Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

We were blessed with excellence, and excellently blessed, and our schoolwork and sports teams and choirs and clubs and shoulders thrummed with the Calvinist confidence that is actually a threat: if you do not become spectacular, it means you are not us.

In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.

My story was mine, but the law’s version of it was not.

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.