I don’t remember the first time I was raped, but I know it happened.

I don’t recall when the memory was lost. I can’t answer #WhyIDidntReport.

I do recall remembering exactly what happened, in re-traumatizingly clear detail, two years later: in the middle of an assembly at school on reporting sexual abuse. And then, I did report. Loudly. In the form of a high-pitched yet guttural scream that seemed to have gathered strength from the time the memory sat dormant in my brain.

Around me, other children–other girls, as far as my ten year old self could tell–had also begun to cry (although none quite so spectacularly as I, unfortunately for my social life). The administration at my private Christian school created an after-school support group for all of us. It lasted for six months or so before either they or we decided it wasn’t worth the effort, wasn’t worth re-dredging up our memories over and over with no real resolution. So eventually I forgot, again. At least, I thought I did. But I never really forgot.

I went through a tumultuous adolescence marked with mental instability, self-destructive behavior, and questionable relationships with men and masculine-identified folks. Standard survivor fare; I won’t bore you with those details. What I will say about that time is that I never fully recovered the memory again. I recovered more of it. For instance, during a particularly intense overnight therapy session at a residential treatment facility when I was sixteen, I remembered again where the rape took place, and I remembered penetration. But still, the full awareness of it was, mercifully, kept from me by my psyche.

When I was nineteen I was raped again, and I remember everything about it. It destroyed me, psychologically, but it didn’t reveal the memory of what happened when I was eight. It did, however, induce all sorts of PTSD and dissociative identity issues that forced me to confront my unprocessed trauma. I went into intensive therapy with EMDR, a course that lasted for about seven years. I managed to reintegrate myself, despite not having access to the actual memory of what occurred when I was eight.

Even without details, I can see the shape of the memory. Bordering the gnawing, gaping gaps in the record, there are some clear lines. I remember my excitement over an older white boy thinking this ugly Black duckling was pretty. How good that felt after the years of bullying and torment I endured. How cool I thought I was when we hung out on the jungle gym and flipped other kids off. Him calling me at my house: me, giggling, my mom, hearing me, asking who I was talking to.

And I remember…a nonlinear empty space. (And something involving the lunch tables, something involving something of his inside something of mine. I don’t try to pin down specifics; I truly consider it a gift that I can’t recall what happened anymore.)

Then, I remember my head down in my folded arms after school, crying. A note from him in my third grade yearbook that I think said something about how ugly my hairy armpits were but I could never tell because I scratched it out immediately after I first read it. My grades dropping, my interest in life degrading; partially because I’m not a fan of standardized education, but mainly because my mind was occupied with blaming myself for whatever happened in that empty space. And later, of course, there is the aforementioned mental instability.

What have I learned from this culture about survivorhood and memory? From watching season after season of SVU, from watching now two women in my lifetime testify that a potential Supreme Court justice sexually assaulted them, from the Mike Tyson trial, the Cosby trial, the Very Special Episodes of various sitcoms and dramas? What is important, when you are raped, after a rape? Remember as much detail as you can. (Remember, even, what you were wearing.) Remember not to take a shower, so your body can remember what they left on you, and you can prove this has happened. Remember to try to leave some memory of yourself on them, a scratch, some DNA, some irrefutable scientific proof. And if you can’t? If you didn’t? If your brain’s split-second decision when it realized you were under threat was to shift you into a different state of consciousness while the trauma occurs so you cannot remember the trauma outside of that state? If instead of smells and sounds and sensations there’s just an ominous void where a part of your childhood should be?

What can you do when you’re doomed to know, but never remember?

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I am a survivor of childhood rape. In fact, I didn’t come to terms with it fully until I was raped again. Part of the reason I had difficulty in validating my experience has to do with the importance memory holds in legitimizing one’s status as a survivor, which in turn derives from a cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist prioritization of the rational and material over the emotional and the spiritual.

When it comes to sharing experiences of rape, we love details; we love when someone’s juicy underbelly of trauma is served up raw for the re-devouring. Narrative structure is important, too. (Make sure it fits the range of acceptable assaults. Make sure you’re weren’t fucking them consensually first or laughing with them first or drinking with them first or flirting with them first. Make sure you’re white, nondisabled, cishet, thin, and attractive.) If you’ve got physical evidence, bruises, bleeding, we’ll of course take those, maybe rub some salt in those wounds for good measure. And you’ve always got to have the corroborating witnesses, preferably of the highest caliber (so not your drunk ex-BFF who’s consensually banging her boyfriend in an adjacent hotel bed and oblivious to your screams).

But when you just straight can’t remember? When your evidence consists solely of a promising life dashed upon the rocks and an empty space? There’s no empowerment to be found there. No statute of limitations to beat out. Neither our society’s system of justice nor the current pop cultural/political moment occurring around sexual assault readily accommodate the slippery nature of trauma memory.

I’m reminded of the difficulty I had in claiming a political identity as a survivor now, in this moment of #MeToo reckoning, with the development of newer hashtags such as #WhyIDidntReport. So many of our methods of personal resistance against rape culture focus on storytelling, splaying your experiential guts onto a screen of various sizes as a form of empowerment. I do absolutely support survivors who want to tell their stories. But as someone who doesn’t particularly want to feed more bodies to the prison industrial complex, and as someone who remembers the name of their rapist but no details in one instance and a bunch of details but no name in the other, I haven’t participated. What would I say? I keep looking out on my feeds to see if any of the stories resemble mine, an empty space; none so far yet.

The confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh was re-traumatizing for me, as it was for so many other survivors. In my case, it stirred up some latent feelings of inauthenticity. In Dr. Ford’s testimony, she leaned on the Western medical-scientific view of memory as primary in determining legitimacy as a survivor, basically stating that she knew she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh because of how traumatic memories encode themselves in the hippocampus. I know I was raped because of how the memory encoded itself into everything else in my life. Could I testify, if my childhood rapist were somehow nominated to some public position? Could I sit in front of that kangaroo court and try to plead my broken life against my rapist’s hippocampus?

(This is one reason why I’m an abolitionist. I don’t believe our current paradigm of justice can account for all the ways one can testify. My testimony is embodied, and so my vision of feminist justice involves a de-centering of narrative testimony, particularly when it comes to rape and sexual assault.)

Our (U.S.) society associates forms of knowledge gleaned outside a rational-scientific framework with femininity and Otherness, thus rendering them inferior in a cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist context. Our society is also a rape culture, and so no amount of remembering in perfect detail will ensure that a rapist is brought to what passes for justice here. So why should I, or you, dredge up our trauma on demand and offer it to an uncaring society with no guarantee of return on our investment? Why prop up the idea that a survivor’s memory is ever worth anything under heterosexist patriarchy?

Again, I don’t want to discourage survivors from telling their stories. I only want us to consider what we accomplish, who is excluded when we emphasize this tactic, and what ideas we’re reifying. Even in the best of circumstances memory can be unreliable, and constructing a homogeneous experience of survivorhood is impossible. There are survivors who remember every last detail, who know but cannot remember, whose memories are completely intact but organized nonlinearly, and whose understanding of themselves as having experienced sexual assault is shaped by the impression the event had on their life rather than any recollection of vivid details of the assault. Some of us contain all these and more. A feminist survivors’ movement must de-center the rational-scientific paradigm and consider all the ways we can know we were harmed, or risk perpetuating cisheteropatriarchal oppression.

Under a waning crescent moon, Amara is in the woods, dipping her hand into a black plastic garbage bag and plucking out tiny cafeteria packets of salt; ripping them open with her teeth and shaking them out until their combined contents form a thick, unbroken circle. She shuts her eyes and speaks under captured breath the words she’s been unable to erase from her memory since she first saw them.

Eyes open.

Pop?

But this is no more her father than it was her uncle Tad, no more a fortuitous family reunion than the dinner with Mother and Father she suffered through earlier was a return to nuclear normalcy. It has her father’s face, but it smells of sulfur and drops feathers and fur as it approaches Amara standing still and proud in the circle.

“This is wrong,” Amara insists, when he stops in front of her and glowers. “I didn’t want all this. I didn’t want a whole new life. I just wanted new skin. Put me back, now.” She folds her arms across her chest, daring him to deny her.

His—its—flat blue eyes take on a bit of luster. Its ruddy peach cheeks spread into a gaping, toothsome grin. It grasps its cloaked stomach with a furry, clawed hand and begins to laugh, a thundering laugh that shakes each molecule of Amara’s confidence. The man-thing lets his laughter trail off into drips and drabs before he speaks.

“Well, Jennifer. You’ve been white for a day and you’ve already mastered demanding a refund.” A laugh bubbles to the surface again. “But I’m afraid we don’t have a return policy. Was that not—” it snorts, stumbles into a giggle, stops itself—”clear when you decided to perform the spell? Did you not—as they say, do your research? Tsk, tsk.” The mouth that was her father’s, that once comforted her with kisses and bad jokes when she skinned her knees rollerblading, that told her that the coily hair she hated so much was indeed beautiful; now that mouth wears the most fiendish sneer Amara has ever seen. A foul smell fills her nostrils and dives down her throat, making her gag and water.

“No,” she says, quietly. “Actually, I didn’t. I just thought you’d make me white, and I’d get to go home to my Mama, and then our lives would stop being such a shitshow.” A creeping realization spreads over her: I’m not getting out of this alive. Mama is gonna be alone. Tears well up in her eyes.

“Ah,” it says, pacing the outside of the salt circle, shuddering pieces of itself onto the forest floor. “Well, we get some of your kind, too. The reckless kind. We like to think it’s that bit of us you’ve got in you.” That sneer again. “Mostly our guests come looking for the package deal. They go pretty quickly. They don’t have much substance for us to really gnaw on—they’re starved, you know—and their meat has a taste. Like lemon dishwater, or diluted vinegar. We love the defiant ones, the ones who’ve convinced themselves that they’re different, that they’re doing something good and right and pure. Their resistance is so tart on our tongues, we taste it in their marrow. We savor it in their blood. We scoop out whole chunks of pride from their skulls and use it to season the meat of the ones soured with self-loathing.”

It stops pacing and bends down, stretching its neck across the salt to square its face across from hers. “I wonder how you’ll taste, in the end.” It smiles softly, her father’s smile.

Part 4 | Part 6


Inspired by the film Wake (Bree Newsome), the novel The Good House (Tananarive Due), the short story “Wet Pain” (Terence Taylor), and, I’m sure, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Patrice Leah Brown, Esq. holds a steaming cup of ginseng tea in one smooth brown manicured hand and scans her maroon At-A-Glance with the other. Someone had the nerve to schedule meetings at 12:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. She shakes her head and considers canceling before she looks closer and sees that the meetings are with members of her Mothers in Action group, and they’re written in a messy version of her own handwriting. Her head drops back and her mouth opens, releasing an involuntary groan. I probably scribbled this in the car.  She takes another sip of tea and clicks the button on her phone to check the time. 7:30 a.m. Where is that girl?

“Amara! Breakfast is getting cold!”

She listens and hears nothing. No movement, no response.

“AMARA! Get down here!”

She listens again. There’s a truck passing on the uneven asphalt outside, a car alarm blaring in the distance, and birds chirping outside the kitchen window, but still nothing from Amara’s room upstairs.

Patrice rolls her eyes and sets her tea cup down on the maple tabletop. I bet she snuck out last night. Again. I’m so tired of playing warden. She pushes back the slatted maple chair, preparing for a battle.

Then she hears the door to Amara’s room open, and footsteps thunder down the stairs.

A beige-skinned girl with smoky hazel eyes, long kinky brown hair pulled up into a puff, a broad, flat nose, and full lips lands in front of the breakfast nook, wearing a black scoop neck t-shirt and ripped jeans, grinning at Patrice.

“There you are. How did you get ready so quiet? And quick.” Patrice squints at her.

“It wasn’t that quiet.” The girl smiles at Patrice and sits down at the table across from her.

Patrice gives her a you’re-trying-me look, but says, “Fine then. You’ve got about 6 minutes before the bus gets here. You better eat those grits. You can warm them up in the microwave if they’re too cold for you.”

The girl smiles at Patrice and begins to devour the cold grits with abandon.

Patrice raises her eyebrows in shock. She expected some sighs and groans followed by a minute at the microwave and 5 minutes of pretending to eat.

“Is there any more?” The girl wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and burps a little.

“Amara, you know good and damn well I make two servings of grits every morning! If you wanted extra you should have woken up. ”

“I did,” the girl says. “I just wasn’t here.”

“Well you need to be here, then.”

The girl tilts her head to the side, automaton-like.

Patrice sighs. “You know, Amara, when you get home from school, we’re gonna have a talk. You’ve been sneaking out, your grades are slipping, and you’re acting damn strange lately. I know you’ve never really wanted to talk about the pain you’ve got to be feeling over your father dying, but I can’t abide this acting out anymore.”

The girl leans over the table towards Patrice with wild eyes. “I want to talk about the pain.” Her tone resides somewhere between earnestness and insatiable hunger.

Patrice is taken aback. Is she really ready to open up? She’s thrown herself into activism, but her daughter has been grieving in tortured silence. She’s tried so many times to get through to her, but her grief has been a fortress. Now, maybe, it’s showing cracks?

“We will, honey. When you get home.” Patrice smiles. “But now, you’ve gotta get to the bus stop.”

The girl closes her eyes and inhales deeply for a minute. She licks her lips and opens her eyes, letting out her breath. “Later?”

“Yes, later.” Patrice gives her a quizzical look. “Are you alright, baby?”

“I’m alright.” She grins. “I’ll see you later.” She pushes back the chair and stands.

“Have a good day, baby.”

“I will.” The girl stops at the front door, selects a pair of sneakers from a pile next to the doormat, and slips them on. She looks at the deadbolt on the door for a few seconds, confused, before she reaches out and touches it. When it turns, she beams. She unlocks the bottom lock, throws open the door, and walks through it with both arms slightly lifted and stretched out to her sides as if she expects to take off flying. Once through, she turns robotically and grabs the door, closing it behind her.

Patrice shakes her head. What is going on with this girl now? She picks up her cup and takes another sip of tea.

Aside from telling her what she’d wanted to hear for months, Amara was acting uncanny. There’s no doubt about that. And even in the telling her what she wanted to hear, there was uncanniness. Why did she stare at her like that when she said it? And when had her daughter ever been excited about eating grits, much less cold grits?

She’s probably on drugs. Weed or someshit. Or maybe she’s pregnant. Patrice shudders.

Her rational, Harvard-assimilated mind tells her she should finish getting ready and ignore what just happened until they both get home. She should ask Amara what’s up; treat her like an adult, gain her trust, talk it out. Just bring it up along with the sneaking out and the grades, all sweet and understanding-like.

But her gut tells her she needs to go now, posthaste, and tear through Amara’s room until she finds the source of the uncanniness. So she puts her teacup down, pushes the chair back, and starts up the stairs.

When she enters the hallway to their bedrooms, she can see the door to Amara’s room is still ajar. Patrice spots something on the ground in the doorway, something dark. When she gets closer, she identifies it as a clump of black feathers, topped with a small tuft of grey-black fur. She’s got animals in here now?

Patrice pushes the door open. A breeze forces the blinds over Amara’s open window into the room with a clang; her heartbeat accelerates for a good minute. She surveys the room and finds another clump of feathers and fur on Amara’s unmade bed, but nothing alive.

She shrugs. She must have brought one of her little friends in here. Maybe they were wearing some funky outfit.

Patrice sets her sights on Amara’s big oak dresser first. Two of the six plastic-handled drawers are open; she zeroes in on those and starts to rustle through Amara’s clothing looking for objects of ill repute: condoms, birth control, drugs, or paraphernalia. She finds none of the first three types, but does discover some items that her parental instincts tell her falls squarely within the bounds of the last category. Except she doesn’t think this has to do with drugs. She doesn’t know what it has to do with precisely, but every bone in her body tells her it’s nothing her child should be mixed up in.

In the first open drawer, she finds a carved wooden box containing various animal bones, a vial enclosing a viscous red substance she doesn’t want to believe is blood, several glass canisters full of fragrant plant material, an alligator foot, a Venus of Willendorf figurine, several crystals, and a deck of tarot cards. In the second open drawer, she finds a bag of salt, a white pillar candle carved with swastikas and encrusted with aromatic herbs and oils, a piece of brown paper bag with something written on it she recognizes as Greek, and a lock of her daughter’s hair tied with a sprig of rosemary.

A few of Patrice’s older relatives used to mess with a little bit of hoodoo, so she knows some of these things are used in fixing mojos. Harmless. But there’s something about the paper. Not just that it’s a brown paper with writing on it, because that isn’t unusual, and not even that Amara is writing in Greek, because, well, of course there’s the Internet. No, it’s something about the letters themselves, about allowing her eyes to rest on them. They seem to jump off the paper and into Patrice’s flesh, delivering a nearly bone-shattering chill.

What the hell are you mixed up in, Amara?

Patrice closes up the drawers and moves on, to Amara’s desk. The computer monitor is black, but the power light is yellow; the low hum of the tower under the desk confirms the machine is merely sleeping. She moves the mouse and the computer whirs to life. The monitor lights up and Windows invites user “Amara” to enter her password.

She interlaces her fingers and stretches out both arms, cracking her knuckles like the hackers in the movies. She chuckles. Who am I kidding. I’m just gonna guess.

Patrice makes a few elementary guesses—consecutive numbers, birthdays—before getting into combinations of dead pets and zip codes. She hits the jackpot with Pete’s nickname for Amara, the last two digits of his birth year and her first pet’s name. The screen rewards her with a welcome and a spinning wheel. I would talk to her about password security if I didn’t want to be able to do this again.

Once the computer finishes loading the desktop, Patrice goes straight for the Google Chrome icon on the taskbar. The Internet is the root of all evil—or at least a lot of it, she thinks—so she’s pretty sure whatever Amara got mixed up in started there.

The browser asks her if she’d like to reopen old tabs. Patrice clicks “yes”. Ten tabs array themselves along the top of the screen. The active tab begins to load ‘http://occultconnection.net/blacksmagic’.

“Oh, shit,” Patrice says aloud when the site loads. A large banner at the top advertises psychic readings. The garish header graphic announces the site as the Occult Connection Messageboards featuring Blacks’ Magic. Along the top of the post listing, a red notification icon indicates the logged in user has new messages. Patrice clicks on the link.

On the next screen is a long list of messages, most of them from a user named “BlkMagic28”, sent over the last few weeks. Patrice selects the newest message from them, sent this morning at 12:30 a.m.

“so did it work?”

Patrice’s eyes fly open. Did what work?

She clicks the next most recent message from BlkMagic28, sent yesterday evening at 5 p.m.

“OK. I kinda can’t believe you’re gonna do it. But i feel you. it is rough.

lookslike it might rain btw. You should get out there before midnight, anyway. Don’t take an umbrella, they scare easy. good luck. ;)”

Her heart starts to pound out of her chest. What did Amara do? She scrolls through the reply, looking for Amara’s response, hoping to get some glimpse of her daughter’s thought process, but it’s gone—excised, she would say—as are all Amara’s sent messages. What the hell—

The half-shut bedroom door flies all the way open, hitting the rubber doorstop with a crash. Patrice jumps and jerks around to see her daughter standing in the doorway, gripping the doorknob. Her head is bowed; her eyes look out over the bridge of her nose and up at Patrice with pure malice.

“Mama, you know how Jerome got himself killed, and then Daddy became a lousy fucking drunk and splattered himself and Uncle Tad all over I-5?” Not-Amara coos in a thick vibrato.

A chill runs down Patrice’s spine. She’s never heard Amara call her father Daddy, and she hasn’t heard her say a single negative thing about him since he died, even in anger. This isn’t Amara, maybe. But that’s crazy. Who else would it be? Her thoughts spin fanciful scenarios. The message said she was going out to do something, something that would work or not. Maybe she got mixed up in voodoo. Maybe she got possessed. Maybe she built a robot in her own image and it went haywire.

She focuses her thoughts using maternal indignation as a prism, putting her hands on her hips for reinforcement. “What are you doing home from school, young lady?”

Not-Amara slams the door into the doorstop so hard it breaks off a piece. “I asked you first, Mama. Do you remember how Jerome’s eyes were still open, and you asked them to close them, and they told you to get the fuck back? Do you remember what your husband’s mutilated body looked like when you had to go identify his stupid drunk corpse? It hasn’t been that long since you dreamt of it, how you could see the white gristle there under his ground beef skin—“

“That’s enough, Amara,” Patrice demands, her voice cracking and trembling. “You will not speak to me any kind of way. I am your mother. What has gotten into you? Tell me why you’re not at school, now.” She’s trying to sound authoritative, but she is scared out of her mind.

“What would you do if I died, Mama?” Not-Amara lets go of the doorknob and approaches Patrice, her malicious glare transmuted into a come-hither gaze. “You’d be all alone.”

Patrice feels new panic tear at her heart. Someone’s taken her. That’s what this is. But then how does she look just like her?

Not-Amara looks at Patrice and sucks her bottom lip. She closes her eyes, inhales, and slips her hand down her pants. “It would hurt, a lot, wouldn’t it. To lose your whole family. One event kicks off a deadly domino effect, and you’re completely and utterly alone. That kind of grief can eat…you…alive.” She rubs herself as she says this, lost in the thought of devouring that delicious pain, that delectable grief. This woman’s pain is so close to the surface she can barely contain herself. It smells heavenly.

Vomit is kissing the top of Patrice’s throat, but anger over this thing having taken her daughter manages to override her disgust. She stands up ramrod-straight and stares down at Not-Amara.

“Where the fuck is my daughter?”

“You won’t find her. But I’m here.”

“If you don’t get the hell out of my house and give me my daughter back, I sw—“

Not-Amara materializes in front of her. “We’re not giving her back,” she growls, shaking the window. “The best you can hope is that she doesn’t suffer. And she will if you get uppity.”

“WHERE IS SHE?” Patrice can’t contain her desperation. “Please, take me instead. Just don’t hurt her.”

Not-Amara bites her bottom lip. “Mmm, no. The process has already started. But, you know, if you decide you get tired of being black…” She throws her head back and laughs. “Look us up. In the meantime, just be glad you get to gaze on something that looks like your daughter. Don’t be a detective. Fix me food and clean up after me and leave me the fuck alone.”

A cold dread fills Patrice’s stomach and compresses her lungs. This thing—these things, rather, since it keeps talking about us—have her daughter and they just expect her to roll over and take it. Not only that, but she’s supposed to serve this thing while its fellow monsters do who-knows-what with her baby? She clenches her fists, ready to go down swinging.

Not-Amara sees her clenched fists and a slow smile spreads across her face. “I can make her feel anything that happens to this body. She might die, but I won’t.” She smiles with teeth Patrice hadn’t noticed over breakfast.

Rage simmers in Patrice’s throat, straining against her epiglottis. Her hands clench tighter for a moment; her shoulders hunch up like a cat getting ready to pounce before she finally releases her hands and relaxes her body. She feels powerlessness invade her being. There’s nothing she can do. Right now, at least.

At this acquiescence to inevitability, Not-Amara laughs, a building laugh that starts slow and ends with her bracing herself on the edge of the computer desk. “Good girl. Better to survive today, huh? You always were smart people.” She winks.

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll be using my room now, Mama,” Not-Amara says in a snide tone. “I’m too old for school.”

Patrice edges away from the desk towards the door, turning to look at the thing wearing her daughter’s body one more time before she shuts the door behind her. She leans up against it and lowers her head, her body wracked with silent sobs. God, please help us.

Part 3 | Part 5


Inspired by the film Wake (Bree Newsome), the novel The Good House (Tananarive Due), the short story “Wet Pain” (Terence Taylor), and, I’m sure, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Also, the last part of this tweet by Jay Smooth.