The Witch Part 5
Donatella
There was nothing about Donatella as a child that gave even a hint of whose child she was, or who she might become once she had left her painful childhood behind. She was a small-boned, coffee and cream-colored Black girl who was forced to wear comically large black frame glasses so that she could bear witness to the doings of a world in which she had very little interest.
No, that’s not quite right. Actually, Donatella was very interested in the world around her, just not the world that was immediately around her. Because the sordid details of that particular world were the sort that placed her inside an off-balance picture frame containing a drunken mother and happy-go-lucky father whose moods traveled back and forth between the seasons at whim, sometimes within the confines of a single day – or even hour. Which meant that one minute Ellis James could be whistling a favorite tune as he stood in front of the stove in their tiny apartment making his baby girl’s favorite blueberry pancakes. But then the weather would change somewhere between the preparation of pancakes and the anticipated delivery to the breakfast table. The clouds would gather as her father’s abnormally deep voice (for someone so small in stature because for goodness’ sake the man was barely just creeping above five foot tall and there were large dogs who weighed more than him) would gather thunder to match the lightning that sparked in his eyes as he threw the griddle with half-made pancakes through the kitchen into the wall of the living room, narrowly missing the head of Fantasma James, his wife, adorned with the ever-present pink and blue rollers in her hair, hanging at odd lengths and angles making her look like a confused rag doll. She was slouched to the side just out of aim on the sofa, smoking a cigarette while pretending to watch TV.
“Why ain’t you the one making these damned pancakes for your daughter, Fan? Ain’t you the mother? Ain’t you? Ain’t that what mothers supposed to do is make breakfast for they children?”
Which was when Fan, who Donatella had always assumed was her mother, simply shrugged her amused indifference, not missing a line of dialogue of whatever happened to be on screen at the time, except to say “but they gotta be your children first, nigguh.”
“You shut your damned mouth, Fan! You shut your damned mouth!”
Which was when Donatella, who only happened to be eight years old at the time – which was old enough to catch the gist of what her thought-she-was-my-mother was saying – scooted around from her seat at the breakfast table where she had been waiting for pancakes to focus her oversized black frames on thought-you-were-my-mother.
“Momma…what…?”
Which was when Fan began to slowly crouch and sink into the cushions, afraid to meet the inquiring gaze of an 8-year-old child who should never have had to ask that question.
“It ain’t nothin’ baby,” she muttered. “It ain’t nothin’. Your Momma and Daddy just fightin’ is all. You know how we fight. This ain’t the first time you…”
“But Momma you said…”
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK AS THE STORY OF ‘THE WITCH’ CONTINUES…