by Donna Hylton
In the span of a single week, three different men have taken what little sense of self I had—one of them a man who leads a congregation in faith of God’s goodness, and another who swore an oath to serve and protect all citizens of this city. Two times now, I’ve seen that asking for help is a declaration that I’m alone and vulnerable, and it’s an invitation for more danger. There will be no more trusting, no more fighting back—not only because I’m exhausted of all my strength, but because by now, at age sixteen, I understand:
I’m nothing more than a body to be abused.
3
TWO BIRDS IN A CAGE
There is rarely such thing as true recovery for the girl or woman who’s been raped. There likely will never come a time in her life when the memory of what happened loses its sense of dark surreality, when she doesn’t ask herself who she’d be if she’d never been left alone with that unfortunate person, in that unfortunate moment. Rape is. Once it happens to an individual, the experience now lives and breathes inside them, always. Rape is its own narrative, becoming part of the victim, taking away who she was before. This is something she always must carry.
This series of rapes and what they’ve revealed to me—that there are some people, even seemingly good people, who will hurt you—instills in me a pain and shame that makes it impossible to function for the first few days to follow. I return to the apartment of the well-intentioned neighbor who urged me to talk to the police. Out of her kindness and discretion, she asks nothing about how it went with the detective or what happened at the hospital. She assumes that my silence is connected to whatever happened to me before we went to the police.
I retreat quietly for a few days, staying inside her bedroom until her parents leave for work in the mornings, when I slip out and use the bathroom. Then I return to her bedroom and lie there, the occasional spell of sleep the only break from the memories of what’s happened over the past week looping over… and over… and over in my mind. I ache to see Adrienne, and yet I cannot move. There is no such thing as someone I can trust. Now, everything I thought I knew about the people who are supposed to protect us is gone.
After several days, my friend tells me that her mother thinks it would be a good idea for me to go home.
The seven-year-old in me inquires innocently again: Home? What is home?
While I’m still living in the confusion of what has just happened, there is one thing that’s clear: I can’t be alone anymore. I have someone in this world, and that’s my daughter. She’s only two—she can’t protect me, but she’s the only person who loves me, who needs me, and whose life would be affected if something happened to me. Adrienne and I need each other.
I know that I have to be closer to Adrienne, but to live in the home of my adoptive parents again is not an option. Even if they would be willing to take me in, without a lock on my old bedroom door, I will never sleep in that apartment another night in my life.
The only possible solution I can work out is to find Theresa, a girl who lives in our building in Boynton who was one of the very few children I met when Roy and Daphne first brought me from Jamaica. Theresa is a couple years older than I am, but has always seemed young for her age. Daphne once stated that Theresa was not very “sharp,” and maybe it was a certain lack of awareness about what might have been going on inside our home that made my adoptive parents deem her safe for me to befriend. I’ve always found her soft-spoken and sweet, a true friend to me.
When I ask around the building, I learn that Theresa is living in the apartment of her best friend, a girl named Rita, whom I met through Theresa when we were younger. Where Theresa’s disposition is easygoing and maybe even a little naïve, Rita has always seemed a little harsher—more advanced, street smart. When I visit Rita’s apartment, her mother says I’m welcome to stay awhile. “Is she sure?” I ask Rita, who assures me her mother loves having people in the apartment—she’s Southern, after all. She and Theresa make space for my things inside Rita’s bedroom, which we three will share.
Their late-night girl talk makes me feel like a part of something I’ve never experienced before. They both like fashion and share their wardrobes, encouraging and accessorizing me as I try on Rita’s formfitting dresses and Theresa’s more retro-inspired outfits. Early that fall, the two of them help me prepare for an interview I’ve gotten through the temp agency that finds work for them both. I get a job at Macy’s as a clerical assistant with the head furniture buyer, taking the subway with the rush hour crowd into the city. Each morning before I leave, I run upstairs to the fourth floor to kiss Adrienne, who’s always smiling with a full belly at breakfast time.
Because of the time I spent as a little girl in flea markets and thrift shops with Roy, I have an eye for good quality and an aptitude for the language in the furniture business. The assistant furniture buyer takes note of my interest in the work and suggests that I’d be a strong candidate for the store’s assistant buyer program, where I’d learn about retail merchandising to prepare for an aptitude test in hopes to get on the company’s executive track.
For an eighteen-year-old single mother with her GED, I know this is a big opportunity. I begin to invest myself more in work, traveling to the warehouse in Queens to learn about product from the two assistant buyers and signing up to play a small role in the store’s planning for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
For the first time in my life, I have girlfriends, a paycheck, and a feeling that I fit in. But just as my life is getting in order, it will take one relationship—followed by another—that will begin to take me drastically off track.
On Saturday nights, Rita, Theresa, and I go out dancing at night clubs around the city. This is when I meet Billy, a nineteen-year-old rapper in a group that’s rocketing to fame with a new record and a video on MTV. Billy is confident, flirtatious, and he wins me over, asking me to marry him within a few months of meeting. We wed quickly and I take Adrienne out of Roy and Daphne’s home and move both of us into his apartment in Harlem. Billy’s mom watches Adrienne each day while I go to work and Billy’s group tours the US. I find my daughter and myself with a man in our lives, as well as a home, and in-laws. For the first time, I’m surrounded with family. I place our marriage at the center of my life, putting on fresh bedding and doing Billy’s laundry when he comes home from touring. We have meals and a schedule and a system to our life together when he’s not out on the road or in the studio.
But when Billy returns from a tour in Canada, he rocks this long-awaited sense of stability when he requests that we bring another woman into our bedroom. NO! my heart screams out. Our love is sacred… but I agree, so used to dismissing my instincts and wanting to please him.
In the midst of all this, I learn that I’m pregnant again. “But I’m about to go on tour!” Billy pleads. “You really think this is a good time for us to have a baby?” When I share the news with his mother, she makes it clear that she’s already got enough responsibility on her hands watching Adrienne while I work. “You just turned nineteen, Donna,” she says. “Do you really want to have another baby?”
“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her.
“I do,” she says. “I’ll call the clinic to make the appointment if you’re afraid.” When I ask Billy what he thinks, his feelings are clear. The two of them talk me into terminating the pregnancy.
“This won’t take long,” the nurse tells me as she places a mask over my mouth and nose.
But I don’t believe in abortions. I don’t mind what other women do with their bodies, but I don’t want to go through with this. “No,” I tell the nurse, blinking softly with wooziness. “I don’t want to do this.”
But the doctor moves in to stand over me. “It’s already done,” he tells me.
Instantly, my body begins to react to the news with the same shock as my emotions do. I shake with fever and begin to vomit, and the staff grows concerned because I’m bleeding so heavily that I’ve lost the color in my face. Everything about this decisi
on was wrong. I can never, ever give this child his life back.
Weeks later, as I’m dealing with an infection from complications during the procedure, Billy comes to me and delivers the worst blow of all: he asks me for a divorce.
On top of the loss, the grief, the disappointment in myself, I feel stupid for having let my heart hope for more.
You are nothing, I remember. Nobody will ever love you.
Even the hurt of the divorce doesn’t unravel my life as much as the abortion does. I cannot take another life… but after I do, I cannot live with myself for having done so.
In the second half of 1984 as I’m approaching my twentieth birthday, I enter a period of the worst self-judgment that I’ve ever felt in my life. My body is no longer carrying the miracle that was my baby. Instead, my psyche is carrying the combined weight of guilt, shame, sadness, grief. In my heart, I’ve always been able to hold on to that little piece of light—the hope that God was holding a space in my future for safety, and love. For happiness. But now, after my second child is gone, everything that anyone has ever told me about why they were abusing me is really true to me: I’m nothing. I’ve deserved all of this.
The moment that the pregnancy’s been terminated, a spiritual warfare begins inside of me. I’ve committed an act against God. Not even He will love me anymore. I am still that alien, that lost little girl unworthy of any other person’s love… and now unworthy even of God’s love.
Emotionally, mentally, I spin and spiral down. I can’t sleep, but I can’t get myself out of bed. I stop showing up to work at Macy’s, and soon, my manager calls Rita’s house to inform me that I no longer have the job.
Finally Rita and Theresa step in with support to help me apply for another position through the temp agency. “It might do you some good to get out,” they say. Just as the holiday season is about to begin, the agency places me in the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift at a gift shop in the lobby of the Milford Plaza hotel in Times Square. With holiday decorations lighting up this section of the city and shoppers and visitors filling the streets, I find that this atmosphere lifts my spirits slightly from my grieving. The assistant manager at my new job, Dalida, is also incredibly kind. We bond quickly, and, craving as much connection in my life as I can get, I quickly begin to regard her like a sister.
During a quiet afternoon as we page through a fashion magazine together from the shop’s newsstand, admiring images of Beverly Johnson, Dalida tells me that she’s been doing some modeling on the side. Modeling, I think. Yeah, that’s what I want to do. Maybe modeling could give me something positive to get excited about. If I were a model, I would actually feel beautiful without people having access enough to touch me or take advantage of me. Dalida says that after you have a good portfolio of photos, you can get booked for jobs that pay thousands of dollars. If this is true, then I could finally provide Adrienne with a really good life.
Dalida brings her portfolio to work to show me how she’s started to book a few jobs. She explains that the key to booking work is to find a good photographer. Not wanting to bother her with all my questions, I begin to do some research on my own to try to find a photographer whose work I might be able to afford.
In January 1985, after Times Square has quieted down following the holidays, Dalida asks me whether I’d be willing to change my shift and work 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. It would make it easier for me to spend time with Adrienne in the day, but there’s one aspect of the shift change that I’m not as enthusiastic about. “I won’t get to see you anymore,” I tell Dalida.
“Girl, when have you ever seen me go home on time?” she asks me. “You know I always stay late. You’ll still see me almost every day.”
I begin the night shift with another girl, named Maria, who’s just recently been hired. With zero makeup and a wardrobe that reminds me of a librarian, Maria seems inhibited, unassuming, and dowdy. “Why are you talking to her?” Dalida whispers to me late one afternoon when she’s working past the end of her shift.
“Because I work with her,” I whisper back.
“Just be careful,” Dalida says. “There’s something about her I don’t like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s creepy. Something about her doesn’t add up.”
I know Dalida is smart, but seeing Maria as an outcast makes me want to befriend her even more. I know how it feels to be the person whom people treat differently.
When it’s just Maria and me working at the store, I learn that she’s three years older than I am. Her mother is from the Philippines, while her father, from Italy, owns a very successful business in Southeast Asia. Her father sounds powerful—he’s friends with several world leaders, Maria says, and she shows me a letter that the pope personally wrote to her family. She also shares photographs from fancy family vacations, like when she toured the pyramids in Egypt. I’m awestruck by all of it, and curious to know more. “Whatever brought you to New York?” I ask her.
In response, Maria opens up to share some of her struggles with me. She’s an only child and her father is very traditional Italian, so she feels that she has to prove herself just because she’s a girl. “That’s why I came to New York,” she says. “To show him I can make it here.” But she’s having some trouble in her personal life—Maria is married and has twin toddlers, but her husband wants a divorce.
As conversations between young women go, all this prompts me to reveal to her some of my story. I tell Maria about the difficulties I’ve been facing, like my own separation. She knows about my daughter, who will turn four in February. I confide in her how hard life was with Alvin, and how I’m working hard to make a better life for Adrienne, who lives with my adoptive parents—another complicated relationship. I open up about some of the things I experienced inside Roy and Daphne’s home when I was younger, and the fact that I ran away to Philadelphia and had to take a job parking cars to try to survive. “So you know how to drive?” she asks me.
“A little.”
“Me too.” There’s an air of shared satisfaction between us, two young, independent women working to make it on our own in New York.
A couple times after our shift ends, the two of us go out for a bite to eat. Maria listens intently when I share background about my life with her. I can also relate to a lot of things she’s experienced, including how difficult it is to please parents when they make you feel like you’re never good enough, and how tough it is to create a sense of family in this city when you have roots in another country.
One night, Maria flips through bridal magazines from our gift shop’s newsstand. “Why are you looking at those?” I ask her. She tells me that she’s recently met a rich Swiss banker, and he’s asked her to marry him. A Swiss banker?! Her whole life is like a fairy tale, I think. If I hang out with her, maybe that could be me one day. “I’ll help you plan your wedding!” I tell her. We browse the magazines, and I tell her my dream is to be a model. “But Dalida says you have to pay a good photographer to take your pictures,” I tell her.
“You need pictures?” says Maria. “I think I can help you.”
“You can?”
“Sure,” she says. “My godfather can help.”
Then for the next few weeks, Maria and I don’t cross paths. “Your friend Maria called,” Rita tells me one night at home.
“She called here?” I scan my memory. Did I ever give her my phone number? “What did she say?”
“She left her phone number.”
“Rita said you called!” I tell Maria the next day. “I was wondering where you’ve been.”
“I’ve been to London to see the queen!” she says. “I’ll tell you all about it—let’s meet at the Sherry-Netherland hotel on Fifth Avenue,” she says. “Then we’ll go out from there.”
The Sherry-Netherland sits at 59th Street, just diagonal from the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. From the entrance, I gawk inside at the lobby with its ornate crown molding and fresco on the ceiling. Under the black awning with a fancy gold clo
ck, doormen help guests out of their taxis and limousines. I try to stay out of the way in the swirl of sights and activity as I wait for Maria while a gorgeous woman climbs into a car in front of me. I stand stunned for a moment: That’s Diana Ross!
Just then, another dolled-up woman approaches me. She’s wearing jeans and high heels, a short fur jacket, and makeup. I stare at her, confused. She starts laughing, and that’s when I recognize her: it’s Maria. “I’ve been standing here, watching you look for me all this time.”
“Oh my God,” I tell her. “Look at you!” She’s so dressed up and glamorous that I didn’t recognize her. She’s a completely different person than the version of the Maria I know from work.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
When we’re seated inside a diner, she begins to tell me about her time away. “I saw my father,” she says. “And guess what he told me?”
“What’s that?”
“He told me he’s proud of me.”
“That’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Now I have to really prove myself. What about you—what have you been up to?”
“Last week, I went to the Wilhelmina modeling agency.”
“How’d that go?”
“They said they like my look, now I just have to come up with the money to pay a photographer.”
“How much do you need?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars.”
“That’s easy,” she says. “We’ll call my godfather. Next week, come see me at my place in Queens. We can talk about how he can help you.”
The following week, we meet briefly at a donut shop in Queens, where from her interactions with the staff, it’s clear Maria is a regular. After we pay, we walk to her building where she lets me into an apartment—a small studio, much more than I’d ever be able to afford on my own. The living room is set up with a little table for dining right off of the kitchenette, and there’s an area that’s partitioned off with a curtain, presumably to be a bedroom. I try to calculate the details of Maria’s life—her temp job, her marriage, her wealthy father—to determine how she’s able to pay for her own place. “So,” she says, interrupting my thoughts as she takes a seat at the kitchen table. “Tell me more about the modeling.”
