The Shame of Speed

Trigger Warning

"Look at how she walks. She is going to be hot as popcorn."

I was 7 years old. The scorn of the words met the scorn in the eyes of female family members as they gathered, watching me cavort in the company of my same- aged girl cousins, gathered in a game of hide and go seek. The looks of the older girls and women who watched confirmed that while I didn't know what being “hot as popcorn” meant, I knew it wasn't good. I was confused about what it was about my bony and brown body that signaled this prophesy, but it was only one of many ways and only one of many times I was convinced, in my single digit years, that I was bad. That there was something inherent to my skin, to my walk, to my very existence that offended adults.

The out loud declarations, always spoken loud enough for me to hear them, were intended to warn me that I was being watched, that I was being seen. The invitation for others to "look" at me inspired a life-long discomfort with being singled out, even for praise. The looking was seemingly to find what was wrong with me, to interrogate me with a focused gaze aimed at shrinking my confidence. It succeeded.

This sexualization of my shapeless body and speculation about how I walked was an indictment of shame. My older and sometimes distant cousins were old enough to be mothers to sleepy infants, but not as old as their own mothers who had undoubtedly told their women friends to "look at them," with the same suspicion and speculation that they did me. Their own mothers and elder women probably called them "hot in the ass" as they were now calling me and must have taught them this calling out and spectacle was a blackgirl rite of passage. There is sometimes an intergenerational suspicion passed down in black families that teaches its girl children shame-- and judgment. 

I was too young and naive to understand what it meant to be

"Hot as popcorn,"

"Hot in the ass,"

"Fast."

I assumed it meant not slow, but the significance of heat was subjective. Was being fast a worse accusation than being slow? Was being “fast” inevitable to black womanhood? And what of this inescapable persistent heat?

The judgment was sudden and spontaneous but ongoing. I paid attention to this marker, this prophesy that hung close to my black body but seemingly fell from my sister's light skin. 

Years later, at a hair salon, I overheard a woman I recognized from church identify me to her friend who was sitting under the dryer as one of my mother's daughters, "the fast one," she said, loud enough for her friend to hear over the buzz of the dryer, loud enough for the stylist to lean in to hear more, loud enough for my high school friend to hear and cut her eyes to me. The church woman’s designation of me as "fast" to distinguish me from my sister, who I suppose, by comparison, was automatically “not fast” was humiliating. It would have angered me if I wasn't so embarrassed. 

I was 14 years old. I knew, by then, what being "fast" meant. 

I wondered where this woman had gotten this information from. This speculation about my speed. I wondered if she somehow knew that from the time I was in kindergarten, until the second or third grade, I was sexually molested. I didn't know those words at the time, but I had wondered when I was being called "hot as popcorn" if that is what that meant. I wondered if the person who pulled down my panties knew that about me too... that I was

"Hot as popcorn,”

“Hot in the ass,”

“Fast..."

but the abuse just felt like attention until it stopped, and then, like everything else, it felt like rejection. I was terrified someone would find out that I was, in fact, like popcorn. 

I wondered if this woman and her friend had found out that a grown man, a relative of a friend, had presented himself to me as a pseudo big brother. I trusted him when he gestured at the safety of drinking the liquor he poured when we joined him housesitting a house big enough to fit the trailer I grew up in. The absent homeowners had a house bar and drinking out of fancy glasses solidified the fantasy that maybe one day I would live in a house that big. That night I staggered up the stairs to the loft and collapsed in the guest bed next to my homegirl, who was already asleep. Sometime later I woke up in the pitch-dark room with the grown man laying against me, one hand under my shirt, the other under my waistband. Startled I shifted away from him and his hand froze temporarily. I froze, temporarily, holding my breath, hoping, at first, that he was unaware of what he was doing—that he was sleepwalking or dreaming. Why was he in bed with us? I silently prayed he would stop and adjusted myself so that his hands, heavy then still, would fall from my body. I slid closer to my sleeping friend. He slid closer to me. Minutes later his hands were on me again—one sliding up my shirt, the other sliding down my pants. I sat up, pulling from his reach and he, again, lay still, playing possum. His eyes were closed when he reached toward me more aggressively. I got up and ran to the adjoining bathroom. I locked the door and refused to come out until the next morning—exhausted and insisting I be taken home.

“Please don’t say anything,” he begged. And I didn’t.

I wonder if he thought I was fast. I wonder if the church woman in the salon had somehow found out about this secret.

Or if she knew that the next year I would be coerced by two boys I considered friends to binge drink a 40 ounce of mad dog 2020 and a glass full of Thunderbird that they had paid an of-age black man to buy for us at the convenience store. Did she know that I didn't realize, at the time, that they weren't drinking themselves, that they were trying to get me drunk and probably intended to sexually assault me? Did she know that when one platonic friend suddenly tried to lead my drunken body to his bedroom and guide my limp hands to the bulge forming in his pants that I panicked-- understanding, through the haze, that my other friend was probably waiting for his turn? Did she know that the memory of unwanted touches I didn't understand alerted me to sobriety long enough to pick up the phone and dial my cousin's phone number? He had his own line and answered on the first ring. 

“Hello?”

I responded by saying his name, louder than I intended but wanting him to hear the desperation and fear in my overly excited voice. I was drunk, trying to sound sober. I was scared, trying to sound calm. “Can you come get me?”

“Robin, where are you?”

“I am at ______'s house. I have been drinking with _____ and ______. They dared me to drink a glass full of Thunderbird." I say, still loud, still drunk. 

"Put ____ on the phone."

My cousin sounded serious—and mad. I passed the corded receiver to ______ who was shaking his head at me in disapproval. I could hear my cousin's voice echoing from the phone. I heard profanity, muffled words and finally "Take her home now!" His voice was serious, demanding. 

"Aight man, we will."

"Right now!" he repeated. “And put her back on the phone.”

“Hello?”

“They are taking you home. Call me when you get there.”

______ and _____ followed my cousin’s instructions immediately. The empty glass bottles were put back in the brown paper bags they had been taken out of and eventually thrown from an open car window into a ditch. By then my head was spinning and I felt like I was going to throw up during the short car ride home. I felt lucky, dirty, and fast. I also felt guilty. I knew better. I had no business trusting _____ and _____. I should have known after what had happened the last time. I wonder if desperation to fit in and misdirected trust is a symptom or consequence of my speed? I was dropped off at the dirt road by my house. The bass and lyrics of Tha Dogg Pound pierced the silence when I opened the car door to get out, "it ain't no fun if the homies can't have none." 

I understood later what probably would have happened if I didn't make that phone call, if my cousin would have not picked up, if my so- called friends would not have listened to his demand. I knew if my virginity was lost in a drunken fog I would have been saddled in shame and speed. My swiftness, my quickness, my heat would have been blamed.

“You know she’s fast,” they would say—gesturing to how they knew all along that I was hot as popcorn.