?” he asked, giving me a full smile with big horsey teeth. His goofy smile reminded me of Mr. Ed, a talking horse in one of my favorite TV shows, and I smiled despite my unease. He took my smile as an invitation and reached his hand out to me. I backed away and could not have been more startled if his hand were a dead rat.

“She ain’t here!” I said, trying to sound unafraid while edging my way back up onto the porch and near the front door should I need to run inside. He changed tactics.

“If you tell me where she is, I’ll give you a dollar.”

A dollar was a lot of money to me and the prospect of getting it was tempting. I didn’t know where Deborah was but I wasn’t averse to telling him a fib to get that dollar.

“Give me the dollar first!” I said with my hand on my hip, trying to look tough.

He laughed.

“Come get in the car. Ride with me to the store so I can get change. I only got twenties,” he said, pulling out his wallet and tilting it slightly toward me so that I could see it was stuffed with bills. When I saw all that money, I felt my eyes bug out far enough to pop loose and roll down the street.

He reached a hand out toward me again, wriggling his fingers in a way that made me think of serpent tongues. When I hesitated, he opened the car door and began to get out. That did it. Something deep within me said
Run!
It was an instinctual fear as clear and undeniable as the fear of snakes or the fear of falling. This man was a predator and I knew as sure as I knew my own name that if I got in the car, I wouldn’t get a dollar. I’d get a world of hurt I was unlikely to recover from. I dropped any pretense of being unafraid and ran into the house and locked the door.

Once inside the house behind a locked door, I peeked out at the man through a crack in the curtains. He was leaning against his car and was digging in his jacket for what I saw was a cigarette and a book of matches. I watched him light the cigarette, and by the way he smoked it—holding it tightly between his thumb and index finger and sucking on it with his face all squinched up like a fist—I knew it was dope.

“Get out of here!” I said under my breath, willing him to burst into flames or get beamed up to a hostile planet somewhere in another galaxy. Instead he lingered in the driveway and took his time smoking the joint before he got in his car and disappeared down the street. It angered me that I couldn’t make that man go away when I wanted him to. He could have hurt me and been sure the police would not be called. Even for people who were not ex-Panthers, it was rare to call on the police for help. I knew my greatest defense was to show no fear. When Mama came home, I told her about the man. She said she thought he might have been Deborah’s pimp and that I did the right thing by locking myself in the house.

Many months later I was home alone playing Pac-Man when I heard pounding on the front door. I was so startled I dropped the joy stick. A pounding like that could only mean the police or somebody looking to settle a score. I sat quietly, with my heart beating in my throat waiting for whoever it was to go away. After what felt like minutes it did not stop, so I crept into the living room and peeked out the window. I saw a skinny woman in a tube top and tight jeans hammering the door, all the while staring furtively over her shoulder. It took a moment for me to register that it was my sister Deborah. She was at least twenty pounds underweight. Her cheekbones were protruding and her eyes were sunken.

I cracked the door open using my foot to keep her from pushing her way in.

“Open the door, Lawanna!” she said, trying to push the door open.

“Mama ain’t here. She say you can’t come in if she ain’t here.”

I could see that my sister was scared of something but I was even more scared of what Mama would do to me if she found out I let Deborah inside.

“Let me in, baby girl! Somebody is trying to get me!”

I stepped aside and let her in, and she quickly locked the door. She turned to me and said, “If a man comes looking for me, don’t tell him I’m here.” Then she ran to the back bedroom and closed the door.

Within a minute there was another round of furious knocking on the door. I cracked the door again using my foot as a doorjamb and I was relieved to see a short, skinny man instead of the big pimp from before. The scrawny guy was trying to see past me into the house.

“Whatchu want?” I asked.

“Deborah! I saw her come in here,” he said, now trying to push the door open.

I pushed back.

“She ain’t here, now get the fuck off our porch!”

The man suddenly pushed the door with all his might, sending me across the room and onto the couch. He walked right in like he owned the place, opening the door to the downstairs bathroom and violently pulling back the shower curtain. I didn’t have sense enough to be afraid. I still had a little bit of tomboy in me telling me that I was fearless and fully capable of defending myself from most dangers. So I trailed behind the man, cursing him out as he searched our house.

He ignored me and continued his search. When he reached the bedroom in the back where Deborah was hiding, he opened the door and saw her. He stepped into the room and closed the door in my face. I was about to enter behind him when I heard an awful sound that stopped me in my tracks and sent my tomboy spirit running for cover. I heard the sickening thud of a fist violently colliding with flesh over and over again. He was beating my sister and I could hear her grunts as she took the blows.

After a minute or two, he came out of the room breathing hard and rubbing his fist. I shrank away from him, suddenly realizing that I too was in danger. That I was in danger the minute he pushed his way into the house. I was only spared because he was so focused on finding my sister.

The man seemed not to notice me now that his mission was complete, and I was relieved to see him walk out the front door. I locked the door behind him and went to check on my sister. She was just getting up from the floor when I came into the room and I helped her to stand. I noticed her arms were just bones when I gripped her upper arm. Her face was just beginning to bruise up, her nose bleeding, and she was holding her stomach.

“You OK?” I asked, nearly in tears.

“Yeah. I’m OK,” she said, as if nothing unusual had occurred.

Then she made her way to the living room and out the front door without so much as a good-bye. I was terrified. Hours later I was still terrified. That afternoon was the moment I realized that being female in my hood was to be vulnerable. The only power grown women had was over their small children. I wouldn’t be a kid for long. I was quickly approaching puberty and the phase in my life when I would no longer feel safe in the world.