I wondered— would it count if he confessed to God while he was reading the Bible?
4
Proper Introductions– Alice
ALICE MARIE SWAFFORD IS MY NAME. Some family and close friends call me AA; that’s short for Aunt Alice. Others in my family just call me Big Al. My daughter calls me Mommy, my granddaughter calls me Granny and most of my students call me Mama Swaff. It must be noted that from my mother, Mary, and my Aunt Shugga, I inherited the seemingly infinite capacity to give of myself, and I consider this to be one of my greatest blessings.
I was born and raised in West Oakland, California— the land of the sometimes progressive and the very much stereotyped. Oakland has always been a place as rich with the cultures of people transplanted from all over the world as it is a place that cradles the under-pinning of poverty, class distinctions, and crime. But isn’t that but a bite of the history of all America? — some bitter, some sweet and everything in between. What can I say?
The story of my life begins in nineteen fifty-three. I am the second child of John Swafford and the former Mary Ernestine James, two hopeful black folks who packed up a few bags and began their migration from Colfax, Louisiana to the seemingly far away land of Oakland, California. I have always believed that my parents shared a most colorful dream of promises and possibilities that must have fueled their courage to travel thousands of miles away from home as they did during the Second Great Migration. No matter how many times I think of what they did, I am profoundly amused and delighted about the act of simple liberation accomplished when they were barely in their twenties. It’s a well-known fact that my mother did not leave with the blessings of her parents. I’m not sure about the circumstances surrounding my father’s departure.
From what I have been able to gather, kinfolk who traveled from the southern states to California by train before my parents did, had sent word back home of the opportunity, sanctuary and peace awaiting them. They truly meant well and wanted desperately for all their families to reach a new reality. But few of those early migrants had the wherewithal to look around and discern that the racism thriving in the South had a northern counterpart, whose recipe for discrimination and oppression came sweetened with just spoonful of subjective hope.
Of course, there were those black folks who were able to slowly peel back the dead skin of hopelessness and the haunting injustice and prejudice of the South, to imagine and then claim new lives for themselves. They planted their determination deep into the new soil of the promise lands, and sometimes, after many seasons, the flowers of a real future bloomed for them and their children and thereafter, their children’s children.
For those who couldn’t master the tremendous feat of even bare survival, the bleakness that prevailed in their new reality was much too painful and perplexing to rise to the occasion of imagining something better, much less, reaching for it. For some, faith was predisposed to being put into a dusty suitcase and thrown out of the nearest backdoor with an— ‘umh huh… and, I shudda known better than dat.’
Many of the hopeless and the faith-chuckers, such as my father, boarded the same trains of the Southern Pacific railway that had carried them north. Some went right back to what they loathed. In the South, they were at least aware of racism and every other hopeproof and peaceproof reality there. Some had lamented— at least they knew what was awaiting them. And I have to suspect that since my mother stayed in California when she was eight months pregnant and had four other stair-steppin’ children pulling at her apron, her faith wasn’t anywhere near as chuckable as my father’s.
Thank God!
—
1959
Daddy was gone, and only God knew when he would come back. The thought kept coming into my head, and I was trying, at my tender age, to make sense of his absence. All I remember is that one night my daddy was feeding me the most delectable blackberries in the whole wide world out of a can, and the next day, there wasn’t a sign that he ever existed. It was as if he disappeared off the face of our world. There were no shoes under the bed that he once shared with my mother, no glass jar where his whisker brush once rested, there was no razor sticking up in the bathroom, and there was no longer a frown on my Brother Arthur’s face. He seemed happier than he’d ever been while our father was with us. Once, my older brother handed my mother a butcher knife when my father was fighting her. ‘Stick him, Mommy’, he cried. Truth—Arthur would never cry for our father. I can understand that now. He was a man in a boy’s body trying to stand up for our mother. Much respect for my bro and all those just like him.
When I found out that my father was gone, I remember sitting by the kitchen window looking out into darkness that would have happily swallowed me whole if it could have gotten to me. My eyes bounced against the solid black walls of night and became chilled. After that, I couldn’t see anything. This happened a lot after my father disappeared, and sometimes I would just stare, not even seeing my own reflection in the window.
‘Alice….do you hear… Come away from the window Alice Marie. It’s time for bed.’
I remember that my eyes wondered toward my mother’s voice, but I don’t recall seeing her. What I do remember is that her voice sounded so sad, and empty as if she was missing something important that belonged to her. Had my father taken something from her as well?
Sometimes I would lay my head on my mother’s round and warm stomach and if I could have slept on it all night, I would have, but my sister Louise was inside waiting to be born without a father around to care whether she took her first breath or not.
Then—
One at a time, the things that made me a whole person started leaving me. Things started to disappear just as my father had. First, my eyesight failed when I would stare out of the window looking for my father. And if my eyes were seeing anything, they did not make a picture that I could hold onto. My mother took me to the optometrist, I had to get glasses.
Then it got to the point where I couldn’t cry even though there were tears sitting inside my eyes. They were all frozen and warm at the same time. And finally, my voice left. I just stopped talking after I put it together in my young head that my father was not going to knock on the door of our little home in the back of my mother’s sister’s house. She had sponsored my mother and father when they came to California. Sometimes I would listen at our door to check for footsteps or for the turn of the doorknob. My heart would beat fast when I thought I heard something. But time after time, I was disappointed and left with so much confusion and shock that I started to shake. I think this is probably when anxiety buried itself underneath my baby soft skin.
School had just started when father left. I was in first grade in Mrs. Kieberman’s large class at Clawson Elementary School, and even though there were many children around me as I sat in my table and on the floor mat, it still felt like there was this giant cold space all around. I never felt warm.
Mrs. Kieberman talked a lot and I think she expected the same of the children in my class. But I had no words for Mrs. Kieberman or the class. Whether my words were in my father’s coat pocket or in a raggedy suitcase packed with his clothes, it didn’t matter. I was profoundly and irrevocably affected in the negative. All I knew was that I could shape my mouth for words to come, but nothing seemed to be able to escape the suctioning gasp in my throat that pulled them back down into a silent place.
And then sometimes I wondered if my father was powerful enough to take something that belonged to me— with him— to claim it as his own, depriving me of the one thing I needed to tell what I felt about his sudden and unexplained exit from my life. Maybe he didn’t want me to speak the truth because it might hurt me more, or perhaps, it was his own feelings he was concerned about. How could I know?
I didn’t want to talk or color endless strokes of scribble on a clean, white sheet of drawing paper, day in and day out. When Mrs. Kieberman would read, I would just sit and stare into space, never hearing the beginning, middle or end to the countless s
tories about Dick and Jane and their also perfect dog, Spot. I really think that I learned to read because I kept the sounds of words inside my brain and they came together and made quiet sense to me. After all, they had no way out.
During this painful time in my life, probably the first, it seemed to rain all the time and it was the same inside my heart and my head; I do believe this is what I felt. Day after day. My eyes just sat down on Mrs. Kieberman’s thin, pink lips and I watched to the words come out of her mouth almost sideways, effortlessly, and she would always look around the class for a raised hand signaling her attention.
“Alice…do you hear me talking to you?” My teacher must have called on me. She was turning as red as the apples that the other children loved to color. “…Alice don’t you…?”
My teacher asked me the same questions too, and day after day, the glue of sadness and confusion would not let my mouth open for even a single word to come out.
One day—whack! That’s all I heard. The hum of a cracking sound echoed in my head. My hand was burning and I started to cry and shake and dance the dance of a panicked child, sucking in gulps of air and then threatening not to let it out until I died a sudden and youthful death. Mrs. Kieberman had taken her wooden ruler and brought it down on my left hand. It was the hand that I wrote my first letter with. And my hand, as it was under attack by the ruler, smashed onto my desk and made hand pate’.
My little wooden desk at Clawson Elementary was connected to a small, dark boy that I used to smile at every day until my father left. I can’t remember his name now, but when Mrs. Kieberman let the monster ruler come down, I screamed, he screamed and my ears popped. The searing harmony of other children crying seemed to back our teacher up until she plopped down in her desk chair without even looking where she was going. Mrs. Tolubin, the school’s principal, escorted me from the classroom after one of my peers ran to tell someone what had happened to me.
“That witch!” The words came storming from behind my mother’s mumble when she came to pick me up. It was another dark day for me.
Before the administration allowed me to go back to Mrs. Kieberman’s class—after my mother had come to advocate for my safety and my rights— I was given a battery of tests. There was one for hearing, yet another one for seeing, and I had to put some puzzles together as well as look at some pictures, which I later learned were ink blots. By the time the tests were completed, it was the end of the year and I had spent most of my time in the classroom with teachers I didn’t even know. They were kind and black— like me. I had also gone on more than my fair share of excursions to the symphony and to the museums. These were the most enriching times of my young life.
When I went home for the summer of 1960, the voice that I held silent for a whole year, except in the presence of my mother, came out of hiding to loudly and playfully herald the days of summer in our backyard and then beyond. I was back with the defining noise of youth and with the other children on Helen Street in West Oakland— who probably suffered the loss of their fathers as well.
—
NOVEMBER 22, 1963. IT WAS A DARK, DARK DAY.
Even at ten years old, I knew and felt things that should have been far beyond my emotional grasp. I watched my president’s casket being drawn by the gentlest horses and for months I heard the funeral march play in my head. It was two days after my tenth birthday. My heart felt so much loss for someone who I had only seen on television and heard on the radio. But I believed that I knew that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a good man and that he would protect the America for which I stood with my class daily to pledge my allegiance. …One nation under God…
When I heard the word, assassinated, in the same sentence as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I knew it was all too formal to be good news even though I believe that I had never heard the five syllable word before in my life. I was still in class when the news came. After that, everything went silent for me again. I prayed for Caroline and John Jr. And I wondered whether Russia was going to attack the United States during our time of crisis. I hoped we would be safe until my mother could stockpile enough water, homemade preserves and canned goods from the commissary to see us through any war that might come to our neighborhood. It would take years for me to try and feel safe as I had when my president was alive.
—
Middle school and high school found me nervous and insecure. This was also the beginning of a time when I could look in the mirror and hate what I saw. I saw an ugly, black girl, whose face would have never been seen in the books about the omnipresent “Dick and Jane” or on any family show on television. I had a big butt that seemed to attract the unwanted and scary attention of old men— even at church. On top of that, I faced a challenge that too many adolescent girls, even today, have to face, sometimes without any defense at all; I had to deal with being molested by my stepfather. Although I didn’t have a name at the time for how he was taking advantage of me, I knew that what he was doing was wrong. Silence claimed me yet again. I could not bring myself to tell my mother what was going on.
Then, as though taking its proper place in the line of my life, the onset of the early symptoms of anxiety and low grade depression stepped up. My pediatrician treated this new thing with Phenobarbital. I was barely fifteen and I was stressed out about everything, especially my grades which were always great. But I never took the medicine with any frequency because it made me feel funny.
By the time I left for college, I was focused on my academics. And it wasn’t long before I developed these strong sexual feelings that weren’t directed at any one young man. I did know that my body was changing and it seemed to want the comfort of a man more than my brain did. Mixed in with this new feeling of need was the lingering desire to be close to my father— who I really didn’t know. Funny. It was just that I didn’t understand whether I wanted a father whose love could keep all danger away, or whether I wanted a lover. Sometimes I felt that it would only suffice if I could have both wrapped up into a hybrid or some kind of tabooish prototype. All I knew is that I needed a man to love me so deeply that it would compensate for the early losses of love in my life— first my father and then my president, who I loved as well.
And of course, I met some really nice guys in college. But all my longing for love was tied the region of the world where I had never had it— home in West Oakland, California. But for this complication in my world, I probably would have never chosen William Jennings Choyce as my mate. And I would have never had to tell the story about being married to a serial rapist and murderer.
William Choyce-Dressed
5
Proper Introductions– William
HIS NAME IS WILLIAM JENNINGS CHOYCE. He is my former spouse and is currently waiting on California’s Death Row in San Quentin with the notorious Scott Peterson, the wife and baby murderer. William and Scott are in line to be executed for committing the most horrible crimes on Earth.
Like me, William was born and raised in West Oakland, California. He grew up in the home with his mother and his father, two sisters and one younger brother. There was also a stillborn child, who even in death, seemed to be more actively and emotionally embraced than the living children. This was an observation that I always found interesting as well as troubling.
The black and white photographs of William and his family when he was young tell a grainy and fading story of normal living for one African-American family in West Oakland during the fifties and sixties. There was the family home in the background, the Choyce kids with their half-conjured smiles and there was Mrs. Choyce, looking very fashionable and beautiful. She was the quintessential image of style and grace, more than a solid representation of motherhood. In most of the family pictures, Mrs. Choyce appears averse to touching her own children; her fingertips hovered just slightly above their shoulders as she stood next to them for a pose. Then there was the front porch, an ever-present prop; it was always clean and clear of the less tidy signs of life, like candy wrappers and cigarette bu
tts. Perhaps a seasoned picture reader could glean a more than speculative blink full of the contemplations going on behind the eyes of the photographed and then again, maybe not. But of all the families and people within a square mile of our West Oakland neighborhood, the Choyce’s were the least likely to be figured out.
Curiously, what seemed to make the Choyce family so different from most other families from outside appearances was the very thing, which in photographs, made them so much like a majority of the families in our neighborhood; Mr. Choyce, the family patriarch, was rarely photographed with his family. And even though Mr. Choyce was a constant presence in the Choyce home—never totally abandoning the family— he could have been considered more absent than the other fathers who came and left and came back and left again, sometimes for long periods of time. Mr. Choyce, however, didn’t abandon his family; he just avoided them in public or so it seemed.
The photographs also show that William had a big apple head with near perfect ears, Chinese-slanted bright brown eyes, caramel skin, and he was always neatly dressed. He looked no different than any other boy child in the neighborhood except that there was nothing rugged about him; there were no chipped knees or no prematurely missing teeth. In fact, he looked too gentle to be a “real” little boy, or the kind that fathers could tuck in the back of a pickup truck.
William also had the kind of interesting shell around him which didn’t blatantly reveal that he was the child of a stern mother who could pull him by the ears, shake out some of the badness, and then send him back out to play with his silent anger. Though many years later, William’s appearance of being near-normal, translate into anything but that.
Conquering Darkness Memoir of the Serial Killer's Wife Page 3