One Sentence Triggered a Memory

They say that smells trigger memories, as does music. I've heard of people hearing one phrase or sentence and an entire experience floods back, washing them with anxiety, fear, anger and, on occasion, happy feelings. I never thought I would hear something that I'd never remembered hearing and have an entire nightmare come back to me, as well as recognizing that it was a pivotal moment in a cascade of tragic events that followed me for a decade.

But today I heard a woman say something in the store to her kid, and I stopped dead in my tracks. The sounds, images, and panic came rushing back to me, in short flashes of still images at first, then a black and white movie. The fact that a person can remember something in such detail, when they have no recollection of the actual event beforehand, is frightening.

Her name was Melody. She was two grades older than me and I guess I was in 4th or 5th year? She was a slightly light-skinned black girl, with medium brown hair. She always had it in pigtails or divided into three sections, with the hair twisted rather than braided, and secured with those weird little ball-elastic ties that we all used back then. She was tall for her age but proportionate. She had a brother that was in my school but younger than me, but I never saw him except for the bus stop in the morning. He didn't talk. They didn't have a father and I'd only seen the mother's face a few times when she'd stick her head out the door to look around.

We lived on a side street with lots of couples, but no families. They rented a trashy house, as most of the people in the neighborhood did. We were the only white family and one of the only few who actually owned their house. Even though I was a petite blonde haired, blue eyed girl, Melody and I still ended up doing things together on our street. A lot of times we'd draw on our driveways with chalk, or listen to music and look for 4-leaf clovers in the yards of the abandoned houses. Sounds innocent enough, I guess. Sometimes she'd touch me in ways I didn't like. It wasn't sexual abuse or anything, I just didn't like her leaning up against me while we were sitting there, or playing with my hair, or asking me to sit in her lap. I never really spoke out; I just squirmed away and said "stop it," in a way that probably sounded more like, "aww, stahp it!" It didn't really happen a lot but it happened enough that I really hated it.

Many times, if we were close to her house, we would start to hear very loud adult screaming coming from inside. There would be banging, crashing, whatever, and then her brother would start scream-crying. I'm not sure what went on in that house but, every time it started, Melody would jump up and run in the house.

I told my parents about it. My dad said, "Typical for a family like that." My mom said, "Leave it alone. It's none of our business." So I pretended it wasn't ever happening.

One day Melody and I were outside and we were talking. Who knows about what, but she ended up asking me if I was ticklish. I said yes. Back then it was true. She poked me in the ribs with a finger and asked me if it tickled. I told her no, she just jabbed me. Then she grabbed my ribcage with one hand and gave a little squeeze. It tickled, yes, and I did my best to mask the fact that it DID tickle and I was getting ultra-creeped out. So I told her I was hungry and was going to go home to get a snack and I'd see her later if she was still out.

But when I stood up, she grabbed me with both hands around the rib cage and started tickling me pretty aggressively. I was flailing around, trying to get loose, but she thought it was because I was just being tickled and she was laughing the whole time. I had my eyes closed because I didn't want to see her horrible, gap-toothed mouth grinning at me while she did it. I didn't see that she'd leaned forward to get up and, with my arms moving around, I kind of hit her across the side of the head with my forearm. Not hard, I don't think.

She shoved me down hard onto the ground, stood up and straddled me. Her face transformed into something I'd never seen before. (This was my first experience with any kind of real-life violence rather than cartoons on TV) She leaned down about a foot from my face and said, "You little fucking bitch," raised her hand back, slapped me hard across my left cheek, turned and left. I was literally speechless.

I was a good kid. I rarely got in trouble at home and I'd never been hit, much less slapped. I'd even only been spanked twice. I got up, refusing to let myself cry until I got in the house even though my face was twisted up. When I walked in, my mom could see the red handprint covering, basically, the entire left side of my head. Naturally, I had to tell her the whole story.

I don't think my dad was home from work yet. I don't know why my mom went over. Maybe to do a mom-to-mom talk? Whatever the case, she made me go with her. She wanted Melody's mom to see my face.

There was lots of screaming inside the house and we could hear a TV turned up loud. I guess eventually the mom heard the doorbell/banging on the door and opened it. She wouldn't come outside but rather stuck her head around the edge of the door. The entire inside of the house was pitch-black and a musty smell blasted out through the crack.

I remember that she immediately began yelling at my mom in some unintelligible ghetto slang. My mom still stayed calm. She turned my head a little and informed the mother that Melody had done that to me. A girl who probably weighed twice as much as I did and was a good foot and a half taller than me. But the mom yelled about how nobody could prove Melody did it and so on. Then more indecipherable shit.

The mom kept yelling and I don't think my mom could make out what she was saying. I did make out a few words that I knew were supposed to be bad words about white people. My mom just stood there with her hands defiantly propped on her hips and her lips pursed tightly.

The mom simply would not quit yelling. She didn't even really have anything to yell about, seeing as my mom had literally only spoken two sentences. My mom could tell she wasn't going to get anywhere with that crazy lady.

My mother threw her hands up in the air and kind of waved them around a little and screamed back at that woman, "All you know how to do is yell! I feel sorry for your children for having such an ignorant, evil hag for a mother!" And she grabbed my hand, spun us around, and stomped us back across and down the street.

And that's where the memory ends. With the realization of "All you know to do is yell," and the fact that it came from my mother as she was trying to get reasons for why her little girl was smacked by a girl with a seriously unfair advantage.

I started thinking about everything that had happened after that. I'd never had bad interactions with black people prior to that. Honestly, I hadn't had many at all, despite where we lived. My dad was racist, but I hadn't adopted his attitude, mostly because my mother was the opposite end of the spectrum. 

My mother had a black nanny, who lived in the bedroom at the end of the hall and taught her how to cook, the proper way to clean and polish antique furniture, and the words to the old black spirituals that they'd sing together as my mom sat on the counter and watched "Mammy" (I swear, that's what she told the kids to call her...it wasn't a racist term just imposed on her) wash the dishes after dinner. My mom has quite a long repertoire of stories about Mammy. She died before I got to know her, but I have 2 pictures of her holding me when I was a baby.

But after that day with Melody, I've come to figure out, my attitudes and emotions towards black folks were not the same. It wasn't fear so much as just the strongest sense of hate. I knew a long time ago that I'd felt that was from a young age, but I didn't know started it.

As I got older, the neighborhood got way worse, and we couldn't sell our house without losing our asses on it, so I endured the abuse, beatings, bullying, and hatred for almost 10 more years before we were able to move to a better neighborhood.

I lived a life as an openly-racist white girl, dated a couple of skinheads (not nazi kinds, just white-power kinds), and tried to find some kind of retribution for all my pain and scars, both mental and physical, caused by blacks. I know damned well that there were plenty of harmless people who became the victim of our hate crimes, and I didn't give a fuck, because their people did the same thing to me: the innocent, petite little white girl who just tried to go to school, get good grades, and keep the hell to herself.

I can't say I've eliminated the racism from my mind. My interactions with them have not improved, really. I just stay out of those areas unless I'm driving through, just to remind myself why I've worked so damned hard to make sure I never have to live in a ghetto ever again. To be honest, I don't care that it's 2019 and we're supposed to be a more "enlightened" society. I know not every black human is a bad one. Deep in my heart, I know that, and I'm fully aware that, peel off that skin, and we look the same. They have human DNA the same as me. But still.

It's made my life full of inner-conflict, that's for sure. As a young adult, I had to learn to hide my racism and do my absolute best to treat everyone the same because that's what's expected in this day and age and, really, unless they victimize me first, do they deserve to be treated with prejudice? No. To make things even more complicated, my now-boyfriend was married to a black woman - a pretty ghetto one, I thought, despite her intellect and ambivalent civility when I met her once - and I came clean about all my feelings one night when I was drunk. He's never held it against me.

And all it took to come to this realization was a mother in the store, raising her voice at her screaming kid who wanted candy. "All you know how to do is yell!"

Because of things like that, I remain...