Behind The Music

Everyone loves a triumph. We like to be a part of the energy of the moment. The win. Often we think we know or understand why the situation is so groundbreaking, but unless we are that person, the idea of understanding is merely a leap of empathetic and/or sympathetic hypothesis. Vh1’s show Behind The Music always fascinated me because of this aspect of the human experience. Often the star overcame a horrific ordeal prior to becoming a star or during the process, which in turn catapulted their being into a greater place of stardom.

As I am often congratulated for my ability to triumph, I thought about my Behind the music, my untold story. I was 13 going on fourteen, my sister and I had been removed from my mother’s care because of severe abuse. After living in a group home for about six months, we returned to court with the goal to be reunited with our mother. We stood in the courtroom, her on one side with her council and my sister and I on the other with our Guardian ad litem (GAL). I looked at my mom and she couldn’t or wouldn’t look me in my eyes; I smiled at her and she looked away. I didn’t know what to think so I just chalked it up to her being upset that “these people were in her business”, as she often stated. A few things happened that day that I can’t forget:

1. The judge was a white woman and she was very kind, it was odd because all the judges before were male and scary and demanding.
2. Our GAL; a large, bulky, Nigerian man held my hand during the proceedings. He’d never touched me before.
3. Lastly my sister’s face when our mother announced that she was relinquishing custody of us to the state, it was blank. I was bawling and she just stood there with her thumb in her mouth.

My D for detained had instantly turned into a C for committed. That was how the government marked wards of the state. We would ask everyone who came to the group home whether they were detained or committed. If you were detained this as just a short dream that would end, if you were committed your nightmare was just beginning. The kids who had been D’s their whole lives were miserable, terrifying beings to be around. Most of them were on medications of some sort for their “outbursts”. I didn’t want to become one these kids, I was so mad at my mom, she didn’t even want visitation rights. My already strained relationship with my sister became more so, because I was a goody two-shoes that never did anything wrong, and she was constantly compared to me. It was decided that we needed to be in different homes, given our extremely different temperaments.

After a long year, I graduated from Junior high with honors. My mother didn’t pay my school dues, my Math teacher did. She also bought my graduation dress.  I had to thrift a prom dress and do my own hair. I made the best out of a painful situation, but I couldn’t stop replaying the moment at graduation when my name was called in that big auditorium full of people and no one cheered for me.

That summer I started my first Summer Youth employment job and I was turning 14. During my stay in the group home, I had befriended this guy, no a man, he was 38. He would let me sit on his porch and tell him all the stuff that I was going through and I had believed that we were friends. The first week of my summer job, I was sitting on the porch telling him about everything at my new workplace and he asked me to come in, I didn’t even think about it. I hopped up off the steps and went in his home willingly. I did not leave his house for a year. I was abducted. For a long time I didn’t use this word because of the shame I felt about trusting a strange man. I should have known better, but the reality was that I really didn’t know. I had no idea that I would be raped, sexually abused, beaten, and humiliated beyond the comprehension of my fourteen year old brain. You see, he just didn’t seem like that ‘type’ person.

I had my first encounter with male rage in that basement. My first pregnancy, my first miscarriage, my first black eye, my first set of broken ribs, I had a lot of firsts. I thought that I was going to die there, and I was often told that I would.  I would pray to GOD for relief, I would say please GOD let him let me go, he wouldn’t. No one tried to help me, not his mother who was nice to me when he wasn’t around, not his ex-wife who was terrified of him, and not his daughter; who coincidentally was the same age as me. These women lived through my abuse as well and I hated them. I hated them for watching me with pitying eyes, I hated them for their silence and I hated them for their fear that I tasted every time he punched me in my face or body. I was doing what they couldn’t do anymore, I  was saving them from a monster.

Nearly a year after I  went into that basement, he told me that he had found another girl.  He told me that he was going to kill me and throw me in the dumpster out back. I believed him. I knew I had to get out of that basement. I planned, I watched him, I started familiarizing myself with his routine again. There were only two ways out as he had always walked me to the basement whenever he was leaving, and locked me in. The was an unused wash room, but the problem was it was filled with rats, spiders and flying cockroaches, and another locked door. I had encountered these obstacles in my earlier days of trying to escape before Stockholm syndrome had set in. Then there was the basement window under the porch and that also had its  own set of vermin. I contemplated for a while and then one day after what seemed like a time of peace, he took a glass bowl and slammed it into my face, leaving a jagged gash over my right eye that he sewed up himself while chastising me for making him mad. The next day, I knew I had to leave. I crawled under that porch and let whatever lived there crawl over my body and in my hair and I kicked those cylinder blocks until they moved to where I could slide through. The sun was shining, and I had on a large sweatshirt and tights and a pair of shoes I found laying around the house that I’d hidden, because my own shoes that I’d come there with had been taken from me.

I walked to my mom’s house, from NW DC to SE. I waited there with my grandmother who looked at me once when I came to the door and just stepped aside and sat on the couch. We stayed seated in the living room, me at the dining room table in my quiet shame and her in her inability to help me. My mother came home at her usual time 6 pm. She looked over me and went to her room. I heard her calling the police, telling them that her runaway daughter was there. I was numb by this time and I waited. I waited for them to come. I waited while they handcuffed me. I waited in the station until the judge saw me. I waited while the judge stated that he was sending me to a lock-up facility. I waited on the van  that drove me to my new home. I never got therapy for this because no one asked, no one cared, I was just another fast ass girl who ran away from home.

These talks of R. Kelly and Bill Cosby remind me of that girl. The one who didn’t know but was held accountable for knowing. She had a future, but it was derailed. She played three instruments, had gotten accepted to Duke Ellington, ran track and was really good at it all of these things. When she came out of that basement there was no track and field scholarships, no elite art high school, just pain. I have done my best to protect her since then but it is time that she lives, that she loves again, that she is heard. She has sacrificed so much and I hadn’t known how to repay her until now.

As a Black woman my experience is not unique, I have met so many women with stories like this and much worse. I don’t know if it’s sympathetic resonance or if I have found my tribe. But I do know that it is unacceptable that so many of us have these stories. That people are willing to step over our broken bodies and spirits to ‘Step in the name of love.’ I find it ironic and disgusting. There is no music, behind the music that you enjoy, there is only pain.