From nobody@REPLAY.COM Sun Feb 09 03:46:39 1997

			Carey's Story

It started out as a perfect day.  The sun was shining, the birds were
singing, and all was well with my small world.  I was young, just twenty,
and I had everything I could want.  I had a wonderful, loving family - my
three older sisters and I were very close.  They were all married, had
children, and lived in the same town so I saw them often.  I still lived at
home with Mom and Dad, but we were also close, so I didn't mind.  I could
have had my own place - I had a great job, working as a secretary in a
real-estate firm - but I wanted to save money for my upcoming wedding.  Plus
back then, girls didn't usually leave home till they married.  Pete and I
had been seeing each other since high-school.  He was studying to be a
minister, at a small Bible college in the midwest, and he'd be graduating
that spring.  I was so proud of him!  Then, we'd get married.  I knew my
parents couldn't wait - they absolutely adored Pete, especially since they
were pillars of the Baptist church themselves.  They were great parents, but
a bit old-fashioned - they didn't even like me working.  They felt a woman's
place was in the home, and were afraid that I'd be corrupted by some
coworker or someone I'd meet on the bus ride it took to get to work.  They
didn't even approve of some of my work clothes!

I'd found out that day that I was to be promoted at work - and I was so
happy!  There was a substantial raise that came with the job, and this would
be welcome.  I knew how lucky I was to have this job.  I had thought about
going to a four-year college, but back in the sixties college wasn't as
important, and I wanted to get married and start a family as soon as Pete
graduated.  None of my sisters had gone, they'd all gotten married straight
out of high school.  I had gone to community college and gotten a degree in
secretarial sciences.  Back in 1962, this was considered pretty good.  I
went home, and shared the news with Mom and Dad, then went to my sister
Kathy's house for supper.  Kathy is the closest to me in age, though she is
six years older than me.  She and her husband Dan were married when she was
seventeen.  They already had four kids, and Kathy was pregnant with her
fifth at the time.

We had dinner and talked about my wedding.  I told Kathy about our plans to
start a family right away.  She just laughed.  "Carey Lynn, you may want to
wait a few years", she said, rubbing her rounded belly.  "Kids take a lot
out of you!"  I laughed too, and shook my head.  "No, Kathy, we want lots of
kids.  In fact, Pete wants us to start right away".  She smiled and said in
a whisper "That's what happens when two virgins get married!"  I giggled and
threw a fake punch at her.  Out of all of us, Kathy was the only one who
wasn't (or in my case, going to be) a virgin when she got married.  Which is
the whole reason she got married in the first place - her oldest girl, Sarah
was born just six months after Kathy married.  That was the family scandal.
We lived in a very small, rural town, and our family was very religious.
Mom and Dad barely spoke to Kathy for years, in fact!  And at that time, an
illegitmate child was much more scandalous than it is today.  My family was
always very uptight about sex in general, and when Kathy got pregnant before
she was married, you'd have thought she killed someone.  Even the fact that
she got married right away didn't help much.  They still weren't on the best
of terms, though at least they would talk to her now.

Well, we talked for a while longer, and then I left.  Kathy's house was just
a ten minute walk from Mom and Dad's house.  It was dark, but I wasn't
afraid.  I'd walked this way a million times, plus our town was very small,
and crime almost never happened there.  It never even occured to me to BE
afraid, even as I approached the old McGuire place.  This was the local
eyesore, it was falling down, and had been vacant for years.  My folks lived
on the street right in back of it, and I usually cut through the over grown
yard to get home.  Some people said transients lived there, but I never saw
any.  Until that night ...

I was walking along the side of the house, just coming to the back of it,
when out of the shadows stepped the biggest black man I had ever seen.  I
stopped for a moment in shock - not because he was a strange man, but
because he was black.  Our town was lily-white, and I don't think a single
black family lived there.  "Oh ... umm ... excuse me" I stammered, and
turned to go back.  I wasn't exactly afraid at that point, just startled.
But fear would come soon enough.  He grabbed me from behind, and put a hand
over my mouth before I could scream.  Before I knew it, he had dragged me
inside the old McGuire house.

It was dark, but some light came in through the windows.  He pulled me into
what must have been the front parlor, and threw me down on a filthy mattress
that was lying there.  The force of being thrown to the floor knocked the
wind out of me, and I couldn't scream.  In fact, I could barely breath.
Before I knew it, the man was on top of me, weighing me down with his huge
body.  Just as I got my breath back, he stuffed a rag of some sort in my
mouth.  I struggled as hard as I could,  but I was no match for this
ravaging beast.  His black skin gleamed in the faint light, and all I could
see him pretty well.  I'll never forget what he looked like.  He was
enormously fat and tall.  He had this huge afro, wide-bridged nose, and a
scarred face with stubbly skin.  His thick lips roamed over my face and neck
as he ripped the clothes from my body, leaving me naked before him.  He
never said a word to me, just grunted like an animal as he squeezed and
licked at my breasts.  I fought helplessly, but my efforts just seemed to
inflame his mad lust even more.  He sat up, legs still pinning the lower
half of me down, with one hand pinning my arms above my head.  With his free
hand he reached down and unzipped his dirty pants.  His mouth split into a
wide, toothless grin as he saw the look of horror on my face as I saw the
size of his manhood.  I had never seen a naked man before, and this man was
truly enormous.  He was as big as a bull!  At least ten inches long,
gleaming black, and hugely swollen.  at that moment I knew - I was going to
be raped.

He fell on top of me, and prized my legs apart.  Then, like a stallion, he
mounted me and tore right into me, taking that precious jewel I was saving
for my wedding night.  My muffled screams of pain and terror inflamed his
lust, and he began to pump in and out of me like an animal in rut.  I lay
there helplessly, feeling the pain with each of his thrusts, my breasts
jiggling up and down as he forced himself in and out of me, over and over
again.  "Ungghhh ... Unghhh", my rapist grunted with each thrust, and the
sweat from his body slicked onto mine.  I stopped struggling, it was too
late now, and I was afraid he would kill me.  He put his arms under my body,
crossed, and held onto my shoulders from underneath, to keep me from sliding
away.  As he tore into me, over and over again, he licked my neck and face.
I recoiled in disgust at the smell of his breath, which stank like whisky.
I felt like he was tearing me apart.  It seemed to go on forever, until
finally, he grunted loudly, and thrust into me one last time.  I felt the
hot jets of his seed spurt inside me, over and over.  Then he fell on top of me.

After a while, he got up, zipped up, and ran off without a backwards glance.
I lay there, on the filthy mattress I'd been raped on, and sobbed for ages.
Then, I got up and ran home.  Luck was with me, Mom and Dad were already in
bed, and I made it to my room without being seen.  I threw on a robe, and
locked myself in the bathroom.  I drew the hottest bath I could, and stayed
there for hours, crying hysterically.  When I finally got out, I took my
torn and stained clothes to the basement, and threw them into the coal
furnace.  I sobbed even harder as I watched them burn.  I, Carey Lynn
Larson, had been raped! And by a black man at that!  I was so ashamed.  I
knew I would never tell anyone.  How could I?  Things were so different back
then, there was no support for rape victims at all.  My whole family would
be shamed by what had happened to me.  Pete would leave me, and everyone,
everyone would know I had been taken by a black man.  They'd blame me too.
My parents had warned me over and over again not to take that shortcut,
because of the transients that sometimes lived there, but I never listened.
No, better to keep silent.  It would be my secret.

No one noticed anything wrong with me, though my Dad did remark on how quiet
I was, and Mom wanted to know what had happened to the skirt and blouse I'd
burned.  I told her I'd spilled ink on them at work, and threw them out.
She accepted that excuse, and said she was glad - she'd thought they were
too "fast" for me anyway.  I tried to get on with my life, I went to work,
wrote letters to Pete, visited with my sisters.  Carried on as normal.

But some secrets can't be kept forever.  About two months after the rape, I
began to feel sick in the mornings.  Mom noticed this, but assumed it was
the flu.  Then the waistbands of my clothes began to feel tight.  Mom
noticed this too, and remarked that I'd better start trying to reduce -
after all, the wedding was just four months away.  I knew it wasn't the flu,
and I knew it wasn't just normal weight gain.  I hadn't had a period since
the rape, and even one as sheltered as I was knew what that meant.  I was
pregnant with my rapist's baby.

I was frantic, I didn't know what to do!  Abortion was illegal in 1962, and
I didn't even know any illegal abortionists.  I tried all the folk methods -
long hot baths, drank a whole bottle of whiskey, even tried to lose the baby
by throwing myself down the stairs.  Nothing worked.  Finally, when I was
five months along, I knew I couldn't hide it any longer.  My weight gain was
noticeable now, and Pete would be home in just one month, expecting to marry
me.  Instead of a blushing virgin, he'd find a fiancee whose belly was
swollen with a rapist's child.  I told my parents, hoping they'd understand.
They didn't.  Before I knew what was happening, they threw me out of the
house.  They didn't believe that I had been raped, they were sure I'd had an
affair with a man at my job - because a while back, right around the time of
the rape, one of the new men at the office had kept calling me and pestering
me to go out with him.  My parents were convinced that we'd had a fling.
So, they threw me out, and struck my name from the family bible.

I was five months pregnant and totally alone.  My sister Alice let me stay
with her for a few days, but then, the news spread all over town.  Everyone
knew that Carey Larson was pregnant by some strange man.  I lost my job.
Pete's mother showed up at Alice's house, and told me her son never wanted
to see me again - I guess she told him that his fiancee was pregant with
another man's child.  After just two weeks at Alice's, she told me that I
would have to leave.  Mom and Dad had told her that they would throw her out
of the family if I stayed there any longer.  None of my other sisters would
take me in - even Kathy!  None of them would believe I was raped either, and
their attitude was that even if I was telling the truth, I had probably
deserved it, and my pregnancy was still a shame on the family name.

I got on the bus, and went to a distant city where no one knew me.  I was
totally alone, and had no one to turn to.  Luckily, I'd saved almost $1000
for my wedding - a vast amount back then - and I could support myself if I
was very careful.  I lived in a run down neighborhood, got a job as a
cleaning-woman for a family that lived in one of the nicer suburbs, and that
was it. I worked all day, on my knees, sprawling awkwardly because of my big
belly, scrubbed floors and washed dishes.  I didn't like my employers very
much - the wife was a drunk who spent all day in bed, and I could swear that
hugely pregnant though I was the husband mentally undressed me every time he
saw me, but it was better than nothing.  I'd need to use a lot of the money
I'd saved to pay for my hospital bills when I had the baby.  I'd go home at
night, to my one-room apartment, and feel my baby kick as I watched the
roaches scurry about.  I still didn't know what I was going to do about the
baby.  I'd told my employers that I was a widow (even wore a cheap wedding
ring), but I didn't know what I would do when my baby was born.  I'd sit
there, on my little murphy bed, and caress my bulging tummy and consider my
options.  Adoption was a natural choice, but the one agency I'd contacted
told me that it was unlikely they could place my child because it was part
black.  White families wouldn't want it, and they already had more black
children than they could place with black adoptive families.  They told me
it was likely that my baby would be put into a home, and never be adopted.
That didn't bother me at first, and I'd planned to do it anyway ... but over
time, as I grew bigger and bigger with my rapist's child, I began to feel
differently.  I was so lonely, and the baby was the only one I had to talk
to.  It wasn't the baby's fault that I'd been raped, and I worried about it
- I didn't want it to be left in a home to grow up.  But how could I, a
white woman, raise what would likely be, remembering how dark the father
was, a very black child?

Nine months to the night I was raped, I gave birth to my rapist's son.  I
named him Amos Job.  As I had expected, he looked very much like his father,
except his skin was just a tad lighter.  I hadn't known up until the moment
I gave birth to him that I would keep him, but that's what I did.  I'd
gotten attached to him, and I couldn't give him up, especially when I knew
that he'd likely never be adopted.  I knew this meant the end of all of my
hopes and dreams - I hadn't spoken to my family at all since they'd disowned
me, and i could never go back there - they wouldn't accept an illegitimate
grandson no matter what color he was.  And it was unlikely that I would ever
find a man to marry - back then, men didn't marry women who'd given birth to
a black man's baby.  It would be just me and my son, living in cheap
apartments, always outcasts.

Well, that's almost what happened.  I went back to work soon after Amos was
born, my landlady, a nice old black woman watched him for me while I worked.
It was hard being a white woman with a black child, even though I lived in a
mostly black neighborhood.  People stared, made remarks, and everyone on my
street, no matter what their color, thought I was a slut.   I was constantly
fending men off.  And one night - my landlady's son, Justus came into my
apartment while I was sleeping.  Nine months later, I bore his son, named
Justus.  After my second rape, I gave up, and now I'm known on the block as
Justus' old lady.  Justus' wife isn't too happy with this, especially since
I've had three more children by Justus, and am pregnant now with my sixth
child.  There's not a lot of money to go around, I still have my cleaning
job, but that doesn't pay much.  Justus gives me money when he can, but
won't let me spend any of it on my oldest boy, because he isn't his father.
Amos looks exactly like the man who raped me, it's almost uncanny.  He's
eight now, and is getting into a lot of trouble, even at that early age.
I'm afraid he's going to grow up like his father.  I haven't seen my family
in all this time.  I ran into Pete the other week, while walking in the
park.  I saw him before he saw me - he was walking with a woman I didn't
know, about seven months pregnant, like I am now.  They had a beautiful
little boy and girl walking with them, both blond and blue eyed, wearing
expensive clothes, and chattering about how they were visiting their "city"
grandparents.  I knew they had to be Pete's kids.  Then Pete saw me, with my
five children in tow, all shades of black and dressed in cast-offs, and my
pregnant belly sticking out before me.  He looked right through me, and I
knew he didn't even realize who I was.  I went home with my kids, and that
night, listening to Justus snore beside me, I cried for what I'd lost.