Read Online How to Escape From a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique - Free Book Online Page B

has burned down the church. Somehow he has hunted her down, and this is her punishment for marrying a nigger and having half-nigger children. Beautiful amber-colored children—the kind she had hoped for to save her father’s sins. Daughters her father would have adored if they had just been lighter skinned and straighter haired. But then Violet remembers her father is dead.
    Violet thinks of all her daughters as strong. She calls them “tough as nails.” Her girls’ shyness or bookishness or violinness is their armor to face the world. A girl’s kind of trick armor. She doesn’t know her daughters very well—there are just so many of them. She doesn’t know that their armor is insufficient when battling the world.
    Only four months ago Deirdre’s son, Thomas, and Violet’s daughter Jasmine went away to college in America. To the same city, but not to the same college. Violet didn’t think much of this. She thought maybe the two would meet up for coffee every once in a while.
    Deirdre hoped that shy Jasmine, with her slutty name, would disappear into the sewers of the city and from her son’s mind. She hoped the girl would end up on drugs or pregnant, and that her son would end up married to an Ivy League coed with professional ambitions and cooking skills. That would show Violet—but then Deirdre would whisk away these devilish thoughts with a little prayer. She does not wish to be so evil. She was only thinking of her son. Deirdre knows Thomas wants to be president someday, but she believes that sons are fragile and in need of their mothers.
    What happened with Thomas and Jasmine is common but not simple. They did meet for coffee in a chain café with a French name.
    “It’s cute in here, Thomas. I like it. I’ll be coming back for sticky buns.”
    Thomas frowned thinking of Jasmine here without him. This was a public place. There were many people around. He thought that this should be their place now.
    “Thomas. Stop making that face and get me some sugar, no. Brown, please.”
    He got up. He loved that she could barely speak to anyone for her shyness, yet she could order him to get her some sugar. She could demand brown sugar.
    While he was gone Jasmine watched the other people, who all seemed pleased with their organic orange juice or chai lattes—things she had never known before. She could hear their private conversations clearly. They spoke carelessly, as though it didn’t matter who was listening. Beneath Jasmine’s new fall jacket was a silk blouse that Moby had once told her looked nice. She shifted now so she could feel it slide across her shoulders.
    Thomas rested half a dozen little brown packets beside her cup. “So,” he said. “How’s chemistry?”
    “I’m not taking chemistry.”
    “It’s a joke. You know, like chem is so hard, so that’s all that anyone really cares about.” Perhaps this was only a joke on his campus or perhaps just in his dorm among his new friends. “So what are you taking?”
    Jasmine chewed a sticky bun and sipped on her coffee. She began her list and leaned across the table so the others wouldn’t hear. “Intro to Women’s Studies. Intro to Psychology. Race and the Essay. The History of Math.”
    “Aren’t you taking English comp or, like, Biology 101 or the regular stuff?”
    “Yes, stupidee. Race and the Essay—that’s a composition class. The psychology is for my science credit.”
    He thought to make a joke about women’s studies but then thought against it. “Race and the Essay. What you learning there?”
    She sucked her teeth with annoyance. “I don’t know. We only been in class for a month or something.” She sipped her milky coffee. It was the color of her skin. “Theory and history, mostly. You know … how ethnicity marginalizes the experience with the world and is reflected on the text … and all that. The stuff we didn’t learn at St. Mark’s.”
    Thomas sat up straight now and stirred his Earl Grey. He wanted to ask what