“Cause I cut myself, and I need a Band-Aid.” Aunt Josie took me in the bathroom, she looked at my panties. She sighed—you know? She had all this stuff in her closet: the belt, the Kotex, everything. I remember thinking, She had this all ready for me? She was equipped for what was going to happen to me, and she stayed home that day and we drank hot chocolate. It was wonderful. I will never forget that. It was one of the reasons, later on, I felt safe leaving my daughters with her despite other dangers because I knew she could be so caring.
One time, I wanted to get a T-shirt, and Aunt Josie said, “Come here, Brenda Jean,” and she looked at me and said, “This girl is busting out.” She went out, got me some beginner bras, and she got me a girdle. I will never forget when that ugly-ass girdle showed up in my life. You know, back in the day, the rule was, you were not supposed to jiggle. Everybody was trying to hold that jiggle down. That caused me so much embarrassment in school. I went to a white school, and most of them girls had flat asses and wasn’t nobody trying to saddle them. When I took my girdle off in the gym locker room, them white girls looked at me and said, “What is all that, Myers?”
And I told them, “That’s my girdle.”
“What?” They didn’t even know what it was.
So the girls didn’t understand why I wore a girdle, and the boys wanted to figure out how to get me out of one. But I wasn’t really playing with boys, I was more laughing with the boys. I saw cute boys and thought they were cute, but that’s it. I had crushes, but I wasn’t trying to be with nobody. I got a ride from a boy named Bobby Starks. Bobby had a reputation. I got out of his car in an alley once, and when I got out the car, my uncle saw us. LC got out of his car. And I walked right past my uncle. The look he gave me, I thought to myself, Aw, he gone tell Aunt Josie he saw me getting out of Bobby’s car. But I just want to say, everybody wanted to ride in Bobby’s car. He had a hot rod! I had rode in the car so many times before, with him and his girl. He had a legit girlfriend, Patsy. Bobby Starks was just really popular in the community. Older than me. I’m in junior high, they were high school kids. And I loved his girlfriend, Patsy; she was my girlfriend Regina’s sister. The older kids used to think of us as those little silly girls. I didn’t think Bobby thought anything of riding us around.
My uncle didn’t tell Aunt Josie, but he pulled me aside when I got home. “I ain’t gone tell Aunt Josie, but how old is that man?” I’m shocked, cause now Uncle LC was acting like Charlie and Dennis, my cousins—getting ready to tattle on me. I should have known it was about to get a lot worse.
* * *
He started sleeping on the couch. I used to sleep in the living room. Bedtime, I used to have to go to sleep with Perry Mason and the TV news on, and should have been asleep, but they kept it on, so I kept watching. But then they cut the TV off, and Aunt Josie said, “Come on, LC.” He laid on the couch, pretending like he was asleep and he couldn’t get up. She went back to the bedroom, and Uncle LC was on the couch, and I was on my pallet. He just slid over and started moving his hands down my nightshirt. And I was real stiff. Scared to move. I panicked inside; I wasn’t screaming but I was scared, crying, and I was tight, tight, stiff as a board. I made myself as stiff as I could. He made me feel nasty. My head was filled with Woody and the bouncy knee. And I was still tight, but he was forcing my legs open. I crossed my legs real tight, and I had strong legs, and I could smell his stinking-ass breath. He never penetrated me, but he had his penis out.
So now I felt like I got it, coming and going. I didn’t feel safe nowhere.
Before, I was strong in that house. Charles and Dennis, they didn’t scare me none. I was a fighter; I felt I could handle anything. But after LC did that, it became a nightmare to go to bed every night. My cousins were getting older. Dennis and I were friendly, but he was a growing boy and he could be tough, and Charlie, he was vicious, a hateful asshole. With everything going on with my uncle, I couldn’t handle them under all of that. I had no defense left. The only thing that kept me from going crazy was school and my friends. In the middle of all that, I was going to bar mitzvahs. I was going to school in Skokie, and the community was totally Jewish. We got Jewish holidays on top of the other holidays we got off. I loved their ass for it. Run Kipper, whatever, I loved it. We was out! They went on amazing trips. I had little friends, and they were calling me. “Myers! Come on! We love Oscar Myers wieners! We love you, Myers!” Ah man, I was having a ball in Skokie with my good friends. But every night, I had to handle this nasty thing with LC. That situation with my uncle made me lose my power. He took everything from me.
Being put in a position like that from some creep, that takes you away from you. It takes your innocence away; it takes your choice. It takes something away from you that you can’t never get back, and even if they wanted to, they can’t give it back. It stops little girls from playing with dolls and ever thinking of being Cinderella. It takes the fairy tale out of a little girl’s eyes. Every girl has a light in her that she keeps. You grow up, but you still have a little bit of fairy tale in you when you are raised in a nurturing environment. You think dreams can come true, but molestation snatches that away from you, and it is replaced with—how can I say how it feels? You ever see one of those scary movies? The darkness is coming around the corner and they see it? And it’s right there and they want to get away from it and they can’t? And the dark keeps coming. You begin to make all things dark; you begin to do dark things because you feel dark.
They take something away from you very valuable. Innocence is a blessing.
I listen to other women who lost their innocence by choice, afterwards, the next day, they felt a little “Yay!” They felt themselves, because it was their choice and they did it at a point when it was something special. But when it is snatched from you without your permission, it makes a sore inside you and it festers. That’s how it was for me. The beautiful light in my eyes went away, cause my fairy tale’s been broken. Maybe if the men knew that, when they took it, they wouldn’t do it. But maybe they would. You got to be really sick and dark to do that to some kid, to some person who never asked for it. Uncle LC was sure like that.
The longer I stayed in that situation, the more I thought something was wrong with me. I thought if my mother were there, she could make LC go away or she could tell me how to be a good girl. I thought I was a bad girl. I thought even if we got caught or if I told, I would be the one who would get in trouble. I felt like the nasty one. All I wanted to do was go back home to my grandmomma. I had forgiven her almost as soon as I had gotten to Aunt Josie’s. I hadn’t lived with my grandmother for two years. Ma’Dea was the one who put a baseball bat on somebody if they tried to rob us. I needed that kind of protection. But Ma’Dea, at that time, was an in-home domestic. She stayed with white folks, and on the weekends, she went and did her thing. Sick as it was, I probably kept her more grounded. I went and saw her on the weekends, and she was living in the basement of these white people. They gave her this small room off to the side, and I stayed with her. I couldn’t wander over the house, cause, you know, white folks were still seriously white folks back then. Everybody had a maid. Ain’t that something? As if it was their right to have a maid. This was late sixties.
This woman my grandmother worked for, she looked like trailer trash to me. She was a waitress, but she had married somebody who had had a little bit of money, and I guess he was giving her some alimony. She had a nice house. That ex-husband paid for everything. I was young and I didn’t know a whole bunch about white people, but even I could tell she was no class of white. I didn’t know a lot about the world, but I knew what money looked like. I was already on top of that. When I was in the suburbs, them white kids used to invite me to everything. They took me on skiing trips. They loved little Brenda. Anyway, my grandmother used to take care of her boy. I liked to mess with him cause he was an asshole. My grandmother used to make me go out in the yard and go and get him to come inside.
“Tom, it’s time to come into the house.”
“Oh, I don’t wanna come in.”
I said, “It’s time for you to come in.”
“I’m not coming in.”
I picked his ass up, and he was kicking and fighting me. And then this little girl saw me, and she started yelling back into her house, “Mommy, there’s a little colored girl taking Tommy away!”
I took his ass in the house, and my grandmother said to him, “Didn’t I say to come here?”
“Yes.” He went to his room. Ma’Dea and I laughed as soon as he was out of earshot. My grandmother had his ass in order.
Our weekends were fun with antics like that, but my grandmother was lonely. She was lonely without me. I told her, “I’m going to come home.” I never told her why. I wasn’t thinking about going back to Ma’Dea’s drinking and abuse. Anything was better than the situation I was in. I guess I thought I was thinking like a big girl. My grandmother needed me.
She was so happy. “You ready to come home?”
“Yeah.”
She said, “I gotta get a place.” And that’s how we ended up on 3247 West Warren Boulevard. We were on the third floor. It was me, my grandmother, and we had a dog named Black Smut. A little cockerpoodle. I was so glad to be back. I had been out in Evanston for too long. From fourth grade up until almost eighth grade. I came back to Chicago when I was almost thirteen. Uncle LC started touching on me when I was ten going on eleven years old. You know, just about the time when my little figure started to show, when my little titties started coming out. And I was sure Aunt Josie discussed all that stuff with him because she didn’t think Uncle LC was lying in wait for his little niece to sprout. He probably knew more about me than I did.
* * *
This thing with him followed me even when I got big. He tried to come at me again, but I was older. I was coming from the streets. I guess he thought me and him had something. In his sick mind, me and him had a relationship. He knocked on my door like he was my man. I told him, “You need to get away from my door! Before I call your wife. My kids in here. This ain’t this! What you doing?”
“Who in there?” he said.
“What you mean, who in there?” See, I wasn’t scared of him then. Did I take his money? Yes, I did. Cause by then I was a prostitute. I’ll take anybody’s money. You goddamned right I did. And I fooled his ass and kept on moving.
This asshole talking about, “I’m gone come by later.” You think I was there? How did that feel? You knocked on my door like you my man or something, cause you gave me a few dollars. Forget you.
I told Josie about all he did, not when I was little, but when I got grown. It took me a while to talk about it. All that molestation turned me into a really unbalanced kid who needed help. But we didn’t help our kids back then like that. Grown folks turned their backs on us for things like being raped and being molested, being mentally ill. Things happened, and we had no defenses because we were children. We were expected to accept it, or we were told we were lying. No one believed our story. Boys and girls. When we spoke up against adults doing stuff to us or other family members doing stuff to us, nobody grown stepped up. Nobody wanted to be our hero.
When I told Ma’Dea, before she died, what kind of man LC was, she believed me. “I know he was a no-good motherfucker. He went at one of Aunt Josie’s aunts. I believe you, cause he tried to have sex with Onie and Chloe and he tried to mess with me. Josie didn’t believe me. And when he tried to get with Suzie, she told Josie. And Josie didn’t believe her.” But years later, when I got up the guts to approach my aunt, my daughters had already told her Uncle LC had approached them, and she let them know then that she knew they told the truth. And she knew I told the truth, too.
* * *
By the time I took to my healing and I saw him again at Aunt Josie’s house, he was suffering. It didn’t really matter to me. I saw him paying for his behavior in a way that I could have never made happen. Karma made it go around, baby. He was suffering. God, You are amazing. At the end, in 2012, I saw LC suffering and I thought, God is good. And LC wasn’t in my head anymore, he wasn’t inside me anymore. Jeremy, my adopted son, was there with me, and Uncle LC was using a wheelchair. He had gotten his leg cut off; he had got prostate cancer. He was just dying, festering inside his own body. He rolled around with a prosthetic leg. And then he took his leg off, and Jeremy was like, “Are you a robot?”
“Naw, I’m not a robot.”
“Well, how you take your leg off?” Jeremy kept asking him crazy questions like that. You know how kids can be irritating? Jeremy was six years old and was asking annoying questions like nobody’s business. He kept asking the same questions over and over again. Jeremy did that to him for about an hour.
Uncle LC had this look on his face like, “Somebody come and get this boy.” You know them kids—are we there yet? Are we there yet? And I let Jeremy pester him. Finally, I said, “Come on, Jeremy.”
As we left, I really looked at my uncle. Wheeling around with one leg and dying in his own stink. Uncle LC didn’t control anything. He couldn’t hurt me. He was paying for all the abuse he gave me when I was little and needed him most of all. And it was all happening without my help. He was paying. Unfortunately, my aunt went through it with him. He was awful, but she continued to be his wife. She says now, “I should have never continued things as long as I did.” She got super sick taking care of his ass. He didn’t like her. He was mean. Just before they went down south, she retired. It was religion that made her stay with him. She felt that “death do us part.” God ain’t never told nobody to stay with somebody that’s abusing you. He never said stay with somebody that’s beating you, cause “death do us part.” Whose death? Mine? That ain’t fair. Our God ain’t said that. She regretted that: being with a creep. He died bitter and mad. It was sad. He’s been dead awhile now. Aunt Josie called me when he was dying and told me, “Brenda, I know he hurt you. You know we don’t talk about this to nobody else.” That’s the closest she ever got to it. Family secrets. But I don’t feel like keeping secrets no more. It took some good therapy to make sure he wasn’t in my head anymore. “We need to pray for him, cause he real sick.”
I went to Keith, my husband. “You know Aunt Josie done asked me to pray for LC?”
We had been married since 2005. Keith sometimes knew my moods better than I did. He said, “What you gone do?”
“The only thing I can do. I’ll pray to pray. Cause if I send Him any other kind of message, He’ll know I don’t mean it. I’m gone pray for God to give me a heart to understand. Maybe God will help me forgive him because I can’t do it on my own. I hope his foot fall off and then we’ll bury the foot and then we’ll bury his ass later. That’s what I really want.” Keith looked at me and just nodded. But God is amazing. God will continue to bless you even when you can’t sing to the place where He is. He knows why you ain’t there, because you are not perfect. You’re not feeling this. You’re not that loving person yet, you can’t reach there yet. Later that night, I got on my knees and thought, You just have to let Him know. “Listen, God, I’m only human, and right now You have to forgive me for not being able to be what You expect of me. I know You expect better of me, but better I can’t show right now. I ask You for forgiveness. I am not able to do it. I don’t like him and that’s it. I’m praying to You. I’m praying so I can get to a place where I can pray for that man. Amen.”
Part II
What’s in the mirror is not always who you are
Chapter 4
The Making of a Real Ho
You know what’s funny? All that time I spent out there with those white girls, I never thought their kind of life was a choice for me. The way they made it would never be the way I made it.
Ma’Dea and I were living on the West Side of Chicago, and life was going back to what I remembered it to be. Old friends were floating back in. Ma’Dea was drinking vodka—a little bit, and a little bit more—and men from the neighborhood started showing up at our door with bottles in brown bags. As for m
e, after a while it began to feel like I had gone from the frying pan to the fire. Did I wear something that said mess with me? Did they smell it on me? There were several family friends who touched on me. They all were gnarly and ugly. Some of them were nasty, creepier than others. I gotta say, I kept their secrets because I didn’t know what to do with them. I think today, how would it have been for me if I had had the courage to speak out? Uncle Lee was in jail. Would he have protected me if he wasn’t in the pen?
One of those dudes was a guy named Cecil. He was thirty years old. He said he was a friend of Uncle Lee’s. Cecil got at me over and over again. He used to come over with a pocket full of money and he slid Ma’Dea twenty, thirty bucks. To twelve-year-old me, that was a lotta money. He told her he been gambling and he didn’t want to go home right now and he needed a place to lay down. Ma’Dea thought of him like a son. At fifty-two, she still really missed her boys. She told Cecil, “Gone and lay down on the couch.” Or sometimes she would say, “Gone lay down in my bed.”
Between my uncle LC and Cecil, I don’t know who I hate the most. My uncle was just a vicious disappointment and turncoat to me, a traitor of the love I had for him, for the respect I had for him, for the hero I had made him out to be. He pushed all of that out of me. He broke so much love and affection that I had. He took my hero from me, which was him in a vile way. The violation he did was so deep. But Cecil.
After he molested me, I hated everything that was so supercool about him, the Super Fly part of him. I hated to see him; I hated to smell him. I hated his walk; I hated his voice. And yet with all of that, one time when he was molesting and raping me I had an orgasm. I remember hating my body for having that orgasm. I had never had an orgasm and didn’t know what it was, but imagine you having your first orgasm with the man who’s violating you. A foul son of a bitch. I rejected my body for a long time after that. I had sex, but I didn’t allow my body to have orgasms. Sex was just a thing with me. It wasn’t satisfying or anything like that. Because of the way I had the first one with him and I didn’t like it. He knew he did it to me, too.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 5