A Face of Courage

“I’ll tell y’all what, if y’all can have Carmen walking by the time we get back, me and ya’ mamma will take y’all roller-skating,” Dad said one afternoon, heading out the door with Mom and carrying two garbage bags full of “merchandise,” as they called it, draped over his shoulder. With a marvelous deal like this, nothing else needed to be said. Immediately, we began setting up our training course in the living room. “Hurry! Move that couch over there and move the other one right here,” Melony ordered Martin and me. The two couches, setting on opposite sides of the room, would now become destination points for Carmen. “Let’s do it!” We chanted with great excitement and anticipation of roller-skating. In no time, we were going at it, getting Carmen’s training underway. Back and forth we crawled from one couch to the other, guiding Carmen by the arms and looking for any signs of independent balance. Minute after minute, hour after hour, we treaded the hardwood floor on our knees, fighting off exhaustion with the thought of being able to finally go roller-skating with the other kids from the neighborhood. “Walk to big brother,” I prompted her from a few steps away. “Come on, Carmen, you can do it!” Back and forth for several more hours we went, taking only a very short break or two. Finally! Sure enough, by the end of the day, all we had done had paid off. Carmen was walking! We all celebrated, skipping across the squeaky floors. The thought of being able to go roller-skating with the other kids couldn’t escape my mind. Butterfly sensations rumbled through my stomach, and chills rolled down my back in my anticipation of our reward. I couldn’t wait to try to be the first one to scramble to the door and tell Mom and Dad the good news. And so that evening we all camped out like puppies at the front door waiting for the mighty master to come home. We waited and waited to share our monumental accomplishment with Mom and Dad, competing for bragging rights as to whose efforts produced the winning result. “I’m the one who got her walking,” Sherl asserted, spirits high. “You must be crazy! Don’t you see those bruises and scratches on my knees from all that hard work?” I retorted, amid all the laughter, prompting Martin and Melony to take a glimpse at the bruises and scratches on their knees as well. As the seconds turned to minutes and the minutes turned to hours, we continued to wait, late into the night. As we waited, we somehow fell asleep and later awakened to the bright sunshine of a new morning piercing through the sheets that we used for curtains over our windows. And still no Mom and Dad. “I’m sure Mom and Dad will be home any minute, y’all know how they are,” Melony said, playing down the desperation we were all starting to feel. With no phone in our house, all we had was Melony’s assurance that Mom and Dad would return to take us roller skating. Clinging to that small hope, we waited another day. “Man, this is wrong! I hate the way Mom and Dad be doing us,” I finally said by nightfall, no longer able to withstand my frustration. “What did you say?” Melony asked in disbelief. “I said I don’t like the way Mom and Dad be doing us.” “You shut your mouth and don’t you ever say nothing like that again!” Melony demanded putting an end to my frustrations. “You and Martin lie down, and I’ll see you all in the morning,” she concluded, tucking us in. And so we spent another night hoping—hoping to see Mom and Dad, hoping to get our chance to go skating. The following morning we woke to Melony bickering back and forth with what sounded like the police. I could hear the distinctive sound of their walkie-talkies cutting into the conversation. “Young lady, we have called a social worker who will be arriving here any moment, and we need you and your brothers and sisters to go with her.” “Please don’t take us. My mom and dad will be right back,” she pleaded. “They just went to the store.” But the two sheriff’s men knew something that we didn’t know. Mom and Dad had been arrested for shoplifting and drugs and were headed back to prison again. “I don’t want to go!” I yelled. “I don’t want to go!” Finally, the two sheriff’s men picked me up and stuffed me into the backseat of the social worker’s car where my sobbing siblings already sat, defeated. Our ride to the crisis center was short, but I filled the car with much-warranted crying and screaming until I was hoarse and couldn’t yell anymore. Seeing our few possessions being set out on the street moments before we had left hadn’t helped, either. This was the darkest night of my life. I lay sobbing my heart away in the foreign bunk bed of the crisis center, my face buried in a pillow soaked by salty tears and globs of snot from my runny nose. Why! Why! Why do things have to be this way? The time we spent in the crisis center still today is a void in my memory; but the nightmares of each night were the same daunting images that continued the breaking of my seven-year-old spirit.