Sometimes Daddy would call and say he was coming to pick us up to take us out. Aunt Nancy would scrub us down and dress us up, and then we would wait. Several times we waited for him and he never showed. After a while, my brother refused to wait, and on the rare occasions that Daddy did show up, Ray refused to go with him. I wasn’t so easily angered. I kept waiting. Usually, around 9 or 10 P.M., my aunt would make me a sandwich and tell me to take off my clothes and go to bed. In that house, bed seemed to be the place you went to avoid talking about anything.
Although I am sure that my stepmother thought leaving me at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee’s house would provide a stable and secure environment while she ironed out the difficulties of her own household, my tenancy there was anything but stable. I had already learned from Grandma that home was a violent place where unexpected outbursts of rage were to be expected. Now, in my new temporary home, with my make-believe parents and my make-believe sister, I was learning how to live a lie. I am not referring here to the “open your mouth and don’t tell the truth” kind of lying. I am referring to the “see what is going on and act like you don’t see it, lie-to-yourself” kind of lie; the silently brutal kind of lying that distorts your sense of self and worth. What I learned from the pillars of stability in my family was the “act like you are okay and everything is fine” kind of lie that is the foundation of emotional dishonesty and self-deception. It became a pattern that stuck with me.
Living with my aunt and uncle, I needed attention, affection, and affirmation. I needed to know that I was safe from harm both inside and outside of the house. But the adults were too busy mismanaging their own lives to realize how they were dismantling mine. I was a good student in school; I did my work with little or no help, and I always got a glowing report card. What I did not get was any type of reward or acknowledgment. While everything “bad” I did was noticed at Grandma’s house, nothing “good” I did was noticed in this place. This only served to reinforce the message that nothing about me was good enough.
Beside the snide remarks about who was or was not my mother or father, the other thing I remember was the “earning your keep” remarks that reminded me to be grateful and that I needed to earn my stay in the household.
My stay with Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee extended into years. It no longer had anything to do with the issues my parents were working through. Instead, it had everything to do with how useful I made myself. I had to cook, not because I was a girl and it would one day be a necessary skill to have, but because people who were not my parents were spending their money to buy food for me. I had to get on my knees and scrub the bathroom floor with a brush because nobody owed me anything. The only way I could secure my place in the place I found myself was to say very little, ask for very little, need very little, and do a lot to make sure that others were satisfied with the way I met their needs. Another pattern.
One good thing about living with Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee was that I made friends. There were other kids on our block whose home life gave me a glimpse of what was considered “normal.” From my childlike vantage point, they had everything I needed and wanted. They lived with their parents. They were kissed and hugged daily, helped with their homework and their problems. They had siblings who spoke to them regularly and looked out for the younger ones. Becoming involved in the day-to-day home life of my friends not only awakened a deep and desperate yearning in my soul; it gave me a vision of what was possible. Without the model of my friends and their parents, I wonder if I would have ever known what to do with my own children.
No one else was teaching me the things I needed to know. No one explained why Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lee fought on Saturday night, why my father didn’t reclaim me, how I was related to these people, or what anything in life really meant to me as a budding young woman. Beyond “work hard, don’t ask for anything,”
“lie about what you see,” and “be on the lookout for something crazy to happen at any moment,” I received no guidance at all about how to live this thing called life. I wasn’t taught anything about money except there was never enough. I wasn’t taught about making choices or taking responsibility for myself. I wasn’t taught anything at all about giving and receiving love or how to distinguish between love and anything else that showed up bearing the name of love. In the absence of guidance I made up my own explanation about almost everything, including myself.
I remember confiding my pain and devastation to a friend the first time I broke up with the man who would become my third husband. She tried her best to help me pull myself together. In the midst of our conversation she asked me, “What would your mother say to you? What did she tell you about how to make it through a broken heart?”
My brain instantly turned to bacon sizzling on a barbeque. I realized that not one of the women in my life had ever talked to me about anything I would face as a woman. I had learned about my menstrual cycle from a friend the day it started. No one ever talked to me about boyfriends or, for that matter, how to be a friend. I got no instruction at all about my body, my mind, or my heart. I never considered, not even once, that a relationship could end and you would move on. I thought I was supposed to do what I had seen the women in my family do: put up with the crap and fight it out as required. Bunny took me to Woolworth’s to buy my first training bra, my first bottle of nail polish, and my first eyeliner, but she never once talked to me about the subtle and not-so-subtle requirements of being a woman. I knew nothing! Absolutely nothing about how to interact with men or other women, other than what I had made up on my own from watching the dysfunction of the adults who moved in and out of my life. They had failed me miserably and somehow it was my fault.
Bunny, my make-believe sister, was the divine exception to our dysfunctional household rules. She introduced me to worlds that I could have never imagined. Bunny was a dancer with a very diverse group of friends who all adored me, and she took me almost everywhere with her. When they were dancing, I followed along in the back of the room. One of the group would always come back and help me get the steps right. From them, I learned classical ballet, modern dance, and my first love, traditional African dance. Through them, I met Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, and Chuck Davis. These were Bunny’s friends and colleagues. They were my aunties and uncles. They were the bright lights of my life.
Bunny danced with Michael Babatunde Olatunji at the New York World’s Fair in the African pavilion, and whatever she learned there, she taught me. In addition to the dance and art of this powerful culture, specifically Yoruba culture, I learned their spiritual philosophy. I learned that African people did not see or worship God the same way American people did. For Africans, God was everywhere, in all things, at all times present, alive in everyone. God had many names, because God took on many forms in order for people to know, worship, and honor God. Bunny explained to me that there really was only one God and that when you took culture into consideration, God had to resemble the people who were worshipping. That’s why, she said, Buddha was Asian and Jesus was portrayed as white. This meant there was a God that looked like me: brown and female.
It all seemed to make sense to me back then. Grandma’s God wanted to smite me like she did. Bunny’s God wanted to dance, sing, and make me happy like Bunny and her friends did. What didn’t make sense to me was why God didn’t stop the madness in my life. Why didn’t God smite Uncle Lee for drinking too much and fighting with Aunt Nancy? Why didn’t Daddy get his eyes plucked out for demeaning Ray and beating me? Why didn’t God fix Ray’s asthma and stop Grandma from being so mean? Despite what Bunny told me, I not only had a distorted concept of God, I had a dysfunctional relationship with God. I learned to pray to God for things, not about things, promising to gain God’s favor by what I would do or stop doing. I had no real idea about what, who, or where God was. I only knew that when I thought I needed God, I mean really needed God to help me, God was nowhere to be found.
It wasn’t until the pathology of my family of origin had bec
ome a life-threatening disease in my mind and heart that I realized, if not for a loving, merciful, and omnipresent God, I would never have made it out alive. I spent three-quarters of my life believing that God had abandoned me before I discovered that I had abandoned myself. That was the pathology. It was the pattern that I followed. It was what I had been taught and, like I said, I was a very good student.
You simply cannot pay the debts that come along with believing you are unworthy. Unworthiness always puts you in debt to anyone and everyone who shows you the slightest degree of attention or love or energy. Eventually, in this form of bankrupt relationship, your benefactors will demand or expect more than you are able or willing to give. This is the precise moment they will choose to call in the loan.
I had just swallowed the last drop of soda when I heard the commotion in the kitchen. I shoved all of my loot under the bed and jumped to my feet. I wasn’t as concerned about what was going on in the kitchen as I was about someone finding my loot— my stolen loot. I had taken some money from Uncle Lee. I had done this many times before, but I always limited myself to coins; fifty cents here, thirty-five cents another time. But today, he was so drunk and he had so many dollar bills hanging out of his pocket, I had helped myself to five whole dollars and treated myself to all sorts of goodies that I did not want to be discovered. Ray was holed up in his room. Bunny was off dancing and Aunt Nancy was out playing cards. Hopefully Uncle Lee was still too drunk to notice that the money was gone. Maybe. Maybe not.
Uncle Lee had fallen down in the kitchen. He was trying to pick himself up by the time I got there, and I kept my distance. I had come to hate the smell of the stale liquor as it oozed from his body and hung on his breath. Seeming satisfied just to know that he wasn’t home alone, he stumbled back to the basement.
When he called me several minutes later, my heart sank. He knows! He knows I took his money. I slid my comic books back under the bed and headed for the stairs leading down to the basement with my heart racing and pounding in my ears. When I saw him sprawled out on the floor at the bottom of the steps, I knew he still had no idea about what I had done.
He wanted me to come down and talk to him. He also wanted me to bring him some of the pickled pig’s feet we had in a jar in the refrigerator. I couldn’t figure out which was worse—touching a pig’s foot or sitting close enough to Uncle Lee to inhale the stench of liquor. Lucky me! I was about to have both of those experiences! I thought about telling him the pig’s feet were gone and making him a sandwich instead. But stealing and lying in one day was too much even for me, so I fished two big, juicy feet out of the jar and put them on a plate with some potato salad. Throughout my tenancy in that house, like when Aunt Nancy stopped speaking to Uncle Lee but still made me fix him a dinner plate, I had been taught to be nice to the men no matter what. So I put the plate, a napkin and silverware, and a nice tall glass of iced water on a tray and carried them down the stairs into the basement to serve my make-believe father, Uncle Lee. All the way down the stairs I prayed that he would not ask me about the money.
He had made it to the sofa. I placed the tray on the coffee table, carefully avoiding his drunken gaze. I would not give him an opportunity to detect any guilt in my eyes.
“Sit down baby. C’mon. Sit down here and talk to me.”
He was patting the sofa cushion next to him. Walking around the coffee table, still being careful not to look directly at him, I could see him bite into one of the pig’s feet out of the corner of my eye. The vinegar from Uncle Lee’s tasty treat; the stench of the liquor hanging in the air; the guilt of being a thief; it was all causing my stomach to flip and me to gag.
“Why don’t you eat this one?”
Uncle Lee extended the other pig’s foot in my direction. Does he expect me to take it with my bare hands? Before I could, he dropped it; right on the sofa, between his legs. Rather than use his hands to retrieve his lunch, he grabbed me by the wrist. Instinctively, I pushed him with my free hand, which gave him the opportunity to grab my other wrist. Something was very, very wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The mixture of scents flowing into my nostrils, the queasiness in my stomach, and the strange smile on Uncle Lee’s face had rendered me feeble-minded, drained of all defenses. My face was too close to his. His tongue had no business being in my ear. Why was his foul-smelling, sticky mouth on my mouth? The more I twisted and turned to get away, the tighter his grasp became. I could feel my body become rigid just before it went numb.
“Stop fighting me. Don’t fight me. We’re gonna have some fun. I’m gonna show you how to have fun.”
My blouse was torn. My panties were ripped. His weight was smashing me into the sofa. His breath was foul. His calloused hands were groping at my private parts. He was hurting me; ripping my insides apart. He was punishing me for taking his money, and there was nothing I could do but lie there, numb and guilty, listening to him say that he loved me.
I am not sure where my mind went; I just know that when it left, I was able to escape the stench, the pain, and the guilt. I wondered what my father would do if he knew this was going on. I wondered about the whispers I heard from the adults that Nett was not my real mother. I wondered if Ray was sleeping or if he would come downstairs and discover what was being done to me.
I wondered where he would run to, where he would hide. There were no closets in the basement. I wondered how long I had been lying there and if I would be the one who would have to clean the pig’s-foot juice off the sofa.
Somehow, I found myself in the upstairs bathroom sitting in a tub of water. I wasn’t sure what to do about the blood floating around my body or the excruciating pain in my head. Since there was no one at home that I could ask about these things, I just wondered. I remembered the vomit under the kitchen table. I would need to clean that up. I also needed to stop the bleeding. It had stained two fresh pairs of panties already. A big wad of toilet paper did the trick, and it stayed in place while I cleaned up the kitchen floor. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the cat, half out of my mind when Aunt Nancy came home.
All the fighting I had seen in that household finally paid off. I knew I had to fight for myself. This could not—no—would not happen to me again. Not ever! No stench of liquor in my face! No tongues in my ears! No ripping of my insides ever again! I told Aunt Nancy what drunken Uncle Lee had done to me. At first she just stared. After what seemed like forever, she turned on her heels and headed for the basement. I was still clutching the cat to my flat chest when I heard her call my name. I decided not to take the cat with me just in case any violence erupted. The cat had been through enough of that and so had I.
“Tell him what you told me!”
I wasn’t sure if it was a request or a command. I did know that it was torture. Alternating between glancing at Aunt Nancy and staring at the empty liquor bottles on the bar, I gave my account of what had taken place. I had the ripped blouse and the bloody panties to prove it, but I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It didn’t. Not because Aunt Nancy believed me and took me into her arms to console me. No, I didn’t need my evidence because Uncle Lee denied it. He denied that he hurt me. He denied that he penetrated me, whatever that meant. Aunt Nancy just stared at him without indicating whom she believed or what she planned to do. Then, without a single word of anger toward him or the slightest gesture of comfort toward me, she said simply:
“Go to your room. Go on and go to bed.”
The house remained silent for the rest of the night. There was no yelling. No crashing of bottles or furniture. There was no music, no television, no running water, nothing. Just silence for as long as I remained awake. The next day the silence continued, and for many days after that it hung in the air. That silence stripped me of my dignity. That silence destroyed my sense of worth. That silence huddled over me and the entire household for the next four years, until a few months after Aunt Nancy died.
My stepmother knew. Somehow she knew. We were sitting in the Horn and Hardart aut
omat when she looked at me and asked:
“Did Lee ever touch you? Did he ever do anything nasty to you?”
The silence had rendered me deaf, dumb, and blind. Suddenly, I could hear again. I could see and smell again. I just couldn’t understand why no one had said anything to me until now.
“Did Uncle Lee ever put his hands under your clothes or anything like that?”
I could feel my head starting to move from side to side, indicating no. I didn’t want to say no, but my body seemed to be responding automatically. I was shivering and shaking my head from side to side. Nett stared at me. She told me that she was my friend. She told me that I could trust her. She told me that she had seen the way he looked at me and that she didn’t like it. I could feel something strange going on inside of me. Finally, I knew that it mattered, that I mattered. I was so relieved. But my head was saying no and my mouth was screaming:
“Stop it! Stop it!”
Who was I talking to? To Nett? To Uncle Lee? To the silence that had followed me like a stench? It wasn’t making any sense. I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to tell her everything, but the pattern of lies had kicked in, the pathology of act like everything’s all right had flared up, and both of these were fighting my deep need to trust this woman who I really believed cared about me.
Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through Page 7