Ours
wasn’t much of a family, with Papa living just down the road with his mistress and four children, and
Mama, bitter and angry all the time, holding it together with the four of us. She wasn’t without sin either, because over the years, we had many ‘uncles’. I think I was about nine when the first one started visiting, then one day, he just didn’t leave. Some nights, I would see him coming out of the room where my three older
sisters slept. I wondered about it, but my little imagination could not stretch as far as to fathom what he could possibly be doing sneaking out of their room in the dead of night. I kind of figured out what he and Mama were doing when I heard the old bed squeaking and the floorboards groaning some nights, and it made me uncomfortable.
That was
uncle Nathaniel. Then came Uncle Dave, and Uncle Hopeton and a few others, some of whose names I cannot recall.
I had just turned eleven when another of her gentleman friends moved in, or visiting, as she told us. I wondered how long it would be before Papa came to drive him away too with his cutlass.
It was a while before Papa got wind that we had a new uncle, and by that time, I was now sharing the room with two of my sisters while the eldest had gotten her own room which Papa added unto the old
house.
I was awoken one night by a stifling sensation, and realized a hand was clamped firmly over my mouth, while the other pried between my legs. I tried to scream, but the hand pressed down harder, and I feared my jaw would break.
Tears welled up in my
eyes as I recognized mama’s newest friend by the weak light of the moon, and felt something hard pressing against me, then it was replacing his hand between my quivering legs. I tried with all my might to fight him off, but the shock of it all was too much, not to mention I was no match for his Herculean strength.
It went on for an eternity, it seemed, and the pain was great. He whispered and said he would chop off my head if I told anyone, and that I should shut up.
I tried to take my mind away from the horror that was happening to me. Now I
knew. Now I knew why I had seen Nathaniel, and some of the others coming from my sisters’ room.
Finally, mercifully, he left, and I wept into my pillow. Tricia came over and held me while I cried, then she said, “Shhh…Denise, nuh mek mama hear yu.”
I wept harder. I hoped and prayed that would have been the end of my nightmare, but it wasn’t. Charlie’s visits to our room continued…some nights it was Tricia, or Jennifer, but mostly, it was me.
Many times I would burst out in tears and Mama would ask me what was wrong. Then she would tell me to stop the noise when I could not offer an explanation. He had said he would kill me, and I believed him.
This one stayed much longer than the others, and that must have been because Mama really liked him. I did not want to make trouble for my mother…but something inside me knew this wasn’t right.
One day, as we walked home from school, I asked my sisters what we were going to do. Jennifer, the eldest of us three, said I had better shut up, or mama might beat us.
I turned eleven, and still Charlie was living at the house. The visits were less frequent, but that didn’t take away the sickness in the pit of my stomach every time it grew dark.
Then, one day, Tricia came screaming, running into the house, her eyes big with fright. She was sputtering something about Uncle Charlie in the cane field. There was blood on the front of her t-shirt.
Mama and us girls ran down the steps, in the direction of the cane piece. And there he was, lying on the ground, almost unrecognizable, one of his legs and some of his fingers chopped clean off his body and gashes in the side of his head. Blood saturated the soil. He was trying to speak, but blood, incredibly red, gushed from his mouth. The wound in his neck was bleeding out too. His eyes rolled back in his head.
Mama knelt there beside him in the dirt, hollering for help, asking him who did this to him. Somebody said it was no use, he was as good as dead. I stared at him, and felt nothing. I will never forget, turning to look at my eldest sister, Georgina, and seeing in her eyes too, nothing. I knew right there and then that she had taken this misery of a beast out of our lives, for good.
They never found out who hacked Charlie to death, but some theorized that it was my father. Charlie’s death must have affected Mama pretty badly, because no more ‘uncles’ came to the house after that.
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