On the positive side, the time I had spent reading while recovering from meningitis had left me with a near photographic memory. And, despite my fragile appearance, my view of myself was that I was physically very strong. I’d demonstrated my stamina by surviving all manner of diseases and illnesses, and I knew myself to be a good person, regardless of what anyone else may have thought.
My emotional despair, however, contained only one little beacon of light, the tiny baby boy who was increasingly centering himself and his needs on me.
As he grew, he clung to me like a baby koala, always clutched to my clothing with his small fists. His face, in repose, mirrored my unhappiness and my family began to call him ‘Little Sad Sackie’; my mother blaming me for his seriousness.
But he was very bright and determined, hauling himself first into a sitting position and then onto his feet by the time he was ten months old. I went back to Tobruk Pool when Russel was six weeks old, in the hope that enough water washing over me would cleanse me of the dirt which had been put upon me. It didn’t, of course, but instead, the child taught himself to swim, and by seven months old could splash his way across the width of the Olympic pool, although he was still too young to walk. His joy at his own accomplishments was infectious, and often served to distract me from my personal gloom.
At the time there were no victim services, no counselling, no victim compensation, and single women with children were regarded as immoral and presumed to have very little intelligence or worth. When the twelve-week maternity allowance payments ceased I went to the government unemployment agency. For the staff there, the fact that I was a black woman looking for work caused consternation, that I had a child, a dependant, caused even more, but that I was unmarried with an infant almost caused apoplexy amongst them. One kind woman told me that I’d have a lot of trouble because male employers would think I was loose, and female employers wouldn’t trust me around their husbands or male employees.
I saw no point in telling anyone the truth, because even women who had been overpowered and raped were considered to have contributed, if not wholly caused, their own misfortune by having acted or dressed in a provocative manner. The crime of rape held a tremendous curiosity for the public, and, over time, I saw numerous other women who had been raped suffer as much from ignorant and even hostile public attention as they had from the initial assault. I was determined not to become one of them.
Physically, I remained very slight and thin, and strangers often remarked, ‘What a good girl you are, holding this baby for his mother,’ or asked, ‘You look tired—will his mother be much longer, do you think?’ Their comments drove me to become very possessive about Russel, and his striking good looks and intelligence gave me a great pride in my maternal status.
At the same time, I grew concerned by the thought that people were always staring at me and my child. I felt that perhaps their admiration of Russel’s features was a mask for unbridled busybodyness. What were these strangers saying about me behind my back? I’d grown up in a racially hostile environment, where being a ‘darkie’ was viewed with suspicion and distrust. I became very protective of my privacy, sharing little about myself or Russel beyond what people could see with their own eyes. I tried to adopt a positive facade to shield my deeply embedded sorrow which may have prompted questions, and to keep out the negativity which I often sensed in the air.
As my love for the baby grew, I began to fret about what he would think if he ever found out the circumstances of his conception, and how he would react if he learned of the burden I had first assumed he would be. I became determined to protect him from this knowledge, no matter what indignities I had to suffer to do so. I knew enough to appreciate that a Black boy child was an endangered species, living with so many external threats that he’d find difficult to negotiate without being additionally burdened from within.
The state of constant sleepfulness in which I’d spent my pregnancy had passed, and in its place came my former alertness and concentration. So I turned back to reading. I read everything I could find on child development, aware of the complete absence of literature on Black child development and, as I did so, I became increasingly aware that the truth that at first I had not wanted him, had the potential to damage any baby’s mind and perhaps turn him into a similar character as those who had perpetrated the crime upon me.
My silence became an imperative, which created a dilemma for me. My mental rehabilitation might have depended on being able to talk about the emotions which were caused by my trauma, but this might have had a very negative effect on my child.
My search for my own identity, I realised, had to take a back seat to the construction of my child’s identity and sense of self-worth. My father’s identity remained unknown. Did it matter? Would my son also wonder who his father was? And what would I be able to do about that when the time came?
My mother’s valiant desire to be a white woman in a world she recognised as intrinsically racist, had, in the end, been a godsend for me. I learned of no other instance in which the rape of a black woman by white men resulted in prison sentences. Perhaps there had been, but throughout my research I’d never heard of it. I felt sure that, initially, only my mother’s ‘whiteness’ had prompted the police to begin their inquiries.
I tried to repay her by becoming the ‘white’ daughter she, in her mind, imagined she already had. I bought blond hair dye, succeeding, at first, only in turning my hair a dark reddish colour. The second application turned my hair brassy, and the third, which I left on for an hour, caused all but about six hairs in the front to completely dissolve and fall off my head in the rinse. I also, and equally in vain, searched the magazines to find out where I could send away to buy blue contact lenses. Her reward for helping me, a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter, never eventuated, and Mum even became cross with me and called me a ‘dill’ when I had to walk around with a beanie on in the middle of our tropical summer to hide my bald pate.
But the extent of my indebtedness to her, for saving me from being put in a mental hospital, for caring for me physically during this terrible period while I was unable to care for myself, and for remaining beside me during the ordeals of the court hearings, was enormous. What sacrifices she had made previously, bringing us children up by herself, and cycling out to her job in the middle of the night, were made insignificant by her efforts to save me as a young adult. I determined not to harass her further, if I could help it, about the things she wanted to keep secret. I, too, had my ‘secret’, which I wanted to remain private, and, although we didn’t need to discuss our pact of silence, our mutual understanding of it has hung heavily between us all this time.
A few months after the court cases were finished, Dellie, who’d changed her name to Delia and broken off her engagement, casually informed me that she had a new friend—a brother of one of the rapists whom I had put in jail. She said I couldn’t hold him responsible for the sins of his kin and that he was a nice person. I was shocked. It may have been thoughtlessness on her part, but it seemed to me that with the millions of people in Australia, she could have chosen her friends more selectively and with some concern for me. I felt completely betrayed at the deepest spiritual level, and a pain flared up in my heart which time has not erased. It was not, however, to be the only betrayal I would receive from my close family and friends. My capacity to forgive was to be sorely tested throughout my life, and Delia’s actions were only the first lesson.
I returned to my totem, the snake, and learned ‘the silence of the serpent’. Without vocal chords, in pain the snake rears back and opens its mouth to cry in complete silence, and its agony is only apparent to those who know it well. I engrossed myself in everything I could learn about snakes, and formed my own opinions about how they had become maligned, like myself, and been made symbols of sin in European theology. This was also very much like the situation I found myself in, through circumstances and actions not of my own making. Their innocence in the face of the way society thought
about them and struck out against them mirrored my own, and my identification with their situation was both profound and emotionally rewarding.
If I followed the path I was paving, I realised I would have to live on the edge, between truth and light, because the truth would almost certainly have negative consequences for the one small person I cared most about. I was in a perverse situation where the truth represented darkness and only my silence in the face of the pain society would inevitably inflict on me could represent light.
Could I do it? Would I be able to carry the additional burden of silence—without losing my mind completely? Could society change enough in my lifetime to be able to help me recover from my ordeal and assist me with this trial?
Although these were tall orders for an eighteen year old to consider and struggle to meet, I saw no other option but to try, not merely to resurrect myself, but to give Russel a healthy start in his own life. I was to assume the silence of the serpent as a cover for myself and my child, an umbrella to hold over both our heads for the next thirty years.
Apart from these deep feelings of love and duty surrounding my son, I had no idea what the future would hold for me. North Queensland remained as racist as ever, but my love for this area, my birthplace, my cradle, was still strong and abiding. Nevertheless, I felt the need to run out into the world to discover what else was out there, and, hopefully, to restore my sanity and faith in humanity in the process. Yet I knew that the string with which my heart and soul were tied to the cradle would tug at me on all levels regardless of where I moved.
From my foundations it perhaps does not stretch my readers’ minds too much to realise that the racism I encountered, which all Black Australians encounter in their childhoods, is the breeding ground of militancy. We all want to be treated with respect and dignity, and when we are treated like scum and deprived of opportunities in life, we strain towards those things through whatever avenues seem open to us. At this terribly unhappy stage in my life, however, it never once occurred to me that I would become a prominent activist in the Black movement, a writer, poet and educator with publications in foreign languages, a global traveller visiting and speaking in all continents, and a Harvard graduate. These triumphs of the human spirit over adversity lay dormant for many years.
Snake Cradle Page 29