by Naomi Judd
The door slowly creaks open. It’s a male figure looming in the hallway. I know instantly that it’s not Daddy. I turn over on my side, as close to the wall as possible, and scrunch my knees up toward my chest. I am hoping this old man who is peering in at me will go away. I dread the sound of the door being closed, because I know the man is now inside the room. I’m a captive. I squeeze my eyes shut, praying that if I pretend to be asleep, he will leave. I can hear the sound of a belt buckle coming loose, then a zipper. His stale breath comes out in short, noisy puffs. I have no reference point for what is about to happen to me, but my infantile innate senses tell me that the survival of my soul is at stake.
I pull the sheets up around my neck and press my tiny body as close to the wall as possible. I sense that the other side of the sheets and blanket are being lifted. The mattress sinks down and the bedsprings make an off-key sound like an out-of-tune Autoharp as the intruder climbs into bed beside me. I can smell hair tonic, cigarettes, and musty body odor. I turn to see that it’s Uncle Charlie, my Grandma Judd’s brother. He places his finger to his mouth and says, “Shhh.”
He reaches under the sheet and grabs the calf of my leg and drags me across the mattress toward his body. I can feel the chicken pox on my back rupturing open from being yanked across the stiff cotton sheets. As I am pulled closer I can see that his pants are undone and his privates are exposed. Of course, I’ve never seen adult male genitals before. His breathing is even heavier, which scares me so much I hold my own breath. He has an odd and creepy grin in the face of my terror. He uses his dirty rough hands to push my nightgown up to my underarms and then grabs at my waist to pull me toward him. In that very moment, at age three and a half, I understand that no one is going to save me from Uncle Charlie. I have to save myself.
I jerk my arms out from under the sheet and grab the flesh of his face in my hands. I dig my fingernails into the soft baggy skin under his eyes. Then I manage to bring a foot up and jab it into his throat, right at his Adam’s apple. Uncle Charlie coughs in surprise and lets go of me. I scramble to sit up on the bed and then scoot back away from him until I awkwardly tumble off the end of the mattress and drop with a loud thump to the floor.
I’m scared witless that Uncle Charlie will catch up to me at the door, but he doesn’t. He is probably equally afraid that someone has heard the thump of my fall and will open the door to find him exposed. His face is now red-streaked from my scratch marks. I yank at the doorknob that I can barely turn, open it, and run along the hallway and down the stairs to the back porch and then out into the cool dusk. Two of my aunts, Evelyn and Ramona, are there shaking out rugs against the back fence. They don’t see the look of pure fear on my face. It seems that doing mundane chores is far more important than a terror-stricken little girl.
Uncle Charlie isn’t looking for me anymore. He has his floppy hat that he always wears pulled low over his face and he waves goodbye to my aunts from the sidewalk and leaves quickly.
I go back inside and peer up at the wrinkled and tired face of my Grandmommy Judd, who is standing at the kitchen sink. She has a bandana tied around her forehead, the sign that she’s suffering another migraine headache. The steam is rising from the hot water in the dishpan and streaming down the window over the sink like long tears on a sad face. What will happen if I tell her? I don’t know what words to use. I have no way to comprehend what Uncle Charlie was trying to do to me. I only knew it was wrong.
Grandmommy Judd looks down at me after I tug on the hem of her dress gently. I search her face, longing for her to see my terror and make me feel safe somehow. I hope she will ask me, “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” when she sees how frightened I am. I don’t find comfort in her eyes, only frustration with being bothered. Grandmommy Judd frowns, raises her eyebrows in a disapproving way, wipes her hands on her apron, and points me back upstairs. I can’t go in that room, again. I stand against the refrigerator, frozen in fear.
Should I run the two blocks barefoot to our home, crossing a busy street by myself, and tell Mother? I already know that her reaction will be one of anger. She never wants to have to interact with the Judds about any issue.
Anytime I expressed emotions, whether they were joyful, fearful, or full of hope, Mother would become annoyed. I knew she would be mad at me for causing trouble. Even at age three and a half, I understood that my mother didn’t seem interested in whatever happened to me. The one person on earth who was supposed to love and watch out for me didn’t. My hope of being protected was crushed.
Tiny Naomi Ellen Judd had no one to tell. No one cared. I fully realized that I was on my own. Live or die, make or break, it all rested on my will. I wasn’t going to die or break. Somehow, I would live. At this early age I possessed the character trait of persistence: There would be nothing I wouldn’t try to live down, rise above, or overcome. For my very young self, it meant that the experience of being sexually assaulted couldn’t be allowed to stick in my memory if I were to survive intact.
I submerged this crushing secret to the very bottom of my subconscious. How many more Uncle Charlies might be lurking out there? I would come to find out there were more, one even worse.
Yet, here I was, six decades later, at a time in my life when I should be enjoying the bounty of my successes and my unimaginably exciting career, panicked, in the middle of the night. Living a past trauma as if it all were happening again.
Larry pulls at my hand to sit down on the edge of the bed so he can rub my back, but I can’t stay still. If I do I’m certain my heart will overload. I can’t breathe well enough to tell him that I am coming apart. Am I losing my mind? The dogs whine and sniff at my feet as I walk to the bedroom door. I can barely feel my limbs, but I move into the hallway. I walk from room to room, never stopping. The dogs follow me, until they realize that I’m not going to settle down. They give up on me an hour later and jump back up on the bed with Larry for the rest of the night. I am too afraid to go to sleep. I don’t want to find myself back in the memory of that feather bed. I keep moving.
When the morning light starts coming through the windows, I am exhausted. I finally sit at the kitchen table as Larry comes down the stairs. I can tell he is extremely worried, but he tries his best to make it seem like any other normal day. He puts on a pot of coffee and then whistles to the dogs to go out. Larry takes out his Bible to read a chapter or two in the same way he does every single morning. It fortifies him. He asks me if I’d like to pray about whatever kept me up the whole night before. I can’t answer him. My mind feels too messed up to plug into anything about God, but I don’t know how to admit that to a man whose faith has never wavered. I manage to mumble, “Later.” Larry pulls on his jacket to go out to the barn to feed the cats and horses. As soon as he opens the back door, frigid, damp air rushes in. It’s another gray and dreary day; one seems to follow another. I drag myself over to the couch near our big kitchen table and collapse under a throw blanket, pulling it up to my chin. I wonder what all of this stress is doing to my health.
While recovering from hepatitis C fifteen years ago, I learned that unbridled stress can wreak havoc on every system of your body, including the immune system, and precipitate many types of illnesses. According to facts quoted by Dr. Andrew Weil, physician and bestselling author, 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians are due to stress-related illness. Andy is responsible for sterling research on mind-body-spirit medicine and has personally taught me so much. I had become quite expert at controlling what my mind would say to my body. I had to. The doctors had told me I would die in three years from hepatitis C. I rejected that message and my liver responded in a positive way. But this time there was no doctor giving me bad news.
My panic attacks are a manifestation of a past crisis hidden in my subconscious. The current message arising from my sleep-starved mind is, “It’s hopelessly over for you, Naomi Ellen Judd. Underneath your upbeat public personality is a ravaged and fragmented young girl whom you’ve spent decades trying to for
get.”
There is someone I wish I could call, someone with whom I once shared everything, who has been with me through most of my trials and all of my successes. She has witnessed me overcoming many challenges in the past. I want this person to come over and just be with me today. I’m in such emotional danger I would love for her to comfort me and encourage me to believe that I will be fine no matter what. I know better. My wishes are as futile as those of the three-year-old Naomi Ellen Judd, hoping Mother would come to comfort her and rescue her from being molested and tell her she can beat hep C. It’s not going to happen now because it has never happened in the past. I know she won’t be calling me. We have barely spoken to each other in almost two years.
I was a full-time nineteen-year-old mother, getting by in my in-laws attic room with my baby, while my absent husband was living the fun student life in a college dorm.
Chapter 2
Leaving Home
She left an old photograph of the two of us in my mailbox. It’s a snapshot of me, age eighteen, in 1964, holding her as a newborn. I’m sitting on a couch in my in-laws’ living room. My hair is teased a foot high and I am wearing one of the three dresses I owned. My husband, Michael, isn’t in the picture because he was away at college and appeared to be footloose and fancy free while fraternizing with other students, leading a double life. I had been left behind to live in his parents’ home, up in a small attic room with slanted ceilings. My back ached from crouching over so much, holding a baby in my arms. I could only stand up straight in the exact center of the room.
In 1960 (an innocent time in our country) I was a naïve fifteen-year-old girl who was being courted by Michael Ciminella, a nice-looking older boy, who seemed smitten with me. I was flattered. He was an only child whose parents belonged to the country club, lived in a beautiful home with a full china cabinet, and had hired a woman to clean their house once a week. Michael had everything I craved, most of all parents who adored him and would have done anything to make him happy. I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.
He attended an elite military school out of state. When Michael was home, he still wore his uniform and cap all the time, turning the heads of many girls as he cruised the streets of Ashland in a brand-new baby blue Chrysler Imperial. I felt like a princess riding around our small town in that expensive, piece-of-art car. My friends were impressed.
As a full year passed, and I had matured a bit more, I realized I had been blinded by the image of his privileged life and not by him. I didn’t respect Michael, despite the fact that he was in constant pursuit of me and was determined I would be his. He was very used to getting his way. He asked me to marry him on our first date. I guess he was thinking that if Jerry Lee Lewis could marry a thirteen-year-old, then what was the problem with fifteen? I wasn’t having it at fifteen or sixteen. It was a different story at seventeen, when marriage was my only solution.
In the photo that was left in my mailbox, I’m looking up at the camera with an anxious, yet compliant, smile, an eighteen-year-old who has been plunged into a responsibility that overwhelmed and frightened her. I saw myself as imprisoned and doomed to a life of housework, ironing, and washing diapers. The lonely, young, inexperienced mother in that photo could never have predicted her own future: that in twenty years this fragile infant and I would become a famous singing duo. I couldn’t have foreseen that my firstborn girl would be blessed with a singing voice that would stir the souls of millions of people.
Yet now, at this traumatic and confusing point in my life, I seldom hear that beautiful familiar voice. I rarely see her, in person, even though she lives on a farm just over the hill, less than a mile away. This is the only way she feels safe communicating with me, a photo in the mailbox and an occasional text message.
I prop the yellowing photo in a prominent place on the hallway table and wonder why she chose this one to leave for me. Does she see the same thing in this photo that I see? Is she looking at the baby or the girl? Because that’s what I was when I gave birth to her, a girl, a terrified teenager, in many ways as helpless as her baby. A year before this picture was taken, I had been going to sleepovers and football games with my high school girlfriends.
I had a deep and unbreakable love for my new daughter the second I laid eyes on her, but I still felt a deep inner conflict about coming to terms with the drastic life change I was experiencing. I had no idea what the future held for us. I only knew it was now the two of us against the world. With no one to talk to, I was left to painfully ruminate over the previous year, which had permanently altered the course of my life from the girlhood I knew only eleven months earlier. Once again, it was obvious that no one would be reaching out to me in sympathy or with advice. I was the one who had disappointed my family by getting pregnant, so I couldn’t allow myself an ounce of self-pity.
Everything rapidly started to change in 1963, the year I was seventeen, in a confusing and scary way when my younger brother, Brian, became terminally ill. He had been hiding a growing tumor on his shoulder. It was obvious that it was serious when our family doctor sent him to a specialist in Ohio. Once he was diagnosed, my parents had a silent but united focus on getting Brian medical help. They spent many days away, driving back and forth to Columbus, to be at the hospital with my brother as he began treatments.
My parents would never discuss the situation with me, even when I pleaded to know what the doctors were telling them. They acted as if not talking about Brian’s illness would make it go away, or at least somehow make it easier for all of us. I could have predicted that they would respond in this manner. I had resigned myself to the reality that “not talking about it” was the way my parents dealt with anything that was difficult to face. I’m not sure that Brian ever knew his own diagnosis or what was wrong with him. At a time when I ached for us to be a close family, to fall into each other’s arms, shed many tears, and support each other through this nightmare, the exact opposite happened. We each went to our separate corners of denial. Mom would stay in the kitchen. Daddy would be at his gas station for twelve hours every day. Brian’s red hair fell out and he would lie on the couch with a bucket nearby for his constant nausea.
My younger brother and sister didn’t seem to comprehend what was going on at all. I tried to occupy myself with getting ready for my last year of high school, but it was a lonely endeavor, especially knowing that Brian wouldn’t be going back to school with me. I felt powerless to help my good-humored, redheaded best buddy.
Desperate to emotionally connect with someone who would understand my fears, I took an opportunity that knocked on my door on the night of my greatest heartache. My parents were on a two-day trip to the hospital in Columbus with Brian. My little brother and sister were staying overnight with our neighbor, who volunteered to get them to school in the morning. For the very first time in my seventeen years, I was home alone. I had let Charlie Jordan, a good-looking high school football player, know that I was at my house and very sad about my brother’s worsening health. I was hoping to distract myself from my worries by flirting with Charlie if he stopped by.
I was flattered when he showed up and was full of compliments about how attractive he thought I was. I wanted to believe his compliments and saw them as an opening to become his girlfriend. I was happy to be held in his arms. But, it turned into much more than that. I was caught up in his desire and beyond having reasonable judgment.
By the time he went home an hour later, he had taken my virginity and left me in far worse emotional shape than ever before. I felt depleted, full of shame, and robbed of my innocence. I spent a sleepless night, one of many, wondering why I let my first time happen that way: no true romance, no flowers, and no commitments. I had no choice but to go to school the next day, although I was terrified that my friends could see my shocking secret written all over my face.
As my brother’s life was ending, I unknowingly began a new life inside me from that one sexual experience with Charlie, one night that was never to be repe
ated. Three months later, after figuring out a way to see a doctor secretly, I had to face the fact that I had become pregnant. I took my allowance from my piggy bank and called the one cab in town, since I hadn’t learned to drive yet. It was November 25, 1963, the same day America buried President John F. Kennedy. The country reeled with the abrupt end of the hopes and dreams of a young leader. I was doing the same on a personal level. My hopes of being a carefree teenager, going to school dances, and dancing to the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had come to an abrupt end.
Not knowing what to do, I found Charlie Jordan after school one day and told him my dilemma. That was the last time I ever saw or spoke to him. He packed up and disappeared. I heard, by word of mouth, that he had moved to Pikeville and was working for the railroad.
My sense of security was completely shaken, because I knew I couldn’t trust anyone to give me guidance. Mother was the one person I longed to go to, but there was no doubt in my mind that she would be too upset about Brian to worry about what this experience would mean for me or what should be done.
I had no loving adult to give me advice or guidance, so I kept my secret all to myself for the first four months. Finally, when I was almost five months along, Mom confronted me. Instead of uniting with me to figure out what would be best for my future and her upcoming grandchild’s, she heartlessly kicked me out of the house during my fifth month of pregnancy. I had my hands on my growing belly as Mother flatly said, “You can’t live here anymore. I can’t have a crying baby in this house.”
That night, as I struggled to accept Mother’s unwavering decision, I went into my childhood bedroom, closed the door, lay across my bed, and wept for myself for the first time over this situation. I longed to have the chance to finish my senior year of high school with my classmates, read books, write papers, and do whatever other seventeen-year-olds were doing. I had only days to figure out where I could possibly go and how I would support myself and the new baby, since I didn’t have a job or a place to live.