I Ain't Me No More

by E. N. Joy

  The next morning, after calling the job to let them know I’d be in late, I got Baby D off to school and headed over to Ms. Daniels’s apartment. We arrived at the courthouse at about 9:15 that morning, but Dub’s case wasn’t even called until about 10:00 a.m.

  When the deputies led Dub into the courtroom, I gasped. I didn’t even recognize him. Even though it had been only a couple of weeks since the last time I laid eyes on him, it looked like he’d been living on the streets since then. He had had a nice slim build before, but now he looked like a skeleton, like he hadn’t eaten since God knows when. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or gotten a haircut. He looked like he probably hadn’t even bathed. He looked like . . . he looked like . . . Who was I kidding? That wasn’t what my baby’s daddy, my boyfriend, looked like. He looked like what he was . . . a crackhead.

  I looked over at Ms. Daniels, who didn’t even seem fazed by her son’s appearance. She had a look of expectancy in her eyes, like that was what she figured he was supposed to look like. That was her baby, and she was looking at him with as much pride as she probably had the day he was born. There was no shame on her face whatsoever. I guess that was what a mother’s love was all about.

  I, on the other hand, was appalled, embarrassed, humiliated, as if he’d come out of my own womb. As if I was responsible for raising him into the man who stood before us in the courtroom.

  “Hey,” Dub turned around and mouthed, his eyes going to me first, then to his mother. He then turned his attention to the judge, who within seconds set a bail of fifty thousand dollars and a future court date. “See what you can do,” was the next thing Dub turned around and mouthed to us as he was escorted out of the courtroom.

  “How much you got?” his mother asked me as we exited the courtroom while the next case was called.

  “I don’t have a dime,” I said, trying not to sound so excited about being broke.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Ms. Daniels sounded so exasperated. “I bet his bond would have been set lower if you hadn’t called the police on him that one time.”

  I felt like I’d been hit with a bolt of lightning. For one, I’d forgotten all about that one time, out of hundreds, Dub had beaten me up and I’d actually gotten up the courage to go downtown and press charges against his butt. Secondly, he deserved to go to jail. He could have blinded me that night. How dare Ms. Daniels try to put the blame for her son’s violent temper on me?

  Chills ran through my body as I thought back to that night. Dub himself had had to rush me to the emergency room. I’d had to lie to the doctors about how I’d come about my injuries so that Dub wouldn’t go to jail right there on the spot. I’d lied only because Dub had stayed by my side the entire time, his presence intimidating me.

  Dub’s uncle’s girlfriend, Nique, had moved next door to us before I moved into Nana’s. One evening she and I had sat out on the stoop, watching our two boys play together while she gave me a piece of her mind about what she thought about Dub’s uncle and his family.

  “They all ain’t really nothing but white trash,” Nique had said, with her chubby brown cheeks and pouty lips. Her skin was so clear and smooth. She was going to be an example of black don’t crack. “Or should I say some white and some gray,” Nique added, taking a shot at the fact that all the women in Dub’s family had babies with black men or biracial men. “My man too. And all the men don’t do nothing but beat on the women.” She let out a harrumph. “But that don’t include my man. He knows better than to try that mess with me.”

  Nique reminded me of Sofia from The Color Purple. I imagined her boyfriend would have the same hard time trying to beat on her as Harpo had trying to beat on Sofia.

  “And even though all the women don’t date nothing but black men,” Nique continued, “I still think they lightweight prejudiced. I even heard Dub and Kelice’s mom talking about you one time. Called you a black witch, or something like that. I was saying to myself, ‘Why she got to be a black witch? Why can’t she just be a plain witch?’ That’s how I know they prejudiced.”

  I had to admit, I was hurt when I found out that Ms. Daniels had been talking smack about me. All this time I had thought that she and I were back on good terms. She never came across as racist or prejudiced. How could she when she, a white woman, had married a black man and had had two children with him, two children that were, according to their birth certificates, black?

  “Black witch?” I said, mocking the name Nique had said Ms. Daniels had called me, still in disbelief.

  About two weeks after Nique’s and my little chat on the stoop, I confronted Ms. Daniels with a couple things that were mentioned in our conversation. It didn’t take her long to figure out where I’d gotten the information. A couple days after that, Nique came charging over to me like Miss Sofia, accusing me of lying about her. Well, I came to find out that Ms. Daniels had added some yeast to the things I’d said. She had put words in my mouth about Nique that Nique had never really said, or maybe she did say them. I didn’t know. I guess I had no business revealing what somebody had told me in confidence in the first place.

  Nonetheless, I was so mad that I took on the role of Miss Sofia and stormed over to Ms. Daniels’s apartment, where I let her know that I didn’t appreciate one bit the fact that she’d put my name in her mouth. I kindly asked her to keep my name out of her mouth in the future before I retreated to my place. I thought that was the end of all the confusion until Dub came storming into the house a few hours later.

  “Tramp, don’t you ever go over my mama’s house acting like you ain’t got no sense,” he said as he punched me upside the head. “Disrespect her again, you hear?” A slap across the face followed.

  Baby D just sat there, engaged in whatever it was he was watching on television. “Ah, ha-ha.” He even laughed at something one of the characters was doing, as if it was the funniest thing in the world. Baby D pointed at the television screen, laughing, as if his dad and I weren’t even in the room, raising hell.

  I supposed it was safe to say that the beatings, the yelling, and the fighting were nothing new to him. He had stopped paying attention. It had become normal . . . for all of us.

  I was way caught off guard by Dub’s attitude. Since when did he care about his mother being disrespected? This was the same Dub who, I found out through the grapevine, had stolen the television out of the room he was staying in at his mother’s house. I’d also been told that he’d stolen the stereo system too. And one day he left her apartment with some other appliances tucked in his jacket while someone waited for him in a car parked outside. His mother noticed the bulge and went after him.

  I didn’t witness the incident personally, but as I listened in sheer astonishment, I felt as if I was there. From what I was told, Dub managed to jump in the backseat of the waiting car and told the driver to hurry up and leave. The driver hurriedly backed up but couldn’t pull out of the parking lot, because he had to pull onto a main street and traffic was coming both ways. Ms. Daniels managed to get the back door open while Dub tried to shield whatever it was he had taken from the house.

  As Ms. Daniels reached into the backseat to retrieve what she knew was her property, Dub, who was wearing black leather hiking boots, kicked Ms. Daniels right out of the car and onto the pavement. He kicked her the same way he’d kicked me in the stomach that day, knocking the wind out of me, only he kicked her dead smack in her face . . . his own mother. She lay in the parking lot with a busted-up face as the car, its wheels screeching, drove away. Her boyfriend was coming up the street and caught the tail end of the altercation. He was the one who had shared the incident with me. It was something I never, ever mentioned to either Ms. Daniels or Dub.

  Dub kicking his mother dead in the face while wearing a pair of boots was the ultimate in disrespect, and yet there he stood, having the nerve to be mad at me for getting lippy with her. Not only that, but he demanded I go apologize to her. “Now, take your tail right on back over there the same way you mar
ched over there earlier and tell her you are sorry.”

  Now I was really Miss Sofia. “Heck, naw,” I was quick to say. Seconds later I saw stars after Dub clobbered me upside my head.

  Holding back all my tears, I calmly said, “Baby D, come on. Let’s go to the car.”

  “But I’m watching—”

  “Baby D, now!” I scolded. And with that, he was by my side. I grabbed my purse, and we were on our way out the door.

  “And fix me something to eat when you get back!” Dub said before slamming the door behind Baby D and me.

  I buckled Baby D into the back of the car, and then I climbed into the front seat. I started the car and pulled off. I had no intention of going over to Ms. Daniels’s to apologize. Where exactly I planned on going, I didn’t know, but it was going to be far away from Dub.

  I thought about driving to Nana’s, but after Dub figured out I hadn’t gone to his mother’s and probably wasn’t coming back home, that would be the first place he’d go to look for me. I could have gone to my mom’s, I supposed, but she would have shot and killed him if he brought drama to her house, and then I’d have a mother in jail and it would be all my fault. I couldn’t do that. I thought about going to Lynn’s, but she now had a two-year-old child of her own and was staying with her fiancé, the baby’s father. Visions of Dub finding me there and killing us all played in my head. It wasn’t just about me anymore. I couldn’t risk endangering the lives of the people I loved.

  I’d finally mustered up the courage to leave Dub, and now there I was, with nowhere to go, nowhere I felt safe. So after driving around, passing everyone’s house that I considered taking refuge at, I ended up just driving to this shopping mall strip, Northern Lights, where I sat for hours. How many hours, I can’t recall. But when I finally looked in the backseat and saw Baby D sound asleep, I knew I couldn’t stay there. I knew I couldn’t let my child sleep on the backseat of a car in a parking lot in the middle of the night. That didn’t feel safe, either. So if we weren’t going to be safe, then I reasoned that it might as well be in the discomfort of our own home.

  When I drove up to the rocky driveway, I could tell Dub wasn’t home. The house was pitch black, still, and silent. I knew he was out hunting me down, getting angrier each minute he couldn’t find me. The entire drive there I’d envisioned him coming out of nowhere in the darkness of the night, snatching me up, and beating me to death right there in front of my son.

  “God help us,” I said out loud with my hand on the car handle, prepared to get out of the car. I had already sat there for at least fifteen minutes with the car running before I finally decided that it was time to pull the handle and open the door. I turned off the ignition, prepared to make a quick exit, snatch Baby D up from the backseat, and make a run for the door. I pulled the door handle, but before I could even push the car door open, I saw him. Dub was heading down the street on foot, at full speed, as if he couldn’t wait to get ahold of me. He was huffing and puffing, almost salivating, like a rabid dog on its way to devouring a pile of raw roast beef.

  I immediately released the handle and pulled the car door closed tight. I locked my door and made sure all the other doors were locked as well. Dub approached the car so quickly that I thought he was going to jump right through the window. The first thing he did was go for the car door and try to yank it open so that he could snatch me out of the car.

  “Get out of the car, Helen!” Dub screamed. “Get out of the car.”

  “No, Dub. Go on somewhere.” I tried to sound unmoved by his tirade.

  “Open the door.” He pounded on the roof of the car, startling Baby D, but not waking him. Baby D was a very hard sleeper. Dub peered down into the darkness at me through the window. “I swear to God, if you don’t get out of this car right now.” He balled his fists so tight, I swore I saw blood dripping from the palms of his hands, where his nails were digging into his own flesh.

  I knew that if I got out of that car, I would endure so much pain that I probably wouldn’t even survive. That was when I did it; I put the key back into the ignition and started the car, determining that the strip mall parking lot was safer, after all.

  Before putting the car in reverse to back out, I looked up at Dub to make sure that he wasn’t in the way, that I wouldn’t run over him. Imagine that. Something in me cared whether or not his life ended at the hands of my two-ton vehicle. And when I looked up at him, from the look he gave me, I knew what was coming next.

  My mind instructed me to close my eyes and to put my arms up to shield my face, but everything happened so fast . . . too fast. The next thing I saw was Dub’s foot coming through the window and smashing me in the face, pressing in all the flying glass right along with the sole of his shoe.

  “Arrrggh! Ugghhh!” I yelped. My eyes were now closed, but inside them were shattered glass particles.

  Dub immediately began to apologize. “Oh God! Baby, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  Hard sleeper or not, there was no way Baby D could sleep through that. He woke up, and I could hear him yelling for me.

  I placed my hands over my closed eyes and just cried out in fear. “I can’t see! Help me! Help me!” I just knew the last thing I’d ever see was Dub’s face, his foot coming toward me. I knew there was no way I’d ever see again, especially since it meant I had to open my eyes. I couldn’t open them. They hurt too badly.

  “Let me see. Move your hands,” Dub ordered. I could feel him trying to remove my hands from over my eyes.

  I pulled back from him. I didn’t want him touching me. I didn’t want anyone touching my eyes. I could hear the car door open. “We gotta get you to the hospital. Get out.”

  He pulled me out by my elbow, and I could hear all the glass that was in my lap fall to the ground.

  Dub led me around to the passenger side. I hated having to trust him to lead me anywhere, but I felt helpless. I heard him open the car door, and he gave me a slight shove so I’d get in. He closed the door and then ran around to the other side. I could feel the car backing out and then, a few minutes later, going full speed down the road.

  I was crying the entire time. My eyes were so painful, and I was so afraid. So many things flashed across my mind. Things like, would I ever get to see my son’s face again? If not, with time would I forget what his face even looked like? Perhaps that was exactly what I deserved. Perhaps I didn’t deserve to see his little face again. Maybe I was being punished for how badly I’d treated him in the past.

  God, if you just let my eyes be okay, if you just let me see my son again, I promise I’ll never be mean to my baby boy for as long as I live, I prayed silently as Dub drove me to the hospital. I could feel the chilly night air traveling through the car from the driver’s side. I didn’t need anything else to send chills running through my body, but it wasn’t like we could roll the window up.

  What felt like only five minutes went by before Dub said, “We’re here.” He put the car in park and then got out. “Come on, Baby D,” he said before walking around to let me out of the car.

  I had no idea what hospital we were at. I couldn’t recall one that was such a short distance away, but then again, Dub had probably gone way over the speed limit. He had probably even run a few red lights, for all I knew.

  “She’s got glass in her eyes!” Dub shouted the minute I heard the automatic sliding doors of the emergency room open up. There was complete darkness, but I could feel people staring. “She needs help fast!”

  “What happened? How did she get glass in her eyes?” I heard a voice ask. I presumed it belonged to the desk nurse. “Uh, we were, uh . . .” Dub stammered.

  All the while I was thinking, Is he going to tell them? Is he going to tell them that he’s the one who did this to me? I waited in anticipation to see what Dub would say. I knew that if he told the hospital the truth, they would have to call the police. They would arrest Dub and take him away forever. Everything might just work out for my good, after all. I might have to go blind in the
process, but my choice wasn’t that difficult: a life of blindness or a life with Dub? I instantly chose blindness.

  “We were driving,” Dub continued. I could hear what sounded like him shifting Baby D from one of his hips to the other. “And . . . and . . . the next thing we knew, someone threw a brick or something at the window, and bam, the glass shattered everywhere, right in her eyes.”

  “Oh, God!” the woman exclaimed. Next, I felt a set of soft, cold hands grab hold of my elbow, the one Dub hadn’t been holding, and begin leading me.

  There was no registration desk where one had to sit down and be asked a million and one questions. I was immediately led to an examination room. I could hear scurrying around me after I was seated in a chair. I could hear others entering the room and the nurse relaying my situation to them.

  “Mommy, are you okay?” Baby D asked, but before I could answer him, I heard a male voice.

  “Hi, Helen. I’m Dr. Rosenthawl. What we are going to do right now is flush your eyes out. Now you’re going to feel fluid, lots of fluid, but it’s only water. Can you open your eyes at all?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Can you try?”

  My tears and murmurs increased at just the thought of attempting to open my eyes.

  “Okay, then, calm down. I’m going to have the nurse hold your eyes open one at a time while I flush.”

  After that I heard something being rolled in front of me, and then soft, cold hands found their way to each side of my face. The hands slowly tilted my head until it was resting comfortably on some type of cushion. The next thing I heard was running water, and then, all of a sudden, it was like I was a swimmer floating peacefully in the ocean with my eyes closed, only to open them and see a large wave coming at me. That was exactly what it felt like when my eyelids were pulled open and an endless gush of water poured into my eye. Then the other was done.