Coal to Diamonds Read Free Page B

was named Elvie Ray, of course) and Estel after her granny Estel Robinson. At some point in my mother’s childhood, my grandma looked at my mother and said,
Well, you’re the other woman
. My grandma learned about her husband’s abuse of her daughter and didn’t even get upset about it, let alone press charges. She would have almost certainly left it alone if her friend and confidante hadn’t said to her,
You need to take your girl to the doctor; you never know what she might have, now
. And so she did. Once in the doctor’s office, the situation flew out of my grandmother’s hands and into the hands of the state. That’s how my mother found herself, not yet a teenager, sitting in a courtroom as a judge decided whether or not her father had raped her.
    The intense sexism, the male privilege that no one even recognized as such, were simply the way things were, the way things had always been and would always be in Arkansas. White man’s rule was not questioned or challenged, especially by some twelve-year-old girl telling stories about her very own father. In a place where so many men were abusive, the whole system operated to deny the existence of abuse, to make it normal, unpunishable.
    The trial lasted from the time my mother was twelve and a half to the time she was fifteen and a half. The whole town knew about it, and hardly anyone was on my mother’s side. School was unbearable. The local newspaper ran a story mistakenly naming my mother’s brother as the accused. Rumors were everywhere and she felt like there was nowhere to turn.
    People came to the courthouse to testify against my mother. My grandma took my mother and her little brother—my uncle—andthe three of them fled to Aunt Jannie’s. But the night before the hearing, Grandma slipped away and met with her accused husband at a hotel room. His lawyers were hiding out on the street, snapping pictures of her as she came and went, and they brought those pictures before the judge.
Your Honor, here is a photo of this man’s wife, the girl’s own mother, leaving a hotel with him this very morning! Why would she stand beside him—sleep beside him!—if he was guilty of the horrible things he is being accused of?
Maybe because she was schizophrenic, for starters. Maybe because the violence in her household had been so severe for so long that the most awful things became normal. My grandparents’ relationship was really tumultuous long before the courts were involved. My grandmother once grabbed a gun and went after her husband, intending to kill him. Her son, still just a kid, got in her way.
If you’re going to protect that bastard I’ll shoot you too
, she’d told him.
    My grandmother wasn’t the only one who went after that man with the intent to kill. Some years earlier, my mother had done the same thing. Never imagining anyone would care about the abuse she was experiencing, or that an adult who was interested in protecting her would appear and intervene, Velmyra decided to murder her father. She had a knife—not a gun—a weapon suited to her size, in her ten-year-old hand. She couldn’t have handled the weight of a rifle, or the kick of it; she didn’t like weapons and was a terrible shot. But knives are sneaky, and they can be hidden and whipped out at the perfect moment. Walking down the hallway toward the room where her father sat, my mother suddenly heard a voice, the raspiest voice she ever heard.
Go ahead
, it said to her, and she knew the voice belonged to the devil himself.
You’ll feel better
, it urged;
he’ll be gone
. Velmyra
would
feel better. Her body would be hers again, maybe; her nights would be hers, her house would be hers, maybe even her life would be hers. But another voice swooped in, not an ugly voice at all, something smooth, golden.
Don’t do it
, it counseled.
It won’t make anything better
. In the dark hallway, my mother was having a vision. That sweet voicewas God, and he was battling the devil over the state