That was the problem. The desire for power erased memory and replaced it with violence. And Be Auntie had the bruises to prove it. Nearly every woman did.
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He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returnedâeyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing somethingâhe wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldnât help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.
She wasnât insulted, then, by their choice to leave her without witnesses. That would perhaps mean that her name would eventually be lost to time, and the girls who came up behind her wouldnât have her to show them exactly who came before. That was where the real shame found roots. She kept it, then, all of it, locked up in her head with the other things that squeezed themselves into that space without even the courtesy of a âHow you?
Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didnât matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyesâthere, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.
See? That was where Isaiah had faltered. To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuelâs list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on peopleâs throats with all their might and asked why the people couldnât breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed âCHAOS!â and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.
Looking back, I realize this time as the beginning of my own radical self-inquiry. My pain helped me realize that I was lost. My soul, no longer content to be âbruised and battered,â took charge of my body and grabbed the attention of my conscious mind. The headaches, which continued even as the self-inquiry began, became a way for my body to say, in effect, âWake the fuck up.â For, if I didnât wake up, my soul was going to drop me to my knees, writhing in pain.