The Torn Trilogy
Smashwords Edition
Published by Josephine Thompson at Smashwords Dec. 2011
This is a work of Nonfiction
(Names have been changed for the sake of privacy)
All Rights Reserved (including digital rights).
Copyright© 2011 by Josephine Thompson for Sara Niles. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the rights holder,, except where permitted by law.
Worldwide Digital Rights belong to Josephine Thompson; all digital copies created from source files held by Josephine Thompson (Pen Name Sara Niles) and may not be reproduced without the express permission of rights holder.
Cover Design: Original art by Ashanti; Graphic design Josephine Thompson
Published in the United States of America
The TORN Trilogy:
TORN FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Book I
THE JOURNEY
Book II
OUT OF THE MAELSTROM
Book III
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Torn From the Inside Out
Literary Narrative Memoir
Compared to “The classic literary techniques used by Emily Bronte…Victor Hugo”
Tisha Holiday (Retired News Writer/Editor)
Torn is a book that can be read more than once, as the levels of insight woven into the social realities are layered. The writing is an easy flow of classic style laced with metaphors, anchored with time-centered historical happenings, brought home to the reader by a powerful appeal to the heart and soul.
Sara Niles invites the reader to go on the literary and emotional journey that eventually covers five decades and culminates with the completion of the third part of the trilogy, Out of the Maelstrom.
With this book, let the journey begin, take the incredible journey of life into the depths of despair and the height of ecstasy, cross the valleys of human pain and climb mountains as we celebrate a power greater than death itself, the power of the human spirit under fire.
EXCERPT
“Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky, it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I; nearly a foot taller and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive”…February 13th, 1987, the night of Sara Niles’ flight with her five small children.
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SYNOPSIS
Given away to her aged Uncle Robert and Aunt Molly at age 1/12, Sara spent ten years on the ‘Flower Bed of Eden’ being lavished with love and attention until death took its toll and Sara married an abusive man named Thomas Niles when she was only sixteen. Niles invites us to enter into her lifelong odyssey by the words: ‘Let the journey begin’, and so it does as the reader enters into a formerly forbidden zone.
The story of Sara Niles becomes more than a story of one woman’s journey into pain, it resounds with the voices of many veteran’s of domestic war. Torn From the Inside Out and its sibling books, The Journey and Out of the Maelstrom make up the complete Torn Trilogy celebrating a power greater than death itself, the power of the human spirit under fire.
CREDITS
______________________
The Torn Trilogy
Front cover: original art by Ashanti; Graphic Design by Josephine Thompson
The poem, The Incredulous Journey Called Life was written by the author, expressly for Torn From the Inside Out, for the incorporation of the beauteous and perilous parallels of life and nature.
All quotations and partial quotations are credited to original authors and artists. No substantial text of any author has been quoted or used without permission, except as permitted by law.
Special Thanks
To all who touched our lives, you know who you are. I ‘Thank you’ for the kindness that you showed us, some were small, but it takes the many small kindnesses to make the world a wonderful place.
To special friends, you know who you are, you are each irreplaceable and one-of -a -kind in your own way.
And to those I met only briefly during some crisis of theirs or mine, whether I was the ‘help-ee’ or the helper; it does not matter, in either case we both found room to learn and to grow and to seek a new way to find happiness in that special place where happiness is always safely hidden away for emergencies.
CONTENTS
Part I
Living on the ‘flower bed of Eden’
Part II
Descent into the Abyss of Hell
Page 85
Part III
The Butterfly borrows Eagle wings
Era of Enlightenment
Epilogue
Addendum
To the Veterans of America
To the Veterans of Domestic War
***********************
The Incredulous Journey Called Life
How grand you are like molten fire
Blazing a permanent path through a vast domain
Unspeakably beautiful scenic shocks of rock and stone
Jut out of the ground in sudden tragic uncertainty
Shake us free with your magnificent power
Awaken us with your horror and pain
Make our hearts scream loudly again
When our spirits are near broken in our last hour
Comfort us with lullabies of soft fields of flowers
Gentle colored sunrises and sunsets
And windblown ballets of feathered birds in flight
Make us thankful for the incredible journey called life
Sara Niles
Let the journey begin…
TORN FROM THE INSIDE OUT
SARA NILES ©2004,2007, 2011
The Journey, Out of the Maelstrom & The Torn Trilogy in all formats: 2007, 2010, 2011
FROM THE AUTHOR
This is a book of nonfiction, a memoir of my life, wherein all of the characters existed and every part of the story is true. Unfortunately, there was no need to lie, for my life was in fact an exercise in tragedies common to the foolish, yet with challenge enough to prove an enigma for the wise, therefore the truth is enough.
Names have been altered, including my own. I found the need to make a composite of several people into one character that played a brief and minor role in my life; all of the others are replicated as closely as I perceived them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PROLOGUE
This book is for me and my children and all of the millions of veterans of domestic war.
In memory of the dead victims of domestic violence, I have retold stories of those who became casualties. The stories below are all true; I retold them from the perspective of my own visualizations in an effort to give some validation to lives wasted and mostly forgotten. Some things are too precious to forget, such as the lessons of history, and the deeds of unsung heroes, for if we stumble into the habit of forgetting, we lose both the value of life and the opportunity to become a wiser and stronger generation. If we forget, we lessen our children, therefore we can never forget.
The Viet Nam Memorial is a tribute to remembering those that should never be forgotten, and although we must never lessen the meaning of the ultimate sacrifice given by the Great War veterans of this country, there is also another group of veterans involved in a war they did not choose. These veterans come from all walks of life and conversely fill offices of high acclaim and the prisons, they are old and they are young, rich and poor, educated and non-educated, male and female: they are the victims of domestic violence. Many have died in domestic war and have been ‘buried’ in the unmarked grave of forgetfulness, therefore to keep their memory alive I present to you a few silent witnesses that you would never otherwise meet.
I could hear the pleading guttural screams of the woman as she begged him to stop stabbing her, until her breath was too weak and her terror filled eyes took over. Twenty-nine times he brought up the kitchen knife designed to slice, and brought it down into her living flesh all over her body, perhaps sparing her heart intentionally, so that she lived long enough for him to snatch her dying, bleeding body up and drag her viciously to the bath tub, already drawn, possibly for him…and drown her. Only then, did the cursing, vicious animal of a man stop and stand back after his rage was spent, and admire his work. He showed her, all right. This husband and father performed for a small captive audience of his own terror stricken children, giving them fodder for nightmares, for the rest of their lives.
The next woman finally got the courage to leave, but she did not hide so he found her and their two children at her brother and sister-in-law’s house. The man went fully armed with intent to murder; he killed his wife and her brother and sister-in-law. This father left his two little girls asleep in the back room, not concerned that his older daughter would have to clean up his mess and live with it the rest of her life. The older girl, not even in her teens, had to carry her little sister out past the carnage to go to the neighbor’s to summon help. She covered her little sister’s face when she passed the bodies of her dead mother and the others, because a child should not have to see such things. Everyone was dead because Daddy, the triple murderer, killed them all and created wounds two generations thick.
One after another, the victims told their stories without words by means of engraved plaques. There were over two hundred life sized cut- outs in red plywood that represented the recently dead victims; each had a name and the date and method of murder. The cut- outs were placed around the rotunda at the state Capitol as part of the annual Domestic Violence Awareness campaign for the State Legislature. I came prepared for the cut-outs of murdered women, but I was not prepared for the number of cut-outs representative of the dead children and men; I was dramatically reminded that murder knows no age or gender. Many children died in violent homes, shaken to death, bashed against walls like mere flies and many died as secondary victims as an afterthought when controlling abusers lost the battle for their ‘kingdoms’ for the last time. Some of the deaths were the result of a last noble act of courage in a short lifetime, heroic sons and daughters who died in the line of ‘duty’ trying to protect a loved one, usually a little sister, brother, mother or father.
There was a plaque of a twenty three year old man who tried to protect his mother from his stepfather and for his bravery he was shot point blank in the chest with a shotgun. I see things in vivid imagery when I am particularly moved, so I envisioned the fight, the threats, the raised shotgun and the heroic son flying backwards as his mother gave a primal scream. Then time stood still for a frozen second, while death announced its victory. Death, with its black ugly soul, the final claimant and the last debt collector comes too often in homes ruled by violence.
I could picture all too well the months and years of pain before the deaths, because I had lived there too, in a violent home of pain and jeopardy, the difference was that I got away. Then again on second thought, perhaps I should say that I almost got away, because the harm of domestic violence in its worst form is almost never ending. The issues cut deep into your soul and deep into your family dynamics until it tears you inside out, then just when you think it is finally over, the ugly thing grows new roots, new manifestations, new issues and new pain.
I worked with abuse victims, and once a year I saw the hundreds of silent witnesses and read the plaques on their wooden chests and the tears flow from my eyes without my permission. I have to stop and wipe in order to see, because by the time I read the last inscription, I feel very tired and do not wish to talk for a while, because I have replayed the screams and the terrified faces, the sounds of bone cracking and guns firing, children screaming and climbing out windows, horrified neighbors calling the police and if the victims were lucky, the comforting sound of sirens when they are early and their mournful wailing sound when the saviors come too late.
Domestic Violence shelters from all over each state converge on the capitols for this event, with hundreds of workers dressed in red swarming quietly. Many of us read the plaques, some of us cry and most of us stop for a moment in time and reflect, and then we go home. If we are not vigilant, we may forget the mighty symbols of violent times that we were witness to. Worse yet, we must never forget the people behind the symbols, the lost mothers and daughters and sons and fathers who will never go home again. We must never forget, and we must not leave our lost dead unburied.
Many years after my own escape from a violent life, I started to work at a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter for abuse victims and embarked upon an education of exposure. I found that victims vary greatly, that ‘one stereotype fits all’, will not work. Victims come from all backgrounds, and in all types, ages and sizes. I once remember walking into a shelter at the beginning of my shift to find a new client sitting in front of the intake desk. I finished her intake and when I walked around to her, she stood. She caught me completely off guard so as she began to stand, it seemed it took minutes for her to unfold her height, as she stood I had to back up to see all of her. This woman was taller than the average population, both male and female, I am sure she was around 6’4’ and weighed a hefty amount. I waited for my state of shock to subside so that it could register that she was the victim of domestic assault. I had to wonder if the perpetrator was related to the giant Philistine, Goliath.
There were so many situations and types of people, and although I discovered victims were different in many ways, there were some common traits evidenced across all spectrums, one trait was certain: those who remained in seriously abusive homes left with scars.
They came with children in all stages of damage, and degrees of anger, the children were usually angry with their mother, seldom toward the abuser. Children find out early that anger toward a dictator is unsafe, so they find a safer target. I knew of many cases of verbally domineering and abusive mothers married to timid men and in those cases, the children are angry toward the father. Whoever is safe, whether they are innocent or not, receives the anger.
The male children, especially the ones in the mid teens are especially angry and in suppressed agony, because they were cheated-they deserved a father that they could admire and copy, like a model, but instead they got a tyrant that told them boys don’t cry. The boys are cursed into maintaining an exterior of false peace while their insides are raging with the fires of pain. Children instinctively crave love from both parents, when it is not received, the loss should naturally be grieved.
Some of the women have up to seven or more small kids, some have emotionally disturbed kids and some are mentally ill themselves. Some of the victims have many other problems, drug addictions, and a sense of hopelessness. We have gotten those who cut themselves and those who have lived abnormally all of their lives and have learned to expect crisis or life is not predictable. First a crisis, then there is peace. It is really the peace they want, but they only know one way to get it. Some were normal, came from good, ‘normal’ families and fell in love with a man who was good at mind games, by the time they caught onto them, it was too late, they had succumbed to a good brain washing. So we debrief, we educate, we direct, we advise and we do a lot of listening at all hours of day and night.
They come by all methods; one lady hitchhiked practically naked after being held by a man she started living with. He raped her and stabbed her, it excited him to stab her and have sex with her in a state of fear. She escaped by running out to the highway when he went to the bathroom and a kind man picked her up and took her to the hospital. They sent her to us via the police. She talked constantly of what he did to her over a matter of weeks, unbelievable things. Ministers, neighbors, friends and law enforcement bring them and they drive themselves, sometimes having to outrun the abuser with the kids screaming ‘he’s gonna ram us, Momma!’ Some come in cars that cost more than my house; the men had total control of the finances, so they use the shelter and declare themselves homeless in spite of having left fancy homes. They are all homeless when they come to a shelter because you have to leave everything when the abuser is willing to kill. It’s either your life or your stuff. I have been there too. It’s like being in the middle of the ocean and being thrown off the ship without a life raft. How do you survive? You learn to really swim hard and long, because leaving is just a beginning.
It has been almost two decades since I fled my home and disappeared with my five small children, all big eyed and terrified, trying hard to be brave. I can see all of it like it was yesterday. Since I have had to recount my past to teams of people, I have thought about my life in more detail than is common. I was told to tell the ugly truth because these people needed to know and feel what domestic violence does to humans. I don’t think words were designed for the degree of pain I wish to convey, or perhaps the skill required to contort language to such a purpose is for a master of linguistics. In any case, it is my duty to report for the sake of the many who cannot speak for themselves, some of the dead victims and those who still live a walking death locked into mentally ill minds for life.
The room was small, the walls created a slight echo, or perhaps it was just my imagination. I had to go so far back into my mind that the present environment closed in on me. Of the five people in the room Kathryn Shipp was the most imposing: she was 6 feet tall, stood military straight with sharply cropped blue-black hair and blue eyes that were intense. She needed everything from me, she had to have the ‘feel’ of the whole story, not just the facts, so she demanded more than just a story, and she wanted a recreation of my life. Kathy Shipp was one of the best attorneys in the state and her client was a domestic abuse victim who had snapped and killed her abuser, so Kathy Shipp needed me to show her why a good little girl could empty a gun on a man with his back turned. I knew why she did it, I knew what she felt, and if it took revealing my soul to help, I would. So I went back to the images of my beginnings and the people and events that shaped my life to make me who I am. There were many forces that forged me, some gentle and kind and some harsh and violent; there were also many people who contributed to the final product that I call me.
In the process of my evolution, I became a victim of domestic war, an emotional casualty for a major portion of my life, entwined, entrapped and emotionally involved until I learned how to become free. Freedom has never been easily gained and has often come at high cost throughout history, but one thing I will always know is freedom is worth every fight, and all pain.
In every life there is a timeless minute or day that will be forever etched into our mind’s memory, they will be unforgettable. I have unforgettable memories that are so vivid that I see them in Technicolor and I hear them with surround sound. Long after I am dead, I believe, I will remember. Two of those memories were the days of my escape to freedom-twice.
PART I
The Flower Bed of Eden
Chapter 1
Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky, it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I; nearly a foot taller and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with and true to my expectation he lunged for me, my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me: “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!!!!!!!” He screamed.
That was the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
Many people asked of me since that day many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles and this is my story.
I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest, accessed by dirt tire rutted roads with a strip of grass ribboned in the middle. This was oil country, oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- Gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
It was nineteen fifty seven, the Little Rock nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between blacks and whites was decided by color and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the white man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful croker-sack door. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old.
The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may be cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the East corner where a roofed water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, on hot days his hatless bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, He not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly and any one of us would have been glad to be taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised. I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now” adding to “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”. And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement died as they followed us down the steep hill all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his baldhead with both my thin dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet as I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, the overflow created a branch of water that was covered with a plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, the smells of the flowers and fruit trees enchanted me as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed as the hunger awakened in me compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt. “Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly. “Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.
I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until Saturday and we will go to town, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, everything that a little girl who had nothing would need. I remember the things I didn’t need, the candles and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both white and black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
Relatives were notified, they came by the carloads to see me and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass eye looked odd with his one brown one set against his tawny gold skin. A semi circle of silky white hair matched his heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, of helicopters, machine gunfire and mortars held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and asked a young family that he was fond of to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.
Chapter 2
My memories, both the common and the spectacular punctuated the stream of time during the brief blur of my formative years. Somehow, the colors, smells and sounds of childhood are like no other in life and can never be duplicated. I have seen orchards in bloom against sunsets so glorious as to move one from the realm of sensate appeal into the realm of enchantment, but I saw them only as a child. The intoxicating smell of gold and silver crayons, the trophies of the Crayola box, had the power to lure me into fanciful trances as I used the colored wax wands to weave magic upon mere paper. The comforting sounds of adult conversation as I eavesdropped cocooned away behind cushions long after my bedtime, and. the rise and fall of soft laughter on summer nights, mingled with the rhythm of the lonely cry of the whip o will made my bedtime lullaby. These things were the milk and honey of my early history.
However good a life can be, there is never total absence of the dark side of the human experience. I remember the feel of falling in the pit of my mind when I heard of the ax murder of my dear cousin Willie who lived within walking distance of our farm. Poor, simple cousin Willie, who had raised children and grandchildren, Cousin Willie who had just barely survived a house fire and wore the burns that came at the cost of her survival: Willie, who bothered no one except to bring cheer by her presence. Her six-foot image graced the top of our hill at least monthly but I knew I would see her no more. She had recently married a man new to the area, some said he was a blessing to her in her loneliness; some said ‘who is he? He doesn’t tell anything about himself does he?’ with heads cocked in suspicion. Cousin Willie married joke cracking Mr. Patrick with the red truck and they say he killed her with an ax and fled. We all got suspicious a little too late. Those were Black days. There was Mr. and Mrs. Morris who lived in a small house off the gravel road that we called the ‘main highway’, Uncle Robert always waved at them when we passed by on foot going to church on Sundays. Mr. Morris chased his diabetic wife around the table one day with a knife and she fell into the glass already scattered on the floor and got badly cut. Gangrene set in and she lost a leg. Death and tragedy do not discriminate. On a nearby farm, little Terry Hempstead’s father bought a black stallion with eyes like a devil and willed to break him to prove his manhood. My aunt said ‘that demon is gonna kill that boy’ and her prediction came true. Terry’s father was found dead in the pasture with the horse trampling triumphantly around him. Deaths, funerals and the constant threat posed by the fragility of life, the imminent danger of our own mortality, were ever present. Harsh reality and black thoughts, I stored away with a shock of emotion and a dose of denial. Deep in the recess of selective amnesia, I vaguely recall the feeling of fear experienced as only a human in their smallest, most helpless state can feel and I carefully chose not to examine those memories, instead I will pull from my psyche’s bouquet the jewels of my past. The jewels are my favorite- I will expose them to the light of my conscious recall and let them shine: the happy times remembered in all the colors of the rainbow, the sounds heard by a happy child in a living fairy tale world and one- of- a -kind people made of solid gold.
I did not intend to let the threat of death rob me of my life, nor allow the threats of life rob me of joy. I greedily enjoyed living in every respect, from the subtle small pleasures to the big victories.
I even loved school from the very first day, although it probably wasn’t apparent from the fight it took to get me out of bed in the mornings. I remember exactly what I wore my first day of school as I was led by my grandmother’s (my mother’s stepmother) hand, after my uncle walked to their home to catch my first yellow school bus. I wore J.C. Penney’s finest cotton in a red and blue tartan plaid pleated dress, little white socks and black patent leather shoes, compliments of my aunt Fannie in California. My hair was braided in two long braids that hung to my waist tied with red ribbons. I stood a bit frightened for a few hours of the first day, and then the tomboy in me came out. After going home with the skirts of my dresses ripped half off from rough play, my uncle went to town and bought me some denim jeans and Buster Browns and said “NOW”, his one word for ‘problem solved’.
I must have been a sight to see in an all black school in the early sixties before integration trickled down to the rural south. No one told me I wasn’t black, in fact many of my relatives were the same shade as ‘white’ folks and they called themselves black, so I was shocked when someone yelled ‘look at the little white girl’ and discovered that ‘the little white girl’ was I. The advantage of innocence is that small children quickly adjust to one another, before the social etiquette of the times steeps into them, so I was accepted, after a minor initiation period and a few minor obstacles of little consequence. The only thing that seemed to really matter after the first few days, was that Sara was a lot of fun and the fastest runner from first through third grade, not excluding boys and the boys liked me because in a game of tug of war, I was the equivalent of three small boys. I had found my niche: it was being the queen of the little people in a world of play.
In order to insure my popularity, I obtained daily insurance by raiding my uncle’s shoe box of silver change and offered to buy the nickel pops and candy. It soon became known that the little pretty girl had a shoe full of money and was generous with it, so I was trailed from the minute I got off the school bus by children who saw me as the nice little girl who was a candy store in patent leather shoes. Of course being nice to me was a prerequisite that needed no mention, I loved being a social creature, living a solitary life in the country with relatives who were all close to one hundred years old made me appreciate the value of being with other small people like me. School days were filled with glorious adventures of mischief and mayhem, with the necessary learning complete with daily recitals of the psalms in first grade and pledges of allegiance. We recited poems of great significance that we only knew as grand musical verses. I learned a valuable lesson and it was learning was sheer ecstasy; the stimulation of thought was chess for the mind and soul. There was a whole new world inside my own mind, worlds and universes so vast and limitless that I instinctively knew I would always venture into its realms for solace and for inspiration.
My exposure to the aged minds steeped in wisdom, led me into a new domain uncommon to children my age and my unconventional ‘parents’ brought me in contact with unconventional memories. Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie were born in the 1800’s and they lived as if the only difference between the era of their youth and the present they lived in was that you didn’t have to light the coal oil lamps at night, there was ‘lectric’ lights, not that it made much actual difference to me since we had to ‘go to bed with the chickens and get up with the chickens’. Those chickens were early risers, we had more than one rooster therefore, the dueling cocks crowed at about 5:30 every morning and we were up with breakfast served by 6:30 winter and summer.
One of my most precious memories was of the festivity Uncle Robert called the hog kills. On the first cold day of November of each year as dictated by the Farmer’s Almanac, Uncle Robert killed, butchered and hickory smoked three hogs. The occasion was marked by the attendance of hordes of friends and relatives accompanied by kids of all ages. The presence of the children was especially welcome as they brought multiple talents for play, such as games that I had never heard of before: Hide and Go Seek, King of the Hill, Ring Around the Roses, Simon Says and many other delectable children’s habits and teases for the spirit.
The grownups had their games too, they just did not call them games, it was ‘work’, but I knew by the men’s roaring laughter and the women’s little chuckles they were having too much fun to call what they were doing ‘work’.
The men would prepare large black cast iron kettles with fires blazing beneath them to boil water. A large barrel tilted in the ground was used to contain the delicious hog after their unfortunate demise by way of my uncle’s 30-30 rifle.
Yelling men to the background sounds of ecstatic children squealing and giggling did all of the heavy preparation. A killed hog always weighed at least 200-300 pounds in order for the kill to be worth the effort, so the men worked hard before their fun began.
A huge oak tree held a system of pulleys sufficient to lift the weight of the hamstrung hog, de haired and ready for gutting. Perhaps it was the primitive instinct of the hunter in them, but by this time, the men were as excited as the children and Shorty Smith interpreted this as his cue to start the musical accompaniment on his banjo. Cousin Joe and Will would then howl together in their version of song and we kids would fall onto the ground laughing. I think the dogs and farm animals all hid, thinking that the lovable humans had all lost their minds and they might be next to die. By dinnertime, if we did not know by then what the women had been doing all of this time, our noses and palettes would soon confirm it.
It seemed that the hog kills were opportunities for cook offs among the women, a sort of ‘put up or shut up’ invitational and we kids determined the winners because they would feed us spicy creamed potato soups and special fried chicken and corn bread until we almost burst and then stuff us with cakes until we begged for mercy. What was puzzling, were that these were the same women normally said ‘that’s enough’ when we asked for seconds. Whatever insanity overcame them at hog kills was fine with us.
By the end of the day, everyone would be tired, full and happy. After hugs and farewells, it would all be over until the next season.
Uncle Robert stopped having the hog kills the year Aunt Mollie died and the house burning ended the country life for good. To me, it was more like the end of an era.
Social change has always been history’s bookmarker. Changes occur in spurts like volcanic eruptions after long periods of calm, and then the chaos of change brings in a new calm. The social unrest in the south centered around integration, and like a slow child, the South was the last to catch up to the modern standard. The slow and painful integration of the south came to my small town and I remembered the changes only as they affected me.
The southern attitude toward change was demonstrated to me by interactions between my uncle and most memorably between Uncle Robert and the local storeowner from town by the name of Goldman. I never remembered my uncle calling him anything but his last name, so I never heard his first name spoken, but I remembered everything else about him, his prosperously round figure, soft hands and pink complexion.
Goldman had only one son that he dearly loved, and he told my uncle that he would shoot his only son, before he would see him go to school and ‘set side by side with niggas’. I had no comprehension of the meaning of the word he used, but I could see the fire in my uncle’s eyes quietly blaze when he replied that it was ‘time to get your shotgun Goldman’ because integration had come. Goldman was a conservative man with white hair and glittering blue eyes. Those eyes seemed to get big as watermelons, as Goldman took off his spectacles and stared at my uncle in shock and embarrassment as my uncle paid for his items, gave a cock sided smile and walked out, with me walking behind him and looking back at Mr. Goldman as he watched us leave.
The whole process in our rural area happened pretty quietly. Goldman held his head a little less arrogantly, but as far as we knew he didn’t so much as slap his son after integration, in any case he certainly did him no serious harm. After a few rough days, we kids did what kids do. The race riots were on the news daily, bus over turnings fueled mostly by angry screaming parents who refused to accept progress. In my classroom I saw the white class clown vie with the black class clown and the white know-it-all vie with the black until the group in silent unison said ‘hey, we’re not so different after all’ and thus the slow death of an obsolete social taboo ushered us into a new era. We children learned to mix quietly while the adults took the battles to the streets and courts nationwide as they found change hard to adjust to.
Along with integration came better supplies and equipment. I was exposed to parallel bars, balance beams, trampolines and graded tracks and I began to love gymnastics, the beauty of artistic expression and grace of movement became addictive to me, as adrenalin highs exposed me to new heights of human appreciation. Neither the emotional changes in my life nor the geographic moves changed my love of athletics. By eighth grade, I could run the hundred-yard dash in near record time and by ninth, I could sail through a five mile run high on endorphins and adrenalin. I ran by day and read by night. Besides physical exertion, I loved to envision worlds never seen and to see things through the minds and eyes of others who lived long ago. I desired to achieve what a rare few achieved. I wanted to run like Babe Didrikson, to paint like Leonardo Da Vinci, and to fly like Amelia, and my dear uncle who convinced me that I could do all things, made a believer of me. I could do anything that my mind and body could fathom; each day was a challenge and a joy. I could not wait to grow, to achieve and to become. Life was a wonder and a precious gift from the greatest Artist of all.