Know My Name

by Chanel Miller

  I received an email one evening informing me of their scheduled ceremony; it would open with the provost (five minutes), an announcement about support services (five minutes), a speech/letter from Emily Doe (five minutes), closing words, moment of silence in support of sexual violence survivors (five minutes). What do you do when you’re invited to your own rape garden ceremony, that’s been scheduled to last twenty minutes? I wanted to give a speech, Thanks for the stones. For being so concerned with agency, they had taken it upon themselves to create a public display of support, inviting cameras, a tidy itinerary, the figurative ribbon cut. They gave me three dates I could choose from. I appreciated that the area had been cleaned up, that students may find solace in it, but it was odd the plaque was still missing. I told my lawyer to politely inform them there would be no ceremony.

  I thought more about anger, about the art piece I would create. A more fitting tribute: a piece called Construction; each victim is given a nail for every day she has lived with what happened to her. There’s a haphazard pile of wood in the center of campus. Victims can come as they please, hammering nails into the wood. All day people hear the banging, all the drilling and incessant interruption. This is a lot of what surviving is like, trying to carry on and get work done, while your past pounds into you, distracts you, makes it impossible. At the end there’d be an immense wooden structure, randomly nailed together, large, useless, pointy, and dangerous in the middle of everything, people forced to walk around it, interrupting the pretty view of the trees. This is also what assault feels like, what to do with this, where to put it, what is it.

  Or maybe a light installation. I could come in the night and install living-room lamps with extension cords throughout campus, large paper lanterns to dangle from trees, littering the campus with bright bulbs until every dark corner was glowing. I’d called that piece All I Wanted.

  Or something more disturbing; I’d make mops, attaching dark, long hairs at the end of wooden poles, dragging them through the pine needles and leaves. Mopping all the vegetation and debris, dragging trails throughout campus, a victim custodian. That performance piece would be called We Wanted to Respect Your Agency, Anonymity.

  One year after our meeting, a month after the garden installation, the plaque was still not there. When my lawyer inquired about it, Appleseed wrote that the space was meant to be inspirational, and it was not okay to target or condemn a single individual. She said they would not be placing it on a plaque because they had to prioritize the well-being of all of our students. She proposed the following quote:

  I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here.

  There is a world in which this is funny, the irony and absurdity too clear. These were words I’d used to comfort my sister straight out of the hospital in the moments I was least okay. In a way it summarized my experience, and I almost green-lighted it, but of course, I could not, due to the fact that it was grossly taken out of context. I began to think if they had a garden for every person assaulted at Stanford, wouldn’t they have rolling acres of gardens, landscaping businesses booked out for eternity? Dry hillsides, littered with benches, cargo loads of pavers? Each marked with this plaque, with this lie we tell ourselves, I’m okay, everything’s okay.

  The other two quotes Appleseed suggested were from the final paragraph of my statement. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. Those words were written from a place of deep hope, cultivated alone in a high apartment in Philly, when hope was the single thing I had. I wrote those words to survive. How could you abandon me these last two years, to reappear and take those lines. To hide the damage, then present the polished. I wanted to offer students a sentiment of solidarity, but could not give Stanford words of hope when they had not provided me reason to feel any. I could not sell victims a false dream, a tranquil and bright-eyed existence. On nights when you are alone, you are left alone. Please let us know which of these quotes works.

  I should have backed out then, said enough. Instead I submitted a new quote: You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today. Appleseed said she’d shared the quote with the Confidential Support Team, and the next sentence started with while we appreciate, and that word again, concerned.

  She explained it could be triggering and upsetting instead of healing. They said I could either choose what they’d selected or find a quote that was more uplifting and affirming.

  As a survivor, I feel a duty to provide a realistic view of the complexity of recovery. I am not here to rebrand the mess he made on campus. It is not my responsibility to alchemize what he did into healing words society can digest. I do not exist to be the eternal flame, the beacon, the flowers that bloom in your garden. I emailed my lawyer: Whenever you get the chance, please let [Appleseed] know I’ve decided not to provide a quote.

  I struggle with how I am supposed to live as a survivor, how to present my story and myself to the world, how much or how little to disclose. There have been numerous times I have not brought up my case because I do not want to upset anybody or spoil the mood. Because I want to preserve your comfort. Because I have been told that what I have to say is too dark, too upsetting, too targeting, too triggering, let’s tone it down. You will find society asking you for the happy ending, saying come back when you’re better, when what you say can make us feel good, when you have something more uplifting, affirming. This ugliness was something I never asked for, it was dropped on me, and for a long time I worried it made me ugly too. It made me into a sad, unwelcome story that nobody wanted to hear.

  But when I wrote the ugly and painful parts into a statement, an incredible thing happened. The world did not plug up its ears, it opened itself to me. I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living. If I were to say I was healed and redeemed, I worry a victim would feel insufficient, as if they have not tried hard enough to cross some nonexistent finish line. I write to stand beside them in their suffering. I write because the most healing words I have been given are It’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay to fall apart, because that’s what happens when you are broken, but I want victims to know they will not be left there, that we will be alongside them as they rebuild.

  Appleseed did not hear the secret in the quote, which lives in the last two words, until today. I can’t promise your journey will be good, I actually guarantee that it won’t. I can’t promise glorious days or shining redemption. I am here to assure the opposite; you will be faced with the hardest days of your life. The agony is incessant, unyielding, but when you get to the point where you feel like everything’s gone, there’s a little twist, a flame, a small shift. It is subtle, it comes when you least expect it. Wait for it. This is the rule of the universe, this is the one thing in life I know to be true. No matter how awful and long your journey, I can promise you the turn. One day it will lift.

  Victims exist in a society that tells us our purpose is to be an inspiring story. But sometimes the best we can do is tell you we’re still here, and that should be enough. Denying darkness does not bring anyone closer to the light. When you hear a story about rape, all the graphic and unsettling details, resist the instinct to turn away; instead look closer, because beneath the gore and the police reports is a whole, beautiful person, looking for ways to be in the world again.

  By now Michele and Appleseed were no longer talking, too much betrayal, mistrust, Michele was livid, Appleseed wasn’t budging. Over a year had passed since the initial meeting, promises were not upheld, no investigation completed. The Fountain Hopper, an anonymous student publication, uncovered the news of the rejected quotes and email blasted the story across campus with the headline: STANFORD’S FINAL “FUCK YOU” TO BROCK TURNER’S VICTIM. />
  In the words of Appleseed, I end where I began. A year after Brock had been released, and I’d received some money, vomited, took a few art classes, received plants and no plaque, a burbling fountain. There was a light installed, which was good, thank you. The dumpsters were moved to the front, cedar walls erected around them. I was hard on myself for a long time, feeling like I did not do enough. But I am learning.

  I worry Stanford will see this as a bashing, a reputation tainting, and will now release a statement asking me to stop naming their staff members after poisonous seeds. But before jumping to a position of defense, I hope they listen, because in an odd way, this is a love letter. My unending attempts to reconcile and reconstruct the world I grew up in. I write in hopes that schools will see how much power they have to help or hurt a victim. Listen to survivors when they come to you. Offer help when they don’t. Do not write polite emails about how you did the best you can, about how actually that was not your job. Just help them. If I accuse Stanford of failing to support victims, I hope they prove me wrong by saying they care about victims and then show everyone how they do.

  I encourage you to sit in that garden, but when you do, close your eyes, and I’ll tell you about the real garden, the sacred place. Ninety feet away from where you sit there is a spot, where Brock’s knees hit the dirt, where the Swedes tackled him to the ground, yelling, What the fuck are you doing? Do you think this is okay? Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I’ve erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever.

  When they held him down, they freed me. Without them, there would’ve never been a chance for me to speak my words in the first place, no hearing, no trial, no statement, no book. Because of them, I am here now. They gave me a chance, to grow and fight and come into myself again. It took a long time, it is still a strenuous process, but I would be nothing without that chance.

  I often get scared of speaking out, of confronting lawyers and institutions bigger and better equipped than me, but when I’m afraid, all I have to do is think of the two of them. I think of how I want to return the favor; to pull the heaviness off you, to be the one yelling it is not okay, pinning your demons down in the dirt, so you suddenly find yourself free, given the chance to begin your journey, growing on your own, uncovering your voice, finding your way back. I want to stay and fight, while you go.

  14.

  WRITING IS THE way I process the world. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever God is up there said, You got your dream. I said, Actually I was hoping for a lighter topic, and God was like, Ha ha! You thought you got to choose. This was the topic I was given. If something else had happened to me, I would have written about that too. When I get worked up over what happened, I tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. I’m a civilian who’s been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. Feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. My job is to observe, feel, document, report. What am I learning and seeing that other people can’t see? What doorways does my suffering lead to? People sometimes say, I can’t imagine. How do I make them imagine? I write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. This is a marker, and I hope that in twenty years this grueling aftermath of victimhood will feel foreign.

  During trial, the judge was like this black peak, bolted in at the highest seat in the center of the room. We rose and sat around him, only referring to him as Your Honor. I never thought to question if it was possible to move the pieces.

  If ever I was distraught or heartbroken, my mom would always say, Go read history. Her solution for everything. For so long I believed history was a thick book you carried around in your backpack, not something you could create. It was one hour in an air-conditioned portable classroom after lunch, watching Civil War reenactments. Our teacher making us eat expired crackers called hardtack so we could empathize with a soldier’s diet in World War II. It’d take me a long time to realize history is happening now, and we are a part of it.

  History is where you will find people who have been through what you’re experiencing. Not only been there but survived it. Not only survived it but changed it. Whose struggles informed them. History shows you what people have endured before you. The year before I was born, Anita Hill testified before the Senate. In 2018, she sent her support to Michele, thanking her for forcing judges to take rape seriously, signing off, All my best, Anita. History shows that if you were in the minority, if no one believed you, it didn’t mean you were wrong. Rather, it meant society was slow to catch up to you. And if those in the minority did not buckle, did not give up their truths, the world would shift below their feet.

  The San Francisco Chronicle reported the judge saying, There is a caricature of me that has been allowed to flourish. He protested against the one-dimensional nature of his new identity. I understood, because it was what I had felt like as a victim. All my character traits vanishing, narrowing my identity to a label, the drunk victim.

  Signatures were still being collected to put him on the ballot. Nicole told me about the volunteers, the retired couple who drove an hour every weekend to staff a table at the Palo Alto Farmers’ Market. I heard about a girl who had been standing with her clipboard collecting signatures, when a man came up and verbally assaulted her, and afterward she sat down in tears, wiped them away, and kept going. So many of the volunteers were survivors, vulnerable to being accosted while petitioning. Yet they still showed up.

  There were many times strangers reminded them that the victim should not have drunk enough to pass out, and part of Nicole’s job was to help them know how to respond. Jim McManis, Persky’s lawyer, stated, This woman was not attacked. These insults, that were meant to make victims crumble, only fueled them to mobilize.

  Every Christmas, my Gong Gong selects something from Walmart for me and Tiffany, and every year I imagine him wandering the aisles thinking, What does an eight-year-old want? A nine-year-old? We’ve been gifted slippers, a striped vase, stuffed unicorn, purple binder, manicure set, hair wrap, mosquito repellant candles. Due to his old age, I drove him for the first time. It was a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, and as we walked through the parking lot, I saw Brock and the judge’s flat heads hanging off a table by the front doors. As we came closer I saw an older man behind the table. I quieted as if seeing a deer in the wild. People passed him left and right, the afternoon was windy and chilly, his pages blowing about as he clamped his hands down on one paper after the other. He was spending his afternoon in the blustery shade, in the hopes of collecting a few more signatures. I went up to him and said, Thank you for being here. He said, Well, it’s important, and wished me a nice day. My grandpa asked in Chinese why I’d spoken to him. Since I couldn’t say, A letter I wrote ignited a firestorm and now our community is rallying to recall the man that presided over my legal nightmares, I said he was my friend’s dad. My grandpa nodded. We went in, Gong Gong taking his time to browse. This year we got chocolate oranges and mugs.

  I watched signs bloom across lawns in my hometown, couldn’t drive a few blocks without seeing Brock’s eyes peering out at me. I was playing a game of they love me, they love me not, with the houses in my neighborhood. It took me a long time to realize that it was possible for someone to oppose the recall, but still support me. There were many attorneys, judges, law professors, who agreed the sentence had been too lenient, but endorsed Persky, arguing he had remained within the rules of law. Slowly I began to take the opposition less personally.

  In January of 2018, nearly ninety-five thousand local signatures were gathered and submitted, piles of pages submitted in stacks of white boxes. I stared at the boxes on the news, wondering how many hours had gone into them, how many people had sat in the shade, and how many passersby had stopped to sign their names, and I suppose this was w
hy I teared up, looking at the pile of boxes.

  As the election edged closer, I received disturbing letters. My house was put on alert. A detective from the Special Victims Unit arrived, tall and gray suited. He said the bushes below my window would need to be cut back, they could hide four to five people. I’d always thought of that bush as a lush, flowering bush, not a place you can hide four or five people. My writing desk was up against the window, visible from the street, so I’d need to move it. We needed a video camera installed and a second lock for our back door. My neighbors were put on alert. I was advised to be vigilant and avoid walking alone. My DA’s office held meetings over my safety, offered to put me up in a hotel.

  I kept writing. Numbers for the SFPD were taped to the refrigerator next to family photos. I kept the blinds in my office closed, ignored the darkness, amplified the artificial lighting, and kept writing. I stopped playing music, suspended myself in silence, one ear always listening, while I kept writing. Every time another unsettling letter arrived, I’d text the new detective, who would come by and add it to his growing folder of evidence. Police cars were on rotation around my house. As threats increased I stopped walking Mogu. My arms ached in the morning from clenching my fists at night. One day I stopped writing.

  That day I stood before the round hedge holding shears. I hacked at it, snapping branches, cutting through stems thick as fingers. White secretions slid out of broken stems, splintered wood scraped my calves. I yanked weeds from the scalp of the earth, found wasps bound up in translucent sacs, pincher beetles spilling out of holes in the dirt with their little tonged butts. Dirt stuck to my heated skin, my knees pink and imprinted by the texture of the pavement. The sun lowered and I was peeling off my gloves when I caught sight of the discarded stems on the cement driveway, the little magenta buds, tightly bound. In my fervor, I’d severed them off. Those were supposed to be my flowers, set to bloom beneath my window. So much of surviving was sacrifice, cutting things short, suppressing life to do what’s needed to make it to tomorrow. I wanted those bright petals to unfurl. I ran upstairs, my arms full of green stalks, sliding them into water.