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6. Turning Points
- University of Missouri Press
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6 Turning Points Gonzales, La. (AP)—The pastor had just started reading a Bible lesson about being born again when the gunman kicked open the doors, fired twice into the ceiling and ordered everybody to hit the floor. He then marched down the aisle, shooting between the benches as screaming parishioners scattered in horror. . . . Among the crowd, police said, were the man’s wife and child. “His little boy turned and said, ‘Daddy.’ That’s when he shot. He hit his wife first and then the baby,” [a witness reported ]. . . . . . . As he left, Holmes [the minister] heard him mumble something like, “That will show you.” . . . Investigators were still compiling the names of the victims , but the minister said the slain wife was Carla Miller. . . . The Millers married about two years ago and [a cousin reported that] Carla Miller left her husband shortly after. “It was just a domestic problem that turned into domestic violence,” [Police Officer] Landry said. Columbia Daily Tribune, March 11, 1999 M O S T O F T H E WO M E N in this study married young and realized almost immediately that their marriage was a bad mistake and they were now in a binding relationship with a raging, abusive man. Their words can convey what the first years of their life away from home were like better than anything I could say. These are sad, sad stories of young lives in despair. We need to notice, however, that it is in the speaking of the violence that the women begin to emerge as beings separate from the violence. It is through the telling of their stories that the women begin to sort things out, to name and acknowledge the 121 122 W O M E N E S C A P I N G V I O L E N C E violence, and to reflect on their own sense of self and how it has and has not emerged for them. I believe they move from a place of negation and silence into a space of embodiment that is personally empowering. We know Tina and Sherry’s stories fairly well by now, but we are barely prepared for the brutality of their first marriage experiences. Tina tells us: And I was with Kenny and six weeks later I was pregnant. I was seventeen and I didn’t want to be married. And what I didn’t know when I first started dating Kenny was that when Kenny got drunk—and I would see him drink—and he was okay sometimes. But when he got drunk. . . . And he got very very mean and I had never known a mean drunk. But he was a meandrunk.Hewasmean,mean,mean.Andthenightwegotmarriedand my Uncle Len was there and my brother was there and my mom was there andwegotmarried.Anditwasthefirsttimehehadevergoneoffonme.He went off on me. He was a terrorizer. He would just get in your face and he wouldthrowstuffandhewouldbreakstuffandhejustterrifiedme.Andhe would keep me in line by terrorizing me. He would terrorize me for hours on end. And that night we got married we went back to our room and he kept me up all night long just screaming and yelling at me. He wouldn’t hit me. He would hit right here and he would hit right here [indicates abdomen with defensive gesture]. He would threaten to kill me and he would tell me that I was a whore and a slut and blah, blah, blah. And I believedhim.Andrightbeforewegotmarried,IbelievedthatIwasawhore and I believed that I was a slut and I believed all the things that he told me. Sherry,too,becamepregnantasateenagerandfoundherselfinrelationships with alcoholic and abusive men: And I had my first child; I was seventeen, pregnant when I was sixteen. The baby’s dad was twenty-three and he was a drunk and he was abusive. He was just abusive to the point to where—his was more of an emotional, verbal type thing. But he was a drunk and for some reason there’s something about drunks. I ended that one, and then I got with another guy and he was real, he was really physically abusive and emotional, verbal, that whole thing, but I would just stick around because I really loved this guy. I remember I was sixteen, seventeen at that time, and I really didn’t think I’d ever find anything else. We lived in a small town at that time and it was just crazy. Interestingly, these...