Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

Little-known fact about victims: they can tell whether you believe them by which term you use when you ask what happened to them.

to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.

It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.

There is a contemporary inquiry into shame that suggests that shame is not as deeply rooted in guilt as in power.

Then these details disappear again. For decades I forget them, if forget is the right word for the white blast of nothing the mind deploys like an air bag at the memory’s approach.

“Well, what fuckers,” she said. “How dare they.” I wanted to push against this to see if it held. “But then I went and lost my virginity to a guy I don’t even talk to. And I’ve made some bad decisions since then.” “Well, of course.” She had enormous eyes, lashed like a cartoon. “Of course?” “Sure. You’re devastated. They stole your self-respect and ruined your sense of boundaries. It’s natural to take some time to get those things back.”

Hester Prynne, Hawthorne writes in The Scarlet Letter, “did not flee.” She moved with her fatherless child to a “little, lonesome dwelling” on the outskirts of town. Of course she did. One step shy of the witch in her cave, our Hester, marginalized by an entire community. I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.

It is only when power is threatened that power responds.

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.