To Feel
I am a fifty-seven year old man. I do not know what a seven-year old girl feels when she is raped at her aunt’s house. I cannot tell you what a twelve-year-old girl feels when she is given liquor and coerced into multiple sex. I cannot feel the loss of hope which by high school will bring a suicide attempt. I cannot explain why trained counselors do not recognize drug, alcohol, and sexual abuse in children and adolescents. I cannot tell you why ministers and lawyers abuse their trust and regard their female client’s sex as the property of all men, something they share in common with far too many men. I can tell you tell you that there are two persons who hate Deion. One is a woman of self-issued prestige who is angry and jealous that Deion had far more men than she did. The other is a male who is angry that a woman, reportedly free with her sex, did not share sex with him. Both are angry for the sex they did not get.
This story was gently but persistently drawn from a woman in prison who had virtually no self-knowledge when I met her. I have spent over five hundred hours in her prison’s visitation room. As well, I spent many days in Carroll County, Tennessee, in Deion’s home. This was time with her children, parents, relatives, friends (the few that deserve that title) and community members who rightly or wrongly judged her.
Over two years ago I met a girl in need of becoming a woman. She had two children and struggled mostly just to be a good and supportive mother. She was 29 at that time and had spent the last seven years of her life in prison. I would know her almost one year before I realized she was not guilty of her crime. She intuitively knew that, but she could not verbalize her lack of legal guilt while, as always in her life, particularly when raped, she accepted guilt when handed it from overbearing males, rapists, judges, and prosecutors. Thus I suggested to her this story, which we both put together, in an effort to understand her life and suggest her innocence.
Understanding her own life was necessary for Deion to mature and be an adult mother. Establishing Deion’s innocence, for herself and myself initially, was to eliminate her own crippling guilt. Secondly it would allow her children some insight into how their mother became one of societies lowest, a convicted murderer. These children have a right to know that their mother is not the person the newspapers convicted. They also have a right to know the relatives and friends who took their mother down. Deion’s innocence will not necessarily get her out of prison since most of her appeals have been squandered by her less than competent lawyers. But understanding her innocence will definitely improve her emotional well being and the well being of her children, Drew, and Savannah, now 13 and 12.
This is a story about sex. It is how sex so quickly ruins a little girl and prevents her from maturing. This story is about the males who impose sex on little girls and the females who condone it. Drug and alcohol addictions do not exist without purpose. Deion’s life was so traumatic and futile that by age fourteen alcohol and drugs were her only escape from the harrowing reality of life in a small Tennessee town. Throughout this story I tried to determine what Deion felt as she went from trauma to tragedy in a self-destructive life. I regret that I never did, or haven’t yet, determined what she felt. I hope that as this story is told someone else will feel what she felt and give her the comfort that I, to my own dismay, cannot.
Deion and I are from the polar ends of the social class structure in America. Being of opposite sex makes it no easier to feel and understand each other. But we are both parents, and that single thread, parental concern for our children, became the common conversation through so many visitation hours. I’ll keep trying to feel what she felt. She will keep trying to tell me. She recently shrugged her shoulders and dropped head between them as a turtle does trying to escape danger, “You cannot feel what I do. You’ve never lost everything. You’ve never had everything taken away. My children, my life.” She emerged from her shell crying, one of the few times in that prison visitation room, and quickly went to the rest room before someone saw her. I can only despair at failure. I am the upper class. My life has been one of advantages. I might understand Deion, but will I ever feel what she feels? Listen to her tell her own story, then tell me what you hear.
THE SEX OF HURT
At sixteen Denise had a house, a husband, a one-year old baby, and a lot of friends to party with. Five years younger, Deion viewed her sister’s life as both mature and complete. It was more fun to be at her sister’s than to stay home where their invalid mother dominated the messy doublewide. “Being at Denise’s was cool,” said Deion years later.
She went on errands with her sister, the two young women riding in the car and waving to friends as they cruised to the store. All Denise’s in-laws and friends knew Deion. She had made herself visible and useful in a dozen ways not the least of which was cleaning Denise’s house and babysitting her little boy, Kurt. All this work had its reward as Deion gained entrance to her sister’s social life. Cigarettes were an assumed privilege not all fifth or sixth graders had. Even marijuana and alcohol were available, a glowing reward Deion felt quite proud to share with her own girl friends. All of this adult partaking seemed to bridge the age gap past adolescence and Deion felt quite grown-up and fortunate.
For Denise, being a housewife was more fun than school, even if the “house” was a bedroom in her in-law’s home. A year and a half after the wedding, Denise and Tony, with FFA assistance, built the small brick two bedroom they would live in for the next twenty years. Deion was there for all of it. Her sister’s life was interesting. Best of all, it was just one mile by gravel road, shorter through fields, from her parent’s home.
Unchangeability and relationships are everything to a stagnant rural life. Family reunions may bring a hundred. Relations walk in the door and don’t need to knock. Unless they have come from afar they needn’t say hello. They fit right in. Kin Folk relations are special. But the most intriguing relation to young people is the sexual relation. In spite of marriage at fifteen, Denise found the opportunities to experiment in extra-marital relations within the security of her nuptial bond.
Deion’s parents one mile away, felt comfortable knowing Deion was at her sister’s house in her adolescent years. She was also less of a burden to them. Deion looked forward to being at Denise’s on week-ends. Ten to twenty cars would park out front and the small house would fill with teenagers and youth of their early twenties. Deion was often the youngest partier and felt quite mature for it. On a winter’s evening in Deion’s seventh grade her sister, urged by her husband, declared “you’re not a real woman until you’ve slept with a man.” Twelve-year-old Deion, who had not started menstruating, was having a hard time deciding if she wanted sex. To help her with the decision, Denise and a few men gave her extra whiskey. With laughter, camaraderie, and coercion, Denise, Tony, and friends got Deion well intoxicated. Shortly before she passed out Billy M., a high school senior, gave her his drunken sex in Kurt’s bedroom. After he was done, Gary B., a young man in his twenties gave sex so painfully that even in her drunk state Deion cried out and tried to fight him off without success. A steady flow of persons went in and out of the Kurt’s bedroom to watch Deion’s sexual initiation. A third fellow climbed on but Deion fought him off before passing out from the whiskey.
It has been forty-five years since I was in seventh grade. It was a Catholic School in Eugene, Oregon and girls did not wear make-up, not even lipstick. No one smoked anything. I was in my twenties before I could imagine events such as Deion went through at twelve. What did she feel? I can only reconstruct events. Did she give consent for the sex? “No, it just happened,” said Deion nineteen years later. Did she like the sex? “No, but it was part of being a woman. That’s what I was told anyway. I loved the parties. But not the sex. I was taught girls are supposed to give sex to guys, it’s what they’re supposed to do.”
The next day’s hangover was tempered by Denise and Tony’s congratulations. It had been a great party and Deion had given a good performance. Deion felt physically sick and emotionally confused. If sex was so much fun why did it hurt and why did everyone laugh at her? Monday morning she rode the school bus with all the other seventh graders.
Sitting at her desk in school, her mind was solely on her education in her sister’s house. Classroom learning had no relevancy anymore.
A few days later, hoping to choose her boyfriends rather than have Denise choose, Deion went flirting. She took a beer in her pocket (proof of maturity) and a few cigarettes. She walked a short distance up the road to “KC” E.’s house. The sixteen-year-old fellow was working on his car when Deion arrived. She hung around talking of nothing, smoking, nursing the beer bottle and feeling cool. That weekend as couples began arriving at the Taylor’s, Deion commented to Denise that KC “was cute” and wondered if he was coming. Tony Taylor heard this and was immediately on the phone to KC. Her brother-in-law’s words remain etched in Deion’s memory; “Deion’s here and wants to fuck your brains out,” said Tony into the telephone. Embarrassment and fear gripped Deion.
The party added one more as KC soon arrived for his promised sexual encounter. He sat at the kitchen table having a beer with Denise, Deion and some others. Deion was scared and unable to look at him. She said little and tried to remain calm. She knew everyone had heard Tony. She knew she was expected to perform. “Somehow I was again in the bedroom,” related Deion at this later date. KC immediately pulled her pants down to her ankles, her shirt and bra remained in place. There was no kissing, fondling, nor thought of lubricant. He simply dropped his own pants to his ankles and mounted Deion. He forced his way in and Deion cried in pain. “He didn’t care that he was hurting me. He just kept at it saying ‘relax, relax and it won’t hurt as much.’” The pain was terrible and all Deion could do was endure and wait for it to end. When he ejaculated he was happy to announce, “feel that?” Deion felt a fluid warmness but did not know what it was. She could only think, “He hurt me, he didn’t care.” When it was over she had to return to the party a spectacle trying to hide the pain. Rooster proud, KC had little to say. There was no affection involved.
The next day Deion consulted her older sister about the pain. “He must have a big penis,” was Denise’s admiring comment. She happily asked Deion if she had measured his penis. It was all a grand time for Denise. It was painful and humiliating for twelve year old Deion.
Years later, in high school, Deion and a girlfriend, Lenette, were searching for marijuana. Lenette’s uncle suggested they try to get some from KC, a fellow Deion had avoided for several years. Lenette dropped Deion at KC’s and went to town on an errand. Deion soon found herself in the bedroom with KC, in the bed, with all their clothes off. This time she was fully aware of what was happening. “I knew before I stopped there it would happen, he was that kind of guy.” Deion was fortified by “eight or ten beers” and she mounted KC herself on top. Without emotion she pumped on him until he ejaculated. Then she rolled over and went to sleep. She woke up to the sound of Lenette at the door. “Deion’s not here,” said KC. Lenette cursed and called him a liar. Deion hurriedly dressed and as KC came to the bedroom she remembered her mission had been to get marijuana. “Got any pot?” said Deion. When KC said no Deion wordlessly passed by him and joined Lenette.
“Why did you have sex with him that second time?” I asked Deion now fifteen years later. With determination she replied, “I wanted to prove he couldn’t hurt me. I wanted to show him he had no more power to hurt me. I’d had so much sex by then he couldn’t hurt me. I had to show him.” Then she stopped and looked thoughtful; “You’ve always asked me why I had so much sex. Is that why? To prove to myself, and them, that they couldn’t hurt me?” I couldn’t answer. I could only suggest “Deion, that was a very sick culture you grew up in. You were wounded badly as a child. Only now are the wounds becoming evident. Perhaps now you can begin to heal.”
RAPE IS A SOUTHERN RURAL PEROGATIVE
Nothing in my life has prepared me to understand these events in Deion’s life. They are so far from my own experience that I can only try to relive them through the maximum detail I can get Deion to reveal. Even at that, our lives have so little in common that I miss many significant things simply because I do not know enough to ask. The early revelation of this abuse, and I am the one who first used the word abuse in regard this activity, came on November 11th, 2000. It was my fourth visit with Deion and we discussed sex since it had come up before. She recalled sex with dozens and dozens of men and could not remember when it started. I asked her how many times she had been raped. Tony, her brother-in-law's rape of her had been related early to me since she was especially bitter about it and it was in public record. She confided her rape in the Carroll County jail and I asked her when else it had happened. Three rapes was the final number she gave at that time. It was how she kept insisting that she did not know how much sex she had due to her drinking and blackouts that caused me to probe this area. Both the events and their chronology were vague in Deion’s mind but I insisted something was wrong here and I asked her to try her best to remember. In December she wrote a letter and gave the following account:
My mom confronted me about this once and I couldn't stand the thought of it and refused to believe it happened. She told me she heard I was getting drunk at Tony and Denise's, so drunk I would pass out and they would let people have sex with me for money while I was passed out. I got real mad at mom for saying such a thing! Even though I couldn't remember what happened because I was passed out, I refused to believe such a thing happened! I felt so betrayed by my own sister, even though I refused to believe it!
Until one night my cousin, (Joe F.) and I were out partying and he kept hitting on me and trying to touch me. I told him to stop that he was my cousin and that it was not right. He looked at me so cold with his drunken eyes and laughed and said "I've already fucked you once! Why won't you let me again!" I looked at him crazy and said "No you haven't fucked me! You're fucking crazy if you think you have!" He said "Yes I have fucked you and it was good but you don't remember it. I fucked you one night while you were passed out at Tony and Denise's along with two other guys!"
Even though I couldn't remember, after him saying this I knew it must have happened. It felt like someone punched me right in the face. Even with the embarrassment and feeling of disgust I looked at him and said, "No, you didn't. I don't believe you." I felt so dirty. The thought of having sex with him disgusted me. I felt like a child who had been made fun of because he didn't wear nice clothes like other kids in school. I felt so alone, sad, angry, betrayed. I couldn't believe my sister let this happen.
In our visit over the New Years week-end the story of this event came forth. Deion had been at Denise’s and they were playing quarters. In this game you bounce a quarter off the table into a glass of beer. If you miss you must drink the beer but if you succeed you choose who drinks the beer. Seated around the table with Deion were her cousin, Joe F., Fred N., “Junior” K., Denise and Tony Taylor. The table soon had a conspiracy to get Deion drunk which she did. Deion does not remember what happened because she blacked out while drinking. She awoke the next morning naked in the bedroom and remembers an empty whiskey bottle next to her. She put something on and went to the front room. She asked Denise what had happened the night before. Denise cursed at her and pointed to a spot on the floor. Deion had vomited from the alcohol and Denise accused her of almost throwing up on the toddler, Curt. Deion felt very bad and didn’t recall the event until her mother confronted her sometime later. She definitely remembers this as the first time she blacked out. After this blackouts would be common and most all her friends have seen her in this walking blacked out state.
The revelation of this story became a turning point in my relationship with Deion. She insisted to me that her sex while blacked out was her fault since, in the words of Denise, “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t got drunk.” I sent Deion copies of Tennessee State law as well as Washington and other states. All listed sex with person’s unable to give consent, for any reason be it drugs, alcohol, or mental retardation, as rape. I further sent Deion all the state statues on rape and the definitions for their application. Of particular interest is the age of Deion when these events took place, and the age of the perpetrators. By mid January 2001 it was clear to me that Deion had been raped dozens if not hundreds of times from age twelve onward. The difficulty was in sorting out the ones she remembered and the one’s she only heard about from others. In her own mind she had yet to even begin to deal with all that rape. She was in denial.
It was at this time that I noticed my own emotional crisis set in. I was suffering the trauma of a person who is close to a rape victim. I called various rape crisis centers and hospitals in Washington. Fortunately, I live in a state where rape is taken seriously. I visited several centers and soon began learning the subject. I bought books on rape and sent a copy of each one I bought to Deion. Upon the advice of a counselor I sought treatment for Deion even though she did not ask for it. When we talked of a counselor she refused group counseling and refused the paid staff of the prison. None of it was effective she felt. Good fortune was ours for the prison chaplain set Deion a one to one appointment with a volunteer. This wonderful woman, Carolyn L., would play a major part in Deion’s recovery. For myself, I had to be content with self-help books.
It a late January, 2001, visit, while talking around the subject of Deion’s sex life, she relayed the story of Gary B., the uncle of her good friend Lenette. This story must have surfaced due to her recent awareness that sex without consent is rape. It seems that Deion and Lenette had gone to Arkansas with Gary. The young girls had partied often at Gary and his wife Arlene at their double-wide mobile home. Gary naturally bought the fifteen year old girls wine coolers on the trip to Arkansas and pot was smoked as well. Deion and Lenette were dropped at Garys sister’s house in Osceola while he went on to visit relatives further upstate. Gary returned and spent only one night at his sisters before returning to Huntingdon. It was during that night, while Deion was sleeping on the couch, that Gary silently came to her. She woke up to her P.J. bottoms being pulled down and Gary spreading her legs. He said nothing but only pushed his sex on her and when he was done he pulled out and left. There was no kissing, petting, foreplay, or talk. He didn’t even pull her P.J.s back up. When they left the next day Deion felt very sick. She sat in the back of the crew cab pickup and said nothing the whole way home. She obviously suffered post rape trauma. Deion did not want sex with him but she did nothing. She lay there inert while he raped her. I asked carefully and persistantly, “why didn’t you fight him off, call out for help, report him when you got home.” Deion looked at me puzzled and confused. “What could I do? What was I supposed to do?” she said. It was clearly beyond her to understand resistance to a man she partied with. At home she understood and avoided Gary’s further advances. She felt terrible around Arlene because she like Arlene so much. “Why did you feel guilty around Arlene?” I asked. “Because I’d had sex with her husband,” was Deion’s reply. She was unable to understand she was raped. Subsequent investigation located this episode at the summer of 1986. Deion was 15 and Gary was over thirty. It was statutory rape as well as 3rd degree rape. Yet Deion did not understand the crime. The event of unwanted sex had become such a common part of Deion’s life that she could not see reality or law.
Contributing to her confusion was the rural attitudes about rape. Her Nashville lawyer reports that rape convictions in rural areas are not common. “They are easy to fight, the court is always against the woman.” It seems that only class differences will produce a rape conviction. That is, if a lower class male rapes an upper class woman there might be a conviction. It a black man rapes a white woman there might be a conviction. But if the woman is of the lower classes, and Deion lived in a trailer, or if she is known to have had sex with others, a charge of rape will seldom be pursued by the prosecutor’s office. This gives a fertile environment for males to continue forcing sex on selective women and girls. The women and girls themselves have surrendered to the inevitable and stop fighting back. But the character harm enlarges as generation after generation of women are born and raised without self-respect.
This story was gently but persistently drawn from a woman in prison who had virtually no self-knowledge when I met her. I have spent over five hundred hours in her prison’s visitation room. As well, I spent many days in Carroll County, Tennessee, in Deion’s home. This was time with her children, parents, relatives, friends (the few that deserve that title) and community members who rightly or wrongly judged her.
Over two years ago I met a girl in need of becoming a woman. She had two children and struggled mostly just to be a good and supportive mother. She was 29 at that time and had spent the last seven years of her life in prison. I would know her almost one year before I realized she was not guilty of her crime. She intuitively knew that, but she could not verbalize her lack of legal guilt while, as always in her life, particularly when raped, she accepted guilt when handed it from overbearing males, rapists, judges, and prosecutors. Thus I suggested to her this story, which we both put together, in an effort to understand her life and suggest her innocence.
Understanding her own life was necessary for Deion to mature and be an adult mother. Establishing Deion’s innocence, for herself and myself initially, was to eliminate her own crippling guilt. Secondly it would allow her children some insight into how their mother became one of societies lowest, a convicted murderer. These children have a right to know that their mother is not the person the newspapers convicted. They also have a right to know the relatives and friends who took their mother down. Deion’s innocence will not necessarily get her out of prison since most of her appeals have been squandered by her less than competent lawyers. But understanding her innocence will definitely improve her emotional well being and the well being of her children, Drew, and Savannah, now 13 and 12.
This is a story about sex. It is how sex so quickly ruins a little girl and prevents her from maturing. This story is about the males who impose sex on little girls and the females who condone it. Drug and alcohol addictions do not exist without purpose. Deion’s life was so traumatic and futile that by age fourteen alcohol and drugs were her only escape from the harrowing reality of life in a small Tennessee town. Throughout this story I tried to determine what Deion felt as she went from trauma to tragedy in a self-destructive life. I regret that I never did, or haven’t yet, determined what she felt. I hope that as this story is told someone else will feel what she felt and give her the comfort that I, to my own dismay, cannot.
Deion and I are from the polar ends of the social class structure in America. Being of opposite sex makes it no easier to feel and understand each other. But we are both parents, and that single thread, parental concern for our children, became the common conversation through so many visitation hours. I’ll keep trying to feel what she felt. She will keep trying to tell me. She recently shrugged her shoulders and dropped head between them as a turtle does trying to escape danger, “You cannot feel what I do. You’ve never lost everything. You’ve never had everything taken away. My children, my life.” She emerged from her shell crying, one of the few times in that prison visitation room, and quickly went to the rest room before someone saw her. I can only despair at failure. I am the upper class. My life has been one of advantages. I might understand Deion, but will I ever feel what she feels? Listen to her tell her own story, then tell me what you hear.
THE SEX OF HURT
At sixteen Denise had a house, a husband, a one-year old baby, and a lot of friends to party with. Five years younger, Deion viewed her sister’s life as both mature and complete. It was more fun to be at her sister’s than to stay home where their invalid mother dominated the messy doublewide. “Being at Denise’s was cool,” said Deion years later.
She went on errands with her sister, the two young women riding in the car and waving to friends as they cruised to the store. All Denise’s in-laws and friends knew Deion. She had made herself visible and useful in a dozen ways not the least of which was cleaning Denise’s house and babysitting her little boy, Kurt. All this work had its reward as Deion gained entrance to her sister’s social life. Cigarettes were an assumed privilege not all fifth or sixth graders had. Even marijuana and alcohol were available, a glowing reward Deion felt quite proud to share with her own girl friends. All of this adult partaking seemed to bridge the age gap past adolescence and Deion felt quite grown-up and fortunate.
For Denise, being a housewife was more fun than school, even if the “house” was a bedroom in her in-law’s home. A year and a half after the wedding, Denise and Tony, with FFA assistance, built the small brick two bedroom they would live in for the next twenty years. Deion was there for all of it. Her sister’s life was interesting. Best of all, it was just one mile by gravel road, shorter through fields, from her parent’s home.
Unchangeability and relationships are everything to a stagnant rural life. Family reunions may bring a hundred. Relations walk in the door and don’t need to knock. Unless they have come from afar they needn’t say hello. They fit right in. Kin Folk relations are special. But the most intriguing relation to young people is the sexual relation. In spite of marriage at fifteen, Denise found the opportunities to experiment in extra-marital relations within the security of her nuptial bond.
Deion’s parents one mile away, felt comfortable knowing Deion was at her sister’s house in her adolescent years. She was also less of a burden to them. Deion looked forward to being at Denise’s on week-ends. Ten to twenty cars would park out front and the small house would fill with teenagers and youth of their early twenties. Deion was often the youngest partier and felt quite mature for it. On a winter’s evening in Deion’s seventh grade her sister, urged by her husband, declared “you’re not a real woman until you’ve slept with a man.” Twelve-year-old Deion, who had not started menstruating, was having a hard time deciding if she wanted sex. To help her with the decision, Denise and a few men gave her extra whiskey. With laughter, camaraderie, and coercion, Denise, Tony, and friends got Deion well intoxicated. Shortly before she passed out Billy M., a high school senior, gave her his drunken sex in Kurt’s bedroom. After he was done, Gary B., a young man in his twenties gave sex so painfully that even in her drunk state Deion cried out and tried to fight him off without success. A steady flow of persons went in and out of the Kurt’s bedroom to watch Deion’s sexual initiation. A third fellow climbed on but Deion fought him off before passing out from the whiskey.
It has been forty-five years since I was in seventh grade. It was a Catholic School in Eugene, Oregon and girls did not wear make-up, not even lipstick. No one smoked anything. I was in my twenties before I could imagine events such as Deion went through at twelve. What did she feel? I can only reconstruct events. Did she give consent for the sex? “No, it just happened,” said Deion nineteen years later. Did she like the sex? “No, but it was part of being a woman. That’s what I was told anyway. I loved the parties. But not the sex. I was taught girls are supposed to give sex to guys, it’s what they’re supposed to do.”
The next day’s hangover was tempered by Denise and Tony’s congratulations. It had been a great party and Deion had given a good performance. Deion felt physically sick and emotionally confused. If sex was so much fun why did it hurt and why did everyone laugh at her? Monday morning she rode the school bus with all the other seventh graders.
Sitting at her desk in school, her mind was solely on her education in her sister’s house. Classroom learning had no relevancy anymore.
A few days later, hoping to choose her boyfriends rather than have Denise choose, Deion went flirting. She took a beer in her pocket (proof of maturity) and a few cigarettes. She walked a short distance up the road to “KC” E.’s house. The sixteen-year-old fellow was working on his car when Deion arrived. She hung around talking of nothing, smoking, nursing the beer bottle and feeling cool. That weekend as couples began arriving at the Taylor’s, Deion commented to Denise that KC “was cute” and wondered if he was coming. Tony Taylor heard this and was immediately on the phone to KC. Her brother-in-law’s words remain etched in Deion’s memory; “Deion’s here and wants to fuck your brains out,” said Tony into the telephone. Embarrassment and fear gripped Deion.
The party added one more as KC soon arrived for his promised sexual encounter. He sat at the kitchen table having a beer with Denise, Deion and some others. Deion was scared and unable to look at him. She said little and tried to remain calm. She knew everyone had heard Tony. She knew she was expected to perform. “Somehow I was again in the bedroom,” related Deion at this later date. KC immediately pulled her pants down to her ankles, her shirt and bra remained in place. There was no kissing, fondling, nor thought of lubricant. He simply dropped his own pants to his ankles and mounted Deion. He forced his way in and Deion cried in pain. “He didn’t care that he was hurting me. He just kept at it saying ‘relax, relax and it won’t hurt as much.’” The pain was terrible and all Deion could do was endure and wait for it to end. When he ejaculated he was happy to announce, “feel that?” Deion felt a fluid warmness but did not know what it was. She could only think, “He hurt me, he didn’t care.” When it was over she had to return to the party a spectacle trying to hide the pain. Rooster proud, KC had little to say. There was no affection involved.
The next day Deion consulted her older sister about the pain. “He must have a big penis,” was Denise’s admiring comment. She happily asked Deion if she had measured his penis. It was all a grand time for Denise. It was painful and humiliating for twelve year old Deion.
Years later, in high school, Deion and a girlfriend, Lenette, were searching for marijuana. Lenette’s uncle suggested they try to get some from KC, a fellow Deion had avoided for several years. Lenette dropped Deion at KC’s and went to town on an errand. Deion soon found herself in the bedroom with KC, in the bed, with all their clothes off. This time she was fully aware of what was happening. “I knew before I stopped there it would happen, he was that kind of guy.” Deion was fortified by “eight or ten beers” and she mounted KC herself on top. Without emotion she pumped on him until he ejaculated. Then she rolled over and went to sleep. She woke up to the sound of Lenette at the door. “Deion’s not here,” said KC. Lenette cursed and called him a liar. Deion hurriedly dressed and as KC came to the bedroom she remembered her mission had been to get marijuana. “Got any pot?” said Deion. When KC said no Deion wordlessly passed by him and joined Lenette.
“Why did you have sex with him that second time?” I asked Deion now fifteen years later. With determination she replied, “I wanted to prove he couldn’t hurt me. I wanted to show him he had no more power to hurt me. I’d had so much sex by then he couldn’t hurt me. I had to show him.” Then she stopped and looked thoughtful; “You’ve always asked me why I had so much sex. Is that why? To prove to myself, and them, that they couldn’t hurt me?” I couldn’t answer. I could only suggest “Deion, that was a very sick culture you grew up in. You were wounded badly as a child. Only now are the wounds becoming evident. Perhaps now you can begin to heal.”
RAPE IS A SOUTHERN RURAL PEROGATIVE
Nothing in my life has prepared me to understand these events in Deion’s life. They are so far from my own experience that I can only try to relive them through the maximum detail I can get Deion to reveal. Even at that, our lives have so little in common that I miss many significant things simply because I do not know enough to ask. The early revelation of this abuse, and I am the one who first used the word abuse in regard this activity, came on November 11th, 2000. It was my fourth visit with Deion and we discussed sex since it had come up before. She recalled sex with dozens and dozens of men and could not remember when it started. I asked her how many times she had been raped. Tony, her brother-in-law's rape of her had been related early to me since she was especially bitter about it and it was in public record. She confided her rape in the Carroll County jail and I asked her when else it had happened. Three rapes was the final number she gave at that time. It was how she kept insisting that she did not know how much sex she had due to her drinking and blackouts that caused me to probe this area. Both the events and their chronology were vague in Deion’s mind but I insisted something was wrong here and I asked her to try her best to remember. In December she wrote a letter and gave the following account:
My mom confronted me about this once and I couldn't stand the thought of it and refused to believe it happened. She told me she heard I was getting drunk at Tony and Denise's, so drunk I would pass out and they would let people have sex with me for money while I was passed out. I got real mad at mom for saying such a thing! Even though I couldn't remember what happened because I was passed out, I refused to believe such a thing happened! I felt so betrayed by my own sister, even though I refused to believe it!
Until one night my cousin, (Joe F.) and I were out partying and he kept hitting on me and trying to touch me. I told him to stop that he was my cousin and that it was not right. He looked at me so cold with his drunken eyes and laughed and said "I've already fucked you once! Why won't you let me again!" I looked at him crazy and said "No you haven't fucked me! You're fucking crazy if you think you have!" He said "Yes I have fucked you and it was good but you don't remember it. I fucked you one night while you were passed out at Tony and Denise's along with two other guys!"
Even though I couldn't remember, after him saying this I knew it must have happened. It felt like someone punched me right in the face. Even with the embarrassment and feeling of disgust I looked at him and said, "No, you didn't. I don't believe you." I felt so dirty. The thought of having sex with him disgusted me. I felt like a child who had been made fun of because he didn't wear nice clothes like other kids in school. I felt so alone, sad, angry, betrayed. I couldn't believe my sister let this happen.
In our visit over the New Years week-end the story of this event came forth. Deion had been at Denise’s and they were playing quarters. In this game you bounce a quarter off the table into a glass of beer. If you miss you must drink the beer but if you succeed you choose who drinks the beer. Seated around the table with Deion were her cousin, Joe F., Fred N., “Junior” K., Denise and Tony Taylor. The table soon had a conspiracy to get Deion drunk which she did. Deion does not remember what happened because she blacked out while drinking. She awoke the next morning naked in the bedroom and remembers an empty whiskey bottle next to her. She put something on and went to the front room. She asked Denise what had happened the night before. Denise cursed at her and pointed to a spot on the floor. Deion had vomited from the alcohol and Denise accused her of almost throwing up on the toddler, Curt. Deion felt very bad and didn’t recall the event until her mother confronted her sometime later. She definitely remembers this as the first time she blacked out. After this blackouts would be common and most all her friends have seen her in this walking blacked out state.
The revelation of this story became a turning point in my relationship with Deion. She insisted to me that her sex while blacked out was her fault since, in the words of Denise, “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t got drunk.” I sent Deion copies of Tennessee State law as well as Washington and other states. All listed sex with person’s unable to give consent, for any reason be it drugs, alcohol, or mental retardation, as rape. I further sent Deion all the state statues on rape and the definitions for their application. Of particular interest is the age of Deion when these events took place, and the age of the perpetrators. By mid January 2001 it was clear to me that Deion had been raped dozens if not hundreds of times from age twelve onward. The difficulty was in sorting out the ones she remembered and the one’s she only heard about from others. In her own mind she had yet to even begin to deal with all that rape. She was in denial.
It was at this time that I noticed my own emotional crisis set in. I was suffering the trauma of a person who is close to a rape victim. I called various rape crisis centers and hospitals in Washington. Fortunately, I live in a state where rape is taken seriously. I visited several centers and soon began learning the subject. I bought books on rape and sent a copy of each one I bought to Deion. Upon the advice of a counselor I sought treatment for Deion even though she did not ask for it. When we talked of a counselor she refused group counseling and refused the paid staff of the prison. None of it was effective she felt. Good fortune was ours for the prison chaplain set Deion a one to one appointment with a volunteer. This wonderful woman, Carolyn L., would play a major part in Deion’s recovery. For myself, I had to be content with self-help books.
It a late January, 2001, visit, while talking around the subject of Deion’s sex life, she relayed the story of Gary B., the uncle of her good friend Lenette. This story must have surfaced due to her recent awareness that sex without consent is rape. It seems that Deion and Lenette had gone to Arkansas with Gary. The young girls had partied often at Gary and his wife Arlene at their double-wide mobile home. Gary naturally bought the fifteen year old girls wine coolers on the trip to Arkansas and pot was smoked as well. Deion and Lenette were dropped at Garys sister’s house in Osceola while he went on to visit relatives further upstate. Gary returned and spent only one night at his sisters before returning to Huntingdon. It was during that night, while Deion was sleeping on the couch, that Gary silently came to her. She woke up to her P.J. bottoms being pulled down and Gary spreading her legs. He said nothing but only pushed his sex on her and when he was done he pulled out and left. There was no kissing, petting, foreplay, or talk. He didn’t even pull her P.J.s back up. When they left the next day Deion felt very sick. She sat in the back of the crew cab pickup and said nothing the whole way home. She obviously suffered post rape trauma. Deion did not want sex with him but she did nothing. She lay there inert while he raped her. I asked carefully and persistantly, “why didn’t you fight him off, call out for help, report him when you got home.” Deion looked at me puzzled and confused. “What could I do? What was I supposed to do?” she said. It was clearly beyond her to understand resistance to a man she partied with. At home she understood and avoided Gary’s further advances. She felt terrible around Arlene because she like Arlene so much. “Why did you feel guilty around Arlene?” I asked. “Because I’d had sex with her husband,” was Deion’s reply. She was unable to understand she was raped. Subsequent investigation located this episode at the summer of 1986. Deion was 15 and Gary was over thirty. It was statutory rape as well as 3rd degree rape. Yet Deion did not understand the crime. The event of unwanted sex had become such a common part of Deion’s life that she could not see reality or law.
Contributing to her confusion was the rural attitudes about rape. Her Nashville lawyer reports that rape convictions in rural areas are not common. “They are easy to fight, the court is always against the woman.” It seems that only class differences will produce a rape conviction. That is, if a lower class male rapes an upper class woman there might be a conviction. It a black man rapes a white woman there might be a conviction. But if the woman is of the lower classes, and Deion lived in a trailer, or if she is known to have had sex with others, a charge of rape will seldom be pursued by the prosecutor’s office. This gives a fertile environment for males to continue forcing sex on selective women and girls. The women and girls themselves have surrendered to the inevitable and stop fighting back. But the character harm enlarges as generation after generation of women are born and raised without self-respect.
posted by Tim at 5:33 PM
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