Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 9

iv

One last last thing. In parentheses.

You see that thing I tell you about how people say Moshe came to be born? I have to tell you that though what happened to Moshe touched me near and deep because I was his twin, not witness and bystander to his life, I cannot shake the feeling that the thing affect not just me or others like me who it touch that close and personal, but all of us—all of us get deeply affected. I mean to say I believe none of us who went to that school ever recovered from this practice of big man abusing little girl. None of us, even those who were only witness and bystander to that particular wickedness.

I feel it have a whole heap to do with how Mosh turn out in the end, meaning how it turn out in the end between him and me, why we never did anything that gave us children together. I feel that maybe if something in me never damage by it (even the rumor of it), I could have approached him more bold. But maybe deep down I have a shame or a terror that is more than the shame and the terror I absorb from him because of his mother—I mean not his mother Rachel but his birth mother. Maybe is the shame and terror of girlness in the face of that unspeakable initiation of the body, so premature and so soon. Maybe is this denuding that happen in a girl's body before its secrets reveal even to itself or its owner, that put what Rachel call my dutty willfulness at bay, and I just follow-backa that terror instead of pushing forward and taking the lead the way I used to do in everything else with him.

They say a parent or grandparent and maybe even a far ancestor can eat sour grape or wet sugar, and as a result, pickni who come long after, their teeth set on edge.