Darkness Was on the Face…

Such a beautiful phrase!

In my experience, too, in the beginning there was darkness, a three-year-old shut in the pantry wailing, darkness with a sliver of light under the door to symbolize hope or establish that this was the pantry and not my mother’s womb. And hovering over my face in those days was George’s hand or tongue. 

George became my stepfather when I was about two years old. He had come off a farm near Colorado Springs where my Gma claimed he had probably fucked goats. (She disliked him intensely, which may explain my loyalty to her.) George had a mother named Clarissa with bright red hair who terrified me with her long pins for securing patterns to fabric. Did she really threaten to pin me in place, or did I just infer that as I crouched, very still, under her huge sewing table? Her monster philodendron wound up the wall and around the ceiling; it threatened to wrap and trap me in their ugly living room. George’s father Fred always wore gray work clothes; his silence balanced his wife’s loud, shrill voice. Years later, he laid out newspaper on the garage floor, ever considerate of Clarissa’s feelings, and blew his brains out. I recall always vomiting during the long car trip from Denver to visit those grandparents. The Anthropologist questions whether it was really motion sickness or apprehension.

So it’s no wonder that George often defaulted to violence. Like his father, he was generally silent. I recall no instance when he spoke to me in a normal voice; he always bellowed. “Dani! Get in here!”  And he hit, often. Open-hand, backhand – no fist, though. If I had really enraged George, disturbed him as he was tying an intricate fly, perhaps, he used a switch. Still, a hand is better than a tongue.

“How do adults manage to sexually molest a child?” a young friend recently asked. “What innocence!” I thought to myself, “How wonderful that he cannot even imagine it!” I explained that adults cannot penetrate with a penis so they use a tongue. Tongue in the ear. Tongue in the belly button. Tongue in the private openings. “Be quiet.” Tongue. “Don’t tell mommy.” Tongue. (So I was mistaken: George must have hissed or murmured those phrases; he wouldn’t bellow that, would he?)

Looking over some pictures, I decide I am being unfair. There’s a picture of me sitting on the hood of the car quite happy in cowboy boots and jeans as George stands nearby. He taught me to water ski, to dig for worms, and to fish. There must have been times when George and Dani simply got along. Does that make me complicit in his hovering?

I never did tell, not my mother, not my Gma. But how could they not know? Why didn’t they defend me? Do all children who are molested spend the rest of their lives wondering about this? (The Anthropologist reports that one fifth to one third of all women in the U.S. have reported some sort of childhood sexual experience with a male adult.) After nearly four-score years pondering the question I have come up with two explanations.

Why Mama Did Not Defend Me, Explanation Number One:

My mother had a very hard life, starting even with her name. As long as I can remember, we called her “Deenie,” a horrible sound, short for “Uldine.” Poor Mama was named after the 1920s child evangelist Uldine Utley, which tells you what her upbringing was like. And, as might be expected (–so the Anthropologist writes after long study of U.S. twentieth century culture), little Deenie in her strict, evangelical household was sexually molested when young. I look at images of her as a child alongside the stiff-collared men in old pictures and wonder who did what to her because I prefer to think one of those nameless, stern elders was the villain.

In most pictures, Mama is next to her older brother. Uncle Joey was everyone’s favorite, mine too. As a child, I thought that Uncle Joey looked like Frank Sinatra, so handsome and sophisticated. He was right out of the TV show Father Knows Best. When cousin Sherry wanted to get a stylish cut, but her mother refused, Uncle Joey took Sherry to the hairdresser. When I stayed at their house for my first sleepover away from Mama and Gma and sobbed most of the night, Uncle Joey sat on the bed patting my hand telling me it would be okay. Years later, when I was sent to Texas A&M for a week at the firefighting academy, Uncle Joey, who lived nearby, visited and took me for dinner.

When he came of age, Uncle Joey beat up his father. The story was that he had a good reason. Joey’s father, John Joseph, had battered his wife, my Gma, throughout their marriage. In fact, my mother’s purple birthmark that covered her back and one leg was attributed to those beatings. When Gma got pregnant a year or so after Uncle Joey was born, John Joseph had Gma drink something nasty and then shoved her down some stairs, trying to trigger an abortion. Gma thought that was the source of Mama’s birthmark, except on those occasions when she was really upset with Deenie and claimed her purple was “the mark of the Devil” on his own. John Joseph regularly beat up Gma, but Uncle Joey finally got big enough to beat up his father as her champion. The judge gave him a choice of jail or the military, so Uncle Joey joined the Navy.

At last! Gma had enough of the violence, divorced John Joseph, and took Mama with her to California so they could be close to Uncle Joey as he did basic training. 

Here I interrupt for a brief but significant digression. The Divorce is my Gma’s great Original Sin for which she suffered most of her adult life, or at least for most of my childhood. Every week Gma had a letter on blue stationery from her mother, Great Grandmother Mable. Every week Gma took the letter to the bathroom, read it, and cried. Years later I learned that every letter castigated her for being a fallen, failed, divorced woman. The Divorce, and later her children’s apostasy, were the reasons I was marched into the church to be Samuel.

Back to the story and explanation: Gma and Mama lived in southern California close to Uncle Joey’s naval base until Mama ran away to Denver, Colorado. How daring!

Many years later, Mama tired of my nagging her to get along with my adored uncle and explained that Uncle Joey had raped her. Eventually she even told her mother. And here is my shame and great betrayal: when my 80-year-old Gma wept and asked me if it could possibly be true that Uncle Joey would do such a thing, I comforted her and said that because my mother was bipolar she sometimes said things that were hurtful but not necessarily true.

So here I have two variations on Explanation One: Why Mama Didn’t Defend Me. Mama did not defend me from George because never in her young life did anyone defend her. Or, as a variation, in some weird time kink Mama learned that I did not defend her when Gma asked about Joey years later so she did not defend me when I was a child.

Why Mama Did Not Defend Me, Explanation Number Two: 

I grew up thinking my mother was 16 years old when I was born. Perhaps that is why it seemed okay to grow up calling her “Deenie” like everyone else did, as if she were my older sister. My math skills were so poor that it took me a long time to realize that 1948 minus 1929 is not 16. Or perhaps it was just that Gma had always insisted that Deenie was that young and foolish, and it didn’t occur to me to consider the dates until I was looking at my mother’s death certificate. Deenie ran away from California to Denver when she was 18. Once Uncle Joey shipped out, Gma joined her in Colorado. She found her Deenie working as a waitress in what was probably the only Chinese restaurant in Denver – pregnant.

Was it seduction? Forcible assault? Manipulation by authority?  My mother sometimes tried to assure me she had found the Sperm Donor attractive and had no regrets, but during her manic episodes she was more candid about the smooth-skinned “Chinaman” rapist. 

However the sperm hit the ovum, Gma dealt with it. She married my mother off to an airman at Lowry Airforce Base so that I would be born there, legitimate. He did not last long, though. Looking at my baby pictures, I suspect he saw the infant’s dark face and realized there was no way I was his progeny. He disappeared, and soon afterward we got George.

I only learned about this at the age of twelve, when my second step-father Richard decided it was good for me to know. He was right in this instance; it was an overwhelming relief to know that George was not my father. I had none of his brutish genes in my DNA, even if I could never wipe that feel of his hovering tongue from my nerve endings.

When I confronted my Gma with Richard’s story, she told me that the Sperm Donor (SD) had offered to pay for an abortion. He was married at the time with a baby son and certainly did not need any demands from my mother. Gma was terrified of the SD, afraid he would send Chinese tongs after us. She had signed some kind of legal agreement that committed her and my mother to make no demands or claims. I convinced her to take me to the restaurant. When we entered, I glimpsed the owner take a startled look at Gma and duck into the kitchen; it was enough to confirm Richard’s story.

How I wanted my SD to be an attractive, exotic, mandarin sort of man! I would have been satisfied, even pleased, with a Fu Manchu stereotype from the movies. When I found out that he would be marching with the Chamber of Commerce at some parade, I stood on the curb, knowing he’d probably be distinctive as the only Asian. It was a disappointment to see he looked like a round, grinning bobble-head sold as a Chinese caricature. He used a lot of hair grease, so his hair was plastered down very much like the shiny black paint that covered those plastic heads.

The night of senior prom, I took my date to the restaurant, taking note of the owner’s son my age who was helping at the cash register. The meal was meant to conclude the painful paternity preoccupations of my youth, a declaration that I was over all disappointment. But years later, I still caught myself pulling my hair back to look in the mirror and wonder if I looked like my biological brother, whether I would have been rejected had I been born a son.

So that is Explanation Number Two: Why Mama Did Not Defend Me. Of course, any maternal protective reflex, especially with sex involved, was tainted by residual resentment towards my SD. And there was the matter of race. Uldine was, after all, a child of her times. She overcame much of it, attended the March on Washington where Dr. King spoke, and even went to Howard University for a year. However, when I was a child, that was all in the future. There was no time kink to temper her feelings, consequently no reason to defend a dark child who was evidence of her defilement. The devil didn’t need a purple birthmark to recognize his own; that dark face was enough. I was the devil’s own to do with as he pleased.

The Anthropologist interjects: This speculation about why Mama and Gma did not defend Dani is ahistorical and far too judgmental. In Medieval times no one would object to droit du seigneur, the right of the first night for feudal lords to sexually exploit serfs. In 18th century America no one questioned the right of slaveholders to use slaves. In the mid-twentieth century United States, no one talked about or disputed the right of adult men to force themselves on children. Men were men, and boys would be boys. 

I heave a sigh of relief. This chapter about violence, incest, and rape is done with, so that the words “darkness” and “hovering” no longer quiver with threat. I can simply enjoy the sound of the words and take them for the brooding, pre-creation meaning I learned as a child Samuel: “Darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.”

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^{Homiletic Footnote:} My first stepfather’s name was actually James George, and he was generally called James. I refer to him as George because – going back to my child Samuel days – James was one of my favorite apostles and epistles: “For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich will fade away even while they go about their business.” Or, “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Yet, it seems contradictory to cherish verses like that in my vengeful heart when James also writes, “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.” That’s sort of like Che reminding people that it is not rage that motivates the true revolutionary, but great feelings of love. Very difficult, that.

^{Research Postscript:} I had abandoned interest in the SD decades ago, before the internet existed and  enabled far-reaching searches. However, I wanted to substantiate a claim in an earlier draft of my text, that there were not enough Chinese in Denver to support a tong. I thought Gma’s fear of the tongs was simply a piece of her long rant against the Chinese that ranged from tongs to gambling, prostitution, and opium dens. I went online to look at the history of Denver’s Chinatown. I am reeling from the find. I read that Chin Lin Sou, an early Colorado pioneer whose adventures should be made into a movie, belonged to the Chee Kong Tongs. Chin Lin Sou’s grandson, Jimmy Chin, was a leader in Denver’s 1950’s small Chinese community and  “owned several restaurants.” So perhaps that friend Jimmy in the next chapter, named for his father, was in preschool with me after all. On the other hand, the article describes Chin Lin Sou as six feet tall with blue eyes–so maybe it is all as apocryphal as my claims to be descended from Admiral Zheng He. 

https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/chin-lin-sou-1836-1894

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