The Betrayal of Child Abuse

A coming-of-age story

Lawrence — that’s not his real name — was a cousin of mine. We grew up in a Louisiana town of about 1,000 people, and though it wasn’t customary to talk about sexuality, everyone assumed that Lawrence was gay. He was one of two people in town, both of whom were my cousins, who fit that description. But Lawrence didn’t try to hide who he was. He lived outside of the rules, and rather boldly so, in a place where there was almost no support for him, at a time when that was incredibly dangerous.

Years later, he was murdered, his body found tied to his bed. The gossip was that his life had been taken because of the way that he lived it.

It was upsetting to see people more ashamed than upset, or hearing about folks showing up at the funeral not to pay their respects, but to see if any men came in and cried a little too hard. The idea that someone could have loved him was considered shameful. It was only in retrospect that I could appreciate the great bravery it must have taken to live in his skin. There were no parades in my town, no bar you could go to, no bookstore where you could find yourself in a novel. Lawrence had to do it by himself.

He was doubly marginalized, if not more than that; the black experience is a marginalized experience, anyway. Oppression can bind people together, but Lawrence couldn’t join another group that shared his experience. That’s not how society works, even in the LGBT community. You are cordoned off, you are separate, and you are othered again and again. That was his experience. And he was never able to say that out loud, not to me or anyone I knew.

Lawrence was a choir director — a singer and pianist. He played at many of the weddings that I attended as a child. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, I was thinking how tragic it is that he brought so much joy to an event he could never experience himself. Not only was he never able to acknowledge any love that he was feeling, but he facilitated other people’s happiness from 15 feet away. As I watched the celebrations outside the Supreme Court, I thought: That would have been for him. A couple of hours later, as I watched the president eulogize the black body of a black man, I thought: That should have been for him. Somebody should have celebrated his life. His life was worthy. He was kind and he was brave. I wanted to write about that, to honor him in retrospect.

A memoir like this is tough on a family. My mom’s only wish was that I change all the names.

She specifically mentioned his name, partly because it was still a shameful thing. It occurred to me then that Lawrence wasn’t ashamed — so why should we be ashamed? His name should be spoken. And, like I said, that wasn’t his real name. His name was Larry.

We lived in a segregated town — all the white people lived along Main Street and on the east side of town, and all the black people lived on the west side. When I was five, my mom and dad broke up and we moved into a new house on the westernmost street in town — the blackest black street. That meant moving out of a neighborhood where I’d been everyone’s darling, where the neighbors would invite me into their houses, call me Charles baby and chocolate, and feed me cookies and cakes. The new house was only seven blocks away, but I was five, so I felt like, I’m never going to see my homeland again.

At the new house, people were constantly coming to stay over. We couldn’t afford summer camps, if there were any, so you sent your children somewhere, you took in someone else’s child, and there was a wash of kids all summer long. When I was seven, my cousin Chester came to stay with us. I was lost and alone amidst all the frenetic activity, and this guy in his mid-teens shows up and wanted to hang out and play with me. I thought, nobody wants to play with me; this is so cool; I feel like one of the big kids. I didn’t know about predators and how their grooming works. They find the most isolated person because they are less likely to tell and more likely to be in need of attention and affection. Predators are incredibly talented at this, even if they’re not aware of it.

During the course of his stay, there is the incident of child abuse, molestation. I call it “the betrayals.”

I thought I must have done something wrong — there must have been a provocation.

When I told him that I didn’t want to have anything to do with this anymore, he never spoke another kind word to me. In fact, he became my biggest bully. Again, that is part of the targeting process, to make sure that the person doesn’t tell, and to defame them if they do. He was unrelenting. Every time I saw him, I was, emotionally, completely unprepared.

I have three kids. When the youngest one, who looks a lot like me, was about seven years old, I remember walking into the living room and seeing him in the chair that I liked to sit in as a child. He was upside down watching cartoons, just being completely natural, and I thought, Oh, my God, that’s so small.

The thing about trauma is that you carry it around with you and keep processing it with the mind you have at the time.

I have processed Chester with my teenage mind, with my 20-year-old mind, with my 30- and 40-year-old mind, constantly asking myself whether I could have done something different. But that’s the 40-year-old me saying that, not the seven-year-old turned upside down in a chair. I had to learn to forgive myself.

After Chester’s betrayal, Uncle Paul became my best friend. I spent my days walking the streets with him, going from one person’s house to another. I was just growing into childhood and he had never really left it. He was illiterate; he had lived with his parents his entire life and never married. His company was the one of the only places I felt safe.

But then, as I write in the book,

“I was awakened by the feel of his hand moving across my hip, arching the way a snake moves across a log, slow and deliberate, searching for a soft spot to come down, purposeful, not a mistake. Without a word, before the hand found its target, I quietly got up and walked out of Paul’s room and back to mine. I never slept in his room again. Neither of us ever spoke of the hand that moved across my hip like a snake. Whereas Chester’s betrayal had broken my spirit, Paul’s broke my heart.”

For him to be part of that betrayal was devastating to me, because it started to feel like a pattern. I wondered whether there was something about me that was provoking this horrid response in people — that removed me from the world.

When I was 16 or 17, Evelyn and I had sex, and she got pregnant. “Is it yours?” my mom asked me. I said that it was, and she walked into her room and closed the door. One day, Evelyn’s brother burst into my English class and announced that she had just had the baby. My mother taught at my high school, so I ran to her classroom; she was on her off-period, cleaning up. I told her the news. She didn’t even stop cleaning up. “You know that baby is not yours,” she said.

I took that to mean she was mad. I refused to consider that Evelyn had deceived me, particularly once I looked into my daughter’s eyes.

When you hold a baby you think is yours, you fall in love.

One day, however, my cousin, a mean girl who was Evelyn’s best friend, came over and said, “Charles, get a clue. She doesn’t look anything like you.” Only then did I count how many months Evelyn had been pregnant — it wasn’t enough. I consulted an encyclopedia and learned that a baby born early would be smaller. This one was big. Nothing added up.

She must have seen it on my face, because a week later, she took the baby and moved away, leaving no forwarding address, no phone numbers, nothing. Three months later, she married a man called Bobby Love in Texas. All of a sudden, everyone was coming up to me, saying, “You didn’t know that was Bobby’s?” And I was like, wait, where were you when I was holding that baby?

I went to college with the ambition of becoming a politician — the governor of Louisiana, if possible. Sending me off, my mother handed me a gun. “Take this,” she said, “just in case.” I put it under the seat of my car and forgot about it. I’d find it while washing the car, push it out of the way to vacuum under the seat, push it back under the seat, never thought anything about it.

The CIA would come to our college every year and recruit in our classrooms. They took an interest in me during my second or third year. I guess they liked the idea of a kid from the middle of nowhere with no attachments, but also smart. They flew me out to D.C. I went through a battery of tests and felt like I was nailing them. The last one was a lie detector test. I didn’t think I had anything to hide. But when they strapped me down, one of the first questions was something to the effect of, “Have you ever had sex with a man?” The only thing I could think about was the molestation.

We were both technically kids, so was that a man? There wasn’t penetration, so is that sex?

And I could hear the machine already, skeesh-skeesh-skeesh. I said no. Skeesh-skeesh-skeesh.

He asked more questions, but I was still stuck on that big one. Eventually I turned around and begged him to start the test again. He said fine and we did it again, and I gave the opposite answer, and the thing still scratched all over the sheet. There was no way for me to answer that; I had too many questions of my own about what happened. So, I went back to school, didn’t tell anybody, didn’t get the internship, and decided that my life was ruined. The government knew I had lied, or believed that I had told a lie that I didn’t know I’d told, so I could never be a politician.

I was depressed, and it was then that Chester called me from my mom’s house, acting like nothing had ever happened. I said, “No, you destroyed my life as a little kid. I almost committed suicide. And now you’ve destroyed my life again.”

I bolted out the door in a rage, still in my PJs, no shoes on, and jumped into the car. I remembered the gun, grabbed it from under the seat, slammed it on to the driver’s seat, and raced down the highway toward my mom’s house. The plan was simple: You walk in, you find him, you don’t say a word, and you kill him. By the time I reached the exit, I was bawling. Chester was about to destroy my future, too. That was the logical outcome of seeing my life through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy.

As you can see, I turned around.