{"id":146497,"date":"2020-07-29T11:00:44","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=146497"},"modified":"2020-07-29T11:29:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:29:17","slug":"be-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/29\/be-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Good"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Hamdan \/ Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n

The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t let you leave,\u201d he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyonc\u00e9 belted \u201cDrunk in Love\u201d in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album\u2019s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyonc\u00e9 looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it.<\/p>\n

One night, my rapist asked if I\u2019d heard of Gregory Porter. \u201cThere\u2019s a song of his that reminds me of you,\u201d he said, and that was the first time I heard \u201cBe Good (Lion\u2019s Song).\u201d It\u2019s about a couple, except the man is a lion, and the woman has trapped him in a cage because he can\u2019t be trusted to roam freely. In the first verse<\/a>, when they meet, the lion is brushing his mane; by the second, he has trimmed his claws and cut his hair, and the woman has already told him that lions are meant to be caged; if they\u2019re left to walk around, \u201cthey might just bite.\u201d The woman\u2019s name is Be Good, a phrase she also repeats to him, though it is he who sings that refrain to us. He is both her amanuensis and her accuser. \u201cDoes she know what she does\u2009\/\u2009when she dances around my cage?\u201d he asks again and again, each time more plaintive than the last.<\/p>\n

My rapist compared me to Be Good because the tenor of our relationship had changed. I had become a difficult woman where I had been so simple before, wanting only his body\u2014nothing more. We had a lot of sex, and my rapist had few inhibitions and even less predictability. In one moment, he could be gentle, almost tearful. In another, rough, commanding, and I liked it. I\u2019d spent much of my life doing the things I believed people expected me to do. Sometimes, I was successful in pleasing them. Other times, I failed miserably, and I thought of those failures constantly. It was nice to let someone else be responsible for making decisions. <\/p>\n

But we were a few months into it, and I had grown tired. My body was always sticky with him, my stomach churning from whatever we drank the night before, and we drank often. I was growing increasingly paranoid about our relationship. Where was its substance? Did he really know me? Once, during a conversation about marriage, I asked him a series of questions, things I already knew about him: my mother\u2019s and my siblings\u2019 names, my majors in college. He couldn\u2019t answer. Those things weren\u2019t important. We loved each other.<\/p>\n

But what did we really have in common? We were both prone to sadness, but we treated our sadnesses differently. His made him angry; the corners of his eyes would sizzle with tears. \u201cCan I hug you?\u201d I would ask. \u201cDo I look like I need one?\u201d he would retort. When I was sad, I played music and sat quietly in dark rooms. I once played Florence and the Machine\u2019s \u201cBreaking Down<\/a>\u201d for him. \u201cThis is what my depression feels like,\u201d I explained, \u201ca monster that creeps into my brain while I\u2019m sleeping.\u201d \u201cAw! I\u2019m sooooo depressed!\u201d he screeched, clutching his chest, his voice high-pitched to mimic mine. I recoiled, shocked that someone who could hold such sadness could also mock it.<\/p>\n

Months before I met my rapist, I had taken a vow of celibacy, a thing I\u2019ve done many times in my adult life. It\u2019s a throwback to the Christian purity contracts of my childhood, the promise to stay chaste until marriage. Something with my rapist was feeling off-kilter, and perhaps returning to my vow would be the answer. In hindsight, I understand it might have looked like an erratic, inconsiderate decision, but it was my right. My rapist didn\u2019t think so. \u201cYou tricked me!\u201d he roared. \u201cYou\u2019ve seduced me and now you\u2019re trying to flip things around to control me.\u201d He would laugh, shaking his head. I was no better than Be Good, but I shrugged it off. No one had ever loved me enough to sing about me. I had my suspicions that no one had ever loved me at all. This is what I was trying to disprove. Maybe, if we slowed down, I could see things more clearly.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Cathy Caruth calls trauma \u201cthe story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.\u201d And the truth is more than a combination of facts, of what we know happened. It\u2019s also the lost experiences, \u201cwhat remains unknown in our actions and our language.\u201d When my rapist raped me, I didn\u2019t know it. It was a Sunday, though I have blocked out most of the day. I can\u2019t remember if I went to church, but I can remember having a potluck dinner with friends. There would have been laughter, maybe even raucous conversations about partners. There was wine, which I drank, and even more when I got home, where I turned out all the lights before texting him. I hadn\u2019t held my ground after saying I wanted to dial things back, and I didn\u2019t want to see myself doing what I was about to do: break the promise I had made to myself.<\/p>\n

The first time we had sex that night was consensual and, afterward, I thought we were done. He was leaving, and I was sprawled on the bed, drifting into a stupor. I heard him take his keys from the nightstand and then put them down. I saw the blur of his red shirt, dimly illuminated by the glow of streetlights seeping through the blinds. I remember the heave and cry of the bedsprings, the heaviness of his body. I remember being unable to move, though no one was holding me down. I don\u2019t remember how it began, or how it ended\u2014only the weight of him, then his absence. I woke up sore the next day, and there was an unopened condom on my nightstand. When I asked my rapist about it, he said, \u201cI left it there on purpose, to remind you how connected we are to each other. I was trying to fuck you into submission.\u201d It would take months\u2014years\u2014to understand what that meant, and that there are costs for both remembering and not remembering, even though both are strategies for survival.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure why, years later, I pulled up the video for \u201cBe Good\u201d on YouTube; although, if I\u2019m being honest with myself, I wanted to hear the song again, and pore over the images associated with it. Doing that would be the closest thing to seeing my rapist, a desire that felt deeply unsettling, but in a way that felt manageable. At any time I could close the window and Gregory Porter would disappear. At any time, I could remind myself that Gregory Porter is not my rapist, just someone who sings beautifully.<\/p>\n

In the video for \u201cBe Good,\u201d a woman dances alone, oblivious to her love interest: a somber, dark-suited man with a neat side-part razored into his low-cut kinks. He\u2019s accompanied by a Cupid-in-training, a girl who unsuccessfully tries to make the woman notice her admirer. First, the girl tries painting on the man\u2019s smile: she literally gives him head gear attached to a binder, with sketches of characters in various states of joy, then grief. Next, she offers a cardboard boom box that he plays beneath the woman\u2019s window, but the woman remains blissfully unaware. She dances away, and it isn\u2019t until the man cuts into her dance and offers his hand that she even acknowledges his existence. Instantly, she falls into his arms, and lets him lead in a courtyard surrounded by other dancing couples. Young men in stylish sunglasses and old men in Kangol hats dip the women, whose large Afros tilt toward the cobblestones as they laugh. Everyone in the video is beautiful. Everyone in the video is Black.<\/p>\n

The couples make me think of the life my rapist and I dreamt of building. He owned a home, but he hated its size and the work he imagined it would need to accommodate a growing family. So he pored over models of geodesic houses, those cheaply built structures that can be as small or as large as you want, but don\u2019t always last. Behind those hastily assembled walls, we could have been one of those couples from the video, my rapist leading the dance as the lion swears he has trimmed his claws and cut his mane. We could have been neat Black. Respectable Black. Safe Black.<\/p>\n

One night, my rapist and I were pulled over on our way home from an art exhibition where we\u2019d drunk wine and marveled at Rockwell paintings of integrated neighborhoods. What I hadn\u2019t seen when the officer asked for his driver\u2019s license was that my rapist had first shown the badge he used to enter the building where he worked as a public health official. The officer believed my rapist\u2019s excuse about still getting accustomed to his new car and let him go with a warning to turn his lights on next time. Later, we drank rum milkshakes and drafted a description of a robbery suspect, like the hyperbolically vague ones I often received by email from campus police at the university where I worked. Light to dark-skinned male, between the ages of 18 and 65. Short hair, but might possibly have dreadlocks. Anywhere from 5\u20190 to 6\u20195\u201d feet tall. <\/em>We shook our heads at the absurdity. \u201cBut I wasn\u2019t worried tonight,\u201d my rapist reassured me, \u201conce the cop knew what I was.\u201d He was enamored with the kind of respectability that gave him a pass, that made him safer to do whatever he wanted in a world where so few Black people could, including the women he dated.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I think of what I missed in his exchange with the officer, but also what my rapist might have missed with me. Everyone keeps telling me rape is about power, and I wonder what power my rapist thought he could gain by raping me. In another life, I was the card he would have slipped the world: a wife with advanced degrees sitting in the passenger seat of the nice car he would drive to our round house, where we would listen to our vintage-voiced music and secretly make jokes about racism. The frames of geodesic houses look like intricate cages, and I wonder what he was trying to lock himself in while also feeling safe. And yet even that rationale feels like an act of mercy I don\u2019t think he deserves.<\/p>\n

In her lyrical history of colonial Antigua, A Small Place<\/em>, Jamaica Kincaid writes: \u201cThere\u2019s a world of something in this, but I can\u2019t go into it right now.\u201d This is how I feel when I think about rape and power, because, as with any story of systemic violence, I no longer have all the details. I am struggling to grasp the full scope of the narrative even though I understand such is sometimes unbearable. Several days ago, I read an article about the rape and murder of Oluwatoyin \u201cToyin\u201d Salau, and how proudly her killer recounted his reasons and methods for killing her. Halfway through, my brain started scrambling for an explanation. How could someone who spent the last days of her young life fighting for justice for Black people suffer so much violence? Maybe it\u2019s a conspiracy, a cover-up, I reasoned. Maybe the police have, for some reason, fabricated this, and these details are actually false. But I know there are other stories like hers. And the details in those stories are the truth. My disbelief is the cage my brain has built for my own survival, which has also trapped me into straining to make sense of what I can\u2019t. In the case of my own experience, I also have to direct myself away from logic for several reasons; first, because what has been lost to my memory in the aftermath of trauma prevents me from having all the details. But also, and this is difficult to say: when I think too intently about what romantic dream of communal solidarity is lost to me as a Black woman who knows that my body is unsafe even in the midst of a world on fire\u2014presumably for the sake<\/em> of my safety\u2014I lose all hope, and I need hope to heal. There\u2019s a world of something in this that I will one day get into, but I can\u2019t get into it right now.<\/p>\n

I wrote this essay thinking I could do one of the few things I\u2019m good at, and make peace with my rape and my rapist for once and for all. Gregory Porter did that with his absent father. Before he made jazz albums, Porter wrote a musical about his life, and it included an apology from his dad. \u201cOnce I performed it on stage,\u201d he said<\/a>, \u201cI actually released that bitterness that I had towards him.\u201d I wish I could do that. I wish it was that easy: me looking to Gregory Porter as an exemplar who can lead me out of this, and who conveniently reminds me of the person who hurt me most. It would be like closing a gap, making a perfect circle. But I can\u2019t hear \u201cLion\u2019s Song\u201d without thinking of my rape, and I can\u2019t hear Porter\u2019s voice without thinking of my rapist. And I\u2019m still trying to understand the logic of rape itself, even though I know there isn\u2019t one, other than the fact that, if my rapist hasn\u2019t gotten help, he has already done this to someone else. On average, most rapists offend seven to eleven times before they\u2019re caught<\/a>. And, as in the case of Toyin Salau, rape victims are often victimized multiple times<\/a>. So, somewhere, my rapist may be telling another woman she is Be Good, and she thinks she has power, that she is in a safe place with him in his cage. But she\u2019s not. Even if this has happened to her before, she has no idea what might ultimately transpire.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Destiny O. Birdsong\u2019s writing has appeared in <\/em>African American Review, <\/em>Indiana Review, and <\/em>The Adroit Journal, among other publications. She has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Richard G. Peterson Poetry Prize from <\/em>Crab Orchard Review. Her debut collection of poems, <\/em>Negotiations, will be published in October by Tin House Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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