Memoir of a Trapped Housewife

Chapter One {Leaving}

Chapter One

Chatawok

April 22, 1954

Hollings, Oregon

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Sable left the day I was away. I had no chance to say goodbye. There was no opportunity for a final embrace. Prevented from relaying how I felt or expressing how much I loved her, the only thing left to grasp was regret. After gathering her meager belongings and pinching ten dollars from the cookie jar hidden in the kitchen cabinet, my dear sister vanished without looking back.

She didn't even leave a note.

She cherry-picked a weekend day for her departure, the day that my family attended a little chapel in the woods about five miles away from where we resided. Sable claimed she came down with something before we all left for the church, and begged my stepfather to let her stay behind. With great reluctance, he did; a decision I'm sure he lamented.

The rest of my siblings, along with mama, father, and myself, hoisted ourselves into the rusted 1930's model truck and put-putted off to church. When we returned, the back door of the house was open and the dog was out in the yard barking up a storm. I shot out from the back of the truck, tearing my good dress in the process, and bounded up the stairs to bedroom belonging to Sable and I.

I sunk to my knees when I realized she left, sobbing and clutching my face. I bawled so hard I made myself ill.

No one could say Sable didn't have a good reason to depart. Life under our stepfather was a wretched prison and he brutally used Sable and I. We knew why. My first father was a missionary who traveled widely. On his trip to Cambodia he adopted Sable from an orphanage, and in the Caribbean he adopted me. After he died mama remarried to Matthew, a man who found it peculiar someone that else should consider other races his children.

"You should be with your own people," he'd tell us. "What your daddy did was wrong." You could see it in his eyes that he despised revealing us to the public, especially me for he feared they would all think less of him. Burnt mahogany wood was the cursed color of my flesh.

Before Matthew enacted a reign of terror, mama fought for us. Somehow she kept our stepfather at bay with her simpering smiles and veiled threats. Overtime, however, her potency eroded. Matthew knocked her around like discarded dolly and the beatings were awful when she challenged him.

Empowered by her growing weakness, he soon became sadistic and domineering. Eventually, mama scarcely thought on her own. It was painful to watch Matthew crush my mother who was only a puppet nestled in his hands.

When he started walloping us, mama was a shell of what she once was. She drifted away, her plight similar to a bottle washed to sea with a note in its glass form that reads 'help'. Fierce, blinding hatred consumed me for Matthew, and I swore to myself that I would never let a man control me. If I married at all, it would be to a man I trusted and whom I would never have to defend myself against. One who wouldn't take advantage of me and then assert that it was his right, because he was owed the benefits of husbandly rights.

As the last recognizable bits of mama disappeared, she caught the flames of hatred in my eyes and took me aside. "Precious, if a man ever harms or threatens you, I want you to find yourself a good sharp knife and make sure you protect yourself. And if you can't get a knife, find a heavy cast-iron skillet. Do that for me precious, I don't want you to end up like me."

I promised.

In light of this, it was a wonder Sable had not left sooner. Though, the thing that stung the most about her disappearance was that she left me behind. Trapped, I was, in Matthew's iron cage. The whole plan since Matthew landed in our lives was to leave together. The cookie jar money was shared, never to be touched until the two of us could escape.