Self determination...One
“The General doesn’t care for books. There’s boxes and boxes of them underneath his house though, piles of the things left around to gather dust. I like to read, one of the women taught me how when I first got sold to him. There are also some books the women keep that we don’t tell him about. That’s how I knew what to do.”
"Emma took another drink and paused her story as she looked over at the cardboard box and the little burden nestled inside of it. “I drank a tea we learned to make. I drank the tea before, more times than I can count, but this time I waited too long to drink it. It hurt, a lot, and what came out…”
"She drifted off for a minute and took another drink before pointing at the cardboard box by the truck. “I was supposed to do for him. That was what Megan asked me to do before she bled out. I was supposed to nurse maid him since my accident so that Megan didn’t have to but that was his plan, never hers. She asked me to take the baby away, to wash it so it could be presented to him but I was supposed to drown it instead. That meant my death and she knew it. She was dying and she wanted me to go out with her, like the pharaoh’s servants of old.”
“I couldn’t do it. I put him in the water and he looked up at me and I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t about being afraid, I was ready to die. I wanted to. The books I read told me the truth, I wasn’t a person, I didn’t have a life. I was a slave, a sow in a trough, producing for its master. That was all I was ever going to be until I wasn’t worth rutting anymore and then I’d be left to wash the stains out of his underwear.”
"Emma looked over at me, probably expecting me to start fetching blankets and tip toeing into the land of nope. When I didn’t move, she took another drink. “See, we’re both killers, and from what the books taught me, my kind of killing is worse, and I’ve done it scores of times.”
"I don’t know if she was waiting for a response but I didn’t have one to give her. There was no contest for first place in murder but what she described sounded more like claiming identity and determining the course of what constituted her life. I knew I hadn’t done the same thing. I didn’t kill to keep ahold of myself, I did it to lose something I felt had no worth."
