LITTLE ROCK — My maternal grandmother was a small woman who pinned her hair up each day into a steelwool bun. She wore sensible shoes and dresses with three quarter sleeves (because bare upper arms were believed to incite lust).
She appeared to my childhood self as cold and intimidating, a woman incapable of showing affection.
My grandfather was a quiet man. He didn’t say much, but, in his own awkward way, sometimes tried to play with his grandchildren. He died when I was quite young. I have few memories of him.
My grandmother passed away suddenly when I was a college senior. My sisters and I headed to the Mt. Carmel School campus northwest of Jackson, Ky., where my grandparents had spent their adult lives.
I hadn’t been to Mt. Carmel in years, having chosen to shun the place that caused me so much pain and stress as a child.
Mt. Carmel was - and remains - a K-12 evangelical boarding school. The campus is nestled deep in the mountains, in the midst of cabins belonging to coal miners and their families.
When my mother graduated from college, she was expected to return to Mt. Carmel and teach. Instead, she fled what she deemed a judgmental, suffocating environment, married my dad and created a new life in Texas, far away from the place where everything she said or did drew condemning stares.
My grandparents arrived at Mt. Carmel in their early 20s, drawn by a fiery preacher woman who had founded the “Holiness Movement.”
They were engaged to be married and hoped to spend their lives converting and educating the unsaved mountain folk.
My grandmother was assigned to teach school in an isolated outpost. She lived with a young woman, also a teacher, who had grown up in those mountains. Grandma was an outsider. She was from Penn-sylvania.
Years passed. By the time I was born, my grandfather was running the school and a nearby junior Bible college with Grandma as his assistant.
For decades they lived in an immaculate small house on campus.
In the years before her death, my grandmother began sorting and labeling things. It would make her passing more efficient, she told my mother and aunts.
When we arrived at the house after the funeral, we found stickers on every single piece of furniture. They indicated who was to receive each item. The only thing she hadn’t marked was a box tucked away in a closet.
It was filled with cards and letters from my grandfather, written during their lengthy engagement.
And in those cards we learned my grandmother’s secret, one she had kept ever since her early 20s, when she lived in that lonely outpost cabin.
One night, as she and her fellow teacher slept, two men broke a window and crawled into the cabin. They raped my grandmother and her friend.
She must have been badly injured. We pieced together a timeline from my grandfather’s letters, which indicated that she had remained hospitalized for several weeks.
Those letters revealed something else - the love my grandfather had for his intended. He wrote lyrically, passionately, of the life they would share after their wedding. He filled each note with endearments, promising lifelong devotion.
He wrote all this while my grandmother recovered from being raped, assuring her that his love remained true.
My mother, aunt and I read these letters and cried.
They had always suspected something bad had happened, but never knew the details.
The letters helped fill in the gaps.
One of the rapists was the brother of my grandmother’s roommate. After the attack, the roommate’s family - prominent and powerful within the small rural community - instructed their daughter not to testify against either man. But my grandmother refused to be bullied. She shared, in painful, intimate detail, the horror of that night.
I imagine the time in which this happened. I imagine my grandmother’s prim nature. I imagine how difficult that must have been for her, to share something so graphic with the police and courts.
The accused rapists were acquitted. And for the rest of her life, my grandmother lived in the same county as those men.
This I cannot imagine.
As we sat there, on my grandmother’s guest-room bed, my mom and aunt recalled how, every time my grandfather went out of town, Grandma nagged her three young daughters to stay close to the house. After dinner, she flitted from room to room, double-checking the locks on windows and doors.
Oh.
My mother made the connection at the same time I did.
“I think that’s why I got so upset every time your dad left town,” Mom said, referring to my father’s frequent business trips to Europe. “I never realized it, but we grew up sharing her fears, even though we didn’t know what caused them.”
We sat there silently, amidst all those cards and letters piled on the bed, and I remember thinking how sad it was that unrelenting, constant fear - through no fault of her own - was my grandmother’s legacy to her daughters.
In recent years, my mother and her older sister have worked through that ingrained fear. They also have come to terms with the lingering resentment they felt toward Mt. Carmel and its profound effect on their lives.
Watching them evolve into adventurous, courageous women has been so inspiring.
I’m proud of you, Mom and Aunt Martha, for shedding your mother’s lifelong fear.
Instead, you’ve seized and instilled within yourselves the bravery Grandma was able to summon when it mattered most, when she faced down the men who violated not only her body, but her belief that all people could be made good.
Cathy Frye, a news reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has two stept eens and two children, ages 4 and 6. Also a husband. And a geriatric, deaf dog. She and Cindy Murphy are co-editors of LittleRockMamas.com E-mail her at
Family, Pages 35 on 12/30/2009