Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

I knew it marked me, to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t stop the questions from coming into my mind, nor the sadness that followed them like fish on a line. My only hope had been to bury it all beneath sweetness and hard work. I was resigned to be a pretender.

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

Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination.

I didn’t need help defining despair. I needed help feeling like a living girl.

What is to be said about the fact that the teacher who reached me—who made me not only think but feel, who ignited the material at hand—was one who was abusing his power of connection with other girls? Do we call that an unfortunate coincidence? Am I betraying the women he violated by writing about how he, almost alone and without knowing it, helped me that fall?

He never really disagreed with anything, just set his idea up there next to yours, as if there was plenty of room on the shelf.

Even he, who habitually saw the best until his face was smashed up against the worst, began to think the district attorney was on to something.

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.

The enormous kindness of a small affirmation like this. I was not crazy. I described things the way they were.

The question tries to portray the victim as the predator, the one with a clever plan. It aims to throw the whole circumstance on its head.

To hear these stories spoken aloud is jarring, but not because it causes us to reconsider who we are and how we are organized. It is only when power is threatened that power responds.