Friday, October 11, 1991, 11:30am
Anita Hill’s voice streamed from the RCA. Dressed in what would become her iconic teal linen suit, she spoke her testimony into a microphone on a table draped with a green table skirt where she sat alone facing fourteen white men who comprised the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. Her voice stirred in me something that I, at twenty-five, alone in this apartment, curled in this secondhand recliner, felt in my bones but could not yet name. I wondered How is she doing this? How is she speaking her words out loud? She read her typewritten statement from sheets of white photocopy paper, the paper itself a ready excuse to turn her eyes downward and not look upuntil she’d read her statement straight through. She did not do that. She made direct eye contact with the committee as she spoke, glanced down at her words, looked up, and kept speaking:
…he would turn the conversation to sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.
He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involving various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.
A memory. Eighth grade. The bus stop at the end of Westwood Hills Drive where I stand in 1979 clustered with the girls pretending not to hear the crude, lewd, sexualized comments one of the boys makes every morning while we wait for the bus cunt pussy she’s on the rag. No matter how hard I try to ignore these words—meant for us girls to overhear while the other boys laugh—I arrive at school feeling smeared, the shameful words trailing me like a smell I catch a whiff of, but can’t quite place, throughout the day.
In October 1991, twelve years removed from that bus stop, and three years out of college, I hardly knew what sexual harassment was, much less that it had eroded my sense of self with an insidious shame. Decades later I would hear an energy medicine teacher say shame is the most toxic emotion, and I would begin to understand just how malignant shame is to a self, a voice. Not just any shame. I’m talking about a particular sexual shame leveled at women in a patriarchal rape culture to blame them for their experience with sexual violence. Slut shaming. The price Anita Hill would pay for speaking.
As she delivered her words—How is she speaking them out loud?—she placed each finished page of her statement face down in a pile to her left. These pages were piling up when she told the committee that Thomas “commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive.” And then she said—perhaps this was the lawyer in her, locating us in place—“The incidents occurred in his inner office—”
Inner office. December 18, 1985. I’m nineteen and waiting tables at a pizzeria when the owner calls me back to his office and makes a pass at me—more like a lunge—and I know from the cold prickles on the back of my neck that he knows what happened after work three days earlier with the pizza guy. Shit. The pizza guy. A recluse in his twenties who my friends and I on waitstaff don’t know beyond our interactions with him at the pizza counter where we shout our orders—large pepperoni!—and he makes the pizza. One time a customer complained their order took too long. The pizza guy blamed me. “Your voice is too soft,” he snapped, “I didn’t hear your order.” And now the owner’s pawing hands. My jaw clamps and my ears buzz and I spin on my heel out of that office while back in the recliner I was about to lose myself to this shame spiral (a term that would not be coined until 1992) when Anita Hill’s voice—a lifeline—pulled me back to the RCA. She told of the now infamous “Who put pubic hair on my Coke?” incident, and then she told how “he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women”—she paused, the slightest intake of breath, as if recharging her courage to speak the next words out loud—“with oral sex.” And I’m back on that damn school bus—this time a sophomore in high school, age fifteen—when the same lewd boy from the bus stop sits behind me one day on the ride home and, leaning over the seatback, whispers to the back of my head things he does with his girlfriend on the top bunk in his bedroom, how he ate her out on Saturday night until she came and his entire face was smeared with pussy and he liked it and she liked it and has my boyfriend ever gone down on me and do I like it? I shuffle my books and pretend to do homework until, finally at our stop, I burst from the bus and hightail it up Westwood Hills Drive in a fruitless effort to outpace the awful clinging humiliation of his words. How is it that someone else’s words—not mine—cause this mushroom cloud of shame inside me that cuts me off from my words, my voice, my self? I want to outrun it. But how do you escape something invisible that’s wormed its way into your body, your cells, your psyche, your very perception until, already by age fifteen, you see yourself through its distorted lens?
That same shame burned my neck in this recliner. Never mind that I was alone in this apartment and there was no one here for me to be embarrassed in front of and if anyone were here on a Friday during the day it would be Steve. We were supposed to be on our honeymoon, but my mother called us home because the cold my grandmother came down with at our wedding turned out to be a heart attack. She was stable now but Steve left early this morning to return his father’s truck—we’d borrowed it for the trip—and wouldn’t be home until Sunday.
I hadn’t told Steve what happened with the pizza guy. Could not telling be the reason I’d been waking up at night sobbing? All the times I found myself crying for reasons I could not—would not?—name? Even when Steve asked, “What’s wrong?”—which he asked often—I would shake my head and shrug I don’t know. Is it possible that some part of me did know? The part that Anita Hill’s testimony was awakening from an unenchanted sleep, which is to say a culturally induced state of unconsciousness about my own experience in a female body?
Anita Hill spoke into the microphone that she’d been hospitalized for five days in February 1983 for acute stomach pain, which she—along with her physician, we’d later learn—deemed stress related because there was no medical diagnosis. I remembered my own buckling stomach pain that began in seventh grade shortly after my breasts began to develop, how the doctor could find nothing wrong, and how these stomach aches intensified in eighth grade.
Is living in a female body in a culture that shames women’s bodies—cunt slut pussy whore—a form of stress that takes a toll on women’s health and well-being? In 1991 I’d never heard the term rape culture, though it was coined by feminists in the 1970s who were trying to raise cultural awareness. As Anita Hill gave her testimony, there was no talk in sight—as far as I knew—of patriarchal rape culture itself as a disease that maligns a woman’s sense of self and voice. Certainly no talk within my earshot of intersectionality, how Anita Hill, a black woman, was up against not only the silence imposed by female sexual shame but also the silence imposed by racism.
“It would have been more comfortable to remain silent,” Anita Hill said. Since the pizza guy, my entire sense of self hinged on my silence (though I didn’t yet think in these terms) and, yes, on my inability to name my own experience. Tell me, how do you speak aloud—How is she speaking her words out loud?—something that so shames you to your core slut whore you don’t—won’t? can’t?—acknowledge it, not even to yourself?
“I took no initiative to inform anyone,” Anita Hill said as she wrapped up her statement. “But when I was asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”
Six months later, on April 5, 1992, two weeks before SCOTUS—Clarence Thomas newly seated on the Court—would hear Planned Parenthood v Casey, I would march down Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a blue button with white lettering sporting Audre Lorde’s words Your silence will not protect you. Marching that day, I would not fully grasp that my female body carried its own silenced history much less that my silence—which at twenty-five I did indeed believe protected me—had cost me my voice and sense of self. I would know only my fierce desire to “find my voice,” as if some part of me beyond my conscious awareness knew that my voice was the way back to my self.
Anita Hill placed the last page of her testimony face down on the pile to her left, lifted the pile and shuffled the pages back into order. I could almost feel her relief, her hands busy while her words, spoken, hung before her in that hallowed room where every man on the judicial committee believed on some level—whether he admitted it or not, it was what he’d been conditioned to believe—that such words are shameful and that the shame belonged to the person who spoke them.
No shame would be brought upon the men on the judicial committee who would ask shameful questions for hours on end, who would do rape culture’s bidding as they deliberately tried to undermine Anita Hill’s testimony in an effort to shame and silence her.
Anita Hill had been answering questions for hours, though I hardly noticed dusk had crept into this apartment. Many of the questions circled back to some version of Why would you put up with this kind of behavior? Why would you not tell anyone before now? Why would you wait eight years to come forward? Even the senators who appeared sympathetic felt compelled to say for the record that they did not understand. One or two conceded that perhaps his inability to understand derived from the fact that he himself had never been sexually harassed. A tiny cultural lightbulb flickering on. But there was no flicker in the arrogant eyes of the senator from Wyoming who, shortly after six o’clock, asked his version of this question in a particularly scathing way. After suggesting Anita Hill may have killed, yes, killed Clarence Thomas with her words—(rape culture 101: blame the victim for speaking; find impunity for the victimizer)—he narrowed his eyes above his half-lens glasses and said like a lawyer coming in for, indeed, the kill: “But let me tell you, if what you say this man said to you occurred, why in God’s name, when he left his position of power or status or authority over you…why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?”
I looked to Anita Hill. She looked at the senator from Wyoming and said without a shred of defensiveness in her voice, “This is a very good question, and I am sure I cannot answer that to your satisfaction…it takes an expert in psychology to explain how that can happen, but it can happen, because it happened to me.”
But it can happen, because it happened to me.
My cheeks were wet before I realized I was crying. Not the kind of wracking sobs that had been waking me up at night. This crying was quiet, almost peaceful, a tiny light flickering on in the farthest reaches of inner darkness: Because it happened to me. Curled in this recliner six years after the pizza guy, having told no one what happened, not even myself, this was revelatory: Anita Hill offered her experience alone as evidence, her experience was her gauge for what she said and how she said it, her words arose from an unwavering connection to herself and her truth.
If me now, writing this, were sitting in that apartment with me then, the two of us glued to the RCA, I would reach for my younger self’s hand and I would say, “Sweetheart, those tears on your cheeks are your body’s natural response to recognizing a piece of your precious self in someone else’s truth. That part of you that you locked away in shame, she exists. She is you, she is me. The story her body—your body, my body—carries is not shameful. In fact, it is her fierce desire to speak her truth that thrums your equally fierce desire to find your voice. Do not silence her anymore. Trust her. She is your voice.”
The sun had set. But for the glow of the RCA, the apartment was dark. I switched on the table lamp next to the recliner and walked, as if in a trance, to the pie hutch in our eating nook. The pie hutch was light oak with a white enamel tabletop and tambour doors opened to reveal a row of black-and-white composition notebooks. I’d been filling these notebooks since I graduated from college in 1988 with a fierce—albeit secret—desire to “find” my voice. (As if there is shame in desire itself, to dare want a voice, to dare want a self.) I mostly wrote snippets of thinly veiled fiction, and lately I’d been recording my dreams, the closest I came, perhaps, to decoding my emotional truth, to puncturing denial. Certainly I’d never written anything that approached the kind of truth Anita Hill voiced in her testimony.
I sat at the pie hutch and wrote on a fresh page in my notebook October 11, 1991, 7pm. The movement of my pen felt different than it had that morning. As if the air in the apartment was thicker than it had been when I woke up, or maybe time had slowed. The tick-tock of the domed mantel clock we received as a wedding present registered in my chest. Maybe it was my hearing that had altered, newly tuned to sounds I used to take for white noise.
Beneath the date I wrote Anita Hill. And then I wrote I too have been sexually harassed.
As a child and teen, kneeling in a confessional, I would make up sins just to have something to confess to the priest on the other side of the plastic screen. Writing these words in the wake of Anita Hill’s testimony felt like sliding open a plastic screen between me and myself and finally acknowledging a truth that, until this moment at the pie hutch, I had not known, or had not let myself know, or had been conditioned not to know. Maybe that was the difference in the air, maybe I was beginning to see a piece of myself I’d previously closed my eyes to.
I too have been sexually harassed. My words, written in my own hand, did not issue me a penance, no fifty Hail Marys to utter under my breath for sins I did not commit. Anita Hill said it herself late in the day: what happened with Clarence Thomas was not her fault, she was not to blame.
Self-blame. Now there’s a sin—strike that—a tenet of rape culture right up there with silence that I’m working to forgive myself for, still, these decades later.
The next morning—Saturday, October 12, 1991—I returned to the pie hutch at dawn with a cup of coffee and my notebook. As I began to write a voice said Write what happened with the pizza guy. The pizza guy. Shit. My neck and cheeks burned. I can’t write about the pizza guy. The blue-lined page of my notebook was cool to the butt of my hand even as the heat spread from my neck to my chest, rose from my cheeks to my scalp. The small plastic screen that had opened between me and myself last night slammed shut. In a determined effort to not write about the pizza guy I began to write about the weather on this chilly October morning but here came that voice again Write about the pizza guy. This voice I did not yet recognize as my own fluttered in my chest and, for a moment, I experienced a calm beneath my breastbone I had not known since before I woke up to the pizza guy on top of me six years ago, his you-know-what in my you-know-where.
But it can happen, because it happened to me.
The tick-tock of the mantel clock filled the apartment.
Can I write about what happened with the pizza guy?
I pressed the tip of my pen to the blue-lined page.
My words emerged in fragments: The Long Island Iced Tea (if only I hadn’t drunk that), handing the pizza guy the keys to my Plymouth Champ, walking up the stairs to his apartment to sleep off the Long Island Iced Tea, waking up beneath him bambambam the wrap-around skirt of my waitress uniform hiked above my waist bambam my panties around my ankles bam my sneakers still on my feet bam tears pooling in my ears bam his voice: Whatdaya fuckin cryin?
To this day I don’t know if his trespass—entering my body without my consent—woke me from the Long-Island-Iced-Tea induced sleep or if my tears in response to his trespass woke me. I do wonder if my body knew before I knew. “Your body is your first level of consciousness,” the energy medicine teacher would say decades after Anita Hill’s words But it can happen, because it happened to me awakened me, ever so tentatively, to my own experience.
Either way, yes, I was crying, both on the mattress in my memory bambambam and at my pie hutch where I watched my pen string together cursive letters on a thin blue line. I hovered just above my own hand and wondered who was moving the pen as I wrote what the pizza guy—bambambam—said next You’re like a fuckin Brillo pad. I watched me on the mattress turn my head to the side, away from the pizza guy, and from my perch at the pie hutch it looked like I’d just turned away from myself and the thought I didn’t fight him off stopped my pen cold. I stabbed my notebook with my pen—bambambam—scribbled out my words, pulled the pen so fiercely across the page it slashed the blue-lined paper, which I ripped out of my notebook and tore to shreds.
It was true that my silence would not protect me, but try telling that to my silence.
Before this pie hutch was my writing table it was my sewing table. Its lower cupboard, beneath the enamel tabletop, teemed with remnants of fabrics from clothes I sewed throughout high school. Its upper cupboard—above the tambour doors—contained my sewing box filled with spools of thread and bobbins, packets of pins and needles, a thimble and—my favorite sewing tool—a seam ripper. At twenty-five I had no inkling how cultural silence and internalized silence “hooked” to keep rape culture in place, but I did know my way around a sewing machine. To create stitches, a sewing machine like my Singer required both an external spool thread that fed the needle from atop the machine and an internal bobbin thread, housed beneath the needle plate. The spool thread created the upper stitches; the bobbin thread created stitches on the underside of fabric necessary to complete the upper stitches and hold a seam. Without the bobbin thread, there was no seam, nothing to hold the upper stitches in place. I was seven the first time I turned the handwheel of my mother’s Kenmore, lowered the threaded needle into the bobbin compartment, and hooked the bobbin thread with the spool thread so that I could sew seams.
If I were to explain the anatomy of silence to my twenty-five-year-old self, sitting at her pie hutch, her words shredded by her own hand, her knuckles purple with shame and fury, I would pitch it in sewing terms: Cultural silence is the external spool thread, outside in the world. Internalized silence is the bobbin thread, wound around your own self. Entwined together, these threads stitch internalized silence and cultural silence into a seam that holds rape culture in place. Take a seam ripper to either thread—cultural silence or internal silence—and rape culture begins to unravel.
Anita Hill’s words cut through cultural silence like a razor-sharp seam ripper, and the power keepers and seekers—beginning with Clarence Thomas and the men on the Judicial Committee—began to unravel. They lost their shit and threw it at Anita Hill. This was a cultural backlash, which is what those in power do when silence is threatened in rape culture: they point a finger at the disrupter—strike that; the truth teller—and they say liar slut cunt whore in a scrambling, same-old-tired-trope effort to restore silence.
“Sweetheart,” I want to say to my younger self as she gathers her shredded words into her fist at the pie hutch, “you are in the grip of an internal backlash. Remember: without the bobbin thread of internalized silence, rape culture unravels. Your silence, I’m sorry to say, works for rape culture. When you wrote your truth last night and again this morning, you shook your internalized silence by the throat. It’s now pulling out all the stops to shut you down and shut you up—even to yourself—as the culture works to take down Anita Hill. (Don’t worry, they won’t. She is far too self-possessed for the forces of rape culture and will come through this stronger, as will you, thanks to her.) Your silence’s specialty, you’ll learn soon enough, is rage turned inward as eviscerating self-blame. You blame yourself for turning your head away from the pizza guy and not fighting but, Sweetie, there’s a physiological reason you didn’t fight. When the body perceives a threat it cannot escape, it instinctively freezes to preserve itself. Self-preservation. This freeze response is not consent. It’s survival. You froze to preserve yourself.” My younger self stomped into the galley kitchen next to the pie hutch, yanked open the cupboard under the sink, and slammed her shredded words into the trashcan where, in a few minutes, she’d dump the coffee grounds for good measure. I nuzzle her ear and whisper, “Sweetheart, your words, no matter how blacked out and shredded, cannot be unwritten. Just as Anita Hill’s words cannot be unspoken. You cannot—and will not—unhear them.
Your reckoning with silence has begun.”
On Wednesday, April 1, 1992—six months after I stabbed my words with my pen—I would sit at our breakfast table eating toast and reading an article by Judy Mann in The Washington Post about heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s rape conviction. Judy Mann called out Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz for his dismissal of date rape as “‘an offense which poses no threat or risk to the public.’” To which she responded: “A woman on a date is not a member of the public?” In 1992, the public was still waking up to the term date rape even though it first appeared in 1975 in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. I’d first heard it from a fellow R.A. outside a dorm in March 1986 three months after I had awakened beneath the pizza guy, but I dismissed my experience as not date rape because, duh, we had not been on a date. Yet sitting at the breakfast table, reading Judy Mann’s article, I caught a whiff of pepperoni and the pizza guy is on top of me and I know the truth I’ve worked so hard to not know. Turns out your silence will not protect you from knowing what your body—your senses—know before you let yourself know it.
I turned my chair around so that I faced the pie hutch, its tambour doors open to my notebooks lined up in a row, and I reached for a notebook identical to the one I stabbed with my pen six months ago. I wrote Judy Mann and I wrote pizza guy and I wrote Was I date raped? A voice inside me said Yes. I recognized this voice. The same clear voice that said Write about the pizza guy the morning after Anita Hill’s testimony six months ago. This time, I did not stab the page with my pen, I did not shred my words. This time, sitting at the pie hutch, I watched my nineteen-year-old self—in her bunk in her dorm in the hours after the pizza guy—press her hands into a steeple and, tears spilling over her temples, ask God with the earnestness of someone in disbelief if it’s possible to make something that happened unhappen. (Ah, so she did know it happened.) She squeezes her eyes tight and, tears pooling in her ears, erases the pizza guy from her experience. This of course does not undo what had been done. (“We cannot be unraped,” Nikki Giovanni would say in the 2010s.) But, conditioned by a culture that denies women’s experience of rape, I did what I knew how to do: protect myself with silence. Self-silence.
It would be the better part of twenty years before I would tell anyone outside of my notebook—beginning with Steve—what happened with the pizza guy. As I write this, decades removed from that pie hutch, I can trace the thread of my voice recovery back to Anita Hill’s clarion call. Poised before that judicial committee, Anita Hill embodied a version of womanhood I had never before witnessed: voice as courage, yes, but also voice as self. Self-compassion. Self-assuredness. Self-resolve. Self-dignity. Self-respect. Self-love. Self-possession. In the face of relentless vitriol—the hearing itself hardly rose above a backlash—she embodied her voice, trusted her words, spoke her truth.
Self-truth.
Friday, October 11, 1991, 3:45pm
Curled in this recliner, I continued to be awestruck by Anita Hill’s ability to speak her truth and push back at the senators who repeatedly attempted to malign her words. Late in the afternoon, however, the senator from Alabama tossed her an unexpected softball: “How old were you at this particular time that you were at the Department of Education?” The kind of question even I could answer. She responded, “I just turned twenty-five when I started the job.” I was twenty-five. And I knew from news reports that on this day, dressed in her teal linen suit, Anita Hill was thirty-five. Ten years older than me. And though I could not imagine ever speaking off the cuff with such self-assurance—How does she do that?—I did wonder, with a tiny burst of hope, as the judiciary chair gaveled a fifteen-minute recess, Will I find my voice by the time I’m thirty-five?
“Sweetheart,” I want to tell my twenty-five-year-old self, glued to the RCA, “You cannot find your voice because your voice is not lost. It’s within you. Your voice is you. Anita Hill was able to speak into that microphone because she knew who she was. She had her self. You see, Sweetheart, a voice is not found. Word by word, truth by truth, self by self, a voice is reclaimed, re-embodied, recovered. Your fight for your voice is a fight for your self. All of your selves: You in this recliner at twenty-five hearing Anita Hill’s testimony, you at nineteen waking up beneath the pizza guy, you at fifteen on that damn school bus, you in eighth grade waiting at the bus stop, you in seventh grade developing breasts, and (look at her!) you at seven catching the bobbin thread on your mother’s Kenmore. Each precious self holds a piece of your voice. Yes, even the nineteen-year-old you who turned her head and froze. Her, too. Especially her.”
Later, when Anita Hill told the senator from Arizona that perhaps her coming forward “may encourage other people to come forward,” a question popped into my mind: People like me? My nineteen-year-old self in her waitress uniform answers, with unwavering self-assuredness, Yes.
Marilyn Bousquin is the founder of Writing Women’s Lives Memoir Academy, where she helps writers get their story out of their heart and onto the page. She believes shared stories heal lives, and that reclaiming one’s voice is an act of consciousness that promotes change. Her work appears in Sweet, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Superstition Review, Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, Under the Gum Tree, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress To Have a Voice: A Midlife Reckoning with Female Sexual Shame and Silence explores the effects of female sexual shame on sense of self and voice, and draws a correlation between cultural consciousness and individual consciousness. Visit her at writingwomenslives.com and on Facebook.
