Charlotte Pierce-Baker, "Memoir and Academics"
(page 4 of 4)

And now - to give you some notion of the book, the memoir, the collection of voices out of which the pedagogy evolved - I will read from the beginning of Surviving the Silence:

(The following excerpt is reprinted from Surviving the Silence, pages 15-21, with permission from W.W. Norton and Company.)

BEGINNINGS

There was a void . . . an absence . . . a silence. There were no voices. There were no structures of reeling or support. So I went in search of structures and voices - in search of community.

I remember vividly a young black woman I'll call Renee; I met her while on hotline duty. I had been called to a "Code R" at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Code R indicates that a rape victim has been admitted to the hospital's emergency room.) I thought she was nineteen or twenty years old. She had cuts, fresh bruises, a look of eerie calm. She was waiting to be examined by a physician and sampled for a "rape kit." As an emergency room crisis volunteer for Women Organized Against Rape in Philadelphia, known as WOAR, my duties were specific: help the survivor feel comfortable and safe, explain procedures, and tell her about WOAR's services. We were instructed to stress that the rape was not her fault and instructed to help her feel less alone. I asked Renee several questions. No response. She obviously was shaken. But her silence was as solid as stone. It made me desperate with uneasiness. I knew Renee needed immediate attention. But in the emergency room everyone waits her turn.

Renee seemed to resent my presence. I asked if she wanted to be alone, and she answered with an abrupt "No." We sat in silence, staring into our separate spaces. Before long, Renee began to speak without my urging. She was not nineteen or twenty. She was fourteen. Only hours before, she had been raped at school by a fifteen-year-old boy in her neighborhood who was "known for doing things like this." She said, "I am not the first." When I asked if the boy had been caught, suspended, and arrested, Renee answered: "Why would anybody care? Nobody's going to do anything anyway." The boy had cornered Renee in a locker room - raped her while a group of students stood and watched. This fourteen year old had resisted as best she could. But now, alone in the ER - with me and her much older boyfriend - she needed and was asking for help. The rapist would be out of school for two, at the most, three days - perhaps a week. Then back to terrorize. According to Renee, this was a familiar story. Why should she go back to school if no one could keep in check this fifteen-year-old boy or ensure the safety of girls in the school community? I realized with a sudden emptiness that I had no idea what Renee would confront when she returned to school after "telling."

We who have survived must tell our stories for Renee and her classmates.

While I was nervously awaiting my turn on the stand at my own preliminary hearing - after bringing criminal charges against one of the black men who raped me - I saw women come and go. The other women who were there on the day of my hearing happened also to be African American. I waited and listened. (Everyone waits her turn in the courts of criminal justice.) I learned implicitly that a woman's word is not enough, that we, the women harmed by rape, serve merely as witnesses. The rendering of our specific brutalities, as in any other case in court, becomes "The Commonwealth vs. the Defendant." Our names do not appear.

When my turn came, I told my story; and the case was given a date. It would go to trial. At the time, I didn't know to be happy. Just as well, since I also didn't realize that going to trial meant I would be dragged through harsh details time after time after time, until I persuaded a jury that my rape had actually occurred and that the "alleged perpetrator" was, in fact, the man who raped me. There were many women, on that day and others, who were not given a trial date due to "insufficient evidence."

As a woman harmed by rape, I write for those women who never have their day in court - who, like Renee, are never guaranteed the safety of everyday life.

I met many women while training to become a volunteer for WOAR. Some disclosed their rapes for the first time during our training. As they labored through rape awareness videos and case history role playing, the pain of their scars was palpable. They fought to endure in order to bring solace to others. Some were able to remain; several had to leave to do the work of their own souls.

I write for those who could not stay.

There are women who continue to care for families and children, when rape and sexual violence have ripped away all intimacies of family life. Husbands, friends, lovers flee; they cannot bear the strain of disclosures, the effort of healing. These women live alone in their nightmares. They have no mediators for their "tellings."

I write for the women who lie alone in the night.

There is an uncanny silence surrounding the trauma of black rape. I believe I understand the silence of black women who survive. I am a black woman wounded, and because I kept silent for so long, my newly found voice is still emerging. Silences have become important to me. I'm not sure why I refused to tell. But I do know I was intensely afraid of the truth in all its manifestations. I was afraid to be heard.

Though I continued "to function" after being raped, it would be years before I began to integrate the trauma into my life. It would take years to embrace the joy of seeing morning light as anything but the end of yet another fearful night, survived with scant sleep or rest. But once I allowed myself to feel the fury that anyone - especially black men, who shared my skin color - would burglarize my home, steal my possessions, rob my body, and wound my soul, then - and only then - I was able to begin my own internal sorting, grieving, and retrieving.

I write now for those who must make the same journey.

Surviving the Silence is the mapping of a new space. A space in which black women can learn to trust and speak to "one other" and then to "one another" in a sharing recovery of memory, of sanity. In this book of voices are voices that worried my head for so long. Now they are "out." Never again will they be silent.

In Surviving the Silence you will meet women who have closeted themselves. In some instances, days of silence became years of undisclosed pain. For other women, survival of trauma remained unheard and sadly unheralded. All the women who have told their stories in these pages have chosen to live in some degree of secrecy, to protect themselves from censure, to stave off family discomfort and worry, or to protect those they have been conditioned to believe are African American "brothers." As I have connected with and come to know these courageous women, I have discovered striking, useful, and productive stories of black survival. Women came forward as I disseminated a "call for interviews" to several Philadelphia agencies. Then, by word of mouth, others heard of my work. Many chose to participate. Slowly, cautiously, women emerged from shadows of silence. I found myself in a world tragically inhabited by more - more than ever I imagined.

While men are not usually incorporated into discussions of rape, they have been allowed place and voice in this book. In the pages that follow, you will hear black men who have nurtured and supported black women surviving rape. These black men labored to understand. They speak with honesty as they attempt to tell other men how to feel, reach out, and connect with women wounded. They speak, I believe, to make our collective black lives better, to acknowledge our wounds and, more precisely, our black woman sorrow. They help us "to tell."

As a researcher and a survivor, my voice joins the voices of other women in this book - women for whom I desperately began searching after my own rapes in 1981. The voices of my mother, my father, and my husband join the book's chorus of witnesses. I have every faith that the force of this book's collective memory will engender a sense of community and renewed possibilities of self-love.

In order to ensure positive beginnings, I ask the reader to be patient, to read only as comfort allows. This is not an easy book, or a soft book. I have tried to tell my story and the stories of my survivor-sisters in ways I feel they must be told: with honesty, humility, and compassion. I profess to have no answers. This book is the story of who I was, who I became for a time, and the way in which I reconstructed my life. It is the story of people I found and refound, and chose to take along with me on my journey toward healing.

In the telling of the other women's stories, I have been protective of privacy (perhaps overly so) and the special relationship I now have with each woman. They gave me their trust. To attempt to explain, analyze, theorize, or interpret their actions would be a betrayal of that trust. If I were to further intrude into their lives with theory or precise interpretations, I would surely compromise their stories. They might flee, be silenced once again.

In our conversations, each woman began a new personal journey toward wholeness. Some have been successful and are working in productive ways. Others still struggle with sharing a deeply painful part of their lives, finding themselves repeatedly trapped in victim behavior. For all women with whom I have conversed, I must listen, without judgment or comment, and pass on their words and wisdom. I know now my role is the ancient one of the storyteller: to open the door and create a medium for survival voices. The storyteller of Native American lore is covered with - attached to - myriad cultural figures. Perhaps she is really only listening. For trauma must tell its own story.

Each reader, I hope, will find and take away what she or he needs. Our souls heal on levels, as wounds to flesh heal in layers. I am certain, however, that we can never again wait in silence. We must "tell." We must begin now to talk to one another - woman to woman, woman to man. And since we must, and I make the demand, it is only fair that I begin - use my own voice - before others speak. The reader must know how I was then in the dark silences and despair of 1981. My voice joins our collective voices, and we shall scratch the surface of our wounds. We shall form community with our stories. We will cast spells with our disclosures. "Spelling," by Margaret Atwood, wondrously captures how the spell of language, the power of stories, can move in the world:

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
where the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits and doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.*

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

And so - I write . . . as our words split and double and speak the truth of bodies wounded.

*Margaret Atwood, from "Spelling," True Stories (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1981), p. 64.