The charge that Saakashvili’s aggression initiated the military conflict is highly unlikely gvien the circumstances.  First, Gerogia had two thousand troops in Iraq which would have made any action against the vastly superior Russian force even more unequal than otherwise.  Troops had to be relocated from Iraq to Georgia to increase the small fighting force at home.  Despite the fact that after the United States and Britain, Georgia had more troops in Iraq than any other country (2000), other than flying the troops home to fight in their homeland, the United States offered no direct military assistance.

A non-warship ship was deployed in the Northern waters of  one of the Black Sea ports by the U.S. Navy to prevent attacks being launched from that port.

As further evidence that the action began under Putin’s prior orders, there are the photos of Bush and Putin sitting side by side at the opening of the Beijing Olympics on August 7th, 2008.  At the same time the Russian army was making its way into Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Putin looks relaxed and is sitting shoulder to shoulder with President Bush making remarks back and forth with the American President.  He is not talking on his cell phone or talking to deputies,  just sitting back and appearing to enjoy the opening ceremonies.

No such move to commence a military assault could have been ordered without Putin’s authority. This means that as the two men sat together, Putin already haad given the order and knew as he sat there the attack had been launched.

The other indicator is that the Russian army is historically notoriously slow to deploy.  In this instance, the Russians were ready to move. 

Georgia, the victim of Russian aggression, has just voted in their first election since the ’08 war, to support by a 61% margin of Tbilisi residents, the United National Movement, the party of Saakashvili.  If, in fact, the Georgian president was as foolish as the convenient revision of history asserts, there is no way his party would still be in office.  It is a tribute to the courage and resolve of the Georgian people that they were not intimidated by the Russian destruction of their homes and displacement of their people into voting the Western-backed party, the party of free speech and democracy out of office, but instead voting resoundingly to reinstate them.

Ukraine, on the other hand, in a radical departure from  its pro-Westsern predecessor, Viktor S. Yushchenko, under the pressure of Russia’s interruption of the flow of oil to Europe over a trumped-up unpaid bill owed to Russia  and after witnessing the fate of the former Soviet Bloc Georgian nation left swinging in the breeze by the West after the Russian military invasion of  their country, elected a former Russian apparatchik, Viktor F. Yanukovich as the country’s new President.  Yanukovich ran on a campaign promising closer ties with Russia and won not by much of a margin, but enough.  

On a happier note, despite the enormous suffering that the Ukrainian people have experienced at the hands of the former  Soviet Union, members of parliament celebrated the first act of alliance Yanukovich made with Russia (over extending Russia’s lease of the port of the Black Sea in exchange for a 30% discount in the cost of Gazprom energy) with a hearty round of egg throwing in the Parliament Building to protest Yanukovich being in bed with the Russians. 

Madeleine Abright’s recent assessment of NATO’s reconfiguration for 2010 contains many worthy suggestions but there is one critical  to NATO’s realistic defense.  (NATO countries are expected to provide military assistance far from European shores.  This is included as an accepted military obligation in her report.)  

The most  important military obligation is that NATO countries be able to defend themselves from attack or aggression, especially from Russia.  In this instance,  to be able to defend their own territory is crucial.  

Ms. Albright points out NATO countries should be able to defend themselves, without necessarily bringing the U.S. military into play, critical to avoiding a confrontation with Russia.  Conventional warfare  or  nuclear standoff.

Georgia obeyed the first rule of NATO-aspiring countries.  It was, after U.S. and Britain, the third largest contingent of allied troops.  We should have our priorities straight after Gerogia’s experience and Madeleine Albright’s wisdom.  Georgia could defend against Al Qaeda in Iraq, but could not defend its own borders against Russian invasion. We could not risk an all-out military exchange with Russia.

Georgia, although not a NATO  country, is the most painful example of ignoring Ms. Albright’s guide for reconfiguring NATO.  Our only contribution to their military defense was to fly their troops to their home front. Despite their contributions to our far-flung military effort and their outstanding performance as our ally, they could not and we would not defend their sovreign territory.

It is the nature of the watermelon to be good-natured, sweet-natured and to bring out the best in everyone except for boys ages 11 to 17. Watermelon boys are good natured themselves, but bad boys all the same. Have you ever heard of the watermelon wars?

I have known watermelon boys to tie a big-bellied simpleton of a plough-striped melon to the IC railroad tracks and wait for hours in the hot, wet night of a Mississippi July for that midnight special (yes, the same Midnight Special that Leadbelly sung about) to bust its guts.

Busting melons is a sport usually confined to neat, tidy places for the most part…Sunday morning church sidewalks where women in bright dresses and delicate high heel sandals, frail little shoes on half-naked feet, try not to slip in the shiny, slick juice of the thousand-eyed hapless guts of melon.

Seed spitting is all right…except it turns into target practice with chunks of sweet, red pulp bursting like blood and gore (the movie kind) across the white butterfly sundresses of sister’s party friends.

Into every lap a little watermelon must fall.

In the late evenings, when only the master bedroom had an air conditioner, Dad would feed slightly too-large pieces into and around the general vicinity of my mother’s mouth.

Papaw grew watermelons; he always had a truckload going to market any day in July or August. That’s why he grew them, to take him to the air-conditioned barroom he always stopped in on the way back home. He would sit at the bar where he would salt down a cold glass of beer like a man taming a bird, and show all of us cousins who got picked to go to market with him, his Wings of Victory silver dollar.

That was my same Papaw who wrote my name in a golden-meated (an experiment for the watermelon industry) melon when it first formed on the vine, and on my birthday I would be presented melon cum laude with the words Pretty Linda, Sweet Linda or even one summer Magpie Linda.

We would play Red Light, Green Light-Hope To See A Ghost tonight, around the house every clear summer’s night. Unless we churned fresh peaches into ice cream, we would have a watermelon party each evening.

Watermelon and a swim made for a party night. Too young for urges or purposes, cold watermelon rubbed on my face and shoulders or on my young, long throat between dips in the pond let me know that someone liked me.

People that ate watermelon with a fork instead of with a shaker of salt and a knife, had a long way to get by me on any topic whatsoever.

They were the people I would let ride my gray, placid-looking Tennessee Walker named Thunder out of spite.

The colder your Daddy or Uncle could get the watermelon by icing it down (forget fitting it into the fridge), the more they would horse around pretending to brag on each other. How cold was it? was the question of the hour. The answer something like “Colder that a ditchdiggers butt in Idaho.”

Between my four cousins, their cousins and our buddies there was almost a birthday a week. ..we’d have fireworks. Then Uncle Will, Uncle Jewel, Uncle Carl, Papaw, and my Dad would have us kids heaven-bound with excitement. Skyrockets, roman candles, slow burning black snakes, poppers (which would explode with a bang if flung down on pavement) and lit sparklers which even the youngest child could hold in hand and write in silver stars on the dark blue night. A homely display by big city standards but oh so beautiful to us children. Pyrotechnics came after the water melon and set us kids off into spinning like pinwheels around and around the house in the night…pursuing fireflies and each other. We were too excited to play games-we were just going wild with happiness at what light can be.

None of us kids turned out happy and well-adjusted and grateful like our folks were. We all ended up alone, or crazy in some kind of way. A few of us died in car wrecks in our teens or in Viet Nam.

All of us youngsters were taught to believe in marriage and family and now almost without exception- everyone of us has been through at least one divorce.

But we all have watermelon songs-mine is Sam Cooke’s “She Was Only Sixteen” with “Finger Popping Time” as a close second.

We are in agreement that we were blessed because at least for a time we lived in innocence, before heartbreak set in. And that it was a lucky thing that we, who as children got excited about cold watermelon and red light, green light after supper, were not kids whose imaginations had been looted, as so many children’s are.

Words themselves are like furrows in our minds turning over the old dark soil of memory into the light of now…a mouthful of cold, briskly pink melon can summon up a whole lifetime of summers. The legacy? A remarkable fondness for mouthfuls of summer.

And like old songs bring back the faces of once-adored, vivid visages and the seemingly endless hopefulness of being young, the frantic song of late-summer crickets and fingers sticky with watermelon wine bring back to me, very close to my heart, the stilled laughter and the faraway adolescent tenderness of a world that is gone.

Songs on the radio, and small, chilly bites of iced watermelon let me into that world again for brief flashes of time, and the children of my friends permit me and the ghosts which only I can see, to settle at the fringes of every grassy circle where moths and fireflies dust off memories of that sweet intoxication, Mississippi in July.

© Linda Larson 2004

(for Laurel’s brother, home from Iraq)

The little white posts

Stuck in the soil,

Markers naming the orchids

At the flower show

Mimic acres of white crosses

Sturdy and upright

Over bones ancient and fragile as

Ruby’s Dragonfly.

Orchids feed only on air,

Yet their blooms are often sacrificed,

Prey to heartless thieves, pirates

Of their ephemeral beauty–innocents,

Casualties many times over of what can be

A rich man’s pursuit. Like these

Acres and acres of

blooming white crosses,

Bedecked, celebrating holidays

With bright cheerful flags waving

Hello from those consumed

In battle, at War Meister’s Command,

Reminiscent of these prize-winning

Orchids with names like Nightfire ,

Army night goggles,

Now in the hands of the enemy.

Simple Pleasures, not Shoot or be shot

Which has a kind of lyrical cadence

All its own.

Origami Cranes suggest civilians,

Piled high at HIroshima and Nagasaki

Awaiting the attention and good luck

Of draftee gravediggers.

The Emperor’s exquisite Saffron Delicacy

Cost Japan so dearly.

Pacific fang,

Truman’s unspeakable

retort.

Babies caught in the

Tiger’s Jaw of history,

Were spat out

In its grinding wheel as

On a nearby continent

Fossils of one century

Named a blood-spattered

Specimen after Rasputin,

Sorcerer’s Kiss, and I

When my ship come in,

As one day it must,

Will name a red as deep

As pockets left by Hellfire missiles,

For Bush’s war, Soldier’s Trust.

I

The morning sun was kind to her

As she began her daily vigil at the bus stop.

Her bones were working just fine and dandy,

The crickety-crick from the cold weather

Was in remission.

She had survived another winter.

So had her companion,

An old, leaning tree

With roots buckling the pavement.

Furry, tightly-furled buds

Testify her tree has pulled through

As well.

They have closed Blessed Sacrament

On this corner

Divided it up for condo’s.

So much for her funeral plans.

Someone has taken the statue

Of the virgin out of the front yard

Of the boarded-up rectory.

So now she says her prayers outside

With the tree

Her only witness.

Before the prayers are said

Before her Daily Bread,

Her first, first touch, first contact

First good morning

Each day is for Tree.

It is that time of year

When once or twice

She had worn her apron high…

No shame in this…

She had been as captive in her day

As her weary tree is in this Spring.

Tree consoles her,

Leaning over her.

She basks in the tree’s on-goingness.

The bus will come when it comes,

I will get there when I get there.

The knot in the trunk raises its lid

And the eye of the tree opens her.

She senses

Not hyacinths, nor lilacs,

But a ruby-throated hummingbird remembered

Struck still in grace.

II

The bus driver,

A hearty soul with hair dyed

An unlikely red

Stopped as always

For her daily passenger,

The harbinger of her routine.

Only there she is

Sitting on the sidewalk

Propped up by the crusty old tree trunk,

Her familiar navy blue pillbox hat

Held in place by unapologetic bobby pins

Her back against the tree.

While she waited for the police to arrive…

Ignoring the disgruntled buzz of her riders

The driver took the old lady’s purse from her hand.

Within was bus fare,

The exact amount,

And the square of a self-embroidered

Handkerchief,

Violet and green leaves

Still immaculate, folded and tartly white.

Her hands were empty now

For all the world to see.

By the time the police arrived

The tree’s eye had turned back

Into a knot in the bark

And nothing was blooming.

They found only

Rusty-looking stains,

Tree stains,

On a pair of white cotton gloves.

I

The morning sun was kind to her

As she began her daily vigil at the bus stop.

Her bones were working just fine and dandy,

The crickety-crick from the cold weather

Was in remission.

She had survived another winter.

So had her companion,

An old, leaning tree

With roots buckling the pavement.

Furry, tightly-furled buds

Testify her tree has pulled through

As well.

They have closed Blessed Sacrament

On this corner.

Divided it up for condos.

So much for her funeral plans.

Someone has taken the statue

Of the virgin out of the front yard

Of the boarded-up rectory.

So now she says her prayers outside

With the tree

Her only witness.

Before the prayers are said,

Before her Daily Bread,

Her first, first touch, first contact

First good morning

Each day is for Tree.

It is that time of year

When once or twice

She had worn her apron high…

No shame in this…

She had been as captive in her day

As her weary tree is in this Spring.

Tree consoles her,

Leaning over her.

She basks in the tree’s on-goingness.

The bus will come when it comes,

I will get there when I get there.

The knot in the trunk raises its lid

And the eye of the tree opens her.

She senses

Not hyacinths, nor lilacs,

But a ruby-throated hummingbird remembered

Struck still in grace.

II

The bus driver,

A hearty soul with hair dyed

An unlikely red

Stopped as always

For her daily passenger,

The harbinger of her routine.

Only there she is

Sitting on the sidewalk

Propped up by the crusty old tree trunk,

Her familiar robin’s egg blue pillbox hat

Held in place by unapologetic bobby pins

Her back against the tree.

While the hearty driver waited for the police to arrive…

Ignoring the disgruntled buzz of her riders,

She took the old lady’s purse from her hand.

Within was bus fare,

The exact amount,

And the square of a self-embroidered

Handkerchief,

Violet and green leaves

Still immaculate, folded and tartly white.

Her hands were empty now

For all the world to see.

By the time the police arrived

The tree’s eye had turned back

Into a knot in the bark

And nothing was blooming.

They found only

Rusty-looking stains,

Tree stains,

On a pair of white cotton gloves.

I

Buckethead

She moved into the other half of the duplex
I owned on the colored side as it was called then
Of Fortification Street-
Where Grant had broken through the Confederate lines
And turned Jackson, Mississippi,
Into Chimneyville.

With her she brought
All of two trash bags.
Her hair looked like the
Nest of a magpie
Done up in platinum blonde.
But she showed up alone,
And she was
Showing.
I couldn’t bring myself
To turn her away.

She kept to herself.
Got up in the morning,
Went somewhere,
Dressed neatly under that banshee hair-don’t.
Never brought groceries home.
Her car
Parked in the side lot
Was littered with soda cans and
Fast food wrappers.

She carried brown paper bags into the house
Clinking like liquor bottles.
Never brought any out.
One day she came over,
Knocked at my door,
Classifieds in hand.

A German shepherd?
A female spayed?
Would it be okay?

The poor pitiful thing.
What would a good shampooing and brushing do?
A trip to the beauty shop was what she needed,
A spot of lipstick,
Not a dog.

All alone she was,
Not even a pretend ring.
Her legs and arms stick thin,
I said yes…
She would have to keep it outside.

She brought the dog home
In early June
The sorriest looking dog I had ever seen.

She’s been on a chain her whole life
She apologized for the dog, now
Skulking low to the ground,
Head turned sideways,
Anticipating a blow…
She dragged it up the steps
She’ll be all right
I am going to call her Tess.

What was her name before?
She didn’t have one.
She was just chained up outside in their back yard.
They just wanted her gone.
I’ll tie her up in the yard.
She said obligingly.

It appears to me she’s done enough
Time at the end of a chain.
My tenant gave me a grateful smile before
Hauling the dog into her half of the duplex.

Moments later they reappeared,
Tess bravely adorned in red leash and collar,
Her mistress in a white sunhat pulled over
That hair’s nest, a great improvement.
But Tess didn’t know how to walk on a leash.
To walk her was hard, sweaty work for the girl.

On one of those walks, up towards
The white side of busy Fortification,
Stopping to buy a soda,
Or sitting on someone’s steps to cool off,
He must have spotted her
Taking a breather along West Fortification Street.

It was hot as Hades,
Almost the fourth of July,
Close enough so fireworks could be heard
Off and on in the neighborhood.
My main concern was keeping cool.
I turned the AC on in the bedroom
And put on my housecoat.
It was time for The Price Is Right.

And then I heard shots fired
Not cherry bombs,
Gun shots.
The shots were
Coming from my front door,
Then into the living room.
I am no fool.
I keep a loaded handgun in my nightstand,
My brother’s doing.

So I snatched up my gun and started shooting back.
The shooter hadn’t figured that the person,
The woman, who lived there would have a gun and
Be able to shoot back,
Defend herself.
Like the coward he was
He ran.

I got a good look at him.
He was white and wore a Bull Durham cap.
I knew right away he had miscalculated
Which side of the duplex she lived in.
Tess was moaning a low feral moan
Through the screen door.
Her mistress,
Whatever her name was,
Stood silent and completely still.
She knew she had to go.
Like a marionette
She headed to her car empty-handed,
Not even a toothbrush.

I went to my Bible and gave her
Four one hundred dollar bills and four twenties.
“Don’t worry about the damn dog;
I will take care of Tess.”
I cannot tell when white folks are pale or just white.
She looked gray.
Grabbed my hand and kissed it,
Held it to her cheek,
Started her car and took off.

When the rent was due
And she hadn’t contacted me,
I went inside for the first time.
It was neat and clean and empty.
She had been sleeping
On a pile of neatly folded blankets and clothes.

What I had heard clinking were pieces of pottery,
Not like any pottery I’d ever seen.
Glistening and strange,
More varieties than a body could dream up
Or want or wish for,
Some I could figure out a use for,
Some I couldn’t.

I started out with good intentions.
I would pick up some corn-husk tamales
On Farish Street and walk the dog at the same time.
There I was dragging Tess by her leash and of a sudden
I jerked her up to where I was standing.

I took the leash off.
Go on now, Tess.
Time to find another friend.
Tess wouldn’t budge,
Wouldn’t even look at me.
So I gave her a shove.
She still cowered beside me.
I kicked in her direction,
Raised my voice.
Still wouldn’t move.
I hollered at her and
Tried to hit her with my open hand.
Then with the leash.
Kicked at her again
And missed again.
Raised my hand to her
Off she ran.

II

Again it’s early summer time,
This time a scorcher.
I have plugged my fan in,
Set it outside to blow on me
As I sit on the porch.
Even so my scalp is wet with sweat.
I am still working nights,
Going to the same job.
Still not part of a couple,
Sitting and reading the Clarion Ledger,
Locally known as the Carrion Dredger.

On the front page,
A photo of a dog,
A shepherd with a plastic bucket over its head
Held by two
Police officers caught in the act
Of removing the bucket.

The cutline reads:

This dog nicknamed Bucket Head
By the children in this Jackson neighborhood
Has eluded capture for many months
Surviving only by the kindness of families
Who over the winter put out food for her.

Jumped into this world feet first
They cut my mother from stem to stern
To rescue my airwaves.

It was a Catholic hospital
Doctors sworn to save the infant
At any cost.

Mother would tell me the story
Over and over again when she was woozy
Bourbon and water calling the shots.

My mother’s outrage
A tattered Cook County certificate
Among my souvenirs.

Behind our flat

The old man walks.

He leans heavily between two canes,

One a blue broom, one a brown mop handle.

His winter-killed eyes signal their shoe button salutations.

Aquarius is too cold to bed with;

His water freezes in his well-balanced buckets.

I keep my eye on him

From inside the window where I wait

Feeling widowed by the ice inside.

The sparrows teem around him,

Like soap bubbles blown from a pipe.

It’s Valentine’s Day

And the old man’s saliva freezes into stalactites

As piercing as thorns. ††

When winter dies I will weep for him

One blonde diamond.

I study him from the window,

Unbeknownst to me,

In training for a part of his drama,

Cast finally as the bag lady of hearts

Which will become my stock and trade.

(c)2005

Dedicated to Willie Joe Namath

We didn’t really have a plan.
We ended up here.
A cold brook gives the place its name,
Runs clear along a stony, sandy bed,
So cold it makes the bones ache.

He held my hand
So I wouldn’t slip and break a hip.
When he was little he loved bananas
Couldn’t get the word out
I became Naner for always having
Naners in the kitchen for him.

Even though I was under strict orders
Not to climb anything at all
We climbed the hill where the young girls
Are buried and it made him quiet.

Downed by Tuberculosis, Malaria,
Redundant Diphtheria, sounding like Latin
Names for flowering killers that might have
Pursued Marie Antoinette if
She had not already been spoken for.

He grew alarmed-
We were alerted to danger by an oncoming
Swarm of mosquitoes.
Such desolate graves might be contagious.

Running for the car, I turned my ankle, and Otha
Practically carried me, we abandoned the
Tombstones, with their fading carved-in-stone dates, that
In a few lifetimes will be gone altogether.

His real going-away party was that evening.
He would be deployed for nine months.
We stopped at Cock of the Walk,
A catfish house on the Ross Barnett Reservoir.
My grandbaby toasted the Mississippi Legends
With Rolling Rock…
“Forrest! Van Dorn! Pemberton! Davis!
Brilliantly outfoxed even Ulysses and Tecumseh!
At least for a spell. “

I reminded him
The pride of Dixie and
Its Sons
Sleep under the red clay
We stand on.
Don’t you fall asleep!
Don’t you fall asleep!

I had never told Otha
I had buried his shot
Dead in the back
Father and what a farce his
Daddy’s death had been–
Killed in an accident
In another misguided war–
I brought this one up on
Honor and sacrifice!

We salted our beers,
And it was the bubbles
Not the South
That rose again,
Tickled our noses and
Made us laugh.
I had to laugh.

Letting him go like this
Behind a lie…
His whole life
A let’s pretend.
Whatever happens
To my little one in Iraq,
Black umbrellas or no
I’ll wear that smile like a flag.

We drank up,
And he drove his Naner home.

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.)