My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  She had been their wild child, the boisterous and flamboyant middle one who convincingly and formidably played the role of the eldest. She’d openly challenged him, Marie-Ange, and other adults on behalf of her sisters and herself, whipping out the harshest truth at the most critical moments to halt reprisals. She’d spoken with the sweetest smile, through the whitest teeth, which caught people off guard. It had taken manly schoolboys several hours to realize that she had just stripped them of their skins with a flirtatious voice and a kind visage. Despite her seeming coquettishness, Clair had not been interested in dating or making friends. Her pretty face and niceness had not only made people fall in love with her at first sight; it had made them believe that she was in love with them as well. She’d learned early on to use her attractiveness as a mask to get away with saying and doing the impermissible.

  Lucien liked to imagine Clair with her Lady-like dark brown eyes, her pupils taking up most of the space in her irises. Copper flecks made them look like they were lighter in the sunlight. Her sweeping long lashes, Carib-Indian complexion, naturally tinted lips that were the color of her skin with a dab of red clay, and small nose rounded out her cuteness. She’d been gifted with Marie-Ange’s hair and a full, womanly height and shape by the age of twelve. She had been the same height as her sisters then, but she’d looked shorter than five foot five because of her curves, compared with their slender builds. She’d been too shapely to be a tomboy, but she’d thrived as a strong swimmer and volleyball player on her high school teams. Fittingly, she’d been drafted into both the drama club because of her poise and looks and the oratory club and debate team because of her polish and articulateness. She’d participated in these activities to dodge Marie-Ange’s three-days-a-week church schedule until they’d finally had it out and landed on her attending church only to sing backup for Dor on special occasions.

  Her schedule had meant that she was always in a rush and walked like a New Yorker— purposeful, determined, almost running, and always knowing where she was headed. Even her heavy backpack hadn’t slowed her down. The textbooks and sports gear had pushed her forward as if she’d been trying to catch a bus to the future. A life outside of KAM and SOP with her sisters in tow had always been one Manhattan sprint away.

  Lucien remembered the standoffs Clair would instigate against Marie-Ange. She rarely argued because it was clear who would win. He’d avoided Clair as best as his driving lust had allowed. She’d done everything she could to stand out, so she would always be seen by someone and not become his prey. She’d experimented with girlie punk, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna style, all-black nearly Goth (but more Greenwich Village than Satanic), and imitation Michael Jackson with tight pants, pleather jackets, spiked belts, and silver studs on every possible accessory and article of clothing. She’d finally discovered the one look that repelled him and shut Marie-Ange up for good. Before it had become vogue, Clair had shaved her head.

  She’d become known as her school’s black Sinéad O’Connor until Roshumba Williams made her mainstream debut with a low ’fro in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. When Veille and Dor realized how much their father hated Clair’s cut, they’d shaved their relaxed tresses and gone natural as well. He’d loved the wigs that Marie-Ange had made them wear to sing at church. But, true to form, Clair agreed to the teenaged Dreamgirls look only if she could wear makeup as well. She hadn’t asked for permission or negotiated with her mother. She’d simply put on lipstick and eyeliner, made her sisters’ faces up as well, and stepped onto the church stage to bask in Marie-Ange’s and the church’s disapproval. Drawn by his daughters’ adult wigs, Lucien attended church to leer at them while pretending to be the proud father of the talented trio. He’d witnessed how Clair had used her painted face to challenge Marie-Ange. She succeeded at threatening him in the process:

  Go ahead. Say something. Climb onstage. Wipe my mouth and I will tell. All of your secrets. What he did. What you know he did. How you know he watches. How he came here just to stare. Unless we show our nappy heads when we get home, we might find him in our closet or behind the shower door. Smear my lipstick. I will unmask you both. Before God. Forget man. I will undress myself. Right here. I will pull down my panties, as our people say, and spout some name-in-vain curses that Ezili would appreciate. I will unveil her and testify about your worship and her true power before your despicable, hypocritical, pathetic congregation.

  Lucien had squirmed while looking at Marie-Ange for a cue. She hadn’t known what to do—have three nappy-headed girls onstage with fades and ’fros or three secret-hoarding, silky-wigged baby dolls wearing devil-red lipstick in church.

  Lucien remembered how, as a baby, Clair had been Marie-Ange’s favorite. She’d maintained that status until she’d started speaking in full sentences at eleven months old. As a newborn, she’d cried just as much, which had given the women in Bois Droit a reason to hold the pretty, chubby infant. Her cries and subsequent silence had saved her twin’s life.

  The midwife hadn’t known that Marie-Ange had been carrying twins. In the forty-one weeks of pregnancy there had been no movement or throbbing from the other lump. Dor had been stuck in the womb. When she slipped out still inside the afterbirth sac hours after her twin, Nen-nen and the midwife were gaping-mouth, wide-eyed shocked. The midwife cut the cord, but neither woman said anything to alert Marie-Ange that she’d been carrying twins and that one of them had perished. Outside, the midwife cleaned Dor as if she believed she might survive. She sucked blood and mucus from her nose, wiped, washed, and wrapped her. She placed her on the stoop next to her tools and the bucket of afterbirth for burial later that night. She attended to Marie-Ange and an inconsolable baby Clair. Despite feeding, rocking, swaddling, shushing, and singing, the newborn firstborn twin cried for hours straight. The women misdiagnosed her as colicky. The baby quieted down only when the faint cries of the other baby outside wafted in through the closed door more like a scent than a sound. Clair wanted everybody to hear her baby sister, the one presumed dead, the one Marie-Ange didn’t even know existed. She silenced herself to create space. Out of her quiet, Dor’s cries perfumed the room. Without realizing it, the women heard two babies in conversation with each other. Clair’s silence spoke to Dor’s astonishingly delicate cry. Dor was a miracle, but Clair was the heroine who made space for her sister to be heard, then seen, then held.

  Dor had grown up resenting the attention she received as the ugly twin, the darkest of the threesome, and became determined not to be the quietest as well. Her skin was just a few shades lighter than her hair, which was black and tough and tight. She’d begged her mother to press her hair, so she could don the same styles as her sisters. She hadn’t needed that to be seen. The whites of her eyes were exceptionally bright, the eyes themselves black with crystalline pupils. She had her mother’s full plum-colored lips and a thin, barely visible gap between her front teeth. In high school, everyone said that Dor looked like a supermodel, but no one could figure out who until she was in college and Alek Wek debuted. She was the thinnest, least curvaceous of the sisters. With her athletic build, darker skin, and coarse hair, Lucien was less interested in her than the others initially. He would gawk at her only when there were no other women in the vicinity. She learned to regret not being the runner, the watcher, or the screamer in the family, because the absence of these talents made her the most fearful.

  She displayed her vocal talent to ensure that she could be heard in the dark even if she couldn’t be seen. Children flocked to her wherever she went. Despite the rigidity that adults observed at first glance, she was always open to a hug from willing little ones, the nicer visitors to KAM, Marie-Ange, and her sisters. She learned never to hug Lucien. She hardly wanted to perform in front of him.

  She was born for song with a gift that had chosen her like a barren woman adopts a child. She sometimes allowed her voice to go breathy and sleepy when speaking. But when she belted out ballads, she shu
t people up better than her twin. Her voice surprised and transfixed people in ways her ordinary presence never could. But she was not a fame seeker because she hated the thought that thousands, if not millions, of men like her father would always watch her in that way.

  * * *

  —

  LUCIEN HAD never told Cocoa that he’d taken her because she was the most akin to his daughters. He’d let her figure that out based on neighborhood lore, old pictures, and his own stories about them. He’d known that, at one time, like most Haitian girls in the neighborhood, she’d aspired to be like Veille, Clair, and Dor. Until now. Until he’d shown her who he really was. He’d watch as terrifying thoughts proliferated like dandelions in an unkempt field. He relished the look on her face as she imagined what he might have done to his own daughters during their first eighteen and nineteen years of life. Having perched himself to peer into her mind, he’d let her torture herself with unspoken questions: Had he ever gotten any of them pregnant? Had they turned appropriately hateful and vengeful? Had he hated the brown hues of their skin so much that he’d had to take a white girl? Had there been four or five daughters? Had he killed one or two, leaving three? Had there been an incest-conceived grandchild? Had he or they suffocated the evidence to keep it secret? Or had the three simply cut off all ties, leaving him to be and do? Why hadn’t they called the police? Had him arrested? Saved others?

  * * *

  —

  LUCIEN LAUGHED behind frozen lips at the absurdity of being arrested back then. Police involvement was something he feared now but not then. He’d seen the police as as likely to be the culprits as he was. Like many of KAM’s patrons, he’d viewed the cops as useless, especially in matters concerning those people: immigrant, black, and/or female, just name it. And the neighbors? He wanted to let out a hoot when he thought of them. None of them, including Cocoa herself, would have ever guessed what he had been doing to women in his house long before he’d outright snatched girls off the street. They minded their business because they didn’t want anyone meddling in their affairs.

  They were Caribbeans, after all. They didn’t need anybody knowing and then judging them for leaving their single-digit-aged kids home alone or for spanking them for disobedience. If they slapped their kids and spouses around, they didn’t want any intervention. It was impossible to know and not to judge, so it was better not to see, not to criticize, not to feel accountable, not to speak up, not to take action. It was easier, like their new lives in New York, sort of. The semblance of choice and ease allowed them to rationalize why they’d chosen racism in America over hunger in their homelands, why they’d chosen indentured servitude over tourist-trap slave wages. He knew why no one had ever bothered to find out and would never ever know. It was always easier not to. It was always easier to do nothing.

  SOL

  Hunger is hell. All the women in Lucien’s basement had learned that they’d never truly experienced it until being taken. Even Sol had not understood. Although she’d made the trip through the desert, she hadn’t really felt hunger until after enjoying America’s abundance for half her life only to be deprived. She’d watched Chiqui break down. Cocoa hadn’t even been able to sing away that pain. Asante had done 180s and 360s from failed hunger strikes to gorging on a week’s rations and anything else Lucien had fed her. Nihla’s hunger had been of a different sort, but by her fifth day in the basement, with no chemical sustenance, even she’d become desperate for ice cream of all things. But none of them had ever experienced the hunger of being in the third trimester of pregnancy with no access to timely or decent food, let alone the stuff that would satisfy raging cravings. The murderous symptoms of pregnancy mirrored some of the symptoms of withdrawal. All the women had watched and empathized with the pregnant one most. But they’d all been there in hunger’s hell.

  In the beginning, hunger had been the most acutely felt sensation, but not the first deprivation to hit. There was the absence of fresh air and its extreme—odors that made them want to vomit. The cold and damp of a cramped cube made of steel, stone, and trampled dirt had made them long for the humble places they’d lived. The cold was incurable even with covers that each had to earn from their captor. They’d slept upright, unable to acculturate themselves to the hardness of the bare floor made of semidried packed mud, decomposed and hardened shit, and the frail bones from carcasses of things they couldn’t decipher. The darkness—not merely the absence of outer light but the terror of the unknown—had outstripped the fear of the unseen. The acknowledgment of a total loss of control over their environment and their bodies messed them up worse than their captor’s touches.

  Sol had not resigned herself to her circumstances until Lucien had taken Chiqui and brought her to hell. She’d finally accepted the absence of light to comfort her sister, who was still afraid of the dark. He had always controlled the darkness. He’d leave with the matches or inexplicably rescind the sundry of sanctified votives. He’d vacillate between luminous generosity and the tightfistedness of a Third World post-storm blackout. Without warning (there was never any warning), he’d plunge them into a darkness so deep it wiped away sound. He might crack the door, so they could see slivers of the bathroom’s light that had not only alleviated the darkness temporarily but had given them hope that they might use the toilet or the shower. On a whim, he might let one out into the habitable parts of the basement, the living room cramped with antiquated entertainment options, the rape room graced with an actual bed with blankets, sheets, and pillows; a carpeted floor; mirrors on the ceiling; painted and wood-paneled walls; a breathable scent like a man’s tolerable musk after a few days without a shower. The wonder of sound, audible only to those who’d spent months hearing nothing but their own heartbeats and the breathing of Zero, One, Two, Three, or My in utero. He’d downright tease them with vacations upstairs, where windows appeared as if they could be opened or, as a first or last resort, shattered and ecstatically climbed through. They’d dance to see doors, front or back, made of wood that looked hackable, locks that looked pickable, and narrow vitrines that appeared expandable. Sol had tried to escape more than once, only to be thrown back into the back room that he’d try to fortify to prevent that possibility.

  Having heard him describe his first test, she’d remained quiet and docile, lest he bring some animal to terrorize them in the back room. Years before renting Asante the basement, he’d performed an elaborate experiment to ensure the safe room’s inescapability, to test the efficacy of its soundproofing, and to try out the one-way intercom. A starved German shepherd, a pregnant she-cat, and, later, her litter of six had been his first prisoners. He’d eavesdropped through the intercom and peeked in periodically to check their status and see who was winning. Sitting in the bathroom, he tried to hear the shrieks of the hungry dog as it approached the ex–alley cat. Hearing nothing, and too curious to endure the silence, he’d go to the first intercom outlet installed to listen to their street fights. He shook with glee when the cat went into labor. He waited to hear if the intimidated dog would seize its opportunity to attack. After a month, the cat and her entire litter were all dead. He never found any remnants of the succulent kittens. The only evidence of them was excrement he never bothered to rake up.

  He’d then experimented with the dog’s starvation over the course of a year. He’d fed it once a week for four months and then gave it nothing but water at the same interval for half the number of months. He would subsequently resume the weekly feeding schedule and then stopped altogether, not even providing water. He listened and peeked daily, shutting the heavy door until the weakened, emaciated dog ceased to approach, saving its strength to mine all edible options, by a starved dog’s standards. The longer he waited, the cleaner the once feces-laden floor became. It took an additional three months for the dog to die.

  His animal trials completed, Lucien let the remnants of the dog’s decomposition and unmined excrement ferment before deeming the environment
fit for human testing. He spent one night a week there until he was willing to piss off Marie-Ange by renting the basement to his for-fee, sucky-ducky tenant, Asante.

  Sol had tried not to reveal how tortured she’d been by stories he’d recounted to terrorize her into submission. He’d been able to trick Asante into the safe room because of her desperation to be hidden from the DEA and her paranoid, vengeful boyfriend. He’d turned her into Zero and recorded her every move in her new prison. She’d hugged the stone wall nearest the door and balled herself up like a bean. One white eye open in the darkness. The other eye swollen shut. No, he’d never hit her. She’d done it to herself. Throwing a tantrum, knocking over the lone candle, then knocking herself unconscious against the moldy stone in the self-created darkness. One eye open, searching out a crack of light. The other turned inward behind a throbbing wound the shape and color of a ripe plum.

  Asante had remembered Roots, the nine-hour miniseries that she’d watched on the new color television set in her mother’s living room when it was first released. This was what African captives must have experienced after being seized or tricked (the same thing, really) from their villages, thrown into the hold, awaiting the unknown darkness lit up by smells so sharp they made them see. It lit their way to the pit of the waiting ship. The shit was the least of it. The decay of the abducted ones, living and gone, penetrated the TV screen, and she could smell the death rot. There she was, incarcerated in an abyss she used to rent, battered by her own stupidity, ingesting the dampness of the darkest place, smelling herself dying slowly.

  Sol had used every ounce of her courage not to break down while listening to Lucien’s tales of the cats, the dog, and his first human experiment. She hadn’t doubted their veracity because she’d experienced his worst. She’d wanted to weep, hearing how he’d broken Asante, who had been in the “why did I?” stage of her captivity. Refusing to assume the blame-load alone, and with her misjudgments and his voice in her head, she’d started in on her kind: Women are simple bitches with simple motivations, easily manipulated and deceived. They feed their own fantasies and buy into anything that seems to confirm or fulfill the tiniest piece of their dreams and desires. There was no reason to believe that she’d had him on lock, that what she’d had with him was ever a relationship, let alone love. She’d loved that he had chosen her, opted to disrespect his wife and make her the woman of the house, in a way. S-T-U-P-I-D. He hadn’t beaten but he had, well, cheated. Obviously! And protection? So much for that. There she was, the worst of her kind, worse than a simple bitch with a bad attitude—a simple bitch with no options whatsoever. She could only be who, what, and how he wanted her to be. He controlled everything in and around her. But that was the stupid part. She’d allowed it.