Coal to Diamonds (3 page)

It’s hard to say one-syllable words with my accent; I have to avoid them entirely if I can. No abbreviations for me. A mic is always a microphone. A bike has to be a bicycle. Sorry if your name is Mike, ’cause I’m gonna have to call you Mikey. Maybe Michael if you make a fuss. Another way to deal with the problem of the single-syllable name is to just throw another name at the end of it. Lee becomes Lee Lee. Jane becomes Jane Ann. June becomes June Bug. And then there is the way the accent renders a name unrecognizable, or turns it into another name entirely. Take my
mom’s name, Velmyra. Folks call her Myra, but for years my paternal granny thought her name was Maura. The woman was shocked when she saw my mother’s birth certificate. She’d been calling her daughter-in-law by the wrong name all those years, and no one else had picked up on it.

Let me tell you about my mother, Velmyra Estel—Velmyra after her granny Velvie May (whose twin brother 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—and
the 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 voice
was God, and he was battling the devil over the state of her soul. The devil’s voice rang through Velmyra’s mind; he goaded her forward. But something was fending him off; it was God himself, she knew it to be. It was pure love, sweet and tough, and protectiveness too. The good voice filled her, drowning out the evil rasp. My mother lingered in the hallway, her hand slick with nerves, wrapped around the knife. She was exhausted and teeming with fear. She listened to the good voice; she fought the devil. In the end, the devil vanished. He was simply gone, absorbed into nothingness. And then God was gone too, but she could feel his warmth upon her. She retreated down the hallway, flinging the knife beneath her bed.

Maybe that environment was why my grandma couldn’t separate the sort-of bad from the really bad from the unthinkable, and maybe it was why she was capable of pulling a gun on her husband over a random argument but then spent the night with him the night before his trial for raping their daughter.

The whole world was against Velmyra Estel during her trial. She had to sit in the courtroom with no one but her lawyer on her side. She must have felt so small. People came and testified against my mom and called her a liar in the courtroom. The judge did not rule in her favor, so her lawyer gave her the best advice he could, in that time and place:
Get yourself married and get out of that house, don’t look back
. My mother left the courtroom and moved herself into Aunt Jannie’s house. Then she waited for some man to come for her so she could have a home of her own again.

Two years after my mom tried to kill her father, when she was just twelve years old, she was condemned as a liar by a judge. That morning, just a girl, she listened to her lawyer’s advice to find a man and fix her situation. One would come, she was certain. Meanwhile she’d bide her time at Aunt Jannie’s, where mess and chaos ruled, but where she slept unmolested.

She wouldn’t have to wait so long. When she was fifteen, Velmyra Estel married a man named Homer Ditto. By the time she
was twenty-four, she’d had three of Homer’s babies—my big brothers, Benny and Robbie, and my sister, Akasha—but there was no more Homer. Their split wasn’t too messy—Homer stayed in the picture, wanting to be a father to his children. Mom found another man, not for long but long enough to have his baby, number four, Mary Beth Ditto. My mother gave me Homer’s name and let me think he was my biological father. He was back in the picture soon enough and didn’t mind taking me on, and it was probably too sad and exhausting to tell me the truth anyway. I was just a kid, and Homer was as much of a dad as I ever had. So he gave me his name and I became Beth Ditto. Most people think it’s a punk name I made up when I joined a band, but it’s the truth. Mary Beth Ditto, born February 19, daughter of Velmyra and Homer.

Mom went on to have more husbands and more kids after Homer—my little brother Jacob, and my baby sister Kendra—which isn’t strange in Arkansas. Women there have plenty of children before their heads stop spinning from their own bewildering childhoods. I wouldn’t change my big, crazy, loving family for anything in the world, but women in Judsonia never had a break to catch their breath or to think about what the hell had happened to them and just let some sort of adult perspective emerge. Growing up there is fast and harsh. Young women pull a bunch of children into the world behind them, without a rest for their brains or their bodies, or their hearts. No space to understand the abuse that had happened, never mind time to figure out how to unlearn what they didn’t even know they’d been taught, or to have a fighting chance to break the cycle. There are just babies upon babies, each one a link in a chain that connects back to the past; the legacy of abuse is made so normal you feel you have to move halfway across the country to come out from under the spell of where you’re from. I got out eventually. But first, I had to get through Arkansas.

My mother’s reputation in Judsonia is complicated. She is an extremely likable woman, affectionate, capable of keeping everyone, including herself, in a fit of wild giggles. She is a warmhearted Sagittarius, and a really funny person, goofy as hell.

To this day, in my family, Halloween is like Christmas. Like seventy-five people show up to celebrate, just from our family. We have hayrides and weenie roasts and bob for apples out in woodsy Georgetown. There aren’t many cops in Georgetown, so we can pile twenty kids on a tractor and drive them illegally up and down the river and not get caught. My mother was always so funny on Halloween. Everybody loved her. Kids loved her. She was
that
mom, the one everyone wanted as their own. She lived for those adoring kids and loved them right back.

My mother loved dressing up so much that one Easter—she couldn’t even wait for Halloween—she dressed up as a bunny and went to work. She was wearing a full-on bunny costume, thinking it was so funny, but she’s a nurse who works with old, delirious people. The patients started reporting to the doctors that there was
a huge white rabbit walking around, the size of a person. The doctors took notes about those old people having a psychotic break until one of them finally spotted my mother, jovial as hell, bopping around in her bunny costume.

Mom didn’t drink or smoke pot or touch cigarettes. Her mother smoked cigarettes during her pregnancy—at her doctor’s recommendation!—and as a result, Velmyra Estel was born with severe developmental lung problems. She’s never even tried a cigarette, and I still won’t smoke in front of her.

Affectionate and kind, pure in her habits, my mom was regarded by the town as a modern-day witch because she was different, significantly so in a place where guns are kept as casually as pets and where white people use the N-word so frequently their kids think it’s just another harmless word. But Velmyra was different. As she still likes to say,
Homey don’t play that
. My friends freaked out when they learned they weren’t allowed to spit the N-word in my home; it was probably their first experience of resistance to racism—of even recognizing racism. My friends also thought it was bizarre that we didn’t have a single gun stashed in my house, not even a regular old hunting rifle. Mom wouldn’t allow it. She’d lived through way too much violence to ever feel comfortable around weapons. How could she look at one and not remember her mother threatening to shoot her brother?

But that wasn’t the only thing that set us apart from the rest of Judsonia. Mom filled a vital role in the town. Judsonians would ignore her in the street, but when their daughters became pregnant (or decided to make an effort to not get knocked up) it was my house those girls were brought to and my mother who took them in for abortions and birth control. Mom fought violence, racism, and sexism in her own ways, in the small spaces where she was allowed control as a single mom in 1980s Arkansas, and this inconsistent yet very determined strength was enough to get her branded as a witch. If that was witchy, so be it.

When I was a little kid, if you asked me what I wanted to be, I
would say a nurse, same as my mom. It made sense that my mom didn’t indulge in unhealthy vices; she worked hard keeping other people healthy, and she tried to keep herself healthy too. Except she dieted. Mom was always on a diet, and her diets got more extreme when she was between men. After my father left, her body got smaller and smaller. She chopped all her hair off into a cute, wild style, started wearing Converse, and disappeared for days at a time. By the time I started high school, Mom, who had once been the size I am now, had starved herself down to a size zero. She was vanishing before our eyes.

It didn’t help that there was never anything to eat in the house. As far back as I remember, we never had food in the cupboards and never a telephone to call for help when our hunger became scary. One summer Mom left my big sister Akasha in charge of baby number five, a newborn. No money in her pockets, nothing but her genuine charm and desperation to barter with, Akasha set out on the long walk to the country store, the sun smacking down on her little head. She was just a girl, trying to figure out how to ask the man at the store to give her some milk so she could make her baby brother shut up.

Of course the man wanted to know, where was our mother? Our mother was working. She was doing her best to keep a roof over our heads and was desperately working as much as she could to put something in those bare cupboards.

I remember Akasha stoic, her teeth gritted against tears. Too proud to weep in front of the country-store clerk, even if her tears might have been the thing to break him down and get him to hand over a gallon of milk. I remember Akasha coming up the road with nothing in her hands, the baby wailing on my lap in the shade of the porch. I jiggled my knees, trying to soothe his cries with the motion, but nothing would work except food. Akasha was mute with rage, her jaw clamped shut around feelings too big for her body. What sort of monster lived inside my big sister? Some beast of hurt and anger, fear and injustice, some animal made of pure
weariness she kept inside. She climbed the porch steps, and her empty hands said everything. Akasha guzzled some water from the tap and then hiked over to see Aunt Jannie, who always had a cup of milk for us and would probably throw some Little Debbie snack cakes into a bag as well—a marshmallow pie or cupcake encased in waxy chocolate. That’s just the backward way girls grew up in my family: daughters shouldering burdens, becoming baby adults. Aunt Jannie didn’t ask questions, Aunt Jannie didn’t even blink, she just poured the milk into a piece of Tupperware and sent Akasha on her way, hustling back home before the Arkansas sun turned the milk sour.