Lost One

𝙴𝙿 𝙾𝙽𝙴: 𝗣𝗔𝗦𝗧

𝚅𝙾𝙻𝚄𝙼𝙴 𝟷

❝There's always a story behind someone's pain. Mine runs deep—sadly, deeper than just me,❞ The voiceover of the singer opens the documentary with the cedar brown beauty as she plants a seat on the curved sofa, ❝A pain that seemed written. A pain outta my control. And only one person can example the start...❞

❝I'm Sunni, and I'm the aunt to Shantey, Monae, and TaJana.❞ She introduces, ❝Why is Shantey Ledé the way she is? All of the why's. Well, I'm here to explain the why. You can't really blame her mother—my sister—no, not really. You gotta go back further than my sister, or our mother. It started with Corine Boudreaux...❞

A flash of photos rewinds speedily and stops on a image of a gorgeous little girl taken in the late 1940s; no smile, simply straight faced in a nice dress and soft, full pompadour. ❝My orphan grandmother. She was this gorgeous Creole woman from Louisiana. Her growing up alone, she always wanted children. But she had miscarriage after miscarriage, then she finally got pregnant and a chocolate baby was born. And the reason I say that is because Corine never gave my mother a name. Nana Corine was what was called around that time, a passing woman. And for those who don't know what passing is, it's a woman that has a fair skin tone and to pass for a white woman...❞

The screen returns to Sunni on her sofa. ❝Nana Corine did. Right there in Louisiana until she moved to Missouri where she had my mother. She had this mentality as 'lighter is better', as anyone did around that time. And once my mother was born, she seen she was too brown and what does the high-yella woman do? She sells her daughter to circus for little to nothing. My mother was dressed as a monkey for entertainment for white folk until she was four years old.

❝Can you imagine the mental damage that does to a child? A baby no less.❞
Sunni paused shortly, ❝You don't have a name, you're dressed like a literal monkey, you're laughed at by racist coons that can't see you're a human being. And whose to say that's all that happened to her. A baby. Then, along the way, some white family finally felt pity on the black circus baby and took her in. Named her Tansi Copeland. The Copeland's had two other kids. Two boys. She went from the circus monkey to a white loving family. Sounds like the perfect picture, right?"

Sunni paused to let out a soft chuckle and shake her head. ❝For about three years. Up until one of the son's managed to fall in love with her. Sick, right? A fifteen year old boy in love with a seven-year-old. Living under that roof, my mother dealt with being raped by him every night. He would volunteer to babysit her just to take advantage of her. Then by age eleven, my mother was pregnant.. with me. The Copeland's found out and they didn't have their son arrested or committed. Instead they pulled my mother out of school and homeschooled her and made a baby keep her baby. Me, I was that baby—the product of a situation out of her control. She had me at twelve, then after only two years she had my sister Tania..❞

1958 floats wide on the screen, fading out into an image of two-year-old Sunni happily smiling and hovering over the newborn baby.

❝A fourteen-fifteen year old with two children by someone that's supposed to be her brother. And once my mother hit eighteen, she was forced to marry her rapist. I was around five and I even noticed the disfunction between them. I didn't understand why at that time. But my mother was never happy. She was depressed every day. Then she would be cussing loud, cutting him with glass during their fights, he would even hit her. It got so bad that his parents threw all of us out and that's when we relocated to the infamous city called Tulsa.❞