My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  After the activity of her mind had given way to emotion, then crept into the realm of bodily sensation, her hunger had ripped her from the inside out like a clawed beast in a bad horror flick slicing its way out of its cocoon. Hunger had been the self-eviscerating quadruped that left her too weakened to even think. But after it had withdrawn its claws and fallen asleep out of pure exhaustion, thought had returned.

  Sol had known this all too well, not just from following Asante through Lucien’s lens, but from watching each captive soul break against her own mind. Asante and all the women who’d come after had experienced it. If their hunger had been hell, then the process of thinking had been its ninth circle. And the physical sensation had been felt only after the mind cracked the door to allow that feeling to slip by. Upon being tricked, shoved, dragged, or rolled into the back room, each of the five had tortured herself with thinking. The what-ifs, the why-me’s, the why-did-I’s had scurried around in their minds, reaching the what-the-hells, the how-could-he’s, the why-would-anyone’s, and then they’d sprinted and hurdled over to the how-the-hells, the what-if-I’s, finally landing on the how-do-I’s, the what-should-how-can-we’s.

  Sol remembered how the answers to these had come later. How the fantastic declarations had come later, much later, after the wounds of self-flagellation had been adequately licked, the calm (not peace) of self-convincing cooler heads had finally prevailed, the self-consoling caresses had been accepted. Later, much later. Long after they’d nearly been broken by hunger, assuaged for minutes with nibbles of fingernails, flesh from fingertips, and flagrant cuticles that had grown wildly in the dark. After they’d progressed to the same edible parts of their toes. After pinches of the dirt floor had become palatable. After, long after, they’d finally paused, forcing themselves not to think but to hear and see, they’d realized that there were things far worse than hunger in the back room: silence, darkness, fear, and getting fucked involuntarily in whatever ways he wanted. At some point, each woman had come to the realization that his preferred position was the one he’d forced them into in absentia. He’d contorted their thoughts and turned them into pregnant she-cats strategizing how to scare off a hungry predator ten times their size before entering the vulnerability of giving birth.

  Sol had witnessed the complex and innate masochism of the human mind. She’d known how thought could gain control of a being and drag her everywhere until it tired out or completely defeated itself, opting for silent self-protection. The women’s minds had tortured them with thinking about everything they’d missed and experiences they never could have imagined. They’d lamented practical goals and fantastic aspirations—educations, careers, affluence, basic female independence. They’d bawled their eyes out over first kisses they’d never have or that hadn’t met their expectations. They’d grieved at never having fallen in love or for becoming enthralled and in lust with the wrong men. They’d tried to imagine what they had not experienced, to rekindle what they’d shooed away out of arrogance and ignorance, or taken for granted as if life owed them something it would award later when they were good and ready. They’d listed: traditionally structured families of their own, hot dates with rich men, entire apartments to themselves, home and business proprietorships, multiple paid-for cars, hotel-and-airfare-included vacations to magazine paradises. Shiiiiiiiiit! They’d listed: learning how to drive. Flying in an airplane. Man, oh, man! Damn! Choices! Remember choices? Ham or turkey? Takeout or delivery? School or sleep in? Work or hooky? Sing or rap? Answer the call or let it go to voice mail? Lights on or off? Candles, lamps, overhead, or iPhone light? Pig out or diet? Earrings, necklace, both, or neither? Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton 2.0, Michelle Obama, or Hillary Clinton 3.0? Or, damn, that next one?! Dammit! I should have voted! C-H-O-I-C-E! Asante had been on the inside before Condi. Sol had been taken just after Senator HRC caused a ruckus in New York. Chiqui had also gotten a glimpse of 2.0. Only Cocoa had been able to revel during the reign of the greatest FLOTUS ever, MLRO. All of them had had to rely on Lucien to share newspaper clippings with pictures, but no dates, and his versions of stories about one or more of these women. He’d even shown them photos of the most recent, unnamed FLOTUS, a rumored captive Zero in her own right.

  Sol had watched the others’ reactions to Lucien’s political commentary after each had returned from a story session with him. She had seen their anger over his opining on inconceivable aggravations they’d wished they could experience again—heat, cold, rain, snow, traffic, the high prices at the supermarket and gas pump, daylight saving time, winter’s impact on solar patterns, too-late sunrises and too-early sunsets, the tardiness of people with payments and for appointments. They’d wanted to slap the stubble off his face, if for nothing else than his complaints about things he caused them to experience in the extreme—insomnia, oversleeping, resentment toward inadequate, absent, and missed loved ones. They’d wanted to head-butt him and knock themselves unconscious in the process for the things he’d said, in part or fully intentionally, to push them into tortuous thinking that had driven them mad.

  Only Sol had ceased the incessant, uncontrollable thinking. She had mastered thought; she’d overthrown the mind regime, taken her soul out of the trunk and put it in the driver’s seat where it belonged. She’d relegated thinking to merely mechanical and functional—a cup holder, windshield wipers, a hubcap—made important and useful only when the driver chose to drive the car and employ it because it made things a little more comfortable or safer. She’d made it optional like heated leather seats, five-way headrests, powered seat positioning. She’d used it as a rearview mirror when her past would be useful and help her to avoid some perilous situation or individual who might sneak up on her. She’d used it as a paper map she could fold away when she wanted. Her mind was not her. The thinking it did, the thoughts it reproduced (it could only recycle information, not create it), the stories it told and retold and then told again in different ways to call attention to itself, did not define her. She was so much more. That should have been a no-brainer for any simpleton. Soul, which is to say true Self, sublimated space and time. Being didn’t just think or believe; it knew that transcendence is not the leaving of one’s body and mind. It was not a disembodied pair of hands folded in prayer. It was the full integration and harmonization of all parts within the purview of the endless, timeless Soul.

  Sol had known, knows, and is knowing the five Fs. That fear generates four, not three, responses: fight, flight, freeze, and freedom. Transcendence. Even before her abduction, before her migration from south to north, she’d known. She’d controlled her faculties the way she’d played with light switches to entertain baby Chiqui in their single room. Later, she’d tried to explain to her sister this control over and integration of mind and body to experience life, whatever the outcome. Chiqui had misinterpreted much of the lesson. Sol had been disappointed to watch her sister conduct her physical and mental faculties like instruments, forcing them into perfection, competition with others, and overachievement. Chiqui finally came to understand her cellmates and sympathize with the pregnant one.

  During their many post-rape story sessions, Sol had come to the realization that she and Lucien had had to have certain experiences in common, that his evil could not have come out of nowhere. There had to have been something they’d both seen, felt, and known, but her knowing had come differently. They’d both experienced fear, but not only did they opt for different Fs at different speeds; they’d chosen their Fs based on a different knowing. Maybe it was because she’d been younger and less hardened or less privileged and more open. Pliant, liquid, and light, she’d gone through, not over, the wall and emerged as pure spirit. At three years old she’d become as knowing as the universe itself. She’d maintained it because of the absence of formal education until the age of seven. By the time she’d started her passage through the back room she could have escaped any circumstances she chose. Mere months in
to her captivity, she’d even progressed toward the realization that she could get herself out of the back room anytime she wanted.

  Sol chose not to reveal herself to Lucien—not yet. She chose to let him believe that she was merely rebellious and cunning, and certainly no match for him. In reality, she was freedom. She just couldn’t let him know. Not yet.

  * * *

  —

  SOL DID not say a word when Lucien’s rescuers came, hollered, lifted him out, and left. She watched Cocoa break down again and wished she could console her. Cocoa couldn’t take it anymore. She could taste the snow outside, she was so ready to be free. She had been counting the days since Nihla’s death and My’s birth. After the fire, she’d dropped all pretenses. No more coquettishness or pretentious optimism. She was ready to get out. She showed an aggression that, if not managed, would result in a brawl with Asante. She would slap the pessimism and the taste out of the older woman’s mouth. Sol reached for Cocoa’s hand and held it. That would have to do for now. Now was just a blip to Sol, but it felt like the one-third of a lifetime that it was for Cocoa.

  Sol had always known that the restraints that held back the anger of those with Cocoa’s sweetsy, cutesy demeanor were tenuous. They were stretched to their limits as they tried to maintain their balance and optimism under the worst assaults. They had to eventually snap. They were never permanent. Sol understood well, and she knew that Asante did too. A belt can hold for only so long. Holding in shit while being force-fed distends the belly. It all must come out of one or both ends unless these are concurrently sealed. Then the person has no choice but to blow herself to bits from the inside out and die. Sol had always known what Cocoa could not see, that Asante’s aggression had always been survival. And that Cocoa’s purposeful restraint would eventually kill her if she didn’t unbuckle the belt. Like all of them, Cocoa was being stuffed with every minute in the back room, her lips sewn shut. The frequency of her bowel movements had always been controlled by him. More than that, he’d plugged her anus just for kicks. “Let it out every chance you get,” Sol had heard Asante say even through her angry silences.

  Sol knew that Cocoa would crumble or blow, just like Asante had. They’d each had a breakdown. Cocoa had tried to sing hers away. She’d pushed it down into her diaphragm and released it in measured notes. But that was not enough for the kind of hurt Lucien had inflicted. His had never been microaggressions, slights pardonable by devout Christians, women, and minorities everywhere or high-road victims.

  It was living four hundred years or more, awoken from death during the transatlantic crossing to find oneself enslaved in the Americas, then killed by whipping or ripping, being drawn and quartered or overworked, then being raised from the dead and transported to the North-South border only to be killed in a Civil War battle, resuscitated again to live through lynching, assassination at the Audubon, raised from the dead again and assassinated again on a hotel balcony, backhanded into a roadside police beating, pistol-whipped and injected with liquid crack, hanged in a jail cell while doing time for possession only to be awoken by a broomstick or plunger up the ass, surviving that then being gunned down for wearing a hoodie a few steps from your own doorstep, waking up to find yourself dead in another cell after a routine traffic stop, shaken up and then choked out in front of a bodega, revived and shot for being unarmed again and again and again across ten states, knocked awake sideways all the way to Kabul, Mosul, or Baghdad only to be stoned, set on fire, decapitated for trying to go to school or rejecting a rapacious husband at twelve, with your head sewn back on you wake up in a secure confessional to be raped, silenced, raped again, and murdered in the name of…rising from the dead after three days’ rest to find yourself brown or black or female or immigrant or poor or young in a school or a boardroom brothel, sodomized in another safe room while awaiting deportation. The real real.

  Sol could see what Cocoa could not: that the brown girl had swallowed four hundred years, swallowed harder, sucked in her gut, and emitted silent gas. Sol had never said this but had seen Cocoa’s belief. She’d convinced herself that it would all pass, which confirmed the correctness of her conditioned response to adversity. Cocoa had always wanted to be right about herself. She never wanted anyone undoing more than what Lucien had already undone. She’d swallowed until her throat became sore, until she couldn’t even sing, until she became constipated, unable to pass anything from any orifice. Her rage would not just pass. Not this kind. Not during or after him. She’d thought that she was saving it all up to appropriately channel it into something beautiful when she got out. She wouldn’t succumb to the knowledge that she was a rag doll he could unsew at any seam or rip open at any unintended spot. He could stuff her full of whatever he wanted, including a baby, and sew her back up, leaving no openings for her to relieve herself, not even narrow windpipes or parted lips out of which to sing the way he loved. He understood the need for an outlet for rage. They were all there because of it.

  “I’m going to fuck that niggah up when we get out of here!” No one had ever heard Cocoa swear before, but Sol had seen it coming. They’d all seen and heard what they’d believed was the worst in one another. But each time any of them did something to surprise the others, it was like a new cellmate had been brought in.

  “Uh-oh. Goody-goody ’bout to lose it now.” Asante shrank back a little as she made the comment.

  Sol held Cocoa’s hand tighter. Chiqui placed a hand on Cocoa’s shoulder. My huddled closer.

  “If you even…” Cocoa started crying before she could finish the sentence. She always cried when she was angry—even with Lucien, who’d interpreted her tears as weakness and submission. Each time, he’d believed that he’d broken her just a little bit more. “That niggah ain’t here, but you his bitch. I ain’t nevah been on his leash. I’ve held my own since I’ve been in here. But if you even…I will whip you with his leash instead of fucking him up like I want to. You do not want to get on my Southside.”

  “I ain’t even…” Asante didn’t get to say studyin’ you!

  Cocoa broke free from what was supposed to be the soothing restraint of her three beloveds. She grabbed an unlit votive and leaped on top of Asante. “You ain’t gonna kill me like you killed Nihla.”

  Chiqui held My as tight as a secret. She sealed her hands over his ears protectively.

  “I’mma kill you first. I ain’t no Little Orphan Annie, but you can bet your bottom dollar on that.” She huffed as she hit Asante with everything except the glass she was saving for the death blow. “I ain’t white. I never been high unless you count falsetto or losing it to the music. I’ve never hoed. I still ain’t never sucked a dick. Bam. Not even his. Bam.” Cocoa stood up because her words had become harder hitting now. “Bam. Cuz if I deep throat a muthafucka, I can’t sing right. Bam. And that muh’fucka believed it.”

  As much as Asante wanted to scream, That’s not how you get pregnant! she held back to prevent further blows.

  “Bam. Now you know. Now you know, bitch. Ain’t nobody gonna kill Cocoa.”

  Sol understood that referring to oneself in the third person was always an escalation.

  “Not him, and Cocoa sure as shit ain’t gettin’ killed by his little bitch.” Cocoa dropped down and got in Asante’s face. “You’ve seen Cocoa, but guess what? You ain’t nevah seen Colette Jean-Baptiste. Now that you done made me tell you my government, you ’bout to see both Cocoa and Colette!”

  Sol saw Cocoa’s hand in the air, pulled back into a fist. She shrunk back and held Chiqui and My, so they wouldn’t see what was coming.

  Cocoa landed the first ferocious blow into Asante’s upturned eyes.

  Blauw! She didn’t give her a chance to recoil or recover. She pulled her arm back and launched her fist like an arrow from a bow. One at a time, she spat out her words like bitter olive pits.

  “I!” Blauw! She synchronized the punch with the word.


  “Ain’t!” Blauw! She raised her fist and dropped it on top of Asante’s head.

  “Dyin’!” Blauw! Asante defensively covered her head with her arms.

  “Down!” Blauw!

  “Here!” Blauw!

  “Bitch!” Blauw! To give her knuckles a rest, Cocoa opened her hand and slapped Asante across the face, knocking her into the stone wall.

  “And in case you illiterate, skanky, hateful piece of shit wasn’t countin’, that was six!”

  Blauw!

  “Now seven! One for every year I been down here. I should give you one more for good luck. Cuz only luck and my mama coming through that door could save your ho ass right now.”

  Sol saw Cocoa raise the hand with the glass in it.

  “Don’t!” Chiqui screamed. “If you’re gonna do that, blow out the other ones. Don’t let him see it.” She had already started smothering My between her breasts.