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Chapter 8 The Second Time Around Marriage, Black Feminist Style Pearl Cleage When I met my first husband, I was running for my life. So was he. I was hiding from a former fiancé whose charming attentiveness—which had earned me the admiration of my dorm mates when we started dating—had segued into violent possessiveness. His determination to control my comings and goings culminated in a terrible act: he stripped me naked and tied my hands and feet while he went out one afternoon, admonishing me not to move until he returned, or suffer the consequences. When he did return, he carried me to his bed and forced me to have sex while he whispered a promise to cut my face with razors if I ever left him. My new husband’s struggle was less personal, but no less deadly. A strong believer in nonviolence, he was reluctantly interrupting his graduate studies in literature to take a teaching position at a historically Black college. An educational deferment would keep him from joining thousands of other young men on their way to Vietnam. When we met, I had escaped my fiancé’s torment by being accepted into a summer program at Yale, which carried a modest stipend. My incredibly ingenuous plan to save my life was to forgo my senior year at Howard University, where my lover was anxiously awaiting my return, head for New York City, and, by budgeting carefully, live on my $500 windfall while pursuing my dream of becoming a playwright. Although I clung to this fantasy throughout the early weeks of the program, I began to sense its inadequacy as the time came to move. My boyfriend’s letters, phone calls, and surprise visits to New Haven were evidence that returning to school was not an option if I valued my safety or my sanity, but even I realized that my fantasy of relocating to New York was just that: a fantasy. Other than 129 130 Pearl Cleage disappearing into some imaginary Black theater demimonde, the only additional possibility was dragging home in disgrace, so my parents could protect me, a humiliation from which I feared I might never recover. My trajectory from star student to free woman was in danger of being derailed by a man whose violence I had yet to reveal to friends, family, or fellow students. I was scared and, I realized, unprepared to take care of myself. I had never lived alone, never learned to drive, never balanced a checkbook. From where I was sitting, the world seemed a pretty dangerous place, and although I would have denied it if anybody had asked me directly, what I was looking for was someone to save me. I dreamed of a strong, smart man, making his own way in the world, unintimidated by my boyfriend’s rage, convinced that all he needed to make his life complete was a fragile, frightened 20 year old without a clue. It didn’t occur to me until years after our marriage had run its 10-year course that my first husband, in his headlong rush to adjust to the sudden, insistent presence of Uncle Sam, did find exactly what he needed in me: somebody even more terrified of the future than he was. In the face of my helplessness, he felt less vulnerable. He had already successfully lived alone (in New York City, no less), had his own driver’s license, and could balance a checkbook without breaking out in a cold sweat. He liked to give directions, and I was trained to take them. After all, I had gotten used to my exboyfriend backhanding me across the mouth when I fell short of the mark. My new husband’s penchant for stony silences to show his disapproval seemed a small price to pay. I convinced myself we were made for each other. Five years later, the fit that had seemed so perfect in our time of mutual crisis was beginning to chafe. Always a political activist on race and war, I had found a feminist friend and, through her, discovered the women’s movement. My violent college love affair no longer seemed shameful evidence of my personal weakness, but part of the larger problem of male violence against women. My frustration at balancing my infant daughter’s needs, my husband’s demands, and the exhausting requirements of my job as press secretary to Atlanta’s first Black mayor was not simply a matter of poor...

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