Me and Ma spent our evenings tiptoeing out of each other’s way, or trying to think of things to say. We hadn’t always been this strained. Before I shot past her height we had been thick as thieves. Sidekicks whose outfits, earrings, barrettes, and fingernail polish were color-coordinated just for the reactions of others. It had been nothing for us to spend hours watching television, running errands, or simply digging through curls to massage each other’s scalps. But our honeymoon ended around the time I got my first period, which showed up early when I was nine. Four brown dots in the daisy-yellow panties I had showed her snatched Ma out of recess. Her affirmative sidekick was actually a real person and evolving woman, no longer a doll. She stopped calling me “her baby” after that, and I started saying Ma instead of Mommy. Friends and aunts had been no help—they only told Ma amplified horror stories of their own girls smelling themselves. Had Grandma still been living, Ma may have had someone to convince her that a little blood hadn’t turned me into a possessed haint hell-bent on discovering and pointing out her shortcomings.

“She’s still a baby, just musty now—from attitude and everything else,” was something Grandma would have advised. But Grandma couldn’t be heard below her simple rectangle of slate in Woodlawn Cemetery. The whippings intensified to beatings and finally fights as my mother struggled to maintain sovereignty over me though I hadn’t yet rebelled.

“They always test it before you have to break down and put a foot in that ass,” I heard one after-work drinking friend telling Ma in the kitchen one day. Ma was complaining about my increasing hours on the phone, talking to nobody but girls I wouldn’t talk to for long. Later that night the first hard, insulting strike occurred when she discovered me gabbing under the covers. My pride was so wounded I couldn’t speak to her for days. Once my silent treatment abated the cloud of tension in the house never quite evaporated. Before she fought me, she had fought her old man—not my father, but this once-promising older guy who had lived with us for a couple of years before suddenly packing just two bags and his stereo equipment.

Soon after that Ma’s eyes became sodden sinkholes, blank upon casual glance from those who couldn’t possibly know what lie behind them. However, to me they were two little crystal balls peeking into a past I had no desire to borrow from for my future. In them, I peered at a carousel of incidents too frightening to recall, too mystifying for my young mind to confront, too incomprehensible for Ma to forget: