Jalondra Davis, Daddy Page 3
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I am a senior in college and yet another guy has bailed. The statistics aren’t foretelling that it’s going to get any better. I don’t get it. What’s wrong? Should I start looking at white boys? Resign myself to bitter Black female loneliness? I go home for Thanksgiving alone. I have been bringing a different guy every year for the last four years, and my family has learned to stop asking, “Whatever happened to what’s-his-name?” Still, my father notices that I am driving my own car and packing up food just for myself and shakes his head. Maybe you need a real thug who would appreciate a woman like you. I don’t understand these hard headed college boys. Do the niggahs have twenty-twenty? My daughter is so fine.
Yeah, Daddy, but my mother is beautiful as well. You know that picture of her at nineteen, in the black wraparound dress? Her skin was so smooth and golden brown, her arms were flung open to the world. She was laughing and her smile was hard and big and perfect, that was before you hit her in the mouth and deadened one of her front teeth. You and Mommy are getting along pretty well now, but what you don’t know is that she could establish an intelligence agency for suspicious wives. She has the codes to your voicemail, your bank accounts. It’s all stored up now, the things she learns, closeted missiles of mass destruction.
One day soon it will be too much and she will open her mouth about what she knows, what we all know, and you’ll turn on the defense, fight attack with attack, Shut the fuck up, you crazy bitch!
You have taught me how easily diamonds at Christmas become shards of glass of angrily busted car windows. How sweet poems on handmade cards become insults, nastiness, rage. You cannot hate a daughter’s mother, even if it’s just sometimes and expect the daughter not to, at some level, hate herself. You can’t expect boys and men not to see that in her eyes- no matter how pretty you tell her she is.
