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  Our house had three bedrooms—one for me and Kevin, one for Franklin, and one for guests—but when I’d told Kevin that Josh was bringing along a girlfriend, he’d insisted they sleep in separate rooms. “This is a Christian household,” he’d said to me. “We don’t allow fornication.” To appease him, I moved Franklin’s toddler bed into our bedroom and set up an air mattress in Franklin’s room for Brennan to sleep on, while Josh slept in the guest room. It felt strange imposing Christian morality on Josh, as he’d strayed far away from the faith we’d been raised in, bouncing between agnosticism and atheism, screwing women he wasn’t married to, drinking, and smoking, but I had little choice. I apologized and shrugged to let him and Brennan know that it was Kevin’s decision and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  The conversation at dinner that night was forced and awkward. Josh and Kevin had only hung out twice before, and during the first occasion in DC, Josh had made his objections to my life choices known, telling me he didn’t think marrying a Black man was a good idea. “Marriage is hard enough,” he’d said. “Race will just complicate an already difficult situation.”

  I didn’t consider my marriage to Kevin to be an “interracial marriage,” but Josh did. He believed that race would be the undoing of my relationship with my husband. But I knew that Kevin’s Blackness wasn’t the cause of our disconnect; if anything, it was his disdain for Blackness that created so much distance between us.

  Besides a relationship with me, Kevin and Josh didn’t have much in common. As a consequence, they didn’t have anything to talk about. During dinner that evening, I did my best to keep the conversation going, but quickly exhausted the main topics of interest in the small world I inhabited: the food we were eating, the house we lived in, and Franklin’s growth and development. Josh filled in the gaps with animated discourses about life in grad school, poems he’d recently written, and his eagerness to show off the area he’d grown up in to Brennan.

  The next morning, as Kevin was leaving the house to go to work, he bumped into Josh and Brennan on the deck. They were smoking, which Kevin considered sinful, so I braced myself for an explosion, but he only asked them what their plans for the day were.

  “I was thinking we might all go up to Yaak Falls for a swim,” said Josh.

  “That would be really fun,” I said. “I’d love to go. I’ll get Franklin’s life jacket.”

  Kevin shot me a look of disbelief before leveling his gaze at Josh. “She doesn’t go anywhere without me. That goes for my son, too.” He turned back to me. “You’re not to leave this house until I get home.”

  I nodded and handed Kevin the lunch I’d made him.

  As Kevin walked to his car, Josh looked at me incredulously. “Seriously?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m sure you and Brennan will have a great time.”

  Josh shook his head. “How do you live like this? You’re too special for this.”

  “No, I’m not,” I muttered.

  My heart nearly skipped a beat from the impact of my own words. At that moment, I could see just how removed I’d become from my goals, my ambitions, myself. I’d lost all hope and desire and traded in all my dreams of changing the world, and for what? To be a stay-at-home mom? A submissive wife? All the energy I’d devoted to conforming to what Larry and Ruthanne wanted (religious obedience) and what Kevin wanted (a white wife) had left me feeling dead inside. I’d cut off oxygen to the parts of my life that didn’t fit with Kevin’s narrow worldview, and while doing that may have saved my marriage, it was killing me. I was doing little more than existing. That I felt so lifeless scared me, but with this fear came hope, for that was the moment I began to wake up and feel like I might be able to start living again.

  Josh was so disturbed by the state of my marriage he addressed the issue in several emails after he and Brennan left. In one, he wrote that he had “never witnessed a civil conversation between [me] and Kevin, even about groceries,” and was concerned that I wasn’t happy. In another, he wrote, “Thankfully, there hasn’t been any physical violence, or you would have no choice but to consider divorce.” If he only knew.

  Kevin was home from work the day Josh sent the latter email, and he intercepted it before I had a chance to read and delete it, as had become my habit. Livid, he yelled for me to come downstairs. I picked up Franklin and carried him on my hip as I walked down to the basement. The room pulsed with Kevin’s rage. He said he never wanted to see Josh’s face again and if he did he would kill him for planting ideas about divorce in my head. When I tried to calm him, he lunged at me, and as he did I wrapped Franklin in my arms and turned to shield his body with mine. Kevin grabbed the back of my hair and threw me across the room. My side and back slammed into the wooden cupboards that ran along the floor, as my body curled into a ball to protect Franklin from the impact.

  As I checked to make sure Franklin was all right, Josh’s words broke through the fog in my head: You’d have no choice but to consider divorce. Up to this point I’d accepted the abuse I’d received at Kevin’s hands to be an atonement for my sins and endured it out of guilt and stubbornness, but now that he’d involved Franklin I could no longer stand by and take it. I had to find a way out. I memorized our bank account numbers, packed a suitcase, hid the guns, and devised a plan. I would rent a U-Haul truck and take off with Franklin and all my artwork—essentially, all that was precious to me. I was terrified about the prospect of leaving, but staying was even more frightening. I tried to take off in the car on two separate occasions, but both times Kevin heard me sneak out and got to me before I could get Franklin in his car seat and drive away.

  The tension in our house was like an obnoxious guest who’d long overstayed his welcome but is related to you so you can’t kick him out. It lingered into the fall. One Tuesday morning in September I was washing dishes in the kitchen and Kevin got upset about something as he was walking out the door to go to work. We got into an argument. He swung at me, but I managed to avoid the blow. Franklin, who’d been playing on the kitchen floor, stepped between us. “Stop it, Daddy!” he yelled. “Don’t hurt Mommy!” Kevin kicked him out of the way, and Franklin went flying across the linoleum and split his forehead open on a cupboard door. As routine as this sort of abuse had become, Franklin had never been hurt before.

  A grim line had been crossed.

  As scared as I was about going to Hell for failing to be a submissive wife, I was willing to do it to protect my child. While Kevin was at work, I snuck into town and reported the incident at the Child Protective Services office, showing them the injury on Franklin’s forehead. After explaining what had happened that morning and how it was part of a pattern of violence and abuse, the social worker I talked to told me I had one month to get Franklin out of the house or else he’d be removed and put into foster care.

  I’d wanted to leave Kevin for some time but had lacked the courage and self-esteem to actually do it. My love for Franklin made up for those deficiencies. Now that he’d been hurt I had no choice. I went straight home and forged an escape plan, while being careful to cover my tracks. Whenever I called the victim advocate CPS had assigned me, I remembered to delete the call log on our land line. Any time I used the internet, I erased the search history afterward. And any time I wrote an email, I’d tell the receiver not to email me back, and then I’d delete the copy of the message I’d sent.

  I needed to go somewhere I’d be safe, but when I appealed to Josh he relied on an Iraq War reference to say no, telling me he wasn’t “going to be George Bush” and intervene in such a volatile situation. Larry and Ruthanne were now living in South Africa, but even if they’d been in the country I wouldn’t have bothered to call them. Which left “Uncle” Vern. The week before I left Kevin, I’d called Uncle Dan, told him about the escalating abuse, and asked if Franklin and I could stay with him. As a gay man, he was an outsider like me, so I thought he might sympathize with my situation, and he did. He offered me his place as a safe house while I figured out my n
ext move. He warned me that he was about to fly out of the country to visit Larry and Ruthanne but assured me that Vern would take care of us while he was gone.

  On October 24, 2004, three days after Franklin turned three, I executed my escape plan. I told Paul and Tami, friends from church, that my marriage to Kevin had hit a rough patch and I needed to leave with Franklin so I could think and pray. I asked them to come to our house after church, and when they arrived I called Kevin upstairs and read him a statement I’d written. After explaining why I needed some time away from him, I picked up my suitcase and with Franklin on my hip headed toward the door.

  “You aren’t taking my son anywhere,” he said, grabbing Franklin’s arm in a grip so tight it made Franklin cry. “I don’t care what you do, but he stays with me.”

  “Then let Paul and Tami take him,” I said before doing the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life—leaving my child behind as I walked out the door.

  I called the police from a pay phone at a gas station, but the officers who arrived at our house told me they couldn’t take a child from one parent and give him to the other parent without a court order. Concerned about Franklin’s safety, I called Paul and Tami every thirty minutes. Finally, after three and a half miserable hours, they picked up their landline and let me know Franklin was with them. My heart lifted. I filed for an emergency protection order, and as soon as it was granted, I gave a copy of it to Paul and Tami to protect them from Kevin’s wrath and took Franklin straight to “Uncle” Vern’s place.

  When we arrived, Vern was feeding the pheasants, peacocks, emus, and other exotic birds he raised. Besides being a bird lover, he was also an expert landscaper. With streams cascading over waterfalls, winding around perfectly manicured patches of lawn and beds filled with flowering plants, and spilling into ponds full of koi and frogs, their property was often featured in the annual Coeur d’Alene Garden Tour. More importantly to me, it was isolated and well protected. Getting there involved a long and complicated drive, and the driveway had an inconspicuous entrance obscured by a bend in the road. If anyone did come down the driveway, Dan and Vern’s German shepherd Bo would alert us. Before I went to bed that night, Vern handed me an aluminum baseball bat and told me he’d keep a rifle close to his bed.

  Franklin and I stayed with Dan and Vern until we moved into an apartment in Coeur d’Alene in early 2005. As supportive as my uncles were, they were the exception. Everyone else in my family and most of my Christian friends thought divorce was an unforgivable sin. When I told them my plans, I was met with scorn. “God hates divorce,” they told me. And, “Jesus can forgive.” They didn’t mean they would forgive me for getting a divorce; they were saying that, if only I tried a little harder, I could forgive Kevin. Any attempts I made to get them to understand what it was like to live in fear for your safety and that of your child fell on deaf ears. Believing that God is on the side of the husband in any domestic conflict, they supported Kevin, who they’d embraced as a born-again Christian, even though they hardly knew him and had known me my entire life. I knew that divorcing Kevin would mean losing my entire family and many of my friends, yet I was willing to do it because I loved my son more than anything else and believed it was best for him.

  The divorce was finalized in April 2005, with me getting to keep Franklin most but not all of the time. I was on my own at the age of twenty-six with very little in the way of steady employment and a three-year-old to support. And yet I felt liberated! The prevailing mindset in the house I grew up in and the one I shared with Kevin—that if it’s not in the Bible you can’t do it—had precluded me from ever fully discovering or claiming my own identity. Living in a new city where no one knew me, I was free to express who I was on my own terms—religiously, sexually, and racially.

  I stopped attending church for the first time in my life and began a process of redefining my faith in more spiritual terms. Up until that point, the power of religious guilt had me firmly in its grasp and the possibility of eternal punishment was omnipresent. I often found myself atoning for merely existing and hating my body and myself. Now, no longer! After a year of therapy, during which I was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from all the physical and sexual abuse I’d experienced in my life, I started dating, men and women, and I once again embraced my inclination toward Black aesthetics. Perched on the edge of a picturesque lake, Coeur d’Alene is a resort town with an avid beach scene. I often sunbathed on the shores of the lake during the summer, and my skin darkened as a result. I didn’t get melanin-stimulation shots or take drugs or surgically alter my body or skin as some would later suggest. I simply liked to get my “glow” on in the summer and keep a tan as long as I could in the winter. I also started expressing myself again through hairstyles, wearing my hair in box braids, Senegalese twists, and faux locs.

  With the braids and my natural tan came the same questions I’d been bombarded with in college: “So, what are you?” and “Are you white or Black?” and “What are you mixed with?” I began answering more vaguely and letting people make their own judgments. I stopped allowing other people to dictate my identity or make me feel guilty about who I was, and when they made assumptions about my ethnic origins, I made no effort to set them straight. Now for the first time in my life, I was truly owning who I was: a woman who was free, self-reliant, and, yes, Black.

  There was just one hitch. In Idaho, it’s the court’s general policy to make divorced parents sharing custody of a child remain within a two-hour drive of each other to prevent drop-offs and pickups from being overly burdensome. With Kevin still in Bonners Ferry, my choices as far as where I wanted to live next were extremely limited. Coeur d’Alene was the closest place to Bonners Ferry that could be called a city and, thanks to Dan and Vern, it was a place where I felt safe, so I decided to settle there. As happy as I was to be free of Kevin, the solution came with a steep price: to retain my custodial rights, I had to remain in this cultural backwater for the next fifteen years.

  Chapter Seventeen

  San Francisco

  DURING THE ENTIRE FIVE YEARS I was married to Kevin, I never had a single orgasm while having sex with him. I’d discovered how to give myself one when I was ten years old and had continued to do so ever since, but I didn’t receive one at the hands (or genitals or tongue) of another person until the summer after my divorce was finalized, when I was commissioned to create an artistic water fountain for the Fountains of Wishes fundraiser in Coeur d’Alene.

  The fountain I designed depicted a steel column of figures struggling against a never-ending stream of water that fell into a pool, into which spectators were encouraged to toss their pocket change. That money, when it wasn’t being pilfered by derelict teenagers, and the eventual sales of the fountains themselves, raised nearly $180,000 for twenty-one local charities that year. The fountain I made featured a globe of reinforced concrete floating above the steel column on a thin steel rod. All the steel needed to be welded together, but I didn’t have any welding tools or much experience. Rodney, the owner of a local welding shop who was wealthy enough to own his own plane and have free time to share, helped me finish the piece and install it downtown.

  Rodney and I became good friends while working on the project together and continued to hang out after it was done. He was married, so I felt safe around him. I wasn’t something for him to control or abuse. He made me laugh. He even taught me how to fly his plane. On one of our outings I pointed vaguely to the southeast and mentioned that Josh was working as a trail manager in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness that summer, stationed twenty-six miles into the 1.3-million-acre slice of untouched nature. Rodney offered to fly me there, and I took him up on it. He dropped me off at a cluster of cabins that served as Josh’s base camp. There I met Tony, the only person left on Josh’s crew after the other guy quit. Tony had long blonde hair, tan skin, and muscles everywhere.

  On my way to the bathroom one night, I noticed the door to Tony’s cabin was
slightly ajar. I tapped on it. Tony was smoking pot and listening to music. He offered me a hit. It was the first time I’d ever smoked weed, and it burned the back of my throat. I soon found myself talking about my divorce. He told me stories about his own troubled past. Throughout his childhood his stepdad had abused his mom. I appreciated that he seemed to understand my pain. Before long we were rolling in the sheets. I was dumbstruck and, as soon as the shock wore off, elated when I had an orgasm, my first while having sex with a man.

  The first orgasm I ever had via oral sex was a present given to me by Paul Arnoti, a thirty-something white guy who I’d met on Match.com and who had a license plate that read—I’m not kidding—I R NOTI. As in, “I am naughty.” Call it a rebound. But it was a rebound that stuck. We dated for more than a year, despite a fundamental disagreement about kids. He didn’t want any; I had one.

  Paul and I had been dating for just a couple of weeks when I flew to San Francisco hoping to sell some of my artwork to Lloyd, a longtime client from Virginia I’d met during my first year at Howard when he bought one of my pieces. In the years that had passed he’d purchased several more. A successful businessman, he had much more money and vacation time than I did, so he offered to meet me in California to discuss some of my pieces. He picked me up at the San Francisco airport and took me out to dinner. While we were eating, he started flirting with me, which I found strange and uncomfortable on a number of levels. He was nearly twice my age, his wife had just died from leukemia, and this was supposed to be a business meeting. In desperate need of an art commission to help me get back on my feet financially, I didn’t want to anger him. But I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, either. When I told him I was dating someone, he stopped hitting on me, but our conversation grew noticeably chillier after that.

  After dinner, we went to a bar to get a drink. I didn’t think twice when he handed me a shot of Grand Marnier. I threw it back and joined some ladies on the dance floor who were having some sort of dance-off. I hadn’t been on the dance floor fifteen minutes when I suddenly couldn’t stand up straight. I was stumbling and dizzy. When I went to sit down, I almost missed the chair. Lloyd grabbed my arm, told me it was time to go, and led me outside to a cab. My vision was beginning to blur. I told him I wanted to go to my hotel room. He said I’d “had a little too much to drink” and took me to his. In keeping with his financial status, it was a deluxe suite.