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  I was so far gone he had to carry me inside the room and set me down on the couch. I looked on helplessly as my hand slipped off the couch and hit the floor. I tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. All I could do was stare at it. I’d lost all muscle control. I fought to stay conscious. As he fucked me, first on the couch, then on the bed where he’d dragged me, my awareness of what was happening flickered on and off.

  “Stay awake,” I told myself. “Stay alive. Do whatever it takes to get back home to Franklin.”

  When my body started going into convulsions, Lloyd threw cold, wet towels on me. Eventually, I passed out.

  When I woke the following morning, Lloyd was perky, almost chipper. “What a fun night,” he said. “We should do this again. Maybe take a trip to Hawaii together.”

  The dissimilarity between our perspectives was disturbing. He was acting like nothing had happened, while I knew I’d experienced something I’d never be able to forget. All I could do was nod as I made my way to the bathroom, where I showered for what felt like an hour, cried as quietly as possible, and formulated a plan. I couldn’t let on that I knew I’d been raped. I didn’t want to put him on the defensive, or—who knows?—I might not make it back home. I needed to get to the airport as quickly and safely as possible.

  During the flight home, I kept running to the bathroom to cry. Paul picked me up at the airport, and I couldn’t stop sobbing and hyperventilating as I told him what had happened. He drove me straight to the hospital where doctors gave me a rape kit exam. Confirming what I suspected, they said my symptoms indicated I’d been given GHB, the notorious date-rape drug. Unfortunately, they couldn’t prove it definitively. It doesn’t take long for all traces of GHB to vanish from your urine and blood, and more than enough time had already passed for it to completely disappear from my system. They pumped my body full of drugs to protect me from HIV, other STDs, and the possibility of getting pregnant. They also lobbed a million questions at me, which I did my best to answer during the brief moments I wasn’t passed out from shock.

  As I recovered, I felt like I should tell someone about what had happened. I was no longer seeing a therapist, so I called Josh. Given his molestation of me when I was younger, I thought he might understand how I was feeling and be sympathetic. Boy, was I wrong. “What were you thinking?!” he yelled into the phone. “Why did you go out to dinner all alone with a guy you barely knew? Why were you even in San Francisco?” Although he didn’t say it in so many words, the message he was giving me came through loud and clear: This was my fault. I’d asked for it. I deserved it. It was time for me to stop acting like a victim.

  I took yet another step back from him. We didn’t talk for at least a year after that. After discussing my situation with a counselor from the women’s center at the college in Iowa where he worked, Josh reached out to say that the way he’d responded had been wrong and acknowledged that he’d made an already horrific experience that much worse. He succeeded in relaying the sentiment the counselor told him he should have originally expressed to me—that he was sorry for my pain and couldn’t imagine what I was going through. The gesture was thoughtful but way past due. I’d already stopped caring about his opinions and had effectively cut him out of my life.

  When I reported the rape to the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), the case worker I was assigned was sympathetic but honest. Geography wasn’t working in my favor. The fact that the rape had occurred in California, Lloyd lived in Virginia, and I’d done the rape kit exam in Spokane, Washington, while officially residing in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, added a layer of complexity to a case that already would have been difficult to win. The lack of physical evidence directly tying Lloyd to the rape didn’t help. Lloyd’s semen couldn’t be found anywhere on me or the pair of jeans that I’d worn that night and later mailed to the SFPD’s lab.* Thanks to the long, cleansing shower I’d taken the morning after, I’d washed away all the evidence. The case worker leveled with me: the odds of a jury ruling in my favor were at best fifty-fifty.

  Making the situation even more difficult, I was in the middle of an ongoing custody battle with Kevin—do these things ever end?—that had flared up once again after Franklin had been injured during one of his every-other-weekend visits with his dad. I was trying to get sole custody of Franklin or at the very least ensure that Kevin’s visits were supervised. After everything I’d endured during my divorce proceedings, the last thing I needed was to get embroiled in another lengthy and costly court case.

  That a case against Lloyd would be precisely that—lengthy and costly—was confirmed when I emailed him to tell him that I hadn’t consented to have sex with him and that I believed he’d drugged and raped me. He not only denied it but sent a very lengthy response that appeared to have been drafted by an attorney. I knew that he was rich, possibly a millionaire, and I also knew, having gone through divorce litigation while unemployed, that in court, money is often more powerful than evidence. Adding to my hesitancy—the optics. I didn’t want to cast a spotlight on myself, knowing that many people would think of me as white and fixate on the idea that a Black man had raped a white woman, when the rape had clearly been about power, money, and gender, not race. I dropped the charges.

  Being raped succeeded in ripping the Band-Aid off the wound from my childhood that had yet to fully heal. PTSD isn’t an ailment reserved for those who’ve fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. The particular type of PTSD I suffered from had several triggers. Anything having to do with religion—church in particular—was one. Men who leveraged money or physical strength to gain power and control was another. As a poor single mother, I was about as low on the economic totem pole as you could get. Buoyed by a consistent salary that dwarfed my sporadic income, Kevin didn’t back down when I took him to court; he fought me with everything he had, and in the end won—if there are ever any real winners in such disputes. The judge didn’t grant me sole custody of Franklin or the supervised visitation for Kevin I was seeking.

  I may not have been rich, but what I lacked in wealth I made up for in integrity. My moral compass was properly aligned. I’d always known the difference between right and wrong and justice and injustice, and I’d worked hard to stay on the correct side of those lines. I’d grown up wanting to help others and change the world for the better, and now after surviving one of the more difficult stretches of my life, this sense of purpose returned full force. It also came with a very specific focus. I not only wanted to help create a more just society, to fight for human rights, to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and to make the world a fairer and more compassionate place; I wanted to devote all my attention to a specific group, the group that had too often drawn the short straw (although luck had nothing to do with it), the group I identified with most, the group I considered my own: the global Black community.

  *In August 2016, I received a call from the SFPD informing me that the Spokane Police Department had finally released the results of the rape kit exam I’d taken eleven years before and it showed that Lloyd’s DNA had been found inside of me. However, I had no recourse because the statute of limitations had expired.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Thirteen II

  AFTER LOSING HIS SEAT AS COUNTY COMMISSIONER and failing to land another job in the area, Larry prayed for help finding his way and got it in 2000, when God called him and Ruthanne to do missionary work for the fundamentalist Christian organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). They rented their house in Troy to some equally zealous religious fanatics and moved to an AiG outpost in Evergreen, Colorado, with all my siblings. Even Josh lived with them for a short spell while he contemplated what to do next after earning his masters from the University of Nebraska.

  The missionary life suited Larry and Ruthanne. When God called them two years later to move to Durbanville, South Africa, a rural suburb of Cape Town, they didn’t hesitate. There, Larry taught Young Earth Creationism and served as director of the South African office of the faith-based organizatio
n Creation Ministries International.

  I still wasn’t on good terms with Larry and Ruthanne, but I made a point of staying in touch with them so I could maintain relationships with my younger siblings. I regularly sent my younger brothers and sister care packages while they were living in South Africa and called them every couple of weeks. I was happy that they still felt connected enough to me to confide in me during our phone conversations. But as pleased as I was, I was also concerned about their safety and well-being. Some of the stories they told me were even bleaker than the ones they’d relayed from Montana and Colorado.

  What was an ideal situation for the white adults was far less so for their young Black children. Since 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a settlement at the site of what would one day be Cape Town, the class system in South Africa has been based on race. In 1948, the racial segregation the South African government had supported for nearly three centuries was given a name: “apartheid,” an Afrikaans word meaning “apart-hood,” or “separateness.” The apartheid era was dismantled in 1994, yet the country remained largely segregated when Larry and Ruthanne arrived. They lived in an all-white gated community where the only people my siblings regularly saw who looked like them were Julia, a Black servant hired to help maintain their three-story house, and the people who sneaked into the neighborhood during the day to beg for food.

  During one phone call Izaiah told me that while he and our siblings were playing outside, one of their neighbors mistook them for vagrants, yelled at them to get out of the neighborhood, and called them kaffirs—the South African version of the N-word. During another call, he shared a story about Larry taking the entire family with him to a colleague’s home. Izaiah and Zach got to the door first and rang the bell. When the woman of the house opened the door and saw them, she shouted, “Get off our property, Black trash, or I’ll call the police!” Larry waved from the car and explained that they were his kids. As scary and degrading as these experiences must have been for my siblings, Larry and Ruthanne laughed them off as “misunderstandings.”

  The intent of another misunderstanding my siblings were subjected to in South Africa was impossible to misconstrue. During apartheid, the South African government established a racial hierarchy that had “Whites” sitting all alone at the top. “Indians” (which included Asians) came next. Then came “Coloureds,” or people of mixed ethnicities. And mired at the very bottom were “Blacks.” This meant that at the Christian private school my younger siblings attended, Ezra, with his light complexion and loosely curled hair, received far better treatment than his darker siblings—that is, until a gang of white children discovered that Ezra’s brothers and sister were Black and used it as an excuse to beat him up. When Izaiah intervened to help his older but smaller brother, the white kids grabbed sticks from the schoolyard and began beating Izaiah with them. The abuse continued even after Ruthanne arrived to pick up my siblings, with the white kids throwing rocks at them as Ruthanne rushed them from the school to the car. They were homeschooled after that.

  Esther had always received worse treatment than her brothers, because, I have to assume, of her gender. Just as they’d done to me, Larry and Ruthanne made her wear “modest” clothes, including bloomers under her dresses. When she was ten, Larry forced her to eat an entire watermelon—I’ll leave it to you to decide if any racism was involved—and, reprising the oatmeal incident with me, demanded that she eat any parts of it she threw up. Ruthanne directed her own brand of cruelty at Esther when, just before moving to South Africa, she made Esther leave behind most of her toys, including the Black Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls I’d passed down to her. Whether out of ignorance or malice, for Christmas that year Ruthanne replaced the dolls that had been discarded with white ones. Before she went to bed every night, Esther prayed to God that she would wake up in the morning and be white, just so her life would be better, easier, closer to normal.

  Ruthanne’s cruelty revealed itself once again after she and Larry returned to the United States and settled in Douglassville, Georgia, a three-exit town along the interstate, twenty miles west of Atlanta. One day, while taking out Esther’s braids prior to redoing them, Ruthanne got frustrated with the tangles. “Your hair is impossible!” she yelled. “I’m just done!” Using kitchen shears, she cut off Esther’s braids one by one. Stunned by Ruthanne’s insensitivity, Esther could only sit on the stool and cry as her hair fell to the floor. By cutting off Esther’s hair, Ruthanne was not only maiming Esther’s natural beauty but also diminishing her self-worth.

  This wasn’t the only callous behavior aimed at my younger siblings while they were living in in Douglassville. On several occasions Larry and Ruthanne removed every item from their bedrooms except mattresses and Bibles and changed the locks on the doors so they only locked (and unlocked) from the outside. For days—sometimes weeks—on end, they kept my siblings (with the notable exception of Ezra) confined to their prison-cell-like bedrooms, only letting them out to eat and use the bathroom.

  As my younger siblings became teenagers, Larry and Ruthanne’s noble experiment of adopting four Black babies began to fall apart. Suddenly the cute little Black children who could be kept in line with a glue stick had grown much taller than their tiny parents and outnumbered them two to one, and the do-as-you’re-told-no-questions-asked discipline tactics no longer worked. When Zach briefly fell in with the Crips, the notorious gang that started in Los Angeles before spreading nationwide, Larry and Ruthanne realized they were out of their league entirely.

  In a 2014 study, Phillip Atiba Goff, associate professor of social psychology at UCLA, determined that Black boys as young as ten are considered “less innocent” than their white counterparts, and that by age thirteen are viewed as adults by many white people. Two years later at the University of Iowa, a team of researchers led by Andrew Todd concluded that people were more likely to associate violence—misidentify a toy as a weapon, for example—after seeing an image of a Black person than they were after seeing an image of a white person, even when the boys in the images were as young as five. These two perceptions form a deadly combination, as innocent Black children often get treated like and suffer the same consequences as violent adults.

  In our family, only Ezra was immune to being viewed so unfavorably. I credit his light complexion as well as his size. Suffering from constitutional growth delay ever since he fell down the stairs as a toddler, even fully grown he was shorter than his diminutive parents. When he turned thirteen, he was the size of an eight-year-old. His skin color and size meant that he not only received preferential treatment, but also that he never had to worry about being sent away—something that couldn’t be said about his less fortunate siblings.

  Once their adopted children turned thirteen, Larry and Ruthanne started getting rid of them one by one. They turned Zach in to the police for being aggressive and violent; as a result, he either had to go on probation or to a reform school. They chose the latter, sending him to Lives Under Construction, a Christian residential treatment center in Missouri that reforms boys through manual labor. While they were there, they heard about Shiloh Christian Children’s Ranch, a group home for abused and neglected children, and thought it would be a good fit for Esther after a girl at church had accused Esther of stealing her phone, which was later found under a couch. Zach and Esther spent their remaining middle school and high school years in these institutions, and I was rarely able to communicate with them during this time.

  Izaiah saw the handwriting on the wall. He told me he felt increasingly uneasy and out of place living with Larry and Ruthanne, especially with his siblings getting sent away. Before Zach was cast out, he and Izaiah had gotten into a fight, and Larry had once again called the police and asked that they be arrested—something almost no Black parent would ever do, thanks to a well-reasoned distrust of the police. With Black males having to endure escalated rates of arrest and brutality by the police and longer sentencing by the court system, handing your Black sons over
to the cops is like throwing them to the wolves. Yes, this would be bad for any kid, but it’s ten times worse for Black kids, particularly males.

  Although the matter was settled out of court as an informal adjustment, the fact that Larry had called the cops frightened Izaiah. He knew that, because he was a Black boy, the police rarely would be on his side. He’d heard about what had happened to Rodney King and others like him. Scared it might happen again, he wanted to get out of there. He wanted to be part of a Black family, a family that taught him Black history and Black consciousness, that valued education, and that would set and enforce appropriate boundaries instead of turning him over to outside authorities. When he was thirteen, he asked Larry and Ruthanne if he could live with me for the summer. They’d made their disdain for my divorce and liberated lifestyle perfectly clear, so I was shocked—but overjoyed—when they agreed to let him visit me in Coeur d’Alene.

  Once I’d agreed to host Izaiah, Ezra expressed a desire to come, too, but I didn’t have enough space in my small apartment for both and wasn’t thrilled at the idea of leaving the two of them alone with Franklin while I went to work because they frequently fought. When I told him that I was sorry, but he couldn’t come, Ezra stopped talking to me for a while. The grudge he held against me would last for years.