Bethel AME Boston’s response to sexual violence in the community
“We’re going to do what it takes,” says co-pastor Gloria White-Hammond, “to be our sister’s keeper.”
At the beginning of Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf’s last novel, a character named Isa reads a story in the newspaper about an assault that haunts the rest of her day. Some soldiers lured a young woman into their barracks, offering to show her a horse with a green tail, and then turned on her. “That was real,” Isa thinks—so real that she seems to see the barrack room, and the young woman struggling, before her eyes.
As I write this column, Christine Blasey Ford has accused Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, of attacking her when they were teenagers and holding his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams. Ford discussed this traumatic experience with her therapist and her husband back in 2012. Kavanaugh denies it ever happened.
Like Isa, I can’t get this story out of my head. “That was real,” I thought when I heard it. You could almost feel Ford’s account moving through the atmosphere, snagging on women’s minds, triggering and troubling our own memories. It’s so sinkingly familiar, a story too many women know in their bones.
