A Note From Kenyora: Lessons Learned With My Mom
Kenyora Parham, MSW, Executive Director of End Rape On Campus
Content Trigger Warning: This following piece contains content that could be potentially triggering for survivors of sexual violence.
It was over a decade before I saw him again–the first person I ever called “daddy.” He was my mother’s first husband, a white airman in the U.S. Air Force. He stood outside in front of my mom’s house with his baby-blue eyes and a smile that would have made you think he was the true Maverick. I ran to him with so much excitement and joy. That was until I saw that in his hands he had my mini pink diary with a ballerina shoe carved on the front with the lock detached. My brown eyes went from happiness to an overwhelming panic. For years I had forgotten. I took the book, ran back into the house, and threw it in the trash.
My mom had called me into the living room and asked me to take the diary out of the trash and hand it to her. In those seconds that I ran and discarded a moment of time that I wanted to forget, he must have hinted to her that she should inquire about it. He left and that was the last time I saw him. As I walked toward my mom, she had her hand out. I handed her the diary. My eyes were wide pleading with the diary as she began to search. I had hoped that one entry was not in there and that somehow it had escaped on its own. She saw it. It was one line that told it all. “Oh my god!” she shrieked. “What does this mean? Who is he? Why didn’t you tell me?” She began to cry and so did I.
For Black women, the ‘code of silence’ permeates deep into our bodies, that if you were to shed each layer of skin, you’d find a dark secret embedded so dark that you may think we’re branded.
For some of us, it starts off when we are children and continues into adulthood. Our bodies become the reluctant and silent gatekeepers of the generations of abuse, molestation, incest, and rape. We’ve been oppressed as enslaved people and continue to be the target of racially motivated violence. We’re called names and blamed for our experiences often by those outside of our culture, our community, and even more painfully by those within our group.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be mad at me,” I replied. I was eight or nine years old when I experienced sexual assault at the hands of a man who was the partner of my grandmother’s best friend at the time. He could have been my grandfather at the time. He had a daughter of his own who was one or two years younger than me. “Oh baby, I could never be mad at you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just sad that you felt that you couldn’t tell me”. Then my mom went into her story–a story that she’s shared with me a few times before. I don’t recall if I said this aloud to her or if I thought this in my head, “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to have to relive your own trauma.” We continued to cry and hold each other.
Like most Black mothers I know of, my mom went into hunt mode to find out where he was. My mom wanted to do to him, what she couldn’t do to her abuser, what she wished someone would have done for her.
My mom was — as the Black community would call her: a baby who had a baby. She taught me about sex, genitalia, and bodily autonomy at the tender age of 5. She was 14 when she had me. Over the years, she bought me books about masturbation and puberty. My mom wanted me to be well-equipped when it came to my body and my body alone. She wanted me to have sexual agency. She didn’t want me to become another statistic. She wanted me to get out of Lynn, Massachusetts, and accomplish something greater than her. She wanted more for me than she could for herself. She wanted me to have choice and power.
However, when she learned of what happened to me, at that moment, I think my mom believed that everything she did for me was stripped away. The truth is, everything my mother instilled in me continues to feed my soul and she is the reason why I am who I am today.
And my goal is to empower other survivors to heal, to share, to fight, to live, and to love, especially Black women who too often get backed into a corner of silence and shame. If you’d like to share your story, we have created a space for you and I encourage you to join us there.
