Ghosted: An American Story

by Nancy French

But the American story is one of defiance, especially of the political kind. My unwillingness to bow the knee to an unsuitable president was the most American thing I’d ever done.

I loved my family and never feared them, though my uncle Jasper pulled me aside and threatened to kill anyone who harmed me—or even dated me. I thought this was normal, but what is normal? Normal’s what you know. And that’s what I knew.

But I was like a drunk swimmer unable to grab onto the life preserver because I didn’t identify that sinking sensation as drowning.

I sang, side by side with people who were supposed to be family members on our journey toward heaven. But the sulfur still bubbled up if you knew where to look.

In church, we’d been taught to cater to the desires of men while not leading them on in any way.

Dad was quiet in his grief, and my mother had a stony silence. In our family we never resolved issues but ignored them until they calcified us.

You could be thankful Jesus died for your sins as long as you didn’t show it in any way other than a furrowed brow during communion.

“But when you’re presented with a choice between the lesser of two evils, choose neither,” I said, paraphrasing Charles Spurgeon.

My whole life, I’d seen people ignore the sexual actions of men if they were valuable enough to the organization.

That’s how sexual predators work. They attack the weak, make them weaker, then discredit them because of their weakness. They go on to bigger and better things, leaving a collection of wounded people in their wake.

By this point, conservatives were decrying the Black Lives Matter organization and not dealing with the tragedy of Floyd’s death. Some even maligned him in their refusal to acknowledge what was happening to our Black friends and neighbors.

Though I still believed the claims and demands on the original BLM website to be misguided, the movement had morphed from its radical nature into a collective sigh of despair felt by many Americans. But most people who adopted the “Black lives matter” language were simply terrified by what was happening to Black Americans.

There is no statute of limitations on truth or for individual and institutional accountability.

I shouldn’t be thankful that a preacher told the truth. That’s Christianity 101. I should be angry—outraged—that he covered up this attempted rape in the first place, letting Conrad go to continue harming more people.