anywhere for an overnight stay, never questioning the arrangement or the comfort it provided. Then, suddenly, without explanation, each child was placed into a bedroom that was completely remote from any other person. For the first time in their lives they were sleeping alone, with doors shut so that the rest of the household would not awaken them. Marguerite had little choice but to either shut her eyes tightly or let those fearful eyes roam around the vacant room. What would she see in the middle of the night? It was a thought she had never had in Stamps when she slept night after night in the same bed with Momma.
That so little was ever spoken in the Stamps household had given both the children a keen sense of intuition. Their lives with Momma and Uncle Willie were in some ways an extension of the frequent church services: people went to church for the purpose of praising their Creator. They experienced boundless joy in His presence and they expressed that joy in their verbal responses to the sermon, and in their singing. Nobody instructed them to repeat a catechism; nobody demanded any obedience. Instead, the circumstances of what going to church meant gave them instruction.
When they were growing up in Annie Henderson’s household, the same kinds of laws were operative. Annie and Uncle Willie wanted only the best for the children. The children felt that aura of comfortable identity: they would learn from them, they would be obedient to the laws of society and church at least in part because those were the laws that Annie and Willie obeyed. Uncle Willie might threaten a child who did not learn the times tables fast enough, but he did so as part of an ages-old formula that adults taught children. Unspoken rules replaced spoken ones, but neither was new nor strange.
The Baxter household had no rules that either Bailey or Ritzie could understand. They were not from this house or from this family. They did not know that meanness was meant to be valued; they had been raised to avoid being mean. The only question Grandmother Baxter ever put to them was whether or not they had behaved … the only answer they could give was that they had behaved. Even when the terms of that question and answer remained unknown, there was only one answer. Yes, they had behaved.
So they sat, little mutes awaiting rescue by the mother they had been told was going to live with them, day after day and night after night. Months passed. They did well enough in the school which, somewhat strangely, seemed terribly easy for them; they waited for a word – from Annie, from their father, from Vivian. Finally, following one of their meetings with their mother at Louie’s, she asked if they would like to move into her house. It was a house she shared with Mr. Freeman. She said that they would be welcome to live in that house. They did not think twice before they told her “Yes.”
Again, Bailey and Ritzie found themselves in separate bedrooms, with Bailey’s room across the hall from his sister’s. The house was large, though not so large as their grandmother’s; and the children were often alone. The pattern was that they walked home from school, did their homework, ate the supper that had been prepared, washed their dishes, continued the homework or, if that was finished, listened to the radio or read. Then they went to bed. Usually Vivian had gone to work as a dealer in one of the gambling houses: she had cooked their meal before she left. Mr. Freeman came home from the yard, but said little or nothing to them. He ate his supper alone. When Vivian came home, his life became energized and he made them drinks, played some jazz, and watched Vivian dance. (Mr. Freeman was not a dancer.) By that time the children were usually in bed so they might see their mother before eating breakfast the next day. Mr. Freeman made it clear that he was not given to child care.
As Marguerite grew more and more lonely, her nightmares increased. In her mother’s house, one means of caring for the child was to allow Ritzie to come into her mother’s bed – a bed she shared with Mr. Freeman. The child was seven years old but she was tall. And she was surrounded by people who had no knowledge of what children did, or even of who children were. Of all the family that Ritzie and Bailey could call their own, only Annie Henderson had lived with small children, only Annie knew the depths of emotion, the needs, the unspoken responses that a child was capable of experiencing. And Annie was five hundred miles away.
The pattern of Marguerite’s going to her mother’s bed was a natural one, one that gave no reasonable adult any cause for concern. But after some weeks of such experiences, Vivian left home early for an important meeting. She left her daughter in the bed with Mr. Freeman. This was the first incident of his masturbating beside Ritzie, and after he had ejaculated, he held her as if to cuddle her. Innocent as she was, she suspected his lie when he pointed out that she had wet the bed – and her suspicion increased when he brought a glass of water from the bathroom to pour onto the wet sheet she lay upon. But when he warned her never to tell what they had done, or else he would kill Bailey, she knew the enormity of her loss of any power to stand against him. As the father figure in her life, Mr. Freeman had not only ignored and disliked her: he now was threatening to kill her beloved brother. And she could tell no one.
Marguerite turned more and more inward. She stopped expressing herself even to Bailey. Disastrously cut off from the human world, still feeling that she had some kind of bond with Mr. Freeman, one evening before her mother’s return, she walked to him and sat on his lap. It was something she had seen her mother do numerous times; in her mind, she was trying to make an overture of friendship. At that time he once again used her body for masturbation, leaving her in the chair as he went into the downstairs bathroom. Again, Ritzie knew she could not tell.
On a spring Saturday, following a night when Vivian had not returned home, Mr. Freeman raped Ritzie. Perhaps what Mr. Freeman had read as foreplay came to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps in his anger at Vivian, he aimed to hurt both the child and her mother. Whatever the cause of the evil, he acted. That he tried to wash away the evidence did nothing to exonerate him. The threats were repeated; the child was in great pain. She experienced divided consciousness; she was completely bewildered. The blood frightened her. This time she told Bailey. Mr. Freeman was arrested; the Baxters were scandalized. But at the back of Ritzie’s mind, and echoed in the responses of the Baxters, was the question of the child’s own possible responsibility: had she encouraged Mr. Freeman? Had she brought this pain on herself?
If this rape had happened in the 21st century, a psychologist might have been found. Medical evaluations would not have been the only care: therapy would have been more important than vaginal healing. But it is 1930s Missouri, and even in cities such as St. Louis, few people consulted psychologists – especially in the case of a child’s having been abused. What our age knows about trauma does not reach backward in time: trauma is that which injures. Repeatedly. Trauma is the unreconcilable injury, the wresting of the power of sanity from a person otherwise viable. Elaine Scarry once said that “physical pain is not only resistant to language but also actively destroys language, deconstructing it into cries and groans. To hear those groans is to witness the shattering of language.” The sheer pain of rape was hardly the end point of the child’s experience. In a definition of trauma, one psychologist says that “trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Psychoanalytic theory and neurobiological studies explore the difficulty of the recovery process…” Psychiatrist Judith Herman, too, sees any traumatic state as staining a broad swath through an individual’s consciousness. All people, says Herman, depend on their belief that certain people can be trusted. Just as Marguerite trusted Mr. Freeman, she was inordinately betrayed – and, through association, his betrayal was also the betrayal of her mother, her mother in her absence, her mother who had brought the man into their family and their home. How was Ritzie to rebuild that confidence?
One common response to trauma is dissociation. Self-protective, a wounded person, whether wounded psychologically or physically, cannot fixate on the injury. At least part of that person’s reaction must be avoidance. This psychiatrist insists on the need for dissociation, claiming that traumatic experience “can produce lasting alterations to the endocrine, autonomic, and central nervous system… [In compensation, the wounded person creates a mechanism] by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory.”
