Stolen Life (55 page)

My first attack happened when I was between two to three years old. We lived in a pink house, next door to a two-storey house and down from the railroad tracks. My eldest brother got on a bus and went one way and the other kids went to a school that sat on the hill […]. I slept in a bunk bed in a room off the kitchen. From where I slept I could see the kitchen table, and my plant that sat on the window. The boys slept in the living room.

The attack on me was by a grown man, by my brother Leon [eight and a half years old at that time], and later on by three other boys, one was tall with red hair. And one boy was our neighbour, and would be in later years as well.

What started my rape was our babysitter [the grown man] caught Leon messing around with me behind the fridge in the kitchen. The man told him, in other words, Leon was not doing it right. I was placed on the kitchen table and the bottom half of my body stripped. He was pointing things out to Leon, saying things like this is this, and this is this, And this is where you put your prick […].

I cry and try to crawl off the table. The man would yell at me and slap my ass. At first. And put me on my back. He hurt me I think by putting his finger up my cunt. I’d cry and try to get away as I was crawling off the table, then he started to poke my ass as well. He yelled at Leon for letting me get away.

One time I put my arms around Leon, to try and carry me away, and the man would throw me back on the table. He bent my legs up past my head as I lay on my back. I could not breathe […].

I was on the table, and Leon watching as this man tried to shut me up, he’d give me a sucker. First he gave me one and started to poke at me again, I’d cry out so he got some more suckers and shoved all of them in my mouth at once. I was suffocating and crying as this man kept poking at me. I’d pull the suckers out and cry and try to get away.

If anyone tried to come in the kitchen, like other kids, he’d get Leon to give them a sucker and chase them away. The guy beat me to shut me up, he banged my head on the table. Then when someone came he’d put his cock in my mouth and almost kill me. But also, he’d bend my feet, to where I swear he broke them, to spread my legs and poke at me. I think he went to put lard or oil on his hands, and then Leon would bend my feet.

I got away from Leon’s hold and the man shook me, beat me, called Leon down, put me back on the table and bent my feet more. He took Leon’s hands, and helped him bend my feet the right way. I could not move. He told him to hold me, and if I moved, to bend my feet some more […].

At one point Leon lost his balance, he was off his own feet and his whole body was pressing down on my feet. At this point I could not move any more, or even cry out. I think I was close to death from all of it and them constantly choking me. I could feel everything, but feel nothing.

This is where I can’t recall all things in such an order. […] The last thing I recall was reaching out to Leon. I think I passed out.

The next thing I recall is Leon and the boys going outside, if not to keep the other kids out, they were running around and looking and blocking the windows. […] I think I kept passing out, but pain would wake me up. And choking, I wanted air.

I don’t recall much else. They then took me to the bedroom, and Leon, the man and three boys came in. Leon was happy to show off to his friends, I was something to him. The man told them to fuck me, they just stood there. Even Leon was quiet now. I think the boys felt sorry for me. The man went as far as to pull the boys’ pants down for them […]. But the boys jumped out of the window.

Then the man grabbed Leon. He started to beat him and threw him on me and told him to fuck me. Leon acted as if he was. The guy told him to put it in me, and tried to put Leon’s cock into me. All the time Leon started to cry, and this guy told me to hug him, that’s Leon, but I could not, I was too weak.

Finally Leon got mad, or the man got mad. He was now fighting Leon, he attacked him and I don’t know if he succeeded in raping Leon, but Leon was crying and they fought some more by the door and against the other wall, yelling. Leon had blood from his waist down, I don’t know if it was from me or from the attack done on him, or both.

The man put a diaper on me to soak up my blood. I don’t know if I slept all day and into the night or into the next night. I could not move or talk, how could I talk, no one understood me anyhow […].

The reason why I recall being two or three when the first attack happened was, when I recalled it, I phoned my oldest sister Karen to ask who that man was that lived with us in the Pink House. She asked why, and how come out of the blue, I recall something from so long ago? I told her he raped me. Then she said, at that time she was six and Leon eight, she said Earl beat this guy up and kicked him out, as he was Earl’s friend, he was about seventeen or eighteen at the most. Earl was in junior high, and he found out this guy would line all four of us girls in the yard on the swings, take our pants down and bend us over the swings and beat us bare-assed.

He also tried to screw us, and I think at this time he had already raped me. Earl caught him trying the other girls and beat him for this […].

I have a hard time writing officially, as you would wish. For the first time, I get a sense someone hears me, or wants to […].

When I was first attacked, I could not speak to be understood, I did not know what happened to me, just pain and scared emotions and thoughts of pain recalled, I could not understand the yelling and beating I received, as it was not a spanking or regular punishment. I did not know I had a vagina or rectum, how was I to know what a penis or sex was? I knew nothing, let alone
what they were doing to me. I reached for my brother [Leon] while I was in pain, and he could not, or was unable to, help me. Or worse, refused to. Or even worse, wanted to but did not know how. And could not. I often wonder, now, if the effect of it caused him to be as he is. Though this does not excuse him […].

At that age I had nothing to compare, that act is all I had. You learn something because people tell you the story around it—well, this was not my case. I had no story. I registered what happened to me as pain, hate, bitterness, yelling, crying, mass confusion with no explanation […].

I stayed in the room where they took me […]. This man would change me, and rinse it out in the toilet. Leon was six man [i.e., the person on watch] for all this. I tried a few times to go where my family was watching
TV
, but the man would grab me and put me back to bed. One time […] Mom took me aside, asked what was wrong and where did it hurt. She could not understand me, it made me cry more, I tried to show her how they hurt my feet by acting it out. And Kathy could not interpret, she was as little as I and I could not get her to understand what I could not understand […].

My guess is I could not recall what happened to me because I did not know what is was at the time. And repeated abuse, with mental abuse revolving around fear of pain, caused me not to really remember. I do know I was safe when Leon started to go to jail, and reform schools, and finally prison.

I wonder now, how could a family, especially a mother, not notice such torture of a small child? Maybe, for whatever reason, no one wanted to.

I’d scream and scream, and tell Mom the shadows had come for me, I saw them move there! I pointed to the small area by the door: when I screamed the darkness curled behind clothes hanging on the coat rack and when Mom came into the room it slid out the door behind her. Mom turned on the light, moved the clothes around piled on the floor by the door and hanging
on hangers, and I tried to say, “He ran out.” But she did not understand. She told me it was just lights moving outside, to stop crying, go to sleep. The nights blurred together. I was awakened again, and again, by the person returning in the night shadows, blending into all the darkness of the house. One night I saw a man bent over, doing something on the kitchen table! I went hysterical with screams, Mom come running. She said it was only one of the boys making a sandwich before going to sleep, shush, shush up, she had enough of me waking everybody in the middle of the night. You go to sleep, now!

I hated to go to bed, to have to try to sleep. Shadows visited our girls’ room, shadows that breathed, that made sounds, shadows I could feel touch me. I hated closets, clothes hanging on walls; breathing shadows came out of them.

In prison most women understand my story; it’s so much their own. But when visitors come here to perform a play for us, the actors are so caring and filled with excitement, they carry such personality and energy of life that everyone is seduced to smile and laugh at abuse they themselves wear in their bodies being performed on stage in front of them. At one point in a play they put on for us the devil tells the pimp to beat the hooker and rape her: the audience in the prison auditorium went crazy with laughter, yelling at the actor, “Go for it, go, go!” First I felt anger, then tears; and when the Good Spirit stepped in to help the woman, I wept for her, her violation, her helplessness. But I also cried for the women here, laughing till they cried at her pain. After everything they themselves have to live with.

There is such evil concentrated in this place. How can anyone, ever, become better if she’s walled up in here? What do plays and colour
TV
matter if you’re in hell?

My thoughts tell me the warden knows there is a possibility I will take my life, and she’s having me closely watched. But if people really want to die, they find a way. An Indian man in Edmonton Remand did it by shoving toilet paper down his
windpipe; a girl there hanged herself from her sink, just sat there forcing herself to bend over till she was dead. One prisoner asked the judge for psychiatric help but the judge said no and the prisoner slashed his own throat right there in the courtroom. In P4W we lost eight women in eighteen months by hanging; one died a year and half after she did it, she was on life support all that time. Slashing is very common, so easy, I was almost tempted to do it the other day. I’d thought my husband being near me would help, but sometimes I don’t know. I seem destined to die alone. No one here to trust or believe.

My mother insists nothing like this ever happened to me as a baby. I was abused, yes—but by the White side of my family. The two Johnsons: first my grandfather Louis and later my father, Clarence. That’s where all my horrible memories come from. The ones that are true, she says.

Mom is Cree, yes, and I love her for that. It is the core of the person I am now and when I’m in the sweat lodge, which stands in the tight corner where the prison walls meet, the Mother Earth and the Creator come there, they are there to cleanse me. But I want her to face the fact that her oldest living son, whom she loves and gives everything to, every penny she has, even if he smashes her houses to pieces with an axe, that the “Squeaky” she loves is sick; to face the fact that she considered her four daughters, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, Vonnie, nothing but bad problems, that she treated us not like the babies we were but as if she thought we could be naturally born whores.

I remember when I was no more than five her warning to us, over and over:

“Girls, be on guard! Don’t hug your dad, never your brothers, your male cousins, or uncles, or grandpas. If you do you’re asking for it, it’s your own fault. Never hold hands with any male, stay away from all boys, protect yourself by crowding together, by hiding in corners, never pump yourself high on the swing because a male might see your panties; leap frog is too sexy, sitting with your legs uncrossed is just asking for it.”

Asking for what? Mom never explained. Once she caught Kathy and me, we were five and four then, playing house naked.
She beat us till the belt broke and she was hitting Kathy with the buckle. Didn’t she realize someone had taught us to play that way?

When Grandpa Louie would babysit Kathy and me, we played house. And it was always nap or bedtime; it was always time to take off all our clothes, time to lie down on the blanket and put our heads on our little pillows and sleep with our legs spread out wide. Or he would let us play in the dirt or mud as much as we wanted, and then he’d say suddenly, “Okay, time for a bath,” and bathe us, a long time, laughing and playing with us in the water. Mom is always yelling, punishing us, Dad is never around, but to Grandpa Louie we’re special, he lets us play, he hugs us warm and gives us candy. He loves us.