“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech … that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.”1 – bell hooks

She walks to the bus stop and sits on the bench. The 12-year-old girl is making her way home after a school ski trip, so she patiently awaits the arrival of the 28. It usually comes frequently, but strangely enough—not today. As she waits, she whips out a book from her bulging backpack, which overflows with dozens of novels, loose papers, and anything else you can imagine. Packed beyond capacity, the bag probably weighs more than her, so she nearly buckles under its weight. She’s a bit of a hoarder with an urge to keep everything at her disposal. If you stay ready, you don’t gotta get ready. But this time, nothing could have prepared her for what was about to happen.

Now, it might seem odd for a child to carry books to a bus stop just in case they get bored. But this child is always reading—any little free time she has, she reads. When her mom asks her what she wants for Christmas, every year without failure or hesitation, she responds with a list of novels. This then swiftly prompts her mom to tease her and say, “Books are not real presents, I can buy you books any day!” But she knows her mother will buy them anyway. Her parents don’t allow her to go out much, so books offer a world of adventure within the comfort of her own home. Her current book comes from The Land of Stories. She owns the entire series and has read almost every volume. Her excitement begins to bubble as she flips the cover to page one of The Mother Goose Diaries. However, she barely makes it halfway through the page when a man approaches.

He’s a middle-aged Black man. She finds it peculiar that he sits right next to her on the bench, but she pays him no mind and continues reading. However, much to her dismay, he proceeds to address her, asking about the book. For the sake of cordiality, she answers, but concisely. She again tries to get back to her book, but soon realizes that that won’t be possible. And of all days, the bus HAD to be late today. The 28 is the most frequent and popular bus in Boston, so why does it decide to pull this mess on this. specific. day. Talk about poor timing.

“Gimme a kiss.” An alert sounds off in her mind; this is a dangerous situation. She must’ve misheard the man because, although she did find him annoying and a bit intrusive for a stranger, she didn’t peg him as a threat. He inches closer and the armrest becomes the only barrier between them. She is physically frozen, but her mind races a million miles per hour assessing her current predicament and looking for an escape. What can she say or do that’ll keep her safe, but will also put an end to this? She decides to tread lightly because one of his hands rests in his pocket, so she can’t tell if he has a weapon. She lets out a faint awkward laugh to lighten the mood, but it does not work as a deterrent, and before she can even register what is happening, his lips effortlessly engulf hers. The pungent taste of liquor consumes her as he drenches her face in saliva. His hands slowly slither up, around, and all over her body, overpowering her petite core while she remains a lifeless shell in his constrictive arms. When he finally surrenders her lips and relinquishes his touch, she slowly stands up, gathers her belongings, and hoists her heavy bag onto her back. But before she leaves, she turns to him and reassuringly says, with an unsuspecting smile, “Don’t worry I’ll be right back, I just gotta go do something really quick.” She has no intention of even looking back at that bus stop; she will wait for the bus at the school building instead. However, she doesn’t make it 20 feet away from the bench when the man stands up and crosses the street never to be seen again. He knows what he did.

My fault … Tell no one … Deep breath … Don’t cry … Take it to the grave … Nothing happened.

But who is she?

I am her, she is me. She is Bermina Marseille Chery. We are one and the same.

In that 45-second walk back to the school, I devised a plan to never speak of it to a single soul, but the terror in my eyes had other plans, and my mortified face sought to say everything that I couldn’t in that moment. They screamed with the specific aim to broadcast our secret to everyone. And they succeeded.

Is it a blessing or a curse that my face reacts with expressions before my brain can process them? She speaks before my mouth does and reveals the secrets that my heart wants to keep close and that my mind seeks to conceal and compartmentalize. Ultimately, she outed me. I guess two things can be true at the same time, so maybe it’s both a blessing—because no one should be made to shoulder such a burden on their lonesome—and a curse—because I was not ready.

I was not ready to confront my preparedness to protect a sexual predator simply because he was Black.

“Do you remember what he looked like, or what he had on?”

“No.”

I didn’t lie though; I honestly couldn’t recall. Just mere moments after the incident, the recollections played in a blurred loop. I could only remember what he did to me and how it made me feel, nothing more. However, I knew that even if I did, I wouldn’t have said anything. But why? I was a child that was just violated by an adult in the most egregious way, yet my first instinct was to protect him. Why did I instinctively choose to protect this man who just harmed me? Sadly, this phenomenon is nothing new. Black women often feel the need to protect Black men even after having been wronged by them. Take Megan Pete, more commonly known as Megan Thee Stallion, for example. Meg is a famous Black Grammy Award-winning rapper. Although she has had multiple chart-topping hits and received a plethora of accolades, even she cannot escape this instinctual need to protect. In 2020, after leaving a party, a verbal altercation ensued between Meg and, another well-known rapper, Tory Lanez. Lanez escalated the situation when he proceeded to take out a gun and shoot her, wounding her feet. When the police arrived at the scene, instead of telling the officers that Lanez shot and injured her, she lied and said she stepped on glass. While recounting the events of that night, in exasperation she stated, “I tried to save this nigga. Even though he shot me, I tried to spare him.”2 Ultimately, she put the safety of Tory, a Black man, above her own by acting as his safeguard from the police and the potential violence they could have inflicted upon him.

Megan’s response strikingly parallels mine in the sense that we acted in solidarity with our race rather than our gender. Like Meg, I felt I had to protect a Black man from the American justice system; the system that has arbitrarily looted and discarded the livelihoods of Black men from its inception and continues to do so today. Police practices combined with legal policies resulted in the systematically disproportionate severe treatment of Black Americans within the criminal justice system.3 Knowing this, it didn’t matter that the man at the bus stop violated me and infringed upon my safety because the societal structures in place would likely do worse by him than he could ever have done to me. Therefore, as a Black person myself, I felt it incumbent upon me to guard the life of another. It just so happened that forgetting his attire and appearance, though unintentional, enabled me to do so.

However, this begs the question: who then protects Black women and women altogether? Why did I readily put the protection and safety of my race above my gender? How can I justify that? Black women, like Megan and me, feel a deep burning desire to protect Blackness even in its criminality, and we must unpack that. Why is this the case? Race as we know it merely exists as a social construct that holds no biological or scientific basis, but it feels deeper than that.4 The connection I feel to other Black people courses through my veins and pumps through my blood as if to imply a biological connection. The sanctity, therefore, of Blackness transcends that of makeshift constructs and creates a family. An unspoken support system is formed to replicate the one that society never granted us. However, this support can morph into a form of violence when practiced in extremes, and the protection of Blackness in its criminality exists as an example of such. It’s counterproductive because it poses a direct threat to the sanctitude of Blackness and that of other identities outside of race. Therefore, in our perceived protection of Blackness, we undermined it, in part, because we neglected our own safety in the process. Are we not Black as well?

With that said, what becomes of the moral obligations surrounding this situation as they pertain to me? To be frank, I considered shielding a criminal from the eyes of justice, so does that make me a criminal as well? I pondered upon harboring a fugitive in the quarters of my mind and withholding the evidence needed to capture him. In a sense, I contributed in a hypothetical form of obstruction of justice. Therefore, if I could think of knowingly protecting a sexual predator and was willing to act upon it had I been given the chance, how can I consider myself a good person with an adept moral compass? If anything, I am just as culpable as he is. I completely disregarded the physical, mental, and psychological well-being of all women for the sake of saving the future of one man. My lenient thought process, if acted upon, would have made me an accomplice in his potential future violations of women; if it hadn’t already. I am both a Black person and a woman and the convergence of these two identities meet at a crossroads which obliges me to pick a side. At that moment, I abandoned my womanhood in favor of my Blackness. I left women to fight and defend themselves against the dangers of this man alone. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”5 Although said silence existed solely as a hypothetical configuration of my imagination, or a fleeting invasive thought, by these standards, it still maintained its detrimental effect. But wait … it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do this to myself, it was done to me, yet I continue to let him off the hook without giving myself the same due diligence. I never resented him, nor did I seek vengeance; I always wished him the best. However, I didn’t grant myself the same clemency. HIS assault towards ME became less about HIM and the implications of HIS actions and more about the implications of my inaction in that moment. I faced the repercussions for the actions of another, so the real question becomes: how can I in this situation be classified as a bad person? In reality, only I assigned myself this designation.

I will never forget what my father told me that day after the incident. In utter disbelief about what transpired, he said, “Gwosè valiz sa a ou genyen an, pouki sa w pat frappe l ave l!” This loosely translates to, “Your bag is so big, why didn’t you hit him with it!?!” I keeled over in a gut-clenching fit of laughter for the first time that day. Unbeknownst to him, this phrase now encompasses how I maneuver through life. It has become a motto of mine that reminds me to combat adversity head-on. Although this looks different for everyone, to me it means speaking out about my experience and this essay works as a means for me to do just that. After six years, I finally garnered the courage to publicly relay my story. When I previously spoke out, it was against my will because my body language betrayed me, but now I do so out of my own volition: to reclaim my story and purpose. I’m not the same 12-year-old little girl anymore, I’m grown. And although I may not have all the answers, what I do know now is that the protection of Black people and women is not mutually exclusive. Protecting predators poses a threat to both groups and my obligation lies in the security of said groups. So, I hoist up my hefty backpack once again, this time, ready to take on the world and see what it has to offer. And if any obstacle arises along the way, I will not hesitate to hit it over the head with my bag.

Bibliography

Notes

1. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 9, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=1813143.

2. Charles Holmes, “Megan Thee Stallion on Tory Lanez: ‘He Shot Me. I Tried to Spare Him,’” Rolling Stone (blog), August 21, 2020. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/megan-thee-stallion-tory-lanez-he-shot-me-1047786/.

3. Michael Tonry, “The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System,” Crime and Justice 39, (January 1, 2010): 273. https://doi.org/10.1086/653045.

4. Brittany E. Bryant, Ayana Jordan, and Uraina S. Clark, “Race as a Social Construct in Psychiatry Research and Practice,” JAMA Psychiatry 79, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 93, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.2877.

5. Chris Weller, Yutong Yuan, “12 Inspiring Quotes from Martin Luther King Jr,” Business Insider, accessed April 15, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/inspiring-martin-luther-king-jr-quotes-2017-1.