DIVINE PERFECTION
By Anitra Winder

This is an excerpt from the book That Takes Ovaries!: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts (edited by Rivka Solomon, Three Rivers/Random House 2002). Reprinted by permission of Rivka and Anitra.   http://www.thattakesovaries.org/.

I was born twenty-six years ago to my mother, my closest stranger.  Sonya was only eighteen, a rambling teenager in the projects of Baltimore.  She conceived me with one of the popular neighborhood Black studs.  But Sonya had a lot of traffic coming her way, so it's anybody's guess who daddy is.  With my creation came years of poverty, regret, and upheaval.  We lived a nomadic existence, never laying our heads anywhere for long. 

My unstable childhood walked hand in hand with an unstable education.  During bouts of depression over a lost love, Sonya would be far too miserable to see me off to school.  I stayed at home and consoled her with my homemade macaroni valentines, sprinkled with glitter and love.  To my disappointment, I'd later find them in the trash.  I was too young to understand; my love wasn't enough.  My love was too small.  It was only five years old.  

Sonya was lukewarm and always longing.  She swore all would be right with the world if she could just have a man at night.  Not some nights, every night.  I saw many come and go, because whereas Sonya may have equated happiness with a man, she never kept one for long.  "Meet Uncle Conrad," "Meet Uncle Larry," she'd say, and I'd think to myself, You only have one brother, where the rest come from?  I was overwhelmed with lost uncles who found their way home by way of her bed.

The years went by, I grew older, and my mother's past became a guide to my future.  When I was seventeen, she was newly married.  Her last words to me cut to the bone: "I finally have a life," she said, "and now you need to find your own."  I wasn't to return because she was finished raising me.  It was that simple.  I slept at the Greyhound station that night, a discarded product of discord.  It didn't take long before I realized sex was an ever-present trade for a warm bed and a hot plate.

I am ashamed of the company I've kept.  Other women's husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons.  I offer no excuses, just the truth about the depths I traveled for the sake of self-preservation.  Young and ignorant, I fell unnoticed into the shadows of our society.  While others my age were celebrating their graduation from the university of this and getting their degree in that, I gave up my ass in a dirty hotel in Hollywood. 

Lying on my back, I'd look right through whoever was on me.  Breath stinking of gin or beer, their sweaty bodies pushed and shoved inside me.  Every day, lists of phone numbers of Johns and Mikes who'd pay a buck or two to see a friend and me "Do what dykes do."  Me on top, her on the bottom.  It doesn't matter, I told myself, 'cause it'll all be over when the money hits the bed and he closes the door.

I tried to suppress my cowardly inclinations.  Suicide could never be a successful escape, yet it whispered to me once or twice—I have the ugly scars from our past dances together.  I'd fantasize about being found dead, beautifully draped across my bed.  At my funeral, I'd hover above, watching the monsoon of tears.  How lovely, I'd think, the world really did care. 

One night I stood at the mirror, patching my face together after a trick nearly split my head apart with a baseball bat.  I craved rebirth.  Evolution.  I was growing sick of the husbands, sick of the boyfriends.  Sick of spreading my legs. 

Finally, barely twenty-one, I abandoned my old life in hopes of living a new one. 

In the beginning, I stood on the back of our prized public assistance programs to help me gain my sea legs.  It was not easy returning to society when for so long I'd looked up at it from the gutter.  Help was fleeting, empathy was rare.  People were dismissive and disapproving.  They rarely looked me in the eyes, as if they'd catch my misfortune.  Even my social worker wasn't supportive.  She glared at me over her Coke-bottle glasses with the warmth of a cobra.  How can she help me, I wondered, when she doesn't believe in me? 

I began my venture into the mainstream timidly.  First I bought an old car.  Then I drove twenty miles to a temp office, wearing a $10 suit, scuffed-up sneakers, and a glow of anticipation.  Intimidated but hopeful, I listened to my job description.  I bit the inside of my jaw raw wondering if they knew what I was. 

I soon sat on an assembly line.  Eight hours a day, plus overtime, for $4.25 an hour.  It was a hundred degrees in that warehouse where I shoved "talk boxes" up stuffed-bunny butts.  I sweated and stuffed for months, and with my earnings moved into a clean, furnished single.  For the first time I worked without the weight of shame and came home to a quiet place that was mine.  It was dreadfully lonely, but I took comfort in the fact that the bed I slept in was used for just that and nothing more.  Even so, I rarely felt the calm cover of sleep.  In my dreams I'd see them: men's haggard and twisted faces hissing my name.  They bound me, pushing me to my knees.  I remembered, though I wished I wouldn't. 

Even now, in the stillness of my room, I often wake a few hours before dawn.  I greet the morning perched on the back stairs, inhaling the sweetness of my Newports.  I watch the crossover of daybreak.  Down the way I sometimes see a couple of "boulevard girls" seeking refuge from the rising sun.  God, they look younger than I was.  Poor lost little girls. 

No, all is not yet right in the world. 

But at the same time, I think about this new world of mine.  I am amazed at the changes time can bring.  I now have a new job, paying a good wage.  What else awaits me?  It's a joy to ponder my opportunities. 

One recent morning, gazing into the sun, I realized for the first time my divine perfection.  The creator of all things thought I was special enough to be blessed with the gift of life.  I cried.  And right then and there I let go of the deprived and painful way I was raised and how that helped shape me into who I came to be.  I let go of the hatred.  I decided to live.  Whore.  Virgin.  Nigga bitch.  Beloved.  I am all.  For all these things have made a complete me, in sorrow and now in peace.