She hadn’t asked me first, but she came into my room wearing my long Fendi head scarf that I had just bought from my favorite African man selling things on Forty-seventh by the El.She asked me if I had eaten all her Danish butter cookies, the cheap ones that come in the round blue aluminum tins. Actually, she told me I had eaten them. I didn’t even know she had bought any Danish butter cookies; I wouldn’t have eaten them all anyway since I only like the ones with the hard sugar dots on top. But trying to explain anything to Ma after she’s made up her mind is a waste of time. I lay down and tried to ignore her, but that never worked. When I didn’t answer her, she grabbed my Afro puff of a ponytail and twisted it tight in her hands. I could feel my scalp burning hot like when I left a perm in too long, only her pulling made it worse.

For as long as I could remember, I had let her hit me, slap me, or do whatever else she was going to do while calling me every name in the book. But this time I don’t know what happened, what came over me. I don’t know if it was because my breasts were sore because I was waiting on my period, but I fought back this time. I put my knees up, then for the first time since I turned thirteen and she started fighting me like she had fought men, I hit my own mother back. She held me down on my twin bed with one hand and started slapping me openhanded with the other. I heard her screaming at me, cussing me out because she was surprised. I think she was a little scared too, or maybe nervous, so I was glad. I felt tears coming, but I held them back. My throat lumped up while words came up from out of my stomach, out of my heart, out of my mouth, and into my mother’s twisted face:

“Keep your hands off me …”

That was a couple days before my aunt Jewel came back, and that’s how those police who came busting through the door after the neighbors called found us—two grown women screaming the same thing over and over, and neither one of us shameful enough to cry. That was when I knew my mother’s life and mine had to change.

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