A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [153]
“You look like a princess wid your pretty braids, and deep down you a creepy little man after some pussy. That all you thinking about. You got the idea you sit in here and keep your mouth shut, ain’t nothin’ going to happen to you, but you got that wrong. The stink a you is flowing out and getting in my face. You jus’ got to sit there and your stink come and get us, make me want to stab somethin’.”
I was relieved of her because someone new came into the pod, someone whose life history was surely already on the tip of her tongue. I knew from the talk that went on most of the day and night that Dyshett had moved up from Illinois with a cousin and the cousin’s boyfriend, in search of a better life, but bringing along with them their drug connections, reinforcing one of the many crack spokes that fanned out of Chicago. I had heard her brag that she didn’t have children yet because she’d had the brains to get Norplant. She wasn’t going to be a welfare mother with ten kids in a project and she wasn’t going to die from any virus. She was everything the others thought they wanted to be: She had knowledge, and strength that went beyond theirs, and she had beauty. She had the singing voice that was as potent as love. In addition to her natural gifts she was rich. She spent a major part of each day cataloging her possessions. She had furs, TVs, diamonds, shoes, earrings, silk underwear, alligator purses. Any item mentioned at table would trigger her memory of her wealth at home. When Sherry said she loved toast, Dyshett put both hands to her head and said, “I got me a toaster in every room. I jus’ love toast too.”
It was those scores of toasters that made me start to think that there might be common ground for us. She was still a child at heart, dreaming up her house, believing in it, committing to it as it became more and more fantastical, with a toaster at every turn. She was all nerve, so energized by rage she had a hard time sorting out what she most hated. I understood right off, after she’d left my cell, that I’d missed my chance with her, that if I’d been quick enough, smart enough, I might have been able to begin to know her. Perhaps it was odd, that it mattered to me. I wanted her to realize that if she could channel her energy she could actually make a path for herself. I often had the sensation that nothing else was real but the confines of the jail and the enraged and hopeless girls who passed through. My family existed only in a dream. I came to think that it was there, in the jail, that action counted for something. And although Dyshett was far stronger than I would ever be, I understood finally that in many ways we weren’t so far apart. When she had stood on Debbie’s mat I hadn’t been able to listen to anything but the drone of myself, in order to remain steady and fearless. For a good part of my stay I tried to think how to get back to the conversation that would reveal and instruct.
She told different versions of a particular incident, as if it were a favorite bedtime story. She used to tell it to whomever was currently sharing her cell, and so I heard it several times over that summer. It was about the time she was raped, depending on her mood, by an uncle, a stranger, a half-brother, an old boyfriend. In some of the tellings she pulled out a knife she happened to have in her shirt and stabbed him as the rape was in progress. She waited for the perfect moment so that he would “be dyin’ and comin’ at the exac’ same tahm.” When she first said that line it naturally got a big response and so she included it in the following versions, repeating it several times in the course of one telling. Sometimes she’d weave Debbie’s story into hers, telling her captive audience that Debbie hadn’t been so fortunate. “That girl, she couldn’t kill her daddy now, could she? And how could she take the poor little babies home to her mama when they look jus’ like her ole man? That night I kill my Sidney I stole all a his diamond rings