Lynne’s Tale

This is a story I heard from a woman I met on a locked all-female unit while hospitalized in Whitfield State Hospital in Pearl, Mississippi, in the mid 1980’s.

Lynne (not her real name) arrived on the ICU, a pleasant-looking fortyish woman with carefully high-lighted blonde hair that came down to her shoulders. She had missing front teeth and the nerve of one dangled down and she was in terrible pain. Her husband, she told me, (the only other white woman in the unit) had her brought into the hospital after punching her in the mouth. She told me it was her fault; she shouldn’t have been drinking beer in a neighbor lady’s trailer in the park where she lived.

She told me her husband would forcibly have sex with her once or twice at night on a daily basis while she tried to fight him off with her fists; she couldn’t stop screaming during these violent attacks.. She had nowhere else to go, no family or friends to give her sanctuary. The couple lived in the country and there was no one to hear her screams.

After we got off the ICU and onto another-not quite as bad but still locked unit-her husband would visit her on Saturdays. The two of us went to a dance on the hospital grounds one evening for patients from all the different units scattered around the plantation-like barbed-wire grounds. We got separated in the crowd. She went outside to smoke a cigarette in the cold, fresh night air…so different than the musty units with their caged, locked doors,

As she stood outside listening to the music inside and breathing in the night air, a man, also a patient, came up to her and took the cigarette out of her mouth ad put his hands around her throat.

“Don’t make a sound,” he commanded and took her by the throat. He was choking her and then letting her take a breath and then choking her again. He half-dragged, half-carried her on the grounds until they reached some grass at the back of a little canteen building where patients could buy candy and sodas and cigarettes.

He forced her onto the ground and, still choking her so she couldn’t breathe and then relaxing his grasp around her throat just enough so that she could take a breath and then choking her again. He forced her to perform oral sex on him. Then he forced her to swallow his semen.

He told her if she told anyone he would kill her.

He told her his name.

She returned on her own to the dance and accompanied the rest of the unit back to the ward.

When we got back and were lying on cots beside one another she told me what had happened and I persuaded her to tell the staff.

She did tell them but couldn’t bring herself to tell them in detail what happened. She was ashamed, too ashamed to spell out the details.

The psychiatrist sent her to University Hospital in Jackson to do a ‘rape kit’ to determine if she had had forcible sex. Naturally, since it wasn’t a vaginal rape nothing showed up in the tests.

She had told her husband on the telephone that she had been sexually violated, but the medical test came up negative. Her psychiatrist told her that if they accused the man who had assaulted her and who was a patient, it would “ruin his life.”

Her psychiatrist suggested to her husband that she was suffering sexual delusions because she hadn’t been able to have sexual relations with her husband in over a month.

They gave him permission for a conjugal visit.

So once again she was sexually violated, this time by her husband, with the consent of her Whitfield keepers and medical staff. She was eventually released into her husband’s care.

Later I heard from someone who worked with her husband at a local lumberyard that she had run onto the Madison County airfield, screaming and hollering and running at airplanes taxiing on the field, begging for a ride to Arkansas which I gathered was her home.

According to her husband’s co-worker, Lynne was returned to Whitfield State Hospital. As much as she hated her husband, he was still better than lock-up at Whitfield. She was once again returned home into her husband’s care.

The last time I tried to telephone her, her husband sobbed as he told me she had left him. No one knew where she had gone.

Margerita’s’s Tale

Margerita had bad luck with men. Her first husband became violent when he was drunk. Her in-laws would hide her from him at these times, as he would threaten to kill her. The rest of the time she found him kind and low-keyed. He committed suicide by drinking Liquid Plumber.

She remarried and had two little girls with a man I will call Oscar. He was someone who loved to make jokes, laughed at everything and enjoyed having fun with his two daughters. He would cook delicious and plentiful Spanish meals for the family, variations of beans and rice. He loved to cook.

When he drank he became a different person. He brought a machete into their bedroom on more than one occasion. Margerita had to be careful not to open the steel door of their Heath Street apartment to let him in. Sometimes his two little daughters would let him in the house. He often struck his wife but never the two girls. He would knock her down and kick her as she lay on the floor. She would pray hysterically and curl up to protect her head as he kicked and kicked her. He continually threatened her life.

Once he broke a window with a brick when he couldn’t get into the house on the third floor, which had a steel door. He never lived there legally but wanted to stay there with his family. Margerita had the locks changed two or three times during the time I knew her.

I read in the Globe, tucked away in the City and Region section that Oscar had stabbed someone twenty-two times in front of witnesses. My first thought and my first phone call went to Margerita. What I thought and what I said was, “Thank God, it wasn’t you.”

Natalie’s Tale

My girl friend Natalie wanted to leave her husband. He was, to everyone else, a ‘good guy’.

She truly loved him she told me, and I believed her, but she was terrified of him. He would suddenly, out of nowhere, out of the blue sky, punch her in the face. He would grab her arm to hold onto her while he hit her so she wouldn’t fall down. Her arms were always covered with bruises.

She never knew when he was going to turn on her.

He believed she was unfaithful. He would threaten to kill her unless she told him who she was ‘sleeping with’, unless she would tell him ‘the truth’. She couldn’t tell him who she was sleeping with because she wasn’t being unfaithful to him.

She would lie in the bed with him by her side, praying to God that he wouldn’t hit her…praying, promising God that if he just didn’t hit her tonight that she would leave him in the morning.

She never did. Most nights he didn’t hit her; many nights he threatened her. She would feel grateful when he didn’t hurt her and think that she loved him, was in love with him, when he was sweet to her.

This sad story didn’t result in death. Natalie called the Domestic Violence Hotline in the City of Boston. The phone number is listed in Information and is 1-877-785-2020. They counseled her to pack some things she might need and go to a telephone where she could call to find a place in a safe house, a house for battered women in danger.

When her husband left in the morning for work she called the hotline and they told her what to do. She packed some clothing, earrings and a gold cross her mother had given her on her wedding day. She had forty dollars she had hidden. It was difficult; he wanted an accounting for every penny.

She went through the house looking for things he might notice. The bathroom towels had to be lined up perfectly. The ashtrays cleaned. Everything had to look as though she had just left the house for a few moments in order to give her time to get to a safe place.

She came to my house to use the phone. She couldn’t stay with me because her husband would come looking for her there. I had a list of shelters for battered women for her to call that I had gotten at work.

She started calling around 9:45 AM and called until 1:30 in the afternoon. No one would take her. The shelters that had space for her were too close, they said, to her house or friends’ houses where he might look for her.

He got off work at three so she had to return home and unpack. She returned everything back exactly as it had been before she had packed and left him. He was as watchful as a hawk and she was frightened he would notice that something was up if she hadn’t returned everything exactly as it was before he went to work. She put the empty suitcases back in the closet. When he got home she pretended that nothing was wrong. She was terrified he would notice something that would tip him off and give her a beating or kill her. He had often told her that if she left him he would find her and kill her.

Natalie did this for three days. Then it was the week-end and somehow she got through it. He knocked her down unexpectedly and she hit her head on the cement floor and was unconscious for a few moments. He was holding her and stroking her hair when she returned to consciousness. She was so sad that she was going to lose him. She believed if she didn’t that he would harm her in a way that couldn’t be repaired.

She vaguely understood that this was happening to her because something had attracted her to the same kind of violence she had grown up with, watching her mother being angrily shouted at and called names until she was crying as she cooked dinner and did her housework.

Finally, after a week and a half of trying Natalie was accepted into a safe house.

She couldn’t make phone calls the first week to any one, even her family members.
She did call me the second week. She was making plans to move away from Boston, back to the countryside where she had grown up and where she felt safe and could find a decent job. Her cousins there were going to take her in.

I don’t know what happened to her husband. My guess is that he has found another victim to control and punish.

I get a Christmas card from Natalie every year with a picture of her daughter Tina, born two years ago into a family with parents that love her and each other, looking bright-eyed, smiling and beautiful for the camera.

(Linda Larson is formerly homeless and lives in Cambridge, MA.)