She turned around and slapped me to the ground. “Muthafuckin savage!”
She spit the words at me as I lay there, her words stinging me more than the blow to my cheek. Yet again, my pain had no place to go.
We spent the rest of our time at the grindstone in silence. I watched the sparks fly and tried to imagine myself in another time, another place. When we finally made it back to the house, I went straight back to my bedroom and slammed the door. I pulled my knife from my pocket and flicked the blade out. I had been practicing flicking the blade like I had seen guys do in the movies, but I couldn’t seem to master the technique of shooting the blade out in an almost magical, Houdini-type move. Next, I was going to learn how to throw the knife and make it stick in the wall like Davy Crockett did on TV. I had visions.
I heard the heavy footsteps of my stepfather as he pounded up the stairs into the house. His voice boomed. “Did you get my money for me, Bitch?!”
I eased my bedroom door open a crack and watched them.
“I told you that I couldn’t get no money,” my mother said. “You know nobody ain’t got no money. You know that shit. You ain’t got none neither.”
“I know I’d have some more money if I didn’t have to put out no money for that bastard you got up in my house. Where is that skinny little nigga you call a son anyway, slut. Where his ass at? Where that motherfucker?”
“I don’t know!” she screamed. “I don’t fucking know, alright!”
A shocked second of silence hung in the air. The next sounds I heard were the utterly identifiable sounds of violence. My stepfather was enraged. He punched my mother to the floor and then he began picking up things and hitting her with them as she lay there. When she finally lay still, beaten and whimpering, he began asking her questions and kicking her to make her answer. When he began to tire, I heard my mother, in a very weak voice, begin murmuring her apolo
gies, begging his forgiveness. He was drunk. It was always the same.
He plopped down on the couch and I heard his heavy breathing from my doorway.
My mother crawled over to him, crying in pain. “Why you got to beat on me all the time?” Her voice was heavy with desperation. “Why?”
My stepfather ignored her and picked up the remote control from the end table.
“Why?” she asked again.
“Bitch, I know you see me finna watch this program, right?” he replied as he flipped through the channels.
My mother curled up in a ball on the floor and I watched as she deftly reached under the sofa and dragged the knife over to her. The blade looked ominous. Its edges looked sharp as she tucked it down by her side, hidden from my stepfather’s view when she turned back to him.
“I just wanna know why,” she said. Her voice was much clearer when she spoke. “You been hittin’ on me for years… and for nuthin’. I do everything I can and you still beat on me. Why you do that?”
“Bitch! If you don’t shut yo’ ho mouth while I’m watchin’ my program…”
“I just wanted to know,” she said, “before I stick you.”
And then my mother plunged the knife into his leg. He howled in pain and tried to scramble away but my mother had his leg locked in an iron grip. She swung the blade again, sinking it deeper into his thigh. My stepfather clubbed my mother in the head with both fists until her grip loosened. He tried to dive on top of her but his damaged leg wouldn’t cooperate. He fell in a heap on the floor next to her and my mother rolled away from him. He reached over, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back toward him, but she had the knife in the other hand and she swung it at him. The knife sunk into his chest to the hilt and my mother froze in terror. He looked down at the knife, buried to the hilt in his flesh, then he looked at my mother with a look of disbelief. An animal cry escaped his lips and he reverted to the monster inside.
He seized my mother by her neck with both hands and began to squeeze. She was powerless in his chokehold and he began slamming her head into the floor. I stood there, in shock, as my mother’s body went limp, as her life left her, and I could only wonder why my stepfather wasn’t dead. It looked like my mother had stabbed that man right in his heart but he was still sitting there, living and breathing. I watched him for a second as he sat there next to my dead mother, as his chest heaved and blood leaked down the front of his shirt. I just knew that he was going to die but as I fingered my knife… I decided I couldn’t wait.
I flung my bedroom door open and charged toward him, knife extended. He barely moved when he saw me coming for him and I swung my blade at his chest and face repeatedly. I realized it was my life or his, so I stabbed at him with blind rage. He was weak. All of that power, his vaunted power, the force that he had hammered me and my brothers and sisters with, that was all gone as he tried to fend off my attack by blocking my stabs with his arm. Each strike that landed drew blood and I vaguely heard his voice as he began to beg.
“Stop… it. Don’t… hit. You… hurt… me. Stop.”
I was covered in his blood, but the sound of his voice froze me. I stepped back from him. “What? What you say?”
“You hurt… me.” I watched his chest rise and fall heavily with the handle of the knife poking out at an angle. “You hurt. Me.” His head lolled to the side but his eyes were still on me. In that instant, I knew he was going to live if I let him, and I vowed that he wouldn’t ever rise from that floor. My stepfather was a big, strong man and the hatred he had placed in my heart now turned to fear, which drove me to the brink of desperation. He raised his hands to the handle of the knife, got a good grip, and violently ripped it from his chest. He howled in pain as the knife fell to the floor by his side and deathly coughs began to rack through his body as he spit up blood. I just waited and hoped for him to die.
“Hurt!” he screamed. “Hurt!”
“Shit!” I screamed back at him. “That’s what you did to us! I ain’t never hurt you before! I ain’t never do nuthin’ to you! But all I am is a bastard, right? All I did was be born, right? Every day! Every day, I hated you. Every day, I was wishing you’d walk out that door and never come back. That we could make it without you… without you comin’ home drunk and beatin’ on me. And for nuthin’, Nigga. For no-thang!” My mother’s body lay on the floor next to him, lifeless. “And look what you did to Ma,” I ranted on. “Look what you turned her into. Look what you did to her! She dead, Nigga! Dead! You turned her heart against me. Her own son. But that’s all right, though. That’s a-okay with me, ’cause you know what? Inna minute you is just gonna be another nigga, dead. Even if I have to do it myself.”
“Boy,” he managed to get out before his body exploded in coughs of pain. “Boy, I ain’t never… gonna die. I’m gonna always get your punk ass. You ain’t shit… just like yo’ apple knockin’ daddy. Yo’ slut ass mama threw her legs up in an apple field to have you… and umma end up fuckin’ you just the same. Shee-it.”
“Fuck you!” I screamed and charged him again. I stabbed him and stabbed him and stabbed him until his lifeless body was slumped face down on the floor. I stood up and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the living room mirror and saw a grisly-looking kid staring back at me. There was blood all over my body and there was a madman dancing in my eyes. My torture was over but my tragedy had just begun.
I arose from the grisly scene in a trance. I plodded out of the house and walked down the hill to Upwards Alley. It was nighttime now and the streets were quiet. I snuck around to the back of Donnell Shunt’s house and hid behind the fence. The grindstone was still there and I watched it for a while… harboring cruel visions accompanied by dark thoughts, the pair playing with each other on a jungle gym in the twisted playground of my mind.