was supposed to be mopping the front porch, she accidentally broke the mop head off the handle. She held the two mop pieces. As I walked from the pig pen to the house, I felt a knot grow in my stomach, as if some impending doom was descending. Mamma came out the front door and looked at Fanny.
“What the h**l did you do?” Mamma yelled.
She grabbed the metal pole and began to beat a crying Fanny with it. The screams were awful, and I knew Fanny could be seriously injured, but I was afraid of intervening, so I just sat by the porch, looking at Mamma with disgust. She finally stopped and went back in the house, slamming the door. Fanny sat down on the porch.
“Let me look, Fanny.” I pulled her arms open. I was thankful for the little rolls of fat that covered her body, as they seemed to have saved her from any broken bones. I took her to the watering trough and applied cold water to the bruises that were forming. I then let her sit the rest of the day while I worked. I fantasied about hitting Mamma upside the head with a shovel. I did not understand enjoying the pain of others. I was affected deeply if I saw any living thing hurting, and I would immediately try to make things better. How could this woman be my mother?
The next day, I started my week inside the house. While doing the dishes, I could not get Franny’s screams out of my head. I suddenly grabbed a butcher knife and put it to my wrist. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes as I tried to force myself to slice through skin and made a light scratch, enough so that there was a light trickle of blood. ”Just do it,” I told myself.
I was turning eighteen in a few months, but I could see no way to escape. I tried to cut again, but I couldn’t. As I stood there in the kitchen, I suddenly stopped as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I realized that I could not kill myself because I wanted to live; I wanted to change the world somehow, and I could not leave Samantha, Fanny and Grandma. They needed me.
I applied pressure to the small scratch, wrapped a towel around it, and finished my work. A new fire was burning in me. I’ve got to get the hell out of here, somehow. Oh God, please get me out of here. I don’t belong here, please God … please God. I must have repeated this prayer at least two hundred times that day. I had a new surge of hope. I was unwilling to bend to the evil people who were supposed to be my parents.
That August, when Samantha turned sixteen, she also received a letter from the government stating she had to come in to set up volunteer work hours in order to keep receiving her check. Mamma gave them some kind of excuse for her, but since Samantha did not go in, her check was cut, too. At that time, Samantha and I began trying to figure what I could do when I turned eighteen to change our lives. We had no knowledge of how the outside world worked, so we did not know where to start.
I thought aloud, “I know when I turn eighteen they cannot beat me anymore. I will be an adult and able to make my own choices.”
These dreams, however, were smashed by Brian as he began beating me for not meeting one of my time limits one day.
“So you think because you are almost eighteen you can start slacking off?” he asked, frustrated. “You better pick up the slack. I swear to God I will be beating you when you are fifty. You are never going to get away from me, never!”
“You can’t do that!” I yelled back.
“Oh, yeah? And who is going to stop me?” he hissed, putting his face up to mine. “What are you going to do, run away and prostitute yourself? Oh, yeah, maybe you should.” He threw me to the ground. “You would make a good little whore.”
And he was right. How would I stop them? I did not know how. Although I was scared, I was also determined to shake the dust from that horrible place off my feet as soon as I got the chance.
My eighteenth birthday came. Around midday, Samantha looked at me over Mamma’s and Brian’s heads. She was standing by the wood burning stove and motioned for me to make the speech we had been rehearsing at night. I was to tell Mamma and Brian that now that I was old enough, a few changes would need to be made. This would start with my making my own decisions. I cleared my throat a couple of times, trying to muster the courage to speak, but I could not do it. Samantha threw her hands in the air and shook her head.
“What is wrong with you?” Samantha whispered as I put Fanny’s coat on her to go back outside to work.
I shrugged. “What do you want me to do, Samantha? You know they are never going to agree to anything I ask, and they could very well really hurt me. I don’t know what to do.” I shook my head. “I really don’t. They will never let any of us leave here, you know that.”
So I waited. I tried to figure out the perfect time to confront Mamma and Brian and to plan the perfect things to say, but I was just too scared. But as the months passed I started to chafe at the injustice of being an eighteen-year-old going on nineteen who was still beaten and yelled at. If I didn’t do something, my life would be the same when I was thirty.
Finally, one sunny April morning, I got up the courage to do something that would completely change our lives forever and send me spiraling headlong on a crazy and dangerous quest for truth and justice.
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything.
—H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
On a sunny mid-April day, I was outside with Fanny thawing out a water faucet that had frozen overnight. When finished, I went into the house for a hammer, so I could nail the wood and insulation back around the faucet. As I went back to the house to return the hammer, I saw Mamma and Brian walking around and watching me. They had started something new with me: instead of telling me to bend over as they once had, now they would just take the flyswatter or the big leather belt and start beating me with it—as if my compliance were not necessary.
When I reached the house, I saw Samantha was mopping, Not wanting to track mud all over her floor, I set the hammer down inside the door and took Fanny with me to finish our other morning work. About ten minutes later, I felt Samantha tap me on the back. I jumped and then looked at her, perplexed.
“What?” I asked, a little anxiously.
Samantha shrugged. “I have no idea. Brian said to come and get you.”
I motioned for Fanny to follow us, and we all went into the house. The three of us stood in the middle of the living room, looking from Brian to Mamma inquisitively.
“What do you want?” I asked Brian impatiently. I was tired and still had a lot of work to do.
Brian pointed to the door. “Did you put that hammer there?”
I looked at the hammer and nodded. “Uh, yeah,” I answered, confused. “I was going to put it away at dinner time.”
“Why did you not put it away when you were done like you were supposed to?” Brian’s teeth were clenched.
“Well,” I stammered, “I didn’t want to track up Samantha’s floor while she was mopping, and I did not think it would hurt anything.”
“Why
