FIFTEEN
Fight, flight, and the humble babysitter
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The 22 February 1973 news article at which I’m now looking begins, “Reports, tips and sometimes wild speculating are keeping the Augusta Police Department and the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department ever alert for the man suspected of one murder and the recent rash of Rapes and Assaults”. To the right of the text are front and profile mugshots, from 18 October 1971, of prisoner 4654, a young African American male with a flat-top afro, not the contemporary style that is pristine sculpted perfection but a free-form “messy” version that is not halo-round, more of a wedge shape, the profile showing some volume extends shelf-like out over the forehead for a couple of inches. Below that article is the news of a white Vietnam veteran, relative of the mayor, who was “realized” by the police as mentally ill from a “nervous breakdown” suffered in Vietnam, for which reason he was turned over to the local veterans hospital after shooting both his parents. They had survived, were in the hospital, and had declined to press charges. An article beside this is on how the census showed an increase in interracial marriages during the 1970s, the largest percentage being in the West, however there was a decrease in white male and black female marriages.
These articles are from The Augusta News-Review, The People’s Paper, a member of the National Black News Service and the only paper serving the Augusta area’s Black community during the time of its publication from 25 March 1971 to 16 March 1985. The final edition informed the reader it would be the last edition as the Internal Revenue Service had given them ten days in which to produce over $12,000 in overdue withholding taxes, interest, and penalties, and they just didn’t have the money, they had not had money throughout their run, were always struggling, the editor was already deep in debt for sake of keeping the paper going those fourteen years, and he was exhausted, even relieved it was the last issue, he was content that the paper had fulfilled its essential purpose during those fourteen years, delivering information and a perspective that the Black community otherwise wouldn’t have had, and had been uncompromising in its commitment to truth and justice for all people, now to find another way to continue the struggle. In its first issue, the editor had introduced the paper’s ethos thusly, “only when people understand each other can they move toward a meaningful relationship wherein the differences of each individual are respected and the dignity of all is insured.” The last issue is archived in the online Digital Library of Georgia, but not that first, and that it’s not available is a disappointment, I’d like to have seen what was the content of that inaugural issue. The editor was Dr. Mallory Millender, who had been teaching at Augusta’s Paine
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College since 1967, from which he’d graduated with his Bachelors of Arts in English Lit, graduate also of the Kansas State Teachers College, the same college my father’s parents had attended in the 1920s, now Emporia State University. He was at the Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia) for his Master of Science in foreign languages, his 1968 graduate thesis being “Romantic Elements in Selected Writings of Balzac”, on the nineteenth-century author’s writings being not only famously realistic but romantic and subjective.. Millender would eventually get his Doctor of Arts in French from Clark Atlanta University. He received his journalism degree from Columbia University in New York. Georgia House Resolution 327, of 2023-2024, recognized and honored Millender for the Augusta News-Review, and his “efficient, effective, unselfish, and dedicated service to Paine College…,” also noting, “Whereas, during his undergraduate years at Paine College, Dr. Mallory Millender participated in and led protests with students and community activists that would serve as the foundation of the dismantling of many Jim Crow statues in Augusta…”
Established in 1882, Paine College is a historically black college, yet only in 1971 did it have its first black president. It had been founded by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, then called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church, then called the Methodist Episcopal Church South and historically white, the assistance of the Methodist Episcopal Church South was requested in order to procure funding, and while the Board of Trustees was the “oldest interracial body in the nation” it would be nearly 100 years before Paine had its first black president. Though I don’t find on Paine College’s webpage on its history, or Wikipedia or other encyclopedias, an explanation offered for why 1971 was the year that happened, I think we can take a look at the 1960s and 1970s and well comprehend why the historically black Paine College would have been pushed to finally institute a black president. In 1970, it was the only remaining school in the United Negro College Fund that had a white president, and an interview with Dr. Mallory Millender, housed on the Augusta University website, has him revealing he was among those individuals, including many faculty and black students, who were demanding a black president, that there were rallies, a crisis was reached. In April of 1970 the white president of Paine College announced his resignation.
For a time, Paine had also served as a high school as it wasn’t until 1945, post WWII, that Augusta had its first public black high school. Wait, the source for that last bit of information is wrong, for here’s another on Augusta’s Ware High School, for black students, which was open from 1880 to 1897, visited by Frederick Douglass who had praised it, then was closed in order for funding to go to the crowded black elementary schools, or such was the excuse. Indeed, I find the Ware High School was often in the news as its closure was met with great protest and resulted in a court case, Cumming v. Board of Education of Richmond County, that made its way to the Supreme Court which in 1897 ruled, “You may be citizens of the US, but you’re black, refer to our decision on Plessy v. Ferguson for what we think about that!” As regards the ruling of the Supreme Court on the state decision concerning Ware’s shuttering, it found, “under the circumstances disclosed, we cannot say that this action of the state court
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was, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, a denial by the state to the plaintiffs and to those associated with them of the equal protection of the laws or any privileges belonging to them as citizens of the United States.” Cumming v. Board of Education of Richmond County had held that (to simplify) blacks and whites alike were taxed for public school education and if the county closed the black high school, it must also close the white high school, based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee to not “deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” To which the U.S. Supreme Court replied that the Constitution of Georgia said, “There shall be a thorough system of common schools for the education of children in the elementary branches of an English education only, as nearly uniform as practicable…separate schools shall be provided for the white and colored races,” and so because of segregation in education the school could be closed, while the county appropriated money for a denomination school for white boys and girls there wasn’t one for white boys alone whereas white girls had their own high school and if parents of white boys weren’t complaining that they didn’t have their own personal high school then neither could it be complained black students didn’t have their own high school. And, “The substantial relief asked is an injunction that would either impair the efficiency of the high school provided for white children or compel the board to close it. But if that were done, the result would only be to take from white children educational privileges enjoyed by them without giving to colored children additional opportunities for the education furnished in high schools. The colored school children of the county would not be advanced in the matter of their education by a decree compelling the defendant board to cease giving support to a high school for white children.”
Which is white supremacist use of supposed logic as proof that they are not being racist, how dare anyone accuse them of being racist. At their white club they would have discussed amongst themselves how there was a reason there wasn’t a black judge on Georgia’s Supreme Court, no women either, which was evidence enough as to who was qualified to think. There wouldn’t be an African American judge on the Supreme Court of Georgia until 1989 and there wouldn’t be a woman on the Supreme Court of Georgia until 1992. Because for a long long time it was taught that only white men could think.
As for separate but equal, that had been legalized in 1896 via Plessy v. Ferguson. Because the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “political equality” was “in the nature of things” to be distinguished from social equality. The United States Supreme Court said that Plessy was just assuming enforced separation meant blacks were inferior, but, “it is not by any reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it”, plus racial prejudice couldn’t be done away with through legislation. Justice John Marshall Harlan cried bullshit, that white Americans matter-of-factly considered themselves superior to other races, in contrast with the Constitution insisting all classes were equal, but he was the lone dissenter on Plessy v. Ferguson—which goes to show that the Supreme Court can and always has made some truly despicable rulings.
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Plessy was Homer Plessy, an “octoroon” (seven-eighths white and fair-skinned) who had been persuaded by a Louisiana civil rights group to challenge Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act by taking a seat in a “white” railroad car, my quotations around “white” very appropriately employed as the railroad wouldn’t have known he was mixed-race by sight, so they were forewarned about the challenge, and he was arrested. We already know what happened with that. Jim Crow.
Another black high school didn’t open in Augusta until 1937, which was the A. R. Johnson High School, formerly the Mauge Street Grammar School, at 1324 Laney Walker Boulevard, this high school named for Augustus Roberson Johnson, a black educator from Augusta and first black educator licensed by the State of Georgia in 1869.
Ware had been located near Reynolds and Eleventh Streets, only a couple of blocks from Paine College’s original location on Tenth and Broad Street from 1884 to 1886, at which time Paine was relocated to Fifteenth Street, which was about two miles to the southwest and then rural.
Laney Walker Boulevard was originally Gwinnett Street, its name changed in 1976 to honor the black educator Lucy Craft Laney, and also Rev. Charles T. Walker who studied divinity at the Augusta Institute at Springfield Baptist Church, “the oldest independent Black church in the United States.” The Augusta Institute moved to Atlanta in 1879, becoming Atlanta Baptist Seminary, then was renamed Morehouse College in 1913. I had no idea Morehouse had its roots in Augusta. Springfield Baptist Church still stands and is at 114 Twelfth Street, on the corner of Reynolds, just a block from where was Ware High School, and near what was originally the location of Paine College. Wikipedia informs us its architectural style is New England meetinghouse, which is rare in Georgia, and as it was built in 1801 it is the oldest “church building extant in Augusta and is claimed to be one of the oldest Black congregations in the U.S.” The New Georgia Encyclopedia says its roots can be traced to 1773 as a church organized, by evangelist Wait Palmer, among the slaves of George Galphin at the Silver Bluff, South Carolina, plantation, located twelve miles below Augusta on the Savannah River, Georgia Baptist Church Records giving the Springfield Baptist Church as established in Augusta in 1793. If you’re on Google Maps looking at the red brick church at 114 Twelfth Street and wondering how this is New England meetinghouse, you’re looking at the wrong but right building, the meetinghouse-style church you want is the one behind the present red brick church. The one behind is a two-story rectangle of starkly unadorned white wood with a simple gable roof, and if one squints one can imagine an antique desire for the climate of Massachusetts, its distinct seasons, rather than the sultry Georgia heat. This is the oldest church in Augusta, originally built in 1801 at 734 Greene Street, then when its Methodist congregation (Augusta’s first Methodist Society) built a new church in 1844, what was called Asbury Chapel was purchased by the Springfield Baptist Church and moved a half-mile to its present location, which was a big event, rolling the church down the streets on logs, then in 1910 a new red brick church was built and the old wooden church moved to its rear. The Springfield Baptist Church, “one of the oldest Black
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congregations in the U.S.”, is in fact the church that bought the 1801 Methodist church in 1844 and moved it to Twelfth and Reynolds (a news item of 6 January 1866 in The Colored American places it at Reynolds and Marbury, so Twelfth was once Marbury) and used that as its church building until the construction of the red brick sanctuary in 1910 or 1912 or 1897, sources vary on the date, 1910 is most often given, I find that 8 November 1897 was when the cornerstone of the new church was laid. It’s called the Springfield Baptist church because Springfield was a free African American community that was established outside what was Augusta proper around the time of the Revolutionary War, a number of free African Americans from the Silver Bluff Plantation having settled there by 1787 (an often given approximation). Springfield’s “rough” boundaries were (and are, as a neighborhood) the Savannah River on the north, Jones Street on the south, Ninth Street (now James Brown Boulevard) to the east, and Fifteenth Street to the west. Too many sources happening, I also now read that “they”, meaning the slaves of Silver Bluff, had “fled with their masters” to Augusta when Silver Bluff was occupied by the British in 1778. Wouldn’t a better way of phrasing it be “the masters fled with their…”, unless the writer (Georgia Historical Society website) wanted to not leave the slaves out of the decision-making process? That makes no sense, I’m grasping at straws here for why the impression is given that the slaves preferred enslavement to welcoming the British. If they were already freed, seems then they would have been called their former masters? The British wouldn’t pass their Slavery Abolition Act until 1833, so they still had slaves, but if American slaves, men, women, and children, escaped their masters and joined the British they were promised freedom in exchange for their service, most given non-military jobs. In 1783, thousands of former slaves would leave with the British, relocating in Nova Scotia or other British Colonies where they would lead free lives.
Masters. Makes me for the first time think of Augusta’s golf tournament, “The Masters” , and wonder if there was initially a hint of plantation nostalgia in the name?
The Colored American was a weekly paper published by John Thomas Shuften, and the 6 January 1866 edition celebrated the first Anniversary of Freedom after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863, 1 January 1866 being “the first new years day since that memorable date, on which our race find themselves fully secured in the liberty guaranteed by that Proclamation, and forever free from the bondage of slavery…” The celebration of that anniversary took place at Springfield Baptist Church. The first African American newspaper in the South, The Colored American was in print from October 1865 to February 1866, out of Augusta, at which point, experiencing financial difficulties, it was acquired by the Georgia Equal Rights Association (which had been founded 10 August 1866 at the Springfield Baptist Church) and published out of Augusta through 1867 as The Loyal Georgian. John Thomas Shuften, who had been born in Augusta, would leave to pursue opportunity elsewhere.
Ask me when I became aware that Augusta, Georgia, was the home of the first African American newspaper in the South, however short-lived. While researching this chapter.
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If freed slaves from Silver Bluff made it their home by 1787, does that mean that George Galphin freed his slaves during or after the Revolutionary War? I set off to find this answer and find he died holding 128 slaves, not including children, so it seems the answer to that is no? Sources here and there state that during and after the war slaves freed from Silver Bluff formed three bodies, those who stayed home and continued the Silver Bluff Baptist Church at Silver Bluff, some went to Savannah where they began the First African Baptist Church, and some went to Augusta, and that each of these congregations claims title to being the oldest African American church in the nation, and they do, now I look up the church in Savanah and it claims it was constituted in December 1777 and is thus the oldest African American church, its sanctuary however not completed until 1859. The freed slave who, on this Augusta historical marker I’m looking at, was the one who established the congregation in Augusta, was Jesse Peters Galphin, an enslaved son of George Galphin—released when George died in 1780?— and this marker gives him as a co-founder of the Silver Bluff Church in 1773, he moving to Augusta in 1783. Okay, here I find, finally, that ninety slaves of Galphin’s had joined the British when they arrived at his plantation, occupying it in 1780, and afterward these were the ones who went to Savannah and Augusta, Jesse Peters Galphin being among the ones who escaped. Oh, damn, wait, here’s yet another version that states these ninety slaves had instead escaped to join the British in 1779, and Galphin seems to have still been alive to flee his plantation when it was occupied by the British in 1780, he not dying until 1 December. So, if George Galphin fled, where did he die? He died at Silver Bluff. But if he’d fled it and it wasn’t retaken by Americans until 1781 as is often stated...one can see how this is confusing. Now I locate yet another site that states he owned sixty-nine slaves at the time of his death, fifty-nine less than stated elsewhere, which didn’t include children. Finally, another site states that when Galphin’s plantation was taken by the British he was put under house arrest (I know I’ve read that version previously but I’d forgotten about it) and died a prisoner at his home, his wealth confiscated by the Disqualifying Act of 1780. Which should mean he didn’t actually possess dozens of slaves and 40,000 acres at the time of his death as has been stated, and yet nearly every website states this is what he owned when he died? Maybe Galphin’s heirs recovered a part of his wealth after his death, but maybe all his slaves had escaped, that seems sensible, except wouldn’t the family have been able to reclaim the ones still at Silver Bluff and those in Augusta? Don’t ask me, I don’t know. Except now I do know, looking at another source, the problem of Galphin’s estate was called the Galphin Affair, the Galphin family having sought compensation from the colonial government that had taken possession of Galphin’s estate after the Revolutionary War. After nearly seventy years of litigation, when Georgia’s Governor, George Crawford, stepped in to help them, on the condition he keep fifty percent of the winnings, the initial amount that they legally won, which seems to have been about $90,000, didn’t include interest, but they finally received it, somehow someway, this settled extra-legally. The family was granted about $192,000, of which Crawford kept nearly half, and William Meredith, the Secretary of the Treasury, kept $3000 for himself. When the public heard about this they were outraged, Crawford resigned and lived his days out in style on his Galphin Affair wealth.
George Galphin, a poor Irishman (Scotch-Irish) had left a new wife
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in Ireland to come to America and seek his fortune, got into Indian trade and quickly did well, he had Indian wives (helped with trading) by whom he had children and had children by his slaves, only freeing two of his enslaved children at his death, and he had one white child but not by his wife back in Ireland, they had no children, they never saw one another again but she was an heir in his will, one wonders if it was a mutual parting of the ways and she was satisfied to be a long-distance Mrs. Galphin.
What ultimately happened to Silver Bluff, which was later owned by the diabolical United States Senator James Henry Hammond, who owned 300 slaves and coined the phrase, “Cotton is king”? Part of what was Silver Bluff is now the home of the Silver Bluff Audubon Center and Sanctuary near Jackson in Aiken, South Carolina, which has several nature trails for strolling, one of which leads to a bluff overlooking the Savannah River—the reason the plantation was named Silver Bluff was due the appearance of the bluffs to early travelers on the river, the mica in the sand of the bluffs causing them to glint silver in the sun (if this phenomena is still experienced, I don’t find it mentioned). Another part is now called Redcliffe Plantation, near Aiken at Beech Island, and was James Henry Hammond’s, his Greek-Revivaled (through later alterations) Georgian home still stands there. That he molested all four of his wife’s nieces, beginning when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, all at the same time during a two-year period between 1841 and 1843, became a (behind the scenes) scandal that guaranteed none of the girls would ever marry, and yet he still managed to become a senator. Plus he raped a slave, Sally Johnson, who he’d purchased in 1838, some reports say he purchased her along with her infant daughter, Louisa, and raped also Louisa when she turned twelve, and his son raped her as well, so Louisa had children by both James Henry Hammond and his son. However, in a letter to his son, Hammond said that Sally claimed Louisa was his child, he said that may be, though he didn’t think so, but to go ahead and take Sally’s opinion on it, and he acknowledged her second child was certainly his child. In the letter, which I will not attempt to paraphrase, he tells his white son, “Take care of her & her children who are both of your blood if not of mine & and of Henderson. The services of the rest will I think compensate for indulgence to these. I cannot free these people & send them North. It would be cruelty to them. Nor would I like that any but my own blood should own as slaves my own blood or Louisa. I leave them to your charge, believing that you will best appreciate & most independently carry out my wishes in regard to them. Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be the Slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.” Hammond will not free his descendant slave children, but he doesn’t want them to be slaves to anyone else, perhaps because he bristled against his very own intimate blood being enslaved by others, just as he owned his blood so did he own these children, and perhaps, too, he didn’t want them freed because as long as they were family slaves they were still in his control after his death. The relationship with Sally and Louisa is clumsily written about here and there by different people, as in “he raped” Sally and Louisa, and I say clumsily because it is a perfunctory description that makes it sound like these women were raped once or twice, when instead we should call it sex slavery, that’s another way of putting it, they were his slaves after all. Sally and Louisa
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are also called his “mistresses”, I suppose because they were preferred, but he owned them, they were his property, he would have felt why should he not have sex with his property, however his white lawful wife did take exception and bundled up their children and left him for a few years because of it. James Henry Hammond would have protested he didn’t rape anyone. He wrote (yes, he wrote) that he thought his four nieces were all having a wonderful time, then the second eldest, nearing the age of eighteen, “took offense at a familiarity”, which surprised him no end after their history of two years, and he from then on refrained from liberties with any of them, such was his respect for them. But somehow the father of the girls, his brother-in-law, learned something somehow and the rage of the girls’ father pursued him. Hammond considered they could meet in a duel, he was fully up for that, he was confident he’d be the victor, but that might not be a good look. Hammond blamed the girls for being “lovely and luscious creatures” with “loose manners and ardent temperaments”, each one “contending for my love, claiming the greater share of it as due to her superior devotion to me”, he blamed his heart that was susceptible to emotions of tenderness and said there were none who could condemn him for he was helpless, any other man in his situation would have done the same as he. (These quotations are taken from his diaries, which were published in 1988 and which I’m perusing.) He laid part of the blame on what he called his brother-in-law’s “systematic attempt to train up pure and innocent young girls to debauchery, commencing from their tender years, by one who should have been their guide and protector”, whatever that means, for it seems he must not have been claiming his brother-in-law was himself an abuser of the girls or else Hammond would have said so without reserve. He also claimed the brother-in-law, who had opposed Hammond’s marriage to his wife’s sister, was so jealous of him that it was this that caused him “to sacrifice even his own daughters to denounce me lately in order to prevent my being elected (U.S.) Senate.” But Hammond did admit that at the beginning of his “dalliances” with the nieces, he considered whether he should cease his “toying” with them, then decided no and “gave way to the most wanton indulgences”. Yes, he recorded all this in his diary, an individual who was a United States representative from 1835 to 1836, Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, then a United States senator from 1857 to 1860. Hammond insists in his diaries that he did everything but have intercourse with the girls, though I’m not certain we can trust a liar. Should we trust him when he protests he had the extraordinary strength of character not to have sexual intercourse with the girls, though they tempted him sorely and he did everything but that, but never that? No, I don’t think we can trust him on this unless he did refrain from intercourse because of fear of a niece becoming pregnant. So, maybe he didn’t have sex with them in a way that could cause pregnancy, let’s put it that way. It’s rather humorous how as the scandal takes root he writes several times about how his wife must not learn of this, as if she hadn’t already, I don’t know if they ever discussed it, he insists he doesn’t think his brother-in-law even discussed with his daughters what happened and that he was motivated only by hearsay.
Redcliffe, now a state park, has tours several times a day. White supremacist culture has memorialized plantation life as gentile nobility splashed with the chaotic interest
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of exotic hanging tree moss under which godly grace waltzes with devilish humid heat, the house slaves know they have it good and those in the fields are picturesque, Van Gogh’s potato eaters would be envious. Not wishing to support the nostalgia and whitewashed narratives, I’ve never taken a tour of such. But descendants of slaves are now making their way back to the plantations where their ancestors were held, to honor them, their strength, and some plantations have responded with honest education on the lives of the enslaved upon whose backs the ruthless wealth of the plantation holder was built. Redcliffe has a Descendants Day for those whose ancestors were enslaved there. Some whites complain about this. “You are why we can’t have nice things.” And that we’re undergoing (in 2025) a deplorable backlash against histories recomposed to address white supremacy and reposition the enslaved so their stories are given significant real estate speaks to how much good progress had been made over the past twenty or so years. Which is true. At the dawn of the internet, real history about the inequities of “we’re all equal, freedom for all” classist-landholders-only patriarchal White supremacist colonialist America were met with shades of discomfort by many who considered themselves progressive, becoming eventually accepted, the internet provided a platform for voices that public education and the media had routinely denied and reminded and reminded with yearly anniversaries of critical events and the births and deaths of overlooked individuals in the attainment of civil rights. “You’re making us feel guilty!” No, we are all of us born into systemic, traditional, hierarchical processes, and it’s quite all right to look at one’s ancestors and think about where they fit in, and how you want to fit.
What are human brains can’t compute is how where there is beauty there is ugliness and vice versa, and that one can accept these exist alongside each other, while tabulating “at whose expense” if such is the case. There’s certainly beauty at Beech Island’s Redcliffe. A photo from the widow’s walk atop the house gives the feeling that if one strained one’s eyes hard enough, gazing out over the treetops below into the far distance through a clear forever sky, the Atlantic Ocean could be glimpsed though just over a hundred miles away. Beech Island, by the way, is not an island. Though there are several theories, no one knows how it came by the name. Because of the beech trees that purportedly used to grown in the swamps? Or was there, in the nearby Savannah River, once an island upon which beech trees grew? Was the name due confusion between English speakers and the indigenous of the area? It was originally Savanna Town, then New Windsor, and around 1730 became Beech Island. Maybe the people who lived there were just that anxious to feel connected with a coast they couldn’t see from widow’s walks but had absorbed the compulsion of the river toward the universal.
When I lived in Augusta, I had no idea the old African American village of Springfield (annexed by Augusta about 1805) was that area by the waterfront as one approached downtown from the west, its character was no longer that of a village, but my subconscious must have perceived something radically different about it as I used to dream about this area, it was the secret Augusta, in my dreams I only visited it at night, a distinct and hidden town within the city down by the Savannah River, there
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were never any lights on in the buildings and there were never any people on the streets, a mysterious entity of a place that survived the new Augusta and which I would visit in my sleep and wonder over. While I dream about other waterways influenced by my youth along the Columbia River and Seattle’s Lake Union, these dreams of Augusta and the Savannah River have been specific, I easily identified the dream neighborhood as starting at Fifteenth Street and continuing east immediately beside the Savannah River, not extending all the way up Reynolds or over into Broad Street, and though I recognized the area, how it is in real life is not as in the dream, nor were there any identifiable features in these dreams, rather there was an imprint in my deep psyche of a persistent once was underneath the current map. Someone might ask, what did you feel about it in the dream? Nothing ever happened while I was there in the dream, it was a place in Augusta and I would simply feel I should try to find it, which was confusing to me at the time as I knew what the area looked like and while the secret neighborhood of my dreams felt real it wasn’t a thing where I could ever find it physically verbatim as if I’d lost it. But the dream persisted. In sleep, and as I woke after dreaming of it again and again, I’d feel I needed to find this place. And, in a sense, I now am, through its history.
The Springfield neighborhood is now recognized as a historic district, and there’s a Springfield Village Park across from the church and in the park is a soaring Tower of Aspiration sculpture by African American, Chicago artist Richard Hunt, and in a small reflecting pool below there is another statue of his that’s called They Went Down Both into the Water. “They Went Down Both into the Water” is also a quote on display above the pulpit in the church, and is from a New Testament story in which Phillip baptizes an Ethiopian, the first black Christian.
Did Millender originally pursue French studies with a goal of escaping American racism for France, then as the American South began to change found his calling in Black journalism at home. In the early 1970s, my spouse’s high school French teacher was African American, as was one of my English teachers who liberally sprinkled her speech with French words and phrases and addressed her students as monsieur and mademoiselle. Maybe I read too much into their pursuit of French, but I think of James Baldwin who said that before relocating to France he had learned about French society through Balzac, and was sure his life in France would have been different without that introduction to how French society worked.
Honoré de Balzac. One of my favorite childhood photos of my son is from when he was ten and frozen in awe before Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a statue that’s about ten feet tall and so imposing in its dynamism that the magnetized eye seeks for a place to settle but is thwarted by the sculpture’s explosive energy, though Balzac is wrapped in a robe that conceals his figure, which rather than containing that energy concentrates it. The statue’s surface transforms all light both swallowed by and reflected off it so the form appears a confusion of erratic surfaces, one is scaling a cliff at night with only one’s fingertips to search for a place to take hold. In my photo—high key, contrast increased so all that is extraneous is erased—light seems to overwhelm the space but the statue of Balzac
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and a few human figures stand out, the central focus being my son, oblivious to my photographing him, he stands at the foot of the statue, his head tilted back, staring up toward the crags of Balzac’s face. For the moment, nothing else in the world exists for him but Balzac, and he has no idea who Balzac is, he is enthralled by Rodin’s attempt to capture Balzac. Also in the photo, in the foreground, are his two paternal uncles, one of whom is on the left of the photo, glancing toward me, his other uncle on the right, standing with his back to me as he gazes in the direction of AK and the statue. At the far left an unknown woman with long, dark hair has made it into the photo, dressed in trousers and heels, she smiles as she speaks into her phone, about to walk out of the frame. I had included her as she nicely balanced the composition of what is a family portrait disguised as a random capture of art appreciators. Fifteen years later we had the opportunity to again view Rodin’s Monument to Balzac when a Rodin exhibit toured at the High Museum in Atlanta, and while it was exciting to experience it again, the light was such that even as I took my photos at the High, no matter how many angles explored, I knew none of these photos would compete with the MOMA shot. I took a number of photos of the other Rodin sculptures but I’ve yet to process them after several years. I’d thrown out a couple of recent projects, which I’d planned for years, that weren’t turning out as I wanted, hundreds of photos. I decided I should put the Rodin photos on hold and approach them in the future, place some space between myself and the exhibit and the failed projects.
Reading up on the history of such Augusta black schools as Ware, Paine, and Lucy Craft Laney’s Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, which I’d previously not thought to look into—but I’ve avoided anything to do with Augusta since fleeing it decades ago—I’m literally pained by the deprivations we experienced as an integrated body of students in 1970s Augusta school system by our not being educated on Augusta’s African American history, I was among the first integrated students and if and when Black history was taught the language surrounding suggested its relevance was for black students, their world, their culture, rather than having to do with all of us, many of my teachers were African American and could daily have been dosing us with Black history, which didn’t happen, and I can only imagine they may have been instructed to keep away from certain subjects, the school board worried that newly integrated white students might feel alienated, when instead we should have been inundated and it impressed upon us that this African American history was American history was history that had to do with us all, not to mention the history of the Creek and Cherokee Nations who in 1783 had ceded the land Augusta occupied about fifty years before their forced removal from Georgia began. When one’s country sells freedom and equality for all, the winning of freedom and equality for all shouldn’t be almost exclusively portrayed in the hands of the landed, white forefathers, some of whom held slaves (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton) and believed voting rights belonged only to their landed peers (the Naturalization Act of 1790 stated only free white immigrants could become naturalized citizens), no women allowed. When all the deductions are taken into account as to who didn’t qualify, real freedom and equality for all amounted to about six percent of the population.
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2
I'm fourteen and I'm babysitting the children of the family who lived catty-corner to us in the Augusta subdivision that used to be known as Brynwood. It can also be kitty-corner, depending on regional preference which gets mixed up with individuals moving from place to place and people of different regions having and raising children in yet another part or parts of the country, so that I heard both catty-corner and kitty-corner and have a moment’s indecision always as to which to say, my brain stops cold as it pulls up the multiple choice options. And do I say coyote with a third syllable long e or just two syllables with no third syllable e? Soda or pop or soda-pop or soft drink? I wonder what I used to say as opposed to what I learned to say later and I don’t know. What did my parents say? I don’t even know what I picked up from my childhood in Washington State, from Missouri, from Georgia, from my Oklahoma father whose parents were from Kansas and Oklahoma and Missouri, or my mother who grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and her parents who were from the Pacific Northwest and Missouri. Though everyone can join in, the game of hardcore regionalism, “You know you’re from such-and-such if you…”, is best played by individuals whose families sat down in a place and that was their home from seemingly forever. The game is a popular one, used by people to know themselves, to supply identity, to set themselves apart from others, to constellate belonging. The conflict is the individual wants to be different, unique, but also part of a group and special by way of the group to which they belong. The same belonging and not belonging is had with regional and micro-regional accents, and for me it’s both education and entertainment to listen to linguists on dialects and accents and their idiosyncrasies, how they became, how they change over time, because I don’t have an ear fine-tuned to hear as they hear and I appreciate their knowledge and skills. As with many people, I think of myself as not having much of an accent and was surprised when the host of a call-in radio show, not about politics, he covered a variety of topics, immediately pegged me as from Washington State when I was in my early twenties. “You’re from Washington State,” he said, because it was Atlanta and in the early 1980s he may only occasionally have had callers from the Pacific Northwest. It was the only time I called into a radio show, his guest was a photographer, the talk was technical, about cameras, lenses, processing, papers, and he couldn’t answer whatever my question was about, he was flummoxed and could only suggest I consult a camera shop but I’d already done that, I wouldn’t have called in if I’d not exhausted my usual options. Instead, I learned I had a recognizable accent and it was indebted to my childhood in Washington State rather than my Oklahoma father and my Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region mother, neither of whom I thought of as having accents. This family for whom I babysat was, like my mother, who I think of as being mostly from Chicago, and I didn’t think of them as having accents, and I didn’t think of them as sounding like my mother either.
My accent remains one that children can have difficulty identifying. My young niece, then in elementary school, who has grown up in New York, her parents from the South, once asked me if I was from England. As a child, having moved down from Washington State to Georgia, my school peers asked if I was from England because
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they thought I sounded like the Disney actress Hayley Mills, and I’d no idea what to think about this because I knew I didn’t sound British and I didn’t sound like Haley Mills. I supposed the reason they made the comparison to Haley Mills was that the 1961 film The Parent Trap was making its way through the theaters again after sitting seven years in a Disney film warehouse or wherever it was they put sleeping celluloid, and because many of us didn’t know The Parent Trap was a reissue we were almost confused that Mills was a plucky thirteen (Mills was fifteen at the time of filming) when two years beforehand she was graduating high school and entering a nunnery in The Trouble with Angels, except that Hollywood years had a near magical relationship with time. Still, that this movie was in circulation again doesn’t explain why my accent would be confused with that of Haley Mills.
Occasionally, I will think of my spouse—born in New Orleans, raised in Mississippi and Georgia by Gulf Coast parents—as having an accent, but usually only after he has been around others with heavy Southern accents (of which there are many types) and his voice morphs to a more Southern hue that reflects with whom he’s been speaking. A singer I know, who grew up in Mississippi, lived in England for many years and when she dips back into those England years, communicating with people she knew then, she shifts into a strong English accent that carries over into daily conversation. Early in our relationship, when I first heard my spouse shift accents, I was astonished and didn’t know if he was intentionally mimicking or code-switching, then I found it was entirely unconscious on his part. Otherwise, he’s never had a heavy accent. Or it may be I have never thought of him as having a Southern accent because he unconsciously curbed it around me. He does have an accent distinct from mine as our niece hasn’t questioned it, but it’s not as strong as the accents of his brothers, and is a very different accent from his mother which, I’ve learned, hints of mid-century Mobile, Alabama, where she lived as a teenager, though she grew up in Arkansas, however her parents came from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. My spouse’s father grew up in Mobile, Alabama, as did his parents, his paternal grandparents, and his paternal great-grandparents whose parents were Great Hunger immigrants from Ireland. Our son, born and raised in Atlanta, I never think of as having an accent. When he was younger, a couple of times in online discussions, someone from elsewhere would comment on his seeming to sometimes perform Black lingo when instead it was natural for the community.
So many identity placeholders. Some like the placeholders they receive by birth and the communities of their youth, others would eventually desire a blank slate upon which they could construct a preferred identity, feeling why should a person be what others make of them rather than what they make of themselves. Some placeholders prove near impossible to drop, such as class, if one is born into a certain economic percentile then the odds are one will not move beyond it because the resources and networks aren’t available.
These particular children I babysat, two sisters and a brother, were cute with an edge, and by cute with an edge I mean they were reality sassy and sharp, not the precocious fake sassy and sharp one gets in movies and television shows when adults pretend to
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write like they’re sassy, sharp children. Reality sassy children often don’t make a lot of sense, the words are ninety percent comedy fail with ten percent stand-up gems tumbling from their mouths in a combination of innocent and needling flair. Art Linkletter, a Canadian-born media personality who went from teaching to radio (paid more) to television, had a popular show during the 1960s, Kids Say the Darnedest Things, in which you-can-trust-me congenial-voiced Art queried predominately California children (none of whom had accents, as far as I could tell) on various subjects that were beyond their level to maturely comprehend, the audience good-naturedly laughed at their innocent ridiculousness, and the children, stunned by the rapid-fire novelties of green room, stage, lights, cameras, action, and you’re done, would bask in appreciation of a few minutes of intense, positive attention, stars for a day, more than a few probably envisioned themselves being thus discovered and transformed into famous child actors. That wasn’t these kids, because these kids had bite, or rather the oldest girl did, the middle girl was her accomplice with little fangs not quite as developed, and the boy, the youngest, did his best to hang on by the skin of his teeth and observe, not being of age to do more than that. The girls went for comedian Don Rickles level of roast-your-hide. No one’s fool, they would have upped the stakes on Art, nosing out his weak spot, would have expected an acknowledgment and a parry or riposte, then would have immediately upped the game again because they were relentless, unless they were not feeling well and then you just felt sad and nursed them and waited for their eyes to light up again and target you with their shine. Art Linkletter would never have chosen them to be on his show—or his helpers, who sometimes coached the children on what to say, I used to wonder if that was the case, and according to adults who had been guests as children it was—because they were too astute to manipulation. If you condescended to them and didn’t treat them as real people they would disengage and not be themselves, they would go-through-the-motions behave until they might decide to buck a disingenuous, untrustworthy saddle. And never mind the roasting, if they liked you and you ever needed a cheering section they would be eager and loyal first in line and the loudest, screaming you through the finish line to victory. They had attitude and we had rapport. Everyone should have such enthusiastic fans in their corner cheering them on through life, even the simplest of chores.
Now I need to stand back out of worry of fictionalizing these children, lest I reduce them to a cluster of traits that are sharpened to the point of over-dramatization for sake of lifting a character off the page and giving them legs. Even unconsciously, writers will do this, start with a real subject in mind then exaggerate certain details over others in order to raise the subject’s profile so they’ll capture the attention of the person in the back row of the theater, at which point the subject has transformed into an imaginary personality the writer will be reluctant to re-evaluate and trim down because the character has become a Pinocchio desirous of freedom, its right to be, and perhaps seems a better story, grippier, is bigger than life. No, these were ordinary children, allowed the freedom to be ordinary children. They were my favorites to babysit, only at the time I wasn’t entirely conscious of why.
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Google Maps shows the single-story, three-bedroom, L-shaped house they lived in currently has a red door. A realty search reveals the house has recently been on the market, images are available, so I can see the interior has been remodeled, the main difference between now and then is that the wall between the living room and family room has been knocked out so they form one great room and the subdivision’s obligatory wood paneling on what were the walls of the family room is gone. Has the house always had a red door? In Richland, the house of my friend Rachel had a red door. In some cultures, red doors are supposed to message hospitality, and there is a certain implied friendliness to a house that strongly broadcasts its front entrance instead of hiding it. Here we are come visit us. When I was a child red doors struck me as mysterious because they were uncommon in neighborhoods where we lived, but I also saw them as extroverted and gregarious, if you were lost then the house to zero in on for help would be the one with the red door. Perhaps I was influenced by churches that had red doors, though Christ the King in Richland didn’t have red doors (I am confident of this as I have a color photo of it that I took at the age of ten), and I don’t know if the Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle had red doors, it doesn’t currently, and though the Church of the Good Shepherd in Augusta doesn’t have red doors currently that doesn’t mean it didn’t have them in the past but probably not, I assume that if a church has red entrance doors then that red has meaning for the church and that they are unlikely to change them. There is no single reason for churches having red doors, instead there are reasons. The red represents the blood of Passover, protection from the Angel of Death, or is intended to suggest the blood of Christian martyrs. The red represents sanctuary, refuge, as in Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the abused, deformed bell-ringer, Quasimodo, rescues the Gypsy, Esmerelda, from the gallows and carries her to Notre Dame, Cathedral of Our Lady, Our Mother, where she will be protected by restrictions on the ability of secular law to invade territory sacred to God, but the church, which does not have red doors, fails as a refuge for Esmerelda because the archdeacon is corrupt and attempts to rape her. When I was nine years old, my mother, late one night, ran off from the hospital where she was a psychiatric patient, and was found hiding under the altar of the Roman Catholic Church we were then attending, Christ the King, which was only a block or two from the hospital. My mother likely wasn’t literally thinking “sanctuary”, that’s not how her brain worked, she didn’t in any straightforward way examine motives during or after the fact. She wouldn’t have ever seen any film adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and wouldn’t have read the book, she probably knew nothing about the plight of Esmerelda, but whatever was her state of mind the church and its altar resonated with her as a place of safety, where she could hide and seek refuge from whatever it was she was running.
When I was thirteen or fourteen and my parents dropped me and my siblings off at church one Sunday morning, the Episcopal one, Church of the Good Shepherd in Augusta, my chore being to babysit while my parents went home to have sex—which will sound like I resented my parents going home to have time together alone, which wasn’t the case, I instead hated the ritual drama surrounding. Their prelude-to-sex for years had been for my mother to explode into violence, almost always in my direction, then my father would thrash the hell out of me for half an hour because I
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was always held responsible for my mother exploding into violence, after which they’d retire to their bedroom for sex and my task was, still crying and shaking all over from my father’s leather belt hitting me up and down from head to toe, to keep my younger siblings away from their bedroom door, I had to play guard in the hall and prevent my siblings from disturbing them, keep them from knocking on their door, keep them even from making any noise at all, or else I’d get into more trouble, my siblings would rage at me why wouldn’t I let them knock on mom and dad’s door, they would be upset with me, they would struggle and fight with me as I guarded the door to the bedroom, my siblings only saw me as a bitch obstacle keeping them from their parents, but that was my job, to keep them from disturbing our parents while they had their sexual consoling time after which my mother would come out cha-cha swinging her hips in a good mood and they’d often go out to one of the several bars they frequented. I couldn’t tell my siblings, “You can’t knock because they’re having sex and it’s my job to keep you away from their door or I’ll be beaten again.” That Sunday was a variation on a long-established theme. I’ve only a faint recollection of an inexplicable explosion in an unending tumult of years of explosions, I’d done nothing but was promised yet another round of grounding for weeks or months, no contact permitted with friends. Capping the explosion was the demand I go with my siblings to church where I was to babysit them. I would have complained I didn’t want to go to church and babysit my siblings who were upset and complaining how they didn’t want to go to church if our parents didn’t go, they didn’t understand why their parents weren’t going to church with them, and were going to give me trouble because they didn’t want to be there. Church might seem it would have been a good place to be as opposed to staying at home where I was miserable, but my siblings and I were too upset to deal with the public eye. Despite this, we were dropped off in front of the church in our Sunday clothes and I was supposed to shut my emotions off like nothing had happened and care for my younger siblings, who were wired, chaotic, because they had their own mess of feelings to deal with, but the long-term crisis upon crisis at that moment short-circuited my ability to cope and propelled me away from the church into a long walk that would take me out of the city and down a less-traveled southern-bound highway than the east-west I-20 interstate. I was crying as I went, and only now do I understand, as I write this, why I overloaded that day, how legitimately overwhelmed I was with the stress of having to always shut down and pretend nothing had happened, and I suddenly couldn’t do it, we were all hyperventilating, red-faced from sobbing, the anger of my siblings was directed against me because I was the one who was tasked with making them sit through church and I couldn’t robotically brace up and toddle the kids down the aisle, file them into a wood pew, and babysit them through an hour-long mass while I was contemplating what fresh hell was awaiting me at home, what would my parents have dreamt up by the time they came to retrieve us, because there was always another punishment waiting me for my non-existent sins, they were telling me even as they dropped us off, “Just you wait, we’ll have decided what your punishment will be by the time we pick you up, if you want something to be upset about that ought to keep your mind occupied.” Our parents having only moments before pulled away in the family station wagon, as I walked away from my siblings who were yelling at me to come back, it tore me up, I cried over leaving them in front of the church, I wasn’t heartless,
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I knew their confusion and fear at seeing me walk away, and I had no idea where I was going, but I was driven by rampant adrenalin, the feeling I had to get away, and I knew also I was leaving my siblings at a place where they were collectively safe, right there in front of the church. (I still feel guilt for this, because they were in my charge, I was the eldest.) Plus, our parents had driven wedges between my siblings and me so that my siblings had become projections of them, even while I was taking care of my siblings they were also acting as little remote spy cameras for our parents, so as I walked away and heard my siblings calling after me I knew they were, however unconsciously, my parents attempting to control me. My siblings were young, that’s how it was, I didn’t blame them for that. I was torn up that I was walking away, I didn’t want to hurt them, but I kept on walking, I couldn’t stop.
What I did wasn’t premeditated. All I knew how to do at the moment was walk. It was a kind of flight or fight response—no, it was a flight response, triggered by not just the stress of that morning but accumulative stress. With no idea where I was going, but avoiding the South Carolina border that I would run into if I walked due east, when I reached the corner beyond the church I turned right and struck out down Milledge Road, going south, what I was trying to do was get distance and time to think about what I could do. No, not even that. I was trying to get time and distance between me and hell because my ability to cope was completely depleted. I had no money. I didn’t want to end up in another bad situation, I wanted safety, not to be exploited, so I had opted to not go east as I wanted to avoid downtown Augusta, I didn’t want to immediately volunteer myself to an area where I’d already experienced how men would hit on young adolescent girls, offering money for sex, that was where the soldiers hung out and I saw them all as obnoxious and vulgar so avoided anyone who had the appearance of a soldier in civilian clothes, though the draft was on and I was aware any of them could have been a few months prior a person who wouldn’t have triggered that response by appearance alone. Blocks of downtown were devoted to bars with topless dancers, porn cinemas, pawn shops, catering to the military. When I was thirteen, before this event, before downtown had completely shriveled up and died except for the strip joints and bars and pawnshops, I’d gone shopping there one Saturday with a friend whose family had a boutique clothing store on a better part of Broad Street, I’d loved Orange Julius when we lived in Washington State and was so happy that a branch had opened on Broad Street, I was in the Orange Julius establishment, had ordered my drink and stood back from the counter to wait for my number to be called when a short man I would have guessed to be in his forties approached me and asked me how much I charged, like right out of the movie Taxi Driver, but several years before Taxi Driver. He was my height which was then about five foot five or six, so I’ve always remembered him as short. I couldn’t tell whether he was for real or if he was vice squad and picked on me because I was dressed in jeans and a stretch-knit fabric top, but not anything that might be interpreted as sexy. It ruined my Orange Julius for me, the fact I couldn’t even go into a store, away from the catcalls on the street, and have fun buying myself an innocent drink made of orange juice and ice and milk and egg whites and vanilla, that I had let my guard down with looking forward to having an Orange Julius made me feel I was partly responsible, I’d perhaps exhibited some childish enthusiasm, and at least for myself I associated any
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trace of childish enthusiasm with becoming prey, like when I was twenty-one and had just gotten a new black Gordon Setter puppy almost for free, I was happy, riding in the passenger seat with the puppy on my lap, a friend driving us down the interstate, and a man passing in a neighboring car smiles with vigorous intensity at me, demanding my attention, his face a grotesque, and I look over and realize he’s masturbating, I was struck by that same pang of shame, had I attracted this through the childish enthusiasm I’d been exhibiting over the puppy (I’d been told had her shots but within a week she was ill and inside three weeks she died of distemper, a dog with the sweetest loyal temperament, we’d immediately become family). I still got my Orange Julius but I never went back to that block for another one. I didn’t complain to anyone that the man had propositioned me, I didn’t yell for him to get away from me, I didn’t want to attract attention, I just shunned him and got my Orange Julius, drank a couple sips while I put distance between myself and the franchise, then threw the drink in the trash because it was tasteless, ruined by the event, and kept walking away, careful to make sure I wasn’t being followed. The last time I had an Orange Julius drink was that day because I didn’t know why the man had chosen me to approach in a busy fast-food establishment, I wondered how he had gotten the idea I was available for purchase, my friend hadn’t been with me at that moment, she was waiting outside, or perhaps she had gone down to her parents’ shop, I don’t think I even told her about what had happened. If I did tell her, and she had been waiting outside, I wouldn’t have told her until we were a several shops removed so that she wouldn’t cause a fuss. If she was waiting down at her parents’ shop, I wouldn’t have said anything because I wouldn’t have wanted her parents to know this had happened.
Despite the soldiers, after MK and I were married and in college, we lived for a time down in the 200 block of Broad Street. I wanted to photograph the downtown area, its old buildings, and I tried to do so on my own but three soldiers, who had harassed me, started following me in such a way that I felt threatened, finally I gave up and started walking home, thinking they’d quit, but they followed me all the way down from the business district, past the Highway 78 overpass into the residential area, where soldiers never went, which is when I became worried, and so they wouldn’t know where I lived I started walking around the residential blocks until I finally lost them or they gave up and went away. Afterward, when I went out to photograph downtown I took MK along as protection, and I thought of how men didn’t have to do this, which made me mad, but I also felt rather like a failure that I was now too frightened to try to photograph downtown again without a male companion, while other women photographers had experienced harassment, been undeterred, found a way to cope, and continued to pursue what they wanted to shoot.
To reassure myself about the date, that the Orange Julius had opened by the time I was thirteen, I search the Augusta news archives and find an ad from August 1970 that reads “Orange Julius Franchise, Now Available, Heart of Downtown, 828 Broad St.” My friend’s parent’s shop was the next block down, so this happened in what I had expected to be a nicer part of Broad Street, for which reason I would have been surprised by the man approaching me, I wasn’t in an area where I would have felt a need to be especially cautious. My reactions weren’t only of shame, I felt also anger,
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but the sense of shame was strong, and inappropriate, I wouldn’t have imposed that same shame on another in the same situation.
That Sunday morning when I walked away from the supposed sanctuaries of church and home, had I been a more adventuresome teen I might have struck out west for I-20 and hitchhiked my way to Atlanta, but I never hitchhiked as I was terrified of being kidnapped and killed, and the reason I was walking away was self-protection, not to propel myself from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. So, having turned south, I kept going south as I needed time, I needed distance, I would soon enough have to think about what to do next and due south was nowhere, I could ponder the future in the middle of nowhere. I had also reasoned if my parents went looking for me, the last direction they’d drive was south. I would have walked four blocks through the Summerville neighborhood down to Central Avenue, and I have no idea what route I would have then taken, but heading south there are any number of parallel routes that would have delivered me to what was then the southern boundary of the city around US-278, what was then called Fort Gordon Highway, and beyond that the very southernmost boundary of Milledgeville Road, which I would have reached after about three miles and an hour’s worth of walking. It may have been early spring or late winter, because the weather was warm enough I didn’t have a coat on, which made me feel vulnerable, not having a protective layer over my dress, my female figure more exposed. If it was late winter then I was thirteen, while if I was fourteen it would have been early fall. Continuing south, I would have eventually crossed Lumpkin Road, and I believe I eventually decided upon Highway 25, which I likely connected with after two hours and six miles of walking. The reason I went for a highway is I thought I had a good chance of almost always being in public view, which would mean less likelihood of a sicko forcibly abducting me into his car, I wouldn’t get lost in back roads, and I’d be also always reasonably near something like a gas station where I could get water. As I went further and further south, I remember thinking I’d fucked up things by being afraid of just going to I-20 and hitchhiking, because if I’d stuffed down my fears about hitchhiking, had things gone all right, I’d already be in Atlanta after several hours rather than down in the rural boondocks, country fields left and right. Hephzibah and Waynesboro were the only town names south of Augusta that I knew, I was unfamiliar with anything outside Augusta, and having struck out down Highway 25 I would have been headed in their direction and would have approached the vicinity of Hephzibah after about fifteen miles and five or six hours of hard adrenalin-driven non-stop walking in my Sunday shoes with their approximately one-and-a-half-inch heels. Continuing down Highway 25, I would have made next toward Waynesboro, but it’s likely around now that I started encountering more semi-forested areas, which made me worried because trees meant I was no longer in plain view, going around even a minor bend in the highway meant the trees obstructed me from view in both directions for too long to be what I felt was safe, plus I had gotten some notice, I feared, from a motorist who made me worried, as I was now deep into long stretches between little crossroads of civilization. A car had slowed as it passed me going south then had at some distance turned and had come back down the highway. There were two men in the car, not just one. The car passed me going north then had returned and passed me again from behind, but I was already wary and
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watching for them, and had put more distance between myself and the road so that I had to partly walk in a ditch. What bothered me is they had continued on south and at a distance had turned left down a small side road, disappearing into a clump of trees, but had not emerged. I’d watched for them to emerge and continue down that road so I’d know I was safe but they didn’t. Walking along farmland on the highway’s edge had been dismal, but it was at least moderately flat open territory with only occasional rows of windbreaker trees. Now there were more trees and there was that car, so it was probably at about 3 or 4 p.m. that I made the hard choice of giving into the necessity of finding refuge, damning myself for not having instead walked west to I-20 and, with luck, finding my way to Atlanta rather than being in the middle of nowhere south of Augusta. I was thinking that if I’d just gone down I-20 and hitched a ride I’d already be in Atlanta where figuring out what to do while dodging being a victim of sexploitation seemed like the better deal, because it was occurring to me that nothing resembling social services existed out in the country, and I was worried that I was soon going to be walking past that road down which that car had disappeared, and I feared what if they were waiting for me there at that bend where there were trees all around. I was also starting to get chilled, the temperature was dropping and without a coat or sweater I was feeling it. Almost as soon as I decided it was time to do something other than walk deeper into trouble, I came upon a small country church in the middle of nowhere, on the right side of the road, and approached it because I had seen a woman, maybe in her fifties, and an older man out front leaving their cars to go inside, and I counted on the presence of a woman meaning a good likelihood of safety. I don’t know what I expected when I walked into the church but I probably had hopes that adult brains would help me come up with a solution. I don’t remember how I phrased my plea for help. Whatever the story was that I told them, it was one of duress, but I didn’t aim to shock, only to impress that I was in a difficult situation at home, I do know I told them my mother was mentally ill, that she had often been in the hospital for long periods until recently, and now she was refusing to go in the hospital and I was having to handle the weight of her being at home. I didn’t want to get my parents in trouble, I still needed to protect them, I needed to protect my family, I had to protect my younger siblings, which meant I had to take care in what I said, but whatever it was that I told them the woman appeared genuinely concerned. She volunteered for me to stay at her house for a couple of weeks, saying something something about how she hoped that would give some time to maybe work things out, give everyone a little vacation from one another, but they would need to call my parents. I told her my parents would never consent to let me stay with her, but I also well comprehended she and the man had no choice but to call my parents, I didn’t fault them for this, but I don’t remember if I was thinking of how they’d have to make that call when I approached them or if I was only concentrating on how I was cold and worried about the car that had passed me several times. I listened as they made the call to my parents, who were at home, they weren’t out looking for me, one of my siblings answered the phone I could tell and they went to get my father, it was the woman who spoke with him and she was genuine, I believe that, she tried to talk my parents into letting me stay with her a little while, it wasn’t a ruse to manipulate me into compliance. While on the phone, my father told her they would consider it but I knew that was only to keep me where I was while they made the drive to pick me up.
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Though I told the woman, no matter what my father had said, they wouldn’t allow me to stay with her, she seemed confident he was open to the idea because he’d said they’d discuss it when he got there. While we waited for my parents the woman talked about my staying with her, how nice it would be, she must have talked about the room I’d be staying in and how she liked making large breakfasts because I formed a strong picture of myself in her kitchen as in an older style house, the walls of the kitchen painted yellow or lit yellow with the sun, I could see her putting breakfast on the table and how I would help her with washing up the dishes afterward, I pictured myself at the sink under the sunny window, I would be the perfect guest, it never left my mind that I didn’t know if I could really trust her, you couldn’t trust anyone, but she was calming, and if I had to pray and read the Bible daily I made the decision I could do that, in exchange for a safe place to stay for a while I could be a good Bible-reading teenager for her, though even if I could trust the woman I wondered what about her husband, I might not be able to trust him, the prospect of meeting her husband made me nervous, I didn’t want to find myself in another situation from which I had to run away. As I sat there and waited I progressed from daydreaming how this would be nice to worries over her husband molesting me then I’d be blamed because I was the wrong one who had come in from the outside and the outsider would always be blamed, that would be a disaster, I didn’t want to end up with a small town church couple reporting me as a juvenile delinquent. My parents arrived after what seemed like a long while, they said they had to eat dinner first, my father came in alone and told the woman no I couldn’t stay with her, she did try to convince him that a little time apart might give some needed rest, but he smiled and said no thank you he could take care of it, immediately had me out the door, in the station wagon and I don’t remember anything else about the day except not knowing what to think when I learned my parents hadn’t made any phone calls to my friends to ask about me, how they hadn’t gone out to look for me at all, they said they couldn’t leave the kids at home alone and didn’t want to look for me with them in the car. Not that I had wanted my parents to find me, not at all, but I wondered at how they’d not made any attempt. It was a conundrum, not wanting them to find me but also thinking it seemed natural you’d look for your child. I can’t find now where the church in which I sought refuge might have been as the area has changed so much in the decades since then, and the incident was one I refused to think about afterward even for a moment, I didn’t speak about it with anyone, not even friends, my family never spoke of it again, not even my siblings. I didn’t attempt to completely force the memory out of my mind, it wasn’t that kind of intolerable where I had to forget it, instead I put it on a very far back shelf and left it alone, untouched, unexamined, I didn’t want to think about it because I considered it a silly move on my part, an absurd failure, what had I hoped to achieve by marching off into the middle of nowhere Georgia. Then, of all things, I had approached a little country church for help. A church. That, too, was an embarrassment, a source of shame, my having sought sanctuary at a little church way out in the country.
My point being that I had taken a chance on the church as a possible place of sanctuary, just as my mother had once done. The night, in Richland, when my father woke me up to tell me my mother was missing, that she’d run off from the hospital,
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the police had stopped by then had gone away, and what I wanted to do was go out and find her. I had a savior scenario in my head of me going out on my bike to participate in the search and was confident that I’d be the hero. I had quickly dressed and was out front with my blue, single-speed bike, ready to ride off, when my father stopped me and said he was going out in the car and my role was to stay put and babysit my siblings, all of whom were still asleep. That was too easy, to babysit my sleeping siblings, and lackluster. Plus I honestly imagined that without my help it would be a long time before my mother was found, by reason of birth I thought I would be a natural homing device, but I reluctantly got off my bike and stayed home, stationed next to the phone in case a call came in about her, and she was sooner than later discovered in the church, under the altar, I don’t know if the story was more complex than that in their finding her there, how she might have drawn notice so that she was found, but she was located, in her hospital gown that tied in the back (I heard the description given of what she was wearing when they were looking for her), and returned to the hospital. The Pasco paper published police and fire calls, but they must not have been exhaustive in that reportage as my bed that caught on fire when we lived on Everest didn’t make it into the paper, nor did my mother’s running off from the hospital when I was nine. Like everything else, these were events writ large in my life, big deals for me, but I couldn’t talk about the fire because it might reflect badly on my parents and nothing had really happened because I was all right, and I couldn’t talk about how the police had been out searching for my missing mother because it had to be kept secret, it was no one’s business, and I was cautioned never to mention it to her, I couldn’t ask about it, it had never happened, it was never discussed again except for once when I was a pre-teen and my mother, drunk, brought it up during one of our daily sessions in which I sat at the kitchen table babysitting her after I got home from school, she laughed about being in her backless hospital gown and whatever ferocious cocktail of drugs they’d had her on (I believe Thorazine was mentioned), and I knew that I would never learn more about it because from what she said she had been so doped up she had been near unconscious a good deal of the time. She talked about her rage over being locked up, which surprised me, that the reason she’d slipped the hospital was she was angry and wanted to show them they couldn’t tell her what to do. For a while, I’d imagined that perhaps a reason she’d escaped from the hospital was because she might have wanted to see her children—for we never saw her when she was in the hospital—but I realized that afternoon this wasn’t the case. We had never entered her mind. But I already knew this, she’d already expressed many times how we were the cause of her hospitalizations, how she’d needed a rest from us, a vacation from us, so she said. When I was ten and she’d just come home from a long hospitalization in Augusta, home for good now they said, she was smiling, she had walked through the kitchen having just entered through the laundry room from the carport, she’d not been there but for two or three minutes at the most, hugs dispensed to my siblings, she was standing at the entry to the family room, a step beyond the refrigerator, she’d not even left the kitchen yet, and I’d innocently asked her, just to be certain, if she was feeling all right and home from the hospital for good now, and she’d exploded at me, she’d turned and screamed at me that I only asked her how she was because I was trying to drive her crazy, I wanted to drive her crazy, I was responsible for making her
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crazy, that’s the reason she kept going into the hospital, it was my fault, and she kept screaming at me that I was the reason she was in the hospital, and maybe she started thrashing her arms at me, slap-punching at my head, I don’t remember, but she hadn’t even made it into the family room from the kitchen when a minute later, while I babysat my siblings until our father returned home, she was being driven back to the hospital for another long stay. It was around that time I think I’d tried to ask my father what was wrong, and he scolded me for asking, he said he wasn’t going to talk about his wife with me, that it was none of my business.
Sanctuary. Yes, of course, for this section I’ve rewatched the versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which (1923) Lon Chaney then (1939) Charles Laughton appeared, and have checked out the 1982 version featuring Anthony Hopkins as Quasimodo. I far prefer Charles Laughton. Even though Hollywood balked at the death of Esmeralda, opting for the happy ending in which she is saved and rides off with the poet, Gringoire, the cinematography of Laughton among the cathedral’s great, gothic carvings is arresting enough, as is his performance, that when he begs why he wasn’t also fashioned of stone one’s heart breaks, or mine does, and the movie works despite Victor Hugo’s original story having been chopped to pieces. Perhaps as devastating, in the 1939 film, is when the crowd converges upon the cathedral in an effort to rescue Esmeralda, and Quasimodo, mistaking them as storming the cathedral to seize and execute her, defends Esmeralda from them, a tragic error that in the book leads to her death, while in the film Quasimodo kills people who had the same desire as he to save the Gypsy. And I could watch Laughton’s Quasimodo on repeat sweeping down to seize Esmeralda from the gallows, carrying her to the sanctuary of the cathedral, and wonder if I will ever not feel his sense of victory and the jubilation of the crowd that urges one to leap to one’s feet. What a triumph in film editing as well. Now I seek out and put on Olivier Latry playing Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor” on the Notre Dame organ, which exhilarates the soul and shatters the body. I listened to the same, on repeat, when in 2019 Notre Dame did the unthinkable and burned. The world and I watched as Notre Dame burned and we experienced it as a crisis for all because it has been so successfully sold as a major world tourist attraction, because it is a wonder of French Gothic architecture that took generations and over two centuries to build, because it has watched over centuries of Parisian urban history, because of its place in the art world, because of its beloved and glorious rose windows, because of its beloved, renowned organ, and because of Victor Hugo and Lon Chaney.
Flight or fight. Several months after MK and I were first married, it came home to me that I didn’t know how to have an argument. Or I did but also didn’t, because I didn’t have a problem with arguments, as in hashing out disagreements. Voices had been raised, and maybe it was this that triggered me. We had been in the living room of our 1910s Broad Street apartment, decrepit but enviably spacious with three large rooms, all that mattered to us was we have space enough for MK to do his music, me to do art, being on the second floor we had what I considered to be romantic views over the rooftops of old downtown Augusta, and I’ve no idea what we might have been arguing about, of course there was never anything physical, but I went flying across the
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landing to the stairs to flee down them to the front door and outside, I was still near the height of the stairs when I stopped, something caught me that day, I realized what I was doing, and that I wasn’t acting with conscious intent, instead I’d been triggered to run. My spouse wasn’t a person who was going to hit me or harm me, I was automatically fleeing because it was a stress response, my mind shut down, my body took over and I had to get out and away. I stopped myself on the stairs, realizing this was a problem with me, suddenly awake to the fact I had to learn how to not run, that I needed to start learning right then how not to flee, that it wasn’t the end of the world, we were in this together and things would work out and be all right. That day, when my feet hit the stairs, I had recognized a pattern, it didn’t begin to occur to me that I was in fight-or-flight mode, but I did understand that my environment growing up had left me without certain coping skills, as in some arguments I would suddenly panic, I would feel the world was about to end, and I would either flame on and run, or simply run, even though I was good at the everyday of accepting and working with no one being perfect, not expecting my partner to be perfect. I didn’t go through a honeymoon period in which one imagines one’s partner can do no wrong, I thought it absurd to set another person up on that pillar from which they must fall, and set oneself up for disappointment when they did fall, for we’re all human and not just fallible but so different from one another that we imagine others are wrong in those matters for which there is no right way, when there are only disparate preferences.
Though I propose I was thirteen or fourteen when I left my siblings at the church, I’ve wondered if I might have been as old as fifteen, but in my memory when I look at my siblings, as I turn to walk away, what strikes me is how confusing and frightening it was for them that I was taking off when I was their caretaker, I could feel their panic at being abandoned, and I wonder if I’d have been so emphatically struck by this if I’d been fifteen and my eldest brother had been twelve, my middle brother ten, and my sister seven. Before I saw the panic in their faces, as I walked away, it hadn’t occurred to me they would feel abandoned, I’d thought in their anger they’d not care if I left. My eldest brother was angry at first and had tried to hold me there, then I’d seen he was less angry than afraid, they were terrified, and it crushed me how I had to ignore this, because I knew they would be all right at the church. I squashed the memory so long, no standout markers remain to place the year, if I could remember what I was wearing that would help but I only know I didn’t have a coat and that by middle to late afternoon the temperature had dropped and I was cold. It’s the expressions of fear and confusion on the faces of my siblings as I fled that make me feel I was younger than fifteen, because that hit me hard and almost made me stop and return to them. Another thing that makes me think this happened before my hospitalization at fourteen is that I have in my memory no concern over not having with me any psychotropic medication which I had begun regularly taking when I was hospitalized at fourteen, upon which I depended to blunt my emotions, shorten the days, and to knock me out when I had a panic attack. I know I’d not started smoking yet and I’d not started drinking as neither of these things entered my head when I was thinking about how I would help the woman with the chores in her home lit up with cheerful sunlight soft beaming through the windows. I also knew I’d never be permitted to stay with her, which was why I could imagine it and not be too concerned with how it was
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a flimsy band-aid on an unfixable situation, plus the woman was married, her husband was in my head a blank gray figure with an empty face and I could only imagine him as being either a prospective abuser or a spouse irritated by the temporary intrusion of another in their home, a stranger who would be like a bone jutting through the skin of a broken leg. As the saying goes, not their circus, not their monkeys. Possibly even worse would be the likely inevitable collision between my circus monkeys and whatever were their circus monkeys, because the guest monkey, not a member of the pack, the outsider, would always be a nervous rung lower than even the home-grown rebel, with every action magnified and suspect as a possible infraction, and evidence of a natural inability to cohabit and assimilate. As the northern child in a strange southern world, who refused to pray in school, who took seriously separation of church and state, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. No wonder I tried to distance myself from this failure, which I knew was a terrible error in judgment on my part.
3
Why, when my parents didn’t let me do much outside the home, did they permit me to babysit? I don’t know why, but they did. When I was twelve they had told me I would be paying for my own things from then on, my clothing and everything else beyond room and board (I’d never had an allowance) would come out of my earnings from babysitting (“You have more money than we do,” my mother had said), I didn’t make much, I wasn’t earning minimum wage, but babysitting kept me in art supplies and typewriter ribbons and paper. One may then ask why anyone would hire me to babysit their children, especially after my complete meltdown when I was fourteen and residence on a psychiatric ward. And yet I did continue to babysit until I was seventeen, when one day a threshold happened, I realized I was burned out on this particular line of work and that this would make me a poor babysitter, which I didn’t want to be, a person taking care of kids had to be there one hundred percent for them.
I feel I should confess one miserable babysitting failure I had. Just as in Richland, where most everyone I knew had a parent or spouse employed at Hanford, in Augusta most everyone for whom I babysat was affiliated with the Medical College. So it was with a couple for whom I babysat once, who had two children, a young boy and an older girl. It was one of the simple babysitting jobs in which the kids are already in bed when you arrive and your task is just to be there for them, which was my least favorite kind of babysitting as I preferred to have time to play with the children and get to know them. Children usually liked me, and I felt uncomfortable with a situation in which I didn’t have the opportunity to build some acquaintance and trust before they went to sleep, for if they woke up during the night I didn’t want it to be to a perfect stranger in their home. As it turned out, when I got there, the little girl was still awake, though already in her bed with her lights on, and whereas most children liked me she immediately let me know she didn’t want me there. I gathered the problem was that they had a babysitter to whom she felt loyal, a woman in her fifties
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or sixties so a grandmother figure, which was a fair enough reason for her to have some resentment with my substitution, I understood that and didn’t push with an attempt to be friends. The girl’s bedroom light was cut off, the parents left, and things were quiet for about an hour. Confident the children were asleep, I was just down the hall from them in the family room reading John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy, a novel that had been sitting out on a table between the small family room and kitchen which meant it was someone’s current reading material, the title grabbed me, who was this goat boy, and as I read the first few pages I wondered at its presence in the home, it seemed out of place because the children’s mother was Junior Women’s Club, and religious, an adamantly cheery but anxious sort who had recently redecorated the dining room boldly with patterned yellow and green wallpaper, something like bamboo fronds against a grid which I understood she interpreted as modern and youthful, just as she dressed in a very coordinated style of wide-legged polyester slacks and mid-calf length vests over long stretchy knit turtlenecks that while intended to hide how she was plump were also clothes a woman such as herself would conceive of as energetically youthful and modern with the pop of a printed silk scarf around the neck. And they were a youngish couple, but she had a nervousness about her that made it seem she was trying to catch up with the times while not straying too far from her Christian conservative roots, she should take care to appear contemporary but not step too far into what would be experimentally modern. So they didn’t strike me as people who would be inclined to read John Barth, or she didn’t, maybe the book belonged to her husband, as they’d lived up the street from us for a year or two I was aware his overly-groomed mustache and his having taken up running was new. They were imports to Augusta as well, originally from Oklahoma and the Pacific Northwest. A wild glitch in the social dynamics of the neighborhood resulted in their extending an invitation to my family to have Thanksgiving at their home long enough after their arrival that they should have known better, and my parents had bewilderingly accepted, maybe we were supposed to visit my mother’s parents in Huntsville and that had gone awry at the last minute or the day before, this had been somehow learned about that we weren’t going to be having a Thanksgiving turkey dinner and thus the invitation to save us from that fate. Maybe we were also there because the husband, before his marriage, had graduated from the University of Washington with his bachelor’s during the same time we were in Seattle with my father at the university pursuing his PhD. A meal for transplants. As we sat and sat at the table with infirm asparagus and naked potatoes with no gravy, the woman never relaxed and though she said she loved to cook nothing about the meal was turning out right, which sent her back and forth to the kitchen checking on this thing and that and what would be a failed turkey, I do believe we were last minute guests, they were generous to open their home to us, I mean that sincerely, and a failed meal would have been fine except that there was nothing right about us all sharing the same table and maybe this also contributed to the woman’s anxiety. My awareness of her redecorating her home was because she had discussed her future decorating plans during this dinner and wondered aloud if the dining room wallpaper was appropriate, and it was also because of this dinner I was aware how greatly the husband had changed between the time of it and the night I babysat, I’d the feeling
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that whatever their lives had been when they first married he was now not only on a different road but a different map. What I did know is I didn’t trust them, he wouldn’t speak a word, and she was always too apologetically nice, I couldn’t begin to tell who she privately was, for every move she made was a question mark, a conflict in deliberately constructed shells for the public. Or maybe she was on amphetamines for her weight, I had wondered if that was what was going on, if they might account for her restlessness, for she was plump and her husband was so runner-thin he seemed to be racing away from her. The disconnect between them was such I wondered if they’d be divorced within the year, except that he was religious as well. I wondered if he had realized he was gay and struggling with this as he was religious. Maybe my read of him was all wrong and he wasn’t gay, but he struck me as dissociated from the marriage and developing a new life already. The people for whom I babysat always seemed solidly seated in their marriages so that I didn’t question what was wrong with them, but with these two I did from the moment I entered their home that night. The family room hadn’t yet been redecorated, and I don’t remember why, but it felt perplexingly in limbo and uncomfortable to me, for which reason I was not too intensely absorbed with trying to get a handle on Giles Goat Boy when I heard activity in the hall and at the same time a strong, foul smell hit me. Going into the hall, I was surprised to find the boy, who was three going on four years of age, very quietly spreading his feces down the walls of the hall outside his bedroom door. I was surprised not just by what he was doing, but how quiet and quick he’d been. I’d never had anything like this happen, and I put him back in his crib (he was still in a crib) and went to start cleaning up the hall when he began headbanging. Again, I’d never seen anything like it, he kept banging his head against the wall, and I was trying to soothe him and get him back to sleep, and had also to finish cleaning the mess. In the meanwhile, the sister got up and was scoffing, like see you’re a horrible babysitter, look how you failed at babysitting us, we don’t want you we want our other babysitter. She wanted to call her parents, and I should have let her. Actually, I should have been the one to call the parents. Instead, I kept telling her there was no need to call her parents, and that I’d get her brother calmed and settled. I didn’t realize I was in over my head. Trying to soothe the boy, I began to feel like what was happening was a prospective with which they were familiar and that no one had told me about. I was baffled because all my child-care abilities were failing me with these two, but I wasn’t ready to admit failure because I didn’t know any better, this was so far outside my prior experience. I was able to calm the boy, he stopped banging his head and even went to sleep, as did the girl, and I spent a while scrubbing down the hall. When the parents returned home and asked how things went, I should have told them the truth. Instead I said things had been fine. They hadn’t been and I should have owned up to it but I thought it was my job to handle things, and I had calmed the children. I knew it was highly unlikely the girl wouldn’t tell her parents all that had happened, I imagined when she got up in the morning it would be the first thing she did, and it seemed to me she wasn’t unfamiliar with such behavior on the part of her brother as she hadn’t been upset by it, and still I didn’t tell them things hadn’t been fine, because I had managed to get the children back to bed, to sleep, and the hall cleaned up. I had the feeling, as well, this behavior was their secret, I didn’t know what had caused it but they hadn’t warned me, and because of that I also said nothing about what had
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happened, because I felt that had they not been hoping to hide the prospect of this happening then they would have given me fair warning and told me what to do so I wouldn’t be alarmed. Before leaving, I had already decided I’d never babysit for them again, but I was certain as well they wouldn’t ask me.
At sixteen, the experience was destabilizing enough that, while this wasn’t when I quit babysitting, it was the beginning of the end of my babysitting days, I’d no idea what to think about what had happened, and the confidence I’d had in being able to handle children was blown. I’d failed, and it worried me.
My friends didn’t babysit, they had an allowance, but babysitting was a common way for girls of the 1970s to earn money or else we wouldn’t have the classic 1978 slasher film, Halloween, in which Jamie Lee Curtis is featured as being vulnerably on a babysitting job when she must fight to protect herself and the children in her charge from the insane, masked Michael who has escaped from a mental institution. The Washington Post, in 1980, wrote that in the 1970s, the charge for babysitting went from seventy-five cents an hour to $1.00, up to $1.25 by 1980. Some sitters charged per child. In 1972, the federal minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, but minimum wage in Georgia was $1.25 an hour, went down to $1.23 in 1979, then in 1980 returned to $1.25, while the federal minimum had moved up to $3.20, however employees always make the federal minimum unless the state’s minimum is more so it seems like an asinine protest if a state insists on having a minimum lower than the federal. We were in an era when my brothers would make better money than I did babysitting by mowing lawns and working as baggers in grocery stores, which were then common jobs for teen boys. According to the Washington Post article boys mowing lawns might earn over twice as much as babysitters—which goes to show that caring for a lawn was considered more taxing than childcare, and that male labor was more valuable than female. One was expected without question to acknowledge this as a forever it-goes-without-argument fact, that a boy was worth more than a girl, and even if one didn’t believe this, the attitude was so pervasive, coming at one from all directions, it was difficult to not be influenced by it. A couple of other students I knew were working at McDonald’s while still in high school, but that wasn’t an option for me because of the amount of time I was needed at home, plus the fast-food assembly line was unappealing. Though my father looked upon waitresses as prostitutes, when I was fifteen I worked one or two weeks as a waitress at Shoney’s (hello Big Boy, hello David Lynch who ate at a Burbank, California, Shoney’s every day for seven years, I had liked the strawberry pie at Shoney’s at Daniel Village in Augusta, Georgia, until I worked there and saw how flies buzzed around the pie or two cut for serving that were kept out of the metal pie cabinet) then had to call out a day, on my sixteenth birthday, with what I thought would be a short-term ankle injury. Though I was hobbling on crutches, my mother had me walk my siblings several blocks down to the pool, Shoney’s called to check up on me during the time I was gone and my mother told them I was at the pool, for which reason I was promptly fired—at least that’s the story my mother unapologetically gave me when I got home, that Shoney’s had called and fired me because I was down at the pool. As it turned out, the waitress job would have been finished anyway as it took several weeks for my ankle to heal, plus it was too
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much freedom so I’ve no clue how I was able to convince my parents to let me get a job in the first place. As I had to pay for my waitress uniform, and I’d had to purchase the approved white waitress/nurse shoes (oxford style lace-ups with thick soles) required for the job, I didn’t make much money those two weeks. The job had sucked, I now had experience with how men, especially those in a group, behaved with a waitress, the sexual comments they’d make entertaining one another at the waitress’ expense (I kept a stone-cold face and if, when I didn’t respond, they pressed a harassing remark by calling my attention to it, I would simply stare and they’d give up), but I had enjoyed the bantering camaraderie of the team of black cooks who didn’t scold me for learning, didn’t harass me, and were only encouraging. If nothing else, the job gave me respect for servers and how important were tips. The next real job I had was after I left home at seventeen, and it was in the evenings, making “We’re offering a deal…” cold calls for a strip mall photography studio that wasn’t an Olan Mills franchise but was an independent that did photography comparable to Olan Mills. I was uncomfortable with the work and if someone answered the phone sounding harried or sleepy, like I’d woken them up, I’d tell them never mind, it wasn’t important, it was a sales call, I was sorry to have bothered them, and I’d hang up. I made few sales and, despite this, when I quit, the owner of the studio said I was doing just fine with the sales I had made and tried to persuade me to stay on, which confounded me. While I may have initially hoped I might move from making calls to being granted an opportunity at learning to light and take studio photos, and quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen, this didn’t factor in my leaving. After a couple of months I quit because of the news of several after-hours robberies in the area, and I felt too vulnerable working in an isolated strip mall when all the businesses had shut down for the day and I was the only person there. I knew if I had reason to scream no one would hear me.
Others are not so lucky, but in my five years of babysitting, not a single father propositioned me, behaved untowardly, or said anything that made me uncomfortable. I was always nervous with them when they saw me home at night, I was nervous when left alone with most men, and I tried to hide it, those minutes were the most difficult for me of a babysitting job and I began to be anxious about their seeing me home about an hour before the anticipated time, but not a one overstepped boundaries.
4
For several years, I regularly babysat for the family who lived catty-corner to us, one of the Jewish families in the neighborhood who had taken me under their wing, at least that was how I looked at it. Walking into a Jewish home and being told I was one of the family gave me a sense of being accepted and security, I had no home, I lived in a virtual prison where I was given time out to do a very few things, such as babysitting, and this then was like a substitute home. One shouldn’t get the idea that it was this way with all Jewish homes or that I considered myself a part of the Jewish community. One shouldn’t get the idea
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that these different Jewish homes into which I was accepted for a time were alike, or that I thought of them as being alike, because the families were all different except for the adamancy I was to treat their home like it was mine, which wasn’t just the insistence I not ask for permission but just pop open the refrigerator door whenever I wanted to eat or drink whatever I wanted when I was thirsty or hungry, and to join in with whatever was going on like I belonged. The insistence I was to treat their home like it was mine was not something said in homes one might qualify as WASP where there was always, even if an extension of hospitality was granted, a cool sense of exclusion rather than an expectance of familiarity. WASP homes always reminded they should be praised for their gracious hospitality, but they weren’t gracious and they weren’t hospitable, there was always the feeling of a debt being accrued that would never offset the judgment leveled against one for not being exactly like them (which I wasn’t). These Jewish homes that encouraged me to eat with them and scolded me when I asked if I could get something to drink—“This is your home!”—had no idea I was eager for and appreciative of a substitute home, or maybe they did a little and I was unaware of it. Each one of them, the parents were from the north, so there was that to take into consideration, they were also outsiders to the southern WASP world, and maybe that was a reason that those for whom I babysat hired me, because I wasn’t a southerner. I didn’t talk about anything intimate with any of them, it wasn’t like that, I didn’t discuss what my life was like with anyone, but they were very relaxed with me, conversational, treated me like I was a part of their extended family, while for my own comfort I always maintained the formality of a very well-received guest who had been honored by their demand I be at home and would thus behave just a little as though I was at home. The children I babysat at this home were active and kept me going, and despite their impishness and love of tricks were well-behaved except for the one time that we were in the back yard playing one afternoon and then they all ran into the house and locked the door, which was their big joke, to have reversed roles and become the ones in control. I was worried as hell for them being alone in the house because they were intelligent kids and I had no idea what else they might get in their minds to do, and was also embarrassed they had managed to so very effortlessly trick me, which perhaps illustrates my trust in them, that we had a good relationship, for they didn’t see this maneuver as any attempt to humiliate and prove I wasn’t a good babysitter. This was them being kids, they weren’t malicious, they were just thrilled to have gotten one over on me. I was stuck, wondering what to do. My ability to keep them glued to me as a source of entertainment was what I hoped would help rescue the situation, and so I managed to have them all gathered at the same window laughing and making faces at me, which is where I wanted them to be, where I could see each one of them and that they were all right, but this also meant that I couldn’t go to the house next door and call their mother (that this was an option for me means I must have had her work number memorized) as then they would be out of my sight. To have them out of my sight even briefly was unacceptable. What if they got it in their heads to turn on the stove? What if they did so somehow accidentally? What if they pursued another big forbidden and dug their parents’ matches out of the cupboard and lit them? For whatever reason, all
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my worries revolved around fire. However embarrassed I was to have it revealed I’d lost control, if I remember correctly what happened next is I managed to talk the eldest girl into calling the number where her mother was so she could tell her about their big joke and she did and that quickly resolved things, the door was unlocked, and the day continued as normal.
My main bonding activity with them, which they loved, was my acting out bedtime stories that were all slightly warped parodies of the fairy tales we’d all been raised on. This was fun for me because they were wholly engaged and always wanted more, and not just because they didn’t want to go to sleep. They would entreat me to act out the same fairy tale several times in a row, and with each retelling, they waiting for their favorite parts, it would become even more hilarious for them. Though I still occasionally babysat for others, I ended up babysitting this family almost exclusively, which I suppose is what can happen when a family is used to you and you’ve developed a close rapport with the children. The familiarity was such that after a while I found other children to be stiff in comparison, not as ready and eager to have a good time and let me entertain them. I wasn’t even really aware these were my favored children, only that caring for them was the situation that was most comfortable and rewarding. After they were fed and bathed and wearied by fun and were wrapped up in bed for the night, I’d settle down in the family room to read, study, or draw, not usually watching the television as 1970s programming was uninteresting, I didn’t like cop or detective shows, hospital dramas, variety shows, and I would peruse the books on their family room bookshelves to see if there was anything new, because if a household was going to have reading material it was the Jewish households that had better choices, the Christian cross didn’t hang over them dictating what would and wouldn’t look appropriate, they were more inclined to have literature by outstanding, contemporary authors. But I’ve made it sound as though I had more experience babysitting in non-Jewish households than I did. I only babysat a couple of non-Jewish households, and each time once and never again. It was like they didn’t want anything to do with me, I didn’t fit in, which was fine, I didn’t care for them either. I thought it was a matter of their southern WASP sensibilities finding me alien and strange, while the Jewish households didn’t act southern (because they weren’t) and often had family in other parts of the country, such as New York, and how we related and what we conversed about was different than the surrounding southern families.
It was while I was babysitting for this household that I read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had come out many years before in 1960 and had been a bestseller but we didn’t have it in our home and what happened with Nazi Germany wasn’t covered in-depth in school where we were given barely a micro scan of the big picture and that was about it. Much about the Holocaust, except for the fact it had happened, was still kept beyond arm’s length by society, at least in Augusta, as if past was past and it didn’t make for polite talk. Hitler was a freak happenstance. His Zyklon-B gas chambers and crematoriums were accepted history but as the message was communicated that they made for vulgar discussion they were kept in the shadow closet of the psyche of Western civilization as events that had kind of
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happened, so distanced as to seem unreal and remote, like the dark secrets in families that were sublimated and transformed into nightmares. Western civilization was one big family for which WWII was the kind of bad taste discussion that was hanging out the dirty linen, you didn’t do it. Hitler was dead so let it go. Everything that happened in Germany should be buried with Hitler, and the Japanese had gotten the atom bomb wake up they deserved. Hollywood produced films of the heroic adventures and triumphs of WWII soldiers, but Hitlerland was kept more remote than Pluto, on a plane so separate as to belong to science fiction or the Brothers Grimm. I knew more than most people my age or even older, and while The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich wasn’t revelatory, it was franker on some issues than publicly spoken about, and gave me more a coherent sense of the history rather than a disjointed event, which was important because I wanted to understand how Hitler happened, he hadn’t just sprung up out of the blue. I had been to one or two Reformed Judaism Sunday school classes in which the Holocaust was readily spoken about, was expected to be remembered, and having had close Jewish friends since I was seven, WWII had been kept always within my frame of reference, I was alert to the realities of antisemitism and the dangers of prejudice as these families talked about these things around and with me. Though statistics report that antisemitism declined so significantly post WWII in America that by 1951 anti-Jewish criticism had fallen to sixteen percent, the tension of “they’re different” was still prevalent amongst White Protestants in the South. It may not have been spoken about, but Bible readings were still being conducted in elementary school in 1969, for which reason a Jewish friend and I had protested when we were eleven, in sixth grade, we were threatened with suspension or expulsion and the lawyer mother of another boy in the classroom had heard about it and come to our defense, which resulted in our being given the option of leaving the classroom and standing outside in the hall while the Bible reading and prayer took place. What was being done was still against the law, but every day when we sat in the hall during the morning Bible reading and prayer we were proud to be making our point that we knew this wasn’t right.
An experienced babysitter, I was acutely attuned to my responsibilities, though perhaps the gravity of the fact that these little lives were in my hands wasn’t as profoundly comprehended as it could have been, because I was so used to taking care of children, having babysat my siblings all my life. I was alert to myriad dangers, the foremost of which was fire and sudden illness, and though the lethal possibles were always in the rear of one’s mind the primary responsibility was to keep the children entertained and content, keep them out of trouble, get them safely bathed (don’t leave them alone in the bathtub) and in bed at the appointed hour, and asleep. The children were my focus, it was my job to not be distracted, so I didn’t talk to friends on the phone, not even after the children were asleep. Some parents assured it was all right if I wanted to nap once the children were down, but I felt it wasn’t safe and as far as I’m aware I only dropped off to sleep once while I was babysitting and was mortified by having done so. Usually, I would read, but even with reading, babysitting could be boring after the children went to bed, no one to talk with, lonely, a little too quiet, and if the television was on that made it all the worse because little on 1970s television,
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whether comedy, drama or variety shows, felt like anything other than mind-numbing, senseless non-entertainment engineered in an alternate universe. One time only, a friend dropped by while I was babysitting, after the children were asleep, and I learned from that experience never to do it again as it was playtime for her, she didn’t grasp the responsibility of caring for children and put me in the position of babysitting her as well, trying to manage her behavior to be more appropriate, so I told her she needed to leave and she was irked by how seriously I took it all and retaliated it was too boring for her anyway. Fine. Please, leave. A babysitter’s job should be boring. She just didn’t get it as she’d never babysat.
This ranch house was much like ours, which was the way it was in the subdivision, a common layout shared with most of the houses. The living room was the main room but not commonly used, at the front of the house, which would have a large picture window looking out on the front lawn and street. This was joined to a dining room that opened onto a kitchen in the rear of the house, which typically had an open layout leading into the neighboring family room, the living room on the other side of the family room’s wall. If I walked from the family room into the foyer to the front door, then I would turn right to enter into the living room, pass through it into the dining area, turn right again and I’d enter the kitchen area. To the left was a small laundry room and doors to the carport and back yard. Continue instead to the right in the kitchen and right of the sink, with its own small window overlooking the back yard, and there would be the breakfast bar where a phone was positioned on the wall neighboring another window, then pass into the family room that always had a fireplace and a large double-pane sliding glass door that looked out on the rear concrete patio and lawn. The family room had the same wood veneer paneling as did ours, maybe stained a deeper brown without any suggestion of red. Their couch sat directly opposite the sliding glass door, and the fireplace that no one ever seemed to use in any of the houses was to the right of the doors as I faced them from the couch. Narrow bookshelves were built into the left wall neighboring the kitchen. Their television was against the right wall, near the door that led to the front foyer and the hall to the bedrooms. As with most of the ranch houses, they had three bedrooms and two baths. The “master” bedroom and its bath were to the rear of the house, and two smaller bedrooms, separated by a bath, were to the front. Almost all the houses had this basic layout, each with minor variations to distinguish them. The southern WASP homes tended to be all decorated the same with heavy wood furnishings in complete sets, the dining and living rooms fully outfitted and complementary, the family room instead casual but also fully equipped. The Jewish homes with which I was personally familiar weren’t so concerned with matching furnishings and everything being perfectly organized down to the magazines set out for display on the living room coffee table. The Jewish homes tended to have magazines like LIFE whereas the southern WASP homes had Better Homes and Garden.
I don’t recollect the furnishings of their family room other than the usual coffee table and a side table and at least one other seat. It wasn’t a set.
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This particular night I’m thinking about would have likely run the same as any other. After playtime, the children would have been bathed and dressed for bed, then I would have entertained them acting out Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Little Red Riding Hood until they were having a hard time keeping their eyes open and I’d tuck them in and these children would then always immediately fall asleep.
The children had been long since put down to sleep, it was late, and I was seated on the sofa opposite the sliding glass doors, they didn’t have drapes on them, there were a couple of lights in the back patio area but they weren’t on. I was either deeply preoccupied with reading, or was reading and my thoughts had been wandering, but I was in that state in which I was a little dissociated from my surroundings by that deep involvement. One will begin to exit that state, sliding back into the world, will decide one has perhaps wearied of the book for the moment and wants something to drink, but instead of that shift occurring, and this is what was jarring about it all, for no reason that I could tell, I’d heard nothing, I looked up from my book at the sliding-glass doors and was shocked because I saw someone staring at me, I saw his eyes right at the glass which meant they were catching the light of the room. I didn’t flinch or jump, I gave no sign of being startled. Instead, I had immediately looked away as I didn’t want to happen to look the person directly in the eye, I didn’t want to appear to have noticed them, it seemed safer to appear oblivious. I didn’t want to make any sudden moves as I was fearful of agitating him and provoking an attack response, so I waited a moment then I put my book down. I felt certain he was still outside the window watching me. I didn't run but rose from the couch and went then to the kitchen phone, knowing he could see me do this if he was still watching. Now I wanted him to believe I’d seen him so I stood at the kitchen window while I pretended to dial out and speak on the phone for I hoped he would think I was calling the police. If he was out there. And as I stood at the kitchen window neighboring the bar, I don’t know if it was after ten seconds or thirty seconds, I saw him scale the back fence and exit the yard, then on the chance he might be watching from the neighboring yard I stayed on the phone a while longer before I felt safe enough to quickly check to make sure the doors were locked (yes), then check on the children in their room (still asleep) after which I returned to the phone.
Yet someone could always tell me my eyes were deceiving me. My parents would have told me I was only imagining things, that I only thought I’d seen someone at the door then scaling the back fence. My experience was that if you saw something exceptional, if you didn’t have hard proof then people tended to say you were imagining it, or they simply paid no attention, making it seem as if your experience didn’t matter. So I didn't call the police because I believed I would likely be told my eyes were deceiving me, that nothing had happened, and, indeed, nothing had happened in that I was also trained to think that nothing "had happened" until you were dead or near dead. I stood there thinking, “but there are children in the house, children for whom I’m responsible,” and perhaps it wasn’t right for me to tell myself nothing had happened because people wouldn’t believe me, perhaps I should go ahead and act as if something had happened. But then as far as I could tell, standing there with the phone to my ear, pretending to talk on it, if there had really been someone
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there, if I had actually seen them climb the fence, they were gone, they had fled. I don’t want to give the wrong impression and have one believe I was uncertain about what I’d seen, I’m trying to communicate how being confident in others not taking one seriously will lend a person to not take their situation seriously. For I absolutely had seen them, his eyes at the window looking at me had been a great shock, like a jump-scare in a film, those eyes, but those eyes were all I’d seen as I’d seamlessly averted mine, hoping it appeared as though I was simply looking up from my book and around the room (actually, I know I’d seen more than just his eyes but his eyes were what stood out). Out of the corner of my eye I understood he was still present as I went to the kitchen but I also felt he had backed away from the doors, which was why I was confident he would see me on the phone. And then while I was pretending to speak on the phone, I saw the person’s back as they scaled the fence and left the yard, there was a light source from a neighboring house because though the yard was pitch black his form was illuminated by a halo effect, he was outlined by faint light as he went over the top of the cyclone fence and dropped down on the other side where I could no longer see him. As they’d climbed over the rear fence this meant they’d exited into another person’s yard, but it never occurred to me they might stay in the area and maybe go to another house, I thought they would now fear being caught and quickly leave the area. Because I had seen them. I knew they were aware I had seen them. I reasoned that as they’d fled while I was on the phone they had assumed I was calling the police just as I wanted them to think. I considered if I called the police they would come and find no one because the person would be long gone by the time the police arrived, and the children’s parents would come home to an upset household and nothing to confidently warrant that upset, no proof that anyone had been there at the sliding-glass door watching me, no proof there had been anyone in the yard. I would be the person who had only thought they’d seen something, which would mean I’d be thought of as having not seen anything, which meant I would be the person who had caused trouble over nothing and wasn’t to be trusted.
I was unnerved enough that after I had checked on things and returned to the phone, I remained beside it until the parents returned home, just in case, making myself very visible in the lit window, wanting to be seen with the phone, aware and watching.
A few days later I learned that a woman, who lived with her parents a house or so down and a street to the rear of where I was babysitting, had been nearly murdered that same night I’d believed I’d seen a man looking in the window. The assailant had broken in, raped her, and had beaten in her head. For years I thought of her as in a liminal space reserved for the living dead, individuals who inhabited both worlds, because it was all uncertain talk those first few days exactly what the outcome was, people said she was in the hospital and then after a few days people stopped talking about her at all, as if it was impolite to talk about her, to ask about what had happened and inquire if she was living or dead, she disappeared from the realm of public acknowledgment. To inquire about or even know anything about the attack was communicated as taboo from the beginning, because of the rape, we should not ask about it and appear to be nosy, we should not think about it, we should not be aware to whom it had happened. A newspaper report I find relates her skull had been
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crushed with an oak table leg and that the assailant called the police on her own phone (an adult woman living with her parents, she had a phone in her bedroom) and then waited outside in the bushes for the police to arrive. I didn’t know this at the time, though it did make it into the papers twice in the week after she’d been attacked, no address or name given, it was related the woman’s injuries necessitated surgery and that her condition was improving, a much later report revealing that her head injury had left her blind for a year. When I learned about the attack I had put two and two together and realized the man I had seen at the sliding glass door must have been this man. Also, the man I had seen had scaled the back fence which would have put him in proximity of where the attack occurred. In a horrible and weird way I was reassured that, yes, I had actually seen someone (the reality of a situation can dim if one imagines others won’t believe them), but it was also alarming that this same man who had nearly killed the woman had that same night been in the back yard of the house where I was babysitting and had watched me through the sliding-glass doors of the family room as I sat reading, had seen me glance up, and had chosen to flee. Did I call the police when I realized it was perhaps the same man? No. I had several things going on in my head. There was the guilt of, "Oh, what if I had called the police when I had seen him? Would they have believed me? Would this man have been stopped? Might this woman never have been raped and beaten? Am I a bad person?” But I also felt like, "Nothing happened to me and there's nothing I could tell them that would help. I don't want to make this about me. Nothing happened to me. If I call the police it will seem to others I am trying to make this about me and draw attention to myself when I wasn’t hurt.” And, "They probably won't believe me anyway that I saw this person. They’ll think I’m lying and attention-seeking. And what difference would it make because I didn’t clearly see his face because I immediately looked away from him in order to stay safe, I can't tell them anything." I also considered that if I was believed I might likely be told that I’d perhaps seen someone else, that my experience was only coincidental.
However, the woman who had been subsequently attacked, was I now responsible for this because I’d not called the police? Was it my fault? For, certainly, if I’d called the police, if they had opted to come out (which might not have happened, they might have considered my story unreliable and told me to call back if I saw anything else) then their presence in the neighborhood would have scared the attacker away. Or maybe not? All these years later, when I learn he’d phoned the police from the woman’s own phone after having attacked her, then waited outside in the bushes to watch them arrive, I am profoundly affected by this information. For him to wait as he did for the police to arrive, he wasn’t worried that he might be caught, he was confident he wouldn’t be caught, and they didn’t catch him.
Was I responsible? Was I not? I couldn’t get it straight in my head if I was responsible or not, and I now felt I couldn’t talk about my experience at all because what was the point, I would be able to contribute nothing meaningful, unable to identify the person, and I reasoned people would think I was only attention-seeking.
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The children. What about the children. Had I put them in danger, I was consumed with worry about this. Had I been irresponsible? But I also felt certain that had I called the police I would have been told I was imagining things.
I reassured myself that I had perhaps at least done something right by not looking directly at him, then going to the telephone and making him believe I’d called the police.
I never told the people I babysat about it. I never told my parents about it. Before I found out about the attack on the other woman, I had been confident I wouldn't be believed. And afterward I felt the same way, that I wouldn’t be believed or that I’d be thought of as attention seeking, and what I had experienced would make no difference. In the decades ensuing, I only told perhaps five or six people about my experience, including my spouse, and with the exception of my spouse I always afterward felt as if I shouldn’t have said anything about the matter because it was long ago and didn’t matter.
I did tell the people I babysat that I needed them to put drapes up over their sliding-glass doors as I felt vulnerable without them, and they said of course, they understood, and immediately did so. For all I know, they had learned about the attack on the woman, but if they did know about the attack they didn’t discuss it with me.
The attacker I’d seen became notorious, making it onto the FBI's 10 most wanted list on 27 June 1974. According to what I can find in news archives about him, he was initially taken into custody in late October of 1971, when I was in ninth grade. The attack on the woman a street over from us happened early Friday morning, August 20 of 1971. By “early morning”, I don’t know if that means not long after midnight or before dawn, so I don’t know how much time had passed after my having seen him and the attack, whether it was not long after or if several hours had passed with him lurking close by. The first day back at school from summer vacation was August 24, which is when I learned about the attack. At my bus stop that was a few houses down from where the victim lived, a girl I didn’t know, with whom I didn’t share any classes, she’d not been at the bus stop the previous year and I never saw her at the bus stop again, had shared information about the attack, at which house it had happened, she’d learned of it from her mother who was a friend of the victim’s mother. Having pled guilty, in January of 1972 the assailant was given three life sentences for multiple rapes and kidnapping plus 95 to 99 years (accounts vary) for other charges. He then escaped from prison 20 December of 1972. In December of 1972 I would have been fifteen and a sophomore in high school, in my first year at Westside, but I have remembered him as having also escaped when I was at Tutt Junior High School which was just a few doors up the street from where he lived, and our school was put on lockdown for an afternoon because it was thought he might be in that neighborhood and they were searching for him. I’m confident it was at Tutt because I well remember looking out the windows at the trees that formed a dense woods behind the school and the houses down Boy Scout Road, wondering where he might be hidden in them, if he was even back there at all, and I thought about the black students who lived in that
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neighborhood and I considered their anxieties and what they were hearing at home. Tutt was far removed from where I went to high school, in a different part of the city. Tutt had formerly been a junior high that served only black students, mine was the first desegregated class to enter it in the fall of 1970. It was about a mile and a half from where we lived, long enough for a bus ride, but only a little over half a mile from where I’d attended A. Brian Merry elementary, also on Boy Scout Road, to which I had daily walked in the morning and in the afternoon walked home, one of a few students not carried by car. With the exception of one black girl in my class, A. Brian Merry had been exclusively attended by white students from a cluster of suburbs now known as West Augusta that bordered the black neighborhood in which Tutt was located. This escape that I’ve believed I’ve remembered occurring while I was at Tutt isn’t to be found in news archives, so I’m led to conclude I must be remembering an afternoon we were on lockdown because they’d identified who the attacker was and believed he was in the area, which means it was perhaps in October 1971, before he was initially taken into custody, which was early Monday morning of 18 October at his home, and I’ve somehow confused this with when he escaped from the Alto Reformatory. Indeed, as they knew who he was, where he lived and were searching the area for him, I may have interpreted the situation to mean he had escaped them. What I remember is that when we left school that afternoon the word going around was that as he wasn’t found he wasn’t believed to be in the area. Because of all the woods, I wasn’t so sure, but if that’s what the police believed then maybe they were right.
After his December 1972 escape from prison, on 14 February 1973 he murdered a 78-year-old woman and assaulted her 14-year-old grandson who lived only a couple of houses from a friend of mine in a neighborhood not closely adjoined by connecting streets to Tutt Junior High yet was immediately behind it, separated by a stream. Augusta was strange in the way some neighborhoods or institutions such as schools were located in pockets of woods and with its winding roads one could be at a place such as Tutt and have no idea it backed up to an entirely different neighborhood that by road could only be reached by taking such a long way around that the areas seemed disconnected and far apart—but they weren’t, they were immediately adjacent, which was also how this part of the city disconnected black neighborhoods from white. I don’t know if he went on foot or by car, but in early to mid-1970s Augusta no black person would have ever been seen driving a car through the Brynwood area, it just wasn’t done, it was likely if a black person drove through the neighborhood someone would call the police. He couldn’t have approached the neighborhood by car. In the case of the 78-year-old woman who was killed, when I was looking at the map it occurred to me that if he had then been hiding in the neighborhood of Tutt that to reach her neighborhood he would have easily done so on foot. Via the woods behind Tutt, just a few doors up from where his family lived, he would have crossed over a stream and been in her back yard. For that matter, he may have reached our neighborhood on foot as well, making his way through the same woods and crossing the same small creek he would have accessed Cambridge Road, four and five blocks down which was our street as well the street on which the woman had been attacked in August of 1971. On foot, he may have made his way down Cambridge via front and back yards under cover of night, and he may have done so a
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number of times casing homes and yards for dogs. It was a garden-style subdivision in which every ranch house occupied a fairly deep lot and had thick bushes, often azaleas, planted immediately against the homes on all sides, flowering bushes often delineated the boundaries of the homes, a buffer between them, and while no home had a fenced front yard, everyone had a cyclone fence about four feet high in the rear, and often enough the rear backyard boundary between houses was a moderate thicket of trees and shrubs. Scarcely any street traffic broke the dark of the streets late at night, often none at all, there was no through street to businesses, it was a 9-to-5 suburb where people went to bed relatively early (what I call early) and rather than leaving on their lights and consuming electricity they would cut them all off not only inside but outside their homes so there would be no porch lights or carport lights burning. As long as dogs were avoided, a person who was reasonably athletic, and quiet, could have traversed the area undetected, on foot, under cover of its bushes and the thicket areas of the back yards.
After midnight, I used to look out my bedroom window at the night street and marvel at how quiet and still it was, seeming entirely asleep, I felt as if I was the only one awake to witness its dreaming. When the moon was full it shone the concrete streets and driveways so that they looked as if they were covered by snow. It now occurs to me to check when was the new moon in August of 1971 and it was on the twentieth, the day of the attack. The attacker must have planned to be out on a night when there was no moon illuminating the streets and yards, no moon to reveal him and cast his shadow, that was why the patio and backyard were so dark. A few times, I went out late at night, all the lights out, the world asleep, but it was when the streets were lit up with the full moon, to play with my shadow and marvel at the magic of the suburb in its communal dream.
Not long after the babysitting incident, I thought I’d seen someone at the sliding glass doors of our home late one night, the drape half open, my parents were already in bed, instead of behaving as if I’d not seen the person this time I’d jumped up and run out of sight of the window, calling out to my brother, B, who was also still up. My initial inclination was to not write of this, but I’ve decided to include the event as, with every rewrite of this chapter, it has stayed with me, a roadblock, so maybe it belongs. Soon after the occurrence at our home, I had pushed it to the back of my mind, and the further removed I was in time, I came to wonder if I’d been hyper-sensitized by my experience in August and might have imagined the person at our window. in the moment I was confident I’d seen someone standing there, staring in. Let me be clear, I had seen someone. However, I had also wanted to not too seriously consider it. Who had attacked the woman a street down was yet unknown, had no face, no name. It felt impossible to me the attacker would return to the same neighborhood, yet it also seemed too coincidental for another man to be haunting the neighborhood in that short time frame, I scarcely even thought of the person outside our window as flesh-and-blood, he felt like a ghost, a shadow repetition of the man I’d seen outside the window when I was babysitting. Though my brother and I talked about the incident several times over the next couple of years—we had shared this experience—I don’t remember if he had seen the person as well, but he would bring it
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up even more than a decade removed, eventually revealing how he had been angry with me when this happened because he was only eleven and he didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t protect himself much less anyone else, and he’d believed he was supposed to do something about the man, which hadn’t occurred to me at the time, I’d not called on him to do anything, I was calling out to him because I’d seen someone and my brother was there. The revelation of that anger was a surprise yet made complete sense. He’d grown up watching media that supported and augmented a culture in which males were expected to be aggressively heroic and tackle a situation, and he had interpreted this to mean, though he was a boy, as the male he must do something and be prepared to fight. But none of this had occurred to me as the legacy of his being a male, because I hadn’t thought of him as having to be a protector. After all, I still babysat him along with my other siblings. I believe I do remember, however, his running to get maybe a bat, like he was going to go into the backyard, and my telling him no. At that time we must have kept the garbage bins at the right side of the patio, that’s where I keep seeing them in relationship to all this, in the crook of our L-shaped house where the main horizontal body of the house met its vertical-to-the-street arm that held three of the four bedrooms, not immediately to the right of the sliding doors but beyond the chimney, beyond the far end of the family room, at the far end of a bedroom beyond it, in that deep, unlit corner area of the patio, because I keep picturing the bins in the dark against the vertical wall of the master bedroom which had no windows on that side. Though I’m positive we had plastic by then, it bothers me that I might be imagining this part if metal was perhaps still popular as the internet says, because I keep picturing plastic, which makes me wonder if I’ve fabricated the garbage bins, so I look up a Sears catalogue for 1970 online and find though metal was still available they were pushing plastic bins in attention-grabbing illustrations larger than the metal and had more options in the plastic type. In a time before built-in obsolescence, when people aspired for the quality of a life-time guarantee, as with Samsonite luggage these Sears cans were advertised as near indestructible the proof being an illustration in the catalogue that depicts one supposedly surviving a drop from a helicopter. At our house, the garbage bins usually were kept next the backyard’s east gate, the one near the carport, but sometimes were against the house as described. There was a west gate as well, which was unkept, not used, an area that flooded when it rained, the arm of the ranch house that held the three bedrooms was on a slight hill and the west path into the back yard was down below the windows of the bedrooms, on the level of the crawl space under the house, the entry to the crawl space located under the bedroom I still shared with my young sister. That side of the house was overgrown with bushes and further secreted by the tall wooden fence our neighbor had on that side that completely hid their back yard (the psychological character of that fence must have been amazing in its desire for invisibility as I never once wondered what that back yard looked like, I never tried to get a peek). The deep back of our yard was a veritable wilderness of tall brushy shrubs and trees both on our side and the rear neighbor’s side of the fence, so dense one couldn’t even see the lights from the house behind us. While we had several exterior lights fixed to the house, the bulbs often out, there was no exterior light for the west gate. A lamp was next the east gate, one was directed on the east part of the patio yard, and there was a lamp out back of the master bedroom, the bulb
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of which went out soon after we moved in and replacing took several years as one thing my father was not was a handyman, he could change a lightbulb but handyman chores would take years to address, if ever (which isn’t a crime, I’m not making it out to be a character defect). Other than that light outside the master bedroom there were no lamps that illuminated the yard except a portion of the patio. The patio light would have been off and if it was working I wouldn’t have cut it on as its switch was on the wall next the sliding glass door, and I’d run toward the kitchen away from the view of the door—a reason I don’t run instead to the family room door on my right was I would have been in view a couple of seconds longer rather than immediately out of sight. The more I sit down on this, examining what I did, it may be I had also grabbed a sizable knife from a drawer in the kitchen, not that I felt in immediate danger, that moment of feeling immediate danger had passed as soon as I leaped up and ran out of sight, after which I felt protected by very obviously not being the only person up and on alert, if I did grab a knife it would have been for self-assurance and just-in-case. If I remember correctly I believe B had been worried that the person might have hidden himself back in the right-hand area of the patio and he kept protesting he should go outside, with the bat as protection, to check and see if the person was there, I understood his reasoning but that wasn’t for an eleven-year-old to do, not for me at fourteen to do, and I told him no, that the person was probably gone, scared off. He thought they were hiding there (did he see them go to the right?) and kept talking about going and out and I kept saying no and they were probably gone. I also believed if they were hiding in the area that if we gave them the chance to flee they would. While it sounds like we were active, in actuality, after B got the bat, all we did was hover in place, on frozen alert, and argue with one another about whether to check outside or not. And we must not have made conspicuous noise as no one woke up and came out to see what was going on. It didn’t occur to either one of us to rouse the adults of the house or to call the police, which says something about our relationship to the adults of the house, to our parents, they weren’t there to be called upon to protect or to help, they had never occupied the position of protectors and helpers, we were not only left to our own devices but were expected to practice containment. So there we hovered in place, between the kitchen and family room, ears wide open and listening, listening.
This occurred after the attack on the woman a street over, but before the person had been arrested, and I’m confident of this because we didn’t yet have a dog. After the attack, people in the neighborhood started getting dogs, including my parents. They picked up a German Shepherd puppy which turned into an animal my siblings and I had to be careful around, it wasn’t a pet because it didn’t bond with the whole family, which is how my mother wanted it, she said she wanted the dog bonded with her, she wanted an aggressive, scary dog that would make people afraid, yet I was the one who had to take it to dog training school at the Julian Smith Casino at Lake Olmstead Park and the dog had little respect for me, even the people at the dog training school had difficulty with the dog, and my parents wouldn’t get involved with the training, I had to do the training though the dog was supposed to be only bonded with my mother, but the dog did become leash trained (a positive being that I learned enough to leash train dogs that I had as an adult). My mother was emphatic about how the dog was
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her protector alone, she was the one who was home during the day while we were at school, she was fine if the dog was aggressive with us and sometimes growled at us because she didn’t want its bonding with her weakened by any bonding with us, she would sit at the kitchen bar with it at her feet, which is how I am picturing her as I write about this because we had a couple of gritty talks about this as the dog sat at her feet at the kitchen bar and because when I’d get home from school and have to walk by the dog seated at my mother’s feet one could be made to feel unwelcome and she’d say what a good dog it was and I’d think, “Damn, what the hell” that our mother thought it was cute when the dog growled at her children. I don’t remember whose duty it was to feed the dog, but it was likely my father’s at first and then became the responsibility of the children as well, which probably helped ameliorate the situation as we were then also a source of supply. A few photos from when I was sixteen show my mother and father and this and that sibling on the front lawn with the German Shepherd, which was in fact a beautiful animal, large for a female, muscular, black and silver rather than black and tan. My mother holds onto its leash so it is right in front of her in a photo where she stands and in another one where she is seated on the front porch steps, the dog looking massive before her. One photo shows my father instead handling the dog, my mother likely having wearied of holding onto it. I’ve always hated those photos, my mother dragging us out onto the front lawn to take them felt grotesque, I had no idea why it was happening as we never took family photos, for some reason she wanted to parade the dog, standing and sitting my parents and the dog are always presented with my little sister, and once additionally with my brother, B, and another time with my brother, W, but I managed to avoid being grouped with my parents because it all would look innocent enough but the power dynamics were such that I felt my parents may as well have been parading themselves on the front lawn with a gun, I am instead in two shots with my sister and brother, B. That same summer I woke up to find the dog sleeping in my bed with me, and as it was a large dog, taking up all of the room, I had nudged it with my foot to get it to move over. The dog growled at me in such a way that I decided it was best not to press the matter so I got out of the bed, and at the time I’d thought the dog and I were at least on fair terms in that it didn’t much care if I existed. I know at least one of my siblings had the same thing happen. In the photos the dog somehow doesn’t even appear bonded with my mother, not in any affectionate way that people experience with dogs that become members of the family and best friends. In this respect, it fit in with the family with its aloof disregard. It wasn’t cuddly, it didn’t talk to you, it didn’t play, it had no personality traits that make a dog a beloved character, it didn’t engage like a dog will that feels like it’s family, the only highly individual quirk it had was the dog ate every Bible in the house. The first two Bibles it ate were old ones with leather covers, not family Bibles, we didn’t have a family Bible, but these were old enough that I had no idea where they came from and perhaps had been given each of my parents when they were young, I don’t know, and as they were old and leather I rightly imagined it ate the bibles for the leather, but then the dog zeroed in on a Bible I’d picked up when I was about fourteen that was like what my friends had, it may have also eaten another one I believe we had a copy of the Jerusalem Bible which would have been acquired during our dedicated Roman Catholic years. Because the latter two (or one) had no leather, and because the dog never ate any other book, I tried to
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find a common link that made them attractive to the dog so that it even selected them specifically, pulling them out of bookcases, ignoring all the other books, but could never reason it out. As B and I couldn’t divine any common association other than the dog eating only Bibles, we amused one another by calling it our Demon or Devil Dog, though we could just as well have said it had a taste for religion. As this happened within the space of a few weeks when I was seventeen I was suspicious enough to wonder if someone wasn’t fucking with the Bibles for some reason to attract the dog to eat them, but I couldn’t smell anything obvious on the non-leather Bibles that might have been put on them to attract the dog. After I left home my parents elected to get rid of the dog, I don’t know when, we were then estranged, but they must have decided they could no longer handle it. In the first year we had the dog, it had one day escaped the back yard fence, I was inside the house, my siblings were outside playing, they had likely neglected to close the gate when they’d left the back yard, and they came running inside in a panic because the dog had chased a small child who ran from it up the street and jumped on them and knocked them down, which sent the child to the emergency room with a concussion. The child’s parents said they didn’t blame the dog. I understood how the child’s running had triggered the dog’s chase instinct, but I also knew the dog was aggressive and with anxious concern I watched to see how my parents would respond, would they fault the dog or child. While they defended the dog, this may have been when I became tasked with training the dog. I heard that after they got rid of it my mother replaced the dog with a small lap dog and the German Shepherd spent its days as somebody’s guard dog chained up outside by itself looking miserable. Which made and makes me feel sorry for it because the dog was the way it was because my mother wanted it so. Perhaps they gave the dog away when my mother became pregnant, or was it when she decided to keep chickens (which soon fled for the woods behind the suburb) in the back yard of their new home. Though it wasn’t a pet, my sister, A, must have been fond of the dog, as there is also one photo of her, still very young, lying on the floor and smiling as she embraces the dog which is sitting beside her, staring off elsewhere as it always did, it was always looking away from you. While such behavior can signal distress and a dog being overwhelmed, this was instead a dog that belonged as much to the dysfunctional family pack as much as any one of us did, holding its own ground and confident in its daily rations.
Despite my experience with that dog, the first dog my spouse and I had was a white German Shepherd, a female, who was easy-going, well-socialized, good with other dogs, easy to train, a sweet dog that loved children. She wasn’t the brightest of dogs, but she was a happy if unintentional clown. When we landed in a living situation in which we had little room and no yard, we knew it was unfair to keep her, and because she loved children we looked for a family with children as her next and hopefully permanent home, found one, and the fit was a good one, the children loved her and she loved the children. At this distance, I’m surprised I even considered a German Shepherd but I think we were told her mother was a sweet, gentle dog, and she was beautiful. She was so different from the German Shepherd I’d lived with during my middle teen years that I never thought of the first one, there was no comparison to be made, that first dog evaporated from memory.
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I’ve a couple of photos of two of my siblings and my mother with the black and silver as a puppy, taken out on the front lawn, the few deciduous trees that can be seen in neighboring lawns are turning red and yellow but are are still full of leaves, my siblings are in summer clothing, B in short shirt sleeves, A in the striped dress she wore to her kindergarten graduation (she was in private school, and I know she wore it at her graduation as I’ve a photo from the event), so it’s in the early autumn, after the attack but before the person was caught on October eighteenth. I would have seen the person at the door in our family room before we got the dog because there’s no consciousness of a puppy in this memory, no puppy becoming excited and yapping. Perhaps this is paranoia on my part, but as the attacker had stayed in the neighborhood after I’d seen him when I was babysitting and had attacked another woman, I’ve wondered if before he attacked her he had been in a position to see the parents of the children I was babysitting return home, and to see me walk back home across the street and down a house, so he knew where I lived. This isn’t a new thought, even then I had wondered if it might have been the same person at our sliding glass door, if he was checking out the house of someone he knew to have seen him, but it was too alarming for me to contemplate. However, it was around then I made a habit of keeping a can of spray art fixative next to my bed, My reasoning was that if I sprayed it in an attacker’s eyes it might buy me enough time to run, and I didn’t want to keep anything sharp like a knife around my bed that could too easily, lethally be turned against me.
Either I saw someone or I didn’t, a person was either there or they weren’t. How many times over the years had I looked up at that sliding glass door and only once did I believe I’d seen someone. In memory that reality degrades so it becomes an exasperating situation of my having seen someone yet not because nothing happened and there is no proof. An absolute is hidden in there and my instincts rebel against an “if” when I describe it to myself in terms of “that qualifier of if means you may not have seen someone.” My instincts fight back and say, “Then there is no if.”
The summer of 1973 I was still friends with the girl who lived a few doors from the house of the woman who was murdered the previous Valentine’s Day, and we’d walk the neighborhood ruminating on what had happened, how the killer was still on the loose, but that it was likely he was now far away. Her mother was openly racist, I’d met her once and all her talk had been about the murder, using it to shower racism on all black people. Just as this friend didn’t visit my home, after that visit I didn’t go to her home. I’ve no memory of how or when we stopped being friends but we were never close, we were only tangentially friends through being mutual friends of someone else. She had major problems, as did I, we shared stories on a few of them, body issues, a disordered relationship with food, I wondered if these things could make us friends but instead each our own stores of gunpowder were resistant to the complications of pooling that gunpowder together, plus we had radically different perspectives on the world.
When he was apprehended 31 July 1974 in Des Moines, Iowa, despite matching fingerprints, he claimed to be another person from Potts, Oklahoma, at least that is the town related in the news, but at the YMCA where he stayed he’d used also an
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Augusta address, retaining the street number of his home but pinning that number to a different street. I can find no Potts, Oklahoma, not even one that has become a ghost town, not even an unincorporated community. Google Maps shows there’s no community by the name of Potts in the entire United States. There is a Potts Mountain in Oklahoma, near Heavener, a small town twelve miles south of the county seat, Poteau. Perhaps, in the creation of his fictional history, he said Potts when he meant Poteau, or he made up a town and the news didn’t comment on its non-existence. Or his claim to be from Potts was misreporting.
5
I have wondered what made me glance up at that moment in August of 1971 so that I saw his face in the window. And what if I’d not looked up from my book?
If he was, indeed, the person I saw out the window, I’ve wondered why he called the police from the woman’s bedroom after his attack on her. With his waiting in the bushes for them to arrive, was it part of his satisfaction, or did he still have it in him to fear for the woman's life, for which reason he’d called the police so that she would receive prompt life-saving care? If we can take it for granted the latter is not the explanation, I don’t know if this will make sense, but as I had gone to the phone and pretended to call the police, I’ve even wondered, if calling the police wasn’t his normal modus operandi, if he was mimicking my actions that night in a weird dialogue. He had seen me go to the phone, he had probably assumed I’d called the police, as I’d hoped he would believe, but as he had stayed in the neighborhood he would have seen that no police had responded. Then he attacked a woman a couple of houses over and called the police himself. There’s likely no connection, but that detail, his calling the police from her bedroom then waiting for their arrival, watching from the bushes, caught my breath when I learned of it and made that call feel personal.
Undeniably dangerous, in 1972 he had been sentenced to three life terms for rape (another paper states for fifteen rapes, yet another says three rapes), fifty years for five burglaries, twenty-five years for five aggravated assaults, ten years for one kidnapping and ten years for one criminal attempt to kidnapping. He was never tried for his murder of the seventy-eight-year-old woman or the assault on her grandson, it felt this wasn’t needed as he was already serving three life terms plus.
He was black, which provoked any latent racism in the white community to the fore, and there wasn’t much latent as it was conspicuous, such as with the mother of my friend who lived a few doors down from the house of the woman who he later murdered, her response was vile and condemned the black population as a whole. White racism was on the surface, one didn’t have to scratch to get at it, and that white racism was confident in the inferiority of black people, that their accomplishments were inferior, without merit, and that they were naturally inclined to violence. Along with this was a heavy sense of the white fear of retribution, of vengeance for generations of wrongs coalescing out of the deepest subterranean reaches of Augusta’s psyche and a terror over the trauma of generations of oppression having escaped the very segregated black neighborhoods to stalk the white suburbs. The Black community was asking why weren’t the police as concerned with protecting black women as they were white women, for the murderer had been a known threat to women in the black community. The Black community was also demanding why wasn’t this killer dealt with as one who was obviously mentally deranged rather than only criminal. The Black community was responding to white racist paranoia because it was there. Augusta’s neighborhoods were hardcore segregationist though sometimes immediately adjacent, and racial integration of the schools had only just begun in 1970. I know I felt the burden of that racism impacting how people responded to the attacks. I also felt how careful we were in school to steer clear of this. The murderer not only lived several doors down from my junior high school, his picture is in the 1971 yearbook of the high school I would attend, a member of the senior class four years ahead of me. That yearbook photo is above the photo of a black youth in a paper Stars and Stripes hat who had been elected to represent “School Spirit”, and a couple of pages over is a photo of the white girl who was the female selection for “School Spirit”. A new school, photos of its construction are in the yearbook, and he belonged to its first graduating class. Did he graduate? I don’t know. I’m assuming he did. His class photo doesn’t look much different from his mugshots of October 1971, with the exception of his afro being fuller. From 1971 through 1974 his shadow loomed over my classes in Tutt Junior High then Westside High School because in Augusta, integration of schools having begun in 1970, we were the first of the integrated schools and among the students and teachers at the junior high and high school I attended there seemed a mutual determination of the majority not to view this person and their crimes as a black or white issue, he should not become someone who might be used by racists to drive a wedge between us, who might cast a pall over our efforts to be a successful example of integration, which isn’t to say there wasn’t friction because with some there was. What black students and teachers were experiencing, feeling, which wasn’t being voiced to white students, I don’t know, but none of us were talking about this at school, or at least no one I knew, we had a wall up against letting in this person’s shadow and any of the racist poison that might be attracted to it.
How he happened, who knows, there’s the conundrum of the cycle of violence, that it does exist, that it creates mental illness, there’s always a price to be paid for abuse of any kind, and yet because one is abused doesn’t mean one becomes an abuser, and just because a race or ethnic group of people is horrifically, violently, socially abused for generations doesn’t mean they will become abusers. With every war and conflict, with the killing of husbands and wives and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers I wonder at the grievous wounds inflicted on the psyches of the survivors and am amazed by those who afterward manage to not respond with a deep hatred engendered by their loss, I am amazed as well by oppressors who act as if oblivious to the hatred they are instilling, pain so profound it passes from one generation to the next, and am also amazed and disheartened when the oppressors are those who have been heinously abused and turn around and abuse others.
People are resilient, or can appear to be so, but I expect trauma to produce unresolved trauma and I have no idea why some victims of trauma go on to abuse others while others do not. I don’t know his personal story. He had an uncle-in-law, also born in Augusta, who was a professor at the University of Kansas, arriving there several years after my father had graduated in 1958, and that uncle-in-law was honored for his achievements and I know he and his wife fought against housing segregation, development or neighborhood covenants that prohibited selling to blacks in Lawrence. I don’t know the pain and horror his family would have experienced as a result of his actions, how they coped, I can’t begin to guess. I don’t know how my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents coped with violent criminals who were family, because no knowledge of it was passed along. I suspect with many families silence is a coping mechanism but it can also be denial. For decades, I deliberately wouldn’t talk about this murderer because I felt I couldn’t talk about having seen him, which I’ve already discussed, and I felt I couldn’t talk about him because he’d been black and I’d no idea of the possible impact of America’s violent history of racism on his mental health, what I wondered was if he could be considered a community health problem. But he abused women regardless of their race and I’ve read he hated women.
I’m a victim/survivor of abuse and I could be said to have broken the cycle of violence in my family, down my line, though I feel guilt that I have likely passed on transgenerational trauma through epigenetic inheritance. But I have compassion and empathy, I’m not an abusive person, and when people suppose that victims must turn into abusers it rankles. Yet I also believe in cyclical violence, I know my mother was abused in some way, I imagine my father must have been as well, and I trust this impacted them, but I still fault them for abusing me, I feel they had a choice. Some are so ill that they don’t have a choice. My grandfather’s cousin, who killed his family then himself, as he was only thirteen years of age I wonder did he have a choice, trusting he comprehended what he was doing I still can imagine he didn’t understand this was a thing he didn’t have to do. Or maybe there were abuses that had happened which made him feel he had no option. Perhaps I could be accused of equivocating, that I am making excuses for him.
The man I saw at the window is dead now, it wasn’t announced in the papers but he passed away in prison in 2015. In 1997 this murderer was the “longest-serving prisoner in isolation” at Reidsville, locked down for twenty-one years, having stabbed guards and other prisoners. Was he was even ever given psychiatric care in prison? He should have been. Whether they imagined he could improve or not, he should have been given care. Though “nothing happened” to me, though I escaped harm, this felt personal to me when I was fourteen and does still feel personal to me, when I learned he’d raped and near murdered another woman after my confrontation with him, I knew he was a person who would stick with me for life, and I would like to know what he felt compelled him to violence, which will never happen, and he may have never been able to himself have an understanding of it. Much was made about how he was intelligent, he had an above-average IQ, but I felt this was so he could be blamed for his actions, and it also seemed people were surprised he was intelligent, as if they expected him to have only an average or below-average IQ because he was black.
While an integrated school felt ordinary to me then, it wasn’t, not in Augusta, and though white and black children were for the first time in Augusta in public school together there was a chasm to be crossed in the disparate yet shared histories and cultures of the oppressor and the oppressed. White supremacy couldn’t see itself, wouldn’t see itself, was so used to itself that it had little idea even in all the ways it was white supremacist, and when confronted would double down and insist it wasn’t supremacist. White supremacy couldn’t even see how typical and offensive was the white savior complex, such as television entertainment in which integration occurred by way of infantilization of blacks, households composed of white, wealthy adults adopting black children. White supremacy didn’t see how black history was the history of all of us.
In Washington State, anti-miscegenation was the law only between 1855 and 1868. Rhode Island’s anti-miscegenation law, passed in 1791, was repealed in 1881. Michigan’s anti-miscegenation law, passed in 1838, was repealed in 1883. In 1887, in Augusta, Georgia, a girl named Alice was born to Clara Jones Page, who was listed in the census as mulatto, and George Christian Stucker, who was white and had been born in Augusta but his parents were German. They had another child, George, in 1888, then the senior Stucker died in 1889. After 1900, Alice took her children north, to Providence, Rhode Island, where she hoped for them to pass as white, which they did from then on, also aways giving themselves as born in Rhode Island. Alice attended college and became a teacher. I don’t know how this was managed but George attended Brown University, studying at Yale as well. In Michigan, he married in 1918 to a girl whose father was German, then changed his last name to Channing. In 1921, in Seattle, Washington, they had Carol Channing, who became a famous Broadway entertainer, and if I give her “mixed” heritage here it’s because of her father being born in Augusta, Georgia, where the anti-miscegenation law wasn’t repealed until 1972, but interracial marriage had been legalized nationally in 1967 so the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws after that fact were symbolic albeit essential. I’m going to take for granted that Alice moved to Rhode Island with her children hoping to broaden their futures with their passing for white, which would mean also cutting ties with their past, as exhibited in her children always giving their place of birth as Providence. I was surprised to see, looking at Stucker’s relations on the white side of his family, that a girl I was in high school with was from a family a brother of his married into, and I could be wrong but with Stucker having changed his name to Channing I doubt that this Augusta family would have been aware they were related to Carol through children had at a time when it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry. I may be wrong, but I would imagine that, after their mother’s death in 1912, the only birth family relations that Alice and George had would have been one another. The move and passing for white also meant the children having to publicly deny their mother, and she having to publicly deny them. In 1905 she gave herself as having resided in Rhode Island for a year, was working as a live-in servant and gave herself as having no children. Clara’s death certificate was, however, signed by her daughter, Alice E. Stucker.
The “color” landscape in which I live now, and have for decades, didn’t exist in Augusta when I was a young teenager, but more than the potential had been established with school integration, and perhaps my read was wrong on some fellow students but there was an eagerness on the part of the majority to not fuck this up as a generation, which was felt by our principals (at Tutt our principal was black, at Westside he was white) who congratulated us at year’s end, as a school body, for our success, which was important, we needed to be reminded to not take ourselves for granted.