“Because she’s your whipping girl,” Brianne says, and then her forehead falls as though it might connect with the ground. It doesn’t, and she nods instead. “Daddy and I hurt her so that nothing would ever hurt you.”
The woman sits back against her heels now, her fair hair flying and falling in wisps, some catching against her wet eyelashes, some attracted to the corner of her mouth. She is every cinematic representation of beautiful despair. She is built to be lovely even as she falls apart.
“Let’s call Daddy, Cherish,” she suggests, her eyes wide as though she’s stumbled upon an escape. “He’ll tell you anything you want to know,” she promises, like she hasn’t put together that I already do.
“Did Jerry poison my toothbrush, or did you?” I ask, and her eyes leap to me and then between Cherish and me. “You know as much as he does. You’ve done as much as he’s done.”
Brianne licks her lips, her eyes returned to mine, and lifts her chin. When she breathes deep before opening her mouth to release it, I don’t know what she’ll say next.
“You love her, Farrah,” she begins. “I know you do. It wouldn’t have worked if you didn’t.”
Her shoulders sink and this time when her phone rings, none of us react. It is decided. The world outside these fences is aflame, and everything can burn but us.
“I hate that the world is this way,” she tells us. “I hate what this country’s done to you—but there’s no taking it back and there’s no denying how beautiful it’s made you.”
Cherish’s grip slackens, and when I cut my eyes to see her, there is a look I’ve seen many times before. It’s the way she looks at me when she is weak or confused and thinks that my strength means I’m the villain, that I made her so. At last it’s directed appropriately.
“The more we learned, the more aware Daddy and I became of just how many roadblocks this country has intentionally put in place to disenfranchise people like you . . . the more beautiful you became. All of you. The more we realized that you don’t see it.”
Nichole Turner walks into the yard, and Brianne Whitman continues as though she doesn’t sense my mother behind her.
“Black Americans, you don’t realize how much you’ve benefited from all the pain and suffering. Being forced to be resilient and authentic in ways white Americans can never be. You don’t wonder what you’d lose if these systems were dismantled completely.” Brianne lets her chin fall into her chest and when her full weight presses into her legs trapped beneath her, her ankles twist and so do her hips until she is sitting flat on the ground, her legs bent beside her.
“We need the pain, but you couldn’t stand to see your own child experience it firsthand,” I say when she seems to have exhausted the energy to tell it. “Something about her being yours altered that conviction.”
“But then she met you,” Brianne exclaims, enlivened again and reaching out to me while my mother approaches her from behind. “And you showed us what to do. When she was hurt, you hurt yourself, and we knew. You could hurt for her.”
I wrap my arm around Cherish when her shivers become full-body tremors that rattle her neck and teeth. She is hearing the truth from her mother, the way she had to, and it is threatening to overwhelm her. Her body itself is trying to reject it, to stop her mind from processing what Brianne Whitman is confessing, so that Cherish can remain naïve and coddled and WGS. She can’t unknow this now, but the void her parents built in her has left her frame unbuttressed. Weaker under pressure, and easy to debilitate.
Cherish is a work of art, and I have the Whitmans to thank.
“We decided it that day, after the nails,” Brianne tells us. “And we wanted to do it right. We wanted to be safe. So we discussed it with Leslie.”
“You don’t mean safe,” I interject. “You mean you wanted legal protection.”
“We wanted his advice—that’s all. And then he put a name to it, he said it was called a whipping boy, and he was so much more ostentatious than we would ever be. He could afford to be, but it was only ever out of love, for us.” Brianne looks at Cherish with eyes as wide as saucers, as though she needs her daughter to believe. “Daddy and I only wanted what’s best for you. It’s the only reason.”
Cherish is holding on to me. Our foreheads are pressed together and one of her hands is still around my wrist because she’s too overwhelmed to remember to let go.
“There’s a way that this could sound plausible,” I tell her mother. “It could sound well-meaning and tragic, ignorant but not malicious. There’s always a way when the victim looks like us and the perpetrator looks like you.”
Nichole Turner stands above Brianne Whitman, looking down on the woman, who has a strange expression of hope in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know where I might be going from here. I know the words, but when my mother looks up at me and curves her lips upward just so—just enough that her infantilizing dimple winks at me—I know how it ends. Nichole Turner does what I always knew she could. Without speaking she conveys everything. She tells me how Brianne will be enticed into the water and how Cherish will come out of it with me.
“This could all have been out of love, Brianne—except that you enjoyed it.”
“I didn’t—”
“You told me what I was. You gifted the book to me, and you sat so close I could feel you trembling with delight.”
She falls quiet, and it speaks volumes.
“Having and loving a Black daughter doesn’t change that you wanted to toy with me. You wanted me to know.”
“I gave you the book because we could finally begin. We’d waited so many years, for you to be positioned just so, and all that time, we knew Cherish needed this—”
“You made dating Kelly a punishable offense so you’d have an excuse to hurt me. You wanted to do this.”
“Yes,” she interrupts me this time. “But only for Cherish’s benefit.”
“Then once more,” I say. “For Cherish’s benefit.”
I roll my head to look into my best friend’s eyes.
“Baptize me,” I tell her, knowing that both our mothers can hear. “The way you did the last time.”
Cherish’s chin snaps to the side, and despite everything she is looking to her mother for shelter.
“RahRah, I can’t. I’m too upset. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Che. I baptized you.”
“I know, I just don’t want to mess up again—”
“You were perfect. Whatever happens, you always are.”