I heard Anita Hill interviewed yesterday. It has been twenty-five years since she and other women testified to the sexual harassment perpetrated by Clarence Thomas. Even after her testimony, Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court by George Bush in 1991.
Anita Hill, now a Professor of Social Policy, Law and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University sees hope in the changes in the law since those dark times. “Victims brave enough to come forward and speak of their abuse empower others who have been abused.”
One bright, hot summer day in the early twenties in Wausau, Florida, my great grandmother, Minnie Clara Brock Gilmore worked in her hard-won fields alongside her daughter, Viney.
At some point during that day, she paused.
Her words must have gone something like this. “There is something I need to tell you. I don’t want you telling anyone else, but someone needs to know.”
I’m sure Viney must have stopped dead in her hoeing or picking or whatever it was she was doing. Her mother’s tone must have been frightening.
What was it that she needed to know? Maybe she stood there and wished her mother would pick someone else to tell her secret to.
But she didn’t. Her mother chose Viney.
“When I was 22 years old, my mother died. Some say my father killed her, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Soon after her death, all of my father’s equipment for casting and making his cooking stoves, all of it was stolen. My father was so overcome with grief over the death of my mother and the loss of his livelihood that he went away and died.
Soon after he died, the county sheriff seized all of our property. I was forced to make my living working on someone else’s farm. My baby sister, Eva, was kidnapped away from me while I was out working. I never saw nor heard from her again. My sister, Annie, was adopted by a kindly woman.
The family I worked for had two sons. One was very kind and good. The other was not. He took advantage of me one day in the north field. My baby girl was taken from me soon after she was born. I grieved myself nearly to death. Your father found me and helped me, and we married and had all of you. Later I found out my first-born was living down in Southport with her adopted parents.
I tell you this so that one day you might meet your sister and love her for my sake.”