It’s funny how memory works

Ican’t speak for all women or men who have been molested, assaulted or raped. I can try to explain my own experience and why I buried the memories so well that I didn’t see the consequences until I finally allowed myself — as a result of the #metoo movement — to look them over thoroughly, put two and two together, and acknowledge the resulting impact on my younger self.

Twice at the age of 12, I was held down by a group of laughing boys while they touched me where they had no right to touch me. I was enraged, frightened, vulnerable, embarrassed and ashamed. I was not physically hurt, but my mind seethed with those emotions that burned a deep wound in my psyche. Whenever I think about those times, those emotions rise again and are difficult to control and have no suitable outlet, which is why I buried those memories as best I could for as long as I could.

The first time it happened, I was at the Vacation Bible School of our church on the playground. My screams and rage were not heard over other kids playing, until finally one nearby girl ran to tell the adults. The boys ran while the women brushed me off and took me inside to a quiet room, where I stayed until VBS was over for the day. The next week, my mother told me I could help teach a younger class rather than return to the class where the boys were.

You may wonder why there wasn’t more reaction to the incident by my mother or others at the church. This was the late ’60s, and this was the first integrated VBS in Cobb County (I found confirmation of this in a news clipping we found after my mother’s death — she was an organizer of the VBS), and the boys were all black. So, by necessity, what I went through was hushed up and I — too young to understand the politics of the situation — was led to believe from the silence that what happened was of no consequence, nothing to complain or be upset about.

A couple of months later, walking home from school with a friend, it happened again. This time they were all white neighborhood boys, and they went after my friend first. As I tried to pull them away, they attacked me. Laughing. It was great fun for them. Once again it was infuriating, embarrassing, terrifying and much more for me. But I did not tell my parents. Why? Because nothing had happened the first time, so my impression was that adults saw this as kids’ play, no big deal. But that lesion in the psyche had grown deeper. The only upside I could see was that it happened by both races, so I knew it wasn’t a racial thing.

The bandage my brain put on that lesion was a deep depression. My mother had a harder and harder time getting me up for school, until one day I just did not go. No yelling, no fussing. Just stayed in bed. I think my parents knew it was something serious, because instead of becoming angry — though they were confused — they took me for medical exams, and then a psychiatrist. He had me record my dreams. One in particular that sticks with me is of a tsunami that I could not escape. It washed over me and then there was black silence — nothingness. The heightened emotions of trying to save my life but being powerless to do so, then the sudden nothingness, I now realize was a re-enactment of my trauma and aftermath.

I eventually went back to school, and had to go to summer school to make up classes. I had been a straight-A student, but my grades became unimportant to me. I just wanted out of school. I laid out so much in high school that the principal came to think my handwriting was my mother’s and questioned a real note I brought from her.

My mother asked if I wanted to change high schools, and I did. My saving grace that got me through high school was an art class the first quarter that led to many more art classes. In fact, my entire senior year was art classes. My teacher said I should go to the Atlanta College of Art, but my grades in other classes were disastrous and I had not taken any college prep courses. I just wanted to graduate and get out of school, which I did by the skin of my teeth.

I had been a great student in elementary school, and always scored way above grade level on the standardized tests of the time. My sister was the same, and she went on to become a CPA and a successful businesswoman — in fact, one year she was named as one of the top 10 business women in Atlanta by the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

I didn’t go to college. I took a few secretarial courses, took mail order writing courses and fed my natural hunger for knowledge with a wide variety of books, delving deeply into subjects I found of greater interest. I feel like I turned out pretty well in spite of my rocky middle and high school years, but now I wonder “what if someone had listened to me, if I had told, if I had been heard?”

So that’s why I didn’t speak out for 40 odd years. Listening to other women and men who have come out after years of silence, I hear their pain and rage and recognize it. Dr. Ford said it was the laughter she remembered most, and I think that was seared into her brain by the rage and helplessness she felt at that time. He may not remember the incident because to him it was just a good time, no big deal, no harm, no foul.

It’s funny how memory works.

Amy Knowles is the night editor and editorial page content manager at Rome News-Tribune. She can be reached at AKnowles@RN-T.com.