Lisa’s reaction shocked me. “Sure,” she said, grinning wide.
“Lisa, he raped me,” I said again, somberly, looking her directly in the eye, pleading for help.
“If you say so,” she said, elbowing me and winking. “He’s a real cutie.”
My heart fell. I grabbed some clothes, put them on over my nightgown, and ran outside to find Charles. He could tell right away that something was terribly wrong, and he suggested we go into the house.
“No!” I wailed. “I’m not going back in there. What if he is still in there?” Charles escorted me safely to his apartment, where I told him what had happened.
“Wait here and keep the door locked,” he ordered. “I’m going to see if he’s still around.”
“Then what are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going to kill him,” Charles replied.
I am very much against violence in any form; I wouldn’t even harm a bug (except maybe a cockroach), but at that moment it seemed perfectly fine with me if Charles killed or maimed my attacker.
“He’s gone,” Charles informed me when he returned. “I looked everywhere. Lucky for him. The bastard probably knew someone would come looking for him.”
Charles sat with me for a long time before he said he had to go out and lock the place up.
“Don’t leave me, please,” I begged.
“You know I have to. Someone has to check the place and be sure everything is okay. It’s almost 4:00 a.m.”
I knew he was right.
“Do you want me to leave the lights on?” Charles asked before leaving.
“No, you can leave them off. I think I will be okay.”
I lay on the couch in the dark apartment, trying to get the horrible, vivid images out of my head. It seemed like Charles was gone for a long time. Feeling terribly exhausted, I had finally started dozing off when I saw a man coming through the door of Charles’s apartment, coming toward me. I rubbed my eyes, but he kept coming, followed by another man, and then another. I knew they were going to rape me. They were breaking through the walls of the apartment now, too. If I screamed, way out there, no one would hear me. Too frightened to move, I lay there immobilized, curled into a fetal position, my eyes closed tight.
CHAPTER 53
I must have finally fallen asleep on Charles’s sofa. I was grateful for the morning light. I was exhausted from a night filled with horror; a night spent watching as one man after another seemed to come through the walls of Charles’s apartment. If anyone had told me one could hallucinate while one was wide awake I would have thought they were on drugs. I have never touched drugs.
“Charles. Charles, are you here?” I screamed out.
“I’m in the next room. It isn’t even 6:00 a.m. Don’t worry, you are safe in here with me.”
I didn’t feel safe. I waited until 7:00 a.m., then called my friend Whelman and asked him to come over right away. Without even asking why, he came right over. I had barely finished telling him about the rape when he jumped up, enraged.
“Let’s go, Charles,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“To the Holiday Inn where that creep is staying. I’m going to teach him a lesson he will never forget.”
“You betcha,” Charles added as they ran out the door.
Alone again, I had a big decision to make: whether or not to call the police and report the rape. I would have loved to see the guy thrown in jail, but I had heard horror stories about how a rape victim is further victimized once the rape is reported. I would have to go to the hospital, where they would examine every inch of me and take photographs of my most private parts. The photographs would be passed around the courtroom as evidence. In the small town of St. Francisville I knew practically everyone in town, and the jurors would all be at least acquaintances. How could I ever face them when I ran into them again, knowing they had seen the police photographs? I would become a laughingstock. I would be so humiliated. After everything else that had happened, I couldn’t put myself through that.
(I later became a rape crisis counselor and manned a twenty-four-hour rape crisis hotline. I have since learned a lot about the crime of rape. I would urge anyone who has been sexually assaulted to talk to someone, or call the local rape crisis hotline, or the national sexual assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE [4673]. It is very important for your mental health and well-being to talk to a counselor.)
About an hour later, Whelman and Charles came back empty-handed. “That creep must have grabbed his things and split town early this morning,” Whelman said.
“Lucky for him,” Charles added.
I slept on the couch in Charles’s apartment for nearly a week.
“It’s time you moved back to your own place,” Charles said one day.
“But I’m not ready.”
“Okay, you can stay a little while longer, but you can’t keep hiding forever.”
Before I moved back into my quarters I called a locksmith. I hadn’t wanted to drill through the striking original painted faux bois doors to put in big, ugly deadlocks that would stand out like sore thumbs, but now, not destroying the pristine doors was not an option.
When I was finally ready to move back into the big house, I coerced Joanie into moving in with me. Her room was outside, next to Charles’s apartment. During the day, she used her own room, but as darkness crept over the house, she moved inside, where we set up a temporary cot right next to my bed.
“Why don’t you let Jim come back?” Joanie asked one day out of the blue, after she had been babysitting me at night for nearly a month.
The child had no idea how desperately I longed to do just that.
“Joanie, you know that’s not my decision to make,” I explained to her. If truth be known, I had wanted to ask him back a million times, and even more so since the rape.
“Does he even know you were raped?” she asked.
“No, and I don’t want to trouble him with it. If he comes back, I want it to be for the right reasons. I want it to be because he wants to come back to me.”
CHAPTER 54
A few nights later I called Jim in San Jose. We talked for hours, and after agreeing to be totally honest with each other, I finally told him about the rape. He seemed genuinely concerned.
“Do you want me to come back?” he offered.
“Yes. I would love to have you here more than anything,” I replied. “I’ve missed you so much, and lately I’ve been afraid at night. But how do you feel about it?”
“Well, I’m not really doing anything here. I’d like to come back, too.”
We never spoke about the laundry room incident that tore us apart, not on the phone that night, and not after he returned to me and the Myrtles.
At first things felt awkward between us: I felt detached, estranged from him emotionally, and I wondered if he experienced the same sense of isolation. Gradually, over time, I warmed up to him, but I still had a nagging fear that he might cheat again, given the right circumstances. I didn’t think I could ever fully trust him again. I guessed that Sarah Mathilda must have felt the same way about her philandering husband, Clarke.
When Jim returned, Whelman just stopped calling. I couldn’t understand this, because he was a friend of Jim’s, too, and as a gay man, he was nonthreatening to our relationship.
“Whelman, it’s okay to come over. Truly, it is,” I coaxed. I really missed him.
“Darlin’, I want you to spend all your time with your husband. If you want your marriage to work, you don’t need me callin’ and comin’ over all the time,” he once explained.
“Yes, I do!” I protested. “I’m so much more balanced and content with you in my life.” But my pleading did no good. The times that I saw Whelman, who used to come over every day, were now few and far between.
Jim Thomson (Miss Maimie’s husband from Catalpa Plantation) passed away. It was such a loss; he had been such a character, a little gruff around the edges, the complete opposite of Miss Maimie�
��s charming and graceful ways.
My husband and I attended Mr. Jim’s funeral at Grace Episcopal Church. He was laid to rest in Miss Maimie’s family plot, along with other former occupants of Rosedown Plantation. Before we left, Jim and I stopped at the Stirling plot, close by, to pay homage to them.
“Whelman is going to die,” Jim stated calmly.
“What? Why would you say such a thing?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” Jim admitted. “Lately, I just get these feelings, and they always come true.”
“You mean you know the future?” I asked.
“Yeah, something like that,” Jim replied.
“Have you ever had these ‘feelings’ that came true before?”
“No, not until I got back to the Myrtles a few weeks ago. Now it happens all the time.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Just silly little stuff, like what someone is about to say, or who is coming over.”
“Wow. I really hope you are wrong about Whelman.”
“Yeah, me, too, but I don’t think so.”
A week later Whelman died. They found him in a tiny pirogue on the pond at his home, with a baggie full of pills. If only he had not backed away, I might have seen it coming and been able to reach out to him. I missed him very much. I had lost many of my close friends during my time here at the Myrtles. Who would be next?
Unfortunately, we didn’t have to wait long before that question would be answered.
CHAPTER 55
One morning Martha Mary looked out the window and said, “Look. It’s a blackbird. He’s tryin’ to git into the house. Y’all know what that means, don’t you?” she asked.
“No, what?” I replied. I had learned a great deal about the black culture in the South, and about their superstitions, or maybe the word is “signs,” as they are usually correct. I had learned how to tell from an onion if it was going to be a hard winter or not. I had learned that if you dream about someone’s death, that person is going to have a baby. But I had not heard about the blackbird.
“When he knocks on the window like that, someone in the household is going to die,” Martha explained.
Late the next night, the telephone rang. I hate those late-night phone calls—they usually bring bad news.
“Did you hear about Mart?” a frantic voice asked. I realized it was Walter, my bartender.
“No, what?”
“She died.”
Oh, my God, no, not Martha Mary, too. She had been there with me, every day, through everything, and I loved her very much. She used to ride with me to Baton Rouge, and we would always stop at Fridays for happy hour and get a strawberry daiquiri, and we would confide in each other. I would miss her very much. She was so young, too, just thirty-nine.
I had been to her house many times. On holidays she invited all of us over to eat with her family. I loved hanging around her kitchen, with exotic aromas and so much food an army couldn’t eat it all. On Christmas or Thanksgiving, besides the turkey, she made the most incredible cornbread stuffing, a big pot of turnip greens, green beans and bacon, dirty rice, smothered okra, and tons of desserts.
“Try this pie, punk’in,” she told me once. “Pun’kin” was Martha Mary’s pet name for me, short for “pumpkin.”
“But I hate sweet potatoes,” I replied, crinkling up my nose.
“Oh, this ain’t sweet potatoes, baby,” she assured me. “It’s pumpkin pie.”
I took a tiny bite, and then another. “Oooh, Martha, this is delicious,” I complimented her.
“See, I knews you would likes it,” she answered.
It wasn’t until the next day that she admitted to me that I had eaten sweet potato pie, reminding me that I had liked it.
It was pouring rain the night of her funeral at the small clapboard church across the way in the all-black community of Hardwood, but the church was bursting with people.
I watched the families in Hardwood with awe and maybe even a little envy. Yes, they were impoverished, and had suffered horrible injustices, but they had a spirit, a unity I had not seen in other communities. On any given afternoon, while the young children played outside in the yards, and the older children played football in the streets, mothers sat in plastic lawn chairs or on old sofas on porches, laughing and talking with one another. Nearly every day, outside Billy’s Grocery Store, the men could be found, sitting in a circle in the shade of an old oak tree, enjoying their beer, discussing life. These families interacted with and depended upon each other. I imagined that it must be wonderful to feel such a sense of fellowship, to know that you really belonged.
In spite of the pouring rain, the entire community at Hardwood turned up at the church to honor Martha Mary. Martha Mary had invited me many times to come to the Sunday service, but Sunday mornings were my busiest time, so I kept putting it off. Until then, I had never been to an all-black church.
Jim and I arrived just as the service was beginning. A crowd was gathered outside the church, drenched from the rain, peering through the church doors, which had been opened wide. We stepped up behind the crowd. Billy D’Aquilla, the mayor, was near the door.
“Frances, come on through. You, too, Jim,” he insisted, knowing how close Mart and I were. Others took my hand and directed us inside the church. Noticing my entrance, the official greeters came to escort me to the front pew, reserved for next of kin. I felt honored, but at the same time, I was petrified, because I knew Martha Mary was lying there in her open casket for all to see. Shaking my head to indicate “no,” I quietly pointed to a pew in the back. I kept my eyes averted from the front, so I wouldn’t see Martha’s body as Jim and I made our way to the center of the pew.
Choir members, dressed all in white, belted out gospel songs and “Amens” throughout the service. The entire congregation swayed and clapped to the rhythmic songs, in stark contrast to the stuffy tunes in the Episcopal Hymnal. Four men and four women, dressed in white from head to toe, acted as official greeters. The four ladies carried fans: If someone became too distraught, they raced over and fanned the grieving party. The men were ready to catch anyone who might “fall out,” either because they were “slain in the spirit,” or because they were overcome with grief. During the course of Martha Mary’s service they carried out one lady after another, each of the four men taking the hands or ankles of the limp woman. It is considered an honor to have people falling out at your funeral, a symbol of how much you are loved.
Thinking about Martha Mary, I got choked up, tears streaming down my face. Within moments, two ladies hurried down the pew and began fanning me. Another showed up with a paper cup full of water. At first I felt terribly embarrassed, but then I realized that it was okay to be sad and wail and cry, to display emotion openly. I had to wonder at the wisdom of being quiet and civilized.
After the service, people were invited to go up to Martha Mary. I knew I had to greet her family, her children, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk past her body. I was scared. I hoped her family would leave through the back so I wouldn’t have to go up front to talk to them.
“I’m so sorry, Jim, I just can’t go up there,” I whispered. “You go up, though.”
“That’s okay, I’ll stay here with you,” he replied, squeezing my hand for comfort.
We sat still in the pew while everyone stood and moved around us. Suddenly, I felt two strong yet invisible hands, one on each of my elbows, gently yet firmly lifting me out of my seat. As I stood up, I watched in amazement as the crowds in front of me spontaneously parted, as if in slow motion, stepping aside and creating an opening from the back of the church where I stood to the altar, forming a clear pathway directly between Martha Mary and me. I gasped. She looked beautiful, so peaceful.
“Look,” I whispered, turning toward Jim. “It’s Martha!” I wanted him to witness the miracle, too. As I turned back to Martha Mary, the people all stepped back into their original place and continued what they had been doing before they parted, and the passageway to
Martha Mary had been closed. It had been truly miraculous.
A few weeks later I was in the kitchen cooking breakfast for the guests. I was still grieving for Martha Mary; she had been so much more than an employee, she had been a close friend, and we had been through so much together. I could not yet face the process of replacing her.
I was turning the bacon when someone grabbed my elbow and clung tight. I turned to face the person, but no one was there. I couldn’t see anyone, that is.
“Don’t worry, pun’kin, I’m okay,” a voice called out.
“Martha Mary!”
Slowly her hands released their grip on my arm, and she was gone. “Martha Mary, I love you!”
Crazy things had been happening around me since I moved to the Myrtles. And now my friends were dying, one by one—Hamp, Beverly, Whelman, even Caesar, and now Martha Mary. I felt as if my world was falling apart.
CHAPTER 56
Joanie, once such a big help, was acting crazier and crazier. For some unknown reason, she had suddenly become openly hostile toward me, and I caught a fleck of something malicious in her ice-blue eyes whenever I caught her staring at me. It was eerie.
In spite of her past behavioral problems, and the fact that her parents could not control her, putting her in juvenile detention twice, I prided myself on the fact that I had never lashed out at her verbally, I had never retaliated or used physical force with her. I had truly grown to love her; she was a member of our little Louisiana family, and I felt the need to protect her.
She started openly defying me by sleeping upstairs in the old nursery where she claimed that she was repeatedly attacked by a ghost rather than outside in the new wing. I was worried to death about that situation, and what it could do to her. As she became more and more belligerent toward me, I wondered if it was wise to keep her at the Myrtles. Was this the house or the ghosts creating these changes, or was it something else?
The Myrtles Plantation Page 22