The First and the Last

A Tale of Two Despicable "Men"

SENSITIVITY WARNING: The following contains depictions of incest, sexual abuse, domestic violence and cruelty.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: The first section is copied from the document I wrote in the middle of the night on November 23, 2013. I was four months into my work with my therapist. This was the first memory of abuse to return to my consciousness. I woke from a dream about it and immediately left my bed to record it. I had no idea that this was but the first of many I would later recall.
The original document contains graphic depictions of abuse. Here, those sections have been removed.

THE FIRST—1975

I was carried to his upstairs bedroom. He spoke in that soft, weirdly high-pitched voice men often use when speaking to little girls. He was saying my name, soothing me. Easing me into the moments that only he knew lay ahead.

He took me to the window and began talking about the young kittens playing in the flowerbed, the trees growing along the fencerow, and the tall rows of corn ready for harvest beyond that fence. He asked me to sing “Jesus Loves Me” with him. I did.

“Who made the trees?”

“God.”

“That’s right, Naynee. Very good.”

“Can we go play with the kittens now?”

“Not yet. Come over here first.”

He sat me on the bed and began removing my clothes, talking the whole time in that same childish voice.

“Okay. Lay down now and look at the wall, little Naynee. I want to rub your back. “

He rubbed my back but only for a moment or two. As his breathing quickened, [REDACTED].

That reassuring voice gave way to low moaning. The bed moved as he shifted his weight. [REDACTED]

I didn’t move or make a sound. A good girl doing as she was told, I stared at the wall. I stared and studied, searching for anything to take my attention away from sensations I couldn’t comprehend and the welling tears I didn’t understand.

In the grooves of that dark wood paneling, I found textures and patterns to occupy me. My vision strove to pull me in the tiny spaces in the grain of the wood. I succeeded. I dissociated to a place my body could clearly never go but it was enough for me in that moment. I was tightly held in that small, dark place. Though my mind and body had taken leave of one another, I felt myself release a long-held breath.

Though my head was turned away from my uncle, I saw, from my perch, what he was doing. It was completely unfamiliar and when he [REDACTED], I snapped my eyes shut. And so I stayed as I waited for an end I could never have anticipated.

To this day, I remember my panic, my loss, my very undoing as from my haven I harshly fell when [REDACTED].

I was four.

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Even now, I can feel the searing brand of the willful lust and hate that fell on me. [REDACTED] Did my mother know what she scrubbed from my tiny body that night as she bathed me? My mind forces itself to tell myself she didn’t. Though the years ahead leave me with more than a shadow of doubt. And that ever so slight diminishing of light is more than enough to shatter a grown daughter’s heart.

So, four years old. That means I couldn’t yet ride a bike, I couldn’t write all of my ABCs, I didn’t know my home address or phone number and I still believed in fairies and Santa Claus. My body on that day couldn’t have weighed more than a full sack of groceries.

Though I grew and matured in many ways, those first moments spent in my uncle’s bedroom have held my mind and my soul hostage for many years. Over time, though, those events were lost to the unseen depths below the surface of my consciousness. The conflict and pain made themselves manifest in my life countless times and it would take cataclysmic betrayal to extract them from their heavily-guarded graves in the murky, muck-filled pits of my past.