Finding Me (24 page)

“Then I’ll buy her some more clothes,” he told me. “Stop making her that crap.” He was such a selfish bastard. On one hand, I loved having Jocelyn in the house. It gave me something else to think about besides my agony. It brought me joy in the middle of a darkness that felt like it would never end. But on the other hand, I was very sad for her. When you’re born into slavery, what kind of life can you really have? So it was a big blessing for us but a huge curse for her, all at the same time. I dreamed that one day that innocent little girl could be free.

I dreamed the same thing for all four of us. I kept seeing Joey’s face in my mind, and that’s what kept me alive. I couldn’t leave him alone on this earth without him knowing me. I kept hearing his little voice in my mind, saying, “Mommy, I need you.” That helped me have the strength to go on when I felt like giving up.

Most nights I’d fall asleep praying.

Dear God … I will not let this tragedy bring me to my knees or define me all my life. I’ve got the right path in my sight. I don’t want to live forever feeling this pain all over again. I just wish it will go away and never come back.

What doesn’t kill me can only make me stronger in my heart. Death may seem like an easy solution, but I think surviving with my head held high is better than lying with my head hung low. I’m staring out of the window of pain waiting for my perfect ending … many days feel like miles of torture in my broken heart. Do you feel my pain ...

22
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Juju & Chelsea

Why must I go through so much pain just to get back to you? My heart fills with so much hate that tears me down … I just hope to be me again, to live so free.

This is for all the women who were told they were nothing … don’t let them tear you down or destroy your heart. You are somebody, don’t let them tell you any different … I really deserve to smile even if the pain is too unbearable.

W
HEN YOU'RE LOCKED UP
, time does something funny—it seems to stop. One way I could tell the days were still passing was by watching Jocelyn. Almost overnight she grew from a tiny bundle into the cutest toddler. The dude never kept her in chains. That’s why she could sometimes waddle back and forth between the pink room and the white one.

“Hey, sweetie!” I would say when I saw her come through the connecting door. She smiled a lot. She always had on a cloth diaper. Sometimes it was sagging a little because she had peed in it.

“How you doin’ today?” I’d say, scooping her up into my arms. After Gina and I were moved into the pink room, I got to hold her a lot more, especially when Amanda was downstairs either in the dude’s room or taking a shower. By then, as I said earlier, he had started letting us shower once a week. That felt like a luxury after having only one shower during my whole first year in the house.

Jocelyn was around one year old when she began making sounds like she was trying to talk. By the time she was one and a half, she was saying short words, like “Mama!” So the dude came into our room one day and told us, “I’m gonna give you different names—I don’t want her to know your real names.” Gina and I looked at each other.

“Well, I’m not using any name you give me,” I told him. “I’ll pick one myself—I’ll be Lee.” That was Joey’s middle name.

“Choose something else, ’cause that’s got to do with my kids,” he told me. I guess one of his children had “Lee” somewhere in their name.

“How about Angel?” I said.

He gave me a mean look. “You definitely don’t look like no angel,” he told me.

“Well, then, I’ll just call myself Juju,” I said. I picked that name because I always loved Jujubes candy.

“Fine,” he said. He turned to Gina. “So what’s your name gonna be?”

She shrugged, and I gave her a couple of ideas. “How about Hazel?” I said. “Or Chelsea?”

“I like Chelsea,” said Gina. So from that day forward, whenever Jocelyn was around, we could only use our fake names: Juju and Chelsea.

In 2009, when Jocelyn was about two, a miracle happened: the dude unlocked Gina and me. He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart. It was because Jocelyn was getting old enough to understand what was happening around her. She would come up to the side of my and Gina’s bed and point at our chains. Sometimes she even pulled at them.

“Juju lock?” she would try to say.

“Get her out of there!” the dude would yell if he saw her touching the chains. “That’s not good for her to see.” He cared more about his little girl seeing those chains than he did about having locked us up in them.

Around that time he started to take us downstairs more often. On the weekends he sometimes let us stay in the kitchen or the living room for a few hours.

“I can trust you more now,” he told us. I went back to thinking about some ways we could try to get out.

I talked to Gina about it. “Maybe we can get out of the back door when he and Amanda are on the couch talking,” I said.

She looked at me but didn’t answer. That’s because both of us knew the truth: he had a gun, and if we tried to run, he wouldn’t hesitate to use it. And even if we did get out, he would murder Amanda and Jocelyn. The only way our plan might work was if we were all in it together.

Sometimes the dude would leave our bedroom doors unlocked, but that was just another one of his tests. Not even a minute after he left he would sneak back upstairs and stick his head in the door. He usually didn’t say a word; he’d just look to see if any one of us had moved an inch. Every now and then he would throw out another one of his threats: “If you show me that I can’t trust you, you’ll pay for it.”

He kept his gun on his hip most of the time, but to be honest with you, he really didn’t have to. By 2008 we were trained. After years of being in prison a crazy thing starts to happen: the locks move from off of your wrists and your ankles and up to your brain. Did I still want to get the hell out of his dungeon so I could reunite with my Joey? Not a day passed that I didn’t think about that. At the time I had been there for more than six years. But after you’ve been raped, humiliated, beaten, and chained for so long, you get into the habit of doing what you’re told. Your spirit starts crumbling. You start not to be able to imagine anything different. And it feels like your captor is all-seeing and all-knowing.

With my wings out wide I’m ready to fly … when I close my eyes, all I want to see is you ... When will our dreams become real so we can live our lives out loud, instead of in the dark where we don’t belong?

“O
OOH
, I
JUST
LOVE
her big ass,” the dude said with a nasty leer.

All of us, including the baby, were in the living room with him. He made us gather around to watch one of his favorite shows,
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
. Kim Kardashian was on the screen. “I wish I could just bend that girl over and do it to her right now,” he said.

I had gotten so used to hearing all of the foul things he said that I didn’t even look up. Jocelyn, who was almost three by then, was running around the living room and giggling.

After the show was over, the dude made me massage his back.

“I’m sore,” he told me. Around that time he had started to ask me to massage him on a lot of nights.
Yuck.
When I was pressing my hands into his back, the cell phone rang. The dude answered and said something in Spanish. He then hung up real quick. “It was that woman again,” he said, as if we cared.

All week the dude had been telling us that he’d met some woman at a nightclub. I guess he thought she was hot. “I don’t know why she keeps calling here,” he added.

The phone rang again. The dude answered and said something else in Spanish. He seemed pissed off. Then he handed the phone to Amanda. “Tell her to stop calling here.” He glared at her threateningly. Amanda stared at him for a moment and then did as she was told. He yanked the phone out of her hands and hung up.

My mind raced.
Would I have had the nerve to beg the woman
to call 911 with the dude standing right there?
I wasn’t sure. I flopped down on the couch, and a tear rolled down my cheek. “Juju mad?” Jocelyn asked when she saw me crying. I wasn’t mad—just horribly frustrated that we were so trapped.

A moment later the dude forced me get behind him again and keep massaging. I dug my fingertips into his skin, but I really wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and strangle him to death.

Later on in the room Gina and I whispered about what happened. One thing had become very clear to me: if I was ever going to break out of this prison, I would have to do it myself.

Vibrant butterfly full of life, every time I see one it reminds me of how precious life can truly be, to be able to fly so free … wherever she pleases with no cares in the world. I wait for that special moment in time when I get to live my life freely too. No more worries, pain or tears, just happiness and laughter … One special day I’ll get to live my life just like that butterfly and no longer feeling blue inside.

23
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Mustard

God is not ready for me yet. What do I do when my world is crumbling down and everything that surrounds me disappears along with love that turns into hate … everything that I once did, I can’t do anymore because my insides are torn from the body.

W
HEN JOCELYN WAS
around two and a half or three, the dude began taking her out of the house. He also began going to church every Sunday. I think he was Catholic—that, or Pentecostal, which were the two kind of churches I heard him mention.

“I’ve gotta put some religion in my daughter’s life,” he told me one afternoon. “She’s gotta know about God.” A little while before that, the hypocrite had been thrusting himself inside of me.
Whatever, prick
.

Sunday was the one day a week that he bathed—that was when I heard the pipes rattling in the bathroom. The dude liked to show Jocelyn off. He seemed happy to have another child back in his house and in his life. “My family got taken away from me,” he often told me, “and now I have a new one.” In his crazy mind he thought he was a good parent. That was one of the reasons he took Jocelyn to church. I guess he thought it was safe for people to meet her, because no one was looking for her. There was no record of her birth; the world didn’t know she existed.

The dude also had the nerve to introduce Jocelyn to his band. If you ask me, that was another stupid move—kind of like when he brought his little grandson upstairs. “I’m gonna take Jocelyn down and let her meet the guys,” I overheard him tell Amanda one Saturday. At the time I didn’t know how he explained where Jocelyn came from. Years later in a news report I read that he told people Jocelyn was the daughter of his girlfriend. Maybe those people believed him. Maybe they didn’t. Even if they suspected something fishy, they never called the cops to have it checked out.

Just like us, Jocelyn was kept inside most of the time. The only difference was that she was free to run up and down the stairs on her own, if the dude was at home. When he got back from work he unlocked Amanda’s door.

“I’m gonna take her downstairs for a while,” he said. I don’t know what they did down there—it sounded like he was sometimes watching cartoons with her. My greatest fear was that after she got older he would start to mess with her the same way he did the rest of us.

As Jocelyn grew, I felt more and more protective of her. Losing Joey was one of the most difficult things I ever went through—and spending time with Jocelyn took away some of my heartache. The two of us had so much fun. The dude had bought her all kinds of games and toys. She even had an Xbox and a DVD player so she could watch children’s videos. I got to see her for about an hour a day, usually when the dude was at work. When she was allowed to, Jocelyn would come sit in my room and color.

“Look, Juju!” she would say, pointing to a picture in her coloring book. She colored the same way Joey did, with crayon marks all over the page.

“That’s so pretty!” I would tell her. One time I helped her draw a picture of Hello Kitty. I drew it first, and then she tried to copy it. “You did a great job!” I told her. She gave me a huge smile. “You’re such a big girl now!”

Using tape, I put her pictures up on my wall, right next to the row of cards I had drawn to celebrate Joey’s birthdays. One of my walls was filled with pictures. Sometimes, if the dude was in a pissed-off mood, he would come in there and rip my stuff down. I always started over and put it all back up.

For the most part the dude tried to hide his abuse of us from his daughter. I don’t think he wanted her to see him as the evil man he was. But there were times when he hit me in front of her. One evening we were all down in the kitchen. Amanda and Gina were making our usual rice and beans, and Amanda was mashing some up to feed to Jocelyn.