Sara Niles's Blog: Sara Nile's Blog, page 4
February 23, 2014
Homicide in the Street by Sara Niles
He was dead, alright. The sight of death is an ugly and fearsome thing, I thought, as I absorbed the tragic sight in front of me. It was a man, ‘The man’ , who was lying in the road with blackish-red blood pooled around his head, and as he lay face down with his feet in his own yard, while his head and shoulders were planted in the street, he gave the appearance of a killed animal felled in its tracks by a hunter.
By the time I arrived, yellow crime scene tape was strapped around the trees, while blue and red lights flashed out of sync with each other, providing the warning surges of light emanating from the tops of police cars and through the windshields of undercover detective vehicles; while the ambulance was parked askew with the neat, uniformed workers eerily standing almost idly by, in no apparent rush to ‘save’ the life of the already ‘dead’ man. I had rushed over as soon as I got the phone call, alerting me to what I was seeing with my own eyes. The phone call had been from my oldest son Tommy who had reached me at the local shelter with the news: “He’s dead! Mama-somebody just shot him-right out in the middle of the street.” Tommy had tersely stated, as a matter-of -fact summation of a wasted and dangerous life. The man was killed within fifty feet of my adult son Tommy’s yard, so naturally I felt I had a license to investigate to see if he was indeed ‘really’ dead.
I received the phone call from my son, while only a few blocks away, so it had only taken a few minutes for me to arrive. I could see past the commotion of all the emergency workers, that my son’s hunter green Chevy truck was parked in his driveway. I had dropped my younger teen-aged son, Mikey off earlier that morning so that he could ’hang out’ with his brother and watch sports on television with him, which was what they were doing during the time of the murder. I parked carefully on the other side of the wide yellow crime tape and about two houses down from Tommy’s, and since there was no way for me to gain access to my son’s house without going under the crime tape, I walked up to the tape, as two detectives nodded at me (I knew them both) and allowed me to cross under the tape in order to walk the few feet over to Tommy’s house. I walked past the man’s bloodied head, taking care to keep moving. I took the time to take a good look at the man, I had to, it was as if some compelling force pulled me in that direction, a force beyond mere curiosity, I needed to see for myself, that he was dead. This body before me was the once loud and brash man, who used to stand out in the street and threaten me as I drove by, and who intimidated and menaced others, now appeared to lie in a permanent state of lifelessness, with not a twitch of movement coming from his body. He was dead. I felt a conflicting wave of relief, that he would not kill the two boys that I knew, nor their mother and I also felt a secondary feeling of reverent sadness, borne out of moral responsibility, simply because the man was a man after-all, a human who would never breathe the breath of life on this earth again. According to Tommy, there was no mystery to the murder since it happened in front of the entire neighborhood, therefore, finding the man who did it, was just a matter of wrapping up a few details. It would be brought to light later, that the task of bringing the killer of the man to justice was as easy as following a trail of crumbs.
But at that time, I did not know how the new murder case would turn out, but I did know that someone innocent would have died if ‘the man’ had not been stopped. The greatest mysteries in life are not the ones concocted for movies and television, nor the fictional stories made up as a result of a writer’s active imagination. The greatest mysteries happen every day, all around us; and in the case of the murdered man, lying post mortem, right out in public, dead in the same street that many local people traveled daily, the mystery was right in our front yard.
Homicide in the Street was taken from Out of the Maelstrom by Sara Niles
Homicide in the Street Free on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Homicide-Street...
Out of the Maelstrom
By the time I arrived, yellow crime scene tape was strapped around the trees, while blue and red lights flashed out of sync with each other, providing the warning surges of light emanating from the tops of police cars and through the windshields of undercover detective vehicles; while the ambulance was parked askew with the neat, uniformed workers eerily standing almost idly by, in no apparent rush to ‘save’ the life of the already ‘dead’ man. I had rushed over as soon as I got the phone call, alerting me to what I was seeing with my own eyes. The phone call had been from my oldest son Tommy who had reached me at the local shelter with the news: “He’s dead! Mama-somebody just shot him-right out in the middle of the street.” Tommy had tersely stated, as a matter-of -fact summation of a wasted and dangerous life. The man was killed within fifty feet of my adult son Tommy’s yard, so naturally I felt I had a license to investigate to see if he was indeed ‘really’ dead.
I received the phone call from my son, while only a few blocks away, so it had only taken a few minutes for me to arrive. I could see past the commotion of all the emergency workers, that my son’s hunter green Chevy truck was parked in his driveway. I had dropped my younger teen-aged son, Mikey off earlier that morning so that he could ’hang out’ with his brother and watch sports on television with him, which was what they were doing during the time of the murder. I parked carefully on the other side of the wide yellow crime tape and about two houses down from Tommy’s, and since there was no way for me to gain access to my son’s house without going under the crime tape, I walked up to the tape, as two detectives nodded at me (I knew them both) and allowed me to cross under the tape in order to walk the few feet over to Tommy’s house. I walked past the man’s bloodied head, taking care to keep moving. I took the time to take a good look at the man, I had to, it was as if some compelling force pulled me in that direction, a force beyond mere curiosity, I needed to see for myself, that he was dead. This body before me was the once loud and brash man, who used to stand out in the street and threaten me as I drove by, and who intimidated and menaced others, now appeared to lie in a permanent state of lifelessness, with not a twitch of movement coming from his body. He was dead. I felt a conflicting wave of relief, that he would not kill the two boys that I knew, nor their mother and I also felt a secondary feeling of reverent sadness, borne out of moral responsibility, simply because the man was a man after-all, a human who would never breathe the breath of life on this earth again. According to Tommy, there was no mystery to the murder since it happened in front of the entire neighborhood, therefore, finding the man who did it, was just a matter of wrapping up a few details. It would be brought to light later, that the task of bringing the killer of the man to justice was as easy as following a trail of crumbs.
But at that time, I did not know how the new murder case would turn out, but I did know that someone innocent would have died if ‘the man’ had not been stopped. The greatest mysteries in life are not the ones concocted for movies and television, nor the fictional stories made up as a result of a writer’s active imagination. The greatest mysteries happen every day, all around us; and in the case of the murdered man, lying post mortem, right out in public, dead in the same street that many local people traveled daily, the mystery was right in our front yard.
Homicide in the Street was taken from Out of the Maelstrom by Sara Niles
Homicide in the Street Free on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Homicide-Street...
Out of the Maelstrom
February 18, 2014
Torn From the Inside Out 2014
February 18-22 Kindle download:
Torn From the Inside Out 2014 Edition
Sara Niles
Literary Narrative Domestic Violence Memoir
In 1987, Sara Niles fled for her life in a February thunderstorm, with five small children in tow.
http://www.amazon.com/Torn-Inside-Out...
Read Chapter One:
Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:
“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!” He screamed.
It was February 13, of the year 1987, the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles, and this is my story.
The Deep South, 1957
I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of ragged grass running down the middle, like frazzled, green ribbon. This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
It was the year 1957, a date that became a famous marker in the racial history of conflict between Blacks and Whites; when The Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between Blacks and Whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the White man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful ‘croker-sack’ door, made of rough burlap. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old.
The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and on hot days his hat-less bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised.
I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his bald head with both my thin, dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt.
“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly.
“Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.
I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need. I remember the things that I didn’t need the most, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
Relatives were notified, and they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.
Torn From the Inside Out 2014 Edition
Sara Niles
Literary Narrative Domestic Violence Memoir
In 1987, Sara Niles fled for her life in a February thunderstorm, with five small children in tow.
http://www.amazon.com/Torn-Inside-Out...
Read Chapter One:
Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:
“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!” He screamed.
It was February 13, of the year 1987, the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles, and this is my story.
The Deep South, 1957
I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of ragged grass running down the middle, like frazzled, green ribbon. This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
It was the year 1957, a date that became a famous marker in the racial history of conflict between Blacks and Whites; when The Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between Blacks and Whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the White man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful ‘croker-sack’ door, made of rough burlap. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old.
The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and on hot days his hat-less bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised.
I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his bald head with both my thin, dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt.
“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly.
“Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.
I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need. I remember the things that I didn’t need the most, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
Relatives were notified, and they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.
February 6, 2014
Twelve Year's a Slave: Reflection
Being Black in America: From Twelve Years a Slave and Beyond
By Sara Niles
In the year 1988, Peggy McIntosh published a landmark essay on ‘white male privilege and white privilege in general, that provided a revolutionary view of what most White people expected as a result of simply being born ‘White’ or Caucasian: The title was White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack
Read:
http://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversi...
The reason this paper was such an illuminating essay in 1988, was because it caused people to take a second look as the way races viewed not only each other, but how White people viewed the world. In the essay, it was revealed that a White person learned to expect to be treated a certain way simply because he or she was White; for example. McIntosh stated that these perceptions and privileges were both “denied and protected” by those who enjoyed them, and that those protected privileges were the total opposites of those of minority races; that being White was not listed as a defining characteristic of an entire race, and the White race was used as the ‘In’ group to provide the standard for those of the ‘out’ groups or races. Even in the year 2014, the word ‘minority’ is applied to most races that are non-White, and ethnic groups and racial distinctions leave out Whites, with the presumption that the majority sets the standard that needs no definition or label.
It is now 2014, over twenty-five years since McIntosh wrote about White privilege, and six years since Barak Obama, the first Black president of the United States, was sworn into office. The racial landscape has changed drastically during the past couple of decades, and will continue to evolve and change; which leads to a question that is becoming more prominent: What does it mean to be Black in America now?
In 1988, being Black in America meant that you suffered the delayed reaction of a culture that was born during the times of blatant racial prejudices and injustice, a time when the era of Integration of the schools was a fresh memory in the minds of many who lived it firsthand (me included). There were many who still held beliefs that Blacks were inferior, less intelligent, less courageous and less handsome or beautiful than their fair skinned and light haired contemporaries; in fact, I remember when Sidney Poitier and Cicely Tyson broke through many of the preconceived stereotypes of what Blacks could and could not do. I remember when Diahanne Carrol was first considered ‘beautiful’ by the standard of White America; and I also remember when the supermodel arena first opened the doors of its perception wide enough to see the beauty of Black female models who ranged from light caramel in complexion, as in Super Model Tyra Banks, to an ever increasingly dark hue of brownness until Sudanese born British model, Alex Wek was pronounced ‘beautiful’, and graced the covers of countless magazines. By now, it was 1995, and the racial climate in America had undergone an extensive degree of change toward being the progressive nation that it has been destined to be, since our forefathers said “every man is …equal”-but we are not there yet. There is still work to be done before the dark shadow of American slavery and its years of ugliness, has been removed.
The last frontier: The Black Man in America, and how he is viewed, is now front and center. The killing of Trayvon Martin presented a hint of leftover stereotypical fear-because if you changed the scenario of the teen-aged Black child innocently taking a shortcut home through a White neighborhood, for a blond haired White child doing exactly the same thing, at the same time and in the same place-it would almost assuredly have produced a different result, from the reaction of George Zimmerman to the judgment of the jury. The national perception is still slightly tainted against the idea of the ‘scary’ Black man; especially if he happens to be ‘dark’ complexioned, with a hint of Africa, the birthplace of the world, apparent in his coloring.
I just watched the movie Twelve Years a Slave, an adaption of the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, an intense account of man’s inhumanity against man, and a historical time of grave injustices against all men born of color, especially those born Black; and I was driven to reflect upon the changing standards by which America deems one human’s life to be just as valuable, or equal to that of another. I remembered Peggy McIntosh landmark work on White Privilege, and realized it has a match in the Black Man’s lack of automatic privilege; although the scene of racial equality has drastically changed for the better, the view of the Black Man in America, still needs work. Until we can see all humans as merely humans, not as a Red Human or a Green One, and measure all people by the same standards, as good or bad.
Intelligent or beautiful, there is work to do yet.
Top Ten Black Supermodels: http://www.loop21.com/entertainment/1...
Alex Wek
Twelve Years a Slave
By Sara Niles
In the year 1988, Peggy McIntosh published a landmark essay on ‘white male privilege and white privilege in general, that provided a revolutionary view of what most White people expected as a result of simply being born ‘White’ or Caucasian: The title was White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack
Read:
http://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversi...
The reason this paper was such an illuminating essay in 1988, was because it caused people to take a second look as the way races viewed not only each other, but how White people viewed the world. In the essay, it was revealed that a White person learned to expect to be treated a certain way simply because he or she was White; for example. McIntosh stated that these perceptions and privileges were both “denied and protected” by those who enjoyed them, and that those protected privileges were the total opposites of those of minority races; that being White was not listed as a defining characteristic of an entire race, and the White race was used as the ‘In’ group to provide the standard for those of the ‘out’ groups or races. Even in the year 2014, the word ‘minority’ is applied to most races that are non-White, and ethnic groups and racial distinctions leave out Whites, with the presumption that the majority sets the standard that needs no definition or label.
It is now 2014, over twenty-five years since McIntosh wrote about White privilege, and six years since Barak Obama, the first Black president of the United States, was sworn into office. The racial landscape has changed drastically during the past couple of decades, and will continue to evolve and change; which leads to a question that is becoming more prominent: What does it mean to be Black in America now?
In 1988, being Black in America meant that you suffered the delayed reaction of a culture that was born during the times of blatant racial prejudices and injustice, a time when the era of Integration of the schools was a fresh memory in the minds of many who lived it firsthand (me included). There were many who still held beliefs that Blacks were inferior, less intelligent, less courageous and less handsome or beautiful than their fair skinned and light haired contemporaries; in fact, I remember when Sidney Poitier and Cicely Tyson broke through many of the preconceived stereotypes of what Blacks could and could not do. I remember when Diahanne Carrol was first considered ‘beautiful’ by the standard of White America; and I also remember when the supermodel arena first opened the doors of its perception wide enough to see the beauty of Black female models who ranged from light caramel in complexion, as in Super Model Tyra Banks, to an ever increasingly dark hue of brownness until Sudanese born British model, Alex Wek was pronounced ‘beautiful’, and graced the covers of countless magazines. By now, it was 1995, and the racial climate in America had undergone an extensive degree of change toward being the progressive nation that it has been destined to be, since our forefathers said “every man is …equal”-but we are not there yet. There is still work to be done before the dark shadow of American slavery and its years of ugliness, has been removed.
The last frontier: The Black Man in America, and how he is viewed, is now front and center. The killing of Trayvon Martin presented a hint of leftover stereotypical fear-because if you changed the scenario of the teen-aged Black child innocently taking a shortcut home through a White neighborhood, for a blond haired White child doing exactly the same thing, at the same time and in the same place-it would almost assuredly have produced a different result, from the reaction of George Zimmerman to the judgment of the jury. The national perception is still slightly tainted against the idea of the ‘scary’ Black man; especially if he happens to be ‘dark’ complexioned, with a hint of Africa, the birthplace of the world, apparent in his coloring.
I just watched the movie Twelve Years a Slave, an adaption of the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, an intense account of man’s inhumanity against man, and a historical time of grave injustices against all men born of color, especially those born Black; and I was driven to reflect upon the changing standards by which America deems one human’s life to be just as valuable, or equal to that of another. I remembered Peggy McIntosh landmark work on White Privilege, and realized it has a match in the Black Man’s lack of automatic privilege; although the scene of racial equality has drastically changed for the better, the view of the Black Man in America, still needs work. Until we can see all humans as merely humans, not as a Red Human or a Green One, and measure all people by the same standards, as good or bad.
Intelligent or beautiful, there is work to do yet.
Top Ten Black Supermodels: http://www.loop21.com/entertainment/1...
Alex Wek
Twelve Years a Slave
January 26, 2014
The Ice Storm by Sara Niles
Essay length short story: 4389 words
Tags: winter storm, domestic violence shelter,record ice storm,community
The forces of nature unleash one of the most devastating and deadly ice storms of the century and while the small, rural community struggles to survive, Sara and her co-workers work to protect the shelter clients and children.
Short story taken from Out of the Maelstrom by Sara Niles
We live in a world so full of explosive power that the extent of natural forces continues to baffle us, from the jolt of a lightning bolt that can melt metal and fuel a city, to the rupture of a volcano. Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water, and occasionally in a lifetime or two, we witness these theatrical performances of Mother Nature.
I expected something dramatic to happen all day, the possibility of an anomaly in the weather was mentioned in passing by co-workers and clients, and of course, store clerks, nervous about getting safely home after work.
The suspense was nerve racking, the ‘gunfire’ like sounds reverberated all over the neighborhood just as darkness had fallen. The massive old quick frozen trees produced loud pops and cracks as they were mercilessly split wide open, crashing into roofs and onto cars sitting in the neighbors car ports, my car was safely tucked in my closed garage, and I hoped it would be spared. The electricity all over the town and throughout most of the county was out, the lines were continually snapping and sagging and the power poles snapped under the weight of the heavy ice laden power lines. It was going to be a long, dark and dangerous night as the wind whistled and the trees screamed. Our house was surrounded by several types of large trees, including one huge three sectioned tree about fifty feet from my garage and I feared the trees could kill us in our sleep if they landed just right, so I stationed myself in the living room by candle light keeping vigil.
It was already below freezing with the temperature dropping rapidly while the ice fell in steady sheets clattering onto the metal roof of the house, adding perilous pounds of weight by the minute. It was totally black outside.
Most of the small town would be without heat and light for a long while, but since our heat supply and cook stove was powered by underground gas lines, we would be warm and would be able to cook hot food, that is, if we were not crushed in the night. I had eaten a warm supper and was watching the candle flicker through the fern leaves of my living room, shadows dancing off the walls.
Free on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ice-Storm-F...
From Out of the Maelstrom
Out of the Maelstrom
Tags: winter storm, domestic violence shelter,record ice storm,community
The forces of nature unleash one of the most devastating and deadly ice storms of the century and while the small, rural community struggles to survive, Sara and her co-workers work to protect the shelter clients and children.
Short story taken from Out of the Maelstrom by Sara Niles
We live in a world so full of explosive power that the extent of natural forces continues to baffle us, from the jolt of a lightning bolt that can melt metal and fuel a city, to the rupture of a volcano. Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water, and occasionally in a lifetime or two, we witness these theatrical performances of Mother Nature.
I expected something dramatic to happen all day, the possibility of an anomaly in the weather was mentioned in passing by co-workers and clients, and of course, store clerks, nervous about getting safely home after work.
The suspense was nerve racking, the ‘gunfire’ like sounds reverberated all over the neighborhood just as darkness had fallen. The massive old quick frozen trees produced loud pops and cracks as they were mercilessly split wide open, crashing into roofs and onto cars sitting in the neighbors car ports, my car was safely tucked in my closed garage, and I hoped it would be spared. The electricity all over the town and throughout most of the county was out, the lines were continually snapping and sagging and the power poles snapped under the weight of the heavy ice laden power lines. It was going to be a long, dark and dangerous night as the wind whistled and the trees screamed. Our house was surrounded by several types of large trees, including one huge three sectioned tree about fifty feet from my garage and I feared the trees could kill us in our sleep if they landed just right, so I stationed myself in the living room by candle light keeping vigil.
It was already below freezing with the temperature dropping rapidly while the ice fell in steady sheets clattering onto the metal roof of the house, adding perilous pounds of weight by the minute. It was totally black outside.
Most of the small town would be without heat and light for a long while, but since our heat supply and cook stove was powered by underground gas lines, we would be warm and would be able to cook hot food, that is, if we were not crushed in the night. I had eaten a warm supper and was watching the candle flicker through the fern leaves of my living room, shadows dancing off the walls.
Free on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ice-Storm-F...
From Out of the Maelstrom
Out of the Maelstrom
January 13, 2014
"The Garden of Eden" from Torn From the Inside Out
From Torn From the Inside Out Sara Niles
Torn From the Inside Out
Chapter 1
The Garden of Eden
Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:
“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!!!!!!!” He screamed.
That was the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles and this is my story.
The Deep South, 1957
I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of grass ribbon-ed down the middle. This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
It was nineteen fifty-seven, the Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between blacks and whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the white man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful croker-sack door. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old.
The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and on hot days his hatless bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised.
I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his baldhead with both my thin, dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt.
“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly.
“Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.
I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need. I remember the things I didn’t need, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
Relatives were notified, they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.
Torn From the Inside Out
Chapter 1
The Garden of Eden
Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:
“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!!!!!!!” He screamed.
That was the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles and this is my story.
The Deep South, 1957
I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of grass ribbon-ed down the middle. This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
It was nineteen fifty-seven, the Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between blacks and whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the white man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful croker-sack door. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old.
The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and on hot days his hatless bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised.
I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his baldhead with both my thin, dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt.
“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly.
“Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.
I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need. I remember the things I didn’t need, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
Relatives were notified, they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.
December 30, 2013
Social Issues: John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck's Gift to Us
The Great Depression was the greatest economic disaster in America. It began with the crash of the stock market on ‘Black Tuesday’ in 1929, and by the early 1930’s, it was in full swing. The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck, painted a fictional story of lives that were all too real for people who lived the tale that Steinbeck recreated through the Joad family’s desperate attempt to survive.
The ‘grapes’ of prosperity, that is the work and prosperity the family hoped to find when they reached the grape orchards in California, became the ‘Grapes of Wrath’, by the time they reached their destination. Economic strife, hardship and the societal turmoil of a frustrated generation, paved the way for a New Day, when Eisenhower moved to enact ‘New Deal’ legislation that provided economic stability for the banks, and welfare programs for the poor, social security for the aged and sick, and a brand new minimum wage:Franklin D. Roosevelt's post depression Programs.
The climate of the American economy was a dark and bleak one, as the Joad family traveled Route 66, while Steinbeck painted a permanent literary portrait of what life was like during the Great Depression era. The Grapes of Wrath provide more than simple entertainment, it captured a piece of American history and framed it in our minds forever.
The Great Depression was the greatest economic disaster in America. It began with the crash of the stock market on ‘Black Tuesday’ in 1929, and by the early 1930’s, it was in full swing. The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck, painted a fictional story of lives that were all too real for people who lived the tale that Steinbeck recreated through the Joad family’s desperate attempt to survive.
The ‘grapes’ of prosperity, that is the work and prosperity the family hoped to find when they reached the grape orchards in California, became the ‘Grapes of Wrath’, by the time they reached their destination. Economic strife, hardship and the societal turmoil of a frustrated generation, paved the way for a New Day, when Eisenhower moved to enact ‘New Deal’ legislation that provided economic stability for the banks, and welfare programs for the poor, social security for the aged and sick, and a brand new minimum wage:Franklin D. Roosevelt's post depression Programs.
The climate of the American economy was a dark and bleak one, as the Joad family traveled Route 66, while Steinbeck painted a permanent literary portrait of what life was like during the Great Depression era. The Grapes of Wrath provide more than simple entertainment, it captured a piece of American history and framed it in our minds forever.
December 19, 2013
The Many Faces of Religion
The Journey
The Journey by Sara Niles,is a narrative memoir that tells the story of Sara and her children after having escaped abuse in 1987 and it spans their live up to 2001. The impact of social systems as part of the context of The Journey, included a profound religious influence upon the Niles family. The following is an excerpt taken From The Journey:
Excerpt
Chapter 8 of The Journey
The Many Faces of Religion
"Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered"
"It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides, multi-dimensionally, and do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely. Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life."
Excerpted from The Journey by Sara Niles
The Journey by Sara Niles,is a narrative memoir that tells the story of Sara and her children after having escaped abuse in 1987 and it spans their live up to 2001. The impact of social systems as part of the context of The Journey, included a profound religious influence upon the Niles family. The following is an excerpt taken From The Journey:
Excerpt
Chapter 8 of The Journey
The Many Faces of Religion
"Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered"
"It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides, multi-dimensionally, and do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely. Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life."
Excerpted from The Journey by Sara Niles
The Many Faces of Religion
The Journey
:The Journey
The Journey by Sara Niles is a narrative memoir that tells the story of Sara and her children after having escaped abuse in 1987 and it spans their live up to 2001. The impact of social systems as part of the context of The Journey, included a profound religious influence upon the Niles family. The following is an excerpt taken From The Journey:
Excerpt
Chapter 8 of The Journey
The Many Faces of Religion
"Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered"
"It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides, multi-dimensionally, and do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely. Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life."
Excerpted from The Journey by Sara Niles
:The Journey
The Journey by Sara Niles is a narrative memoir that tells the story of Sara and her children after having escaped abuse in 1987 and it spans their live up to 2001. The impact of social systems as part of the context of The Journey, included a profound religious influence upon the Niles family. The following is an excerpt taken From The Journey:
Excerpt
Chapter 8 of The Journey
The Many Faces of Religion
"Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered"
"It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides, multi-dimensionally, and do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely. Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life."
Excerpted from The Journey by Sara Niles
December 14, 2013
The Journey By Sara Niles
Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”
“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”
“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger”
“Emotional breaking'The Journeys are delicate to repair and even harder to decipher. I was not smart enough, nor did I have the wisdom needed for such a job at that time”
“Ariel was the perfect emotional adapter when things went wrong, but she was not amenable to life when things went right. It seemed her coping mechanism was geared towards trouble”
“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”
“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger”
“Emotional breaking'The Journeys are delicate to repair and even harder to decipher. I was not smart enough, nor did I have the wisdom needed for such a job at that time”
“Ariel was the perfect emotional adapter when things went wrong, but she was not amenable to life when things went right. It seemed her coping mechanism was geared towards trouble”
December 12, 2013
Nelson Mandela: A Living Legend in his time
Review of the book: Long Walk to Freedom
It was said by psychologist Abraham Maslow, that when it comes to human growth, only a special few ever reach the pinnacle of altruistic achievement that marks the best they could be, the point of being self-actualized. Nelson Mandela was one of the special few, as his point of achievement reached legendary proportions: after spending twenty-seven years in prison on manufactured charges designed to stop him from his mission of freeing the South African people from an unjust and tyrannical Apartheid, he was set free (1990), only to almost immediately become the president of South Africa (1994). The story of Nelson Mandela’s life sounds almost magical, as though it was concocted in the mind of a fantasy author-yet, it was true. Mandela was a living legend in his time; and until only a few days ago, he was a living legend all of my life. A Long Walk to Freedom is now a chronicle of world history, and Mandela is part of the ‘ages’.
In a Long Walk to Freedom (I first read it in the 1990’s), Mandela speaks of all the happenings in his life that made him the person he became, from his birth and childhood, his relationship with family members, and into his adulthood, and his eventual mission to end Apartheid and the cruelty it inflicted upon his country. Mandela spoke of what nature and nurture added to his determination, and of how his family culture added to his development as a man. Mandela recounted his education and his role as a reformer; his imprisonment and the ordeal that lasted for almost three decades, and finally, his freedom: The Long Walk to Freedom.
There is no ‘poor me’ attitude, nor is there an air of superiority in his story, only the honest revelations and inner reflections, of what we now know for sure, was the mind of one of the world’s greatest leaders. Mandela, the son of a ‘kingmaker’ who himself became ‘king’, the president of South Africa, and an international icon.
The writing style is polished, and full of insight and detail, making it a very enjoyable read. This book should become one of the great autobiographies of all time, along with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Malcolm X.
It was said by psychologist Abraham Maslow, that when it comes to human growth, only a special few ever reach the pinnacle of altruistic achievement that marks the best they could be, the point of being self-actualized. Nelson Mandela was one of the special few, as his point of achievement reached legendary proportions: after spending twenty-seven years in prison on manufactured charges designed to stop him from his mission of freeing the South African people from an unjust and tyrannical Apartheid, he was set free (1990), only to almost immediately become the president of South Africa (1994). The story of Nelson Mandela’s life sounds almost magical, as though it was concocted in the mind of a fantasy author-yet, it was true. Mandela was a living legend in his time; and until only a few days ago, he was a living legend all of my life. A Long Walk to Freedom is now a chronicle of world history, and Mandela is part of the ‘ages’.
In a Long Walk to Freedom (I first read it in the 1990’s), Mandela speaks of all the happenings in his life that made him the person he became, from his birth and childhood, his relationship with family members, and into his adulthood, and his eventual mission to end Apartheid and the cruelty it inflicted upon his country. Mandela spoke of what nature and nurture added to his determination, and of how his family culture added to his development as a man. Mandela recounted his education and his role as a reformer; his imprisonment and the ordeal that lasted for almost three decades, and finally, his freedom: The Long Walk to Freedom.
There is no ‘poor me’ attitude, nor is there an air of superiority in his story, only the honest revelations and inner reflections, of what we now know for sure, was the mind of one of the world’s greatest leaders. Mandela, the son of a ‘kingmaker’ who himself became ‘king’, the president of South Africa, and an international icon.
The writing style is polished, and full of insight and detail, making it a very enjoyable read. This book should become one of the great autobiographies of all time, along with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Malcolm X.
Sara Nile's Blog
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