Healing

It was April 2002, the last day of GLBT Pride week at the college where I teach. We gathered as usual for a celebration potluck at the home of my friend, who co-advises the GLBTA organization. We were tired but joyful--proud of the excellent work the students had done to bring nationally-known speakers and performers to campus. As twilight began to fall, the students left in small groups, planning their weekends. I remember telling them to be safe and, jokingly, saying “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That shouldn’t restrict us to too much,” one of them joked back.

I have a picture in my mind of us sitting in that circle; I can still hear the deep laughter of one of the co-chairs, Jen, and see another member, Dustin, running his fingers through his hair as he paused dramatically during a funny story. In this picture, they are innocent, untouched by anything hateful or harmful, proud of who they are, and safe.

I can see the big prairie sky turning from blue to pink to blue-black as the students trickled out the front door.

I wasn’t there later that night when Jen, Dustin, and Dustin’s boyfriend decided they were too tired to go out and chose instead to go to the local grocery store to rent a movie. I wasn’t there to hear their laughter in the car, and yet, I can hear it—Dustin’s a little higher than a typical guy’s laugh, the earthy, deep, short giggle in Jen’s throat. I don’t know what movie they were looking for, but maybe that’s what they talked about as they rolled out of the car, Dustin’s hand in his boyfriend’s, oblivious to any sideways glances of the teenagers parked at the McDonald’s, one of the local teen hangouts in our small town, which shares a parking lot with the grocery. Or maybe they were still talking about Pride week, the giant flag they’d unrolled on the student center’s outside wall, the image of the campus’ chancellor dangling from the end of the rope when the flag stubbornly refused to fall.

Whatever it was they were talking about, according to the interview records, they didn’t hear the high school kids by the magazine rack, who were making comments about the men’s linked hands and the quick kiss Dustin gave his boyfriend after he made a joke. They did hear the reprimand of a community member named Katie, who told the kids to get lost, get over it, mind their own business. She talked to Jen, Dustin, and his boyfriend after, explaining what had been said, what she’d said back. This did not faze them.

And then they rented the movie, got into their car, and drove away. It didn’t take long to figure out they were being followed. A car pulled up beside them, windows down (it was, as I recall, a mild April, nothing like this year’s snowy one), the boys inside shouting words like “buttfucker” and “faggot.” They shouted for Jen, Dustin, and his boyfriend to “get out of our straight town.”

The three of them, unnerved, drove back to campus and parked their car. By then, the other car seemed to have disappeared, and for a moment they felt safe again, even laughed it off. Then, as they were crossing the street to get back to their dorm, the car sped up and drove toward them as if in an attempt to run them over.

This was the first of a series of hate crimes aimed at the GLBT community in our small town. It was also, for me, the one with the most impact. (I have written about it before in this blog). On the positive side, it was the first time the mayor, police force, and Human Rights Commission got together to discuss how to make the community safer for GLBT people. On the negative side, a spiral of silence began to surround the boys, and they were never caught—even though the police are certain of at least one of their identities, nearly certain of the other’s. Parents refused interviews, kids at the high school said they didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Eventually, the case was closed.

Both of our student victims were gone within a year. Neither finished college. And this week, one of them, who now lives in LA, came back to find some closure.

It was good to see her. She’d had a rough run of it over the last six years, but is now doing incredibly well. She looked the same, except that she could make eye contact and was a little more maturely dressed (though, as my daughter pointed out, still very fashionable) and clearly much more confident.

We had some good, long talks. She got to meet my daughter. She got copies of the records, including more than 10 interviews with high school kids and their parents. She discovered one of the boys admitted to doing the yelling but was never charged with harassment because the police believed the driver, whom he would not name, had committed the “only criminal act,” as a good-natured, well-meaning police officer explained to us when we met with him in the giant, 70’s-style atrocity that is our police building and courthouse.

Later, on my home computer, we looked up the harassment law and realized he could have been charged. I felt like I’d been a terrible advocate, missing such an obvious point. But it is now too late to file charges: even if the records did not contain black permanent marker slashes over the last name of every interviewee, six years have passed, and according to law, a civil case must be brought within six years.

As night fell on her last day here, Jen, my daughter and I went to the grocery store where the crime had begun. We stood silently in front of the movies.

“It’s just a store,” Jen said, but she was clearly unnerved. She said she wanted to walk around the store for awhile, to try to remember some of the good things that had happened there. “I don’t want my only memory of this place to be that night,” she said. My daughter and I waited—and waited. After awhile, I got scared—where was Jen, what had happened? A few nearly impossible scenarios flew into my mind—someone had recognized her, maybe some of those boys-turned-men were in the store again. But then, she was back, saying she was ready to drive away.

We drove the same way they had driven that night, in silence, down the small access road that goes from the store to the main road, past Subway, past the cemetery. But when we got to the turn—the place where the car had pulled up beside them, where the boys had screamed their hateful words—the road was blocked.

“I can’t help but think this is a sign,” I said into the silence, which my daughter was prayerfully respecting. Nobody responded. I circled back another way, around the campus, past the horse barn, past the baseball courts, eventually landing in the same space where, according to the records Jen had received, they had parked that night.

School is out, and the lot was empty. We got out and walked toward the road. “Here’s where it happened, where we crossed,” Jen said, and we paused while she lit a candle and put it on the ground. “Everything looks different,” she said. “I thought we’d run up a hill to get to the dorm, but there’s no hill, just a tiny embankment.” She turned to me. “Did they do something here?” she asked, and I shook my head.

Memory is faulty when it comes to details. When I remember the home of my childhood, the room where my mother died, for instance, it is giant in my memory, the red-orange carpet searingly bright. When I went to that same room the day my father was moving out after losing everything he owned, I saw an empty, too-white, tiny space; it was hard to imagine my mother’s hospital bed had ever fit there.

Of course, just as the loss of my mother is deeply imprinted in my heart, even if the room’s details are lost to me, what happened to Jen that night, the feelings she had, will be with her forever. That is how trauma works—memories fade into imagined spaces too large to hold the details (small embankments become hills we struggled to climb; small rooms become spaces giant and bright enough to contain a mother’s death), but emotions remain.

My friend put a flower on the road next to the candle. She read a beautiful poem she’d written about the innocent, idealistic young woman who had died that night inside her, and how she was now reclaiming her, how she would take her with her when she left.

“What happened to the girl?” my daughter asked, confused by the poem.

“Nothing,” I said firmly. “She’s still alive, inside Jen.” My friend nodded.

Then I spoke about the joy and idealism of that afternoon, the pure wonder of finishing a successful pride week, of celebrating who we are. I spoke of how proud I was of my friend, and my daughter, for their willingness to move forward, to find ways to effect change in the world despite the trauma they have experienced.

We all looked up at the road, imagining the car waiting on the corner for Jen and her friends to cross the street, the calculation involved in that act. I imagined Jen just hours before that car turned the corner, remembered her deep laugh, her eyes looking directly into mine, her political resolve to make this town a better place for everyone.

Then I thought of her the next time I saw her, clearly broken, unable to look me, or anyone, in the eye. She is bright and was an excellent student, but it has taken her years to find her way back to what others would call a “normal” life. She still hasn’t finished college, though she’s thinking now of going back. Dustin, too, faced several years in an abusive relationship and other hardships, but, like Jen, he is heroically getting his life back on track (he recently reconnected with me via e-mail).

Both of them truly believe they almost died that night. The fear is palpable in the interview transcripts that happened a week later, when the police asked them, over and over, if they were still afraid. Yes, they answered again and again. Yes.

In one of the interviews, one of the boys who admitted to being the car but would not reveal the identity of the driver responded, when asked if he’d been trying to kill anyone, “No. If we had wanted to kill them, we wouldn’t have done it in the middle of town.”

A chilling sentence, when one considers the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998. Then again, more recently, Lawrence King was murdered in his own high school—apparently high school boys have moved from dragging their victims to the outskirts of town to pulling out guns in their middle school computer labs when they feel threatened by another person’s sexual orientation.

I kept staring at that corner, but I couldn’t imagine the car turning toward us. I breathed in deeply. We were safe. The road was quiet; there were orange blockades blocking our view of the place the boys had turned. “We had to come back here by another road, because we’re different people,” I said. “And we’re going to leave here by another road, too, because after this ceremony, we aren’t who we were the last time we came.”

I wanted to say again that I was sorry—sorry I hadn’t done more to push the county attorney to press charges, sorry I hadn’t done more to help Jen, and Dustin, stay in school. But that night, I also forgave myself for everything I hadn’t done. Now that I’m a parent, I am even more aware of my own failures—how I so often fail to live as lovingly or heroically or thoughtfully as I want to live, how I so often don’t show as much compassion as I want to show—but I am learning, too, to say I am sorry, and then to move on.

What is harder if I’m also even more aware of the power of words and actions to hurt as well as to heal. But I have to forgive myself, as well as those who hurt me, and move forward.

It is hard to collectively forgive those who hate us enough to want to hurt us, but Jen and I and my daughter did our best that night.