Many years ago I saw a television talk show where a woman was being interviewed about domestic abuse. What I saw so struck me that I can recall the scene thirty years later. She was young, maybe twenty and had a very pink complexion. She had dishwater blonde hair and plump, soft lips coated in shiny, coral-colored lipstick. She explained her problem; as her tears washed her black mascara down her face she said, “…and then he grabbed me and choked me! Oh, he almost suffercated me.”
Such a pitiful child, she was systematically denied the education and resources to fend for herself. She, like so many young women, was condemned to do hard time in the service of a man in her quest for resources. It is easy to imagine the limited choices this girl had if the option that seemed the best to her was to seek resources through a male who could use those resources to control her and bind her to him despite the terrible abuse she suffered.
On Tuesday morning, last week, at 11 am, I heard a timid little knock at my door. It was Angela, the twenty-two year old girl/woman from Philadelphia who had met my terra cotta-toothed, brain-damaged neighbor of violent reputation on the internet and promptly married him. He was thirty-eight; and Angela was twenty; he lied to her to get her here. Two years later, barely long enough for him to have inseminated her and for her to give birth, she was standing at my back door, shaken to her core, with a ten-month old baby on her hip. What is it about my back door that attracts the desperate? (See
The Night of the Junkie)
The fact that she was standing at my back door was no small feat -- she was a captive and was not allowed to learn to drive. She had to walk more than a mile by road or half-a-mile on foot over some very rough, rattle snake infested terrain to get to me. She was out of breath and sweating profusely in the 100-degree heat.
I had known for some time that this was going to happen. I had met Angela twice before. A friend of mine had once tried, for the sake of the baby, to employ the abuser, Angela had latched onto my friend and called him regularly especially when things got bad at home. He had been telling me of the growing tension in the family; and although Angela had never mentioned the escalating violence to him, I had guessed at it.
I think the abuser would have killed her eventually. I knew, as isolated as she was, that because my house was closest to hers and I had no ties to her husband’s family, that I would be the one she chose to help her when the time came. My friend would not be able to help her because, even though he is gay, the abuser was very jealous of his relationship with Angela. I was barely a blip on the radar of the abuser. I thought very seriously about the role I could/should/would play.
I answered the door and brought her inside. When she had clamed down a little bit, I told her, “To come to me once is a very good thing. To come to me twice is unacceptable. I will help you once. Think very carefully about what you want me to do to help you.”
Before she could think about what she wanted, first the abuser’s grown son, himself an abuser, and then the abuser came to fetch her home; they had stalked her across the countryside following her tracks and the trail of baby-ware she had abandoned in her flight. I sent them both away saying that he had been a “bad boy” and that we were having “girl time” and that I would bring her and the baby home later.
Next I had her call the abuser and tell him the bald-faced lie we had concocted -- I was taking her shopping with me so she could cool down. A half hour later I took Angela home and she picked up some things for Chester -- his car seat, some food, a change of clothes, his birth certificate and shot record, and his favorite toys. Then, through the long day, I smuggled her and her child out of the backwater community where I live and into a better future.
As we made our way to safety, Angela told me some interesting things. She told me that the abuser is a devout Christian and goes to church every Sunday where he gets forgiven for all his transgressions because he has taken Jesus (I mean Gee-zuss not Hay-zoose) as his personal savior. She told me that she was his third wife and that his first two wives had left him after seeking refuge in domestic-violence shelters.
She told me that earlier that week, when all of the rest of the house was asleep, she had watched Dr. Phil. She said didn’t believe much in psychotherapy but she watched because there was “nothing else on.” She said the abuser would never have let her watch that show if he had been awake. The show was on domestic violence. Angela said, “Dr. Phil looked right at me. He knew I was there, he was talking about me, to me.”
As it turns out, when we arrived at the minor metropolitan area an hour distant, there was no room at any of the local shelters for Angela and her son, not even at Catholic Charities (ironic, isn’t it?), still, I made her sit in a restaurant with me and say over and over into the phone, “ Hi, I am Angela Thornton. I am the victim of domestic violence and I have nowhere to go. I have a ten-month old son. I only have $9.34 and we left without any thing, we just have the clothes on our backs.” I made her repeat this exercise for forty minutes, then I stashed her in a Motel 6; when I left her she was poised to return to the bosom of her family the next day.
Once she was safe, I needed to think about my own safety, after all she was headed for the East Coast, but I was going to be left with the aggrieved husband who knew I was the last one to see her. He would be expecting an accounting from me.
So, when I got back to the hood after depositing Angela and Chester in the motel, I burned into the abuser’s driveway, leaning on the horn. “Where are Angela and Chester?” I demanded aggressively. ”What do you mean?” the abuser enjoined. I told him another carefully concocted lie, “She disappeared at the diner. I went to the bathroom. When I came back she was gone. The waitress said a woman came in, they asked for to-go boxes and left right away.” I wanted to disarm the abuser, to make him think he knew who took her, so I described his favorite sister when I depicted the phantom woman Angela had left with; I called the mutual friend to get that description.
The abuser said he thought he knew who the mysterious woman was, but he would make a missing person report if he couldn’t find Angela. In that case, he said, I should expect a visit from the Sheriff. This was my exit visa. I said that I didn’t like being ditched and I said, “When Angela gets back tell her she owes me a BIG apology!” Then I stormed off like a dark energy cloud.
In the end, however, it was a Sheriff’s Deputy who saved me from the abuser. I preempted the abuser and called the Sheriff’s Office to report the events of the day saying that I was trying to prevent further involvement in their turmoil. He talked with Angela and then, when the abuser called to report Angela’s disappearance, the Deputy cut me out of the picture with surgical accuracy by concocting his own bald-faced lie. He told the abuser that Angela was in a domestic-abuse shelter and that the woman who had met Angela at the restaurant was a worker from the shelter. I can’t ever remember being so well served by an officer of the law.
Finally, I was no longer implicated and Angela and Chester were safe on the East Coast. I talked to the friend of a friend who had talked with Angela since she had returned to her parent’s home. Angela was fine, he said. He said she was seeing a pattern in her life; he told me that this was the second time she had gone with an older man she had met on the net. The first one took her to Kentucky where he kept her in an escalating cycle of violence until her parents rescued her. Now she was here 2,200 miles from home.
Angela and others of her generation have replaced the coral-lipped girls on the TVs of yesteryear with fresh faces. Mothers who were enslaved to the heteroarchy, made to depend on a male for resources, sent off their daughters to marry and take their turns in the yoke of oppression. My mother sent me off in this way, ready to take my turn, showing me constantly that I was aiming too high by preparing me for nothing, by hating the sight of me because I was a living reminder that her own mother had sold her out and condemned her to seek resources for herself, and the children she was burdened with, from a violent and dangerous male.
So the cycle spins feeding fresh meat to the heteroarchical machine that spits out damaged minds and hearts. Still this is the system that the Christian right would have everyone on the planet locked into, even though it gives cruelty and abusiveness a place of power and importance.
Since it doesn’t automatically bring peace and happiness to families, and in fact causes so much suffering, what then is the value of the heteroarchical machine to the Christian right? The value, of course, is economic and political power!! Every new Christian represents another potential dollar in the coffers of the religious leaders and another potential vote in favor of their interests.
It is well documented that the Shaker religion of the Northeastern US failed and all but disappeared after 1900 because they were sexually abstinent and only brought in new members through conversion and adoption, not through active breeding.
The Christian right serves the principles of the heteroarchy to its congregations like pabulum because every female who will breed and bear off-spring, potentially means an increase in economic and political power for the church hierarchy. The more their women breed the greater the benefit to the church. A growing church is a profitable church, so it pays to marry off prepubescent girls to lecherous old men or to allow one man to have thirteen wives. It hardly matters that some children will be lost and all but a few will suffer.
A boy that I was very close to in high school found me on the internet a year or so ago and told me about the suffercation of his family. He had joined a fundamentalist bible church and married one of the unmarried women in the cult. She bore him eleven children. Five are still with the cult, but of the others one died at age ten of untreated stomach cancer, one is a prostitute, two are addicted to methamphetamine, one died in street violence, and two of the boys are serving life sentences for crimes of violence. Net gain for the church, even though they lost the parents and six of the children – three bodies.
Every new Christian is another human who bets against him or herself. All are betting that if they surrender their civil rights, their rational intellect, their money, their children, and their votes they will get economic favors in this world and that they won’t get kicked in the teeth in the next by the most petty, vindictive, arrogant, megalomaniacal, big-daddy bantam of them all!!
I hope that Angela breaks loose of the grip of the heteroarchy and I hope the abuser will never figure out that I was the one who helped her escape. I hope, too that the coral-lipped girl parleyed her television appearance fee into something more than she had before her fifteen minutes of fame. Somehow, though, I doubt it.
