Being abused or neglected as a child increases the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by nearly 60 percent, and the likelihood of adult violent crime by approximately 30 percent.
I was moving along through the twelve-step program when Leslie got a set-designing job that would take her to Germany for several months. I’d been praying for her to get a job, but I didn’t want it to be all the way in Germany. I was in my Fourth Step Inventory, a step where you go real deep, and I was terrified about Leslie being so far away. Selfishly, I didn’t want her to go. She assured me I’d be okay and arranged to leave me in the hands of her friend Diane.
I knew Diane from meetings. A white woman in her sixties, Diane worked as a technical writer and lived alone in Santa Monica. I liked her, but for the Fifth Step, where you admit your wrongs to yourself, to God, and to another person, I’d intended Leslie to be my other person. But Diane let me know it was okay to tell her things, that she’d done things too.
I had written a description of events in my life where I’d caused harm, and of the times where harm had come to me and what my responsibility had been. There were a lot of times. As I read my list to Diane, she listened quietly, without judgment. We continued on together and, for Step Eight, I made a list of the people I had harmed. Again, mine was a long list. In addition to people I knew, I had many people I didn’t know, including those whose identities I’d stolen. I even added the courts—I had stood in many courtrooms because I’d broken the law, and I was now holding myself accountable.
Diane looked at my list and thought for a moment. “Because it isn’t possible for you to reach out to everyone, there is something called Living Amends. It’s where you live a new way, with purpose, each day thinking about other people and helping people and bringing goodness into the world.” This resonated so deeply with me. And, eventually, it would change the course of my life.
“You can’t force anyone to believe in you,” Leslie had told me before she left. “All you can do is show by your actions.” I played her advice in my head as I went to Mama to make amends. I apologized for being defiant and disrespectful, and for the hurt and worry I’d caused. She listened, then nodded. I didn’t have expectations that we’d forge a new bond, but I left feeling relief, and that was something. I had said what I needed to, and had done so without pointing the finger back. Some weeks later, when I went to visit Mama, she asked, “Susan, you don’t mess with that white stuff anymore, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Just don’t ever do it again,” she said. On my next visit to her, I was sitting on the couch when she called to me from another room. The way she said my name, her voice didn’t have that edge, that resentment that usually cut into her tone. Maybe the difference was, in fact, the way I heard it. But it didn’t matter if it was her or me, because in that moment I believed something had been restored in her mind and in her heart.
I went to Melvin next to make amends. Years ago he’d accidentally left a diamond-covered Baume et Mercier watch in my car, and I took it and sold it. After all this time, I finally admitted this to him, and said I was saving up to pay him back.
“I always knew you’d taken it,” he replied.
I felt like a rat. Of all people, Melvin had always been there for me. And I especially felt bad because he’d recently furnished me with a used car.
“Sue, you don’t need to pay me back,” he said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
George was next, and we met for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Openly, there was no sign of hard feelings but, just because he’d never expressed it, didn’t mean there wasn’t hurt lingering deep down.
“George, I am sorry for the times I lied and the times I didn’t show up and the times I let you down. You spent over thirty years believing in me, despite the many disappointments. There’s a lot of stuff in that thirty years. You let me know that in the pit of the pits, I was still a good person. When no one else had compassion for me, you did.”
He teared up, something I’d never seen him do before. “I knew you’d be all right one day, Sue. And you’re all right. It just took a little time.” And then he changed the subject, and we ordered lunch. A decade later, when I was honored as a CNN Hero, I’d thank George Cameron on international TV for standing by me, his devotion proving that anybody can be that one person who believes in you.
I now needed to turn my attention to Toni. The twelve-step program instructed that you were not to make amends if it could harm someone. I visited the therapist I’d seen while at CLARE as I tried to work out if I should tell Toni she had been conceived from an act of violence.
“What are your motives for telling her?” the therapist asked.
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to hurt her,” I said.
“Are you trying to get her sympathy?”
“I don’t know. It feels really complicated.”
We went back and forth before I came to the decision that Toni was an adult, and she was owed the truth. She deserved to know why I hadn’t been there the way I should have been as a mother, how the torment within myself kept me at a distance. She deserved to know what she meant to me.
But getting Toni to sit down and talk one on one proved difficult. She was always on the move, as though she didn’t know how to be alone with me. One night, I cornered her.
“I really need to talk with you about something,” I said.
She looked at me begrudgingly. “All right. I have to take my braids down, why don’t you help me and we can talk.” She sat as I stood over her, using a safety pin to undo braids as tiny as strands of yarn.
“I want to talk to you about something important,” I began. But I didn’t know where to begin. I’d been weaving this lie since before she was even born. When I’d been pregnant with her, I had a boyfriend, Robert Carter, who offered to give his last name, though he knew the baby wasn’t his. I figured it would stop questions and give my baby legitimacy—really, I don’t know what I figured; I was fourteen years old and scared and angry and hurt. After Toni was born, Robert went into the military, and I ran away from home, so contact was lost. Yet Toni grew up with his name, Carter, and the story my family and I told her: that I’d lost touch with her father because of the service.
I took a braid of her hair in my hand. “Toni, something happened a long time ago. December 24th of 1965. I was raped, and you were conceived. Robert Carter isn’t your father. I don’t know who is.”
She barely moved. I continued, describing how I was going to give her up for adoption, but couldn’t. “I knew I had to keep you.”
I could see, behind her eyes, she was putting it all together.
“So that’s why my birth certificate says father ‘Unknown,’” she said, her voice surprisingly even.
Thirty-one years ago someone at Booth Memorial had written that. I hadn’t realized Toni ever saw it, but of course she had. Not much escaped her. I searched her face for a sign of what she might be feeling, but she was emotionless.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“You sure?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Shit? Damn? Something. You angry at hearing this? Mad? Sad?”
“Who else knew?” she asked.
“My mother, my brothers.”
“All these years, and no one told me?” Abruptly, she stood up. “So, it’s like, joke’s on you, Jack?”
“Wait,” I said. I wanted to talk more, wanted to hug her, and desperately did not want her to leave angry. But she stormed off.
For the next couple of days, she did her best to avoid me, and I knew enough to leave her alone.
When she was ready, she sent Ellesse off to the movies and came back to me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot,” she began. “At first I thought, okay, so now I know this, but it really doesn’t change anything. I’m not gonna wake up tomorrow any different. But I did wake up different. I had a weight lifted. For all these years, I wondered if Robert Carter was ever going to walk back into my life. I’ve been holding a grudge against him. Wondering who he was, wondering where he was. Where was he when I was little? Where was he when I had my high school graduation? I’ve fielded so many questions from Ellesse about when was she ever going to meet her grandfather. For so long I’ve been telling myself to go to the VA and try to look him up. I wanted to find him, and ask him, Why? But now, now I can stop being mad at him.” Relief filled her face. “I can let Robert Carter off the hook.”
Still lingering was the question of whether she could let me off the hook, too. She continued, “I’ve been asking myself, how do I forgive my mom for this? But the real question is, how do I not? I can release you for at last having the courage to tell me the truth. Those circumstances became my blessing. I can’t say anything else, because that would mean I don’t belong here, and that my daughter doesn’t belong here. I’m not owning that negativity. All I can I do is process the positive.”
It was then my turn to feel relief.
Toni and I continued talking, the most open and honest conversation we’d ever had. I told her I was so concerned about leaving her at my mother’s house with all my brothers around. I asked if anything had ever happened, if she’d ever been molested or beaten. She assured me she hadn’t.
“As much criminal activity as my uncles did,” she said, “they were good to me and looked out for me, always telling me, ‘Get to your homework.’ They had me reading from their high school dictionary when I was still in elementary school.”
I laughed, now understanding why Toni made Ellesse lug around a dictionary and read from it. I was so grateful she was never harmed in my mother’s house, though I couldn’t help but wonder how most of my brothers could have been so cruel to me, yet so kind to Toni. Then again, why did I think being “kind” meant not laying a hand on her? It wasn’t just lack of abuse that made someone kind. The truth was, Toni had been their little tool. My brothers would give her piles of cash to hold for safekeeping. She’d tape thousands of dollars to her stomach, under her clothes, and wear it to school. She’d been in the house, afraid, when arrests had gone down, and she’d watched the police cart off my brothers.
Not that I’d been much better toward her. As the amends process opened the door for Toni and me to begin knowing each other anew, she recounted a day when she and I, along with some of my brothers, were in a motel room and the police burst in, shouting at us to get on the floor. Though only five years old, Toni knew the drill: don’t say anything, don’t cry, just step to the side. But this time, the police yelled at her to get down, too. Terrified, she started crying as she got down, the motel’s musty shag carpeting in her face. As my brothers and I were arrested, Toni overheard the police deciding to drop her at MacLaren Hall.
In our neighborhood, you knew about MacLaren, the children’s center where neglected or abused kids were taken. Toni crossed her arms and insisted she be taken to her grandmother’s house. She recited the address on Highland Avenue, saying it over and over and over, until the police finally pulled up at my mother’s if for no other reason than to get this stubborn kid out of the car before taking the rest of us to the station.
I didn’t realize Toni remembered that day, she’d been so young. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t wanted her to remember. As she recounted it with a surprising level of detail, shame rushed over me. I had subjected my young daughter to that? She’d seen me and her uncles treated that way? And, if she hadn’t known my mother’s address by heart, I could have lost her to the system. “I was scared and sad for a long time after that,” Toni said. “That was the day that made me stop trusting the police.”
It occurred to me she’d lost her trust in me long before.