Inherited Trauma Theme Analysis

It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.

I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”

“Neither am I.”

I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out of my mouth.

Decagon Women’s Correctional Center, right outside Norristown, owned by a private company, is worshipped by the locals for the work it provides: serving visitors, guards, clerical staff, cafeteria workers, health care folks and most of all construction laborers repairing the road and fences and adding wing after wing to house the increasing flood of violent, sinful women committing bloody female crimes. Lucky for the state, crime does pay.

How can she persuade women to improve their looks with products that can’t improve her own? There isn’t enough YOU, GIRL foundation in the world to hide eye scars, a broken nose and facial skin scraped down to pink hypodermis. Assuming much of the damage fades, she will still need plastic surgery, which means weeks and weeks of idleness, hiding behind glasses and floppy hats. I might be asked to take over. Temporarily, of course.

Nothing announced her attack on me. I’ll never forget it, and even if I tried to, the scars, let alone the shame, wouldn’t let me.

Memory is the worst thing about healing.

As we walked down the courthouse steps she held my hand, my hand. She never did that before and it surprised me as much as it pleased me because I always knew she didn’t like touching me. I could tell. Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me. Rinse me, actually, after a halfhearted rub with a soapy washcloth. I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch.

Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little. But you have to understand: I had to protect her. She didn’t know the world. There was no point in being tough or sassy even when you were right. Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired. She could know any of that or how her black skin would scare people or make them laugh or trick her.

He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

When the police responded to their plea for help in searching for Adam, they immediately searched the Starberns’ house—as though the anxious parents might be at fault. They checked to see if the father had a police record. He didn’t. “We’ll get back to you,” they said. Then they dropped it. Another little black boy gone. So?

Complaining about her mother, she told him that Sweetness hated her for her black skin.

“It’s just a color,” Booker had said. “A genetic trait—not a flaw, not a curse, not a blessing nor a sin.”

“But,” she countered,” other people think racial—”

Booker cut her off. “Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”

His words were rational and, at the time, soothing but had little to do with day-to-day experience—like sitting in a car under the stunned gaze of little white children who couldn’t be more fascinated if they were at a museum of dinosaurs.

Having confessed, Lula Ann’s sins she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, race, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath.

So they believe.