Shootout in the Sierra Desert
All that men want, Black girls in STEM turned to crime for survival by Naomi Tamara Cash.
A group of black girls traveling across the Sierra Desert west unto California in Ivy's barely working van from the 1970s, hoping to be a successful girl group focusing on science. Chelsee, Sierra, Anna, and Ivy want to go to UCLA in the fall to study biology, math, computer science, and engineering to improve the world, but will it happen? The girls stumble across an abandoned house across U.S. Route 66 in New Mexico. Ivy says, " Maybe we should stop and rest for the night." all agree: So the girls unpack their van to make a cozy home look girly, and Anna (the airheaded one of the group) says, "Guys, let's unpack and decorate the living room because this place looks trashy." When they enter the home, beer cans and spiders are everywhere, but Chelsee and Ivy say they can work with them. The kitchen is just as filthy, and the bathroom is a horror scene; the bedrooms are just as worst. But the girls wanted to rest for the night, and they thought, "What can go wrong?''. A truck full of redneck young white guys spots the abandoned house now with the girls inside, and they state that they will be back later to "take out the garbage."
Let's do a little rundown on the girls before we continue: They all met each other at a STEM for Black girls convention in Miami, Fl (where Ivy is from and attends college), and they hit it off.
Chelsee (aged 26) is a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Tougaloo College, an HBCU in Mississippi, with loving parents and a house full of siblings; Chelsee was the eldest daughter taking care of five younger siblings. Her parents worked daily, so Chelsee could attend a Mississippi college and get out of the rural area they lived in. Her parents were pretty upset when she told them she was leaving for UCLA in California, but they wished her well.
Sierra (aged 20) is a Bachelor of Science focusing on Physics with a minor in Engineering; she stems from a middle-class black family from Georgia. Sierra attended Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. She is an Alpha Kappa Alpha member. Sierra is focusing on becoming the next Albert Einstein but as a black woman.
Anna(aged 19) is airhead regarding relationships and her surroundings but is a double major with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Africana Studies. Anna but unlike Sierra, comes from an upper-class black family whose careers are in entertainment. Anna attended Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas.
Ivy (aged 17) is the youngest of the group, a collective, Jack-Of-All-Trades, Double major who has yet to graduate with her bachelor of science in Computer Science specializing in Data Analytics. Ivy is also a dual enrollment student at two prestigious colleges in FL. Ivy is looking to graduate with her associate in Biology at a community college within the following year. Ivy didn't, however, grow up in a two-parent home. Ivy was raised by her daddy, barely seeing her maternal family member due to conflict between her father and his ex-wife's family. Ivy orchestrated this trip to research in Silicon Valley in hopes of working for Google.
Back to our story, Anna says we should decorate the living room of the abandoned house to make it more girly; Ivy asks why? So Anna responds, "Just to make it look like home." Chelsee and Sierra are busy making dinner in the kitchen while Ivy and Anna beautify the living room. Ivy goes to turn on the TV, but the antenna is crooked, so she says she'll go outside and try to fix it: As she walks out, she spots the truck down the street from the house, gawking at the home where she was, so she ran back inside to tell the girls when she comes back outside with the girls the truck is gone, so Chelsee says Ivy is seeing and imagining things again. Ivy is a machete-wielding, karate-kicking, razor-under-the-tongue-holding young girl; She takes pride in chopping up a motherfucker if they get too close to try and harm her sisters. After the situation outside, the girls sit down for dinner, play card games, and do what ordinary girls do at sleepovers.
Ivy tells the girls that she wants an early start on the road to California, so she tells the girls to get to bed, so not wanting to sleep on the dirty beds that were already there. So the girls decided to make a fortress on the living room floor, like a tent in the woods. Sierra told the stories while in the tent(fortress), and Ivy told scary stories because she knew the others were weak. So all the girls used the hose in the kitchen to wash up for bed because the bathroom was beyond repair. Anna wanted to use the little girl's room to go number 1, so Ivy pointed to the bucket in the corner and said, "Go there and dump it outside." Anna being a lady, huffed at the idea of peeing in a bucket and throwing the waste outside. So Ivy asked, "Would you rather sit on the toilet in the bathroom and probably get an infection? Or use the clean bucket and throw the waste outside? The choice is yours." So Anna hung her head down, used the bucket, and threw the waste outside.
So all the girls settle in the fortress to sleep. At 1 am, Anna awakes to smell smoke in the kitchen; Not to alarm the other girls, she enters the kitchen and finds four white men sitting in her kitchen with their feet up. She asked them what they were going there. They answer and say what are you pretty little girls doing in our granny's old home? Mind you; these are the same young white dudes on the truck earlier that Ivy had spotted earlier eyeing down the house. Little did Anna know these four dudes had nothing but sin on their minds
Anna answers and says they're just staying for the night to get back on the road and head for California in the morning. Rory(one of the guys) spots a guitar in the corner of the kitchen and says it's not ours, and Anna answers and says it's mine. And Rory responds and asks, "What a pretty thing like you doing playing the guitar?" Anna replies, "My dad used to teach his girls how to play the guitar when we were little." So Rory asks Anna to play something for them. She walks up, gets her guitar, turns back to find the other three missing, and she urges Rory where did they go? He said to get their guitars to play with her. She yells that's sweet! So she starts playing an old record that her dad used to sing to her when she was little, and Rory is amazed by her singing and guitar playing. Surprisingly this didn't wake the rest of the girls up.
The other boys come back into the house with their guitars and look at Rory, so he asks Anna if they want to do a duet with her, and they want her to give them something after every chorus is finished. Would she do it? So Anna agrees; after they start singing and the first chorus is over, Anna gives each of the boys an apple, and they all throw it on the ground. So she asked them whether they liked what she gave to them. They responded that is not what they wanted, so after the second chorus, Anna gave them money, and they each threw it to the ground. So as airheaded and naive as Anna was, Rory figured this out, so he asked his brothers to stop playing, and he took Anna to the side and explained what they wanted. He asks Anna to remove an article of her clothing after every chorus. So Anna agrees: So Rory asks his brothers to start playing the song over, so after the first chorus, Anna removes her pajama shirt, and the boys go wild. This wakes up the rest of the girls, and they head straight for the kitchen. Ivy grabbed her machete; they arrived at the door when the second chorus was over and saw Anna removing her pajama pants and throwing them at them. So they ask her what's going on, and she explains to the girls what Rory told her to do. So Ivy, Chelsee, and Sierra look at each other, look back at the guys, and ask them to leave. The guys refused to leave, stating that they had trespassed on their property and that they could do whatever they wanted to them. Ivy says that they might look fragile and dainty but that they are going to whoop the stew out of their ass if they don't leave: So Rory and the three other guys all whip out pistols; little did the girls know that Ivy had a '22 in her bra so Chelsee and Sierra puts up their hands and asked them what they wanted: They replied with " that Nubian slave pussy."
Chelsee looked at Ivy, and Ivy looked back at them, so Chelsee and Sierra folded like a piece of paper crumbling up. But Rory didn't touch Chelsee or Sierra; he came up behind Ivy, touching her buttocks, and Ivy pushed his hands away, so Rory pushes Ivy to the ground and stomped her. Ivy is curled up on the floor in pain, and Rory says, "That is what happens to black bitches like you." As he approaches Ivy on the floor, Ivy pulls out her '22 revolver and shoots him in the head; Rory falls to the floor, clean dead. Mind you, the other three guys are in horror, and they pull out guns and start shooting, so Ivy ducks underneath a table in the kitchen and starts shooting them back. Sierra was behind one of the guys, picked up a kitchen knife, and stabbed one of the guys in the neck; he fell bleeding, and the other two guys were in shock. Chelsee picks up her taser and shocks one of the guys, and Sierra stabs him in his heart; Anna is screaming, and the rest of the girls tell her to keep quiet because they don't want to draw any attention from the gas station down the road: Now one is standing all alone in a house with four black women, he drops his gun and puts his hand in the air and asks the girls what do they want because he will give it to them, the girls found some old rope and chains in one of the old cabinets, and they bind his hands and feet to a kitchen chair, and stripped him naked and place one of his dead brother's bodies in his lap. Ivy says for the next day or two or even a week, you'll look at your brother's decaying bodies, smell the stench of your crimes, and die peacefully of horror and hunger, but before you die, you'll remember our faces and say "you know, we should've left them girls alone."
So Ivy went to the sink, washed her hands of any blood or residue, and told the girls to take off their clothes, put them in an old bucket, burn them, pack up all their belongings, and leave nothing that could pin out that girls were here. So the girls packed everything they needed, returned on the road, and headed to California. It was a quiet ride, but Ivy told the girl this one thing " That situation back in Arizona shall never be spoken of again. We shall go on with our lives and become the best STEM performers the world has ever seen.''
That's the story, folks; Ivy, Chelsee, Sierra, and Anna all graduated from UCLA, and Ivy graduated from FIU and MDC with her associate's and bachelor's degrees, respectively. In addition, Ivy graduated from UCLA with her master's with honors and is now working for Google. As for the guys, all remains of them are their skeletons in an old, cold, abandoned house without anyone knowing they are there dead.