The first swing of my daddy’s belt was nothing compared to the second, third, fourth, and onward. My daddy beat me for what seemed like hours. He swung his belt with every fiber of his being. It landed on the skin of my young body with the force one would imagine he’d use in fighting a man his age and his size. The only time I got any reprieve was when I slipped out of the clutch of his hand. Trying to get away from him, I would head straight for the corner of my bedroom where the radiator sat. Inevitably, I would run into it, burn my leg or arm, and head back in the other direction, giving my daddy the opportunity he needed to grab hold of me again. My daddy beat me until he started sweating. Swinging wildly so that he missed me as often as his belt connected with my flesh, he beat me until all the furniture, except the beds, was scattered throughout the room. He beat me above the pleas of my stepmother to stop before he killed me. When one of his wild swings missed me, it hit her. My daddy beat me until his pants fell off. And then he stopped, not because I was barely conscious, but because someone was knocking—no—banging on the door.
The neighbors had called the police. Somehow, my stepmother got them to go away without coming in. I don’t remember where she found me. I do remember waking up in the bathtub with her crying over my bruised and battered body. I don’t remember if I was still crying. I do remember that my entire body was throbbing and one of my eyes was swollen shut. I remember because there was a cool washcloth lying across that side of my face. I also remember the exact words Nett spoke when I was conscious enough to hear:
“Why do you have to make him so mad? Why can’t you ever do what you are told?”
If I live to be 100, I will never forget those words. I will never forget lying in that bathtub, with the scent of Listerine lingering, beaten to within what felt like an inch of my life by a stark raving lunatic and believing it was my fault. And I did believe it.
After all, I did get lipstick on the sheets.
The beating was only one aspect of the devastation I experienced that Halloween night. At some point, I must have sought refuge under my bed or Ray’s bed. What I saw when I looked up is etched into my mind even now: my older brother, my hero, crouched down in the closet, with most of his body hidden by the clothing hanging above his head. His head was resting on his knees. At one point, our eyes locked. If my eyes were communicating anything, it was, help me! Which of course he did not—he could not. Like I said, it is one thing to get a beat-down. It’s a whole other thing when the beat-down is silently witnessed by your hero. That turns the beat-down into a slaughter.
Pathology. What causes a grown, unemployed man who hasn’t been home in four or five days to come home and violently, viciously beat his baby girl? Perhaps he wasn’t grown up all the way. Perhaps my childhood was a shadow of his own, in which he was stuck. Perhaps it was the pressure of being a man who didn’t have a job, couldn’t get a job, and had two kids and a wife to feed. Perhaps it was just a diversion to avoid my stepmother’s questions about where he had been and why. Maybe. Maybe not. Could be. Who knows?
Puzzle. What causes a grown, employed woman who has accepted a child born during and outside of her marriage to the child’s father, who has agreed to rescue that child from being battered, to hold that child responsible for her battering? Perhaps it was the pressure of working for very little and stretching it a long way to care for children who were not her own. Perhaps she had just been glad that her man was home and my shenanigans had ruined her plans for the evening. Or perhaps they were both crazy—just so plumb crazy with their own grief and guilt and anger and sadness and woundedness that they had to inflict pain on somebody. What I do know is that the depth and breadth of physical, psychological, and emotional wounding I experienced could have only been inflicted by people who, if not insane, had definitely run out of sanity.
Pieces. Fifty-something years later, I can still feel and hear and smell and taste the bloodiness of that beating. It wounded me in places that were too deep to bleed, places that allowed parts of my self to leak out. That Halloween fright night taught me lessons I would spend half of my life trying to unlearn. Each time my father drew back his belted hand and violently, vengefully brought it forward to make contact with my body, he taught me that love will hurt you, and men will beat you, and somehow it’s your fault. This was a lesson that I could not, would not escape for a long time, but my brother did. He escaped and he watched; probably grateful that it wasn’t him being brutalized; probably convinced that he never wanted to have anything at all to do with my father. Maybe he really wanted to help me and didn’t know how. I married two men who were just like that—men who wanted to be men but just didn’t know how. That Halloween beating defined an aspect of my sense of self that I took into every relationship, with every man and every woman for the better part of my adult life. Like so many children who are brutalized, abandoned, and neglected, I came to believe that who I was and what happened to me didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to the people who hurt me, and it didn’t matter to God.
I made certain other decisions about myself and life that night. I decided that I was unlovable. No one who was loved would be treated in that way, and no one who loved me would do that to me. Or would they? I also decided that men could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. That’s why the police left without a real investigation of the facts. In fact, my father got away with what he had done because my stepmother made an excuse for it. So I learned that I too had to make excuses for men who treated me badly. I learned that it was best not to expect a man to help me, defend me, or stand up for me. If my brother couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, who would? Another big lesson I learned from my stepmother that night was to do whatever was required to keep the peace.
After the police left, she didn’t take me into her bed so she could nurse my wounds and rock me to sleep. It would have been soothing for me to sleep with Nett on the pullout sofa in the living room, like we did some Friday nights when we watched movies. But we didn’t. Nor did she tell me to “move over,” like she sometimes did, and curl up next to me, pulling me close so that I would feel safe in my own bed. Instead, she went into the bedroom with my father and shut the door. My brother told me what it meant when we heard the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump on the wall of our bedroom that was connected to theirs. I listened to those thumps and then to the silence because I was afraid to go to sleep. Somewhere between the time the police left and the time the sun came up the next morning, I must have decided that even when a man treats you badly, you still have to sleep with him.
A lot of things changed after we moved into the bigger apartment. Daddy was still writing numbers, but he started to get arrested. Once, the police surrounded him when he was getting out of his car. Ray and I were sitting on the fire escape; we saw the whole sordid affair. They threw Daddy against the car and searched his pockets. I guess they found what they were looking for, because they shoved him head first into the police car and drove away. Another time, Daddy was leaving a neighbor’s apartment after collecting a bet when the police stopped him in the hallway and carted him off to jail. Nett told us that all the people in the building pitched in to pay Daddy’s bail. When he came home later that hot summer night, people sitting around outside applauded.
That was the first and only time I was proud to be his daughter. T hat pride didn’t last long. One day shortly thereafter, Ray and I were in our room watching television when we heard knocking—no—banging at the door to our apartment. The door came crashing in and Daddy came running down the hallway with several white police officers in pursuit. Ray headed for his favorite place, the closet. In a short time a whole lot happened: The front door was lying on the floor, Nett had been slammed into a wall and had a huge bruise rising up on her forehead, most of the rooms in the house had been deconstructed, and Daddy had been taken away. Miss Brooks, our neighbor from down the hall, grabbed me as I was biting the police officer who was swinging Nett around by her hair. As Miss Brooks carried me out into the hallway, I
noticed that Ray was already there. She took us to her apartment down the hall and made us tea.
Mr. Rootman, Daddy’s friend who owned the candy store down the street from Grandma’s house, came by Miss Brooks’s apartment. He brought treats for me and Ray and a huge wad of money for Nett. Then he dropped a bomb. The word on the street was that Grandma had turned Daddy in to the police. I’m not sure I understood what “turned him in” meant, but from the names Nett called her on the telephone, I knew that what Grandma did could not have been a good thing. I also knew that no one would ever do anything about it. Adult mistakes never bore any consequences in my family.
Shortly after Daddy went to jail, my brother and I went to live with Nancy and Lee. We knew them as our aunt and uncle, although I found out much later that they were not related to us by blood. Nancy was my birth mother’s best friend. I was told they were like sisters. Although Nett told us it would only be for a few weeks, two months at most, we ended up living with Nancy and Lee just short of six years. In that home, my new home on a nice quiet street in Brooklyn, I learned how to physically and emotionally fight for my life. I learned how to fight the quiet, dirty fight that many women fight to stay in painful relationships. Unfortunately, my young mind became confused about the messages I received, and I ended up creating the exact same negative scenarios in my life that the adults modeled for me. In fact, one day I realized that the apartment I lived in with my physically abusive husband had the same exact floor plan as the apartment where I experienced the Halloween horror. The pathology had manifested in a very concrete way.
To be a good fighter, you have to be stripped down to nothing.
A fighter is trained to forget what they know and who they are outside of the ring.
Once a fighter is stripped down, they can be built up by one voice; The trainer’s voice.
And it is assumed that the trainer has the fighter’s best interest in mind.
CHAPTER 4
BLIND IN ONE EYE … CAN’T
SEE OUT OF THE OTHER
Secure the children first! It is the responsibility of every parent and every adult to ensure that the children in their care are safe and secure. What I am referring to goes way beyond feeding, clothing, and washing behind a child’s ears. What I mean is that adults, I believe, have a God-given responsibility to make sure that all children over whom they exercise authority are guided, nurtured, and protected from harm—all types of harm. Unfortunately, in far too many instances this never happens.
Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee were pillars in our family. Unlike my parents, they had been married forever. They had one child, a girl, my older cousin Bunny. She became my make-believe sister. Aunt Nancy was short and very round with a sweet round face. She looked like a walking, talking pumpkin. She was a stay-at-home mom who took in and cared for other people’s children during the day. Today she would be called an entrepreneur with a homebased day care. She wasn’t a stranger to me, because I had spent many afternoons at her home before I started going to school. Uncle Lee was a mystery. He was tall and very thin. He barely looked at me when he spoke, and when he did, I could hardly hear him. In all the time I had been in his company, I’m not sure he had ever spoken ten words to me, or to anyone else for that matter.
Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee owned their own home with a finished basement and a backyard in a multi-ethnic, working-class neighborhood in Crown Heights. Their home was the place where most relatives wound up when they were going through difficult times. No one ever explained their family ties. Yet I was expected to give all of these people access to my head and heart; to treat them like intimates although I didn’t know who they were, where they came from, or why they were a part of my life. I also had to do what they told me to do and trust that their intentions toward me were honorable.
Uncle Lee was a school-bus driver, a functioning alcoholic, and a creature of habit. He went to work at 4 A.M. every school day to drive wealthy children in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to their small private school. While the children were in class, Uncle Lee doubled as a cook. At 3 P.M., he drove the children home. He was home every evening at 6:20 p.m. to flop down into his old recliner in front of the television set. He ate his dinner in that chair, watching television as if his life depended on it, until he fell asleep. Day in, day out, that was his routine, until Friday. Friday night was a totally different story. On most Fridays when Uncle Lee came home, he was rip-roaring drunk. He would stagger in the house, singing loud and off key. If he made it to his chair, he would sit there cracking corny jokes and trying to tickle everybody who passed by him. If he didn’t make it to the chair, he would plop down wherever he fell to sing his songs and tell his jokes. Aunt Nancy would push him away when he grabbed at her while they exchanged affectionate hugs and kisses, and she always laughed at his jokes.
At some point, Friday nights changed and everything else followed suit. Uncle Lee stopped coming home after work on Fridays. When it first started happening, Aunt Nancy would sit in the window, waiting for Uncle Lee’s car to appear. Sometimes she would cry. Other than that time Grandma was pleading with my daddy not to take Ray away, I had never seen an adult cry. I knew that my own tears were usually attached to some sort of physical pain; I had learned long ago not to cry when I was sad or disappointed or when someone hurt my feelings. So watching Aunt Nancy cry made me very uncomfortable. It gave me a funny feeling in my chest that sometimes made it hard for me to breathe.
One Friday, after several hours of sitting in the window, Aunt Nancy called a taxicab. This was huge! We never took a taxi anywhere unless it was an emergency; besides, we had a car. Well, actually, Uncle Lee had a car. The only thing she said to me was “Come on!” I scurried to follow her out of the door. Without a word to me, Aunt Nancy told the driver where to go. It was an area I didn’t know. When we arrived, she told him to slow down so we could cruise along the block. I saw the car first. I had no clue about what we were doing, so with great enthusiasm and as loud as I could, I shared my discovery:
“There’s Uncle Lee’s car!”
The cab screeched to a halt. Aunt Nancy peered out the window. The driver asked, “Is this it?”
Aunt Nancy was silent. Finally, she said, “Take me back to Schenectady Avenue.”
I was totally confused. I thought we had come to get Uncle Lee. So, I asked, “Why are we leaving? We’re leaving the car? Is Uncle Lee coming home?”
Aunt Nancy shot me an icy shut-the-hell-up glance. And I did.
Aunt Nancy had discovered, through “wifely investigation,” that Uncle Lee was seeing another woman. Although I only heard bits and pieces of their whispered conversations, I am sure he denied that he was having an affair. I suspect that Aunt Nancy knew the truth, but it must have taken her a while to get the information and inspiration she needed to address the problem head-on. Unfortunately, she was not mindful of what she was teaching me in the process of her own learning.
When we got home after the taxi ride, Aunt Nancy went back to her perch at the window and told me to go to bed. It was hard for me to figure out what was really going on or how to feel about it. I knew there was trouble brewing but I could not tell who it was that was in trouble, crying Aunt Nancy or absent Uncle Lee. Like most children caught between two troubled adults, I made it all about me. Somehow, in my mind, I felt it was my responsibility to make things better.
At some point in the wee hours of Saturday morning, Uncle Lee finally came home. Drunk. I heard glass shattering in the kitchen, my cousin Bunny’s voice, then my brother’s voice. My curiosity and fear brought me to the kitchen door. There was a human minefield on the floor. Aunt Nancy was on top of Uncle Lee. Uncle Lee was entangled with Bunny, my brother had a foot— not sure whose—in his hand. My first instinct was to laugh, until I saw the blood. Aunt Nancy was cussing and clutching something in her teeth. It was a hand; Uncle Lee’s hand. This was a knockdown, drag-out fight between two people who supposedly loved each other. This was a mess! A confusing mess! And because I w
as the one who saw Aunt Nancy crying, the one who rode in the taxi and saw Uncle Lee’s car, somehow this was all my fault.
Children are often required to clean up the mess that adults make, even when the adults show no concern at all for how their messes infect children’s lives. After everyone was separated, Ray and Bunny and I set about administering first aid. I focused on Aunt Nancy because she had the least blood flowing. I rescued her wig from the doorknob and attempted to apply a wet facecloth to her swollen, bloody lip. I handed her the wig and she promptly threw it across the room at Uncle Lee, calling him a string of filthy names that told the whole story for us children. Bunny was crying and dabbing blood from her daddy’s head where the glass or whatever had made contact with his skull. One of Uncle Lee’s eyes was hugely swollen and both his lips were bleeding. He was so drunk he could hardly speak, though he kept trying.
Not a word was spoken about the events of that night, but they became the weekend pattern. Uncle Lee would not come home on Friday. Aunt Nancy and I would take a cab ride to locate his car. When Uncle Lee did come home, drunk, Aunt Nancy would attack him, beat the mess out of him, and then patch him up. After the first two or three fights, we children stopped interfering. Instead, we would wait until they were both asleep, curled up against each other, and then clean up the mess. On Monday, it was back to work, to school, to childcare, to preparing dinner, as if the weekend had never happened.
I’m not sure when Aunt Nancy became “my mother” or when Uncle Lee became “my father” or when my cousin became “my sister.” I do know it was a gradual transition that made me feel somewhat more secure, yet sad at the same time. I knew that my brother and I had come to the family refuge because my father had gone to jail, not because he didn’t love or want us. But when I realized that my father had been released from jail several months after we’d been adopted into Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee’s family, I wondered why he or my stepmother didn’t come to take us back home. I discovered he had been released from jail the day he drove by my aunt and uncle’s house without stopping. I ran down the street screaming like a lunatic, assuming he had not seen and couldn’t hear me. By the fifth or sixth time it happened, I resigned myself to believing that it wasn’t him; it was just a car that looked like his. I knew that was a lie, but anything else would have been too crushing to consider.
Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through Page 6