“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
My sisters became my platoon. We were all in a war, fighting for significance. Each of us was a soldier fighting for our value, our worth. We were all in it together; we all needed one another. None of us could fight individually. I know I didn’t have enough strength. We were fighting a war with seen and unseen enemies. Regardless, our commitment was to the whole. It was a together-or-nothing ethos. Eventually, we would separate and some would be left on the battleground intact but missing something. But, as children, we were in it together: Dianne, the oldest; Anita, one year behind her; Deloris, two years younger; and me, three years her junior. We all wanted out and our bonds of sisterhood helped make a way. Dianne was the brains. Anita the brawn. Deloris was the mastermind. Me? I was the one who could either drag the whole team down or up miraculously in the final hour.
We were transformed by Miss Tyson. Then, winning the drama skit contest shifted our lives because our sister platoon had seen a physical manifestation of winning our war.
The bat from the softball set, the red bat we won, became the rat catcher, a tool in our arsenal.
Rats always come out of nowhere. You could be sitting in front of the TV, watching your show, and all of a sudden, a rat jumps on the couch. Or one comes scurrying out of a hole in the wall and in a flash is underneath the couch.
Whenever we saw a rat, we told Anita, “I saw a rat!” Once she saw the rat, she got the prize we won—that red bat—out. We would all stand behind her, clutching her. Dianne said, “It went under . . . It went under there. Get it. Get it. Get it.” We were all really quiet, waiting for it to slow down. We saw its tail, visible under the couch. Anita waited. She, who, by the way, became an all-star softball player, timed it perfectly. Bam! She actually knocked the tail off the rat. She didn’t kill the rat. She just knocked its tail off.
The prize bat came in handy again when Mama was napping in her bedroom, her mouth open, in the middle of the day one weekend. Unafraid of our black cat Boots, the biggest freakin’ rat we had ever seen was on her pillowcase, slowly inching toward her.
We snuck out and told Anita, “There’s a rat. It’s about to kill Mom— bite Mama’s neck!”
Anita got the bat and once again, we were behind her, holding on to her, as the rat stealthily inched toward Mama’s open mouth. Why we just didn’t yell, “Mama! Wake up!” to make the rat jump off the bed and run, I don’t know. Boots leapt onto the pillow, viciously “Meowed,” and the rat darted into the closet and hid among the crowded clothes.
Mama awoke startled. “The rat is somewhere in the middle of the clothes,” we screamed. Was it in between the coats or hidden in the dresses? We were trying to figure it out, peeking to see its tail from behind Anita who wielded the red bat. “I think it’s right here,” she said. “Make sure you get it, Anita, because he’s somewhere in the middle of these clothes,” we chimed. Anita aimed perfectly. She timed it, just like she later hit softballs. And as hard as she could, she brought that red bat down and flattened the rat like a pancake.
The great memory of winning that contest—my acting debut, that started me on my journey toward becoming an actress—is accompanied by recollections of that red, plastic bat and its handiness as a rat killer. Rats are a huge part of that memory of winning. I’m terrified of rats to this day.
Our growing-up years were speckled with good moments. Happiness for me was Valentine’s Day. My father knew how to celebrate Valentine’s Day and other major holidays. He bought lots of chocolate, and believe it or not, for Easter he bought Easter eggs and gave us cards. Christmas, especially when we were younger, was festive and we would always put up a tree. Once I got to be about eleven or twelve, there weren’t many gifts.
But still, we had a Christmas tree and my dad was the happy drunk when he would play his guitar.
I was seven or eight when my dad got us a pool table. It was a full-size pool table. My dad bought it because he liked playing pool at the bar. I loved playing pool. After a while, that pool table was jacked up, and we never had another one. But sometimes we would go to the bar—back in the day when parents could take kids to the bar—and play darts and pool and be treated to Sprite and potato chips.
These happy moments would soon be followed by trauma—the rage of my dad’s alcoholic binges, violence, poverty, hunger, and isolation. In my child’s mind, I was the problem. I would retreat to the bathroom, put something against the door so no one would come in, and I’d sit for an inordinate amount of time staring at my fingers and hands and try to erase everything in my mind. I wished I could elevate out of my body. Leave it.
One time, when I was about nine years old, I succeeded. I left it; my body that is, in a manner of speaking. I floated up to the ceiling, looking down at myself, observing my hair, my legs, and my face. Then I faced myself, staring directly into—me. Wow! I loved it. It was a magical, secret power, only I didn’t see myself as magical or powerful. I just felt free. It was my way of disappearing. It was my high. I couldn’t always control this out-of-body sense, but when I could, it was beyond fabulous. The power to leave my body, to be relieved of Viola for a while, was an ever-present image that followed me for decades.
I never liked how it ended, though. These out-of-body experiences would always seem to stop abruptly. I would come crashing down, like in movies where someone has telekinetic powers and would lift an item but couldn’t concentrate anymore, so the item would come crashing down. I was out of my body and suddenly, back in it. I tried to compartmentalize, to dodge those heavy emotions, until I couldn’t. The power was temporary.
Even now, me and Deloris have dreams about “128.” It created the backdrop for bonds of sisterhood. “128” was a womb of sisterhood. At night, we sisters would huddle on a top bunk for warmth, horrified at the sounds of rodents eating pigeons on the roof, eating our toys, squealing, when we felt the weight of their bodies as they jumped on our bed searching for something to eat. We would wrap bedsheets around our necks to protect ourselves from bites.
Going to the bathroom at night in the midst of this was not an option. Cutting on the lights and watching them scurry was not an option because there were no lights in the part of the apartment where we slept. The bathroom was a faraway place on the other side of the apartment, but it may as well have been on the other side of the world. If you didn’t go before bed, you could forget making that journey at night. So, we just peed.
We dreamed away our problems. When Dad was drunk or there was turmoil, my sister Deloris and I would disappear into the bedroom and become “Jaja” and “Jagi,” rich, white Beverly Hills matrons, with big jewels and little Chihuahuas. We would play this game for hours. “Ooh my, Jaja,” Jagi would say, “I bought this fabulous house and my husband bought me this beautiful diamond ring.” We played with such detail that it became transcendent.
We played with the backdrop noise of our mom being beaten and screaming in pain. But we believed we were in that world, until eventually, Deloris would break the spell, saying, “You’re not Jaja. You’re poor. You’re on welfare. You don’t have diamonds.” We’d fight and the game of pretend would be over—until the next time there was family tumult. It was how we escaped. We transformed into people we felt were “better.” People who existed in a world we only dreamed of; women who were not us. We played for fun and out of desperation. Jaja and Jagi were our pretend protection.
The majority of my most joyful memories were from my relationship with my sisters. We dreamed together so fiercely. We started a band called the Hot Shots. We were trying to be the Jackson 5. We never wrote a song or played an instrument. We had no money to take lessons. But what we lacked in ability, we made up for in drive and imagination. Deloris was on drums. Dianne was the lead singer. I played the tambourine and Anita was on guitar. We could pretend and escape into our imagination.
We were fascinated by fireworks. One day we purchased firecrackers. Having the money to do so was a big deal. We bought them from one of the corner stores. For reasons I don’t remember, we decided to light a firecracker in the kitchen of 128 and throw it out the window. I was in charge of holding the firecracker. I froze, or as they say in the vernacular, I “nutted up.”
My sisters screamed at me to throw it but I couldn’t move. It exploded in my hands!! My hands went numb, completely! Visualize a Looney Tunes cartoon where I totally lose my hearing and smoke comes out my nose and
ears. Like Wile E. Coyote, I stood with the exploded firecracker in my hand. My mouth gaped open. I saw my sisters mouthing the words, because I couldn’t hear: “Viola, are you okay?” “Stupid! I told you to throw it.” Then my ass started to cry. “I’m deaf! Oh my GOD!”
My hearing came back.
My sisters and I continued to navigate our world. We continued to figure it out on our own in the absence of parents. Our parents were just trying to keep us alive the only way they knew how. They controlled what they could and injected ritual, joy, hope in little ways. For example, we were gifted new clothes at least once a year on Easter. Despite pissed beds, almost never having clean clothes, rats jumping on our bed at night, broken furniture, food insecurity, shoddy plumbing, no phone, we all got a brand- new outfit. The potency and power of tradition is deep.
My mom would break out the hot combs—a metal curling iron and straightening comb that she would put on the stovetop fire. With Blue Magic pomade, she would proceed to straighten and curl our hair for Easter. It was a sadistic ritual as I saw it. She would slap and yell at us “Keep ya ass still or I’ll burn ya” if we squirmed. When that hot straightening comb hit that greased piece of hair, sizzled, and fell on your ear or face, you had to squirm. Sometimes she’d get to talking and leave the comb and curling iron on the fire too long. Those hotter than hot irons would burn the hair black.
“Keep ya ass still!!”
In the end we looked really cute in our maxi dresses and new shoes, but, man, did we look greasy. We didn’t care! We loved it. My parents gave us candy, some money, and we would stand in the yard waiting for anyone to pass by so they could see how cute we looked. Finally, Dianne came up with the idea of going to church. She said that’s what they did down south. The only churches in Central Falls were Catholic. We got up the courage to go since most people we knew in Central Falls were Catholic.
We went into Holy Trinity Church and sat in the back. From the moment we stepped into the church all eyes were on us. I thought everyone was mesmerized by how cute we looked. We pretended or tried to learn the songs and different responses. Then, prompted by Dianne, we went up for Communion. “Just say Amen after he puts the bread in your mouth.”
I was excited about getting the little piece of bread. When time came to take the bread of Christ, the priest leaned down and whispered, “Are you
Catholic?” Dianne, with her mouth still open, ready, shook her head truthfully, “No.” He motioned for us to leave. I then realized why we had been so closely observed.
After that, we took our Easter money to Leroy Theatre to watch a double feature and eat either hot dogs or large bags of M&M’s. Seventy- five cents for a double feature and 35 cents for a big bag of M&M’s.
The other holiday was Halloween. We would be the first ones out trick- or-treating and the last ones home. The goal was to get as much candy as we could. We would fill one bag and go out with another one. We never really had costumes so we would just put my mom’s makeup on our nose, forehead, cheeks, and that would be it. There was no money for anything else.
One year we made it a point of going out before it got dark. We ran out with our pillowcases and paper bags. It was the best idea because we were the only kids out. We saw no one else! Absolutely no one. We were going to get the best candy because we were the first. We knocked on our first door. It was a father and a mother with about three kids. We screamed, “Trick or treat!”
The man looked completely startled and burst out laughing, “Halloween is tomorrow! You all came out on the wrong day!” His wife and kids came to the door and proceeded to laugh hysterically at us. We ran away fast and didn’t stop until we got home.
Some battles we won—survived together and emerged with laughter and perspective, and some brutal ones—sexual abuse—we lost.
Sexual abuse back in the day didn’t have a name. The abusers were called “dirty old men” and the abused were called “fast” or “heifers.” It was shrouded in silence and invisible trauma and shame. It is hard to process how pervasive it was. What made us sitting ducks was our lack of supervision and lack of knowledge. It was a different time.
The abuse spanned from random old men on the street telling us, especially me because I was the youngest, how adorable we were. Then came, “I’ll give you a quarter if you give me a kiss.” I wanted the quarter. I would take it, give the old man with a cane a kiss on the cheek. He would linger there. Staring. Waiting for something more. I would look around suspiciously until something in me told me to run.
A birthday party at a friend’s house was crowded with hard-drinking, beer-swilling types. The house had a back porch that led onto the rooftop of
their garage. It was a great space to play as kids, which is what we did that day. One of the men at the party would pretend to chase us between drinks. We would run and laugh. He chased us until he just about cornered us, but all the kids managed to duck, dodge around him. Except me. I froze and he grabbed me!
All the kids were pointing, laughing at the fact I was caught. He grabbed and said, “You are so cute and pretty. . . .”. Then he proceeded to lift my skirt, pull my underwear aside exposing my butt cheek, and begin to rub making sexual noises. The children screamed in horror and ran. I squirmed and punched my way out of his arms and ran. The other kids began to tease me, “Ha! Ha! You got caught! That was nasty!” I was absolutely devastated. Making matters worse and even more confusing, I was the one being humiliated, not the man who felt me up in front of everyone. I was just eight but felt dirty, spoiled. Even more insidiously painful, I was ashamed at how I felt, not just what happened. Think about that for a minute—ashamed at myself for feeling violated by a grown-ass, perverted violator. I was by myself at that party. Alone. Left to fend and navigate the shark-infested waters by myself.
We were left with older boys, neighbors who would “babysit” us and unzip their pants while playing horsey with us. My three sisters and I (Danielle wasn’t born yet) were often left unsupervised with my brother in our apartment—sexual curiosity would cross the line. He would chase us. We would lose. And eventually other inappropriate behavior occurred that had a profound effect. I compartmentalized much of this at the time. I stored it in a place in my psyche that felt safely hidden. By hiding it I could actually pretend it didn’t happen. But it did!
Once again more secrets. Layers upon layers of deep, dark ones. Trauma, shit, piss, and mortar mixed with memories that have been filtered, edited for survival, and entangled with generational secrets. Somewhere buried underneath all that waste lives me, the me fighting to breathe, the me wanting so badly to feel alive.
But this is the journey! The only weapon I have to blast through it all is forgiveness. It’s giving up all hope of a different past.
My mom is now seventy-eight and her memory is slowly starting to fade. As I watch her now, I am desperately trying to hold on to every bit of time we have left together. I’m trying to take all the secrets and barriers off the table, any barriers we could possibly have between us.
One day over some green tea and toast, we sat and talked about past memories and my childhood in Central Falls. As we talked, a knot in my stomach bubbled up and showed itself. It’s that familiar feeling I get before I do something risky or uncomfortable, like when I’m in social environments where I feel I don’t fit in. But this particular time, I pushed forward anyway. I dug down deep. I harnessed my anger, my hurt, and I told her about a painful memory.
“Deloris, Anita, Dianne, and I were sexually abused,” I told her as I uttered my brother’s name in that same breath. “He chased us in the apartment. He was aggressive. We were scared. We were so young, Mom. There was penetration with Anita and Dianne. Me and Deloris were touched.”
There was silence. She didn’t move. It’s ironic that she was sitting in my beautiful kitchen of marble and porcelain, with the subzero refrigerator and high ceilings, and it meant absolutely fucking nothing compared to the largeness of the truth of what was happening. Success pales in comparison to healing. Not just the truth of the abuse but the decision to love, to forgive . . . what I knew the reaction would be . . . which was silence.
Silence.
Heavy silence. The silence that’s steeped in shock, hurt, guilt, recognition of her own abuse. The silent desperation of trying to negotiate the complexity of being a mother. The only sign that something had shifted in her was her uneaten toast.
There were other kinds of incidents we experienced as a sisterhood.
We were trying to make sugar candy on the stove while my parents were out, either at the local bar, though my mom never drank, or my mom was at bingo and my dad at work. Sugar candy was a country tradition that my sister Dianne taught us. You pour an insanely inappropriate amount of grease in an iron pan and pour enough sugar to give an entire school full of children diabetes in it and just stir over a high flame. It would caramelize.
You then turn the heat off and let it cool and harden into sugar candy. We would try anything involving food. We were always, always hungry. One time we let the grease cook too long and it popped out and splattered all over Anita’s face. She screamed! We screamed! Dianne got a greasy rag and wiped. A layer of skin came off. She grabbed her coat and ran out to get my mom. Anita ended up in the emergency room and had big blisters on her face.
Our silent competition about who wet the bed the most and who would end up stopping first.
My brother playing Bruce Lee threw a butcher knife at my sister Anita.
Miraculously, it missed her organs, and embedded itself in her leg instead.
My parents started fighting while my mom was doing Dianne’s hair. My father got so mad and out of control he threw a glass at my mom, which hit Dianne in the head, splitting her head open. Blood gushed out.
When I look back at what I’ve seen, my only thoughts are that it’s amazing how much a human body can endure.
There are not enough pages to mention the fights, the constantly being awakened in the middle of the night or coming home after school to my dad’s rages and praying he wouldn’t lose so much control that he would kill my mom. Sometimes her head or arm would be split open. She would have a swollen face, split lip. I was always afraid when he picked anything up like a piece of wood because he would hit her as hard as he could and keep beating. Sometimes all night. There were so many times that we would see droplets of blood leading to our apartment and we just knew what was happening. It was chaos, violence, anger, and poverty mixed with shame.
One night, my father came home profoundly drunk. He kept saying, “Mae Alice, I’m dying. I’m not gon’ live past the night! Wake up the children!”
My mom, crying, woke us all up. We were exhausted and just sat in their room trying not to fall asleep. My dad was on the floor, wasted and periodically throwing up clear liquid. My mom was holding his head, crying.
“Y’all! Ya daddy’s dying,” he moaned. “I ain’t gon’ be here much longer. I want to say bye to all of y’all.”
I started crying. I was the “crybaby.” My sisters were stoic. My dad began to say good-bye to each of us.
“Deloris; you smart. You gon’ do good but you gotta stop stealing ya sisters’ shit and sellin’ it at school. Don’t think I don’t know watch ya doin.”
Deloris then started crying. A little. “Dianne, you take care of ya sisters.”
“Vahla; you my baby. You know ya daddy loves you, but yo’ ass need to stop pissin’ in the bed and stinking up the house!”
“Nita; I don’t know what the hell to do with you. You piss in the bed, steal, fight people . . . AAAAAhhhh!” He convulsed, threw up, and went cold. Stopped moving.
I wailed, “Daddy! No! Don’t die, Daddy!” Then he woke right back up. “I love y’all.”
My mom looked at us and said, “Y’all go back to bed.”
There were continual battles. After every one of them there was a looming reality. How will we overcome this one? The only hope was that these ever-present battles would be little traumas, not a big trauma. In the early ’70s, my sister Anita came face-to-face with a big one.
It started out as a normal, uneventful summer day, and my family and our next-door neighbors, the Owenses, were all sitting on the porch talking. Now, this was at 128. The Owenses had the apartment that we eventually would occupy once they moved out. They were a large family just like ours. We were very close and would just play together all the time. As the adults enjoyed the calm of the porch, we kids were running inside the house, periodically ducking our heads outside. While we young’uns frolicked without a care in the world, Mrs. Owens and my mom suddenly blurted, “Look at the monster! OMG! What is he doing?” Of course, we ran outside to see.
“Look! He ran into the backyard,” we exclaimed with excitement, absolutely unaware of where this seemingly innocent ride would later take us.
As we ran to see the monster in the backyard, our parents screamed behind us, “Don’t you go near that man.”
We saw him: a man in the middle of the backyard with no shoes on, jeans that were torn at the leg, and a shirt that was haphazardly buttoned. He just stood, rocking back and forth, back and forth, and groaning. His eyes didn’t register us at all even though he was looking straight at us. Our parents weren’t joking. If he wasn’t a monster, he would certainly do until a real one came along.
We screamed at him, “Look at us! Wooo-hooo! Look, monster! We’re here!” We were terrified, but playing it off brilliantly, in our minds, with our rude taunts. Suddenly, a stray cat we had unofficially adopted came walking over to this man. We screamed, “Cat!” We hadn’t named the damn cat yet. “Cat! Get away from him!”
We screamed at the top of our lungs hoping to startle the cat enough for it to run away. We certainly didn’t have the guts to run near the monster and get it. So, we just kept screaming, at the cat and to the man not to pick up our kind-of pet.
Suddenly, the rocking entity that looked every bit the part of horror movie villain picked the cat up by the back of its neck. Our screams got louder. If he heard us, we couldn’t tell because he didn’t respond to us. Instead, he looked at the cat, stroked it almost lovingly, and then calmly broke its neck.
Blood oozed out of the dead feline’s mouth. Its head hung, although it seemed like it was still trying to live. The man held the bloody cat up, let its blood drip down his face, and licked it. He flung the cat down and smeared the blood on his face ritualistically, like war paint.
We were absolutely still. Not believing what we were seeing.
Traumatized.
Suddenly, like a switch turned on, he finally registered us, his childish tormentors, growled, and charged at us full speed. We ran inside our apartment building like hunted animals, clawing over each other, scrambling, crying. We made it up the stairs. When we looked around, out of breath, crying, we discovered Anita wasn’t there.
We contacted the police, and my father frantically searched the city for Anita while we were in tears. Unbeknownst to us, Anita was being pursued. She later recounted that while we, her sisters and friends, rushed to the apartment, she had taken a different route. The assailant soon spotted her and began his relentless pursuit. Anita described how she ran and hid behind trees and the large rock at Jenks Park, trying to stay quiet to avoid detection. Despite her efforts, he continued to track her, turning every hiding spot into a temporary refuge.
As Anita fought for her life, we were oblivious to her exact whereabouts. The police arrived at our home, but they were equally unsure of her location. Then, we saw her running down Washington Street from Jenks Park, visibly exhausted and hysterical. She dashed into the market across from our house, with the assailant in close pursuit.
The butcher from the Colombian market, armed with a machete, emerged and shouted, “Stop!” Miraculously, the assailant, who resembled a character from a horror movie, halted. He appeared stunned and immobile, as if someone had disabled him.
We watched as the police restrained him with a straitjacket and transported him on a gurney to a padded van. We later learned that he had recently returned from Vietnam, where he had survived by eating various rodents and even cats. His severe PTSD had led his wife to evict him that day.
Anita, always the strong one in our family—the survivor, the fighter—was profoundly affected by the ordeal. Even the strongest among us can be deeply scarred. This incident left Anita feeling emotionally drained, and the bloodshed, whether from our mother or the chaos we encountered, left us in need of healing. Unfortunately, we lacked the understanding and resources to address it properly. We simply didn’t know how
