The "White Glove Treatment"

I was about eight, and my mother had sent me to live with Emma, my grandmother...Selma, my mother's sister...Eddie, her husband...and schizophrenic Sidney, my mother's brother.
I remember being shaken...softly shaken.... from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. Everything was dark.
I didn't surface out of sleep all at once. Selma drew me out of sleep like one would draw out a bucket from a well. She called my name softly....Bobby....Bobby. Awareness of details came to me slowly, but Selma was in no hurry....Bobby.
Selma held a flashlight...letting it dance around...to her face...to the knife she held...the same knife my grandmother used to cut up chickens.
Her eyes danced, wild...and her smile was mean, showing lots of teeth....mean. And she was wearing white gloves.
"Aunt Selma? What are you doing?"
"Bobby, they're all dead! I have killed them all...."
Selma then went on to tell me how she had murdered everyone in the house. Eddie, Sidney, Emma..... And now it was my turn.
As she went on, I cried, I begged.... Hope? Well, there seemed to be none. It was my turn to die. My terror brought her amusement. She wanted me to beg...to plead. And she laughed and preened in
the face of my fear.
Why?
Selma explained later that this madness was a punishment for my bed wetting, my poor conduct reports from school....just for everything....including the holes I tore in the knees in my pants when I fell playing outside...including the shirt that got torn during a fight at school...including breaking my glasses.
She put down the knife...the flashlight...rubbing her gloved hands together as if she were warming them for the task to come. Selma spoke of strangling me, and I would be dead like the rest.
This night was later referred to as the night Selma gave me the "white glove" treatment.
Selma joked about it! And she shamed me by describing the terror and fear I exhibited as she played out the scene.
Why?
Goodness came about through punishment and shame.
There were nights when she would have me drop my pants so that my knees would be bare.... then she would pour raw grits or rice on a sheet of newspaper and have me kneel on them.
I would beg to get up, just as I begged for my life that night.
And the stories of me on grits and rice were also told with the same lightness...and I felt the same shame.
Why?
It seems that my mother had spoiled me...and this called for drastic measures. Something had to be done....quick.
There was the night Selma was so outdone that she took the shade from a floor lamp...and then held my bare arm against the hot bulb.
All for my own good.
I learned many lessons about goodness and evil in the St. Thomas Housing Project....for my own good.
There was a German boy, Eric, that lived near our building. I loved his accent.
Eric and I had been friends for a few days when he invited me to come up to their apartment. He wanted to show me something funny.
He and I entered their home, and nobody was there except his grandmother....and she was totally deaf.
Eric told me, "Watch this!" Eric went behind his grandmother and began to call her all sorts of mean, profane things....and then he laughed.... I was stunned.
Why?
Eric's laugh...and Selma's laugh...to me they seemed the same.
And they were!
Sick.... I never played with Eric again. Sadly, I spent years trying to gain the approval and love of Selma. And sadly I tried to see the necessity and humor of the "white glove treatment", the raw grits and rice, and the searing light bulb.
It took years...long years....to see Selma and Eric as the same....to see that I had a lot in common with Eric's old, deaf grandmother. We were both unable to hear what they were saying....
The deaf woman and I? There was no blame....there was no excusable reply to "Why?"