33
http://tinyurl.com/msumobile
"Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people . . . I had to stop talking." I was probably 10 or 11 when I first read those words from Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I did a lot of reading as a young child because I grew up in a house where people said that children should be "seen and not heard," "speak when spoken to, answer when called." Many of the stories that captivated me were about benighted children, from Oliver Twist to Pollyanna, to Richard Wright and Maya Angelou.
It was the late 1980s and I was enduring a hellish childhood ravaged by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of my adoptive mother whose fierce Pentecostal religiosity made her speak in a language fit for the trees and sky, and whose brutality could have made the Brothers Grimm, Joan Crawford, Sybil Dorsett's mean mother, and "Mister" from The Color Purple wince. And it was also an era, particularly in African-American communities, when folks still weren't having healthy conversations about wife beating, child abuse, and sexual abuse. "What goes on in this house stays in the house" was the communal mantra.
This silencing left me feeling vulnerable and unprotected, resulting in abuse that scarred up my body, welted my psyche, left keloids on my self-worth, and had me wishing I had never been born. The silence left me with a diminished sense of self and fear that speaking my truth could produce negative consequences for me, my adoptive family, and black people, who are, on the whole, incessantly pathologized in the mainstream American imagination.
After spending years not speaking, Angelou found her voice, and in doing so she planted a seed for me and legions of others who've endured the nightmare of abuse. I'm glad she broke her silence because her rich and rumbling voice helped me move past the fear, the silence, and a victim narrative that nearly made me turn on myself. This goddess titan not only transcended and transformed victimhood, her poetry, her beautiful haughtiness, her love of self, and her desire for truth-telling gave me the tools that I needed to grow up, to fight back, to recreate myself, to become a writer and an activist. Because of her voice, I was able to develop a sense of possibility beyond what I could see then as a vulnerable black girl child who was told to stay in her "place".
Stacey Patton
Reporter, author, founder of the blog Spare the Kids