I'm not sure, if this relates or not. When I was about six or seven, it was summer time, and I was playing in the sprinklers, wearing my bathing suit, I remember that it was a two piece and yellow and brown. I asked the next door neighbor's boy Steven if he wanted to play. He was also a couple of years older. He said no, but asked me to come into the garage with him. He had a knife, which at first I didn't believe was real, he made me touch it, it was. He made me take my top off, and put saw dust down my pants. He made me lay down on the ground and put spiders on me. I hated spiders for along time after that. He brought another boy over and I do remember begging him to let me go. I remember being scared. My story doesn't see to or compare to what others have gone through. I do remember that after, I wouldn't go outside, I wore long shirts and jeans, and Steven, when school started was the ring leader for the group of tormenters of name calling in school. Only now, I've begun to realize that maybe it was an assault in a way. I don't know. I'm glad that these sites exists.

-Tina

hi, my name is Casey. I have been molested numeruos times and I just need to share some of it with someone.

I was first abused when I was about 8. My father came into my room after I think my mother fell asleep. He came over to my bed and pulled the covers off of me. I complained that I was cold and he told that it was okay because he was going to warm me up. He got in my bed and started to spoon me. I didn't know what to do, this had never happened before. I could feel him hard against my back. He put his hand on my lower thigh and started to push my nightie. I couldn't breathe. I wanted him to stop. I tried to get up, but he held me down. He was much bigger than me.

"It's alright honey. This is what every little girl has to do."

He got on top of me and slid my panties down. I tried to grab them, but he took them off. I started to cry, telling him I didn't want to do this. He ignored me and spread my legs.

"Now honey, you need to stop crying because if mommy wakes up I'm going to have to hurt you and mommy real bad. Do you understand?"

I tried to slow down the crying, but I couldn't. What was he going to do? I tried to shut my legs, but he grabbed my thighs and squeezed. God, it hurt so much. I cried out and he covered mouth.

"What did I tell you. Shut your fucking mouth or mommys dead. You do what I fucking tell you to do."

I wanted to die. Why was he doing this to me? What had I done? Do girls really have to do this? I didn't have time to think when he started feeling me up. I could feel his fingers all over my groin. I felt so disgusting. He took one of his fingers and pushed it inside me. I made a noise and he grabbed my throat. He held me down and started fingering me.

"You like that don't you? Yes, of course you do. It feels good, doesn't it? Do you think you could take two?"

Right at that moment he pushed two fingers inside of me. I would have screamed if his hand hadn't been holding my throat so tight. It was so hard to breathe especially when he was doing this. Finally he stopped fingering me.

"When I let go of you, do not scream or i will kill mommy. You're going to like I promise sweetie. Just be quiet and I won't hurt you anymore."

He let go of my throat and stuck his head in between my legs. I just laid there and whimpered silently. Tears falling down my cheeks. He lifted his head and told me to get on all fours. When I didn't he picked me up and threw me on my stomach.

"Do it now! You do what I tell you to do!"

I got on all fours, of course still crying. I heard him slid his boxers off and drop them on the floor. He started rubbing his penis on my ass then my vagina. He spit on his hand and rubbed it on himself.

"See if you just do what I say nothing bad will happen. You are so beautiful honey. Your ready for this. Now tell your daddy you love him. Say I love you daddy. Say it!"

"I llove yyou daddy."

"Good girl. Now see? How hard was that? You are such a pretty little girl. You're going to like this I promise."

He started slowly inserting his penis in me. I started to cry out in pain, but he put his hand over my mouth. It was so painful. It took him awhile to get himself all the way in.

"You are so tight. You are such a good little girl. I love you so much honey. Doesn't this feel good? Now say I love you Daddy."

He let go of my mouth and I could barely get the words out. Finally when said them he covered my mouth again and started to pull then he shove it right back in. My cries were muffled out and mother couldn't hear me or help me. He just kept going, first he started slow then it just got faster and faster. I felt like I was being ripped open. I heard him groan and he shoved it in one last time. When he pulled out he let go of my mouth. I just laid on my bed in a ball, crying. He got up and put his boxers back on, slipped my panties back on and told me if I ever told my mother what happened, he would kill me and her.

This happened for about the next 4-5 years. At least until my parents got a divorce. I haven't seen my father since I was 13. I still haven't told my mother of what had happened all those years, probably never will. At night I can still hear my door open and footsteps come in. I have nightmares sometimes. Thank you for reading.

-Casey

Hi, My name is Nathan Landers I am a victim of abuse and I wrote my life's story of how I survive. I would like to share it with you I tried to get published but industry in only about making money. So this is my story from the heart. I can be reached at Landersnate@aol.com

For 24 years I was mentally dead. I was too sad to be depressed, too hurt to feel pain, too scared to be afraid. I was too lost to be found, too confused to be understood. My nightmares came during the day and at night I cried myself to sleep.
I was too free; and so I became vulnerable to everything and everyone around me. Because I ended up getting played by many of the people I should have been able to depend on the most—my family, friends, and even my pastors—I came to hate myself and turned into my own worst enemy.
By the time I turned sixteen, I was convinced that I was never going to make it to adulthood. There was no reason for me to believe that I wouldn’t end up, as they say on the street, beaten or starved to death by my fake parents, shot and killed by niggaz in ’da hood, pimped by the drug lords who rule the violent alleys in ’da Bean (Boston), or that I would simply die by my own hand because of my lack of self-worth.
My parents never built me any fences to protect me from a life wasted on the streets of my ’hood. They never set down any plan to teach me how to become a positive man. Instead they poisoned me to believe that I was nothing but someone else’s trash, some young dumb creature they told over and over again “would never amount to nothing.”
God must’ve been watching over me because by now I should be crazy, locked up in prison, or hooked on drugs. One thing I know for sure: if God hadn’t given me a dose of the self-control He did, I swear I would have ended it all. Many times thoughts of suicide corrupted my mind. Life seemed too long and the pain too strong for me to hold on when I’d done nothing wrong to deserve my suffering.
But every time those evil thoughts came into my head, the same question kept popping up along with them: Why should I choose death over life when, according to the Bible, there’s still gonna be an eternal fight for my soul, in a place unknown? So my heart kept on beating and I kept on looking for my salvation.
From my teen years into young adulthood, I searched the earth for peace of mind because I hadn’t yet understood the power of God’s peace, the gift of the Spirit that Jesus gave to His disciples before leaving them behind: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give you as the world gives (John 14:27).
On my journey, I confronted—and rejected—drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and a life of crime, all of which should had consumed me when I was at my lowest point—homeless, poor, hungry, and desperate to survive.
But before a higher Truth could me set me free, I first had to unravel the truths that had twisted into a knot of lies during the first 24 years of my life.
*****

My name is Nathan Clarence Landers—or is it?
I never knew that I’d been adopted until the year I turned twelve. I wasn’t blind and I was no fool; I’d always known that I looked different than my parents. But when I saw my face in the mirror, race was not my concern; my buck teeth were. Yo, here comes Roger Rabbit! my classmates and the neigborhood kids used to holler when they saw me heading their way, or Nate, you ever think about auditioning for Alvin and the Chipmunks? or, Hey Walrus Mouth, I hear they’re doin’ a remake of “Leave it to Beaver”—you gonna be the new star? Being picked on like that practically every damn day didn’t give me a whole lot of time left over to worry about why I didn’t have the shape of Papa’s nose or the color of Mama’s skin.
But all that changed one cold October day when my mother brought my world crashing down around me. All hell had broken loose when my eight-year-old sister Selena accidentally found out that she was my parents’ daughter by adoption, not by birth. Selena discovered the truth while she stood waiting for her school bus to arrive at the corner stop. There she was recognized by a stunned older girl who introduced herself to Selena as her sister.
“You’re my sister! I know it! And I can prove it. Come on with me,” she said, grabbing Selena’s arm and pulling her away from the bus stop. Selena’s eyes opened wide and she began to cry and shake her head with disbelief. My parents had never given Selena any reason to dream that she had any family outside the mother and father and siblings she had grown up with all her natural life, as far back as she could remember.
Selena was even more amazed to learn that that her new found big sister had been living practically around the corner for as long as she, Selena, had been growing up under my parents’ roof. But what really blew Selena away was finding out that she also had a second biological sister living around the corner: her identical twin. I don’t think Selena was ever the same after finding out the truth. I don’t think any of us were.
So, maybe it shouldn’t have come as a complete shock to me that I didn’t belong to our parents by blood either. “Look, Nate, there’s something you gotta know, too,” my mother began slowly. “The woman who gave birth to you is dead. And you would be, too, if the right people hadn’t come along to save you. After she had you, that little whore threw you away in a dumpster!” The minute the words were out of my mother’s mouth, I felt shrunk down to practically nothing. There was now no way, I felt, that I could ever be a normal teenager.
Before I found out about my adoption, whenever my parents had come to school and my classmates had remarked on how I little I looked like my mom and dad, I would snap at them, “Shut up!” After mom had her little talk with me, I felt like I had to invent my own legacy. Too humiliated by the thought that I’d been thrown away as a baby like someone’s garbage, I began telling anyone who asked that my biological parents had died tragically in a fire.
As I got older, when new friends asked me about my appearance—which happened all the time because I didn’t look very much like most of people I grew up with—I tried at first to avoid answering the question rather than telling an outright lie. But each time the question got asked, my self-esteem went through the basement.
So, after a while, I invented an identity that could explain the texture of my hair and the shape of my nose and mouth: “Half-Italian and half-black" became my standard reply. Once I began telling this tale, I planned to take it to my grave. I was living a lie, even as it ate me up inside.
But is a lie really a lie when you don’t know the truth?
*****

Before my parents adopted me, I was an orphan at the New England Home for Little Wanderers. The Home got its start and its name back in 1865, when ten Boston businessmen felt sorry for the kids who had been left homeless by the Civil War. It’s always insulted me that the Home has hung onto its name into modern times. Little Wanderers? Damn! I guess it must sound cute to some people, probably the folks who give money to help keep the place running. But to me, the name makes it sound like I ran away from my parents when they were the ones who outtie 5000—took off in a hurry—on me.
The crew who started the Home never meant for it to serve as a permanent place for children but instead as a temporary stop, where kids could prepare for new lives with new families. “The Home’s singular focus for the past two centuries,” its little pamphlet says to this day, “has been helping children achieve independence and success from seemingly insurmountable difficulties.” Well, what could have been more insurmountable than being a newborn chucked in a dumpster to die?
The couple that ended up adopting me out of the Home had founded their own foster association. They ended up sheltering more than 30 kids into their home over the years. When I was six months old, they brought me to live with them as a foster child in the part of Boston called Roxbury.
During the mass migration of African Americans from the south to the northern cities that took place during the 1940s and 50s, Roxbury had quickly become the heart and soul of the black community in Boston. My adoptive mother had been part of that historic migration, uprooting herself from South Carolina and settling down in Boston around 1960, at the tail end of the exodus.
As a child, I never did figure out what drove my mother to leave behind everything and everyone she had known her whole life to move to a strange, cold place like Boston. She hardly ever spoke about anything from her past. I do know that she had come up in a strict, religious family ruled by my grandmother who had been born in 1892 and whose own parents—my adoptive maternal great-grandparents—had been slaves. As a child, my mother helped take care of the hogs her family raised for food. She also picked cotton. She never attended college although later on in Boston she worked as a home health aid for several years.
In all my memories of my grandmother—my parents piled all of us in the family van to go down and visit Big Momma in South Carolina several times during my childhood—she is always bed bound. One of my aunts—the kindest one out of Big Momma’s 14 children—took care of her. Every one of mother’s brothers and sisters went on to have at least ten children of his or her own, so this meant that our extended family was huge. When I was about twelve we went to our family reunion in South Carolina, where we could hardly keep track of the couple hundred relatives in attendance.
Because she was so sick and frail, Big Momma would always talk in a whisper. And it seemed like every sentence she ever spoke had some reference to “the good Lord.” I would give her a hug as she settled back on her pillows and she would exclaim, “Oh God, just look at you!” or “Oh God, come to your momma, baby, that’s a good boy, oh good God.” I think she had a soft spot for me out of all my brothers and sisters because she knew that my mother had given me my middle name of Clarence to honor the memory of my grandfather, who died before I got to know him.
Big Momma lived in the same house where she and my grandfather had raised my mother together with 13 other children. The house sat alone on a hill. It was old, with chipped white paint, and run down in the way you’d expect considering that 14 kids had come up under its sagging roof. A two-seater swing hung crookedly from rusting metal chains suspended from the ceiling of the front porch.
Inside the house it was usually crowded and always dark. The light bothered Big Momma’s eyes and she claimed she could see better in the shadows. I don’t know if was the result of the windows staying shut for this reason, or all the sickness and medicine hanging in the air but the rooms always smelled nasty, like there were dead people chilling in the basement and closets.
I knew, from the handful of stories my mother told me about her own childhood, that Big Momma had had, back in the day, a lot more fire in her than what I witnessed in the sickly old invalid stuck in bed in her little dark room. Raising so many children with so little money had been tough on everybody, my mother made clear, including the family pets. Fido had been my mother’s favorite dog and she and all her brothers and sisters used to play with him every day, she told me, until one day when Fido went missing.
For three days, my mother cried and constantly pestered my grandmother with, “Mama, where’s Fido at?” to which Big Momma would always answer, “Shut up.” When my mother had bugged enough hell out of her, Big Momma finally snapped and confessed the truth at the dinner table one night: “Well, now what do you think? You’ve been eating Fido all week along. All of ya’ll have—he’s in your stomachs!” All the kids ran from the table, my mother said, and went outside and threw up.
I don’t know whether or not the story was true—my mother always did have a way of playing fast and loose with the facts—and I sure as hell don’t know why my mother chose to tell it to us, her own horrified children over our own dinner table when I was just a young kid. It used to give me chills, especially when I thought about how there were times growing up in our own house in Boston when we, too, ran short of food and when our own dogs and cats had mysteriously disappeared.
One fact I did know for sure: religious faith ran deep in Big Momma’s clan. Two of my mother’s brothers grew up to become pastors of their own churches. I thought my Uncle Buck was cool, the one time I got to watch him preach in his small Baptist church in Candem, South Carolina. Spinnning around like a combination of James Brown and Michael Jackson, he jumped up and down on the pews, yelling to his congregation “Nobody’s leavin’ here until you praise the Lord!” Uncle Buck’s son served as
the church musician. This same cousin owned the only carwash in town and I have good memories of drinking a cold can of Mello Yellow, sitting on some nearby swings and watching him scrub down cars covered in reddish South Carolina dust.
*****
But mostly my mother’s past remained a mystery to me. I did know that she had been divorced before she hooked up with my adoptive father, although she never talked about her first husband. That marriage had turned out four children, two sons and two daughters. They were all adults by the time my mother adopted me. I never once heard any one of her biological children mention their daddy.
While my adoptive mother traced her roots to the rural south, my adoptive father had been born in the heart of New York City. He was a tall, handsome, light-skinned man—and the coolest person I knew growing up. He dressed in sharp three-piece suits complete with cuff links and tie clips. He even carried handkerchiefs that matched his ties. Dad had a real deep voice and walked like he could’ve been the president of the United States. He was much loved and respected in the church community and ran one of the largest black churches in the city. “Brother Landers,” I heard people say admiringly again and again, “we just wouldn’t know what to do without you!” But he didn’t have any power at home.
Like my mother, Dad, too, had been divorced. He and his first wife had had one daughter. I never heard any of the details about what had destroyed that first relationship but I would occasionally see his ex-wife at church. I thought she looked evil judging by the stern expression she always seemed to have pasted on her face.
Dad worked for a time at an electronics company and he could fix anything he put his hands and mind to. He even took some engineering courses at MIT and once built a computer from scratch. He was a great businessman and would design all the stationary, programs, and flyers for every major event at our church.
I loved him and always worried that something bad might happen to him. At night I would pray for him. My heart still pounds remembering the panic I felt when one day, as he was taking down a tree in our yard with a chain saw, he accidentally cut a deep, bloody gash on his arm.
Dad lectured me regularly about maintaining my cool. “All right now, Nate” he used to say, “just settle down. You don’t want to go losing control of yourself.” He was an expert at it, whether dealing with the dramas at home or the politics at church. One of his favorite expressions, which he often repeated to me, was “he who owns the problem, owns the solution”--—good advice I later took to heart when I made my final break with my with him. Dad was religious but not expressive. I never did see him catch the holy ghost in church, but he taught bible study for many years on Sunday evenings.
My father often showed sympathy toward me in my clashes with my mother, and even stood up for me sometimes. But whenever I asked him for information about my birth parents, he would tell me, “Only your mother would know about that.”
*****

My mother was forty-three when she adopted me and my father was forty-nine.
I don’t know exactly what motivated them, as middle-aged newlyweds each with grown children from previous marriages, to adopt a toddler like myself together with three other young children: Chico, Selena, and Oleta. Chico was six when I came into the household. But Selena and Oleta were three years old, like me. At church functions, people who didn’t know our family would frequently come up to my mother, saying things like, “Oh, aren’t these children precious! Are they triplets or are two of them twins?” My mother would simply answer no. She never gave any indication that Selena, Oleta and I were not biologically related to one another and she never volunteered that we were her adopted children.
Besides the four of us they adopted, my parents also opened their home to two slightly older foster kids, Toni and Joe. Toni must have been around eight and Joe around ten at the time my parents brought them home. My dad made up playful animal nicknames for all six of us; he called my sister Oleta “Bird” and me “Tiger.” But people at church and in the ’hood always referred to the whole crew of us as “Sister Landers’s kidz.” Maybe because my parents were past their natural childbearing years, they wanted a “fresh batch” of their own to raise together. And maybe my mother didn’t want to be the only one of Big Momma’s 14 children to bring up fewer than ten kids.
But I also suspect that the money my mother received from the state for taking all of us in may have been a big factor behind her decision to create such a large, instant family. People in the Department of Social Services and the probate family courts may not like to talk about it but the ugly truth is that the lack of economic opportunities has turned foster care and adoption into a kind of urban industry for some greedy, crooked, heartless excuses for parents. There are too many people who are motivated to take in children as a source of monthly income. That is also why there are always too many stories in the news about how children like myself end up neglected, poorly dressed, and sometimes even starved.
Or maybe my mother took in so many kids because she wanted a second chance at parenthood; her four biological children from her failed first marriage had turned out to be no prizes. Kelly, the oldest daughter, works as a registered nurse and is the only one of my mother’s biological children who completed a college degree and who’s never seen the inside of a jail cell. She somehow learned to be independent, avoiding the trap of drugs, prostitution, and the other self-destructive behaviors that messed up the lives of her siblings.
Latoya, my mother’s other biological daughter, has always depended on welfare. She is in her early forties now and raising four kids. When I was twelve years old—the same year I found out that I’d been adopted—her firstborn child died of sudden infant death syndrome. Latoya announced to the entire family that I was responsible because I’d touched him after I’d been playing with the family dog: “Nathan killed my baby, he killed him!” she screamed, as our mother physically held her back from me.
Latoya spent most of the funeral glaring at me across the room, where I was sat, crushed with guilt, opposite the tiny, white-draped casket. Afterwards, my father explained to me that the baby had died of something he called crib death, but it took years for me to understand what that meant, and to realize that I really hadn’t accidentally murdered my nephew.
Latoya was an active drug user in Brockton, Massachusetts, where I stayed with her for a little while in 1995 when I was homeless, until her constant hounding of me for money drove me away. One day I refused to give her any more money because I’d found out she was using cocaine. She slapped me so I left.
Latoya was eventually locked up for more than a year on prostitution and drug charges, not the first time that the criminal justice system had caught up with her. Her sixteen-year-old daughter—my mother’s granddaughter—became pregnant with her second child while Latoya was in jail. Latoya’s other daughter dropped out of high school.
Besides Kelly and Latoya, my mother also has two sons from her first marriage: Barry is still serving, as far as I know, a long prison sentence on felony charges; Teddy is living with AIDS in Boston.
Teddy tracked me down one Sunday in church when I was eighteen and he was thirty-seven, although he looked much older than that, dressed in a pair of torn, dirty jeans and shuffling along looking exhausted. I looked into his eyes and saw a broken man desperate for help. “Nathan, you’re all the family I got,” he told me. “Please help me. Man, I your brother!” He was HIV-positive, he went on to reveal, and had served a long time in jail. Could I collect his disability check every month from the government for him and give him allowances? I helped him out as best I could for a year until I could no longer deal with this added pressure in my troubled young life and never saw or heard from him again after that.
If my mother felt any remorse or responsibility for the way her biological children’s lives had turned out, she never expressed it. But given how bad three out of four of her biological children had screwed up in life, maybe she perceived us—her adopted and foster kids—as some kind of opportunity for redemption.
She definitely gloried in the wide praise she drew for the many contributions she made to the community through her foster organization. She was well known locally for the Halloween parties she threw, the gift exchanges she ran every Christmas to ensure that not a single child in the association went without a present, and the hundreds of eggs we—the children—colored and boiled every spring for the massive Easter egg hunts that my parents’ foster association organized at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo.
As children we often got roped into fundraising for these events. I hated selling chocolate candy at shopping malls and spending what seemed like endless afternoons with my brothers and sisters hitting up strangers for sales while our mother sat in the van listening to gospel music for hours on end, usually Skippy Whites’s program. Every black Christian in Boston at the time listened to Skippy, who had a deep respect for gospel music even though he himself was white. The call letters of his station were WLVG, which stood for “We Love Gospel Music.”  
While fundraising, we weren’t permitted to take breaks; we would go to the van only to turn over the money we had raised before loading up with more chocolates to sell. Sometimes we got donations and we had to turn over every penny of those, too. My mother always got the credit for making things a success. But I have to admit that I may have gotten some of my creative edge from her. My earliest lessons about entrepreneurship and showmanship, so important in the music business, came from her examples. But, at that time in my life, I needed a parent, not a business mentor.
My mother’s establishment of her own foster association, her record of community service, and the active role she played in her church all contributed, no doubt about it, to the image on paper that she could offer a child in need an ideal adoptive family. My father had a good job, owned his own home, and practically ran a big church. My parents had a new marriage and the experience of having taken in more than two dozen children by the time I joined their family. By all appearances, this must have looked like a respectable place for a child like myself, who had been abandoned and needed a fresh chance in life.
But it would not take me long to discover that this home would serve not as a healing balm but as a reason to seek refuge.

II
House of Blues


By the time my parents purchased their red and green four-story house on Brook Avenue, Roxbury had already become an inner-city dump, plagued by the drugs, gangs, and violence that go hand in hand with poverty. Weed and crack were available on every other block of my neighborhood. Once after school one of my boyz opened his backpack so he could show off his gun to me. This was normal business in the ’hood—most niggaz, as we called each other, carried shanks (knives) and guns. When I asked my friend why was he walking around with a weapon, he answered, “Yo, I gotta protect the merchandise,” the merchandise being dime bags (ten-dollar bags of weed) and bumps (twenty- dollar blocks of crack) he peddled to his desperate customers.
The area around my parents’ house was home mostly to Cape Verdean and Puerto Rican families, who owned all the local businesses. My parents were not friendly with the neighbors, preferring to hang with their English-speaking, Baptist church community instead of the Spanish-speaking, Catholic families on our block. We minded our own business, which wasn’t hard to do because our house was surrounded by a sturdy fence built of stacks of split wooden logs. All but two of the windows had been nailed shut, to prevent strangers from breaking in—and children from busting out.
Attached to our house was a vacant business. My parents always referred to this building as “the store,” which we used as extra storage space to lock up our bikes and other stuff. But whenever I went inside there to grab my bike, I used to look around and wonder about just what kind of business, exactly, the old owners had really been running in the store.
There were no shelves or racks like you’d expect to see. But there was a wooden bar, some beat up chairs and tables, and even an old-fashioned wooden telephone booth—like the kind Clark Kent used to come smashing out of in those black-and-white “Superman” TV shows. I always figured that the place looked a hell of lot more likely to have been a drinking, gambling, and general hot spot than some friendly neighborhood grocery.
The windows of the store had been boarded up for as long as anyone could remember. My father, paintbrush in hand, fought a running battle with the local graffiti artists. Nicknames, swear words, and gang symbols appeared, were painted over, and reappeared. My father never caught any of the vandals despite his lookout.
Ours was the only ugly house on our street and all the neighborhood kids made fun of us because of it, calling it the “Addams Family” home after the 1960s sitcom set in a creepy haunted house. But these insults rolled off my parents’ backs. They didn’t seem to give a damn about what outsiders thought and they never invited the only people whose opinions did matter to them—the members of their church community—to our home. Whenever I complained to my father about how the neighborhood kids were teasing us about the appearance of our house, he would always say to me, “Just be thankful for what you have, Nate.”
My brothers and sisters and I were hardly ever allowed to play with the other children living on our street. We also weren’t allowed to invite friends over. When neighbor children would sometimes come by to ask if I could go outside, my mother had the nasty habit of slamming the door shut in their faces without saying a word to them. Then she would turn to me and yell, “I told you, little nigger, to tell them not to knock on my door!”
Our family’s social lives revolved not around our neighborhood but our church. Dad was the chairman of the board of trustees of a Baptist church in Boston and Mom headed up many organizations within the church. As a child, I didn’t have any choice about attending services and got dragged to church almost daily together with my siblings in my parents’ big brown Ford van.
In the van on the way home if I told my mother that I had had a good time at church or that I had found Jesus, she would never beat me that day. One time when I was twelve years old, I even stood up in front of the entire congregation and proclaimed, “I want to be saved!” She instantly jumped out of her seat onto her feet, standing proud to be my mom. That Sunday my parents took me out to eat at a restaurant.
Even when we were not in church my mother made our faith part of our daily lives at home. She constantly listened to gospel recordings for choir rehearsals. All week long, my brothers and sisters and I had to learn and practice the songs she selected. A lot of them came from the southern gospel quartet tradition and were pretty painful on young ears: I’m coming up on the rough side of the mountain / I must hold to God’s powerful hand, I’m coming up on the rough side of the mountain / And I’m doing my best to make it in. I didn’t want to sing about some damn boring rough side of the mountain but we children never had any choice. Sometimes even late at night we would be singing the songs of Zion in mom’s bedroom. If I showed any resentment at having to stand up singing for hours in her cluttered room, she would slap me with an extension cord until I got rid of my “nasty attitude.”
The singing practice sessions began when I was about five years old, the same year my mother—inspired by a love of God, music, and the limelight—decided to found her very own gospel choir. She always did have “that itch” to put on a performance and I can trace my love of being onstage back to those early days.
One event I always looked forward to was the annual fashion show she organized. Mom would rent a school auditorium and sell tickets for the show. And guess who were the models?—we, her association children, were, of course. Afterward, the church ladies always put together a serious dinner including all my favorite dishes: fried chicken, baked macaroni and cheese, collard greens, potato salad, homemade biscuits, and ice cream and cake. The best part of the experience, though, was walking onstage trying to imagine myself as a star. And I felt like one at those fashions shows.
But my mother’s gospel choir was by far her most ambitious project. My mother named the choir after her own Sister Landers Foster Association and forced all of her association children to participate. Besides our practice sessions at home, we had choir rehearsal at church every Thursday and Saturday. If I got tired during rehearsal and didn’t sing as well as Mom felt I should, she beat me, in the car on the way home or once we arrived there. Of course, no one outside the family knew what she was doing to make us perform.
My mother arranged for her choir to perform many concerts and our audiences generally seemed to enjoy them. Because we were so young and cute, there quickly came a high demand for us to perform at many churches in Boston and even in New York, where we gave an annual performance.
At first my mother used to collect money from the choir members’ parents to cover the bus rental costs of getting to New York. Once we began making a name for ourselves on the gospel circuit, my father picked up all the choir members in a big church van purchased expressly for this purpose.
In later years, the choir founded by my mother became the official, permanent choir of the Roxbury Baptist church we attended. I don’t think I ever saw my mother as thrilled as she was on the day our pastor stood up in front of the congregation to make this announcement. After my parents moved back to the south, the choir took on new leadership and is still in existence to this day.
My musical talent was evident as a child. Even if I was mad that I had to perform, I did my best every time. I sang many solos for the choir and this made my mother happy. It also prevented some beatings. I remained active in the choir until the age of sixteen, when I began to speak up for myself, warning my mother never to lay her hands on me again or I would call the police.
While I respected the many fine things Mom did for her church, I deeply resented the reality—hidden from congregation members who knew only the “holy-holy” act Mom put on around them—that at home she neglected and often abused us. When, as an adult, I began speaking out the truth of what had gone on inside our home, more than one person who knew our family at that time, confessed to me, “You know, I always thought that something just wasn’t quite right in that house.”
But no one ever chose to take action. Had any of them followed through on their suspicions, my brothers and sisters and I might have paid a different price at 55 Brook Avenue all those years.
*****

We almost never could predict what would send Mom into one of her fits. She didn’t have too many set rules but preferred to just make them up as she went along. When she got really upset, she would sometimes use the store attached to our house as a kind of jail cell. She would lock me up in there for five hours or more at a stretch. The first time this happened I was ten years old and “running off at the mouth” because I’d threatened to tell dad that she’d beaten me. “I GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO TELL HIM!” she screamed at me, as she snatched me and began dragging me toward the store entrance.
Kicking and crying, I grabbed onto everything in sight to try to keep myself from getting shoved in. Everyone in the family knew I was scared to death of the dark. That’s why mom threw me in the store that day and many other times like it; in there, there was no electricity, no bathroom, no food or water, just complete darkness. I could hear rats rustling around me but I couldn’t see them. I would ball up in the corner and pray.
But usually mom just liked to hit us. Once we were all sitting at the dinner table, except for my mother who was locked upstairs in her bedroom as she generally was. My sister Selena, who often didn’t really seem to understand the things that came out of her mouth or why she said them, announced out of the blue, “Mary was a pimp!”
My father, freaked out by what he took to be Selena’s disrespecting of the Holy Mother, turned around and ordered my sister upstairs to report what she’d just said to my mother. A few minutes later, we heard a loud scream from second floor and then watched Selena race around the house, my mother in hot pursuit, an electrical cord in hand.
I can no longer remember what I did to set mom off the first time I have a clear memory of being beaten. As I was lying asleep in my bed one night, my mother entered the room, knelt across the back of my legs, and began whipping me with a thick rubberized cord. With each blow, I felt like I was being shocked with electricity. This beating, like the hundreds like it that would follow, lasted about five minutes. I just cried, closed my eyes, and took it.
Whenever my mother was extremely pissed, she would flip out and yell out all kinds of nasty insults as she beat me. “You nasty buzzard,” she would scream at me in between smacks, “I’m gonna knock the daylights out of you,” or “I shoulda left you to die!” While one of us was being knocked around, the other children would generally run to their rooms even before my mother could issue her standard warning, “If you want some too, just go ahead and stick your head in here!”
Although she once whipped me so bad with an extension cord that I couldn’t lie down to sleep that night, my mother worried that, as I got older and bigger, the cord, belts, shoe heels, and broom handles were not hurting me enough. So she took to chasing me around the house with an aluminum baseball bat.
I often asked her why she’d bothered adopting me if she didn't love me and couldn’t even pretend to. “I don't have to love you,” was always her response. If I made the mistake of addressing her as “mom” in a moment of her anger, she’d hiss, “I am not your mother, your mother is dead! Do you understand me? Dead!”
*****

Throughout most of my childhood, Mom isolated herself in her bedroom. I don’t know why she felt the need to hide herself away in there because most of the time the only rooms in the entire house we, the children, were allowed to go into were our own bedrooms and the bathroom. I was permitted in my parents’ bedroom only when my mother wanted to punish me or when we had to rehearse choir songs. “If I ever catch you all downstairs, I’ll make sure that you won’t be able to sit down for a week,” my mother used to warn us. We almost never broke this rule.
Both my mother and father displayed zero trust toward us. We weren’t destructive juvenile delinquents, but they treated us like we were. We lived much of our childhood in lock-down mode; besides always taking care to lock the entrances to the basement and attic, Mom and Dad also sealed off access to the entire first floor of the house by installing a door at the bottom of stairway and keeping it locked tight. Mom kept the keys on a giant safety pin she always wore fastened to her clothes. I felt envious and ashamed when I eventually realized that most of my friends were allowed to go into their kitchens at home or even their parents’ rooms to spend time with them.
Every day when we arrived home from school, we would find our mother already locked inside her bedroom. I would do whatever chores I’d been assigned—picking up trash in the yard, washing the walls, sweeping the floors—and then, because the rest of the house was off-limits, I went straight to my bedroom, where I would do my homework, write poetry, compose songs, and play my keyboard. There was never any greeting at the door for any of us, or any questions from our mother about how school had gone that day.
I don’t know exactly what mom was doing up in her room daily. She may have been resting. Sometimes we could hear her talking on the phone to her friends from church. Church was the center of her life and she seemed to fill up her day with activities geared toward church projects.
My father was aware of my mother’s pattern of behavior and argued with her about it many times. “Rosa,” he would try to reason with her, “What’s your problem? Why do you want to sit cooped up in that room all the time? Please—the children need a mother!” But nothing ever changed in her routine. The only times my mother ever appeared happy and truly alive were when she was fronting at church.
On most days, Mom would emerge from her cocoon only to use the bathroom or to go pick up my father from his job at a development corporation in South Boston. Sometimes she brought us along for the ride. We generally sat on the floor of the van; the seats, my mother insisted, were only to be sat in on the way to choir engagements or during Sunday morning trips to church. To prevent us from getting the seats dirty, my mother used to make us take them out of the van after services each Sunday. We lined the seats up neatly in the entrance hallway of the house until it was it was again time for us to exercise our weekly privilege of being able to ride on them to church.
But for all her obsession with rules, my mother would still occasionally behave in ways that even we understood to be strange, even by the wack standard we had come to know as normal. She almost never displayed any shame about being naked. She routinely walked down the hallway on the way to the bathroom with no clothes on at all. Almost all of my memories of getting haircuts from her include the sensation of her naked breast resting against the back of my head.
One time we were all eating dinner at the dining room table when my mother—my mother who prided herself on the pressed dresses with carefully matched hats and shoes she wore to church on Sundays—suddenly appeared on the stairs, walking slowly down toward us with her breasts exposed. “Dear,” my father asked nervously, “why don’t you go and put on some clothes?” “Go to hell,” she snapped. I felt like my food was about to come up.
Most nights we, the children, prepared supper but our mother would rarely eat with us, even though my father often begged her to join us. My mother would unlock the door leading to the downstairs so we could move from our bedrooms to the kitchen to start cooking. Sometimes we turned on the television set in the dining room as we worked. This was the only time we were ever allowed to watch TV. After dinner, we were expected to wash the dishes, mop the floor, and take out the trash before our mother would come downstairs, send us up to bed, and re-lock the door leading to the downstairs.
While we sat at the dinner table with our father, mom would usually remain in her room. My father made an occasional attempt to argue with her about this, telling her, “What you’re doing is wrong! Come on down here, Rosa, and eat with us, please!” But nothing ever changed. One time she admitted to me that she was afraid I’d poison her food because I was filthy and unclean. After dinner, my father would sometimes carry upstairs to my mother a plate of the food that we’d prepared and just eaten, but she always rejected it, sending him instead to one local restaurant or another to get take-out for her.
Because they happened so rarely, I can still recall one of the very few nights when my mother had actually done the cooking herself. My father was at a church meeting. As I sat at the dinner table I looked up and noticed a roach crawling across the ceiling and then watched in disgust as the roach fell into my bowl of franks and pork beans.
“I can’t eat this,” I told mom, gagging. She glared at me and replied, “Oh yes, you can. You’re not gonna waste my money, you hear? I don’t give a damn what’s in your food, you’re gonna eat it!” With that, she angrily plucked the roach out and stood over me, forcing me to finish every last forkful. As soon as I was done, I threw up and got another beating.
Unless we were being punished, learning choir songs, or leaving the house together to go to church, we would generally not see our mother at all. Most of the time, I had the strong impression that she not only didn’t love us, she just didn't like us.  
And sometimes I was convinced that she hated us. Besides beating me, my mother found any number of ways to humiliate me. She didn’t even respect my privacy in the bathroom. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, I always made a frantic effort to take care of my bodily functions as fast as possible. If I didn’t, my mother, annoyed at having to wait while I was using the toilet, would often suddenly shove open the bathroom door, popping loose the flimsy hook-and-eye mechanism that held it shut, and yank me off the seat. I wouldn’t even have time to pull up my pants. She would proceed to do her business right in front of me, shredding my dignity and leaving me deeply embarrassed.
One day when I was thirteen, I rushed home from school because I urgently needed to relieve myself. I pounded on the front door of the house, pleading to be allowed in to use the bathroom. For 30 minutes, my mother refused to open it. Right there outside our door, I lost control of my bowels all over myself. When she finally let me in the house, she already had a belt in her hand. “You nasty bastard! Lord, I’m gonna kill you!” she screamed as she beat me, still covered in my own mess, for not getting to the bathroom on time.
My mother never saw her cruelty toward us as anything other than our own fault. Any pain we expressed only seemed to tick her off even more. When she used to cut my hair as I sat on the floor of her bedroom, I would cry as she chopped away with a rough and heavy hand. Each time I cried, she would slam her hand against my face, screaming at me to stop crying. The more I cried, the more enraged she became, the more she hit me, and the more I cried. It was a cycle that we never seemed to be able to break out of.
My father stood up for me every now and then, but he generally chose to keep a low profile. He found it easier to give into my mother’s will most of the time. And it seemed like she wanted dad all to herself. Sometimes my father would escape to the attic to work on his computer and my mother would yell to him, “Robert, what the hell are you doing up there?” “Coming, dear!” he would answer, stopping in the middle of whatever project he was involved with and going downstairs to her. One time my father was helping me with my homework when my mother screamed for him to leave me alone. Almost instantly and wordlessly, dad wrapped things up and walked away.
But my father never beat us and always talked to us. That’s why we confided in him. He was aware of my mother’s actions because we would tell him about them, but he didn’t actually see most of the beatings because they generally occurred while he was at work or at church meetings.
On occasions when he did witness the situation getting out of hand, he limited himself to telling my mother, “Rosa, leave the kid alone now! You’ve done enough.” When I would try to complain to him about how I was being treated, he would usually say to me “Now, Nate, you know how your mother is.” That was my warning to try not to piss her off.
There didn’t seem to be anyone else to turn to besides my father. My mother had us too scared to even think about saying anything to anyone outside the family about what happened in our home. And, strange though it may sound to someone who has not been raised in abusive circumstances, we looked at much of this behavior as normal. We weren’t allowed to visit other people’s homes and had little basis for comparison. I didn’t realize until I got older that not all kids were confined to their bedrooms or got disciplined at the end of an extension cord or aluminum bat.
I blamed myself for the beatings. I believed that I deserved my mother’s punishments and even felt guilty at my lack of gratitude toward her for taking me in when no one else had wanted me, a harsh reality she reminded me of often. Whenever I begged her for more information about my birth parents, she would always yell, “Your mother is dead and she never wanted your yellow nigger ass!” I never let her see me cry when she said this to me although I was shattered inside.
One of the first times she ever said these words to me, I fantasized about jumping out of my bedroom window, three stories up and overlooking a patch of broken bricks and sharp rocks below. Over and over I would run as fast as I could, accelerating from the wall at one end of the room to the window opposite, trying to imagine what it would feel like to smash through the window opening.
Too afraid of the unknown of death, I never actually worked up the courage to follow through on my fantasy. Just as devastating to me as my mother’s insult was my father’s reaction when I told him how deeply her words had hurt me. “Leave it alone, Nate,” was all that he said to me, “just leave it alone.”
Our house was too big for anyone on the outside to hear us scream and, even if it hadn’t been, there were no other houses within earshot of ours. The marks from the beating were mainly in private areas and they always went away. Once I briefly considered telling someone at my Catholic elementary school the whole story.
Disturbed at hearing a first-grader exclaim, “I hate my life!” Ms. Palmer, a white teacher, took it upon herself to buy me lunch after school one day. Distracting me with a small bottle of bubbles she gave me to play with, she gently tried to find out what was wrong. I told her only that I had no friends and was being picked on at school because of my buck teeth.
Suspicious of my explanation, Ms. Palmer drove me home that day, telling my mother at our front door that that she had treated me to lunch as my reward for doing well in a spelling bee. To my amazement, my mother immediately quickly put on a show of maternal affection and pride like I’d never seen before; holding me against her side, she gave me a little hug and rubbed the top of my head. I mean, she could’ve won an Oscar that day. She thanked Ms. Palmer, said a polite good-bye, and closed the door.
Mom quickly dropped her act and got to the point: “What you been telling that white woman?” she demanded, eyeing me suspiciously. From her tone of voice, I understood instantly that I was about to pay a high price for any house secrets I’d given away. “Nothing, Mom, nothing!” I answered nervously, “I just did a good job in the spelling bee, like she said. That’s all!” I hoped my voice wouldn’t give me away.
My mother’s acting job must have satisfied Ms. Palmer. I was careful never to give her or any other teacher any more reasons to suspect the abuse I continued to suffer in secret. To remind me that I’d best keep my mouth shut, my mother served up her usual threats to me at home. “You better not say anything about anything that happens around here,” she’d warn me, “or the dog catcher’ll come along and take you away for good!” I was six years old and had no reason to doubt her.
So nobody knew anything.
Sometimes I imagined running away but I was too scared. Where was I gonna run? A world that I didn’t know or understand is where I would’ve landed. My ’hood was a place where stabbings and shootings took place practically every week. I was afraid of the violence. So I stayed—until my family left me—and learned the bitter truth that my home concealed dangers even more brutal than those lurking out on the streets.

-Nathan Landers

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