For the New Jersey Four
This story is for Patreese Johnson, Terrain Dandridge, Venice Brown, and Renata Hill, who, in 2007, received prison sentences ranging from three and a half to eleven years for the alleged felony gang assault of a man who threatened to rape them in New York City’s West Village. The story is also for Chenese Loyal, Lania Daniels, and Khamysha Coates, who were offered plea bargains in the same case. The women have been known collectively as the New Jersey Seven.
Verniece
This is a story that matters, so listen. I’ma tell it. The summer my words were snatched away, the weatherman on Channel Nine kept promising a heat wave. Had me dreaming of days curled up under the dust and rattle of the AC with my son, Anthony Jesús, and nights out in the Village with my lady and our squad. It was the summer after high school graduation, and a heat wave woulda left my mother too drained to hassle me about my life, my weight, and my plans. None of her muttering: “What you fi do, Verniece, sit at home with that girl, getting big as this house while your baby starve? Yu na have plan?” My plan was I was gonna go to college to major in Astronomy, back when I bothered with a future tense. When I told my mother this, she usually grunted. “No, yu nah gwan waste my money or yours, studying some devilment ’bout birthdays and signs.” She would sigh her anger, sucking my dreams from me like the gristle from a chicken bone.
I looked forward to sweating it out that summer, gathering words for that fight. But the damn heat wave never came. Days, weekends, weeks, months passed, and nothing. I started to imagine myself leaping into the television with the weatherman and snatching the gray-speckled rug off his head, just to show him how it felt to have small hopes taken away. But that was not my spirit back then, before my words left me. I was patient, quiet. I waited.
I don’t remember everything that happened that night, but the things that came before—I know those like my skin. Those stories—the ones that make what happened to us matter—are not about a man who tore into our summer and broke us. Those stories are about us—about me and my lady, our homegirls, and our son. Who we are and who we were, who we might never be again.
Before they took my words away, it was me and Luna and Anthony Jesús, plus my mother, when she wanted to act right. Even when she didn’t, our family was the proudest thing I had. We were not like the teen pregnancy stories you see on television. I wanted Anthony Jesús as much as anyone ever wanted anything—a million times more than I ever wanted some man. Truth be told, my mother was happy to learn a baby was coming, too. Seeing Luna and me together and so strong for two years made her panic, started her in early on those things that middle-aged mothers go through—hassling me about when I’d find a husband, worrying endlessly about growing old on God’s Green Earth with no grandbabies to care for. Sometimes, when the bookshelf buckled or a doorknob came loose, she would take an Olympic breath and sigh out: “Yu know we need a man in the family, with yuah papa gone now.”
I would get up quickly from wherever I was and fix whatever was broken. Then I would remind her—silently, in my mind—that my father had died a decade ago, and had never been the handyman type in life. Be careful what you wish for, my fantasy self would say. I knew it wasn’t a son-in-law, or even grandchildren, that she wanted. What she wanted was a different kind of daughter. If I had come to her at any point in high school to tell her I’d sworn off pussy and decided to go celibate, become a nun, she woulda flown to the church, tithed her whole pension, and sung the choir off the altar with the force of her gratitude. Her problem with me had nothing to do with motherhood. It was about womanhood, and which kind of woman I would be. In my mind, I told her all about herself. But in real life, I said nothing. Just counted the weeks till Luna and I had saved enough money to pay her cousin for his Y chromosomes.
Luna went to school and worked two jobs that summer, while Anthony Jesús and I kept each other company, held each other down in my mother’s house. Luna would come home from her afternoon gig at the Pretty Look nail salon on Bloomfield Ave with soul food dinners for all of us, my mother included. Every time, my mother refused. She would look at the bag in Luna’s hand, all grease-heavy and smelling good. She’d breathe in the smell and you could see the want on her face. But she’d purse her lips, pat her stomach, and say “M-mm, no. Me nah feel settle,” and turn back to her room. Then I’d hear her, late at night, muttering to herself as she crept to the kitchen, rifling through the leftovers, “Just fi likkle pick.”
Luna didn’t let my mother get to her. She just hid her hurt and kept trying. She sang to me and the baby whenever we needed it, brought home bootleg telenovela DVDs whenever I asked, and told me my body was her favorite place on earth. Her lips were like sponges just wrung free of cool water, perfect on Anthony Jesús’s cheeks, perfect anywhere on me.
We weren’t sweating what my mother—or anyone else—had to say back then. I still had the words I thought would protect me from everyone’s opinions, keep me doing alright in the world. I found those words the same day I found our son’s name, and I thought both would hold me down forever. That was a year before that night in the Village, four weeks after I pissed pink on the EPT strip. My mother dragged me to Saint Anthony’s, eager to have me “put likkle face” in, let the old church ladies see me again before my belly started to show. Her face was a bright mix of shame and glee—happy about the baby, sad about me, and so I was sure the day would be miserable. I hated church usually—the slowness of it, the meanness of the women, the sour-breathed gossip and the eyes raking you down when you went for communion, looking to see if you’d put on weight. My father never went to church, and when I asked him why once, sometime in the third grade, he told me that being black and awake in America was enough of a double-bind for him; he had no interest in an afterlife that promised more of the same. I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but it sounded right to me. I hustled my way out of going to church as often as I could, and when I did go I did my best to send my mind away.
But the day my words came to me, I couldn’t get out of going. And so I sat in the pew with my mother, letting the music pass the time as always, thinking about eating fried wantons with Luna when I got home. But at the end of the service, something happened. The closing hymn that day did something—took me from the shaggy pew where I was sitting, made me forget the press of my too-tight pantyhose, my mother’s hips against mine. I can’t remember what the song was called, but I remember how the lyrics surprised me. They were not the usual tired mess about a man in the sky who said Do This and Don’t Do That in a language nobody understood, or a ghost who played truth or dare games with your soul. There was no double bind, no damned-if-you-do, no one saying what to do or be. The lyrics were just a name. And just like any word changes shape when you say it long enough, this word changed, too. Eventually I stopped hearing everything around it, and the name meant something simple: You are a person. God loves you. That’s it. So I got up and I left the pew, but I took those words and the feeling with me. I put all that into our baby’s name—Anthony Jesús—and let the past sag to the ground like a churchlady’s scowl.
For the next few months, I made those words a gate behind my ears: We are people. God loves us. That’s it. I repeated the words in my mind wherever I went. Whatever was going to get to me had to fit through those words first. Those words kept me going with my head up when I walked around the city with my homegirl LaShanya—a slim, pretty, light-skinned type girl with a long auburn weave. But after I found those words, I almost didn’t care. I could walk with my homegirl and just be with her and laugh. When I went around Newark holding Luna’s hand or pushing the baby, those words kept the frowns and pointing fingers at a distance, and made it so I almost didn’t see the looks people gave us. By August, I thought I had gotten good at a new kind of hearing, a new kind of seeing—the kind that made no room for people’s chuckles and the stares. I thought I had learned how to walk in the world just feeling like a person, no matter who else was around. But the night my words fell away, I learned I was wrong.
It was a Saturday night, and I remember the moon looking bright, like the white tip of a freshly-manicured nail. It was hot, finally, and Luna had gotten off from the Pretty Look early, so we went with our girls to the Village to relax, do us, enjoy the summer. We were rolling deeper than usual that night—there were seven of us altogether: me, Luna, LaShanya (who we all call Sha), and our girl TaRonne and her woman, plus two of Sha’s friends—a rich, Jersey City girl named Margina and a brownskinned femme named Angelique, with dreadlocks and an eyebrow ring. Sha collected friends like jewelry, picking them up whenever they caught her eye, valuing them enough, but never crying too hard over the occasional loss. The people she brought around usually fell right in with most of us. They were Sha’s people, and so they were cool with me.
TaRonne’s teacher girlfriend, Arya, must have been upset about something, because she snorted like a sick dog every time TaRonne talked on the ride to the Village. TaRonne treated Arya’s attitude like how a little kid treats a video game, pushing random buttons and giggling at the response. “Arya’s in a bad mood,” she announced to all of us from the back seat. “She don’t understand why we always walk around in the Vil when we could be sipping sherry with other young professionals like her.” Arya huffed and looked out the window. “Nah, I know what it is,” TaRonne said after a few seconds. “She’s just worn out from being so intelligent, and accomplished, and fine. It ain’t easy being a dream come true.” She squeezed Arya’s waist and let her head fall onto her chest. Arya sighed and ran her hand over TaRonne’s fade, pushing her own cheeks toward the window to hide her smile.
We parked on West Street and walked up to the pier on Christopher to drink Coronas and watch the rich people’s lights flicker on the other side of the Hudson. When we got to our regular bench, Sha turned to Margina and asked if she knew anyone who lived in one of those apartments. “I just want to know who my neighbors will be when I blow up,” Sha explained, crossing her legs and fanning her dress out behind her on the bench. Margina leaned her back against the railing and said, “Um, I don’t think I know anyone there,” her voice all nervous and small. I decided then that I liked Margina—she was quiet like me. But TaRonne liked to make waves.
“Right, right,” she said. “I guess you not in the habit of mingling with Daddy’s tenants. I know how it is.” Margina turned the color of Pepto Bismol and tried to sound hood. “Nah, it’s not even like that, yo” she said. Then she gave an awkward smile, crossed her legs, and looked down at her shirt.
We could all tell the little girl was feeling TaRonne, but Arya wasn’t bothered at all—she was out for fun. She uncapped a bottle of beer for Margina and raised her own. “To new experiences!” she said. Then she tongued TaRonne down right there, hands palming TaRonne’s skull like a basketball, her eyes wide open and staring dead at Margina. The couple’s love tiff must have dissolved by then, because they didn’t stop kissing till Luna busted out in her jingle-bell chuckle. Then the rich girl went from pink to purple, and turned her face back toward Jersey. Luna put her arms around my waist and we threw our heads back, drinking our laughter like raindrops.
That was the last thing I remember before the man showed up—all of us laughing, kissing, feeling at home in the night. I keep that moment high up on a shelf in my mind now, in a row of important times I do not want to forget: the first time I saw my baby smile, the day my father gave me a toy telescope for no reason other than it made him think of me. The day I found my words-- the words that left me, in a second, for a lifetime, that night on the pavement.
Now that my words are gone and I have nothing but time to think back, I remember another moment that belongs on that list, too. It’s another story that matters, even if it only matters to me. It was months before that night in August, but I see it clear as yesterday. Anthony Jesús hadn’t been born yet, but he was one of our plans, along with my astronomy and Luna’s zoology and a tall house in the suburbs with mango smoothies always in the freezer. Luna was reading on the sofa while I sat at my father’s old desk, making flashcards for a Spanish test. The day was so still it almost seemed fake. For hours, it seemed like the only things moving were the little bits of dust that floated in the strip of light between my mother’s curtains, tumbling slowly over themselves like cells under a microscope. Suddenly, Luna slammed her book shut, the smack of the pages cutting into the silence.
“People talk,” she said. She was looking at me but past me, like how my father used to do. Then she paused and focused. “The only real difference between people and animals is that people talk. That’s it.”
It was the kind of moment that flags itself for you, announces its importance right away but waits till later to be explained. I thought of plenty of reasons to remember the moment right then—how beautiful Luna looked with her face pinched up in thought, how nice it was to know that no matter what anyone said about me and my girlfriend, they couldn’t say we weren’t smart. But as time passed, what Luna said stayed with me, and soon the question came up: if that’s true—if talking makes a person—then what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I speak?
That’s when I started looking for words, I realize now, now that I am still and boxed in quiet, with no one to listen and everything to say. Those words meant the chance to be a person, in my own language, for real.
That moment is as big as a planet for me now. Every day I think about it and find new stars, new rings. I remember it together with our laughter at the pier, just before my world fell from its socket. Now, in the quiet, I remember the seven of us, Luna, LaShanya, TaRonne, Arya, Angelique, Margina, and me—chilling, glowing, taking gulps of the night and sprinkling it out in laughter. I remember our loudness, how huge we felt, in the best way, and how free. I can’t say exactly what happened after that, how it started, what the man said, what he did, how we responded. But I remember opening my mouth saying, “We are people,” and feeling, believing, that words could help us.
TaRonne
We left the pier with our faces tied tight into smiles, me and my lady in the front. Arya was laughing, her hand all warm and wet in mine. Vernice and Luna were behind us, quiet as usual, cuddled up in each other like West Fourth was their living room. Sha’s little friends were holding down the rear, and Sha was on the near side of the curb, brows sharp as switchblades, face in full glow like she was a drag queen walking for femme realness. Before shit went down, the night was nice, cool, everything peace. Then I saw it happen in sepia tone, time winding down to slow motion. I knew shit was wrong before the dude threw his cigarette at us, before he touched Arya’s neck, before he slung his threats at Sha. As soon as he called Vernice what he did, I knew there would be a fight.
Me and Arya had had some problems in the car, but she had brought it down to a simmer by the time we got to Sixth Ave. She was finishing up the summer session at Morton Street Middle School, and someone had asked her to make a list of the students that should be kept apart in the future, just so that a gun or a baby didn’t show up in class one day. I told her I didn’t think that was her place, that by the time they’re twelve, kids should be allowed to conduct their little romances and tragedies as they please. She shot me an icicle stare and told me I was naïve. “You can’t pretend the teacher’s role is strictly intellectual in 2006. Things are not that simple for us, TaRonne.” Full first name. I knew she was tight. I told her I knew she wasn’t simple, that I liked how complicated she was. She told me “Complex!” and started popping some shit about transitive verbs. I put my arm around her, said I didn’t know the difference but was ready to learn. She liked that. By the time we walked past the movie theatre on West 3rd, we were back to our black-dyke-hood-love like in Set It Off, all Cleo and Ursula again.
We walked past the newsstand where some skaters and rich kids and a handful of gay boys were scattered around, all talking kiki and enjoying the night. Merengue horns and hip-hop beats hovered over the pavement, and the smells of beer, smoke, and McDonalds’s French fries mixed thick on the street. In front of the sex shop on West Third, a homeless woman was sitting on the ground, talking to her scarf, and when we passed the woman, Sha’s little richgirl friend stared like she saw an alien, then stepped over the woman like if she wasn’t there at all. I whispered in my lady’s ear: “Arya, what you think would happen if we brought her back to Newark with us, or took her up to Harlem?”
Arya laughed. “She’d probably front like she wasn’t scared, just like she’s been fronting all night, trying to be smooth.”
I laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a front. Maybe there is some smoothness to her, after all, deep, deep down.”
Arya slapped my finger and shot me a look that made me wish we’d stayed in bed that night.
Then I saw him, half a second before he saw us. He looked about thirty-five, although I found out later that he was in his twenties. And from the table he had set up on the pavement, covered with DVDs, I would have sworn he was a bootlegger, although the papers, the prosecutor, and everyone else who mattered called him a “filmmaker” from the next day on. When he opened his mouth at Sha, I didn’t care what he called himself.
“Hey, princess!” he said. Sha didn’t respond. He didn’t give up.
“Sweetheart, I’m talking to you.”
“She’s not interested,” I told him from the far side of the pavement.
“Why don’t you let her speak for herself?” He moved from behind the table and took a pull from his cigarette, stretching his neck to see where my voice came from.
“She doesn’t have anything to say to you,” I said, loud now, getting hot. “She’s gay.”
Then he looked dead at Verniece, thinking she was the one talking, instead of me.
“Who asked what you think, you goddamn elephant!”
Verniece was shocked frozen, like if someone had snuck up on her and flashed a camera in her face.
“Fuck you, nigga!” I shouted.
“Oh, that was you?” he said, taking another pull and finally turning my way. “You look like a fucking man. What, you sticking up for your woman? Don’t go that way, sweetheart.” He looked at Sha and grabbed his fly. “I’ll fuck you straight!”
I shouted something—I can’t remember what, the words and the spit and my teeth all mixed up in my mouth. He flicked his cigarette at us, the cherry arching across space toward Angelique and Margina, who looked like they would piss on theyselves soon, if they hadn’t already. We were in motion before the fire landed. I can’t really call what happened after that. Wild how time and space make perfect sense up to a point, but then unravel like shoelace threads in the tick of a second. I saw his hand on Sha’s neck, in her hair. I felt my fists pushing hard into his shoulder, the blows never landing heavy enough. I saw Angelique and Margina get some hits in too, felt my surprise. I heard some words come from behind me, from Verniece maybe, but I have no idea what they were. I never saw a knife, and I never heard the muthafucka cry. I wish I had.
Arya is the only one who hears me when I say I saw it coming from that one word—elephant—before the spit and the fire and the bodies flew. Everything after that was like dominoes falling into place on a track. Tell my femme friend you want her pussy. Fine. Call me a man. Whatever. None of that is new. But what he had for Verniece was something different, like she wasn’t even human. He tore the person out of her, like he tore out that clump of Sha’s hair, like the judge tore up our lives and everything we know, chunks of us missing like the truth missing from news stories.
The cops, reporters, lawyer, jury, everyone but my woman skips over that part, that word—elephant—like they want to press fast forward and get to the part of the story that really matters. When the first report came out without mentioning what he called Verniece, Arya said it was because the white reporter didn’t see why that kind of “dehumanization” would mean a fight to us. I realized then that Arya is the naïve one. I tried to let that word sit in my ears for a long time after she said it: dehumanization. By then I knew I wouldn’t get to hear her talk like how she does for a long time. That was our good-bye.
I can’t speak for the rest of us, but I was glad when he took that step and put his hands on Sha. Hands you can see, touch, prove. Hands you can bite and burn and tear away. But words, I’m learning, ain’t shit.
Sha doesn’t know if she stabbed the man. They screamed the question into her face for hours and each time she said “I’m not sure.” But I know this—I wish I’da had a knife in my hand, wish I’da heard him shriek like a dying cat under my fingers. I can see that night however I want to see it now, and I see it this way all the time: I’m the one with the knife, and I am sure. This woman sticks it in that nigga real fucking good.
LaShanya
The knife was a gift from my mother. She gave it to me to keep in my purse, because she loves me, because she didn’t want me to be the first of the two of us to leave this world. They were killing black dykes in Newark—like they always are, here and everywhere. But now there was Sakia Gunn, my cousin’s sister-in-law’s friend. Sakia with the deep eyes and the sweet, shy smile, Sakia who was fifteen and could’ve been me, stabbed to death on the same corner where I used to catch the bus to work, right by the twenty-four-hour police booth, and still nobody saw. Wal-Mart doesn’t give time off for hate crime danger, and I had to work late nights all the same. My mother called that knife my bodyguard. She gave it to me to keep me safe. To keep me whole and coming home.
When I think of that night, I think in lists of things. The courtroom is a big wooden box, and as I sit here, my heart tries to fly away from me, but the lists bring comfort, something solid, like place. I think of the smell of my hair grease melting under the streetlights. I think of my newest sisters, Angelique and Margina, wailing behind me as the fire flies at my eyes. I think of the man, the stripes on his shirt getting bigger and bigger until they are on me, right on top. I do not see my knife. I try hard, plunge my fingers into memory. I try to see myself pulling the blade from my bag, try to feel what I have never felt before, my knife slipping past skin, sinking quickslow into flesh. But all I can remember is the weight of his hands on my scalp, those stripes falling on top of me, like how this judge sits on top of the room, hovering like Jesus hovers in holographic paintings on project walls.
Judge McBain, sitting on top of me, his face breaking like a cloud, his cackle crashing over me like lightening. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” he says. He tells us that’s what we should have thought. That was the command that should have traveled like blood from our brains to our bodies. Not DUCK, not BLOCK, not PROTECT YOURSELF, YOUR GIRL. As though “I’ll fuck you straight” was just a pack of words.
The man has a name, but I’d rather not say it. He’s sitting up in the wooden box, just like he sat up in some reporter’s face, saying he didn’t think it was a crime to “say hello to a human being.” I’ve never felt more alone, more confused than in this moment. I feel like this man and Judge Dickbrain—that is what I want to call him, where they’ve got me to now—I feel like the two of them come from the same place, someplace where a bootlegger without a pot to piss in and a white man with power dusting his shoulders like dandruff can be two sides of the same damn coin. This is not a place I ever thought I’d be. I did not know I lived there.
But Dickbrain is the bootlegger’s parrot in his sentencing speech. “Sticks and stones,” he says first. And then: “Words don’t justify hurting a human being.”
I sit and remember stripes and sounds and hands flying into me like arrows, wonder if either of them knows how good “human being” sounds right now, as a thing to be. Sounds like a safe place in the flow of words and things, something as sure as the ticking of the clock at the back of an old, hollow room. I wonder if either of them will ever know how hard it is to think human, to be human, when someone is threatening to knock, force, fuck the you out of you.
I hear our names hit like tennis balls across the courtroom and I think: we are women whose names mean things. Luna is bright and distant like the moon she is named for. Verniece is named for her mother, who’s more like her than either of them can admit. Arya is named for a beautiful kind of song. Angelique is named for an angel that welcomed her mother to heaven in a dream. Margina is named for her father’s choice to forget the center of things and live well on the sidelines. TaRonne is named for a grandmother who spat in a white man’s face for calling her “girl,” and an aunt who raised all her sisters’ children on the salary of a maid. My name comes from Hopi and Spanish and Newark Ghetto, my mother’s imagination and a mix of things. I wonder if Judge Dickbrain would have anything to say about that.
But when the thunder quiets and the cloud seals up, what he has to say becomes clear. He forgets about names and drops numbers on us all. Angelique Ramos, Margina Thompson, Arya Lewis: Six Months Probation. Luna Martinez: Three years in prison. TaRonne Daniels: Five Years. Verniece Smith: Eight Years. LaShanya Parish: Ee-leh-ven.
I will be nineteen tomorrow. The next time I am able to run through a sprinkler on my mother’s street, kiss my girlfriend in a quiet room, make myself a turkey sandwich, dance or sing with no one watching, I will be thirty. I will never remember a bloody knife in my hand. No one will ever have to prove it was there.
When we left Verniece’s house that night, her mother was on her way to church. While they got the baby dressed, Mrs. Smith asked Verniece over and over to come with her to the service. Verniece said, “No,” sweetly, then strapped on a baby sandal, pulled up a tiny sock. Her mother asked one more time on her way out the door, and Verniece said “No, thank you” again, like she was turning down butter for her toast.
Mrs. Smith held the baby and said to all of us:
“Alright, then. You girls be safe.”
We were seven girls to her. Seven women to us. Either way we were people, sure as time.
Verniece
All I do now is remember: I am wrapped up in Luna, my girls, and the warm, licorice sky. The man tears like a bullet through our night.
“Who asked what you think, you goddamn elephant?”
I am afraid for my girls, for Luna, and for myself. I see him reach for Sha, his palms spread wide and ready to grab, and I think of her mother, of my mother, of Anthony Jesús. I don’t know what will happen. Then, the thing Luna said wails in my ears: The only difference between people and animals. And my own words swirl up into orbit: You are a person.
So many things are going on in this moment, I feel like my mind is breaking down to mesh, to screen. I cannot tell what is happening inside, what out. I see a man in pink come, I see a woman run away. I see fingers and DVD cases and a nugget of fire fly. I see Luna and my mother holding the baby, smelling good like ackee and saltfish. I see blood curled around stripes, and Sha holding a silver-soaked blade. From one side of my ears or the other I hear him say again: “Goddamn,” “God-damned,” “God-dammned elephant.” I feel my words popping like firecrackers inside my mouth, and I let them blaze the air:
You are not a man - Your sneakers are cheap your clothes are corny you have no job - You are not a man, hands on your sleepy little dick trying to prove it’s there - You are not a man, what you know about God some white man in the sky—If your God doesn’t know me blackdykemanwoman god fuck him he’s doesn’t exist—You are not a man—You are a joke.
All those words, all that time, beat into nothing like bubbles on the wind.
Columns of newspaper ink are burned into my eyes now. I try to make faces out of the lines and curves. I do not want to read what they say about us. I would rather see anything else. In one paper, I see my mother’s head turning toward our apartment door, an almost-eclipse of black hair and a crescent of powdered cheek. In another, I see Luna’s proud neck, Anthony Jesús’s sourdough chin. I say nothing, think less than nothing—just try to pull their faces through the ink.
My first night here, I make a decision: pretend. I play games with myself, pretend to fool myself like my mother used to do when she didn’t want to really see me. I tell myself things are not what they are. I pretend that things are me and Luna and the baby, slow-swirling mornings dappled with laughter, endless hours of warmth and clean air. If I want to share my dinner with Anthony Jesús, I decide he’s on my lap, his polka-dot bib brushing my wrist. When I miss TaRonne and Sha so much it hurts my chest, I decide they’re here on the cot with me, and we laugh.
I wade through the sea of orange suits, eat my food, and do what I’m told. I try not to think in days, how they close me up in darkness, stuff all my holes with funk and pain. I try not to think of how time is crusting over, baking me deeper into stillness each time the moon brings a day to its end. But there is always the ink, running like blood up and down the newsprint paper. Even when I say nothing, the headlines are always there: KILLER LESBIANS’ TRIAL BEGINS… SEETHING SAPPHIC SWARM DESCENDS… BLOODTHIRSTY PRIDE ATTACKS.
On the morning after my first night here, someone puts a newspaper in my hands. It’s folded open, and before I read the headlines, I find my name in the middle column, a gnarl of ink at the center of the page. “Verniece Smith, 19, was hauled out of the courtroom after an emotional outburst. ‘I’m a mother,’ Smith wailed.” I read up from there, wading back through the spread of letters, grabbing onto the lines and curves I can find sense in. I float up through my girls’ names and ages, the number of years each of us will lose starting now. Then I see the headline: LESBIAN WOLFPACK HOWLS ITS END.
This is when I decide to make things whatever I want them to be. If I cannot be a person I decide, then anything can be anything at all. I find Luna’s hand in the paper, our baby’s eyes in the black of the ink. From the space around me, I carve my mother’s smile and a deep, wetwarm sky.
I get up, tighten my grip, and breathe. Then I part my lips, clear my throat, and say—out loud—”Let’s go.”