Not knowing what I’m going to find, I throw off the covers, grab my robe, and hurry down the hall into the front room. There, lying face down on the floor, is Momma, unconscious, a two-by-four stuck in the back of her head and a pool of blood spreading underneath and around her. Sharon’s cries begin to escalate as she stares down at our mother alongside me. “Wake up, wake up!” she screams. “Wake up!”
Fighting the paralysis of shock, I feel some other mechanism take over, and my immediate reaction is to assess what has taken place, like a crime-scene analyst.
First I observe that Momma was trying to get out of the house and move toward the door when Freddie attacked her with the two-by-four, bashing it into the back of her skull with such a force that the wood splintered into her skin, sticking into her, spewing blood not just underneath her but everywhere in the room.
Next, feeling the waves of terror that Momma is dead or about to die, I turn to see Baby on the telephone calling the ambulance. Freddie’s baby sister, affectionately known as Baby, reassures me that the paramedics are on their way and goes to calm Sharon.
Amid all my senses trying to compute the mess of blood, fear, my sister’s sobbing, and Baby’s insistence that Momma is going to the hospital and she is going to be all right, and more blood, the volcanic question of What can I do? erupts in me. The answer: clean the stove! I have to do something, anything. I need a job, a duty to perform. So I race to the kitchen and begin to scrub our old-fashioned cookstove that seems like it’s been used since the time of the Pilgrims and is caked with a grime of an unknown lineage. Using a scrap of a dishrag, Brillo, and soap and water, I commence to clean and scour with all my being, at the same time that I commence to pray. My prayer is even more elaborate than Oh, God, please don’t let Momma die. It’s that, but it’s also God, please don’t let anyone come in here and see this place all dirty like this.
The idea that the white paramedics and policemen will see the blood everywhere and then the dirty stove as well is too shameful to bear. So my job is to clean it up, to prove that decent people live here, not savages, with the exception of Freddie, who has drawn blood, once again, from a woman.
When the ambulance came, the attendants moved in quickly, spoke to Baby and Bessie, not to me of course, put Momma on a stretcher, with the two-by-four removed, took her out to the ambulance, and drove off.
Even then I continued to clean, the only task I could find to create order in the chaos. The world became very small for me that night. A part of me shut down in a way that froze me emotionally but was also necessary for my survival.
