Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux
“Your dumb ass still ain’t learned a thing.” Her eyes were vicious as she looked at Esther. “You a lot bigger than you was when I threw you out of here before, but you still just as stupid as the day is long. You just like that crazy bastard that sired you. There ain’t none of me in you. But I know how to deal with you.”
Two steps brought her to the pallet where we lay, immobilized. Esther let out a sharp frightened sound like a dog that has been hurt as her mama grabbed one of her plaits and pulled her to her feet. “I know exactly how to fix your smart ass,” she hissed, as she led Esther out of the room by her hair.
From the other room I heard quick intakes of breath and the muted thuds and smacking sounds that my mama’s fists made when she pounded dough to make bread. The noises were magnified like sounds in a bad dream that seemed to go on too long. I thought about getting up and running from the house, but I couldn’t move. My heart pounded, and I prayed to Jesus for salvation as I had learned to do in Sunday School. My voice rose and fell in a frantic litany of every prayer I had ever learned. “Our father … the Lord is my shepherd … bless the little children … protect the meek …”
Esther appeared in the doorway. There was blood dripping from her nose onto her lips, and she was wavering on one leg. Her mama stood behind her with a crazed look still in her eyes. She looked at me and shoved Esther into the room with such force that Esther landed on her knees in the middle of the room where the nail polish bottle had been. “You come here,” she said to me.
I got to my feet slowly, already crying and still begging for mercy from God. Esther’s bloody nose and the angry red splotches on every part of her body that I could see, made it clear that her mama did not understand what it meant to be merciful. I stood before her pressing my hands together in a fisted version of praying hands.
“Put your hands down and look at me.”
Her voice was no longer human. But I had been trained to obey my elders. So I lowered my arms to my sides, eyes trained on the floor, still mumbling my prayers. “Look at me,” she said. What I saw when I raised my head was a matured hatred directed straight at me. Then I thought I saw a flicker of joy or forgiveness in the dark eyes that looked down into my own, so I didn’t expect the hand that swung out from her side and struck me across the face, knocking me off balance. Her other hand came from the other side to deliver the real blow that sent me reeling across the room. I bumped into Esther where she was still kneeling on the floor. We ended in a tangled heap on the pallet.
“That’s for not telling me what that dumb-ass bitch was up to.”
As Esther and I sat up and collected ourselves, wiping tears, snot, and blood from our faces with our hands, her mama tossed two folded brown paper bags at us. “Put your shit in these bags and get out of my house. I don’t want either one of you under the same roof with me for another minute.”
In silence we stuffed our things into the bags and stood in the middle of the room, waiting for some miracle to take us away. Esther’s mama appeared in the doorway again. “Y’all know the way to the door. Get your little asses out of my house.”
With faces averted and minds burdened with guilt and pain, we walked to the door, off the porch, and into the street. The quiet night air soothed my burning skin as I turned and began marching in the direction I thought would take me home. The stinging pain in my jaw and a sharp ache in my wrist dulled as I allowed myself to think about the fact that I didn’t know exactly how to get myself home. In my bruised memory the cab ride to Esther’s mama’s house had gone on forever.
Esther walked beside me, her shoulders slumped in a posture I had never seen her wear. Her eyes looked at the tips of her toes. We had neglected to put on our shoes.
“Esther?” I ventured, suddenly filled with fears about rabid bats swooping down on us, or wild possums attacking as we roamed around town, forever trying to find our way home.
She looked at me with an expression so empty and bewildered that I could not form the words to ask if she knew how to get to her grandma’s house. She turned her attention back to the ground, and I was content for a time to just walk beside her.
I could not imagine what it felt like to be Esther. I felt sorry that someone so powerful as her mother could hate her so much, and I was embarrassed to have seen proof of it. I stole sly glances at her face, moving there in the dark, as emotionless as something carved from stone.
After we had walked for a long time, Esther stopped under a streetlight and sat down on the ground with her back against the light pole. She set her bag on the ground beside her. Slow silent tremors began to shake her body, gently at first. Then the tremors strengthened, making her moan and shake violently. Her head dropped forward and her heavy plaits stuck out from her head like tired horns. As her shoulders heaved in her private anguish, I stood paralyzed in the street lamp’s murky yellow light.
I decided to try hugging Esther as my mother did with my little brothers when they cried. Esther shrugged my hand away savagely when I touched her shoulder.
After a while she stood and wiped her face on the hem of her night shirt. I didn’t realize that I had been crying until she looked at me and hissed, “I told you I hate crybabies.”
“Help me untie my hair,” she said suddenly, pulling roughly at one of her plaits. “These things are making my head hurt.”
We unbraided her hair carefully, and she ran her fingers through it, coaxing it back to its familiar wildness until it stood out angrily, dwarfing her narrow face.
“I didn’t want to stay at my mother’s house no way,” she said, reaching up with both hands to tug at the little hairs on the back of her neck. “She’s always trying to get me to come stay with her. But even though she loves me, I just don’t like to stay with her.”
A voracious sense of loss clawed at my insides. It tore at my stomach until I dropped to my knees and vomited in the dirt. I didn’t want to look at Esther. Something was wrong with her and her mother. I saw this as clearly as I saw the purple remnants of mulberry cobbler in the vomit on the ground in front of me. I felt weak, and I understood why she hated my kind of weakness. I didn’t want to get up.
Esther simply grabbed my nightshirt and pulled me to my feet.
“It’s a good thing that you ain’t me,” she said with disgusted pity. “Come on,” she added, gentler. “Let’s go find my grandma’s house. She’ll be glad to see us. She didn’t want me to go to my mama’s house no way.”
I don’t remember how, but we did find our way home, and neither Esther’s grandmother, nor my mother was glad to see us.
“I can’t believe you acted a fool in somebody else’s house. I thought you had better sense than that,” Momma said, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shaking her head with confused anger. “I know I taught you better than that.”
She put her hand under my chin and tilted my head to get a better look at my bruised cheek.
“That heifer didn’t have to hit you so hard. But now you know. Don’t go behaving like a fool in another woman’s house. Even when I ain’t around, you got to act sensible. Like you got some manners. Like I been raising you. Don’t give nobody reason to think they got to hit you. Maddy. You ain’t a little child anymore. You got to learn the world ain’t a easy place. You my pride and joy—don’t be giving me no reasons to be shamed of my own flesh and blood.”
I wanted to say I was sorry—sorry for shaming her, sorry for thinking Esther was better. I wanted to tell her about the hate I had seen in Esther’s mother’s eyes. I wanted to ask her if it was possible, could a mother really hate her child? But my tongue was tied by shame. I watched her making poultices for me to hold against my bruised face and wrist. And for the first time that summer I noticed her swollen legs. They looked like smooth brown tree trunks planted in a pair of Daddy’s old work-boots. She moved slowly, listing from side to side