Excerpted from BLACK CHAMELEON:

They say this story stays in all of us. The way trauma is passed through DNA. I can only assume so is survival. I don’t come to this by casual assumption but more a reading of bones, or what is left after bones are gone.

I know little of those women outside their strength. Maybe even less of the ones on the other side of Genealogy’s Brick Wall. I never met my great-grandmother Ma’Dea. But the way my mother talks of her, of all the women up the line of her blood, makes me believe in reincarnation, if only for a moment. Makes me see that the women before us left something in our genomes. A way to see out. They say that a memory changes its face every time you look at it. What is a memory anyhow, but a story you have heard rattle in you so many times that your mind calls it truth? My favorite truth happened long before I can remember. But my mother does.

The way she tells it:

It was during the swelter of an Alabama summer. Ma’Dea, who raised my mother as her own, held her by the wing. They fluttered into Kress, a five-and-dime store, something like a Woolworth’s. This was back before integration. But the white folks didn’t pay them no mind, long as they stayed in their own sky. The humidity itched up my momma’s throat something awful and left her a wicked kind of parched. She slipped her hand from the nest of sweat building between hers and Ma’Dea’s, flitted over a couple aisles in wander, and then beelined for the fountain marked White.

All the itch still climbing, she transformed into a plumage so vibrant, all the white folks stopped and stared. Tracked her with their eyes like they had pockets full of rocks and a hankering for stoning. To them, she was a leper, and there weren’t enough angels stirring in that fountain to heal her from what they were planning.

Just then, Ma’Dea spotted her, like any momma would. Saw them sharpening their tongues on the rocks. Made her voice a trumpet to my momma’s own rapture. Hollered, “Pat, wait!” And my momma froze, long enough for them to slide their hands back into their pockets. The corners of their mouths perked to approval. I guess it looked like the wild had learned the rules, like the Jim Crows could check their own chicks.

Just then, Ma’Dea saw them in all their happy and sepa- rate. Knew that, any moment, they could break their beaks for simply trying to scratch an itch. She saw my mother’s bewilderment and decided to send a stone of her own flying back.

“Don’t drink out of that one, it’s dirty.”

She pointed to the fountain marked Colored.

“The clean one is over here.”

Momma says Great-Grandmother’s mouth coulda killed her many a time. But how else could my great-grand teach my mother to traverse the past and the future? How else would I learn to be a tongue in two time zones?

She has always been a short thing, my mother. Five foot four in a house near full of six-footers. Skin of chocolate opal found near the Cahaba. Sang Marvin Gaye while teaching my brother and me how to build a sarcophagus for no-name Barbies. How to preserve the heart in a mason jar. How to liquify the brains and snatch them from the nose. We stomped bricks with our bare feet and baked them on our patio. We let Anansi and his pot of beans play in our eardrums before water fights and Skip It. She told us of Mahalia, Nikki-Rosa, Maya, and Nefertiti like they were the neighborhood women. Ones she grew up with. Ones we did too.

She rolled stories of sit-ins and water hoses in her mouth like revolution. Spat a sea of unfuckwithableness that turned our house into an island. Then she taught us to wade. To pray and wait for an answer. To take action in the quiet. Faith without works is dead and don’t nobody got time for that when you are mastering chronoclasms.

She had a saying: “If you ever think the time will come that you are too big for me, I will break you at the knees and knock you back down to size.”

She held all the smooth stones in a house of giants. She knew that soon, all of her children would be bigger than her, so she got her threats in early. Muttering something like:

If you are not careful, the goddess Enilder will turn you into a star. You will think of yourself more highly than us. Forget the days of cheese toast and sugar-dust sandwiches. Too celestial to ground your feet. You will think you are the all-knowing map. Move far, far away. You and your cul- de-sac wisdom. Will forget the joy of having nothing. Only return on the holy days. To kiss me with pity and hold to the outskirts of town. You will know someone took your cool, the way your mouth used to fold over slang. Occasionally slipping into your native tongue like an incantation of a for- mer self. Apologizing before someone figures out whose you are. Seeks you out. And if I don’t do it, the Lord will have to pull you from your own constellation.

Is that what you want?

She feared God as much as I feared her. But what is a healthy faith without a little reverent fear? Can you say you have spent time with a god if you have never been overpowered? It is the reason why we cloak. Why we only show so much of our glory every day. Why we only reveal our true selves in portions to those who prove themselves worthy. Why our children see us the most clearly. Why my mother felt the need to adapt. Leveraged her second eyes and some of her sanity for a job in espionage. She told us she used to work for an aeronautical tech company, but no evidence points to this being true. However, she showed us daily how she could stealth.

My older brother, Josh, was a trickster. Four years my senior, every moment spent spinning some web to catch me in. He was slim and lanky, like my father was when he spent his free time swimming, but branded with the kind of devilish smile that proved he was up to no good. He would trick me into believing that the hard-boiled eggs he put back in the fridge were turned solid by magic, only for me to try to splatter egg all over the freshly mopped floor. He would convince me that mudpies were made of chocolate, until I swallowed the first gritty bite. He would sneak in my room in the middle of the night and hide in my closets just to scare me. And somehow, by his weaving, I often found myself tangled on the wrong side of the almighty belt.

Maybe this was the time he convinced me that saying the words damn and hell were acceptable because they were in the Bible. I told my mom, “Damn, Mom, get the hell out of my room,” and then instantly regretted it. My brother’s jaw fell open in the guffaw of a fully executed trick, as she sniper-rifled the legs from underneath me with a single look.

I knew what whoopin’ was coming for me. So I did what any rookie criminal would do—I ran.

I tried to find a place where the assassin couldn’t find me. Lunged my body down the hallway toward the crawl space at the back of her walk-in closet. I knew she couldn’t reach the deepest part of it. Watched her swat her hands before calmly standing, staring, and proclaiming, “I’m not gonna chase you.” Then she wandered off to watch her sto- ries. She hadn’t given up. She was, after all, a spy. She had to be with us. But every 007 knows, some of the biggest threats hide in gentle words.

I bear crawled from the back of the closet, she nowhere in sight. I snuck down the hallway, trying to avoid every creaky land mine down the stairs. The TV began the Days of Our Lives theme, and she was locked in, but I couldn’t let my guard down. She may have gone in the restroom. She might’ve stopped by the kitchen for a snack. She had proven one time before that she could make a Cap’n Crunch box feel like a whip against my backside, and my brother was always giving her a reason to crack it. MacGyver had nothing on the way she transformed a broom handle, book spines, and jellies into weapons of warfare.

From beneath the balcony, I watched her back settle into the beanbag upstairs. I typically had an hour for the rage to cool off as she watched another pair of twins come back from the dead to cheat on each other with their biological dad’s long-lost stepson. I retreated to making amends, sure she would forget what I did with a sink void of dishes and a floor clear of Lego.

I cleaned for an hour before my mother came down and saw all the straightening up I had done. I held my breath, and she offered me a meal. She wouldn’t poison me, would she? After watching The Princess Bride three thousand times, I knew the art of switching glasses. I waited until her back was turned and pretended to swap everything, including our napkins. She kissed me on the forehead and returned upstairs to her room to sing Andraé Crouch and scrub the tub. I heard the bass of gospel spread throughout the upstairs, and I was in the clear.

In a weird twist of kindness, my brother asked me to play paper cutouts with him. Occasionally his boredom would outweigh his need to torture me in the way broth- ers find entertaining. We cut the bodies off celebrities in magazines and assembled them into new beings. Centaurs. Minotaurs. Oprahtaurs. We pushed them across a giant poster board, crafting scenes and story lines. Before long, my smile returned and my guard dropped. We ate dinner as a family, on a large green tablecloth that inhabited the family-room floor. We watched TGIF, laughed together at that darn Urkel. When Step by Step finished, we all got ready for bed. First, room raids to clean up any remaining toys, then showers so our pores wouldn’t be open in the morning. My mother always says that’s how you get sick.

My brother’s room was a powder keg of dirty dishes and paper strips left over from the day’s play, so he told me to shower first. I stripped down and turned on the hot water. There was a giant mirror that spanned an entire wall of the bathroom. When the steam was hot enough, it fogged over completely and became the canvas for finger graffiti. I wrote my name and drew a cat before I jumped into the shower to wash off the day. When I was done, I reached my hand around the partial wall to feel for my towel. I peeked out but couldn’t quite reach it. I bent my arm farther around the wall, searching for the hook, when a warm talon grabbed my arm and yanked me from behind the curtain. My mother was crouching on the water tank of the toilet with a belt in hand. With one swift move, she pulled my entire writhing wet body up into the air and began to swat.

I. TOLD. YOU. I. WAS. N’T. GO. ING. TO. CHASE. YOU.

My body flailed and bent. I lost body parts and regrew them under the storm of my own tears. I screamed until there was no sound left to fuel my pantomimed cries, and my body collapsed at her feet, cold and wet and toppled over. Once she was done, she smiled. Kissed me on my forehead and said good night. Her calling card of love. The way Black mothers on plantations would beat the hell out of their children first to get grace from the master. Better it be done by someone who wants to see you alive.

Now before you call it abuse, you must understand what spoil lies in wait for undisciplined children. That a planet waits to cast stones and blame it on a wild child. My mother knew the great lengths Love demands. That Time sets different parameters. That this need for perseverance, that thing in our DNA, isn’t always rational. No fight or flight is. It is a preservatory. It is selfish, the way that Black mothers are taught to silence. It says, if you are my child, you deserve the right of life. There is too much in you to lose. Even if it hurts me more than it hurts you, I know what sparing the rod might lead to. Even the gods have rules. And when someone broke them, it was a mother’s job to redirect them.

My older sister learned that firsthand, long before I was born.

My three older, stair-step sisters, Denise, Monique, and T, all shared a father with me but spawned from their own shared mother. Their momma and my father called it quits years before. And despite the way their momma forced him to divorce his violin or wielded her words like a battering ram, their union yielded three beautiful girls who sprouted under the City of Angels’ towering skyscrapers that cut through the sky like a legion of wings under the piercing sun. A halo of smog settled on the head of the brilliant metropolis of glass and Golden Globe, and the City held its own heavenly highway of stories.

My eldest sister, Denise, was born mute. Her umbilical cord danced too tightly around her throat in childbirth, but her mastery of ASL and her love of fried chicken and hidden candy under the foot of her bed made our twenty-one-year age gap seem trivial. She would con people who took pity on her stuttered step and chest-bound hand out of their money, only to sneak me some of it before turning her body into a trail of brown dust on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. The baby of their bunch, sixteen years ahead of me, was Monique. Smile like bottled lightning, slim like our father in all the tea-brown pictures of my parents frozen in the sev- enties. Always introduced me as half of her sister but loved running her hands through my wavy hair and the smell of new men. And then there was T right in the middle.

T was tall at every age. Eighteen years my senior, she was shapely and golden-boned. The only of my father’s children to be blessed with his emerald eyes. Her long, pear-skinned legs seemed to go on forever. She was a child of the City. A brash tongue bent on surviving streets barred by blue-and- red feuds. She learned combat before compromise and was determined to make sure that my father’s move to remarry and have more children didn’t challenge the territory she had already marked out in his heart. After all, when your turf is threatened, the only answer is to fight for it. But she didn’t know of my mother’s power.

My mother was no stranger to issuing her own valiant blow. She did what the woman before her couldn’t: she gave my father an heir. And T’s momma hated my mother for it. The growing resentment of the new prince turned them into water and fish grease, popping off at every meeting. My sister was pulled between the two households, trying to draw new boundaries or at least hold on to the ground she already had. I don’t know if it was the growing danger of being burned or an enemies-close thing, but the birth of the first boy in four pregnancies drew my sister closer to our father’s nest. And somehow T was the only other child that ended up moving in with my mother and father, shortly after my brother was born, when they escaped the City for the refuge of the distant suburbs.

The Inland Empire was a different kind of desert palace. Rolling hills of dust and quiet streets surrounded what would become our suburban kingdom, as folks fled the City to build custom lives around us. Manufactured homes in the dry summer sold cheap in exchange for an hour-long commute back to the heart of the angels. The light pollution that made the angelic sky a scatterplot of planes landing at LAX and satellites dissipated under the rule of the night. Out in the Empire, you could still make out Orion’s Belt. My father wanted to raise us somewhere we could still map out our way to safety. He stumbled upon our corner lot while ministering with a good friend. The ground was quiet, and the neighborhood was new. He knew this would be our fresh start. But T wasn’t going to let fresh beginnings leave her behind. Her teenage allegiance to her own momma made her hell-bent on breaking mine.

She made sure to sneak out and ditch class often enough to keep my momma’s instincts sharp, but, even at fifteen, she couldn’t shake all her budding responsibility. That small sliver of adultness, that brooding compassion, she saved for our brother. When it came to him, she loved him like a leaf loves to shield the branch. She was his second mother, toting him on her hip at every chance. Rocking him to silly songs. If only she had found a way to obey the rules of my mother’s new queendom.

My father often traveled for work, leaving my older brother and sister with my mother. One night, my mother left to take my father to the airport in the nearby canyon, where the roads narrowed and dipped, catching the fading sun behind the winding hills of the Empire. Both of them instructed her not to take my brother out of the house. My parents’ rule was easy: “Nobody in, nobody out.” It was nearing night, and the news stories proved that the city’s danger wasn’t as far away as once imagined. The streets between our desert oasis and T’s stomping grounds had their own reputation for vomiting up the bodies of young girls in the wee hours. My mother had seen reports of brown feet toe-tagged in the industrial washes, highway shoulders, backwoods. If they would kill a young girl, what regard would they have for a child? My sister listened briefly, before the need for snacks or drinks, or the longing for the outside air, became a hook in her chest. She grabbed her jacket and packed up my brother. It would just be a quick walk to the store. They would grab a few things and be back before my mother knew it. They didn’t plan on losing track of time.

Who knew T’s friends would be hanging on the corner until the dollar movie started? It was just a coincidence that they were all heading to stash cheap snacks at the liquor store before they snuck into Richard Pryor’s Here and Now. They would have snuck in the kid, but our brother’s bedtime was approaching, and he was at the age of recalling every new word aloud at the most inopportune time. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t try to convince her. Time wandering down the storm drain. Evening slipping to night. I guess T didn’t bet on how fast minutes could turn into hours. She also didn’t bet on my mother dodging traffic like she was in a high-speed police chase.

My mother returned to find the house with the lights still on but no movement inside. She checked every room for bodies, calling their names. Then she began recon of the block. She went door to door to all of my sister’s friends’ homes. But all of them denied seeing her. My mother then tracked down my sister’s boyfriend’s house, but she wasn’t there either. Knowing the way my mother worries, I’m sure the heaviness followed her from there. That it began playing movies in her mind. Altered news clips where my sister’s green eyes and brown skin were all you could recognize. In her arms, a bloated chocolate ball of a child sat. She always jumps to the worst conclusions. With nowhere else to look, she drove all the way back home to wait for enough time to pass to call the police. But upon opening the door, she found my brother sitting in my sister’s arms like they had been there all along. My mother laid into my sister.

“Where have you been?”

“Here.”

“Oh, really? So you’re just gonna sit there and lie to my face?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I don’t know that you left?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“You think you are just gonna take my baby and go wherever you please?”

Now, my mother says this is where my sister raised a hand to her. My sister says my mother became a deranged woman, loose about her mind, and attacked. The truth is a pendulum. My mother channeled all of her grandmother Ida Mae’s power. I’m sure my sister summoned her own gods. Then the clash. My mother called my father’s almighty belt to her, and it unbuckled itself from my father’s waist and landed in her hand. My sister tried to duck and dive. She tried to outrun the belt that grew longer with each swing. First it knocked her clothes clean off her. Then it absorbed my mother’s strength. With each returning syllable, bits of Black began flying off my sister. Each thunderous hit, another chunk of Black airborne. Until it finally happened. My mother had beaten all the Black off my sister.

The belt went limp at its conquest. My sister cowered on the floor, now a ball of red and bland flesh. My mother told her that the belt needed time to rest; then she would come back to turn her another hue. She closed the door behind her on her way out.

My sister wasn’t one for waiting for danger to return. She grabbed some of our father’s old clothes—a hoodie zipped up the front, oversize sunglasses—and headed out the back window like she had done so many times before. Jumping over the hedges, she slipped through the gate. She snuck down the block, ducking behind sheared bush and potted plant, until she found herself at the closest cross streets. She figured the council of friends might give her some advice on how to outrun my mother’s anger. She found them tucked under the fluorescence of 87 octane, in the midst of parking-lot pimping. But as she approached, she noticed how their faces twisted. The closer she inched, the more concrete their shoulders and backs became.

“Hey, you guys, it’s me, T.”

She tried to push her way in, but the group wanted noth- ing to do with her. T overheard two of them talking: “Can somebody get this white lady outta here?”

Before now she hadn’t looked down at what my mother had accomplished. The coal of her hands now a cooling ash. She stumbled from the group and found her reflection in the store window. All of her features were still there. But it was as if someone had siphoned all the amber right out of her. She pinched her arm to see if she was dreaming, but it just blushed red. She didn’t know how to fix this, but thought maybe going back to the beginning was a start. She had to find a way back to her momma’s house. Maybe she could reset her? The City has a way of reminding you who you are—and, I mean, after all, she did make her in the first place. But how would she get there? Her momma’s house was over an hour away on the bus. It was getting late, and all the weirdos were starting to come out.

T thought that the store owner may have a phone she could use. Opening the glass door, the chime echoed through the store and the small, familiar brown man appeared. He had an accent thick like sugarcane. She didn’t like him much. He had run her and her friends out of the store more than a time or two. He even had additional cameras installed to watch the neighborhood kids when they came in, after the last bell, to get Now and Laters and the Ninja Turtle popsicles with the bubblegum eyes. He swore they were going to fill their backpacks with Pabst beer and RC Cola when he wasn’t looking. But this time, he was gentle. He even smiled, stood up straight. She sauntered through the aisles and picked up a pack of Lemon Cremes. But here, where accusation had met her so many times before, no one was paying attention. The in-store cameras were turned to the outside lot. There was no extra attendant unpacking items in succession with the aisles she shopped on. No one seemed to follow her. She even went as far as opening her purse before getting to the counter, and no one moved an inch. She searched the back wall for a telephone but found nothing but an overstock of generic tea and Kudos bars. A couple officers showed up just as she was pulling a bottle of water from the back fridge. She knew this drill well. Soon they would pull her to the side and ask her to empty her bag. She readied herself for the inquisition, but none ever came. Instead, the officers just tipped their hats and grinned. She watched them discuss something with the store owner. They fussed back and forth, pointing at the TV monitor that dis- played the curb just outside the store. They quieted briefly as T paid for her items and left before things got any stranger.

Back out in the harsh lights, the officers rushed and headed for her friends. She watched as those who were too slow to scatter or too determined to reason were slammed against the sides of cars and shoved into the backs of cruis- ers. Most of her friends now lay facedown on the pavement, knees in their backs, backup arriving in haste. She watched the officers slam a few faces into the ground until blood spilled from more than one lip. A woman of a certain status drove up in the bustle. Her car sleek like the wildcat that protruded from its grille. She smelled like money and was clean like fresh bleach. She slid her body close to T’s as she entered the store.

“Shame, isn’t it.”

“Yeah . . .”

“Women like us shouldn’t have to worry about getting robbed on the way to get gas. I hope they lock them up for good.”

I guess T looked like she would agree. And while she didn’t, all words to argue back seemed to stick against the back of her throat. No matter how she tried to speak up, she was a prisoner to her own silence. The green in her eyes glazed over as the familiar bodies became more kin to the pavement. A fourth wall emerged, as she fixated on flashing lights and the nonchalance that settled in the crowd around her. The officers hurried her and the other bystanders along, saying there was “nothing to see here.” But she couldn’t stop staring, locked onto each body as they crumpled into the back of cop cars and disappeared under fleeting sirens.

By the time the cop cars had become ghosts on the horizon, the night had turned deep and unwelcoming. The warnings about “ditches and strangers with vans” echoing louder in the streets. T decided to beeline for the bus stop. It was the fastest and cheapest way back to her momma’s door. She hopped on the 22 headed east. The bus driver made the men up front give up their seats for her. The bus was fairly empty; a few homeless men stammered through the door, paying their fee before bumbling to the back. One locked eyes with her, his glassy jet-black eyes gleamed from behind his dark skin. T grabbed her purse and clutched it tight. Why did she do that? This seemingly involuntary reaction. This route didn’t stop in Fear as often as it did in Pity. She shook it off and looked out the window, watching for her stop. When she arrived at Wilmington and Alondra, she hopped off the bus and headed toward her mother’s place. The neighborhood was grimier than ever before. Bodies wrapped in blankets in alleys. Late-night deals in plain sight. All of it now making her shoulders rise and her arms tighten. She crept through the street, avoiding eye contact. None with the late-night barbers who used to let her sweep up for payment under the table. Even less for the fishnet women who taught her how to dance when her momma was working the graveyard shift. The street that used to know her name like its own child now had harsh breath and an uneasy embrace.

With quick pace, she made it to the steps of her mother’s home. The blue facade riddled with unruly cobwebs and a mailbox full of bills. She knocked hard. Her momma always sat in the back room and took her time when she wasn’t expecting visitors. Before long, a shadow passed behind the iron screen and then disappeared. She knocked again.

“What do you want?”

“Momma, it’s me.” 

“Me who?” Her momma peeked out from behind the door that crept open behind the dead-bolt chain. It opened wide enough to show her bulging eyes.

“It is me, T.”

Her mother closed the door, as if to open it, but nothing ever came. T knocked again.

“Woman, what do you want?” T’s momma yelled from behind the door.

“I want to come home.”

The door now opened all the way, to the mouth of a Glock pointed clean at T’s forehead.

“You ain’t my child. This ain’t your home. And don’t nobody who look like you got a place here.”

The door slammed hard. T staggered from the porch, mumbling her mother’s words over and over in confusion, like a lost soul in a world that was willing to open its doors, but not willing to call her its own.

My mother said she didn’t see T for a while after that. That it took her getting pregnant with my niece to bring her Black back. Not full tint, something more red-boned. It is something in the process of carrying new life that brings you to yourself. By then, my mother had moved on to birthing me and had given up trying to convince my sister of all the things she had to lose.

Contributor’s Notes

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, librettist, educator, activist, performer, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, Texas.

Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination and was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award and an honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. A German translation, under the title "Berichtenswert," was released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag.

Her most recent choreopoem, PLUMSHUGA: The rise of Lauren Anderson, debuted at Stages Houston Oct 13 and was recently mentioned in the New York Times Fall preview. Her upcoming memoir, Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co, 2023), explores the use of modern mythology as a path to social commentary. This is work that spills over to a collaborative art exhibit "_____ as Myth" which was on exhibit until January 14, 2023 at Rice University.