Black Star Girl

My first memorable personal example of the solid parenting partnership of my mother and father had to do with me doing my best to keep secret something troubling me, not share my dilemma with anyone. It was the summer I was five years old. An extremely personal problem was ruining my days and nights. I wanted it resolved without anyone knowing the embarrassing situation I had gotten myself into. Aunt Cora and Uncle Herb lived in our neighborhood, a nice residential area of all single family homes. Their home was behind ours on Matthew Street. All we did was walk through our back yard, then cross the alleyway to be in their back yard. I usually asked to go along when mother visited her sister. Mother resisted, reminding me, “you’ll get bored and want to go home before I’m ready. Why don’t you stay here?” If I insisted on going, thinking of the good time ahead if my cousin Ellen was home and let me hang around with her, mother let me tag along. Ellen, Aunt Cora and Uncle Herb’s only child, was a neat cousin. She was a beautiful teenager, thirteen or fourteen years old and so lucky to have a lot of long wavy light brown hair that she wore ‘out’. My own long very curly hair was braided neat and tidy into two pigtails, we called them, down to my back with a colorful ribbon bow on the end of each. It was oh so b o-o-r-r-ring. My cousin sometimes let me brush her hair which I could never do with mine and which was also much more fun than even brushing my doll’s hair. It was great when Ellen was there to play with me. One particular summer day, I went along with mother and Ellen wasn’t home, had gone off with her friend. Eventually I asked permission to go outside to play. Both Mother and Aunt Cora were happy I asked since they had resorted to whispers as they gossiped and laughed about things they didn’t intend for me to know. “Stay in the yard”, Mother said. My Aunt’s back yard had very little play space. One side was widely bordered with her flower garden and the other was almost all vegetable garden. Still I had fun. When I remembered to bring my jump rope I practiced in the grassy lawn patch between the path and one of the gardens, that is, if the weekly washing was not hanging out to dry. I also liked to skip from the back yard on around the west side of the house and across the front yard onto the narrow, heavily shaded, beaten dirt path, between the east side of Aunt Cora’s house and the neighbors tall, thick hedges. Returning on the shrubbery shadowed path into the back yard, skipping and singing, the only light being the pale blue sky above, it was an adventure, a journey through a mysterious tunnel. This particular summer day (when I was only five years old) I was happily hopping and skipping along the almost dark path toward the sunny back yard, singing softly to myself when there sitting on the incline that held the hedgerow was a neighborhood teenage boy I knew, asking me to “stop a minute”. I had not seen him until he spoke. I was startled. He motioned me to come over close to him. I did. I knew him. Right away, he asked me to pull my pants down. I was wearing a dress. “No”, I said, as it flashed into my mind that my underwear and what was underneath was my private, personal business not to be shared with anyone, I added, “ I can’t do that”. “Come on”, he begged, reaching out to the skirt. “I won’t hurt you and no one will know” With an adamant “no” I backed away, then mumbled I had to go in and hurried away. I was embarrassed. I did not tell anyone a thing. It happened again, the next time I went with my mother. He asked the same thing, “Pull your pants down”. I got away. Still I kept his bad action to myself. I did decide never again to play on the pathway around Aunt Cora’s house. I would avoid him. The next time I went to Aunt Cora’s with mother, I stayed inside, making myself scarce by playing in a corner of the kitchen or on the staircase behind the kitchen. When they realized I was not asking to go out and play, they invited me to. I said, “No, I’ll stay in here”. They wanted to know why. I didn’t have a reason, only a soft shrug of my shoulders and a closed mouth “I don’t know”. Jokingly they suggested perhaps I discovered it was more fun listening to them than playing outside. That was not to be. Shooing me out the door, mother dispensed her routine order “stay in the yard!” He was there, hiding in the hedges. One more time I managed to escape as I kept saying “no”. I was scared. I did not know what to do to make it stop. He had not tried to hurt me but this time, he offered money, pennies and nickels. “How is this going to end?” I worried. It so frightened me that I started dreaming about him. Still, I did not tell anyone. I simply decided not to go to Aunt Cora’s house with mother again. When she announced she was going to visit her sister, I showed no interest in what had been my opportunity to be with her, away from my brothers and sister. Mother was puzzled, which surprised me. I thought she would be glad I didn’t beg to tag along. But her concern was, “why?” I had no reason, shrugged my shoulders and claimed “I just don’t want to go.” Mother decided my behavior was strange and told my dad, which I did not know until he questioned me. My father was mostly patient in handling his children but he also had a demanding, “I will control this” approach he used if he felt it was necessary. Talking to me alone at the dining room table, him sitting in his arm chair at the head of the table, he did not bully, he was empathetically persistent. He made it clear to me that he knew there was a reason I did not want to go with mother and he had to know what it was. I tried to resist telling but his manner and my fear that things would get worse if I did not tell someone was the catalyst that worked. Hearing the story, from the beginning, daddy was quiet, somber. At the end, looking past me, at nothing, in a second or so, his eyes turned to me, “Don’t worry”, he said. “I will take care of everything. You will not be bothered again.” I recall hearing snippets of him speaking with mother about watching after me and not letting any of us out of her eyesight for long periods of time. Mother stunned, was in complete agreement. It wasn’t mother’s fault. I was not out of her sight that long and I was in my aunt’s yard. Daddy spoke to the teen’s father telling him it was up to him to see that his son never again approached any of his children. “But, if you can’t keep your boy in check, “I’ll check him”. The kid was a problem, used to terrorize my brothers, loved taking their baseballs from them. Daddy did insist on talking to the boy, in the presence of his parents. Daddy emphasized his continued inappropriate actions would not be tolerated, promising penitentiary was the next punishment he could expect because Daddy would see to it. We had no more problems with the neighborhood bad boy. No one did.