RedBone (5 page)

—Farah

Nighttime fell on the projects and everybody in the house was trying to find Farah. They were in the middle of the worst heat wave DC had ever seen, and she was a sickly child who never went out without telling her parents. As everyone hung in the living room waiting for word, they all felt that Farah’s disappearance may have been stimulated by the way Brownie had treated her earlier that day.

“If my baby ran away I’m gonna hurt you, Brownie! Ashur said, sitting on the sofa and drinking his seventh beer, while a cigarette dangled from his other hand. “You hear me, woman!” Brownie was struck with fear, knowing full well what her husband was capable of.

“Don’t threaten my fuckin’ child, Ashur. Not in my house and not in front of me, anyway,” Elise said, setting places at the dining room table for her card party later that night. “Fussing and threatening never helped nobody. Trust me. I know.”

“Well, I’m tired of her treating her bad,” Ashur continued, giving his wife evil looks. “If my kid don’t show up in the next fifteen minutes I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” He looked at his wife and mother-in-law with a creased brow.

“She gonna be fine. Herbert out there looking for her too,” she said, referring to the maintenance man. Mia, Chloe, and Shadow sat quietly in their room, waiting for the verdict. They knew better than to get into their parentsbusiness. In fact, the last time Chloe gave her two cents on a matter, while Brownie was washing her hair, Brownie screamed in her face so long her hair dried.

After fifteen long, antagonizing minutes, Farah walked slowly into the house with the dopehead Herbert, the project’s maintenance man. She was wearing nothing but her white cotton panties. A strange odor that resembled burned meat seemed to follow her as she stood in front of her parents for judgment. Her skin was red and blistered, and she could barely put her arms down. The abscesses on her body were filled with puss, and she looked like a monster. Farah had spent the entire time outside, trying to be brown like her family. Trying to look like them, in the hopes that Brownie would love her more. “I found her on the roof,” Herbert said. His grey uniform was ashy. “She awfully beaten up but she alive.”

“We got it from here, Herbert,” Elise said. She was so rattled by the sight of her granddaughter that she dropped the plate of chicken on the floor. “Go on now.”

“You got a few bucks?” he asked, scratching his arms. “I’m hurting really bad.”

“Nigga, get the fuck out of here!” Brownie screamed, pointing at the door.

When he left, Elise asked, “Did somebody rape you, child?” When Farah didn’t answer her quick enough she said, “Did anybody touch you, child?”

Farah shook her head. “No, Grandma. Nobody touched me.”

When Ashur saw the terrible condition of his daughter, he smashed his cigarette out on the wooden floor and hopped off the couch. “Then what happened, Reds?” he asked, looking over her scarred body. “Where have you been?” He figured after all the kids he abused, God was ready for payback. “I been worried about you all day!” he said, pulling her into his embrace.

“Daddy, no!” she screamed due to the sunburns and blisters that covered her skin. “It hurts.”

Ashur pulled himself from her body and looked at her. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I went to the top of the roof. And took all my clothes off.” Everyone looked at her with wide eyes. They always knew Farah was going to stir up shit in the family, but no one thought it would be like this.

“For what, child?” Elise asked.

“So I could get a tan.” She cried softly.

“Why would you do something so stupid?” Brownie laughed, thinking it was funny that she was riddled in pain. “You know you can’t be outside like that! You ain’t trying to do nothing but hog up all the attention!”

“I wanted to look like you.” Tears fell down her red face but she was afraid they would hurt if she wiped them away. “But, Mamma ... it hurts real badly. So bad I wanna scream but I’m afraid.”

Elise stepped up and said, “We gotta take this baby to the hospital. This don’t look too good.”

Farah was in the hospital for two days as the doctors tried to understand the nature of her illness. They knew she stayed out in the sun for hours trying to get a tan, but what they couldn’t understand was the reason for the blisters and hives that covered her skin. Farah was in so much pain that she could barely move. She’d already pulled a few pieces of hair out of her scalp, to eat the follicles before swallowing the strands. She did this when she was miserable and uneasy about life, which was often. Even at the moment, she had a bald spot the size of a golf ball in the middle of her head, and because Brownie left Farah to groom herself, she was able to keep her secret. To conceal her personal abuse, she’d brush her hair into a ponytail and cover it up. She suffered from trichophagia, the compulsive need to eat one’s own hair, which could be deadly.

For the first few hours she was hospitalized nobody came to visit, and she was devastated. That was, until the hospital called about her vagina and the possible sexual assault on a family member’s part, or so they thought. Because Farah was on the roof with no clothes on, the lips of her vagina were also damaged. So when the Department of Social Services came to investigate, Ashur and Brownie went to the hospital to defend themselves. With the help of the doctors, and several tests, they were able to convince everyone that the marks between her legs were also as a result of the sun’s strong rays.

But when the confusion was over nobody stayed, due to the drama in the neighborhood because of what they’d done to Theo. Dinette was threatening to call the authorities until she kissed the barrel of Ashur’s gun. And although her grandmother called to check on her frequently, she seemed too busy to give her the face time she so desperately needed. It seemed the more she tried to be like the rest of her family, the more they pushed her away.

Lying in the bed, she grabbed her black diary. Farah didn’t journal like most young girls her age. She wrote her life on the pages of her book the way she wanted it to be. She believed it wholeheartedly when Elise told her she could have anything she wanted in life, if her heart was in the right place, and she jotted it down on paper.
Once it’s on paper, it becomes life,
Elise would say.

Grabbing her favorite red pencil she wrote:

Farah was on the roof baking in the sun. She was so excited when she saw her skin turning the color of her mother’s. When it got late, she went home and all her family could talk about was how beautiful her chocolate skin was. Later, she went outside to play with the prettiest girl in her school, who was also her best friend, Coconut Elway.

Farah knew it was wishful thinking to think a kid who didn’t fuck with her could be her best friend, but this was her book. Continuing her story, she wrote:

Coconut talked about her boyfriend and Farah talked about hers. She said his name was Sam, and his skin was as dark as her mother’s, and that he was as handsome as her father. The coolest thing about Sam was that he was as strong as Superman.

Hearing a noise outside, and missing her family deeply, she looked toward the doorway. When she saw a few people who didn’t even acknowledge her, she grew angry. Opening her diary back up, she wrote:

And then somebody killed and raped Farah and everybody in the family felt guilty because they didn’t come see her!

Pushing her book aside, loneliness kicked her in the gut, and she cried herself to sleep. But on the second day, when Mia and Shadow caught a bus to the hospital to see her, she was elated. The doctors and nurses did their best to make her feel at home, but in her opinion there was nothing on the earth like family.

“You know they were trying to say Daddy fucked you, right?” Mia said. “The house been real fucked up lately, and we owe it all to you.”

Farah frowned. “What? Why would they think something like that? Daddy loves me.”

“Because you sat in the sun naked with your legs open,” Shadow said. “What kind of shit is that?”

“Farah, why you do that?” Mia sat on the edge of the bed. Farah was still wrestling with what people thought of her father, and tuned her siblings out. “Who goes on the roof butt-ass naked trying to get darker? You can’t change your complexion by getting a tan.”

“Permanently anyway,” Shadow added, eating the Jell-O Farah pushed to the side hours ago. “Dad was supposed to be taking us to the movies, but you fucked that up for everybody.” Tears poured out of her eyes, and like his father, Shadow wanted to run. He wasn’t good with emotions and preferred it if the women in his family refrained from being so sensitive. “Stop that crying shit. It makes my ass itch.”

“I don’t mean to cry.” Farah wiped her tears away. “But I want Mamma to love me like she loves everybody else. Why was I born like this? I wanna look like y’all since it’s obvious that’t why Mommy hates me!”

“Love is overrated,” Shadow said. “You ain’t missing nothing.”

“I’m serious!” Farah barked. “Maybe I can do something to make her proud, like help y’all out with the routine for the family celebration,”she said with wide eyes.

“You know you can’t do that,” Shadow said. “Mamma don’t want you being in that shit. Just leave it alone. It’s stupid anyway.”

“But maybe if you taught me the routine, she would like it.” She looked at her elder siblings. “Please ... I wanna show her that I can make her happy too. I wanna make her proud.”

Reluctantly, Mia said, “We might as well show her. It ain’t like we wanna do the shit anyway.” She played with the remote on her bed and turned on the TV.

“Okay, but if Ma get mad, you make sure you tell her it was all your idea,” Shadow added.

“Done,” Mia said, stopping the channel on
The Golden Girls.
“I ain’t scared of nobody out this bitch, including Mamma.”

“So we’ll teach you, but you gotta stop crying and being soft. I mean, why would you wanna look like us?” Shadow asked. “All I fuck with is red bitches anyway. Dark-skinned bitches ain’t poppin”.

“You so fuckin’ ignorant,” Mia said. “And how all you fuck with is red bitches when your mamma black?”

“Well, I ain’t fucking my mamma, now am I?” Shadow said.

“I don’t know ... you tell me.”

“I just prefer light-skinned chicks. I guess you could say I like what I like. So see, Farah, you ain’t gotta look like us to be better. You already are.”

Chapter 4

“I’m Farah Cotton, and I want so much to be your friend.”

—Farah

The gym class was a madhouse at Farah’s school. Balls were flying everywhere but in the direction of their intended targets. As always during this sorry excuse for a class, Farah was dressed in her blue and orange gym uniform, and was sitting on the bleachers alone. Her diary rested on top of her dark blue shorts as she looked at her classmates having fun. For her, this class was the pits without Theo, and she hated every fucking thing about it. She wondered if he would ever return to school, because she missed him already. Normally when the weather was nice the gym would be silent, and she and Theo would sit in the bleachers and talk all day. But thanks to her parents and her rare illness, she was a social outcast during the most critical time in her life.

She was about to start writing how she wanted her life to be with her make-believe boyfriend, when Shannon, Nova, and Wendy came running up the bleachers like their lives depended on it. The wooden steps rocked under Farah, and she put both hands to the side for support. When they were seated next to each other Coach Jaffrey said, “What are you ladies doing up there? Unless you have a letter excusing you like Farah, you need to be down here playing dodge ball with the rest of the class.” At the mention of her name, everyone looked at Farah and she held her head down. Because she was hospitalized recently for her condition, her light skin looked like she had chickenpox, and parents warned their kids to stay away from her. Farah’s classmates hated how Farah always seemed to have favor with the coach. They would’ve taken their anger out on him if he didn’t live in the very neighborhood they did all of his life.

“I’m serious now. You and the girls need to come back down here and participate. The only one allowed to sit out is Farah.”

Shannon, the leader of the pack, was a brown-skinned pretty girl with medium-length black hair and a body more developed for her age. She had ass, titties, and hips too early and she knew it. “Mr. Jaffrey, we just got our periods and we can’t play. The gym erupted into laughter, knowing if there was one thing Mr. Jaffrey avoided, it was the topic of little girls’menstrual cycles. “If you want to check my pad, I’ll go in the bathroom and take it off and show you.”

With his face beet red he said, “No ... please don’t ... Never mind.” Then he blew his whistle, and addressed the rest of the class, mainly boys. “Everybody else get back to work!”

After laughing so hard they couldn’t contain themselves, Shannon and her crew huddled together to discuss the real business at hand. “That bitch is so fucking nasty. She was over my house spending the night, right?” Shannon started. “When all of a sudden, she gonna ask me if she could borrow a pair of my panties, because she was seeing her boyfriend later that night and wanted to take a bath.” She frowned. “She must’ve forgotten her own.”

“So what you say?” Nova asked. The girls were so close together they looked like conjoined triplets.

“I said fuck no!” Farah was ear hustling so hard, her neck was hurting. “What I look like?”

“She is so not clean,” Nova said, not liking the subject of their conversation anyway. She was also a cute girl with honey-colored skin and short, curly hair. “Who the fuck uses somebody else’s drawers?” She glared, shaking her head.

“Exactly!” Wendy added. A little on the chunky side, she was still considered a cutie because of her silky black hair and dark Indian skin. “Coconut is so trifling!”