Читать книгу I Shared the Dream - Georgia Davis Powers - Страница 13

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GROWING PAINS

Who doesn’t remember being thirteen?—that in-between time when you’re neither child nor adult. Overnight I seemed to stop being a child, yet I wasn’t a woman either. Confusion and restlessness reigned. Along with wondering what I would do when I grew up, I was now trying to cope with puberty. No one told me anything about the changes that were occurring in my body. Even with all those babies born in our home, I didn’t understand the reproductive process. I just knew that having babies caused my mother to get terribly out of shape, with swollen ankles and a swaybacked walk. Why do girls have to have babies, I wondered. Why not boys? It wasn’t just having them, either—it was all the work afterward. I felt that it all fell on Mom.

Boys had all the advantages. My brothers had to work in the garage and learn to be mechanics as soon as they were old enough. They probably thought I was the one who had it easy, but I wanted to work in the garage with them. I begged my father, but he refused to let me.

“What are they doing in there that I can’t do?” I protested.

“Now, now,” my family placated me.

Like her sister Mary Kaufman, Mom was also religious. She continually told us to be good and to avoid sin. On any appropriate occasion, and on some occasions that I considered inappropriate, she would quote the Bible. One of her favorite exhortations was “What doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his soul?” I’m sure setting her children’s thoughts on higher matters was ultimately very beneficial. However, during the years I went through puberty, it became painfully apparent that it was my body, not just my soul, about which I needed more information.

My breasts started to develop and my brothers teased me, pointing to them and laughing. One morning I woke up in a pool of blood. I screamed. Mom and Cousin Frances came running. Two years earlier, Frances had asked me to go to the store to get her a box of Kotex.

“What’s Kotex?” I had asked.

“Never mind,” she had said, “You’ll find out soon enough.” I found out that morning.

Frances lent me an elastic Kotex belt and pad, then Mom sent me to the bathroom to wash and put it on. “You’ll have to wear this until your menstruation stops. Change the napkin often, wash often, but don’t get in the tub,” she admonished.

That’s all she said! Nothing about pregnancy or sex, just that I would bleed for three or four days every month. How disgusting, I thought. I know people can smell the odor. I don’t like this.

I didn’t understand about sex, and certainly not love, except I knew it made people miserable sometimes. About that time, Cousin Frances—my beautiful Cousin Frances with the cafe-au-lait complexion and impish freckles—had fallen in love with a married man who had broken her heart.

When I was fifteen, I learned about sex the crudest way a girl can. A man, who was ten years older than I, lived down the street with his mother. Fie had a thin build, curly black hair, and walked with a limp because one of his legs was shorter than the other. He was always nice to me, giving me candy and other treats when I visited his mother.

One afternoon he saw me on the sidewalk and said, “Georgia, let’s go to my house and make some candy.” It sounded like fun and I loved candy, so I went.

Once there, he said, “Come out back to get some coal for the stove.” When we got inside the shed, he grabbed me. He forced me down onto the dirt floor, pulled open his pants, and stuck his penis into me. It hurt badly. I yelled, kicked, and tried to push him off.

“Let me up, you dirty dog!” I screamed, but he kept on moving inside me. Though I fought with all my might, he was much too strong. Finally, he let me up. Blood streamed down my leg. Sobbing, I ran straight home, went to the bathroom, and began to wash. I didn’t understand what had happened and I didn’t feel close enough to anyone to talk about it. I kept the awful secret to myself, but I suffered over it for a very long time. Now, as I reveal what happened for the first time, I feel relieved to finally break my silence. If I’d had a daughter, I pray to God I would have built enough trust and love between us so she could tell me if anyone had violated her body.

In a way, though, I was luckier than many women who have been raped; I’ve never been tortured by the idea that it was my fault or that there was something I could have done to prevent it. I did not tell anyone because I felt dirty. I felt that I had been tarnished by losing my virginity, but I always knew whose fault it was. The rapist had abused me and I hated him for his crime, but I did not hate myself.

After the rape, the man stopped coming to my house and I didn’t visit his mother again as long as he lived there. So, I was surprised when, months later, I came home from school and met him coming out my front door. I looked away and said nothing, just passing by him and going straight inside.

Later I learned that the man had come to ask my parents if he could marry me after I graduated from high school. As I entered the house, I heard Pop saying angrily, “If he ever touches my daughter, I’ll cut off his head and throw it out in the snow!”

I just stood there, afraid to say anything. I had never heard my father speak with such anger. It made me uneasy, so I just kept quiet. I thought to myself, sadly, You’re too late, Daddy, he already has.

Because of the rape, I was slow to acknowledge my burgeoning sexuality. Boys, however, had begun to notice me. Joe Ray Jr., who had always been a close friend to my brothers and me, now wanted to spend time alone with me. Often, he would come and sit with me on the porch of wherever I was baby-sitting.

Eventually, though, my traumatized feelings calmed down and I began to look at boys in a new light. I fantasized about Carroll Mason, a good-looking boy I met at a party in Bloomfield, where I had been visiting my cousin Josephine Bishop. I wondered if I would ever fall in love and get married.

Then I met Duke, the first boy for whom I felt a real passion. I was a senior at Central High, the Black high school, when he transferred from Crispus Attucks, the Black high school in Indianapolis. I met him at Coach Willie Kean’s house on Grand Avenue, but I had already noticed him in my trigonometry class. George Duke Beasley. He wore suits custom-tailored by his brother in Indianapolis and was the star of Central’s basketball team. We became lovers.

Duke kept a room with an older couple, but his meals were not furnished; he was always hungry. My love for him was such that I gave him my lunch money. I thought this an important indication of the depth of my affection. Because the Keans were one of the families I cleaned for, I had a key to their house. We would meet there when we knew they were going out. One night, though, they caught us.

“What’s that?” whispered Duke. “It sounds like the back door opened.”

“Quick!” I said. “Get under the bed!”

Straightening my clothes, I went out to meet the Keans and nervously explained that I had come over to do some cleaning. I went home and laid down on the couch, worrying about Duke under the bed at the Kean’s. About two hours later, I saw him coming up our sidewalk and I rushed outside. “What happened?”

“After you left, they came into the bedroom and Coach called, ‘All right, Duke, you can come out now.’ He lectured me for an hour about how I could have gotten you pregnant.” After Duke left, I tossed and turned all night. When morning came, I told Mom I was too sick to go to school. Around noon I told her I was feeling better and was going over to the Kean’s to clean. Because it was the middle of the day, I was alone in the house. By the time Coach and his wife Helen came home, the place was spotless. I had cleaned like I’d never cleaned before.

I apologized to Mrs. Kean. She said, “Georgia, you know what you did was wrong, and you know I’m going to have to tell your parents.”

I was frantic. I couldn’t let her tell my parents. I ran down to the basement where Coach Kean was working.

“Mrs. Kean says she’s going to tell my parents what happened last night. I know it was wrong and I apologize, but you can’t let her tell. If you do, I’ll have to tell her how you pat me on the behind when she’s not looking.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.

My stomach was in knots for the next few days. As time passed and nothing happened, however, I decided I was out of the woods and relaxed. I had intuitively negotiated from a position of strength and won. It was a lesson not lost on me.

I had always hoped to go to college, but I really didn’t know how I would do it. I had no money for tuition and books and there was no way Pop or Mom could help me. My teachers knew I wanted to go, so Helen Kean and her sister Naomi Lattimore persuaded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority to give me a two-year scholarship to Louisville Municipal College. Duke received a basketball scholarship to the same school.

Duke and I graduated high school together in the spring of 1940. We celebrated by going to one of the few restaurants in the area where Blacks could eat inside. It was a roadhouse on River Road owned by Mrs. Gertrude Ake, a friendly Black widow. Her specialties were tasty country fried chicken and liver and onions with sweet potatoes.

After graduation, Duke went to Indianapolis for the summer and I went to work in Louisville at Grant’s Five and Ten Cent Store on Fourth Street. We hated to part, but we knew it was only for summer vacation.

At Grant’s I worked as a counter girl, serving hot dogs and root beer. “Georgia,” my supervisor admonished on my first day, “you can serve colored people, but don’t let them eat at the counter.”

I said nothing, but I knew I could never tell anyone that they couldn’t stand at the counter and eat. In my third week on the job, my physics teacher, Victor Perry, came in. He saw me and walked up to the counter, where I stood. “Mr. Perry, would you like a hot dog and a root beer?” I asked.

“I believe I would,” he answered.

I’m sure he assumed it was all right for me to serve him or I wouldn’t have offered. He stood at the counter eating and as we talked, I could see my supervisor watching. I knew what was coming. When Mr. Perry left, she strode over to me. “Georgia, go to the office at the end of the day,” she said sternly. I didn’t wait until the end of the day, though. I knew she meant to fire me and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. I quit then and there.

Mom’s last child, my brother Carl, was born that summer. I was sixteen and embarrassed that Mom was pregnant again. When Carl was born, I loved him dearly, but I wouldn’t take him outside of the house because I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d had a baby. Inside our home, though, I held and cuddled him all the time. I may have been compensating for my resentment of Mom’s pregnancy, or I may have had a premonition that our time with Carl would be short.

Both Duke and I did above-average work our freshman year. We had no money and few new clothes—but we had each other. We were happily planning our future together when I learned that he had left Indianapolis because a girl had been pregnant with his son. He had not wanted to marry her, but after his son was born, he supported him. Duke didn’t tell me about the baby. I found out by reading a letter he had written to his mother. I cried for three days and refused to tell my parents what was wrong. When I finally did tell them, Pop, who had always been wary of Duke, said, “I knew there was something about him I didn’t like.”

At the end of the school year, Duke went back to work in Indianapolis. Heartbroken over what I had found out about him, I looked for a summer job in Louisville. I went to work for the Tuckers, a well-off family who lived on Cherokee Road, an upper-class neighborhood. Every morning, Mr. Tucker would get the Courier-Journal to “see what the stock market is doing.” This was my first contact with people who had unearned income; everyone else I knew labored for a living. While Mr. Tucker was studying the stock market, I was working every day of the week, from seven in the morning until it was nearly dark, keeping his house clean. I made seven dollars a week.

I’m sure that the Tuckers weren’t any worse than other people who hired domestic help and that they were probably paying the going rate. It was my early experience at this job and others like it that gave me a deep conviction that poor, working people don’t “get their share of the pie” in our country. My experience with this type of unfairness made me determined to do something about it.

Before school began again, my brother Jay, who had a good job, gave me a special present. I didn’t have many clothes, mostly what I could make myself. One day Jay said, “Georgia, I want you to have a new coat when you go back to school. I have an account at Levy Brothers. Go and get what you want and charge it to me.”

In fact, he let me buy two coats—a fitted, black dress coat with jeweled buttons down the front and a medium blue, plaid wraparound coat. I felt like a million dollars in those coats.

That fall, when I returned to Municipal for my second year, I made a discouraging discovery. I found out for the first time about the discrimination within the Black race based on shades of skin color. If you were light, you were invited into the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority; if you were brown, then Delta Sigma Theta accepted you; and if you were dark, you pledged Zeta Phi Beta. I was in the Ivy League Club, a precursor to belonging to Alpha Kappa Alpha. My family was composed of people with a wide range of skin tones, but I despised these distinctions. Disgusted, I dropped out of the Ivy League Club and refused to pledge a sorority.

For his second year of college, Duke went to A and T College in North Carolina. When school ended in the spring, he came to see me on his way home to Indianapolis. We went out to dinner at Betty’s Grill on Tenth Street. Duke knew he had hurt me, but he didn’t know how badly.

“Georgia, I’m sorry I hurt you. I love you. I want us to get married.” He pulled a package out of his pocket and handed me an engagement ring.

I knew what I had to say. “I love you too, Duke, but I can’t marry you.”

“Why, Georgia?”

“I don’t think I could ever accept that you had a family and kept it a secret from me. You betrayed my trust by doing that. If you couldn’t tell me something that important, I can’t marry you, no matter how much I love you.”

It was hard for me to say, and when he cried, I cried too. We parted, two very sad young people. We did not meet again until twenty-five years later, when he came to Louisville as part of his work as regional director of the National Equal Employment Opportunity Office.