By Shirley B.
Somewhere along the way, after the first six months or so, Mrs. A. must have decided that if she couldn't make us over, that she would break us instead. Physical punishment became the normal thing in the house, along with groundings for weeks and months at a time. This was at her discretion depending on how bad we were or if she thought we did things intentionally or not. I never really understood her reasonings at all. As far as she was concerned, you couldn't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, which was one of her favorite comparisions for us. The physical punishment progressed to beatings and slapping our faces. The beatings usually meant that we stripped down to nothing and she beat us with a leather belt. She tried hard at first to make sure the marks couldn't be seen when our clothes were on but when she started slapping our faces too, she was at the point where she just didn't care anymore who knew. In those days, people pretty much minded their own business about domestic violence and wouldn't interfere in what was considered family affairs. Violence in this household didn't happen to only my sister and I, Mr. and Mrs. A. were just as violent to one another. We could all sit down to the dinner table and suddenly food and fists would begin to fly between the two of them. After a while , my sister and I realized that when this happened, we needed to find cover and find it quickly, because when they finished with one another they ususally turned on us to finish their rage. Mr. A. use to joke that anytime Mrs. A. wanted new clothes or new furniture or whatever, she'd start a fight, and he could tell how much it was going to cost him to have peace and make up with her by the intensity of the fight. Well, it wasn't very funny to my sister and I.
But along the way, I realize now that God sent angels in the form of human beings who cared for us when they could. One such occurence was when Mr. and Mrs. A. were having an extremely violent fight and glasses and mirrors and windows and everything was getting broken all over the house. My sister and I decided to leave til it was all over, but where do we go?
Using all the childish judgement that we had, we discussed that there was an older couple who lived a few houses down the way. We passed them everyday when we walked to and from school. To this day, I still don't know their names, but they had a dog named Heidi. The dog was so nice and they were so good to that dog, we decided we would go there to their house. So we gathered our purses and put in our hairbrushes and toothbrushes and left our house in the middle of all the screaming and fighting and walked down to Heidi's house and rang the doorbell. When the old couple answered the door, we introduced ourselves and told them where we lived and what was going on at our house , though you could hear the noise from where we were. We told them that we liked their dog and thought maybe they would let us stay at their house for the night or until the fighting stopped. We told them we could just sleep on the floor right there in front of their fireplace with Heidi , if it was okay. Maybe they were just too shocked to say no , so they escorted us in, or maybe Mr. and Mrs. A.'s reputation preceded us. I don't know. But that night, we stayed there with Heidi til the wee hours of the morning when we woke up and walked home. All was quiet, but we could see two big piles of something in the front yard which turned out to be all of Mr. A.'s clothes. The doors were unlocked, so we went in and went to our bedroom. The next day, we got the feeling they never knew we were gone because neither one said anything to us. That night, this sweet old couple gave us refuge we needed so much.
I have to say that Mr. A. didn't beat on us like Mrs. A. did. No, he had other problems we had to watch out for. It didn't take long before we realized that he was always spying and snooping on us. We had to constantly make sure that our doors were locked when we bathed or changed clothes, and make sure the windows and curtains were pulled well closed so he couldn't peek in from the outside or barge in on us when we least expected it. His behavior got progressively worse and more perverted over the next few years as we grew up.
During the next three years or so, life settled into a pattern of sorts. We were never allowed to sleep til we just woke up, not even on weekends or summer vacation. Mrs. A. woke us up early with a list of things we had to do that day and do them right or else. As we learned to read better, she'd tape notes on mirrors and doors and walls in every room we went into.
In the bathroom on the mirror , "SCRUB THE SINK", or "SCRUB THE TUB" OR SCRUB THE FLOOR OR SCRUB THE TOILET. There were notes to vacuum or wash dishes, sprinkle clothes for ironing or just for ironing, sheets to change, clothes to hang out, on and on.
It never stopped, not until the day I left to be on my own. Work was never finished in this house. Mrs. A. would tell us that if we were sitting down when she walked into the room, she could find something for us to do. When I grew up and married, it took my husband years to break me of the habit of sitting on the edge of my chair, or when he would walk into the room, I would jump up and start cleaning or working on something. He hated it but knew that was how I lived all those years. So, he got to where he'd simply walk up to me and put his arm across my chest and gently pushed me to the back of my chair to relax. It worked. Soon , I let go of that habit of always being prepared to jump up and get busy.
During that time I also learned to cook and to sew, out of necessity. The clothes that Mrs. A. had made for us when we first came to live with them, were going to have to last us a long, long, time it seems. She absolutely hated buying any clothes or shoes or anything for my sister and I. We didn't understand why. She just did. So those dresses were remade over and over, into skirts or shorts or whatever we could make them into. Since she dressed us like twins, and I was smaller than my sister, my sister's hand me downs came to me. However, they looked just like the ones I had already been wearing. At least then, she had to buy my sister something to wear. It just didn't make any sense to us at all. We never asked for anything for fear of being punished but it was hard going to school every year. Young children can unintentionally be cruel to others kids. We were living in the middle of all Mr. and Mrs. A.'s wealth, but our socks were so worn that they had holes in them or were so stretched out that they slid down into our shoes. One dress in particular, I was reminded of lately. It was my dress of many colors.
When we first came to live in Galveston, this dress was made for me. It was the only one that I remember my sister didn't have a matching one for. It had so many beautiful pinks and yellows, and lavenders. I had never seen anything like it. But it was so memorable that the other kids remembered it well, no matter what I made it into. I remember that Mrs. A. said we were not allowed to come into her bedroom. It was off limits to my sister and I. Well, that was like waving a red flag in front of our faces. We didn't like surprises or secrets and in our minds, whatever she was hiding, we needed to know about. We decided we needed to find out what she was hiding in there. So one day when she was gone, we took off our shoes and went into forbidden territory. We went snooping. There's no nice way about it. We went snooping. And my goodness!! Here was one huge drawer chocked full of socks and hosiery, packages that had never been opened yet.
Row after row of new underthings. In her closet that went from one side of the room to the other , were some of the most beautiful clothes. New ones too, that we had never even seen her wear. Everything was lined up and coordinated . Under each dress sat the matching shoes to that outfit. On the shelf above, sat the matching hat and purse to that outfit. At one end of the closet were coats and furs with matching fur trimmed hats. We had never seen the like before in all our lives! Our own poverty, our own nothingness, seemed somehow more glaring in the middle of all that opulence. It really hurt us at that point I guess, that this woman could have so much when we had so little , and we understood that she really didn't care at all about us. As I got older , I often wondered if there was a good reason she never had children of her own. I began to think that either she was so mean because she couldn't have children or......well , maybe she couldn't have children because she was so mean. I know that's child's logic but God is in the answer to that somehow.
Another of Mrs. A.'s issues with us was food. She was determined that my sister and I would learn to eat something other than beans and potatoes and cornbread. Why? I don't know. It sounded good to me and my sister. Of course, we weren't really as limited as that to what we liked to eat, but she was the boss. So meals went like this. I liked sweetmilk and my sister liked buttermilk, so Mrs. A. would give me the buttermilk and my sister the sweetmilk. Mr. A. would help us out on this one. When it was really a bad situation, he would ask Mrs. A. for something that she'd have to go to the kitchen to get for him. While she was gone, I would drink my sister's milk and she would drink mine. Or, if it was certain foods that one or the other couldn't handle, I would eat hers' off of her plate or she would eat mine off of my plate. It sounds bad, but she intentionally did this to us, and there were some foods one or the other just couldn't keep down. For me the main one was okra. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get it down my throat. It would automatically come back up. It just so happened that one such time, we sat down to eat and my sister and I were arguing with one another privately about something, and Mrs. A. served okra at that meal. Naturally, being mad at me, my sister had no intention of helping me out on this one. Not this time. So I tried to eat the okra, and sure enough, I barely made it to the restroom before it came back up. My sister was right behind me and ran back and told Mrs. A. that I threw it up. Mrs. A. accused me of doing it on purpose and dragged me back to the table for a big bowl full of okra. Everyone else had left the table, so I just sat there. I was miserable, and I could hear my sister crying in the other room. She liked okra and knew that if she had just helped me like we had been helping each other all along, I would have been okay. It looked like a standoff. I sat there, she stared at me, I sat there and she stared at me , I stared at that HUGE bowl of okra, she stared at me. I just couldn't make myself try to eat it again. This was the second try and I just couldn't do it. No matter the consequences, I didn't want to throw up again. Finally, she grabbed me up and threw me out of the room and told me to go to my room. I thought it was over....until I came into the room with my sister the next morning, ready to leave and walk to school. There on the dining table sat the biggest bowl of okra I had ever seen, it seemed that way to me at the time. Mrs. A. sent my sister on to school while she made it clear to me that I wasn't going until I ate that bowl of okra, and I had better eat it quick, because if I was late for school, I would be punished for that too. So I held my nose and downed what I could in a matter of seconds, grabbed my books and ran for the door to get outside before I threw up again. I didn't look back. I stopped to throw up, and with my face swollen from being slapped and vomiting, I walked that long road to school that morning. My sister had waited along the way to help me and together , before long we were laughing and joking and singing. Do Lord oh do Lord, do remember me.....oh, do Lord oh do Lord, do remember me. This was one of our favorites that came to us again and again and again. This was also one of the things about my sister and I that Mr. and Mrs. A. disliked the most. They seemed to get madder and frustrated even more when after punishment or a beating, when they sent us to our room, it didn't take long before my sister and I could nurse our physical and emotional wounds for each other, and before long, they would hear us talking and laughing from behind closed doors. I guess my sister was tougher than I was. That was a big difference in our personalities and character. As for me, I hated it when they got in my face, screaming at me at the top of their lungs, just inches away from me. They seldom called us by our given names. Usually, they talked or screamed AT us, not addressing us by name. I was struggling with the fear . It seemed that they enjoyed seeing the fear in our faces. Then one day, I heard someone talking about fear. They said that when someone was trying to cause fear in you, that they loved getting a reaction from you, that they fed on that reaction. I never forgot that lesson. They said if you were the victim, and someone was in your face, to just pick one eye on that person, and stare straight into it. Don't blink, don't flinch. Take every emotions out of your face and they'll give up sooner than later. I was only nine years old, going on ten, so I couldn't do much to protect myself, but I could do this. I could learn this. And so I did. Mr. A. came to call this my indian face. He hated it. Mrs. A. hated it. I loved it. It was a small amount of power in my control, no matter what they did to me. I knew that they hated this, and didn't know how to react to it.
So we lived this way daily. Anger and violence was a regular thing. One incidence was a car chase over the causeway from Galveston to Houston. Mr. A. was having a night out with his secretary and Mrs. A. found out. Mr. A. had already left his office , so Mrs. A. threw my sister and I in the back of her pink Impala , loaded up her gun and off we went. We knew what a gun was and what it was for. My sister and I were no strangers to that either. It didn't take long before we were coming over the causeway and up ahead we saw Mr. A. 's black Cacillac with his red-headed secretary sitting close by his side. Believe me, Mrs. A . saw red alright!
Mr. A. must have spotted us in his rear view mirror and knew without a doubt that he had been found out and he was in big trouble, because he sped up and the chase was on. He later told us that he knew she was out to kill him. He knew her well. The chase went on and on through the back roads of LaMarque and Dickenson, Texas that night . Finally, Mr. A. got tired of running I guess, and stopped by a huge ditch in LaMarque. Everyone jumped out of the cars, including my sister and I. We weren't going to miss this one but we didn't want to be closed in the car in case we needed to get out of there quick. And there they were, the red-headed secretary screaming at the top of her lungs in fear, and Mr. and Mrs. A. fighting, rolling around in that big ditch. She was trying to get a shot at him with the gun in her hand and he was trying to stop her and take the gun from her at the same time. Mrs. A. was a tall, stately woman of five feet nine or ten inches, not fat , but raw boned and tough. Mr. A. did manage to knock the gun out of her hand, and it was over. Well......not quite. The gun had landed right at the feet of my sister and I who were standing in front of the cars by the ditch. All was quiet, the screaming had stopped. As I looked back on this incident, I found it almost funny , simply because when my sister reached down and picked up that gun, for that one moment, I wonder what they must have been thinking. There we stood. We had the gun. We had lots of bad memories of what these two had done to us. Hmmmmm.....Suddenly, Mr. A. was telling my sister, "Give the gun to me" and Mrs. A. was hollering " NO!, don't do it, give it back to me!"
Oh the thoughts that went through our heads at that moment. But still, we were just kids and Mr. A. lunged about then and grabbed the gun from my sister's hands. What now? ........
By now, my sister and I were beginning to feel very unloved and unwanted and rejected over and over again. Author, Beth Moore , wrote in her book, "Praying God's Word", about what God's Word says about these feelings. She wrote: "God was pleased to make you His own. Pleased!! He didn't just feel sorry for you, He chose you because He delights in you! You were never meant to get through life by the skin of your teeth. You were meant to flourish in the love and acceptance of Almighty Jehovah. When He sings over you, dance!!!"
(l Samuel 12: 22)
(Isaiah 49: 15-16)
Lord God, in Your Word You pose the question, " Can a mother forget the baby at her breast?" You assure me that though SHE may forget, You will absolutely never forget me! You have engraved me on the palms of Your hands. Praise your wonderful name!!!!!
My sister and I were about to learn who we really belonged to . Praise the Lord!
