by Pamela Sneed
It was through Shaun that I was introduced to new ways of life. Everything about Shaun and his family was illicit. He took me from church and the suburbs into the back roads of Boston, which led like steps to an underground scene. Like the leader of a band or great conductor, Shaun took me to the first parties in Boston among artists and actors who starred in famous controversial plays, lived in kooky, alternative, and communal households. These were artists who had living rooms like my Uncle Vernon, decorated for effect, but instead of antique long-legged dolls, they displayed larger than life-sized wooden crosses and a huge stereo speaker system. These were artists who ran toilet paper through the streets at night as a signal and trail to the party. They also displayed ambiguous and diverse sexuality. They looked at my stature and shouted appreciatively, “Amazon, Amazon!” These were artists who weren’t afraid to take God’s name in vain. There were men who wore black leather jackets with tassels on the ends that jumped up when they danced. These were Black artists who dropped acid and were children of famous New York authors. These were Black artists who attended boarding schools, were students of the elite Harvard, Black artists who stayed in areas of Boston that are now too prestigious to live in.
Shaun introduced me to the underground Black gay sections of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and to the infamous Thayer Street—the artistic loft section behind the drunken men’s hostel, where artists lived when it was still affordable. It was also at the height of the punk era with debuting bands like The Violent Femmes, Psychedelic Furs, and the Butthole Surfers. Shaun introduced me to Black gays who threw Friday night parties on Thayer Street. Everyone dressed up like on Halloween in dramatic costumes and stayed up all night waiting in anxious anticipation for the moment when Chaka Khan’s mega-hit “Ain’t Nobody” blasted through the speakers. At the party’s end, in a stunning dénouement, the other campy disco hit would blast out, about a scorned woman who comes to say to her lover, like Jennifer Holiday in the Broadway hit Dream Girls, “It’s not Over.” The entire place would go berserk with people dancing and living it up. These were artists who waited for Friday night to buy eight balls of cocaine and did it in back rooms where only the coolest of cool were invited. With Shaun I was always invited. His beauty and charm like my own were passports to a new world.
Eventually, Shaun faded into the background. I joined a vanguard and moved to the fore of an artistic world, which became my family and a trail leading me out of my small town. Through Shaun, I gained courage to call myself a lesbian, and it was he who showed me the pathway to becoming an artist.
Shaun was not gay, but gays were his chosen people. He prided himself on being different, and men as well as women loved him. There were trysts and things he’d never mentioned, like his father having shot someone, and he himself having spent time in prison. Sometimes it seemed like a cross he carried like Jesus.
One day in early summer, I had run into Shaun in downtown Boston. We stood on cobblestones near Boston Commons. We were newly broken up. We weren’t speaking. I was angry. “Hey Hun,” he said, charmingly, “Come to my birthday party,” he said. “I’d like you to meet my new lover.”
I can’t tell you what made me say yes, but I did. We all met in Shaun’s tiny apartment above his grandmother’s house. She was blonde with one side of her head shaved. I wore a white leather mini-skirt. I’m not sure what he told her about me, but she burst out in declaration as if to counter anything he’d told her, “She’s beautiful.” We all ended up at the house of probably another woman Shaun was seeing. He disappeared into a backroom with her to do drugs while Lauren and I sat in the living room, chatted, and fell in love. She introduced me to punk music and a punk lifestyle. Most of her words were, “Fuck this.” I remember early on sitting in a diner with her and she threw sugar packets across the room at people. She was rude. She taught me to eat bananas and chocolate with coffee, and that dessert could come before a meal. She broke rules.
In the way that Joshua changed and became a man when I returned to him, I became a woman with Lauren. I changed overnight. It was my love for her that made me stand up and challenge my father.
On one particular eve, I was going to meet her. I was ironing my clothes, a light blue man’s shirt. My father was lying on the couch, drunk and angry, noticing all the changes in me and said, “You’re not going out, you’re not to leave this house.”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“You’re not,” he commanded. Our fight escalated. He had a history of violence against women, his wives, but never with me. “Look at you, you’re a goddamn lesbian,” my father yelled. “You’re wearing men’s clothes.” He was referring to all the ways my style had changed after meeting Lauren. The fight continued to escalate. He followed me into my bedroom and shoved me hard into the window. The large glass pane broke and formed jagged edges. With one sudden or false move, I might have fallen out or been sawed in half. But I fell forward. As I lay on the floor my father kicked me furiously in the stomach. That day, I left my parents’ house and never returned.
After Shaun and Lauren, and moving to New York, I met Cheryl.
Cheryl was short, light brown, stocky, athletic and middle class. I was tall, elegant, working class from the suburbs. I pretended I was tougher than I was. I swore a lot. Moving to the city from Boston, I might as well have had a cow and a pail. I was that naïve.
Cheryl and I were opposites. She was introverted. I was extroverted. She was perceived as a good girl. I was perceived as a bad girl. I suppose we both needed some of what the other had. We met at the same YMCA on 34th St. where I met my best friend Michael. Cheryl and I became lovers. At the time she was dating a man and I know I must have seemed like Shaun to her—bold and beautiful, an out lesbian. There was a fear of me, too. Cheryl and I moved in together and we were each other’s first lesbian relationship. We were able to consummate in a way Lauren and I did not. We were two Black women in a white school, and we negotiated that terrain together.
When I think about Cheryl there is a lot I don’t want to talk about. There is pain and betrayal. At the beginning of our relationship I had gone with Cheryl to meet her brother. We both assumed we were playing it straight, keeping our physical distance, but later Cheryl’s brother confronted her. “She’s your lover,” he said. He could tell in the way we moved together.
People have asked who I was at this time. Flipping through a journal I kept during those years, I read page after page that I felt numb. I numbed myself through partying. Michael, my new best friend, would call me at all hours of the day and night and ask me to go party. I always answered the call.
Of the two-and-a-half years we spent together, the end was the most important part with Cheryl. I’d outgrown the relationship, but I couldn’t leave, coming from where I’d come from, having been orphaned as a child, it was unspoken that you never left someone. If you want to understand me, want a window into circumstances that shaped me, watch the film What’s Love Got to Do With It, loosely based on Tina Turner’s abusive marriage to Ike Turner, an abuse she eventually overcame. Return to the film’s beginning, go to Nutbush, Tennessee, and meet a boisterous little child singer named Anna Mae Bullock. In the film’s first scene she is a rebellious child singing in the church. In the second, she is being left by her mother, who is trying to escape an abusive marriage, which also happened to me. In a scene that exists in almost darkness, little Anna Mae asks her grandmother in utter bewilderment, “But why did she leave me?” The grandmother, unable to respond with any viable answer says in an effort to comfort, “Just don’t you worry about it.” In the third scene, Anna Mae is eighteen years old, reuniting with her mother and sister. She is resentful for having been abandoned. She meets Ike Turner in a nightclub and they share a love of singing. Later in the film, he renames her Tina.
Being left by her mother is the event that forms the basis of Tina Turner’s marriage to Ike Turner. After the initial honeymoon, for years afterward, she is kicked, beaten, stalked, and raped. I believe no m
atter how monstrous Ike was, even if she were raped and beaten, she never wanted him to feel as bad as she had growing up, to feel that alone. She never wanted him to have the experience of what it felt like the day her mother left. It’s worse than what a prison can do.
There’s a scene near the end, after Tina has escaped. Ike surprises her in a parking lot. “Dammit,” he says through the car window, “I want you to stop all this foolishness, Anna Mae, and come home.”
He doesn’t say Tina, the name he gave her, but appeals to Anna Mae, the little girl who was abandoned.
So it is because of this little or large happenstance in childhood, being abandoned by a parent, through years of abuse, you’ll stay, through rape, the disparagement of your name, acid burning, scars …
Every day, your role is perfected, having been punched, beaten, kicked in the chest, threatened, thrown downstairs. It’s happened so often it becomes a dance or a routine. As seniors, my parents adopted a wild little black cat. They named her Mysti but I’ve nicknamed her Bat Girl. She climbs up walls, shelves, breaking things, she tears the kitchen curtains going after a fly. She is also incredibly sweet and stays with me when I make art. When I’m at my parents’, most of the day is spent with them asking, “Where’s Mysti?” And we collectively search the rooms and under the beds to find her. I’ve nicknamed her Bat Girl because she was so wild as a baby that they kept her in her carrier with the door locked at night, and sometimes during the day, too. Most animals fear or dislike carriers but my mother’s cat returns to it, sleeps there now as an adult willingly because it’s where she finds comfort. She is unaware it’s a cage.
Recently, I read the novel, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. The heroine is a slave named Cora, who survives almost everything, years and years of abuse. To survive she has to kill a man. Cora is also abandoned by her mother, who ran away from slavery and later dies from a snakebite. Cora survives a brutal rape on the Hobb plantation by a group of men. She is stitched up by other women on Hobb. Finally after a lifetime of being on the run, a runaway, she finds love, like the character in Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, where the main female character who saves other girls is also ruined but finds love. Cora’s first instinct is to apologize to her lover about her rape. He says no, it is she who is owed the apology. The scene makes me think of what I have carried, things that I blamed myself for. It reminds me of Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She can’t stop mourning the child she killed to protect from slavery. The child haunts her and then finally disappears. She says to her lover Paul D, with deep regret, “She was my best thing.” Paul D responds with tenderness in the famous lines, “No girl, you your best thing.” “Me?,” she cries and asks. “Me?”
Yaa Gyasi’s historical fiction novel Homegoing starts in Ghana at Cape Coast Castle, and follows generations of slaves, symbolically cursed women and some men, Each of them carries a small stone around their neck, an heirloom passed between generations. Finally, in contemporary times, a young descendant is swimming with her male lover near Cape Coast Castle. They have returned as tourists. She takes off the stone her family has worn for centuries across generations. She tosses it to her lover and says, “Here, you take it.” It makes me cry because finally she is free and no longer needs to wear the stone.
So I stayed with Cheryl, doing drugs and hurting myself. I always carried with me that little voice, like Anna Mae asking in darkness, “But why did she leave me?” Because I had been left by my first adoptive mother, because I had barely seen her again, because nothing was ever explained to me, I couldn’t do to someone what was done to me.
One night while I was working at a bar, I left to buy drugs. Or, as I see it now, I was two people and one took me to buy crack. I went to the Lower East Side. Someone led me into a hallway. It was set-up. They saw I was green, alone. Attempting to get away, we struggled and stumbled out into the street. One said to another group member, “Give me the knife.” Someone planned to stab me. I had a beautiful brown leather knapsack with my poetry from school. I realized in that moment that I couldn’t give it up. Writing and what I had learned in Jane Lazarre’s class was the only reason I had to live, so I fought.
I said, “Here, take the money, take the money,” the hundred dollars or so I had in tips from bartending, but I wouldn’t let go of the knapsack and the poetry inside. I somehow escaped, I don’t remember how I got home. I took a long bath; I tried to scrub off what felt like dirt. I didn’t tell Cheryl about the attack. After that night, and being confronted by Cheryl about drug use, all I could manage to say is, “I want to go home.”
I boarded a bus to Boston, to my parent’s house, but I misunderstood. The home I cried out for was not my parent’s house, but a warm place in me. I was still sick in my heart from the attack, but I sat in my parent’s house under a dull lamp light, reading to heal. I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I got to the place where Sethe, the runaway slave, is found near dead in the woods. It’s winter and she has frostbite. She is numb all over. She is found by a poor young white girl who massages her frost-bitten limbs. It’s agony for Sethe. The young white girl understands and says, “Anything dead coming back to life, hurts.”
From that moment on, like in the classroom at The New School reading Sula, my feelings came alive, all those that I’d repressed, and I started to cry. I thought of Baby Suggs, in Beloved, an aged grandmother who is also an unofficial preacher. In a clearing in the woods she tells slaves, in efforts to heal them, “I want you to cry now, for the living and the dead, just cry.”
Later, in my twenties, after moving to New York to pursue education and life as an artist, long after Cheryl, Shaun and I stayed in contact. I returned to Boston for a visit. I was hurting from a break-up. I’d spent one of my school semesters drugging until it had gotten out of control. I think I’d called Shaun because in many ways he was still home to me. When we got together he took me out for old time’s sake, for a night of snorting cocaine inside the loft of a famous photographer. I had visited the loft before, and was always impressed by its cool, the people, light bulbs and flashing cameras. We stayed up all night, Shaun, the photographer and me, drinking, snorting and smoking cocaine laced with PCP. By morning the room spun in my head. I could see glimpses of gray light through a covered window. Shaun was high and while readying to leave, he mumbled, “Listen, Hun, my car’s broken down and I need some help to get started. My mom’s working temporarily around the corner, and I’ll go ask her to help us out with some money.”
So he left, with no intention of returning. Meanwhile, I was being pressured by the photographer to perform a sexual favor in exchange for cab fare, which I needed to get home.
I remember a beautiful white cotton model’s dress that the photographer instructed me to put on. It was sheer and beneath I felt naked and afraid. I remember the sour taste of a condom breaking, cum in my mouth, and a feeling of dirt and violation by both him and Shaun.
For a long time after I didn’t speak to Shaun, or confront him for leaving me in that situation. I returned to New York, knowing there was no one in Shaun to confront, no conscious person who might have shown up and said, Yes, I love you, I’m sorry.
I began to realize that part of Shaun’s mystique was his elusiveness, an ability to scheme women, while stringing along as many as possible. I suppose now, after traveling the world and living my life as an artist, I’ve met hundreds of Shauns, people who heap damage on you and act as if it never happened.
After many years, I contacted Shaun again. It was a few days before Christmas, and we met outside of his grandmother’s house by an ornate tree. I had long since resolved the situation in the photographer’s loft for myself. The Shaun who greeted me was not the same person I’d known. He was no longer the bright light leading me like a great conductor into a new world. His features were the same, same as the chiseled Nefertiti he resembled, but the sun that bronzed him was gone. I knew he’d been defeated by the same history and tragedy that surrounded his mother, father, brot
her, sister, and him. He could never escape.
“I was in the hospital,” he said. “Had a car accident, broke a lot of bones and was self-medicating,” which was his euphemistic way of saying, “I’ve been on drugs.” I saw that he was suffering. I told him about my life in New York and my own current struggles. I wanted to show him how much I had grown up. He looked at me and said, “You’re still so beautiful, Pamela. Please don’t ever give up.” And for one brief moment in the moonlight on a Boston rooftop he held me, with his lips brushing mine in quite the same soft way they had on prom night years before, when he’d awakened something in me … to longing, lust, and my power as a woman. So when he kissed me there and then, and held me in that moonlight, though what we had was far behind us, I felt my heart flutter for him, as it always had, beyond reason.
EPILOGUE:
Uncle Vernon passed away a few years ago. From my earliest memories as a child, I remember his painting and collages. He was the first person to ever plant in me the idea that anyone could be an artist.
My family has healed many things, some not. My stepmother is obsessed these days with the idea of me coming home … The other day she sent me a text out of the blue:
Hi Pam
I bought you a blanket and a comforter, so you won’t be cold this winter when you come home.
Love Mom