Chapter 23: The Hideous Brand

23. The Hideous Brand

Ghosts are scary, but perhaps only because they are a deviation from what we all think of as being “normal.” After my experiences with the darkness that Phyla had told me was Garish, or Garish and Throttle traveling together, and the wave of memories that come with my touching of the amulet, the ghosts in the basement seemed only mildly so. As I remembered them, I realized that they had not been threatening me, but only asking me to see their pain, perhaps to offer some small measure of empathy for the suffering that they had endured in the final days and hours of their lives.

 For the next few days Phyla and I still ate together at mealtimes, but I kept my distance, not finding any time for kisses and other pleasures. I was trying to process what I had seen, and what I had felt when I touched the pendant. At night as I lay in bed I thought about it, the key to my mysterious past, perhaps, only a dozen feet away, in Phyla’s room, waiting, calling to me. The sensation of salt water in my mouth and nose had been so real. There was more to the story, so much more, but it was like it was hidden in a mist, always just out of reach.

Those same fears were tied into my relationship with Phyla. It seemed that she couldn’t be happy just to let things grow between us as they had been going, that she needed me to remember a deep love, that kind that was forged over years of trials and battles as well as affection. And we both knew that the path to those memories involved recalling the pain of what I endured before I became a very shy spider, living under the microwave in Allison’s suburban home.

For the time being it seemed safer to focus on better understanding the truths that Michele had revealed that afternoon in her room. And the ghosts. They held the key to the very breath of the house itself, its history, maybe its presence. And perhaps they, more than any living being, could tell us who was trying to kill her.

In history class with Mrs. Dickinson we had gotten to the Emancipation Proclamation, and the irony of the event in that none of the slaves who were freed could know that they had been legally freed. The war crept along, one painful battle after another. Now, instead of feeling awkward about Michele’s presence two rows over, I felt as if I had joined her in this journey, even though there was so much I didn’t know about what she had been through.

In English class Mr. Perkins was still droning on about the themes in Great Expectations while I tried to pay enough attention to pass a test when and if we ever had one. More often than not I was simply doodling in the left-hand margin of my spiral notebook, but occasionally I wrote down something he emphasized in such a way as to key us in that it would probably be on the test. No one had given me a copy of the book yet, but I wasn’t going to say anything. In my room, in the evenings, I was still reading Huckleberry Finn, which according to Michele, was actually a banned book at Holshue House because some senator had seen it on a list of books that should be banned for all high school students. There are other people in the world who are afraid of truth, even powerful white men like that senator.

It was largely curiosity, the need to understand something, that led me to seek out Michele in the common room the next day. I sat down next to her on the old green Naugahyde couch, a refugee from some doctor’s office of decades before. She was wearing a light blue long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, looking at her math book, pretending to study for the afternoon class that we were to attend in a few minutes.

This time when she looked up it was without any of the old malice, and she simply said, “Hello.”

“Hi,” I answered and then sat there awkwardly, unsure about how to begin with so many of my questions about her previous life as well as about the ghosts that we both had seen.

“Did you want something? Specifically.” She asked finally.

“Yeah,” I answered nervously and looked around to see if anyone else was within earshot. We seemed to have that side of the common room all to ourselves.

“Well, don’t act like it’s some big secret, or people will think that we’re conspiring together, planning our next big break-out or something.” She smiled. “Living in … that place where I lived for two and a half years, you get good at this. Talking about something while making it look like you’re talking about nothing.” She did a little fake laugh.

Her mentioning the place where she had been held for all of that time switched the direction of everything. I decided to ask about that instead, “So when you were there, were there other girls there too?”

She nodded, and pretended to smile again although I could see that all of this was bringing back a lot of painful memories. “About six of us, most of the time. Sometimes someone would die and sometimes it would take them a while to find a replacement.”

“Die?”

She nodded.

“So, did you guys get to keep any of the money?” It seemed like a really stupid question, but I was trying to get some kind of a picture of her life before Holshue House.

She shook her head. “It wasn’t that kind of place.”

“What dya mean?”

“Those men, they didn’t pay to … to do us. It was a private club. Only members. And they was all white men. I mean, all white men who actually did us. There was some women, wives I think some of them were. And there was this one, she took care of shaving us down there and lookin’ after our periods and such. One time Davis got her real mad ‘bout somethin’ and she stripped her down, turned her over knee and beat her butt red until she had her bawling, and then she finger-fucked her ass right there in front of everyone. That was kinda like …” she stopped suddenly and her eye shifted up behind me “No,” was all she had a chance to say.

Erika was walking towards us, flanked by her retinue, Lindsey and Rebecca. She walked right up to within two feet of me and then stopped. Leaning in she spit on me, aiming for my face, but the spit landed on my pants leg instead. I started to leap up to smack her big time, but Michele had a hand on my wrist, signaling for me to stay down. “You are scum,” she said before turning to walk on.

Lindsey and Rebecca had held back and Rebecca was blushing with embarrassment, and they quickly followed her as she walked on out into the hall.

“Sometimes you gotta be careful ‘bout when you choose to fight. She wants to get you in trouble, get you sent a way. Maybe she wants to make sure I don’t have any friends. So a lotta times it’s just better to just let it go.”

I was shaking, but too interested in what Michele had just been telling me to want to go into a discussion about Erika right then.

Michele continued with what she had been telling me, “And that woman, she was there for my abortions. The men they didn’t have nothin’ to do with that.”

“You had an abortion?”

Michele nodded, “Two of ‘em, before they got smart and put me on the pill. Some of the men thought it would be good to have us walking around all fat and pregnant, but they got overruled ‘cause what was they going to do? Try raising babies?”

“And the men, they just had sex with you? And didn’t have pay or anything?”

“I s’pose they paid some kind of membership dues or some such shit. And wasn’t really sex they wanted – it was rape. They felt like the more they raped black girls the more they were paying black people for having gotten all ‘uppity’ like. Rape is about power, in their case white power, so it was always rough.”

“And you didn’t get to just say no to sex? Like I don’t want it tonight?”

“Of course not. I was just a possession, a symbol of my race to those men. And it wasn’t sex. It was just rape, over and over again, month after month. I never had sex, like the kind where you want it, so maybe I’m still a virgin.” That made her laugh a little.

Then she looked around the room to make sure that Erika and her friends had gone, that no one was paying any attention. “Come with me to the restroom. I wanna show you somethin’. But you gotta promise not to ever tell anyone, not even Phyla.”

I watched as she closed and slid another book out from inside her math book and on into her bookbag ahead of the math book. I caught a glimpse of the cover the number 1619 on the front. It was the old read-a-book-hidden-inside another book that I had always heard about people doing, but more often with some forbidden magazine or a comic book. The book she was hiding looked like a serious book, but I was certain she had a good reason to be hiding it. With the book bag flung over her right shoulder she led the way down the hallway to the restroom and had me follow her in.

The restroom had multiple stalls with latches, but no lock on the door. She started into a stall but then said, “No. That would look too weird.” Once again casting a glance around the room, she put her butt on one of the sinks. Her nervousness was making me nervous, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her fingers as she undid the button and the zipper. The faint odor of her privates wafted my direction as she pulled open her pants to reveal the dark skin of her lower abdomen and a line of kinky pubic hair above her pink bikini pants.

There, below the waistline of her jeans and just above the panties, her otherwise near-black skin was white and raised in puffy letters that said, “OWNED.” She had been branded. She stood very still and nodded to tell me that I should look closer. The ‘O’ was open on the bottom and right where it was broken on the right was a less-than sign, a <, and right above and to the left of that, inside the circle of the ‘O’ was a greater-sign, a >.

“The little arrow things, that’s the sign of Jera, so it says ‘Jera owned,’” she whispered.

“What’s Jera?”

“It means ‘Harvest Year.’ It’s the name of their club. They intend to harvest us all back into slavery, beginning with the girls they rape again and again.”

I knelt before her and with my fingers gently touched the puckered skin of each letter, so white against her own blackness. “Did it hurt?”

“Shit, yeah. It hurt like sixteen kinds of hell. They had me tied down and I screamed and screamed until they stuffed a cloth into my mouth, someone’s underwear I think. And I cried for days. But no one gave a shit.”

“Has Ms. Slanick seen this?”

“No. I was strip-searched when I was first arrested. The lady guard just laughed. She figured it was just some funky game I played or something. Once I got here no one ever looked at me, or took off my pants.”

I touched it some more, wanting to ease her pain with the touch of my fingers, even knowing that the pain now was really only inside her.

“You’re the only one here who’s ever seen it. I’m really careful about my shower time, and keeping my back to everyone the few times I’ve been naked near the others. You can’t tell anyone. Understand? This is my deepest secret.”

“Of course …” I started to say.

But I was interrupted as the door to bathroom swung open behind us. “What the fuck?” It was Phyla. “You really have become a total slut,” she yelled.

Michele was rapidly refastening her jeans. I stammered out a “But …”

But Phyla was too upset, “After all that we have struggled with over the years. And you don’t know … and you won’t remember … and now you just … with just anyone …” and she stormed out of the bathroom.

Michele looked at me with sympathetic eyes. “Find some way … tell her something to make her understand that it’s not … that. But please don’t tell her that I have been branded as a slave.”

I nodded, tears in my eyes, totally confused about so much, including my feelings for Phyla, and for a past that I wasn’t able to face. I turned to go.

Michele stopped me for a moment, whispering, “There’s something else that I need to show you. Come to my room tomorrow night, after lights out.”

“But the cameras …” I answered in a whisper.

“Use Phyla’s trick with the cameras.” Her pants were now completely back in place and she was acting like she was straightening her kinky braids in the mirror.

“She taught you?”

“No. But I saw her looking at them and figured out what she was doing. Good trick.”

I just nodded, not even sure if I was consenting to meeting her in her room after lights out, or to just knowing about the camera trick. I walked out of the restroom ahead of her, unsure about whether or not I wanted to seek out Phyla, or how I felt about my whole relationship with her. Finding me with my face practically in another girl’s pants looked bad, but it wasn’t like I was doing anything wrong. And what is wrong in a relationship as undefined as the one I had with Phyla - all the business of being expected to remember. And she was the one who pushed the pendant into my hand, forcing me into those horrid memories. What is she had actually been some kind of cruel master back in those murky hidden days of my past? What if it were her instead of Garish, or what if she working in cahoots with Garish? At least I was learning about Michele, and the past that she was sharing was evidently very real, just as real as that ugly brand.