By Sarah Sheppeck
“I want to hear all of you.”
“Do I have to tell it in order?”
“However you’d like.” She takes a cigarette, lights it, hands me the pack. “The only condition is that you have to tell it all.”
“Okay.” I exhale a thick plume of smoke. “All right. Here goes.”
•
It’s Saturday, so I wash and oil my hair. It’s spiritual, sensual, the way the curls alternately clutch my fingers and yield to their touch. I exit the washroom a goddess, the very image of Oshun. The white woman who lives here points at my head and asks me what happened, says she’s never understood African hair.
“At least,” she says proudly, “I have never felt inclined to touch it.”
•
The white man to my left at the bar asks if I’ve ever been with a white man. I drink my wine. He continues, “I was raised not to see color. I just see a soul.” I sip. Another Black woman enters and sits three stool down. He takes the empty one beside her.
The white man to my right says he’s not usually attracted to Black girls, but I am beautiful. “What are you mixed with?” he asks.
“Blood and skin,” I say.
He laughs, but, “No, really,” he says, “you look good in black. Actual Black people don’t look good in Black.” He continues, “Your nose isn’t wide like Other Black People’s.”
My wine ends up in his face. The bar kicks me out.
•
My first love has left me. My replacement is small and thin and blonde and very, very white. I comb through his email, look for clues that he still loves me. He has written her that he will never date a Black woman again. She replied, “She’s not even Black. She’s almost as white as me.”
I do not check his email again.
•
After my first rape, I go back to work. I am writing for a white woman, a memoir for which she will receive all the credit. She says something that reminds me of It, and I begin to weep. She insists I tell her everything, so I do. She lays her hand on my hair and tells me I am well spoken even in distress.
When the memoir is published, my story is a part of it, but now it is hers. She is a star now. She does interviews and tells the story of her tumult, tells of the pride she feels in the help she has been able to provide other survivors. She is rich. I have stopped writing.
•
I stub out my cigarette. I stare at her, expectantly I suppose, though I couldn’t say what it is I’m expecting.
“So that’s it,” I say. I look for something for my hands to do. Always aware, always in tune, she takes them.
“Oh, baby,” she says, motheringly, “Never give a white woman anything you aren’t prepared for them to steal. That includes your trauma.”
Sarah Sheppeck is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her B.A. from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, she is now kicking it in Brooklyn with her beloved nephew and her dog, Chloe. Find her on Twitter @EpicSheppeck if you like thirst traps and loud opinions.
Photo by Daniele Fotia on Unsplash.
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