Charlotte Pierce-Baker - Surviving the Silence: Black Womens Stories of Rape

SURVIVING THE SILENCE

Black Womens Stories of Rape

Charlotte Pierce-Baker

Copyright 1998 by Charlotte Pierce-Baker

All rights reserved
First Edition

Quote from the forthcoming In Search of Africa by Manthia Diawara, Harvard University Press. The Creation Story, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Copyright 1994 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. The Hill Has Something to Say by Rita Dove, copyright 1993, reprinted by permission of the author. This material originally appeared in Selected Poems. Spelling by Margaret Atwood 1981, reprinted by permission of the author. This material originally appeared in the poetry collection True Stories.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

Desktop composition by Roberta Flechner
Book design by Chris Welch

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Pierce-Baker, Charlotte.
Surviving the silence : Black womens stories of rape / by Charlotte Pierce-Baker.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 0-393-04661-3

1. RapeUnited StatesCase Studies. 2. Afro-American womenUnited StatesCrimes againstCase Studies. I. Title.

HV6561.P54 1998

362.88308996073dc21 98-14518

CIP

ISBN 978-0-393-24978-1 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
http://www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

FOR MY PARENTS, JOSEPH AND WESLYNE,

WHO TAUGHT ME LOVE, PATIENCE, COURAGE

AND...

FOR ALL THOSE WHO HAVE TRIED

TO HEAL THEIR SOULS.

It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory.

Gayle Jones, Corregidora

[The stories] are all we have... to fight off illness and death. You dont have anything if you dont have the stories.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.

Gloria Naylor,
The Women of Brewster Place

T here was a void... an absence... a silence. There were no voices. There were no structures of feeling or support. So I went in search of structures and voicesin search of community.

I remember vividly a young black woman Ill call Renee; I met her while on hotline duty. I had been called to a Code R at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Code R indicates that a rape victim has been admitted to the hospitals emergency room.) I thought she was nineteen or twenty years old. She had cuts, fresh bruises, a look of eerie calm. She was waiting to be examined by a physician and sampled for a rape kit. As an emergency room crisis volunteer for Women Organized Against Rape in Philadelphia, known as WOAR, my duties were specific: help the survivor feel comfortable and safe, explain procedures, and tell her about WOARs services. We were instructed to stress that the rape was not her fault and instructed to help her feel less alone. I asked Renee several questions. No response. She obviously was shaken. But her silence was as solid as stone. It made me desperate with uneasiness. I knew Renee needed immediate attention. But in the emergency room everyone waits her turn.

Renee seemed to resent my presence. I asked if she wanted to be alone, and she answered with an abrupt No. We sat in silence, staring into our separate spaces. Before long, Renee began to speak without my urging. She was not nineteen or twenty. She was fourteen. Only hours before, she had been raped at school by a fifteen-year-old boy in her neighborhood who was known for doing things like this. She said, I am not the first. When I asked if the boy had been caught, suspended, and arrested, Renee answered: Why would anybody care? Nobodys going to do anything anyway. The boy had cornered Renee in a locker roomraped her while a group of students stood and watched. This fourteen year old had resisted as best she could. But now, alone in the ERwith me and her much older boyfriendshe needed and was asking for help. The rapist would be out of school for two, at the most, three daysperhaps a week. Then back to terrorize. According to Renee, this was a familiar story. Why should she go back to school if no one could keep in check this fifteen-year-old boy or ensure the safety of girls in the school community? I realized with a sudden emptiness that I had no idea what Renee would confront when she returned to school after telling.

We who have survived must tell our stories for Renee and her classmates.

While I was nervously awaiting my turn on the stand at my own preliminary hearingafter bringing criminal charges against one of the black men who raped meI saw women come and go. The other women who were there on the day of my hearing happened also to be African American. I waited and listened. (Everyone waits her turn in the courts of criminal justice.) I learned implicitly that a womans word is not enough, that we, the women harmed by rape, serve merely as witnesses. The rendering of our specific brutalities, as in any other case in court, becomes The Commonwealth vs. the Defendant. Our names do not appear.

When my turn came, I told my story; and the case was given a date. It would go to trial. At the time, I didnt know to be happy. Just as well, since I also didnt realize that going to trial meant I would be dragged through harsh details time after time after time, until I persuaded a jury that my rape had actually occurred and that the alleged perpetrator was, in fact, the man who raped me. There were many women, on that day and others, who were not given a trial date due to insufficient evidence.

As a woman harmed by rape, I write for those women who never have their day in courtwho, like Renee, are never guaranteed the safety of everyday life.

I met many women while training to become a volunteer for WOAR. Some disclosed their rapes for the first time during our training. As they labored through rape awareness videos and case history role playing, the pain of their scars was palpable. They fought to endure in order to bring solace to others. Some were able to remain; several had to leave to do the work of their own souls.

I write for those who could not stay.

There are women who continue to care for families and children, when rape and sexual violence have ripped away all intimacies of family life. Husbands, friends, lovers flee; they cannot bear the strain of disclosures, the effort of healing. These women live alone in their nightmares. They have no mediators for their tellings.

I write for the women who lie alone in the night.

There is an uncanny silence surrounding the trauma of black rape. I believe I understand the silence of black women who survive. I am a black woman wounded, and because I kept silent for so long, my newly found voice is still emerging. Silences have become important to me. Im not sure why I refused to tell. But I do know I was intensely afraid of the truth in all its manifestations. I was afraid to be heard.

Though I continued to function after being raped, it would be years before I began to integrate the trauma into my life. It would take years to embrace the joy of seeing morning light as anything but the end of yet another fearful night, survived with scant sleep or rest. But once I allowed myself to feel the fury that anyoneespecially black men, who shared my skin colorwould burglarize my home, steal my possessions, rob my body, and wound my soul, thenand only thenI was able to begin my own internal sorting, grieving, and retrieving.