by Aimee Molloy
Molly watched the dust from the road form circles around the windows of the car as they passed seas of palm-thatched roofs and barefoot women in colorful boubous selling fresh milk from plastic bags on the side of the road. Thinking about the idea that for the rest of their lives these girls would endure such silence, she felt the tears begin to well in her eyes.
Because when it came to the idea of suffering in silence, she understood.
SHE WAS JUST SEVENTEEN years old, a few months into her first year at the University of Illinois, when it happened. He was a graduate student at the university, five years older than Molly and a member of a student activist organization on campus. He spoke passionately and intelligently at the antiwar meetings she attended, urging students to more deeply question why, exactly, the United States had gotten involved in Southeast Asia. Molly found him powerful and fascinating, and when he approached her after a meeting to ask her to dinner to discuss an upcoming rally on campus, she was flattered.
He offered to pick her up at seven o’clock that Friday evening. Molly, ready early and unable to contain her excitement, decided to wait for him on the steps of her dorm. More than an hour passed and he never came. Feeling embarrassed and rejected, she went back upstairs.
The next day she was studying in the student union when he walked into the room. He immediately approached her and apologized.
“I needed to attend an emergency meeting,” he said. “I didn’t have the number for the phone in your dorm. There was no way to let you know.” He invited her to drop her studying and come with him to the organization’s office, to meet some of the people working on the new issue of the underground newspaper. Molly felt elated as they walked through a tranquil leafy neighborhood just off campus, happy that he was still interested, that the night before had been a misunderstanding.
They had just walked through the door of the newspaper’s office—the ground-floor apartment of a two-story home—when she felt his hands on her, rough and violent, pushing her to the floor, pulling off her top. Molly was too shocked to respond at first, but she quickly felt herself fighting back, trying to push his hands away and pull her shirt back together. But he overpowered her, and before Molly knew it, in a fit of strength and force, he’d removed her clothes.
Lying on the floor at that moment, she knew she couldn’t let it happen. She’d never been with a man before, had only kissed a boyfriend, and she was not going to allow him to assault her. She found a strength inside of herself, was able to gather every ounce of it, and pushed him off her. She crawled to the front door, but it wouldn’t open. He had somehow locked it from the inside. She had no way out.
He dragged her into a bedroom in the back. It was only then that she had the wits to realize that this was not the organization’s office. This was his house. In the bedroom, as he groped her and pinned her arms to the bed, she tried her best to steady her voice and reason with him.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I’d like to just go.”
“You can go,” he said, with blatant cruelty in his voice. “After I have sex with you.”
Molly was somehow able to break free. She ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind her, frantically checking to be sure he couldn’t get in. In the mirror she saw that there were bruises on her skin and scratch marks on her arms and legs. Wrapping herself in a towel, she sat on the cold tiled floor. For the next few hours, she tried to comfort herself by silently reciting the nursery rhymes she remembered from her youth.
It was early the next morning when she heard him kick the bathroom door. “Get the hell out of my bathroom and out of my house.”
Molly waited a few minutes before opening the door an inch and peering out. She saw him lying on his bed. Seizing the moment, she moved as quickly as she could to collect her tattered clothing. “You’re lucky,” he muttered. “I screwed some other girl the night before. I was tired last night. Otherwise you would have had no chance.”
She walked back to her dorm in a daze, and when she entered her room—bewildered, bruised, and with her clothes torn—her roommate gasped. “We’ve all been so worried,” she said, leading Molly to sit on her bed, where she covered her with a blanket before running from the room to summon the dorm mother.
“I was at this guy’s house. He almost raped me,” Molly managed. “I have to go to the police.”
“Are you badly hurt?” the dorm mother asked her.
“I’m bruised and sore from fighting him off.”
“Go take a shower.”
“But I have to go to the police.”
“You can’t do that,” the dorm mother said.
Molly looked at her in confusion. “Why not? I don’t understand.”
“You know how you feel right now? You’ll feel much worse after going to the police.”
“I don’t understand,” Molly repeated.
“You went to his house, right?”
“Yes, but I didn’t—”
“They’ll say you were looking for it. You have no defense.”
Molly felt as if the room were spinning around her.
“I’m telling you, I don’t want you to go to the police. I don’t want you to have to go through that.”
“But I should do something about it. I should try to stop him.” Molly began to sob, finally allowing all the tears she’d been holding back. “What did I do wrong? I just went over to see about the newspaper. It was the middle of the afternoon—”
“Shhh,” the dorm mother said. “Go shower. Get some rest. You’ll feel much better.”
The next morning Molly woke up feeling achy and alone. Someone had come to her with the name of a psychiatrist affiliated with the university’s psychology department. She went to his office, still in a state of shock. Sitting across from him in a small, brightly lit room, she felt the devastation of what had happened to her sink in further as she repeated her story. “This person who I thought was doing good for society, who believed in peace and justice … I just can’t make sense of it. He’s talked so much about ending violence and the war.” She began to cry again.
The doctor listened and when Molly was finished, he nodded his head. “I think I know why you’re having such a hard time dealing with this.”
“You do?”
“Well, you liked it, didn’t you?”
Molly felt her stomach turn. “What?”
“You liked it. What he did to you. I think that’s really why you’re this upset.”
“What are you talking about?” She stood up, fumbling for her purse. “How could you possibly imagine that I could have enjoyed that?”
Molly left the office feeling desperate for help. Unsure of where else to go, she found herself at the front door of the Lutheran church on campus, where she asked to speak to the pastor, a kind and ordinary man she had talked to once before. When she explained the situation, he clearly was at a loss for words, unable to offer her any guidance. “God will forgive you,” he finally said.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” Molly stammered.
“Pray about it. You will find comfort in God.”
Molly left, found a pay phone, and called her sister, Diane, now a student at Southern illinois University. Diane’s voice broke with concern when Molly, still in tears, told her what had happened.
“Molly, you need to talk to somebody who will understand. We’ll find you the right person.” Diane had a friend who had seen a counselor at the University of Illinois’s student counseling center, and Diane called Molly later that afternoon with his phone number.
This man was the right person, or was at least the first one to try to assure Molly that what had happened was not her fault. “You absolutely should not feel any guilt about this,” he said. Molly felt a wave of relief that someone, finally, understood what she had endured; that even though the physical assault was over, her suffering was only beginning. During her second meeting, he shared something that shocked her. “You’re the fourth woman we know of that th
is guy has attacked. One girl who came to us says he tied her to the bed, raped her, and she was afraid she was pregnant. He left bite marks on her body.”
“He’s an animal,” Molly choked. “What can be done to protect other girls?”
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do. His father is politically well connected. These events take place at his house. If people want to press charges, they don’t have any proof. If I went to the police now on your behalf, they’d say he didn’t rape you. They’d ask why you were at his house.”
“I told you. I went under false pretenses.”
“I know that. But can you prove it in court?”
Molly left his office feeling nothing but overwhelming shame. How had she gotten herself into this situation? How had she not protected herself better? She longed to speak to other women who had been through the same situation, but in 1967 there was nowhere to turn, no support groups for women in her situation, no female counselors she could find. Again and again, she returned to the advice the counselor had suggested: she needed to tell her parents.
Molly’s hands were shaking a few days later as she stood at the pay phone dialing her parents’ number. She hadn’t wanted to do this. Her mother was not the type of woman who was comfortable speaking about sexuality. Molly had been too timid to even tell her mother when she got her first period, choosing instead to go to a friend’s mother. The only sexual guidance Ann ever offered Molly was to remind her that kissing boys before marriage was dangerous. And after all, hadn’t her parents tried so hard to protect her from bad things just like this? But Molly didn’t know where else to turn. She’d become too distraught to study or attend classes, and she feared she was jeopardizing her education.
She didn’t say much on the phone, other than that she wanted them to come for a visit. A few days later, Molly sat at a campus coffee shop across from her parents, the grief of her story heavy in their eyes.
“Where does this guy live?” Al said. “I’m going to beat him up.”
“No, Dad, don’t. He didn’t end up raping me. I just wanted to tell you.”
Ann was mostly silent during the conversation, but a few days later Molly received a letter from her mother. “Someone who has not suffered cannot live life in all its fullest, Molly,” Ann wrote. “I would never want you to hide and be afraid and sit within your four walls. You go right on meeting life head on and do the best you can when you meet its vices and its virtues. … Somehow, as bad as I know this experience was for you, I feel that you will get so much from it. … I think you know such things existed, but until you are actually faced with all the complexities and the impacts of such an incident, you don’t really know about it. Maybe now, because of this, you can save yourself or someone else from a much worse situation someday.”
Molly found great comfort in her mother’s letter, and she tucked it away in a safe place, thinking about it often. But after that day, she kept the experience to herself, and it would be many, many years before Molly would divulge her experience to another person outside of her family. She had been made to feel such shame about the assault, and she didn’t know how to speak of it. She didn’t want to rock the boat by going public about it, to bring further attention to what had happened, to be stigmatized from that point forward as either the girl who’d nearly been raped or the one who had caused all the trouble. She didn’t know what else to do.
So she did the only thing she could do: she lived with the silence.
8
Démb ak Tey (Yesterday and Today)
By 1976, after living in Senegal for two years and having fully abandoned the idea that she was going to return to the United States anytime soon, Molly had come to an important realization: her true passion lay not in what she had come to Senegal to study—African literature written in French—but in the field of development and the study of national languages. “The African literature I was reading was frequently about people trapped between two cultures,” she says. “But as I ventured out into Africa, to the markets of Dakar and the villages outside of the city, I realized that people were not torn at all. … They loved their culture and were confident in their way of life. They had a very clear idea of society based on family, friendship, warmth, and hospitality. They were proud to be African.”
By this time, Molly had received her master’s certificate from the University of Dakar. She went on to receive a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when her thesis on “The Role of National Languages in Development,” which she wrote in Dakar, was accepted. In it, she argued for the use of national languages, particularly in education. Hoping for a way to apply her studies and insights, she showed up unannounced at the Peace Corps office in Dakar, where she asked to speak to Jack Schafer, the director at that time.
“I’ve come to pitch an idea,” she said, taking a seat across from him. “I want to start a center for children not enrolled in school. A place where they can engage in cultural activities while learning to read and write in Wolof, through books written in their own language.”
She’d had the idea a few months earlier, she explained. Since arriving in Dakar, she’d been volunteering at a city orphanage and had discovered a scarcity of books available to Senegalese children. Any children’s books she could find in bookstores or libraries throughout the city were written in French, and their stories about Jacques’s adventures on the Paris Metro or Marie’s skiing trip to the snowy Alps were hardly geared to the children of Senegal. “How can children be expected to enjoy reading if nothing available for them to read is relevant to their lives?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Jack Schafer replied, likely feeling confused.
“They can’t,” Molly continued. “And I think we can change that. We can produce the books ourselves at the center.” She’d already worked it all out, beginning with having found the perfect location for the center—two rooms in the African Cultural Center, in a neighborhood called the Medina. Located near downtown Dakar, the Medina was established by the French authorities in 1914, after a severe outbreak of bubonic plague, as a so-called native quarter for the African population—a segregated area where Senegalese were forced to live separate from the areas inhabited by the colonizing Europeans. It had remained one of the most populated and poorest sections of Dakar ever since. Extended families were crammed into two-room apartments; children too poor to attend school roamed the narrow streets all day with little to do.
While this may have been the neighborhood that most visitors to Dakar would have preferred to avoid, it had always been one of Molly’s favorites. She was drawn to the energy she felt, the vibrancy of life, in the neighborhood. She often visited a woman, the mother of twelve children and the grandmother of many more, who lived in the heart of the Medina. “Mama,” as she was known throughout the community, always welcomed Molly with open arms, offering her a place around the bowl. As everyone knew, Mama was one of the best cooks around. Her small, simple, and comfortable house was always alive with dozens of children who, like the thousands of others living in such close quarters, had nowhere to go for play and learning activities. The time Molly spent there convinced her that the children of the Medina might really thrive at the center she had in mind, if given the chance.
“I’ve also been in touch with several different publishing houses based around the world,” Molly went on to explain, “and have asked them to send children’s books of African stories with beautiful drawings and simple text. I want to translate these into national languages and use them to encourage Senegalese writers and artists to create books that will interest Senegalese children.”
“I’m not saying any of this is a bad idea, but maybe you don’t understand how the Peace Corps works,” Mr. Schafer said when she had finished.
“I know exactly how it works,” Molly said. She knew it was a rigorous and competitive application process, requiring background checks, reference letters, and a health screening, after which selected volunteers w
ere assigned to an existing position chosen by the Peace Corps. “But can’t we make it work a little differently this time?”
“How so?”
“I want my job creating this children’s center to be a Peace Corps position.”
Perhaps it was her persistence or the strength of her idea, but the Peace Corps director said yes. Using a special exemption from normal procedures, Schafer created a three-year individual placement for Molly sponsored through Senegal’s Ministry of Culture. The position came with a standard stipend of about $200 per month and a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the very busy and bustling Sandaga market, next to the car rapide terminal. Molly would go to sleep each night and awaken each morning to the sound of the conductors yelling out destinations throughout the city: “Grand Dakar! Grand Dakar! Yoff! Yoff! Yoff!”
Before opening the center and beginning her position with the Peace Corps, Molly returned to the United States to spend time with her parents. During this visit, her family received devastating news. Her father, Al, was diagnosed with colon cancer. Molly ended up remaining with her parents for five months, and she felt lucky to have this time with her father, despite how sick he’d become with the disease. After all these years, it seemed that he had changed.
“Molly, some of the people in this town are quite racist, and I don’t like it,” he said to her one day.
“But Daddy, you have had a racist attitude in the past. Have you forgotten how uncomfortable you were when my African-American friends came to the house when I was in high school?”
“Oh, that was a long time ago, Molly. People change. How could I not have changed being around you and your sister all these years? I’ve realized it’s wrong, but that is how we were brought up then. By the way, I’m thinking about going into the Peace Corps now,” he said with a smile. “Do you think they would take me with cancer?”
“They’d be lucky to get you,” Molly replied. Al died one month later.
UPON RETURNING TO SENEGAL after Al’s death, Molly opened the children’s center, which she named Démb ak Tey (Yesterday and Today), and worked there for six years—the first three as a Peace Corps volunteer and the next three with funding she secured from the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation. The center became not only her livelihood but her life. As the only employee, Molly spent nearly every hour of her week at the center, a work ethic she would never abandon. Throughout these six years at the center, she adapted dozens of stories into Wolof, developing an impressive library of children’s books written in national languages. Each day as many as sixty children, including of course Mama’s grandchildren, crowded into the center’s two rooms to hear Molly read these stories aloud in her increasingly fluent Wolof.