Waking Up The Village
(1774 words) WAKING UP THE VILLAGE As a church worker I lean in the direction of taking on the lost and the forlorn. That’s what Jesus did. He hung out with the marginal, the sorry poor, and the pitiful---the ones society blames for being that way. When they are eleven, nine, and five years old, and it’s hurting cold, and they look up at you shivering with cotton and dirt for covering, blame isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Open the door and let them in. Dee, the nine year old was the leader. Hyper, inquisitive, resourceful, her eyes were the Artful Dodger’s scanning the room for anything not tied down. I thought of the countless Fagan’s waiting at home: their children were out getting the spoils that the adults were too tired, too drunk, too beat up to be bothered for. The hurt running across the generations leaves a mark like an engraving on a tombstone of the souls of the Young-Old Ones. In Dee’s expression was emblazoned an “S” for survival, as bright and as big as Super Man’s. The boy, Winston, was the five-year-old. He was mute, pale, dirty faced, impish. He had an odd likeness to the guitar player on the bridge in the movie “Deliverance.” For him, an emblazoned “A” for anger. Jennifer, the oldest, giggled as if all of life was an embarrassing mistake. Just get all of this over with! Once through the door it didn’t take long for the Dodger to find the kitchen and help herself to leftover coffee hour sweets. She eyed the coffee creamer and went for that too, gulping it down with a greed that comes with hunger. Hunger in any child, in our country, was a new concept for me. Where had I been? Dee was scanning everything, for anything, a hard drive grinding until it settled on www.foodnow.com. She settled on the grocery cart filled to the brim with non- perishables collected to stock local pantries. “Can we have some of them things?” “Of course. I’ll set you guys up so you can carry some of these home. Where do you live anyway?” I was cautious, not sure. Would it be my place to pursue the details of their lives? More like it, would I really want to know? That day my heart was set for compassion, an alarm clock that would go off so many times my heart drums would break. The sun had disappeared for weeks when Dee first called for me to come, her mother was sick. I had spent my childhood in the luxury and safety of one of the first gated communities, where children could run free at night down manicured streets into two parent homes that were havens of protection, safety, and love. The neighborhood these children inhabited was rough and mean and scary. I was afraid to see beyond the kicked in front door to the house---one in a series of many---where the children lived more like beasts than like children. “Anybody here? Hello!” Jennifer rushed out with her hands behind her back. She was hiding something she didn’t want me to see. “Ma’s here. You wanna go see her? She’s in bed. She’s in bed a lot these days.” It was clear that Jennifer, although only eleven, was the mother to the Mother as well as to her younger siblings. I tried to see what she was concealing and soon learned that secrets, sneaking, lying, and hiding were the super highways of navigation for children surviving in abusive households. I followed her over piles of filthy clothes, and misplaced and tattered old furniture. The door was cracked to Mother’s room. I peeked in. She was asleep, snoring. Her face was swollen and bruised. Next to her bed a table surface was covered with pill bottles. Her bra strap fell down over her upper arm and her left breast oozed out from the bra cup. A tattoo of a heart encircled by a serpent was etched in blue and red above her nipple. The place reeked of cigarettes and stale beer. A roach skittered across the bedroom floor, what there was of it not covered with dirty laundry and shoes. My lungs burned. My heart ached. My mind spun. A tiny voice hollered from the top of a flight of stairs. “Hey Rev. Betsy, come up here!” I followed Dee’s voice, tripping over more things strewn over steep, squeaking boards that led upward into a tiny, triangular space. An attic. Up there were swarms of more clothes, a dumping ground from a giant yard sale. Burrowed into the clothes were three mats, cushions that might have covered a patio chaise lounge. This was where the children slept. Hanging from the ceiling was a bare wire with a broken bulb on the end. The one small window was cracked and ice formed on the inside. There was something cracked and frozen about this scene of destitution and deprivation. There was something depraved about this mother knocked silly by some man’s fist, a case of beer, and a week’s supply of Vicadin. When parents are gnawing on their own pain like a dog on its last bone they’re blind to anything or anyone else. That’s when the System steps in. The System is nothing more than a bunch of caring souls who want to help. It seems that on most days their alarm clocks have wound down. And who winds them back up again? It takes at least one person to wake up the whole village of strangers trying to raise the children of the children of the children of the bone gnawers. For Dee, Jennifer, and Winston, I assigned myself to wake the village. Had I known its slumber would be so deep--- it would be years---would I have even begun the agonizing Sisyphean climb? By the time the System came to I was sure the suffering had etched its indelible crease on each young heart like a riverbed carved deep into hardened, cracked clay. Was there any hand, any voice, any love that could reshape the mounds of muck, dirt, and grime of these children’s lives? In her fourth grade classroom, Dee, at age nine was found curled up in a ball in the closet, tearing at her face with her nails, screaming. Winston, in first grade, pulled a knife and was put in a youth home, the beginning of a continual pattern of violence. Jennifer, on countless occasions left her house to walk for days, to live in the woods like a wild animal, just to be out of the lustful gazes and attacks of Mother’s doped up boy friends. She was desperate to be free of the responsibility of protecting her younger siblings when her mother would leave them alone for days. Her nightmares persist to this day. What stunned me, what infuriated me, what filled me with such hopelessness and even disdain was what, to me, seemed like calculated indifference. I wanted “Child Protective Services” to do what it was there to do: protect abused and neglected children. Not tomorrow, not next week, or next year or years after that, but now. Each day that Jennifer, Winston, and Dee waited was another day for the scar tissue to form hard, impenetrable coverings over their souls. As time went by I watched the tiny flicker of light in Dee’s eyes fade out. I know that her soul lives. But it lives like a sleeping bat whose radar has gone awry. It hangs upside down in the deepest, darkest recesses of its cave, and when it awakes, if it does, it will take a miracle to find its way to sustenance. In our state the single requirement for issue of the sacred court order to remove a child from his or her abusive situation is physical evidence. P.S. assured me that if the children would testify to their experience they would be protected. Otherwise, finding physical evidence--a bruise, a cigarette burn, a broken limb-- was like tracking ghosts on a trail swept clean by a family haunted by enmeshment and delusion. Years of observation, of note taking, of networking with concerned friends, family members, child advocacy professionals, teachers, counselors, psychologists--years of reporting-- would not alter the daily bearing down of life on these children. I and others who loved them, would have sheltered them, fed them, tucked them in at night, and sent them to school in fresh clean outfits. We would have loved them like the mother they deserved. And in time we might have loved the Mother too. Three and a half years after the day I met the children a letter arrived informing me that my most recent report to Protective Services was being processed. Adequate proof had been shown to issue a court order for Jennifer’s removal from her home. This came when Jennifer felt strong enough to defend her own life. She talked. Soon, the other children would be taken out. It only seemed to make sense that Jennifer would come to live with me, and of course I longed to embrace her. I had on countless occasions given her sanctuary, answered her calls in the middle of the night, risked going to jail for harboring a runaway, withstood the violent wrath of her family, attended court hearings, hired lawyers, formed committees, and kidnapped her from school to accompany her to medical appointments. None of that mattered. Jennifer was whisked from my house as temporary hold over to a family two towns away. Call me self-righteous, naïve, out of touch with the Village rules, my hope remained to liberate Winston, Dee, and Jennifer from a Hell where the flames were fanned by lack of physical evidence and by their own confused resolve to stay with the familiar rather than risk the unknown. In the process I came to appreciate what a mistress must experience. No matter how invested she has been, no matter the depth of her passion and devotion, in the end she is still the mistress. She must stand on the fringes, incognito, while the family gathers at the grave of her lover. They who care less mourn with empty platitudes and claim the spoils. And all the old photographs, not much to cling to, remain in cracked frames on the pill -covered table next to the bed where Mother takes her next lover. She will always be Mother. And her children will always bang their crippled wings in the direction of her tortured light.
Copyright © 2001 B. P. Skinner |