You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  And yet, people forget. There is the “Wait, what?” every time I talk about being raped. I sometimes wonder if it’s because we have decided what a person who has been raped looks like, and part of me feels a second of relief that I don’t appear to be a victim. At least of that. And another part of me wants to say, “Yes, I was the victim of a gun-toting rapist, and you know what else? I fought him. I grabbed his gun and fired off one shot on some superhero shit. I missed and was beaten more for it, but hey, I got a shot in.” But no, I don’t even get the mythology of that. No superhero origin story for me.

  Seeing Jordan and Magic in their Olympic jerseys, however, I remembered what I had erased from memory. This teenager, devastated in every way you could think of, physically and spiritually, looking for heroes on a TV screen. I had two black eyes and my face was so bruised it was green and blue, so swollen I saw the Elephant Man in the mirror the one time I let myself look. My rapist was still out there—somewhere, and in my mind, everywhere. The last I’d seen of him was his back, casually walking out the fire exit of the storeroom where I’d pleaded for my life.

  Those weeks after the rape are not the story I tell. I skip ahead. Yes, I have talked about the death of who I was before, and the person who rose up from the ashes. But what made up those ashes? The truth is, what I had lost was the cloak of respectability that my parents trained me to think would protect me.

  They had moved us to the predominantly white community of Pleasanton, California. Growing up there, the thing I heard from my white classmates was “You’re different than other Black people.” I made them feel better about their racism and notion of white supremacy. If I shape-shifted constantly to make white people comfortable by being the appropriate, reasonable, good Black person, I would get something in return. Their trust, access to opportunities, and safety.

  I knew that part of my father’s heartbreak about my rape was that he and my mother had worked hard to price themselves out of such things. I believed in that, too. We were in this perfect planned community, and I in turn behaved perfectly. I was an athlete who got good grades, dressed appropriately, and spoke the Queen’s English. That cloak of respectability lay heavy over me, and it both defined and confined my identity as I grew up beneath it. But I would be safe.

  While I was being raped, I left my body and looked down at that girl. This doesn’t happen to good people, I thought. When that illusion was taken from me, I was left completely exposed, literally stripped and violated.

  My “recovery” began at home, mostly alone. My boyfriend had seen me at the hospital, and his devastation was such that once I was home, I didn’t want to tell anyone but my closest friends. My parents and older sister worked full-time at telecommunications jobs and had to carry on with life. My little sister was in and out, mostly out. Only my life had stopped. As a family, we’d started a routine that would define all of our interactions. I did not want to be seen, so it was best to pretend not to see me, and they would also get used to me disappearing because of my PTSD.

  “Where’s Nickie?” one would ask.

  “Oh, she’s literally crouched behind a door, hiding,” I can hear them say, quiet, as if the person should know better. “Act like you don’t see it. It’s fine. Gotta go . . .”

  It became impolite to ask what I was doing.

  I was nineteen. The body wants to live, even if we don’t know how. Red blood cells rush to the cut, and some chemical signal tells them to produce collagen to create new tissue at the wound. New skin begins to form, and the edges of the cut pull to reach each other until the wound closes to leave a scar. I felt a visceral need to heal and to be whole, though I didn’t know how to will that into action. A different version of me had to start somewhere, and it began by watching the Olympics.

  In the Before, the person who I was had looked forward to the Olympics for weeks. She was an athlete, someone who loved to watch gymnastics, track and field, and basketball especially, but there was always some random sport to get interested in. Four years before, she had very strong feelings about the redemptive arc of the South Korean team getting the gold in women’s handball.

  Now, I watched the opening ceremony with eyes that were nearly swollen shut, no longer crying because even the Kleenex touching my face hurt. There he was, hard to miss even if the cameras weren’t focused on him: Magic Johnson in the athlete parade, six foot nine in his Team USA–issued blue blazer. There had been so much conversation about who would be on the Dream Team—the first time professional athletes would compete—and so much of it focused on whether or not it was safe for Magic to play. That previous November, he had learned he was HIV-positive during a routine physical. He’d retired immediately, at just thirty-two. HIV was so stigmatized in 1992—and still is—but back then to such a degree that Australia threatened to boycott rather than play against Magic, on the grounds that just to be close to him would be to risk infection. Would the guys on the team even accept him?

  In the parade, I watched Magic and that mile-long electric smile of his, Scottie Pippen beaming next to him. People said Magic was finished when he retired, and here he was smiling. Again and again, the announcer returned to comment on Magic as athletes from all over the world broke away from their own teams just to be near him. To pat his shoulder, to hug his waist. They were doing everything they could to be close to someone who had been deemed untouchable.

  I felt a single, solitary pulse in my heart. Not a leap, or anything anyone else but me could register, but a sign of life.

  * * *

  The next day, Sunday, the phone rang and rang. One of my longtime friends had gone to a party and told everyone what happened to me, adding details with her imagination when facts were missing. The story was repeated and repeated. With every telling, the bashing of my face with the butt of a gun grew more severe, the images of my trauma more horrible. One constant in every retelling was that it was a Black man who raped me. All of these white people, who had allowed me to walk among them, now gasped that I’d been so damaged “by one of her own people.” People wondered if I’d known him and asked what I was wearing that had invited this to happen.

  I had walked among them, so smug in my assimilation that maybe they thought I deserved to be taken down a peg. Reminded who I was.

  I let the phone ring and focused on the Olympics instead. That Sunday the USA basketball team took on Angola in their opener. Olympic broadcasters were already following every move of the Dream Team, focusing on the stars: Jordan, Magic, Pippen, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing . . . Each was a Black lead in his own storyline, and though NBC packaged each as compelling in the Olympic tradition, they didn’t need to. Each man transcended any production-team vision to own his story of excellence. Unapologetic in their Blackness and stardom, these superstars did nothing to dispel the notion that they thought they were too good and too rich to stay in the Olympic Village. Anyone who questioned this got their answer when any of the players hit Las Ramblas in Barcelona. They were mobbed like gods, worshipped by growing throngs of people literally looking up at their bemused faces. As Americans, they were bringing dominance back to basketball in the Olympics, restoring order with Black excellence, not even three months after L.A. burned in the protests over four officers’ being acquitted of using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. On camera, which was novel then, the cops had struck the twenty-five-year-old with batons at least fifty times, burned his chest with a stun gun, and broke both his right ankle and a facial bone.

  After the acquittal, the prosecuting team proposed a theory: maybe the defense’s playing the videotape over and over again, so often in slow motion, had caused the jurors to simply become “desensitized.” There was no longer any stirring of a collective conscience. This is the norm today, when we see autoplay tweets of Black individuals and families murdered, assaulted, and disrespected on a trauma loop we cannot escape.

  I would propose that to worry people are desensitized is to assume the jurors, and most people
, were ever sensitive to Black pain to begin with.

  Like now, the U.S. was anything but a good place to be Black in 1992, but these larger-than-life Avengers were representing our country. Was this rebranding of America on a global scale problematic? Was white patriarchy trying to show that it loved Black people by lifting up these men? None of that occurred to me at the time. I needed a lifeline, and what I saw was unapologetic Black stardom and perseverance.

  The next evening, July 27, my boyfriend came over with his brother. I had always been so embarrassed by our living room, and now I felt trapped there. It was cheap, econo-luxe without the luxe. The couch had a hole in it for years, one my parents covered with a throw that always had to stay in place.

  At the hospital, my boyfriend had nearly collapsed in tears at the first sight of me. He kept repeating my name, sadder and quieter each time, like he was chained to something that was falling away deeper and deeper into darkness. Me. I couldn’t fully grasp what caused his grief. What percentage of his desolation was that this had happened to me, and how much was it that this had happened to his girlfriend?

  I kept the TV on while he sat on a chair far away from the couch. His brother, an assistant college basketball coach, stood awkwardly in the room until he finally sat. I stared at the screen, and out of the corner of a swollen eye, I could see the brother’s face turning back and forth from the TV to my face. He was here as an ambassador for my boyfriend’s family, who were Greek and Mexican. They were cordial to my face, but my boyfriend made no secret that they called him a nigger lover when I wasn’t around. They had always begged him to dump me, but the brother was here to back up what my boyfriend had to say that day: now that his family saw how heartbroken he was over my rape, they understood this love was real.

  It was like they’d come from a faraway shore to greet me on my desolate island. To bring me the good news that I now mattered. In the face of my trauma, his reaction was what the family needed to see me as human.

  I still wouldn’t look at them. A Gatorade commercial was on, blasting in the room. People running around in the bright sun in the world going on outside the living room. I didn’t know what his brother wanted. Gratitude that my plight stirred something in their consciences? A nigger lover, yes, but this nigger was somehow different.

  The U.S.-Croatia basketball game came on and I was relieved they focused their attention on the screen. This was a big one, with Croatia being the one team that could stand out against the U.S. My boyfriend’s brother talked about the Croatia forward, Toni Kukoč, getting drafted by Chicago, as if I didn’t already know. The general manager, Jerry Krause, was obsessed with Kukoč. This white player from Croatia was going to be the future of the Bulls. The current and future kings of the Bulls, Jordan and Pippen, disagreed. The announcers kept talking about Jordan and Pippen shutting Kukoč out, only letting him get four points the entire game. “Oh, man,” my boyfriend’s brother kept saying.

  “They’re incredible,” I said softly.

  It must have been the first thing I said the whole game, because they looked over at me quickly and the speed of it made me flinch. I resented the sign of weakness, and I had a flicker of anger. What made my boyfriend’s family worthy of defining my worthiness? I asked myself, not ready to ask this out loud.

  Meanwhile, over in Livermore, a fifteen-minute drive from where we sat in the rubble of my life, my rapist was about to strike again. He had been in and out of the Clothestime store at the Pepper Tree Shopping Center during the day, and then, as he had done at my Payless, he returned just at closing. It was slightly before nine o’clock at night, and he got in saying he wanted to buy something for his girlfriend. Once in, he pulled a gun on the two women working there, a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old. Like me, he had them walk in front of him at gunpoint to the backroom, where he ordered them to undress. He raped the nineteen-year-old girl, and sexually assaulted the twenty-year-old.

  The girl he raped convinced him that if they weren’t all out of there by thirty minutes after closing time, an alarm would be triggered and police would come.

  My rapist, now our rapist, fled into the July night.

  Eight miles away, I exhaled when my boyfriend and his brother let themselves out. Eventually, I waited long enough that I thought I might trick myself into falling asleep in my bedroom. I brushed my teeth without looking in the mirror I had studied myself in for years.

  In bed with the lights on, I again smelled the gunpowder from the shot I’d gotten off and missed. I did not close my eyes.

  * * *

  Days later, a manhunt was on. The rapist was photographed at another Payless, and police tied him to a fourteen-day spree of robberies and rapes. He turned out to be a former Payless employee, which explained his understanding of our closing schedule. They staked out his mother’s home and after a few days, he turned himself in. My father told me his name, and I was struck by the fact that it was just a slightly different spelling of a Nebraska Cornhuskers football player I had cheered for. What a terrible, weird coincidence, I thought. It’s my only tie to my rapist’s name. From that moment on, if I heard that name, I thought only of the football player. My rapist’s name was and will always be Rapist. According to a court report, he specialized in robbing Payless shoe stores: “After visiting the shoe stores and making himself known to the clerks, he would return at closing time, rob the clerks at gunpoint, and on some occasions rape a female clerk.”

  The phrasing of “and on some occasions” in relation to rape has stuck with me for its relaxed, minimizing candor.

  My father went to the arraignment. He thought this was a type of revenge—something to bring him peace. I had no such illusion. I stayed home and watched the Olympics.

  On August 1, Gail Devers took her place in lane 2 at the women’s one-hundred-meter dash. Her medical history had made her one of the big Olympics stories leading up to this first race. Just a year before, side effects of treatment for Graves’ disease—an autoimmune disorder of the thyroid—had made her feet so swollen that her doctor told her that if she had walked on them for even two more days, she would have had to have them amputated.

  “And here she is,” an announcer said. There she is, I thought. Her braids were in a ponytail, her brown skin beautiful in the light. I’d already been struck by the women on the USA track and field team, none of them shape-shifting into the smallness of Black American humility. They all had braids, long nails with vibrant colors, outfits cut to win . . . and they were loved.

  The eight women took off, racing to a photo finish in the time it took me to take a breath. The winner was Gail Devers, the woman who once could barely walk. Watching her victory lap, I felt that pull again on my heart.

  “A lot of times in athletics and in life you feel walls closing in and you can’t get out,” she said at the press conference afterward. “Use me as an example. If you believe in yourself, if you have faith in yourself, you can do anything.”

  The walls had not just closed in on me—the very foundation I’d built my life upon had crumbled beneath my feet. Gail Devers extended her hand, invited me to walk on the uncommon ground of excellence. Not just taking steps we thought we never would again, but running. Competing to be great.

  That night my mother sat on the edge of the couch and gingerly brought up the family reunion. On her side, we are part of the Bryant-Fisher lineage, the largest Black extended family in Nebraska. We set down roots in the state in 1902, when Emma Early Bryant-Fisher moved to Omaha as a single mother twice widowed. The second Sunday of every August, all the branches of the family—the “Dozens of Cousins”—gathered in Omaha for what we called a picnic, but it’s a festival. She wanted to go with my older sister, Kelly. She didn’t pressure me to go, but there was an unspoken invitation for me to come along.

  I nodded. I couldn’t possibly think that far ahead.

  Five days after she won the gold medal, I watched Gail Devers start in the hundred-meter hurdles. Here we go, I thought. I was with
her in the lead. Then, on the tenth and final hurdle, she fell, dragging her foot. She somersaulted into the finish line, coming in fifth. They showed the footage over and over again, reveling in the failure of it all until the shock of the fall was gone. But I only saw the last frame of the slo-mo: when she got up on the two feet she’d almost lost.

  * * *

  The Dream Team played their last game the day before the closing ceremonies. The actual game, a rematch with Croatia and Kukoč, was a formality. A setup, really, for the medal ceremony. “I am here and I am dominating,” each man said to me as they played, so skilled they basically took turns at the basket so each could score in a gold medal game. “You are going to see me be great.” They didn’t make that greatness easier to swallow to represent their country. Each would be his full self. Maybe I could be my full self, too. That’s the message that was building in my head.

  During the medal ceremony, these men showed such camaraderie when so much of the world, and certainly the United States, was so frayed, openly rejecting people with HIV and discounting the value of the lives of Black Americans. And here were these Black men embracing each other. The idea came to me, small at first, that we can’t save each other, but perhaps together we share the keys to our own salvation. When we see each other, embrace each other’s greatness, that is freedom, the freedom to be.