So who cared if I had a job?
My parents, naturally.
I began to dread routine calls home to Detroit every Sunday. I couldn’t bear to hear my mother ask for the zillionth time, “Do you have a job yet?” But one Sunday my mother surprised me. “Daddy and I want to come to your graduation.”
“My graduation? I wasn’t even thinking of going. No one I know is going.” I spared her the rhetoric, but going to your graduation wasn’t something you did in those anti-establishment days. We had more important things to do, but of course, I couldn’t name them.
“Ma, it will be stupid. They’re not going to talk about anything important.”
“What is it you want them to talk about?”
“About real issues on everybody’s mind. Like the riots, like Vietnam, about the students shot at Kent State, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.”
“We just want to see you graduate, Linda. We’re very proud of you.”
They were proud of me? That’s all she had to say.
“… Sure, Ma. If it will bring you and Daddy nachas, come. We’ll go to my graduation.” I had planned to come back to Detroit when classes let out, but I’d stay the extra week. I even had the grace to add, “I think it’s nice you want to see me graduate.”
They were my family, and I truly hoped to bring them a little pride. It wasn’t easy considering the life I chose. My parents’ friends had been shepping nachas for years from their children’s law degrees, marriages, babies and good jobs. Though they liked Jeffrey, he wasn’t bragging material.
“I’m still hoping you’ll date Jewish guys,” my mother said whenever the subject of Jeffrey came up in conversation, which wasn’t often.
During the years I ignored their preferred script for me, my parents still kept up with phone calls and visits, put up with my politics, general moodiness, griping and political rhetoric. And, to my great delight, my father never once stopped sending his legendary “care” packages.
I was always curious to see what new gems my dad added to his usual monthly mix of regulars — cans of tuna and sardines, boxes of wholegrain Wheatena cereal, white-shelled pistachios and bags of figs, dried apricots and lima beans. What surprise would be in his package this month? Mothballs and rubber bands again like last month? Or perhaps another hard-boiled-egg-slicer and apple-corer like the month before that?
I always wanted to know how and why my dad decided what new items to put in. Did he see a melon-ball scooper in a hardware store and decide his college student daughter desperately needed one? Or did he think, “I bet Linda could really use a ball of jute twine,” and then go shopping specially for it? Whichever, those boxes were always precious to me.
Other than fairly decent marks throughout my college years, there had been little else my parents could boast to their friends about. And to my mother, particularly, boasting meant the world. So I booked them a nice hotel close to the auditorium where commencement was being held. I then crossed my fingers that they wouldn’t ask to see where I was living.
It wouldn’t be long. To graduation I would go.
With a week to go before graduation, houses on our street emptied as classes ended and students trickled home to summer jobs. Six of my housemates were gone. Three were left behind. Lorne, who lived upstairs; Rosie, a close girlfriend; and me. I would be the next to go. In one week, after graduation, I would pack my worldly belongings into my parents’ car, and drive back to Detroit to spend the summer sorting out what came next.
One night, four days before graduation and three before my parents’ arrival, Rosie, Lorne and I walked out our front door onto the raised front porch. It sat atop an elegant wrought-iron staircase with railings that led up many stairs from the street-level garden below. I crouched down on the top step, Rosie took the lone chair. Lorne leaned against the railing.
We sipped iced coffee and nibbled watermelon, spitting seeds into the garden below, noting how different the street felt without the usual hubbub.
Looking down the street, I saw Tom, the neighbourhood cop, coming towards us on his nightly beat. Washington’s police department was trying to improve community relations to cut down on crime, and beat-walking cops were part of the program.
“Hello up there,” Tom yelled to us. Normally, we’d respond with an invitation for a chat and cold drink. But not that night. We were too hot to engage in even the minimum of chitchat. Tom hung around for an offer, but when none came, started to move on. Before disappearing, he called up, “It’s a hot one, all right, so be careful. Things are different around here these days.”
We didn’t really know what he meant and were too hot to care. “I can barely see him walk down the street,” I commented, only seconds after Tom moved past the house. Though the streetlights were on as usual, it was unusually dark and noticeably quiet, making me feel slightly unnerved.
A while after Tom left, I saw the silhouettes of five young men across the street. They were coming our way, acting loud, crude and badass. When they noticed the three of us sitting on the porch, they stopped and huddled in conversation, too far away for us to hear. When they broke out of their huddle, they turned around and started walking away.
With my relief came white-person’s shame. Shame for feeling afraid. Shame for being afraid because the men were black. Shame I felt unsafe because they were black. Shame because I thought they were drunk, maybe high and possibly dangerous. Shame because it meant I was guilty of racial stereotyping. It was what anyone with a conscience in 1970 was desperately trying to rid the world of. We were all too aware of our country’s history of stereotyping, falsely arresting and lynching black men for crimes they did not commit. In my head, Billie Holiday was singing:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood on the root
Black body swinging in the Southern Breeze
Strange fruit hanging from poplar trees.
I was busy chastising myself when I saw the men turn around once more. They were crossing the street, running in our direction. Without a word, Rosie, Lorne and I jumped up, turned towards the door and reached for the handle. The men were at the bottom of our steps.
They started running up. Only ten steps to go before they reached us. We had one, maybe two seconds to get in the house. It looked good. We would make it.
“Hey, man, be cool,” one of them yelled up, friendly-like. “Why you all runnin’ way like that? We just lookin’ to score pot.”
In the nanosecond we paused to listen, our grace period slipped away. Three men pulled revolvers from their pockets. One, cold and hard, was pressed to my right temple. Shoving me towards the door, its owner yelled, “Get in the house.”
Rosie and Lorne were told to lie on the bed in the front bedroom and cover their faces with pillows. I was led to a back bedroom, told to do the same. As footsteps approached me, lights in my head began to darken. I had the feeling that my body was separating from my soul right then, whisking me into some inexplicable state that would help me survive the horror of what came next.
Despite a vagueness engulfing me, I had one moment of remarkable clarity. I experienced the “life passing before me” moment. I knew in a way I had never known before or since, how much I wanted to live. Life wasn’t something I was casually passing through. There was so much more yet to be. For all the ugliness the world held, it also offered good. I knew more was yet to come.
If I came out alive, it would be a blessing. No matter what happened.
I closed my eyes and prayed to the same god I prayed to as a child. It was the one I asked to make my parents stop fighting and keep the bogeyman at bay. Please dear god, keep me safe to see the morning light.
I lay on the bed afterwards for what seemed like hours. Were they still in the house? I thought I heard them leave, but maybe they were upstairs, rummaging around. What if they came down and heard me calling 911? I was paralyzed with fear that they’d come
back. I had no sense of how much time was passing. I just lay there, not moving. Rosie and Lorne, still in the other room, did the same. We didn’t even call out to each other.
What may have been half an hour later, I heard Rosie yell out meekly. “Leenda?”
I got up slowly and went to them in the next room. I gasped when I saw Lorne. He had been tied up in the same room with Rosie, obviously helpless, unable to protect her. He couldn’t look at either of us. It was then I knew Rosie had been raped, too.
A cruiser came and sat in front of the house, lights flashing red circles through the night’s still impossibly thick air. Two uniformed policemen led Rosie and me out of the house. They were taking us to the hospital. They headed Lorne to another car, to the station.
The days, even weeks that followed, disappeared from memory. Only a few moments remained. Being mocked by a nurse when I arrived at the hospital because I had put my shirt back on inside out. The pained, helpless sound in Jeffrey’s voice when I called the next morning. The mean, jeering taunts hurled at Rosie and me from police suspects piled behind bars that we were forced to look at in the back of a paddy wagon.
The only thing keeping me sane were the lyrics I kept singing over and over in my head from a song James Taylor had just released. Using his words like a mantra, I kept repeating Fire and Rain, rain, fire, lonely times, find a friend, see you again, fire and rain, rain and fire. His lyrics gave me much-needed solace, the way a jilted lover takes comfort in songs of heartbreak. I was also trying keep my mind filled every single second, hoping to block it from screaming…“I’ve been raped.”
My sister Barbara and childhood friend Sybil flew down from Detroit to Washington to handhold me through the round of hospital examinations, police interrogations and line-ups that lay ahead. They did the right thing. Being 1970, the world was still not a kind place for sexually assaulted women. Neither my roommate Rosie nor I were treated well by the many cops, doctors or nurses. I badly needed someone to speak for me and remind everyone I was the victim.
I never told my parents what happened. I had been sparing them the details of my life for years. They missed out on my first kiss, dalliance with drugs, hitchhiking mishaps and serendipitous late-night trysts. Children keep things from their parents. But not telling them about the attack was different. I knew that secrets this big held power. It would separate me from them forever. They could never possibly know or understand me again.
I didn’t think I had a choice about keeping the secret. Perhaps there was some hidden shame, even guilt behind it. Rape victims often feel both. If so, I wasn’t aware of either. I just felt I was protecting myself. Protecting myself from them. I knew from past experiences that my father would become bitter. Instead of lamenting what the world had done to him, this time it would be what the world had done to his baby girl.
My mother would have somehow made me feel bad, no matter how unintentional. She wouldn’t have blamed me for what happened exactly, but would somehow plant seeds leaving me with self-doubt.
So I did what my mother did — what I promised as a child I would never do. I kept a big, dark secret. I was doing what I had come to believe my mother had done about my grandmother: I was protecting myself from what other people, including the people I loved, might think, say or feel. For the first time in my life, I understood what may have motivated my mother. Telling the truth wasn’t worth the risk.
I never doubted the wisdom of keeping silent. Yet I often longed for the comfort I know a parent can give a hurting child. I wished I’d had a relationship that didn’t demand secrecy. Perhaps telling my parents might have helped me to release, then incorporate my pain rather than repress it. Maybe that would have kept it from rearing its head unexpectedly when I least expected it on that flight from Tampa so many years later.
My parents arrived for graduation right after my sister and Sybil left. I was uncommunicative, though not altogether different from how I had been for years. My parents chalked up my sullenness to being sad to leave Washington and worried about my future. I never said otherwise.
I went to my graduation. I had absolutely no memory of who spoke or what was said. I could not remember shaking hands with the dean or accepting my diploma. My parents told me I was there.
I never once looked at my parents’ many snapshots of the occasion. When they both died more than twenty years later, pictures of Linda’s Graduation Day 1970 also died, unclaimed and unlamented, along with them.
3.
Seeking Safety and Solace in a New Country
Detroit to Toronto, 1970
I WENT BACK TO DETROIT that summer to heal, as if healing is something you do. But the Detroit I went back to was different from the one I had left. My parents had experienced their own trauma in the intervening years.
While still at Michigan State University, I had gone to Europe with Sybil, my childhood friend from Detroit. At an outdoor café, I glanced at the newspaper sitting on the next table. “Detroit in Flames” read the headlines in the International Herald Tribune. I knew what it meant. Newark, New Jersey, had already gone up in smoke from racial riots that summer. Thirty-five people had been killed.
I called home. My dad answered. He was barely able to talk. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We’ll talk when you get home,” he said.
“What about the store?” His jewelry store was downtown, right where the riots were.
He handed the phone to my mother.
“There’s nothing to tell you, Linda.” She was firm and unconvincing.
“I hate it when you keep things from me,” I said. “If there’s something I should know, I want to know now. Not when I come home.”
“Daddy was hit pretty bad,” she eventually conceded. “They smashed the front windows and took everything out of the display cases. They ran inside, took what they could carry or stuff in pockets — watches, wedding rings, gold necklaces, even the light-up Madonnas.” Lit canisters were thrown in the store, so it was damaged by fire and smoke. “Daddy’s heartbroken.”
To help end the riots, Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent Army troops. After five days, 2000 buildings were destroyed; 1139 people were injured, and 7200 arrested. Forty-three people died. The youngest was Tonya Blanding, aged four, killed by gunfire from a National Guard tank when her father lit a cigarette near the window of their darkened apartment.
Max’s Jewelry Company on Detroit’s Chene Street was the ma-and-pop jewelry store my grandfather opened in 1910 after fleeing pogroms in Poland. Next to his family, the store was the love of my dad’s life. He worked hard, never got rich, never intended to. He doted on his customers, mainly Polish, black, Italian. There were also the “hillbillies,” the men from Mississippi and Alabama who came to work at Chrysler or Ford, who asked to put their wedding rings on “lay-away” so they could pay a few dollars each week until the ring was paid off. “I never ask them to do any paperwork,” my dad once told me. “Most can’t read or sign their name except with an X. I don’t want to embarrass them.”
My dad was a gentle, unworldly, idealistic man who believed family was all. Though marital bliss wasn’t much evident in our household considering my parents’ frequent fights, my dad still extolled family life and cherished its sweetness. I knew he hoped I would marry young and have children soon after. He undoubtedly planted seeds for the domestic future I invented for myself. My oldest sister Barbara had married at eighteen. I knew my dad hoped the same for me.
Like me, my dad loved children, was shy and sensitive. Whenever I needed help figuring out the world, I would join him after dinner in our book-laden den where he’d recline in his Lay-Z-Boy. I’d plop myself down near the TV table beside him. While he cracked walnuts and cut apples for us, I’d ask:
“Why did kids at school say I would burn in hell?”
“Why were the women who cleaned houses all Negro?”
“Why did the lady at the fruit
store have blue numbers painted on her arm?”
“How many trees are there in the Amazon?”
Though I never got an acceptable answer about the trees, my dad’s other answers taught me about being Jewish, about being “other” and why some people don’t like you because of it. I knew my dad was happy when I asked what he called “your hard questions.” I was proud that everyone said I took after him. And not only because we both had the same big, bright blue eyes — eyes I once heard referred to as the legacy of a thousand pogroms. I was proud I inherited his idealism. I always felt loved and protected by my father. I used to think my dad saved my life when I was a child, though I was never sure from what.
I hung up the phone after talking to my mother about the riots and returned to the table in the café where Sybil was waiting.
“He’s too fragile for this,” I said. “My dad doesn’t have good survivor skills. You know how idealistic he is. I’m afraid he won’t recover.” My father saw young men he knew break his windows, reach in and take loot, set his store on fire. Never in a lifetime could he understand what would bring someone to do that.
Though I was nineteen at the time, I was already becoming aware of something my dad didn’t seem to know. Our lives are not solely determined by what happens to us. How we deal with what happens is what matters.
Several weeks after my return home in Detroit, I received a letter from the courts in Washington. They had arrested possible suspects. Would I come testify? I was pleased to hear they had followed up on our case, but knew it would be a mistake to go. My sister and friends agreed. I had already been poorly treated by police and health professionals. I didn’t need one more person hurting me.
In 1970, the law, cops, courts, jurors or judges seldom took the side of a rape victim. Five years later, in 1975, Rape Shield Laws were passed in the U.S. Before then, an accuser with any previous sexual history in a rape case was not presumed innocent. That changed with the law, which also prohibited publication of the identity of an alleged rape victim, and threw out the requirement that rape victims prove they had resisted their attackers. We owed these changes in the law to the women’s movement of the 1970s. Reform of rape laws was one of its top priorities. I wished those changes had come sooner.
Not Exactly As Planned Page 4