Man Curse

by Raqiyah Mays

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  This book is for those who have ever wanted lasting love and felt like they might not find it . . .

  Most likely you are still paying the price for these childhood experiences. The absence of strong, positive role models almost always leaves scars, and as an adult, you will have to struggle to resolve the experiences of a painful past.

  —DEREK S. HOPSON AND DARLENE POWELL HOPSON, FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND SOUL MATES

  Chapter 1

  I used to think the man curse began with my mother in Trenton, New Jersey. She had been seven or eight years old; she remembered feigning sleep, her eyes squeezed tightly closed. And a man, his face a disfigured blur, pushed open the door to her bedroom. He pulled back the covers and rubbed his dry, ashy hands over her calves, knees, thighs, and eventually settled on her vagina. He pushed her panties to the side, petting her virgin softness, then grabbing it as if he were a toddler manhandling a cat—

  “Wait,” Meredith cried, cutting off my story in midsentence. With the concern of a best friend, she asked, “Your mother told you this?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. Like it was normal. Like most mothers would talk to their kids about sexual assault. Meredith had been my best friend since middle school. But I’d never told this story to her. I’d never shared what I’d written about it. Not till I realized I might be cursed, too.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be cutting you off,” she said, pulling out a cigarette and flicking her lighter. “Okay. Go ahead . . .”

  I reopened my notebook.

  My mother says the next few minutes or hours are missing in her mind. She knows he rammed his penis into her purity. She remembers intense pain and how she held in her need to yelp cries of shock by squeezing her eyes closed and biting the bottom of her lip. She remembers the taste of blood dripping from her mouth, how it carried a subtle taste of salty sweat that dripped from the chest of the man flopping atop her. She recalls feeling a wet stickiness on her inner thigh as he began ramming harder and harder, faster and faster. She held in desperate breaths of suffocating pain. But still, she couldn’t resist letting out a whimper as the tears rolled down her face.

  “If you say anything,” he said, panting in her ear, “I’ll kill you . . . and your mother.”

  Thrusting like a horny teenage boy, he stabbed inside her, holding himself still before the final push. Steady. His body convulsing. Trembling. Twisting. Pleasurable movements that ended by releasing a drawn-out moan . . .

  She remembers the bedcovers muffling his slapping sounds. The room suddenly smelled of tuna and peppermint toothpaste. And when it was done, he remained motionless, lying on top of her weak, skinny body for minutes that, my mother says, felt like years of life lost. When he finally pulled out and stood up, she kept her eyes tightly closed. She felt a tissue swiping at her inner left thigh. His pants belt clicked. His pocket change jingled as he slipped on a pair of pants. She felt him leaning over, his face centimeters away, hot breath melting her ear as he said, “Remember. I will kill you and your mother. Don’t say shit.” When she heard the door close and sensed an empty room, she opened her eyes.

  She never saw that man—outside of daydreams, nightmares, and reminders—again.

  “So . . .” Meredith jumped in, massaging her temples, disturbed, as if her ears had been raped. “She just blurted this story out while you were watching 60 Minutes?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “They were doing this report on child predators. I remember she was making some muffins for dinner. And this all just came out.”

  “And you were how old?”

  “Thirteen, I think. I can’t really remember.”

  “Yeah, because hearing that was traumatic. What the fuck?”

  I remember thinking the same thing when I heard the story. I had stared in disbelief. Eyes stretched wide in horror. Silence saturated the room and the sound of my loud swallowing was like a vibrational echo that bounced from one living room corner to another.

  “Wh-what . . . ?” I’d blurted out, stammering. I’d mainly mastered the stuttering that had haunted me since kindergarten. But in moments of discomfort, the difficulty always returned. “Wh-what happened?”

  She told her story, detail by nasty detail. She wondered whether he’d done the same to Aunt Connie, who was sleeping in the next room. Her voice quivered, elevating to a suspenseful crescendo as she reached the end of the assault scene.

  “I don’t remember his name,” she’d said. “I remember his voice . . . and the sound of those keys jingling.”

  “Girl . . .” Meredith shook her head, angrily stabbing a cigarette into the ashtray. “I’m sorry. You were way too young to hear something like that. Thirteen is a teenager. I mean, that’s what a grown-up tells a therapist, not her damn kid. You might as well have been raped, too.”

  Meredith Benjamin had always been my protector. The one who always had my back. If I needed to escape a fight with Mom, Meredith was there, either on the phone or, lately, speeding around the corner in her beat-up brown hand-me-down family van. Rusty fender and all, wheels squeaking to a halt, about to fall off as they reached my driveway. She played both best friend and psychologist, using the degree she’d gotten from Johns Hopkins to practice her listening and feedback skills on me.

  “Where was your grandmother during all of this?” she asked. “Does she know?”

  Not at all. Grandma Fey was rarely around when Mom was a young child. She was often in New York, working several jobs, whatever she could find, saving the necessary funds to bring two daughters to live with her. She’d leave my mother wherever she had a friend or fellow church member. But usually they’d spend summers with Ms. Adelle, Grandma’s girlfriend from childhood days in South Carolina.

  Bethany Adelle had a quaint home, where Mom and Connie each got their own bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. While Bethany worked her usual twelve-hours-plus overnight nursing shift, Mom and Connie were allowed to stay up late and leave food on their plates. They could sit on the front porch and play with the neighborhood kids after the sun descended and streetlights illuminated. There were no curfews, rules, or lost TV privileges. All was carefree; that is, until he moved in.

  His voice was deep, like Barry White’s, a baritone bass. My mother recalled romantic vocal cords, actions disguised with tender hugs, and talks on laps quickly morphing into hideous form—flirtatious comments, “accidental” touching, and a traumatic after-midnight visit.

  Even decades later, Grandma Fey knew nothing about this attack. And Mom didn’t know whether the same was done to Aunt Connie. Yet whenever talk of a sexual assault would arise—via a news report, TV topic, or magazine article—my mother would turn to me and divulge her story once again, and I’d squirm inside behind a face frozen in confusion.

  “And now,” Meredith asked, “because of that ass Dexter, you think you’re cursed, too?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes,” I said, staring down the empty road. “But if I am, I’m breaking this damn thing. And at the moment, Dexter is my personal curse.”

  Chapter 2

  A woman knows when a lie is lingering. It’s the small things that jab at the intuition, causing knots of anxiety that twist the stomach. Like when your lover’s phone rings and your insides cramp, your sixth
sense grumbling at hearing irregular vocal inflections. He takes the call in the next room. Your ears jump to attention, like a dog on alert, clearly able to hear through whispers full of vague answers in a feigned upbeat tone. Like the singsongy lilt that makes a baritone into a tenor. When Dexter does this, before I casually interrupt by walking into the room and speaking loudly, he sounds like he did when we first started dating a year ago.

  May 15, 1996. My senior year, a week before graduation, I’d moved off campus from Morgan State to live in a one-bedroom on the second floor of a multifamily apartment building. Didn’t know what I wanted to do with my English degree. Couldn’t figure out how to turn my writing into profit, although I freelanced as a copy editor for a professor on campus.

  To help pay the $300 monthly rent, I worked a second job at a men’s clothing store in the local mall. My four-day-a-week, semi-part-time, minimum-wage job made me just enough for rent, clothes, hair, partying, and weed. The icing was that I was in the perfect place to meet men, those with disposable incomes looking to buy a suit. I ran into all types of gentlemen—officers, lawyers, doctors, marketing executives—mainly bachelors who’d come shopping alone, looking for a woman’s style feedback. And I was happy to offer my advice, having them stand in front of a mirror and lift their arms, allowing me to measure their length and neck size, mixing and matching ties to collared shirts and pin-striped suits.

  But the moment Dexter walked in, my world slowed to a halt. Literally, things moved in screen-grab motion as his magnificent muscular body strode with confidence toward me, smiling.

  “Hi, pretty lady.” His accent told me that he had to be from the South. “You work here?”

  Dexter was a short man, standing an inch under my stilettos at five-five. He had a tiny bald caramel head and a gold hoop in his left nostril. His oversize fatigue jacket and black Timberland boots with the tongues hanging out added to the thuggish sex appeal that a girl from the suburbs loved.

  “You need some help?” I asked, looking him up and down. “Would you like to see a suit?”

  “Yeah, a black one,” he said. “I’m going to church with my mother.”

  My heart melted.

  “Okay, well, lemme see what we have,” I answered. “You live around here?”

  “Just moved to town. Finished with the army and don’t want to sign up again. So here I am.”

  I could feel his eyes checking me out as we walked through the section. I saw the store manager, Paul, smile at me as I started to sort through the rack of black suits, finding one perfect for his small frame.

  In the months I’d been working at J. Riggings, the staff had come to love my outgoing, sociable spirit. Management was impressed by my numbers: I made huge sales, with men often buying two suits at a time. It was my first job in retail, and I enjoyed it. Besides my least favorite part—standing for four to six hours—I loved meeting any man who needed my assistance.

  “Lemme measure you,” I said, stretching the blue tape wide. “Is this church visit a special occasion?”

  “Well, yeah, considering I haven’t been in years. But when you’ve been in the military, you need God in your life.”

  I tried to hold my impressed smile while maneuvering the tape measure, slowly rubbing my hand across his biceps as I checked his arm length. Then I placed the measure inside his leg, stretching it from under his crotch to the floor. When I stood up, our eyes met and time stopped again. Slow and light, I thought I’d fallen in love right there.

  “Let’s have you try on a few things I picked out.”

  “I’m sure whatever you choose is perfect,” he said, following me to the dressing room. “Your husband must be a fly dresser.”

  “Oh, I’m not married.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t found the right one yet,” I replied, sick of the tired lines men and women used to explain being single. The predictability was such a turnoff. I didn’t bother hanging Dexter’s suits. Instead I lazily dropped them on the small stool in his stall.

  “Can I get your number?”

  I snatched off one of the price tags and wrote it on the back.

  “I work Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and weekends. But you can catch me in the early afternoons or evenings after nine.”

  He called promptly at noon the next day. Later that afternoon he came over, and after a couple of hours of flirty foreplay, we were on the sofa, him on top of me, pulling my panties down, diving into a steady stroking flow. He was as thick and solid as a smooth, green banana. I was as wet and juicy as a ripe, fuzzy peach. It was the best sex I’d ever had.

  “I don’t normally do this,” I said afterward, embarrassed, feeling like a whore. “Move this fast, I mean . . .”

  “I know,” he said, stroking my hair. “You like to have a boyfriend.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I just can. You probably keep a boyfriend.”

  “Maybe.” A coy smile curled onto my face. “Maybe I like being in a relationship.”

  “You like stability. And that’s how I know you’re not a ho or something. You just want a steady man to be with. So lemme be your boyfriend.”

  I should have realized that was a little too fast. “Why do you want to be my boyfriend?” I asked, laughing. “You don’t even know me.”

  “Because I know we’re supposed to be together. And when you know, you know,” he said, sitting up and grabbing his pants. “In the military, we rely on instinct to survive. And my instincts are always right.”

  We were inseparable after that. And a year later, all I could do was regret every minute of it. I couldn’t wait to get back to Maryland and break up with him.

  “I told you I didn’t like his ass. Told you I thought he was crazy.”

  Meredith sucked her teeth as she stared into the rearview mirror, putting lipstick on. “I always know the crazy ones. But you know what? I do the same thing. Whenever you’ve told me about my crazies, I never listened.”

  “Well, Dexter was worse than any of your exes,” I said. “I wish I had an older brother to beat his ass. But maybe it’s just me. Maybe this is what I attract.”

  I was about to go on when my aunt Connie knocked on the window. Meredith rolled it down.

  “One. You took too long to go to the store,” she spit. “Two. You’re being rude. This is your family reunion, Meena. Cousins here you haven’t seen in years. And three. Your mother is looking for you. She needs your help inside. Did you even get the garbage bags?” I nodded, but Aunt Connie did a sudden about-face back into the house. Short and brisk, direct, and far from sweet, she had the ability to get her point across with few words and lots of attitude.

  I apologized to Meredith. “Sorry. Just come inside and get a plate. Meet the coven of so-called cursed bitches.”

  Chapter 3

  As we walked into the house, the elder women sat around the kitchen table. Food was piled on plates, stacked next to plastic cups. Meredith and I entered the kitchen just in time to hear the tail end of my cousin Gina’s latest man-gone-wrong scenario. In her midfifties, single, she had flown in from California with an everlasting pessimistic attitude that seemed so contrary to the sunshine everyone bragged about on the West Coast.

  “Whaaaat?” someone blurted out. “I can’t believe he did that.”

  “That’s what they do,” said Gina. “Dogs. All of them.”

  “It’s part of the curse,” Mom commented with a shrug, brushing crumbs off the kitchen counter. “I’m alone today because women in this family are destined to have problems when it comes to men.”

  Mom had never spoken these words before, at least not directly to me. I’d grown up hearing about the curse when eavesdropping on adult conversations during rare family occasions. Usually, it would take just one cousin discussing her man drama before word
s such as “curse” and phrases such as “issues with men” began morphing women of the Mitchell clan into bitter hens—fussing and clucking about roosters kicking dirt on them. After that issue passed, the conversation turned biblical, with a battle of verses and chapters validating the theory of a family generational curse.

  “ ‘The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ Numbers 14:18.”

  “Yeah, but what about ‘You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.’ ”

  “Amen,” the room would sing. “Exodus 20:5.”

  “Well, don’t forget Galatians 3:13. ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” ’ That’s us. ’Cause we black and we was slaves and we hung from trees.”

  “Well, what about Anna Belle?”

  Silence stiffened the room. I breathed a deep sigh and looked at Meredith.

  “Who’s Anna Belle?” she whispered in my ear loud enough for everyone to hear. But few looked up. Others acted as if they weren’t moved by the question.

  “ ‘She of the Mitchell clan will be without he.’ That’s what the curse says, right? I don’t know if I believe that,” my mother said, sucking her teeth. She dug in her bag and pulled out a tissue. “I mean, yes, there may be a curse. But to blame Anna Belle? ’Cause she cheated? I don’t know. I’m sure plenty people cheat and go on to be in happy relationships.”

  At age eighteen, Anna Belle Mitchell, my great-great-grandmother, had an affair with the pastor of the church. His wife, upon finding them in bed together, took a strand of Anna Belle’s hair left on the sheets and placed a curse on it. That doomed Anna never to find healthy, lasting love with a man, banishing her from jumping the broom. “She of the Mitchell clan will be without he” is what the pastor’s wife apparently said seconds before her death. This legacy of broken relationships would be passed down through the family of Mitchell females forever.