Sweeter Than Honey. Mary B. Morrison

us or to have the house to herself with Don, Mama didn’t care where we went or how long we stayed. I guess my being the opposite of my sister hanging around the house reading books or listening to music most of the time invaded Mama’s privacy.

      Don’s eyes widened. He swiftly sucked air into his mouth, snapping his head toward Honey. When he pushed me, I fell to the floor screaming, “Mama!”

      My mother, Rita, raced into the family room, bypassing Honey. Rita stared down at me. Hatred narrowed her eyes that never blinked. I spread my legs, hoping she could see what Don had done to me. This was my chance to have him confess he was wrong and confirm I was pure. But he didn’t. I lay there trying to figure out why a grown man would take advantage of a minor and why my mother would let him.

      Sinking into the gray carpet, I felt my ignorance giving me away to the streets when my mother deemed me competition as opposed to her little girl. True, most times I was guilty of something, but not trying to have sex with my mother’s man or the boys I went to Flagstaff High School with.

      My heart exploded like a bomb when Mama believed her husband-to-be’s words, “Rita, get rid of her…your tramp of a daughter just offered me her pussy,” over mine. “Mama, I swear I didn’t, he’s lying. He stuck his finger between my legs. Go on, tell ’em I’m a virgin. Honey, you saw him. Tell Mama what he did,” I cried, spreading my legs wider this time. Instantly I’d become a casualty of compassion.

      Before my sister answered, the strands of my ponytail wrapped around my mother’s fist. Content that he was out of the spotlight, Don sat on the sofa with his lint-filled Afro and sagging gut gargling beer like mouthwash while fingering the remote, flipping through channels like nothing was happening. Instead of helping me, Honey bent toward the floor, grabbing my white ankle socks. The tip of my brand-new tennis shoe slammed against her chin, knocking Honey on her ass.

      It was an accident. I’d never done anything to hurt my sister. Honey was the only sibling I had.

      Angrily, Mama dragged me faster. The rug beneath my butt felt like a flaming match frying through my skin. Frantically kicking the air, I yelled all the way to the door, “Bitch! Let me go! Grab his fuckin’ ass!” I peeled my fingers from the door hinge, barely escaping the slam!

      That wasn’t my first time getting thrown out of the house, but it was my last time calling my mother what I’d wanted to call her for a long time. She was a bitch. Why I’d gotten kicked out every other month since I’d grown unusually large breasts twice the cup-size of my mother’s and sister’s put together, I didn’t know. How could my mother carry me for nine months, birth me, then despise me for being molested by her man?

      Dressed in pink shorts, and a white shirt with a pink cat on the front, I stood outside the door for fifteen minutes praying my mother would open it. When she didn’t, I knew better than to bang on Rita’s door. The smell of Mama frying Sunday morning bacon and baking homemade buttermilk biscuits made me hungry. Surely Rita would slide me a plate or a slice of my birthday cake so I wouldn’t have to walk down the street to the Sunshine Rescue Mission.

      I waited in vain, drifting off into thoughts about attending my first day of school tomorrow, celebrating with all the seniors, and getting my driver’s license in the mail. Within seconds all of my hopes of becoming the youngest valedictorian had become dismal. I sat on the steps watching the heat waves float through the hot air in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our small town was a short drive from the Grand Canyon, where lots of tourists came to see one of the seven natural wonders of the world. As a homeless child, I felt like the eighth wonder that no one cared about. People drove by me waving but all of them kept going.

      Sitting alone on the steps gave me lots of time to daydream about the big city with bright lights. I’d heard lots of neighbors and students rave about Las Vegas, but I’d never been there. I heard that pretty girls made lots of money simply because they were cute like me. Vegas was over a hundred miles away from my house, too far for me to travel alone with no money.

      The orange sunrays traded places with the blue moonlight. Gazing up at the stars, I questioned why I’d fallen into a bottomless pit so young, so innocent, and so afraid. Cursed for being beautiful, I slept on the ugly concrete porch until the break of dawn. The crackling of the front door startled me as I sadly looked up into my mother’s piercing brown eyes.

      “Mama, please, I’m sorry. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll stay in my room after school whenever he’s here, I promise.”

      Desperately seeking my mother’s forgiveness, I apologized for Don’s faults. I had no place else to go. Not permanently. With her silver spiked heels, my mother stepped on me like a doormat and kept walking as if I were invisible: incapable of being seen.

      Years later, at times I still felt I wasn’t perceptive to the human eye. Funny how back then I thought I was grown until I had to make it on my own. Over the past decade, I’d learned a lot about being a woman, not necessarily the easy way.

      In my opinion, ninety-five percent of all women were abused at some point during their lifetime by their mothers, their fathers, their husbands, their boyfriends, strangers on the prowl seeking a rape victim or in my case all of the above. Living on the streets convinced me that the five percent who weren’t abused died at birth. If only I could’ve been so lucky.

      My sister to this day still lives at home with our mother. An old high school acquaintance said Honey was dying of some rare form of cancer and that I was Honey’s closest possible match for a donor. Was that God’s way of paying my mother back? They didn’t need me then and I don’t need them now.

      After my mother kicked me out I would’ve gone to live with my dad, but we never knew our father. And the way I saw it, any man who’d abandon his children was the worst type of abuser. Forget that lame bullshit about the mother keeping him away. I swore I was never having kids. My daddy had a choice! He could’ve fought for joint custody, weekends, supervised visitation, something. Anything was better than nothing. The one time we asked about our father, our mom cursed us out.

      “Jean St. Thomas’s green-eyed, slick-haired red ass ain’t shit! Never was shit! Ain’t never gon’ be shit! Sorry-ass son of a bitch ain’t never paid one damn dime to help me take care of y’all and if you ask me about him again I’ma beat y’all’s ass! Now, get out of my face!” Then she mumbled, “That good-for-nothing-but-a-wet-dream bastard better not ever call me again asking to see y’all.”

      Daddy wanted to see us?

      My green eyes filled with tears at the thought that my mother hated me but wouldn’t let my daddy love me. I guess I was light-skinned with straight hair like my father, because my mom and sister had skin like dark brown sugar and hair equally coarse.

      Whatever, I didn’t need any of them. I was fine. Honestly I was. But it still hurts that after all these years Mama never inquired about where I was until Honey got sick. Mama didn’t care if I never came back. If she could suction my marrow through a straw over the phone, she would do so, then hang up in my face without saying thanks. Maybe one day I’d go back to her in my white-on-white or my black-on-black Jaguar and show her how successful I’d become.

      I still blamed and will never forgive my mother for the life I was forced to live after being kicked out. As an involuntary high school dropout, I’d hitchhiked and moved in with my instant twenty-three-year-old boyfriend who brutally stole my virginity, then yelled at my ass every other day like he was bipolar. He had me so screwed up in the head I jumped every time he spoke. I’d leave the house and forget to put on my shoes. I’d pour orange juice on his cereal instead of milk because I was so afraid he’d beat me if I didn’t get him what he wanted fast enough. After six months together, I slept in the doghouse that was inside the garage just to stay out of the way of his fists.

      At seventeen I ran away and married only what I could describe as Charles Manson’s offspring. Brutally he stomped my ass daily, I think either for his amusement or for his daily thirty-minute workout. The reason I stayed was, once again, I didn’t have any place to go, nor did I have any money. That was another lesson learned.

      Men controlled women by making