Daily Excerpt: Blest Atheist (Mahlou) - Mercy, part 2
Today's book excerpt comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou.
Mercy, part 2
I began fighting Ma at a young age. When I was small, Ma was like a god, a strong, mean, and angry one. She loomed large, powerful, and seemingly omni scient. As I grew older, however, I learned that I could fight this god and retain my dignity, and as I grew even older I found that I could fight this god and win. Perhaps my growing ability to vanquish the earthly god in my life colored my own disposition toward God the Almighty.
Small, with “dark eyes that could sparkle with delight or flash with fire,” according to relatives who remember those days, I apparently exhibited from birth a pro found orneriness. The pediatrician could not calm me at my six-week checkup and strapped me to a table, waiting for me to stop screaming. For two hours, my screams pierced the doctor’s closed window, causing passersby in the city square below to stop and wonder what was happening. The doctor sent Ma to take a walk. I often wonder if that episode and other displays of my strong will frightened her into wanting to control me with every trick she had, including violence. Finally, I fell asleep. That incident was telling. I would go through childhood screaming, as I defiantly thrust my lance at the paddles of the immutable windmill known as Ma.
Perhaps this defiance made Ma even more brutal. Having felt like a loser at school in her growing-up years (something I learned through a variety of sources in later life), she was now unacceptably finding herself a loser when pitted against her oldest, and for a very short while, only child.
My first memory of windmill-tilting defiance is a conversation that took place between Ma and me, a kindergartener at the time. It was a conversation engendered by an unfortunate decision. Possessing a great imagination and surprisingly, given our abusive home, being an inveterate risk taker, I had set up a play barbershop one afternoon and had had the audacity to take real scissors to Danielle’s tidily braided hair. I snipped off one of her two pigtails. Danielle instantly became afraid of repercussions from Ma, but I reassured her.
“Don’t tell Ma,” I said. “She is too dumb to notice.”
That advice worked for a couple of hours. Then suddenly Ma looked at Danielle strangely and commented, “Danielle, what happened to your hair?”
Danielle melted in fear and wailed, “Bethie said you were too dumb to notice!”
Whether Ma was angrier about the hair cutting or about the comment that I thought she would be too dumb to notice did not much matter. After cutting off the other pigtail and then hitting and kicking Danielle until she could barely crawl to bed, Ma turned on me.
“You go get me a switch right now! You are really in for it!” She nearly spat at me, and rage shook her entire body as if rage itself were the living being and Ma an obedient symbient.
A “switch” was a forsythia branch from the bush in the yard. Danielle, who to this day thinks that Ma grew that bush for the sole purpose of having handy switches, and Katrina used to scurry off after their own switches in frightened obedience to Ma’s demand that we all bring our own switches to her, but I was too defiant to do that. If she were going to beat me, I certainly was not going to make it easy for her!
y youngest son, Doah, whose name was derived from Shenandoah, a valley near which we lived for nearly six years, must have inherited that sense of defiance. Actually, I know for a fact that he did, but had I needed proof, a multi-month visit by Ma to our house when Doah was eight years old would have been adequate proof. One day, when I arrived home from work, Ma asked me if I had moved the wooden spoons because she could not find any. I looked. They had, indeed, mysteriously disappeared. Weeks later, as my husband Donnie left for the airport with Ma firmly strapped into the passenger seat, Doah appeared beside me.
“Gramma all gone?” he asked, in the mentally challenged language that is the best communication he can manage to this day.
“Yes,” I told him. “She is going back to New England now.”
“No come back?”
“No, sweetheart, she is not coming back. At least, not for a long time because New England is very far away.”
“Good,” he pronounced and walked over to our never-used sofa bed. Opening it, he reached below the mattress, pulled out all my wooden spoons, and took them into the kitchen, putting them into the drawer where they belonged.
“Doah,” I asked him, “why were the wooden spoons under the sofa bed?”
“Gramma say she hit me with wooden spoon,” he replied. “No wooden spoon! No hit!” He grinned. Indeed, mentally challenged or not, he is my child!
Back on the pigtail day in 1956, I would not cry out for mercy. I was stubborn about those kinds of things. Left without a switch, Ma grabbed the nearest instrument available, a wooden hairbrush. Since I refused to get switches, the chosen weapons of torture used with me were more unique than the ones typically used with my siblings: paddle ball handles, brooms, hairbrushes, shoes, belts—whatever solid object was handiest at the moment. Ma held me tightly by the hair with her left hand and with her right hand thumped me forcefully again and again with the hairbrush until the handle snapped off. Exploding with anger over the broken hair brush (probably wondering where she was going to get money for a replacement) and blaming me for the breakage, she pummeled me with her fists and stomped me with her feet, screaming over and over “I’ll teach you to break my hairbrush,” “Have you learned not to break my hairbrush yet?” “Tell me when you’ve learned not to break my hairbrush.”
At these moments, I would let my body go limp, mentally “step aside” from the pain, and analyze what was going on with my body, rather than feeling it. While it may not have been the best approach to stop the beatings, it did serve as a way to manage a situation in which I was the weaker. Stepping outside my body to manage intense pain—mind over matter—is a technique I learned as a toddler. This survival technique, like many others I developed in childhood, turned out to be good preparation for an allergic-to-painkiller adult life in which I have had to use the mind over-matter approach with doctors doing grin-and-bear-it biopsies and dentists doing root canals without anesthesia.
Grin-and-bear-it was an attitude enforced from a young age. One of my most painful experiences was not deliberately inflicted—a wonder in and of itself. It was, however, home treated, and painfully so. I was running across the yard—I was always running, either away from anticipated abuse or just using those well developed leg muscles for play—and tripped on wood that had been torn off the chicken coop and piled for later disposal. I sprawled across a board, and a rusty nail pushed itself through my right lower leg like a skewer forced through a ham shank for roasting on a spit. When I stood up, the board was tightly attached to my leg. I called to Dad—I would never have called to Ma for fear that she would blame me for causing some kind of damage to the way the boards were stacked or otherwise find a reason to beat me for what had happened. Dad came, saw the situation, and said that he had to pull the nail out of my leg. He told me to stay still until he came back. He returned with a clean cotton rag and that wonder drug, mercurochrome. My lip must have trembled when he pulled the board away from my leg, sliding the nail back out, for he ordered me, “Don’t be spleeny!”
Being spleeny was a bad thing. Being spleeny meant that you had no backbone, that you cried when there was no need to cry. Every cry, even in the midst of be ing beaten, was considered unnecessary. Punch! “Don’t be spleeny!” Kick! “Don’t be spleeny!” Bite! “Don’t be spleeny!” Splinters, burns, cuts, scrapes? “Don’t be spleeny!” No, sir, no one would ever call me spleeny. Being spleeny was just something I was 14 blest atheist not, even from my very earliest days. Tolerate the pain of removing a rusty nail from half-way through the leg? Piece of cake! Actually, though, that day I really wanted to be spleeny as the nail emerged from my leg with a long hot flash of pain that continued to hurt for days. I wanted to be able to cry, but I dared not. I wanted to have a loving parent who would hold my hand and soothe me. Hah! That only happened in books. Hugs? I saw other parents do that so I knew what a hug was, but I never knew what a parental hug felt like. Even Dad, who loved babies, stopped hugging us as soon as we started walking. So, that day I bit my lip and put my mind in that other place that just observes what happens to my body and ceases to feel it. Since the mercurochrome was applied while I was in an altered state, I felt the sting only as vicarious pain. In the same way, I experienced the wrapping of the wound. I was definitely not spleeny.
I don’t remember how long the wound took to heal. I don’t remember being taken to a doctor—I do not believe I was. The leg did heal, and all I have left is a small scar as a reminder, making the nail injury a permanent reminder never to cry about pain, no matter how bad.
Spleeny went beyond hiding pain. It expanded to include hiding all emotions. To this day, my family and friends are much more likely to know how I think than how I feel. When someone asks me how I feel about something, I can rarely answer.
The ability to tolerate pain was honed through the daily beatings. I did not cry out at those, either, other than to hurl ever increasingly obscene epithets. I would not give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that they had succeeded in hurting me. I just “managed” the pain. First, I saw no alternative. I knew that mercy would not be forthcoming although the pleas of my siblings in such situations sometimes brought the beatings to an earlier conclusion. Second, I knew that Ma would eventually run out of steam. Third, somewhere deep down I knew that I could not let whatever happened get the best of me, or my identity, which was very important to me, would be lost. So, instead of pleading, I argued. When I got older, I fought back physically, replying to scream with scream, slap with slap, punch with punch, kick with kick, bite with bite, hair pulling with hair pulling, spit with spit, and insult with insult.
In this early memory of snipping off Danielle’s pigtail, I was only five, so the only way I could fight back was to bite, kick, and try to escape. I was, however, clearly physically the weaker, and Ma’s beating became heavier and heavier until I could do nothing but close my eyes in the hope that when I woke up, the immediate pain would be gone even though there might be some leftover pain from the bruises. Bruises I could manage. I was used to feeling that kind of pain most of the time, and I hid the physical marks under sweaters and the long pants that I wore under my skirts. (Girls in rural New England in the 1950s were not allowed to wear pants to school unless they wore skirts over them).
Whenever I realized that I had lost the physical battle and that there was nothing to do but wait for the rain of blows to stop, I would further distract myself from the pain with thoughts of revenge. Revenge was something that I learned to accomplish to perfection although once I left home I quickly realized that thinking up avenues of revenge is a very ineffective way to manage anger. Perhaps that is because I no longer had a need to deal with daily abuse, and that sense of relief turned me nearly instantly into a chronically happy person, like the bubbles of carbonation rushing into the air with the opening of a bottle of Perrier water.
In this childhood memory, I planned the ultimate revenge, at least, in the mind of a five-year-old. My parents were well-respected members of the community, hiding the abuse of their children behind political involvement and a show of their children being well-taken care of. Of course, we were raised to fear telling anyone although sometimes we did tell and were not believed, so strong was the image of the perfect family that our parents had successfully produced. Ma would do anything to keep alive the false image of this ideal family.
My revenge, then, was to do something that would embarrass my parents and in this instance as a five-year-old unversed in matters of embarrassment to self was well-planned. While I was severely beaten for it afterward, I savored every second of relating it to Ma. Arriving home from kindergarten, I announced in a proud and contemptuous tone, “You beat me yesterday. Well, I got you! Today I wore no underpants to school, and I showed all the boys. I told them you won’t buy me any.”
Ma raised my skirt, and sure enough, I was telling the truth. Truth-telling caused me to receive more beatings than most of my siblings although infliction of physical pain followed the routine of daily vitamin pills for all. For each one of us children, the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was differently apportioned, but we all were treated to at least a little of each kind and a major helping of the physical variety. The irony is that we went to school looking well cared for: scrupulously bathed, immaculately clothed, hair combed (and, for the girls, braided). The wounds were in the heart, in the mind, and on the covered parts of our bodies.
Mercy, part 1, can be found HERE.
For more posts about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books, click HERE.
For excerpts from more books, click HERE.
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