Testimony: Louisiana, 1864

At the time when I was raped by a man in uniform, what happened to me wasn’t seen as a crime. After all, in those days, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Kentucky, the age of consent was ten. I was ten in Louisiana and not from one of those other states where the age of consent was as high as twelve. Whether a woman or child, in the eyes of the law, I was old enough to say yes, though I had said no. I had screamed and hollered and fought because the soldier would receive no punishment besides the one I could scratch into his feckless eyes. What did it matter if he was Union or Confederate? North or South, he was a man, and I was a ten-year-old girl. Blue or Gray, his kind were all the same to me. The North wore blue, and the South wore gray, but they were all men in uniform. In my time, most girls didn’t report men like him because we girls would be blamed and banished after entering a courtroom of men. Answering to the male judge and the male jury, to tell what had happened at the hands of a man, we would be interrogated by men about what a man had done. It was worse if the “woman” was only ten. Even if I had wanted to go through that trial at ten years old, just to have a chance to face my attacker in the light to tell my story, I wouldn’t have been allowed. I wouldn’t have been allowed into the courtroom to speak of the crime committed against me because I would have had to have proven how old I was when it happened. Born to a captive woman and taken from my mother at the hour of my birth, I had no way to prove how old I was in Louisiana in 1864.

Women in War

After being set free by the soldiers who captured them, the women and girls live the rest of their lives knowing at any moment they could be taken again because their humiliation is like a drug the soldiers have become addicted to using. In chains in the back of trucks, women and girls are humiliated for all to see and then erased in the days to come. When anyone attempts to tell their story, it is called a lie. It is a lie, soldiers say, though captive women are offered as a reward for fighters. It is a lie, it is a lie, the women say, because they don’t want to shame their fathers. Girls are used as a lure for new recruits, advertised with legs spread, left for dead, abducted, in chains in the back of trucks. It is a lie, it is a lie, the girls who live say, wanting to spare the feelings of loved ones mourning the dead and to have some dignity, a chance at life after being set free. They have seen boys and men, once gentle, become intoxicated by torture. These men have become torture addicts in war, though in peace they never would have been exposed to the drug that changed them. Screams of women and girls excite these men. Women have seen boys become intoxicated by the suffering of girls. Girls have seen men drunk on the humiliation of women. Once certain boys and men are exposed to that high, they are forever addicts, craving the suffering of women as if it were a new street drug. Even in times of peace, some soldiers will attack women and girls again. By obeying orders, certain soldiers, who never would have attacked a woman or a girl in times of peace, form lifetime brotherly bonds with other soldiers in warzones where they become intoxicated by outraging women and girls on open roads, in houses, behind stores, on concert grounds, in basements, in the shadows of tanks, at gunpoint, on dirt, in the beds of trucks driving down streets on fire. Obeying orders, certain men and boys who would have been good fathers in times of peace, bring children into the world to harm women and allow their children to be raised by strangers to harm the enemy even as the children become the enemy. High on torture, the soldiers are harming a part of themselves, forever left behind. As their children become the enemy, the women and girls carry untold stories so their children will never know. Babies become weapons of war in a basement of a house, where girls and women are told that after the soldiers are finished with them, they will never want any man. Why, some captured women wonder, does the soldier focus on this business of women wanting? Even before the attack, the men fear that the captured women and girls might be capable of wanting other men in some future that will no longer exist because of what happens in the basement. Pregnant after their rape, the captured girls will each raise a soldier’s child. The baby will be hers but will look at her with their father’s eyes. The child will love their mother and never understand the lie of the father. It is a lie. It is a lie, the leaders of the occupation say after a woman is taken by the commander, stripped naked and branded on the night tanks enter her village. In the basement, there are so many screams braiding into screams that no one can hear when a father offers his daughter in forced marriage to avoid her abduction, when a mother is taken from a child, when a starving girl becomes a prostitute and is vilified for it. Hunger has driven her into the arms of the men who have killed her family.

Human Snow

After the raid, does evidence fall from survivors like snow in winter, like leaves in autumn glinting golden in dying sun, or like dust from Grandmother’s handmade curtains, dust containing the shed skin of so many people? After the bombing, ash falls on us from the sky like snow. Does evidence drift like raindrops in a storm? It’s easier to talk about why we sometimes don’t scream, than it is to say why men are collecting hairs in an envelope—stains, laundry, and fingernail clippings tell our story more than words. If what happens to us becomes part of us, our story is written in bloodstains on a slide under a microscope, on the back of a headrest in a car, the fibers transferred onto us. Today, another woman’s nails have been clipped, labeled, and saved as evidence. Her clothing must be carefully removed to prevent evidence from falling. In the vents of buildings, what happened to her is pushed through the air we breathe.

Blackout Curtains

Female veterans are more likely to become homeless than women who have never seen combat. Few of the women and girls in this emergency shelter have long hair like my mother. Intertwined by military, marriage, and religion, the roots and branches of family trees have become entangled with churches that favor certain hairstyles not preferred by the military. Not every woman in the shelter is okay with that. The shorn woman shaved her daughter’s head. Now her daughter is not mistaken for a subservient girl but a soldier. As we settle in for the night, I whisper my mother’s story in this palace of broken windows. I am living beyond her. To make up for the life that was stolen from my mother, I work nights braiding the hair of women and girls who have run away to start new lives, to give them what my mother never had: a chance. Mother was taken out of a secure unit of the military hospital, where she ran to the roof. (It took me a long time to understand that saying “secure units” was a way to avoid saying “Psyche Ward.”) Our family ran out of insurance, and the doctors said my mother was stable and no longer a threat to herself. The doctor said it was time to take her home. My father grasped her arm as they walked away together. Letting go of her while unlocking the car, he turned his back only for a moment. She ran to scale the fire escape and leapt off the hospital roof, her long hair waving, like a dark flag in the wind. She lived, only to die another way. My father screamed her name, worried he was losing her. That was the one thing he couldn’t stand, her running away from him. That’s not the story I will tell the girl tonight as I draw the blackout curtains the way my mother once drew her long hair in front of her eyes. No lights should be seen through the trees hiding us from the highway because no one is supposed to know we’re here. After the war, my mother used to hide behind her long hair because she wasn’t allowed to escape.

Tinsel Orchard

I fear I imagined it, not as much as I fear I didn’t. Where was my mother if not buried in the ground, and why did my father have her hair? Still too terrified to ask, I suspect the first time I saw her like that, her long hair hacked off, short like a boy’s, I should have guessed Mom was gone. Even after she was dead, the men in my family were still stroking her long hair. She came back to them, night after night in the form of other women with long hair. That was the real reason my aunt wanted to cut my hair. I know that now, though I still haven’t forgiven her, even after seeing my father, weeping, after Mother was gone. Spying on him and seeing him with a long braid, I glimpsed Mother’s hair. He clutched her braid in his bed. During her wake, he begged to keep her braid. When everyone else had left, he and I stayed behind with the open casket. He reached into the coffin with a pair of scissors to cut off the braid. Hiding her braid in his jacket, he left the church with me. Whenever I’m in the house and he’s gone, I search for the braid and find strands of Mother’s hair threaded like tinsel among the branches of the orchard. Like the trees, she links the earth with the heavens.

No-Lie Cherry Pie

“It’s cherry-picking season,” Stella says, overlooking the orchard in the evening, as she slices her No-Lie Cherry Pie. Stella, with her ankle-length hair, never cut her hair in her life. Stella, whose mother was a veteran who disappeared like mine, whispers in the kitchen, “The little girl’s mom took off last night.” Filling the pot with water, I stare out the kitchen windows facing the orchard and realize that there are parents everywhere who drop out of their kids’ lives. They hide and ignore any attempts to contact them. “She’s there, again, isn’t she?” asks Julia, who once sought help from the police, who couldn’t do much to protect her. Having missed so much work that she couldn’t make her rent, she began calling crisis hotlines, whose workers directed her to where women find women and bring women to us on hidden roads through the cherry orchard. A child of veterans, I’ve heard many lethal conversations ever since my parents returned home from the war. One night when I was crying for my mother, my father tried to explain how my mother had escaped into the birds in the cherry trees, the moonlight shimmering in the inky pond on autumn nights, the wind ripping through the leaves in a whistling howl that comes from the direction of the military hospital. The old military hospital holds women who’ve seen combat and fought like men. I’ve often driven into its parking lot to stare into the windows of the secure ward. The hospital windows are collectors of the heartache of veterans’ husbands, fathers, boyfriends, and sometimes strangers, but also a certain brightness that shines on farmers, grocers, policemen, road engineers, firefighters, bakers, carpenters, and the postman. The engineer of the train, the man in the control tower, loves the veteran woman he terrorizes the most by helping her transition back into civilian life at home. In the locked ward, I once saw my mother dancing. When the nurses caught her, she was shorn. She crawled the white tiles to collect her hair in her hands. I wondered how long it would take for her hair to grow back as we stared at each other through the barred windows overlooking the cherry orchard. The orchard stretches to the woods, where we sometimes see a woman hiding. She’s not really a woman. Blossoming in the wind with the shadows that fear the moon, she’s the thing my mother became after dying.

(Image: Rare Agfacolor photo taken by Ewa Faryaszewska in Warsaw, Poland during the Warsaw Uprising, August 1944)