Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed (ed)

Truckers often run the same routes. They sometimes travel together. The men who heard my father were near him. They figured out what truck he was driving, and they began following him, not just that day, but repeatedly. You can’t hide an eighteen-wheel semitruck or easily lose someone who is following you. And you can’t follow someone very well when you’re in a semi, so eventually these men abandoned their own trucks, their own livelihoods, so they could more easily and stealthily play their game and follow my father in cars and vans. I wondered what kind of hate would make you put aside your own livelihood to terrorize someone else. At that age, I had underestimated how much hate people had. I had seen hate in school, sure, but I never felt like I would be killed over it. Years later, my dad told us about the kinds of things they said to him over and over again on the CB radio, the things they threatened to do to him, to his body, to us, his wife and children. For months they did this while we wondered if he was safe. I would sometimes imagine him being cornered somewhere. I’d think of him in his truck, afraid to sleep even after hours and hours of being on the road. Or worse, being dragged from sleep when they finally spotted his truck in a rest area.

  My dad grew up with certain notions of how men should be—tough, showing little to no vulnerability or pain or emotion. The only time I had seen him cry was at his father’s funeral. And even then, there were only a few tears that slid down his stern, stoic face. But the day he told us about what was happening, my father’s eyes filled up with tears. It scared me because it signaled to me the severity of the situation.

  “Jenny, is something bothering you these days?” I stared at the guidance counselor’s black dress socks and loafers.

  “No.”

  My family was private. I think this is why I didn’t say a word to that counselor. My parents had an aversion to sharing any of our problems with anyone else, and so the attitude in my house was always you handle your own problems. I also think the prejudice and hate my parents suffered as immigrants made them raise us to trust only each other. What happened to us and our family was no one else’s concern. Maybe I worried that if I told what was going on, it would put my father in more danger. So I kept it to myself.

  “Can’t the police help?” I remember asking my dad. He shook his head. “They won’t do anything, not unless something happens. Besides . . .” He didn’t finish or express his distrust of law enforcement, but I sensed it. Besides, they were following him through several states up and down the East Coast and no single police department would be in charge or care much what happened outside their district. Besides, my dad had experienced discrimination from law enforcement already, especially in the Southern states, where he was threatened the most, where these men felt especially emboldened. I remember wondering why my dad was so distrusting of police.

  Years after this incident, he would falsely be accused of trafficking drugs among the tomatoes and limes he delivered and he would be hauled away for questioning before ultimately being released. The produce he was hauling would rot and he would not be paid. No lawyer would take his case though they told him it was a clear violation of his rights. Years later, I would watch news clips of Black men being gunned down by police on television and hear people deny there’s a problem or that there’s a need for police reform.

  So I stopped wondering.

  “Don’t go,” I told him. But my father couldn’t afford to miss a trip. There were bills to pay. There was produce to be delivered. This was our family’s livelihood.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be okay.” He smiled, but it didn’t fool me.

  Every day, for months, between infrequent phone calls in a time before cell phones, I wondered if he was okay. I wondered if they got him. If they cornered him somewhere. If they forced him off the road. If he was in a ditch somewhere. If they would kill him right away or torture him before killing him. I’d learned about the cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan; I knew what they’d done to people. I knew they liked to hide their faces. I learned that sometimes hate and cruelty is flaunted and other times it is carefully covered up.

  We’d moved down to Florida from New York two years before my dad was followed by those men. I didn’t like Florida once I got here. I wanted to go back to New York and told my dad every chance I could how much I didn’t like it. One of the main reasons I didn’t like it was that I felt something in the air, something I couldn’t name, something that scared me.

  When I went into certain stores, I felt it. A thick air, weighty with judgment, discomfort, fear, disgust. It was something I’d never felt before. It made me want to brush at my arms. It made the back of my neck tingle. It made me feel afraid. Ashamed. Hated.

  I didn’t know it then, but I realized over the years it was racism and prejudice. That’s what it feels like. I saw Confederate flags waving from the back of trucks, on T-shirts and belt buckles. Until then I hadn’t noticed how some people looked at my parents when they heard their heavy accents and broken English. I wanted to move back to my old New York neighborhood, where my friends were brown and I didn’t feel hated or judged or glared at, where my father wasn’t in danger or threatened. I wanted to run, to leave. But we stayed.

  Those men eventually grew tired of terrorizing and threatening my father. Little by little, it tapered off. Just like that.

  They grew tired.

  Like little boys who’d lost interest in a new toy. Who decided they were tired and needed to move on to another game.

  But they were not little boys. They were grown men. And what they did was not child’s play. It was a crime for which they never had to answer. For a long time my father was looking over his shoulder. For a long time I did not see peace in his face. And it was a long time before I didn’t worry each time he left for another trip or I could fall asleep without the images of terrible things happening to him.

  Over the years, I saw my city change. I saw more people of color when I went to the store. I saw more same-sex couples holding hands. I felt the heavy, thick air of my youth thin out some, and it became easier to breathe. I still see the Confederate flag, but I also see more acceptance and unity. And twenty-eight years later, my city looks and feels different. I like living here. I’m proud to live here.

  But that morning after the election.

  That morning, the air felt thick again. I felt the staleness of the past find its way back. And I felt betrayed. I had believed in change and thought I’d witnessed it. But I felt deceived. In many ways, I felt like the kid on that couch in the counselor’s office.

  Is anything bothering you, Jenny?

  Yes, something was bothering me!

  I’d felt a knot in my stomach for months.

  I’d felt impending doom.

  I’d feared the worst and it happened.

  I felt gutted and without a voice.

  I felt small and as if this world did not understand or care about me.

  I felt betrayed.

  And angry. So angry.

  Because wasn’t it obvious? Hadn’t it been obvious?

  It was nationalized on television. Mexican men like my husband, my son, were called rapists by a man who embodies hate. Immigrants like my parents, my grandparents, most of my extended family, were called criminals.

  Is something bothering you, Jenny?

  And there were people who worshipped and fed off that hate, lots of people. They rejoiced at the way hate spoke, at the assumptions it made, at the way it lashed out with astounding regularity. This hate wore a suit. It came under the guise of success. And the people around him dressed up their hate too. They wore shirts and hats promoting it. They aligned themselves with it and started vocalizing their own hate. They felt empowered. I saw them standing there, behind their leader, on television. I spent a lot of time just looking at their faces. They looked like the mothers who picked up their children at the same school I pick up my children. They looked like men who played with their kids at the park down the street. They looked like teachers. They looked like people who checked out my
groceries. Except here, their faces were all twisted up. They were beaming with hate. No, they did not wear hooded cloaks. They made hate look professional and polished and astoundingly normal.

  Is something bothering you, Jenny?

  Everyday people, all around me. I started hearing more and more excuses for the hate being spewed. I saw some rally around it and others quietly accept it because it would not affect them, or because it was advantageous for them, or because even though they knew it was wrong, it felt good to hear someone give voice to the secret hate they kept in their heart.

  I searched the faces of strangers everywhere I went the day after the election. I wanted to catch somebody’s eye, exchange a look of understanding. But I felt like no one would look at me. I felt like nobody cared. I searched and searched for something. Grief or hate. Either one. I just wanted to know, wanted to see, who stood with me and who stood against me. But I saw so much apathy, which only made me feel worse. I wondered if I could read what people saw when they looked at me. A man came into the coffee shop where I sat trying write. He was wearing a Trump shirt. His back was turned to me and I sat there wondering, if he had turned around, would he have glared at me? Or would he not have seen me at all?

  For the first time in a very long time, I felt hopeless. The sobering truth sank in. I’ve gone through difficult times in my life, and the one thing I always held on to was hope. I’ve always believed in hope. Even during the situation with my father, I had hoped with all my heart it would stop.

  But the moment the 2016 presidential election results were official, I felt hope had betrayed me.

  The man who was now our president seemed just as dangerous to me as the men who had terrorized my father.

  Is something bothering you, Jenny?

  Yes. But unlike that day in the guidance counselor’s office, this time I will not stay silent.

  As I type these words, he is being sworn in. It is a reality I cannot watch. I will instead do something to work against it. I will write this essay for you and hope it awakens something in you. I think others are doing the same. I think so many did not want to see the seedy underbelly of America, the part where racism and homophobia and misogyny and fear of anything different exists. So many people could not understand the way someone could so easily step in and awaken the hate in others. They did not understand that hate has always been there and it was just waiting. For this moment.

  But now I am sensing something else, too.

  Other sleeping dragons have been awakened.

  Social justice warriors.

  And they are raging mad and breathing fire.

  I have found hope again. I am hoping now. I will continue to hope. But my hope is accompanied by action now. Because I am not helpless. I am not small. And others in this world do understand and care about me just as I understand and care about them. I am not afraid to speak now. And so with others, I will unite, in voice, in written word, in petitions and resistance. Together we will hold those in power accountable for their actions and we will make them answer.

  We will hope.

  And we will bring about change.

  WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT SILENCE

  Amber Smith

  When I began thinking about my contribution to this anthology, I thought I knew exactly what I would write about: rape culture. This is, after all, an issue I feel so passionately about, and one I have already explored fictionally in my debut novel, The Way I Used to Be. And I’ve had so many incredible, moving, and validating discussions with readers about rape culture and what it means to be a survivor of sexual violence. But the more I wrote the more personal this essay became, until I realized that I couldn’t write about rape culture in the meaningful way I wanted to while continuing to exclude my own life experiences. I felt it increasingly important to openly acknowledge that I am a survivor of sexual assault, although I hadn’t felt comfortable sharing this publicly up until the writing of this essay.

  Part of the reason is that I’m a very private person and it felt too personal to share (and on a practical level I wanted to maintain a clear separation between the fictional world of my book and my real life, as they are two very different entities). But if I’m being honest, I know the other part of the reason is silence. Silence is not only an inherent quality of rape culture itself, but in many ways, it has also been a defining force in my life, and it is something that I will probably always wrestle with to some extent.

  I grew up in a military family, one that was very much characterized by a stoic, stiff-upper-lip mentality, especially when I was a little kid. There was always love in my family. But there was never a lot of communication. We didn’t talk much about our feelings or our problems. Our struggles—both those of my parents and of me and my siblings—were by and large private battles waged in solitude. (In fact, even as I write these words, my own inner child feels a little anxious that I am breaking some kind of unspoken rule encoded in my DNA.)

  My father was in the army for more than twenty-five years and my family moved a lot, which particularly affected my older siblings, as I was not in school when we did most of our relocating. My dad served two tours in Vietnam and it would not be until much later that I realized he had been silently struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for my entire life. At that time PTSD was not something people understood very well, and certainly nobody was talking about it. Looking back, I can see how PTSD influenced everything that went on in my family, keeping our interactions on the surface, often with a forced sense of calmness. It was almost as if we had all learned to build walls around ourselves, stuck in survival mode by proxy. And so we never ventured into the deep end of the emotional pool, but rather, we stayed in the safety of the shallow end, treading water. In fact, much of the closeness within my family didn’t happen until we were all adults.

  In this environment, I learned early on to be quiet and agreeable. I was taught to not make waves, keep my head down, mind my own business, and turn the other cheek. Just ignore the bullies and they will go away was a familiar mantra. My parents were simply giving me the best advice they had in their arsenal, as all parents do. After all, these were the methods that had allowed them to move through their world when they were growing up. But I lived in a different world and I would learn that these methods would not be the ones that were going to work for me. Instead of making me strong and self-sufficient and resilient, as they were intended, they made me feel small and stagnant and uncertain of myself.

  From a young age I felt pretty isolated from my peers, which I now know is extremely common, as nearly everyone can relate to the feeling of being alone. But at the time, I thought I was the only one who felt this way. As I entered school I was painfully shy, extremely introverted, and didn’t make friends easily. I had health issues and learning disabilities as a child that made me feel like an outsider. But I was sensitive and creative, and found ways to express myself through art, which has always been my saving grace. I often preferred the world of my imagination to reality, and that is where I felt the most comfortable. Out in the real world, I remember feeling like I just plain didn’t belong.

  I was in second grade the first time I was sexually assaulted by one of my closest friends. It was not only an act of physical violence, but emotional violence, as well. We had been friends for years, we went to school together, played together, and from my perspective, were best friends, which was no small thing for me. We were playing at his house like we had many other times, when this assault happened. It came out of nowhere, and I remember distinctly feeling as if someone else had taken over this boy I knew so well—both his actions and his words seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely. In retrospect, I believe (though I can’t know for sure) the reason it felt as if it was not really him is because he was doing to me what may have been done to him, playing something out that actually didn’t come from him. Regardless of why it happened, it was a devastating violation of trust and a betrayal of the bonds of friendship we shared.
r />   I don’t know why there were not adults there to begin with, but I am thankful that his grandmother suddenly came home during the course of this event, because that stopped the situation from progressing any further. I know that I was visibly upset and shaken by what had happened. Clearly, when his grandmother saw me she must have realized something was not right, but she said nothing. So I ran away as fast as I could. And my friend soon followed behind, chasing me all the way down the street to my house. I’m sure he was trying to prevent me from telling my parents what had happened. I did tell, though.

  I think it must have been a difficult thing for my parents to understand, let alone know how to help. I was so used to downplaying everything because that is how my family operated back then. So I’m not even sure I explained the situation fully or gave any real indication of just how severe, distressing, or traumatizing it really was. I’m not sure if they truly comprehended that I had in fact been sexually assaulted by my friend. After all, when we think about children being abused or assaulted, we often assume the perpetrator must be an adult, not another child.

  There was no further conversation about it, at least not one that happened with me. Perhaps they felt that there was simply not much to be done. I probably seemed “okay” since I didn’t know there was another way to behave at that time, and so we all just acted normal, went about our lives, and never talked about again. This must have seemed the path of least resistance, and it is a story I have heard from so many survivors. But acting normal and ignoring what had happened began to make me feel like what happened didn’t even matter, like what happened wasn’t important. I felt like it was something I should be able to simply let go of and move on from, only I didn’t know how. Looking back, I realize what was happening under the surface was that I was beginning to feel like I didn’t matter, like I was not important.

  It was several months later when I was assaulted again, this time by the same boy who had gotten away with it the first time, along with another friend of his. This time I did not tell anyone.