I Will Find You (17 page)

Laura Wills, the youngest of Millie and T.C. Francis’s eight children, was still living in Cleveland. Charlene told her I would call, and she had prepared herself. She’d talked it over with Charlene. She’d sought guidance from her pastor. She’d prayed to God.

By the fall of 2007, at her pastor’s urging, she was ready to tell her story to me.

I didn’t call. I wanted to meet Laura, but when I returned to Cleveland from Boston I was not ready. I felt upset and depressed by what Charlene and Philip had told me. I couldn’t get the image of the boys hanging from hooks out of my head.

One week went by. Then two. I busied myself with transcribing the recordings and searching for records that weren’t in the files I already had. I still didn’t call Laura. Winter crept into Ohio. Masses of gray clouds parked themselves over Lake Erie and Cleveland, where they would stay through April.
Honking geese passed under them. After the cold came the snow.

Thanksgiving was approaching when I finally called Laura. She told me she’d wondered if I was ever going to call, and invited Lisa and me to come visit. The Monday after the holiday, we drove to her house on Cleveland Road in Glenville, a neighborhood of front-porch houses that had once been 90 percent Jewish and middle-class. Superman was born here, the creation of Glenville’s Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As the Second Great Migration brought a wave of black families from the Jim Crow South to industrial cities, the newcomers to Cleveland found that Jewish home owners were more willing to sell to them than others. In 1940, the neighborhood was 2 percent black; by 1950, as the Jewish population began to sell their houses and move to the suburbs, that number had risen to 40 percent. Today Glenville is 97 percent black.

Laura was ready for Christmas. Presents were wrapped and waiting under a tree, its blinking lights competing with the big-screen television. It was tuned to a televangelist, who preached with the backing of a full gospel choir. On one wall hung a painting of the Last Supper, surrounded by framed photographs of Laura and her husband, Gus, and their children. On a stand in the corner, a Bible was open to Psalms.

Laura sat on the couch holding her son, Keishaun. I sat next to them, balancing my recorder on the cushion in between. Keishaun snuggled his head against his mother’s shoulder and coughed into her chest, the coughs deep and wet. “He has asthma bad,” Laura said, patting his back. “I’ve got to give him a treatment in a little while.”

“He’s so cute!” Lisa said. “How old is he?”

“He’ll be three in January,” Laura said.

“He’s big,” Lisa said.

“Yeaaahh,” Laura said, stroking his head. “He’s still my baby.”

I had seen the family resemblance in Charlene and David, but Laura seemed to come from a different family altogether. Her skin was much lighter, her hair straight. But it was the eyes that really separated her from them. Charlene and David had a hard, calculating gaze that unraveled me. Laura looked at me with eyes that were reserved but peaceful.

“So, you talked to Charlene,” I said. “Did she tell you anything about what I’m doing?”

“That you’re writing about my brother, about you being a survivor?” Laura said. “You were my brother’s victim?”

Keishaun coughed. She shifted him on her lap. I nodded.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “I didn’t really know him. I distanced myself from my brother, growing up. He has always been disturbed, far as I know. In and out of prison, since he was twelve or so. He had attempts on my father’s life. A couple of things in Boston I can remember hearing when I was a child, him being in jail. He’s always been a problem child. I distanced myself from him. Far as it goes.”

It almost sounded as though she had practiced it before we came over. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about any of this.

“My father was an alcoholic; he was abusive to my mother,” she said. “He would do things, tamper with me, and said if I told my mother he would kill me.” She said this without emotion, reporting facts, exactly the way I told people about my rape.

“What do you mean, tamper with you?”

“I was so afraid of him where I automatically, when he came to the door, I would pee on myself. And that would make him angry, and he would drag me in the bathroom and my punishment, after he got through beating on me, I had to get on my knees and hold my face over in the toilet, the commode, until he decided I could come out of the bathroom. And every once in a while he would say, ‘Laura, come here, Daddy want to check you and see if you peed on yourself.’ And he would pull my pants down and stick his fingers, you know, and be playing with me down there.”

When Laura was six years old and her brother Neamiah was eight, Millie Francis ran away from her husband, leaving them behind. The other children were grown and gone, or in juvenile custody.

“She told us she was going to the store, and she never came back,” Laura said. “She left us with our father for a two-year period. And an incident happened. My father had got drunk, and he took me and threw me across the table and he broke my shoulder and my arm. And they got word to my mother—they found out where she was—and she came back to Boston and she took Neamiah and me away from him, and he told her if she ever came back that he would kill her. And the rest of us.”

By then, Millie was going with a new man, Frank Rodriques, and had changed her name to Matia Rodriques so her husband couldn’t track her down.

“They traveled a lot, her and this man,” Laura said. “We went to Texas and Oklahoma, and came here to Cleveland,
too. In Texas they had this little wooden church. Frank took me in the church, I remember him pulling my pants down and bending me over the pew, and he didn’t molest me in my vagina.” Laura paused and lowered her voice. “He did it rectally.”

Laura was eight years old.

Her older sister Linda came to visit from Boston. “She was bathing me and I was all rough and raw down there. I told her what Frank did, and she told my mother, and my mother didn’t believe me. She said, ‘Stop lying, he’s taking care of us.’”

They moved on, to Muscatine, Iowa. “Charlene came to visit, and she realized that it was still going on. So she called the sheriff, and the sheriff came out, and I had all kinds of people asking me questions, asking me to describe how big his penis was and asking me how it happened. And Frank just skipped town. We ain’t seen the man since. I don’t know if he’s living or dead. After that it seems like my mother just started drinking and never stopped.”

Millie took her two youngest children to Cleveland, where Charlene lived with her husband and infant daughter.

Charlene and Millie started going to the after-hours joint in the basement of Velma Chaney’s house. There, Millie met Ida Taylor and her husband, and they introduced her to one of their friends.

“She met this man called Earlie B., and I don’t know what this man had, but it was enough to make her not want to take care of her children anymore,” Laura said. She didn’t mention the glass eye, so I didn’t, either.

“She just gave up on life,” Laura said. “All she wanted to do was serve him and become an alcoholic and do what she
wanted to do. She told me and Neamiah, ‘I’m gonna let y’all stay with Velma for a while and then I’m gonna come back and get you.’ Well, Velma went and got permanent custody so my mother couldn’t get us back.”

As foster kids, Laura and Neamiah brought in a monthly check for Velma. She also put them to work, cleaning the house and sometimes delivering the drugs Velma sold from her back door.

“We hated her,” Laura said. “She used to call us little half-white bastards, ’cause of our light skin and straight hair. She beat me so bad with an extension cord you couldn’t believe it—for getting the wrong thing at the store.”

Neamiah ran away from Velma’s house when he was fourteen and Laura was twelve. “I don’t know if Charlene told you, but Neamiah is gay,” Laura said. “And Velma caught him and some other boy having sex. So she made him dress up in one of my outfits, a dress, and parade up and down the street. After that, he told me he was going to a place called Safe Place for teenagers. I told him, ‘Don’t leave me alone.’ He left ’cause he knew it was going to get worse, but he promised to come back and get me. I haven’t seen him since.”

I was beginning to see that Laura kept her distance not just from her family, but from her own history. As she talked, I could hear myself telling my story with the same distance, as though it had happened to someone else.

Laura met Gus Wills when she was fifteen. His family lived three doors down from Velma.

“I didn’t know he liked me, I was so scared of men,” she said. “I was timid. I was—I couldn’t even look a person
in the eye. I was scared of men because every one that ever came around, they molested me. So here comes this young boy down the street, he comes down and says, ‘I want you to be my girlfriend.’ Just like that! He didn’t ask me, he just said, ‘I want you to be my girlfriend.’” So that’s what she did.

Laura started spending most of her time at the Willses’ house. They were a good Christian family; Gus’s grandmother was an ordained minister. They went to another church on Sunday, but they had a sanctuary in the back room of the house where they had Bible study and helped anybody who was in need of help.

Laura was in need of help. She loved going to Mrs. Wills’s house.

When she was eighteen, she got pregnant. It was an accident, but it was not a terrible thing for Laura. “That’s the only real love I ever knew: my daughter and my husband-to-be. His family kind of knew the abusive situation in the foster home, so his mother told me to bring the baby and move in with them. I moved in with them, and that’s the best thing I could have done in my life.”

Gus was away in the military, and after a couple of years he and Laura got married. He was posted to Germany, where they lived for six years. One of Laura’s sons was born there. They saved money, and came home to a Cleveland that had been invaded by crack.

“I was going out partying with friends that I hadn’t seen since I was overseas,” Laura said. “And I heard about this crack stuff, and I’d go to these parties. Then one night I was so drunk, one of my girlfriends was like, ‘Hit this and
it’ll sober you up.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s that crack—they say you get hooked on that.’ She said, ‘You won’t get hooked, it’ll just help sober you up.’ I tried it, and she knew that I had a little money, getting back from Germany, and she knew that getting me to use drugs, well, it would supply her. As it went on, the little bit I was trying, I didn’t realize it was becoming an addiction.”

It didn’t take long before she ran out of money and started stealing. “I found myself doing things that I wouldn’t have done if I had never made the choice to pick those drugs up. I would come in and take things out of my house. I stole from relatives, I stole from my children, their toys; anything I thought could be sold, I took. You have to be a real crazy-looking woman to be walking down the street carrying a TV. And the TV, you bought it for two hundred dollars and all you get for it is twenty.”

When she ran out of things to steal and sell, she sold herself. “I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of,” she said.

She had three children by this time, a daughter and two sons. She left them alone in the house while she went out to get high. She got into a lot of cars with a lot of men. Two of them raped her. When I asked if she had reported the rapes, she looked at me as if I was out of my mind. “I didn’t want to go to jail,” she said.

Laura continued as though she were testifying in court. In a monotone, she told me about losing everything. “That drug demon, it wanted what it wanted,” she said.

It went on for fifteen years. Her fourth child was born with drugs in her system. “She’s not right,” Laura said. “She’s what you call mentally retarded.”

The hospital alerted Children and Family Services. The caseworkers determined Laura was neglecting the children. They came to the house and took the four children away from her and Gus. They were gone for twelve years.

Laura told me she thanks Jesus for their foster mother, who officially adopted all four children. She’s a good woman and loved them, Laura said.

Her children gone, Laura went on using. Gus finally had to make her leave their house. She was homeless, sleeping in crack houses and cars. She went through a drug program, but only because it was a choice between the program or jail, and she started using again as soon as she was out. She was picked up for solicitation five times. One of those times a judge sent her to the workhouse for eight months, but she got out after two and a half for good behavior.

“I couldn’t deal with being sober, because when I was sober I started thinking about my kids and crying,” she said. “I didn’t want to live like that. I could see myself dying in a crack house, and I didn’t want to go that way.”

Right before the new year of 2004, she called on God for help, even though she didn’t really believe in any of that anymore. “But I came to the realization, I’m never going to see my kids, and the last time I got high, this guy raped me in the car, and afterwards he took all my clothes and my shoes and turned me out of the car. And something came over me, and it was nothing but God speaking to me and telling me to come out. I was tired. I had called on God, to give me a moment to make a decision, to take me away from this. I was homeless, it was in the winter, I was in the backseat of a car under a nasty blanket.”

She went to her husband’s apartment. “I asked him, could I come in and take a bath and get something to eat? And he said, ‘Laura, I can’t let you in. I got to show you tough love.’ And I said, ‘I’m tired. I really need to take a bath and use the phone and see if I can get some help.’ And he said, ‘If you’re tired and you really want to get yourself together, first thing in the morning I’ll take you and make sure you get help.’ I took a bath, and he made sure I ate. And he watched me all through the night. I don’t think he got no sleep.”

The next day Gus took her to get treatment. “I did outpatient for six months, intensive treatment, going all day every day, and then I did three and a half months aftercare. Then I did meetings, which I still do meetings today.”