When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  We don’t see what women do to themselves as aggressive or violent because we don’t perceive self-destruction as something that we willfully direct. Our leading popular feminists blame eating disorders, for example, on the fashion industry, and have even called anorexia a form of “genocide,” perpetrated on women by the misogynists on Seventh Avenue. The manifold causes of eating disorders notwithstanding, the point that is always missed in this discourse is that aggressive gestures are directed by cultural expectation: more often inward if you’re female, more often outward if you’re male. Because we don’t recognize the commonality in these two directions, we tend to pathologize self-destruction, to peg women as afflicted and mentally ill, while understanding men as willful, immoral, and antisocial.

  Whenever there’s an increase in female drug abuse or drinking, an expert in addiction research invariably chimes in with an explanation that points to external pressures, such as social coercion, as if women were never reckless and wild of their own accord. Much of what is intrinsic to the concept of aggression—a willingness to be extreme, to go to the wall, to up the ante for something we want or believe in—is presumed missing in the female psyche. Self-injuring women are frequently mislabeled, according to Dusty Miller, as “schizophrenic, depressed, obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, multiple-personality disordered.”

  In essence, what is lost in the way we view female aggression is its moral and rational content. Women are not responsible actors imposing their will upon the world. They are passive and rather deranged little robots who imperil themselves on cue. Suicide statistics provide an interesting window through which to look at this. In

  1992, 34 percent of Latina high school girls and 24 percent of white high school girls in America said they had considered suicide at some point that year. This leads us to believe that our young women are wandering around in despair, as Mary Pipher argues in her 1995 best-seller, Reviving Ophelia. Young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are two and a half times more likely to attempt suicide than are young men. But young men are five times more likely to actually kill themselves. The highest rate of suicide in America belongs to the scions of the privileged patriarchs: 16.1 of one hundred thousand white adolescent males end their own lives. Are girls less competent at self-obliteration? According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, boys use more instantly lethal methods, like firearms, whereas girls tend to swallow pills, so that death arrives less certainly. Yet, in America’s prisons, where neither sex has access to firearms, eighty-eight males committed suicide in 1993, and no females did. Is it possible that some girls are using gestures of self-destruction as a form of empowerment and a language of protest?

  “I dare you to prevent me.”

  “I command you to rescue me.”

  “If you leave me, I will die.”

  Male coercion takes the form of saying, “Do this, or I will harm you.” Sometimes the man succeeds. Sometimes he courts retaliation in kind, starting a fight in a bar and getting stabbed, or battering his wife and paying with his life when she shoots him. For women, on the other hand, coercion may take the form of saying “Do this, or I will harm myself.” Sometimes the woman succeeds. Sometimes she becomes the architect of her own destruction. Who, male or female, is more coercive?

  Ultimately, the effect that indirect strategies have on our understanding of female behavior is to erase the connection between one form of aggression and another. We can trace the arc from ape to male, follow the line from fistfights to warfare, see a continuity of intent in willed aggression. All men are not killers, but the potential is there: We see the capacity to use force. This is why battered women’s advocates talk of escalation theory: A man who hits his lover could very well kill her one day. As a matter of intent, there may be no truth to that at all, but as a matter of potential, there is. With women, on the other hand, the gestural connection in aggression is obscured. If a woman slices her skin or fashions her words into weapons, how clear is it that she can shift direction and suddenly engage in overt violence? It isn’t clear at all. That is why criminal women wind up so radically isolated from their own sex, cast out as sexual deviants, dykes, witches. Feminist criminologists have tried to bring them back into the fold by recasting them as victims, arguing their violence away. But the truth is, although few of us will ever encounter women who are blatantly evil, strategies of aggression and violence are culled from a shared cultural repertoire. Just as Richard Ford shares a gestural language with Anthony Riggs and Michael Cato, so Toni Cato has a language in common with her putative sisters. The violent woman differs from other women in character and propensity but not in modus operandi. Instead of insisting on her innocence, we might insist on the capacity of all women to bring their force of will to bear upon the world.

  In the early spring of 1993, two years after her husband’s death, Toni Cato went for a job interview. The job was narcotics trafficking. The men who were offering it were undercover agents for the Drug Enforcement Administration who were unaware of Toni Cato’s prior infamy; they stumbled across her when she got involved in a ten-kilo cocaine run to Texas with a friend, on a study break before college finals. Her friend was caught and arrested by Texas state troopers, but Cato, who says she was merely accompanying him on the trip, had already flown back to Detroit: “I’m paying to go to school, this is coming out of my pocket, and I’m not going to miss my finals,” she later explained to the undercover agents. Hoping to crack the trafficking ring, the agents tapped Cato as a potential unwitting informant. Lured by the prospect of money and travel, she agreed to a series of meetings.

  Her conversations with them took place in a small, stripped-down office stocked with a couple of hard wooden chairs and a desk. A surveillance camera was high up in the wall, providing a view of a young, sturdily built, attractive woman attired neatly but casually, resting her hands in her lap. On these videos, Cato looks focused, purposeful, and calm. She isn’t terribly interested in flattering or flirting with these big-money drug dealers. If they can offer her a way to make serious money without much risk, she’ll consider it. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she tells them at one point, and her matter-of-factness makes you inclined to believe her.

  Toni Cato grew up young. Her mother, Paula, in love with her drugs, as Cato recalls, left her children alone for hours at a time and as often as not returned home without food. At the age of five, Toni was farmed out to relatives, ultimately winding up with her grandmother on Conley Avenue. But her little brother, Michael, stayed behind “and spent the majority of his time left alone in the house.” His lifeline was Toni, who talked to him on the phone when their mother was gone, often reading stories to him over the line. Brother and sister remained close throughout school and beyond, eventually “turning to the streets [together] without our family knowing.”

  As the meetings progressed, Cato began to feel she might rely on these dealers to help her out. The word on the street about her involvement in Anthony’s murder had not wholly subsided. “My name is coming up constantly,” she told them. “I’m not in an uproar, I’m not nervous or anything. It’s just that my name is on everyone’s lips.” The source of the innuendo was Antonio Shelby, the man who first tipped Detroit detectives off to the murder-for-insurance scheme. “Antonio Shelby came forward and said that I offered him money,” Cato explained to the agents, neither confirming nor denying that Shelby had spoken the truth. “[The prosecutors] had to prove that I had knowledge of what happened [to my husband], and they have no proof of that. They have some motive, because we had marital discord or whatever, but that’s all they have. That’s why the judge let me go.” Her fear, however, was that sooner or later, the cops were going to find a way to make Shelby’s statement stick. For that, there seemed only one solution.

  “From the very beginning when we were going through the preliminary hearings,” she told the agents, “me and my brother were thinking about it.”

  “So you think extreme
action is necessary,” one of the agents replied, masking his astonishment. This was, after all, just a minor drug investigation until Cato raised the fate of Riggs.

  “M-hmm,” she replied, rather dispassionately.

  “What do you want done?”

  “I want him eliminated, period. No coming back, no nothing.”

  Cato sounded for all the world like a mafia boss or a secret agent, commanding the fate of a man in a perfunctory and impersonal way. In reality there was probably a great deal of personal upset. Shelby had been family; he betrayed her. Perhaps what was worse, after he sang to the cops, she bumped into him visiting with her mother—“the man who was responsible for sending my brother to prison standing there in my mother’s living room laughing and talking as if nothing had happened.” That had to hurt. Could it be she was striking back at her mother?

  She and the agent discussed a fee: fifteen thousand dollars if she wanted it to look like an accident. Did she have enough money for that? She said she did. They talked about it like they were arranging a bank transaction and settled the affair with nods of the head. “That’s our job, solving problems,” said the agent, “so we’ll take care of it.” He did, but not as she expected. He contacted Detroit homicide and gave them their long-sought suspect.

  In November, Toni Cato was rearrested, this time for two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. After a two-week trial, she was convicted by her own words. It was June 1994.

  If Toni Cato is illustrative of indirect aggression, she is not a tidy example. African-American women have a different social and historical experience of violence than white women do. The historian Laura Fishman points out that slavery and its ceaseless outrages fostered in slave women a much greater need for self-reliance and forceful action. Many slave women developed “a reputation as fighters.… They were tough, powerful and spirited.” They argued with their masters, sometimes assaulted them, frequently committed arson, theft, even infanticide as indirect forms of protest, and occasionally murdered the slaveholders. White slave mistresses, for their part, could be extremely cruel to black slave women, but they confined their attacks to the privacy of their plantation parlors and appealed to their men for more public abuses. More than a century later, it is still possible to glimpse these differences between races. The differences are apparent in how subcultures of women express themselves in adolescence. On the street outside Public School 119 in New York’s Spanish Harlem, a visitor saw two high school girls one day slamming each other with words. “Who you tellin’? Who you tellin’? You gonna beat me up with your umbrella?” one girl shouts. “Ain’t nobody gonna do shit to me.” For a moment it looks as if the confrontation will escalate, as if one of the girls will produce her “boxcutter,” a razor-sharp knife that’s the preferred weapon of New York City girls at this moment, good for slashing wincing cuts into one another’s cheeks. But there’s a storm moving in on this cold November day, wind gusts whipping up the litter on the street, deterring the girls from hanging outside. They gesture their mutual contempt and move off into a sideways slicing rain.

  Down in the basement of the school, in an office filled with industrial-size cans of peanut butter, beans, corn, and macaroni for an upcoming food drive, a lanky, well-muscled, middle-aged guidance counselor holds forth on his twenty-three years of trying to prevent students from fighting. “In this community,” Cedric Southerland says, “girls and boys are almost interchangeable. We have girls in this school who would wipe the floor with boys their age. They don’t think twice about it. Sometimes you can’t tell the aggressor from the aggressee. I had a girl last year, she looked like a little angel. She had already slit a girl’s face open. I had three girls in here the other day, one of them had her eye blacked and her hair extensions pulled out.

  “Yesterday,” Cedric says, “I had a girl in. She has this brother, she loves him, but he’s a pain in the butt. She tells her parents but they don’t do anything. So she stabs him in the hand with some scissors. So she’s having a problem with being heard, getting people to believe her.” Not for this girl the muzzled, feminine silence we hear so much about in the literature on adolescent females. To reach his kids, Cedric posts a sign in his office that reads: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Black girls in his community consider themselves to be tough; there’s no feminine currency in being frail, because, in large part, black women hold the community together. They can’t look to men for protection: the men aren’t around.

  “I was never involved in a gang,” says Toni Cato, reflecting on the fights between girls in her own high school. “I had been approached a couple of times because I had a reputation for being mean. [But] I didn’t associate with too many females because they kept up too much confusion, and if I had wanted, I could have caused enough havoc by myself.” Instead, she concentrated, successfully, on staying on the honor role.

  “Girls are much quicker to fight than boys at this age,” says Southerland. “They’ll hit you in a minute. But if you take that to another level, to the street, then it changes. It’s the boys that shoot you down.” He pulls open a desk drawer and brings out a box filled with freshly sharpened pencils. Tucked in among them is a delicate gold watch, which one of his students stole from someone on Lexington Avenue. “The boys here are little hoodlums in training. Now it’s watches, later it’s gonna be cars, and then they’re gonna need a pistol.” As Southerland sees it, the opportunistic aggression of girls will not become their vocation; it isn’t on-the-job training the way it is for boys. White or black, almost universally in North America this century, girls’ aggression has gone underground as they mature, retreating into indirection—or into the private, less remarked-upon realm of the home.

  According to data collected on all homicides in the city of Chicago from 1966 to 1996 (there are no comparable data for Detroit), the Chicago citizen at greatest risk of being killed by an intimate partner is the African-American man, at almost double the rate of African-American women and five times the rate of white women. Eighteen percent of black men killed in Chicago in those years died at the hands of their mates. These men, husbands or lovers, were most at risk when the woman was in her teens or twenties. The risk of being killed by a female partner in any racial group peaks when the woman is in her twenties and then declines sharply.

  Whether the men provoked their killers or not, assaulted them or not, seems to be highly variable. Sixty-five percent of the men killed by women in Chicago had no recorded history of violence, domestic or otherwise. Does that mean that police simply didn’t know about their vile behavior, or that they, like Anthony Riggs, genuinely cared for their mates? Probably both. In eighty-six cases, the woman killed her partner when he tried to leave her; in sixty cases, she killed a man who had left; in eight, the victim was her female lover; and in twenty-four, she used an accomplice or a hit man, removing herself from the scene of the crime. Indiana criminologist Coramae Richey Mann looked at female homicide offenders from six major U.S. cities, including Detroit, and found that 30 percent of the women who killed men had previous arrest records for assault, battery, and weapons charges, and another 38 percent had between one and thirty previous misdemeanor arrests. Alcohol was the most common combustive fuel, leading Mann to suggest as a “conceivable interpretation … that both parties were drinking, a domestic fight ensued, and the female homicide offender won.”

  This is difficult to accept. It sounds wrong. It goes down sour. But it is our frame of reference, our habit of viewing women as put upon, done to, afflicted, that makes us so resistant. The field of criminology has taken, for its reference point, the political agenda of Second Wave feminism, in which the systemic powerlessness of women is the transcendent theme, subsuming within it the intensity and passion of individual females, never allowing that one woman can be more powerful and harming than one man. Women kill only in fear, for survival, to take a last stand. Violence by women, as two criminologists wrote in 1995, is simply “a resource for self-protection.” The two
criminologists based their conclusion on a review of fifty homicide cases. Eighteen of those cases, or less than half, actually supported their contention. What do they do with the other thirty-two cases in which the victims were children, other women, and patently innocent men? Take them as evidence that violence is human, not gendered? Examine them as a means to further our understanding of what women do, and what is unique to women, and what is shared with men? Or do they put the thirty-two cases aside and never address them, and fall into silence like the pundits in Detroit?

  On Thanksgiving Day in 1994, a week or so after Toni Cato was arrested, the Associated Press ran the following stories:

  In Peoria, Illinois, thirty-seven-year-old Francine Knox was charged with manslaughter for electrocuting her seven-month-old nephew with a stun gun.

  In Largo, Florida, Christina Rubio was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for poisoning her thirteen-month-old son. She was already on probation for the attempted murder of her three-year-old daughter.

  In West Palm Beach, Florida, Naomi Morrison pleaded guilty to aggravated battery, robbery, and auto burglary. In an attempt to steal her victim’s wallet and car, Morrison bit the ninety-year-old man in three places, once to the bone, and transmitted the AIDS virus, for which she’d tested positive in 1988.