I wonder what the raped girl writes.

I was nineteen years old, and a very young nineteen, before I realized that the world wasn’t like my tiny hometown of Blakely Georgia. It was to be several more years before I realized that the idyllic Mayberry vision I had always held of Blakely was just an enforced façade. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything bad happening in Mayberry or Blakely, no, right there within a stone’s throw of my bedroom a father was raping his daughter, a husband was beating his wife, and several men were slowly drinking themselves to death.

Blakely was ground zero for the ultimate don’t ask-don’t tell policy. If no one spoke of it then it didn’t exist. She got that black eye because she fell down. No one knows who got that young teenage girl pregnant. The fact that she never left her house was ignored, and the rumor grew, bigger than her belly, that she had slipped away with a black boy, even though there was none to be found in our neighborhood.

 As I grew older my visits to Blakely because less and less frequent as its gravitation pull became weaker and weaker. My father eventually stopped asking, “When are you coming home?” Blakely was never home to me, the house in which my father lived was more or less the house my father owned, a place where I was forced to stay until I grew wings strong enough to fly away. I’ve slept under overpasses and felt that same sense of strangeness I always felt in my father’s house.

 Sitting here, thinking about that house, my father’s house, and writing about it gives me a feeling I cannot explain. No adjectives suffice in my efforts to describe it. It did feel like home when we lived on Westview Drive, right beside the City Pool, but the house on South Main street always felt more like a halfway house, or a way station of sorts, maybe a Hostel, or minimum security prison. There was always the feeling of some sort of minor Evil there, as if some lesser demon had sent a bored minion to watch over me.

 I wonder what the raped girl writes.

I wonder what she remembers of those years in Blakely, those years where school and church were the only two havens from the abuse she suffered. I got a minor demon while she was living in the deepest, darkest, hottest part of a hell that I never suspected existed. It never occurred to me that the same girl I played with at the City Pool would go home that day to be brutalized by her father, a man I held in great esteem, at that time. I wonder if while we were talking about how hard school was, or how bored that we were, or whether or not we would ever master the one and a half gainer, if she ever felt like saying, “My father beats the hell out of me until I submit to being raped.” But that would have more or less put an end to the rest of our petty bitchings, wouldn’t it?

Out of the three girls in the family only one was treated like this. The other two remained mute about it for decades. The mother never spoke of it. The older son never hinted that he knew what was going on, but it is difficult to believe that no one else knew about it while it was happening. All of this might have passed without anyone ever knowing except she returned home after many years away to confront her family and her demons. That was an act of courage of a magnitude that the rest of us will never know, and quite frankly, wish that we didn’t.

We citizens of Mayberry, and Blakely, are guilty of complaisantly accepting the peace offered by a much higher demon rather than step inside the hell of the raped girl. We knew something was wrong, or at least the adults knew. The doctor knew. The people at the hospital knew. And they all sat and shook their heads and hoped that she wouldn’t scream loud enough for the neighbors to know, too. I was too young to know. I bought into the stories of her falling down, or her having “female problems” and I believed the myth of Mayberry in Blakely, enough though my own life was proof it wasn’t real.

Years later, decades too late, I saw the man in the grocery store and when he turned to greet me it saw that look in my eyes. He saw me look at him with the same look his daughter looks at him. My eyes saw in him the terrible monster that he once was, and always will be, and he was very familiar with that look now. We didn’t speak, we still don’t speak of it now, do we? Despite the distance of the years, and the distance I’ve put between myself and that place, I still won’t confront the monster, or break the peace of Mayberry, or Blakely.

Take Care,

 Mike