Bildungsroman

after Kerri French

I'm not ready to say I didn't deserve it,but I can admit that, at twelve, I thoughtI could live a better life with white people.That summer, I'd left a letter outlining my planpoorly hidden in the pages of my first bible:Please adopt me out. I don't fit here,I begged in a buoyant pre-teen cursiveunweighted by failure or rejection, having never learnedto read between white girls' smirks whenever I madea point to sing "See You Later!" in locker-strung hallwaysas they headed to cheerleading tryouts or soccer practiceand I walked back to Eden Gardens South.So, when I whispered bitch one Monday morningas my mother railed about something I'd forgotten—shirts left on the clothesline to sag with rain,blood on the toilet seat, paper I'd thrownabsentmindedly into the bowl again—I had it coming. I was green as a banana,and my mother, blessed as she was with the giftof work-hardened fists, beat me ripe.No school for three days, and I only returnedwhen she found an oversized shirt of my sister's:sheer bishop sleeves with Madonna's faceprinted in oranges and reds—logical enoughfor a Louisiana September, long enoughto cover bruises rotting from purple to brown.My friends knew enough to be suspicious.I'd been threatened enough to stick to a story.My teachers—who knows?—might have looked the other way.I cradled my head in the Madonnas and thought of herPepsi commercial: a black-and-white reel of her childhood—perfection on a screen within a screen. I'd be grown before I learned she was namedfor a mother who died early. The fictionsof who we've wished to be flash before us, burn relicsthat aren't extinguished even after flesh heals.I wish my mother understood the mysteryof my skin, how lonely I've always feltin this house and hers, that was so often emptyof the choir of her voice, which drownedout my own with its lush siren, but stillheld together the plaster of walls that, without her,felt as vulnerable as blades of grass.My best friend laughs, "I wonder if every black girlremembers a day her mother beats her into a woman?"Madonna wails: "Everyone must stand alone."I learned as much, and in the tear-stiffened hazeof the days after, I learned that there are lyricstoo godless to be uttered, and others—more subtly so—for which I am compelled to lift my tongue.