In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

Like so many women before me and since, I learned that you go back, you stick it out, you love the man until he is saved by your sacrifice. It’s the kind of thing you can always see going so badly in someone else’s life, but not in your own.

But after fourteen years of speaking and being punished, there was a dark lesson taking shape within my mind. I realized that the people who were supposed to love me, who were supposed to protect me, would actually sacrifice me and send me to a witness chair to be cross-examined by a man who didn’t know me and whose job was to reveal me as a liar. The people I loved sent me to that courtroom with my father—my mother didn’t come, my stepmother didn’t come. Before I got to that courtroom, I knew they no longer cared what had happened—they didn’t doubt it had happened but were sure I had wanted whatever he had done, no matter what I said. And if my own family felt that way, I knew everyone else would, too. I knew that the truth no longer mattered, especially my truth. That there was more risk in speaking than in keeping it secret.

I tried to explain that being poor means there is no car to sell, no certainty in any income. And most of all, there is nowhere to go when things get too hard or you get too tired. There is no one to call, no saving grace. Just the fear of losing your children or your home, the fear of freezing or starving. Dignity is far from important, and in the throes of poverty, the need to survive outweighs all else except the need to forget your misery.

I finally understood that the same people who sign petitions for laborers across the world don’t always love the laborers next to them. And that health care for all sometimes means not the ones who smoke. I realized that the feminists around me would still ask, Why didn’t you kick him in the balls? because a woman should be able to fight off two men twice her size. A feminist can still say, She was sprawled out for the men, and an entire community will shut out a young woman who is trying to figure out how to survive and be a mother if her decisions don’t meet their standards, if she doesn’t control the story told about her. I finally understood that so much of what I did looked ugly to the people around me, and they were happy to accept whatever a man decided was ugly.

Like many poor people, I grew up learning not to trust the police, and nobody had to sit me down to tell me why. I knew that poor people had a good chance of getting into more trouble if they called the police—you might have a warrant for unpaid traffic fines, or maybe the baby has a bruise and the police call Social Services. Maybe you had a drink or something to calm the nerves, and now your husband’s come home to knock you into the wall a little. Call the cops—maybe you’ll go to jail, maybe he will. Maybe both. It’s harder to pretend when you’re poor—harder to keep up the shiny veneer that tells the rest of the world that you’re harmless and innocent, that you deserve protection. I

Like Granny before me, I have largely hidden my emotional work and struggles from my children.