her, yet she did not move. Everything around her grew quiet. She stood alone in that room, even though her daddy sat in front of her.
“Daddy,” she said to the floor. “I got accepted to Upward Bound. I wrote one of the best essays in class and I was one of the only girls they chose.”
He grunted, wiped his nose, and leaned back, never turning his head her way.
“What the hell is Upward Bound? And who told you to do some essay without my permission?”
“It was an assignment in school, Daddy,” she responded. “They made us do it. I didn’t even know it was a contest.”
She prayed he wouldn’t smell the lie on her lips. She’d known they would choose the best ones in the school. That’s why she had written an outline and sharpened her pencils for a whole minute before she began writing. She’d never liked writing before, but she wrote as if she loved words, as if her need to escape could be funneled from mind through pencil to paper.
“They said mine was one of the best, Daddy. That’s why they want me to go, even though I’m so young.”
He looked at her then, his stare so sharp one would think he was whipping her in his mind.
“Don’t no-damn-body at no-damn-school got the right to say where you can go and when. Who the hell they think they are and who the hell you think you are?”
She had no answer, as that question never required one. She was nobody next to her daddy, no more than a portrait nailed to a wall. Whatever opinions she had she’d stolen from him, and she could tell his opinion concerning Norfolk State was not one she wished to possess. She considered retreating before dismissal, but she’d learned earlier in life never to turn head or back to her daddy. He could get from one side of the room to another with one jolt of his body.
Big Boone stared at Momma, saying with his eyes what he did not want to say with his mouth. He noticed her long, thin body growing fast. The curls enveloping her face were the same ones she’d worn as a baby. She was auburn brown, the color of sky right before the sun hits the horizon, and she was pretty, true to the nickname given to her years before. She was the baby of the family, but she had never been his baby. Toward her, he had never been soft; so many parts of him hardened before she was born.
He expected her to turn, to run before he became what she’d always known him to be: heavy, pressing, crowding out anything that did not please him. But she stood limp, head down, without confrontation, just standing. He waited for her to plead, for her to say something that would cue him to scream, to order her away, maybe even slap her for talking back. But, she just stood. He had skills when responding to talking, to those working to convince him, but standing, silence was different; he found it difficult to reply when conversation had not begun.
He’d not often had that problem, but something in him wanted to wait for her, to see what she would say, what she would do in order to capture what she desired. One thing was certain: he did not want her to go. He’d already lost so many: her momma, his sons, his other daughters. Out of them all, she was the one left. Who would he be without someone to lean his power on? She, the coffee table of his life, had been there to hold his drinks, his food, his stress when it grew too heavy for him to carry. But part of him wanted this for her. Part of him was proud of her accomplishment, even though he didn’t fully understand what that accomplishment was. She had written an essay that won her something. That must have meant she was a good writer and a smart girl. He and his wife may have given that to her before she was born.
Growing up, Granddaddy had never been a big writer or a reader; he was never good with words. Numbers were his thing. They meant dollars, survival. Words could get you dead. Too much talking meant not enough working. But his baby was smart, even though she hated words and he often had to chastise her into finishing her work for class. She’d written an essay that had gotten her into college before she was old enough to go. That opportunity he wanted to give her, a chance to be more than he could. But no one had ever given him anything. He took to breaking the law in order to get what he and his family needed. That was the world she had inherited. To demand anything less would make her weak and he’d seen to it that none of his girls were weak. So he’d give her work she’d already proven she could do.
He swallowed hard, sat back farther in his chair than the frame had ever intended, and said, “If you want to go, Pretty, write ten reasons I should let you. Write ’em out and I’ll think about it.”
Momma sat in her room, writing words that did not flow as they had when she wrote the essay for Upward Bound. The words she wrote for her daddy were reluctant to appear, as if they feared her daddy too. Her writing was disjointed, too much pressure on the paper, her life sketched in scraggly lines. She started, stopped, balled up the paper, started again. She scratched out a word. Wrote another. In between each page she crumbled, her future dipped into a valley. It stalled there, unable to muster energy to creep up the mountainside. There were moments she was able to press on the gas of her existence, when she barreled up that mountain, revved herself past the downward tug of incline. Then, there was no destination in mind, just the moving reminded her she was fighting toward her own space. Finally, she’d scribbled ten things, ten reasons her daddy should let her leave his house.
“What were those reasons?” I once asked. She said she does not need to remember. I, on the other hand, must know. Did she write she had missed her period and she knew, but really didn’t know what that meant? Had the graphite against paper wanted to confess what had happened with Pop, as she, clenching her fingers, burrowed down on blankness, wrestled words into short, simple sentences? Had she fought the urge to write, “I need to get out of here before we all know,” aware he might not read beyond the letter “I?” Those things cannot be known. The past only reveals what it chooses, but I see her as she inspects her paper, as she says a prayer for each word, and takes her future into her daddy’s room.
Momma quietly handed her daddy the paper. She quivered as she leaned toward him. He pretended to read even though the curves, the straight lines had always been foreign to him. He cleared his throat and she flinched in response. She looked straight ahead. He stared down. No parts of the house creaked. Even the windows seemed to hold their breath. The ear of the world turned toward him—waited—just as Momma did.
“All right, you can go.” He spoke with heat, as if she were in need of a whipping.
She heard it that way too, but through the heat she heard song. He ordered her out of the room, told her to clean something before he changed his mind. She didn’t smile as she left and she didn’t look back. I see him and her in my mind and I know what Momma did not; if she had looked back, if her eyes had touched his, she would have seen the smile, the celebration in him.
Her first week in Norfolk was the reprieve for which she’d prayed. Norfolk State University was only twenty minutes from her daddy’s Deep Creek, and yet it felt years away, so far, from the two-bedroom house with floors that had moaned as she tiptoed over them. She had moaned too, quietly, so her daddy couldn’t hear, once she’d passed her second month without a period. At Norfolk State, she could moan loudly. There she wasn’t Big Boone’s daughter, she wasn’t “Pretty,” and she wasn’t the girl Pop had deposited his shame into.
No fear of her daddy hearing in spaces he did not own. This new space, with buildings so large they could have birthed her daddy’s house five times over, belonged to her. She belonged to it, and neither she nor that majestic campus would suffocate under this new belonging.
There’s
