andrew allen

I’m finally going to tell you my story. Why I’m here. How this account came to be. Something in my soul says that now is the time. When I was 6 years old, I was sexually abused by a family member. It was horrific. It tore my family to shreds, and my only solace was in my best friend, Monique. I don’t know if her mother knew what was going on, but she encouraged me to stay over all of the time, and was genuinely one of the kindest, most loving women I’ve ever known. Monique and I road the school bus together every single day. We would laugh, talk, trade Lisa Frank stickers and sometimes she would braid my hair. (I think partially out of pity. It was always a tangled mess.) One day our bus driver had to get off of the bus for a moment, and although we were in the first grade, the bus was full of students all the way up to the sixth grade. A sixth grader enthusiastically asked if we wanted to hear a joke real quick, and like most schoolchildren would, we all eagerly screamed out “YES!!” “What’s black, yellow, and screams a lot?” She asked. We all yelled out a thousand different guesses. One of us screamed “a bumblebee!” Another screamed out “a taxi!” The sixth grader looked around and then leaned in to scream “A bus full of n-g-ers going off of a cliff!” The bus exploded in laughter, but I didn’t laugh. I don’t remember anyone telling me what the word meant, but I clearly knew, because I remember looking all around the bus to see if a black person was onboard, and feeling extreme relief when I had determined that there wasn’t. I sat there, wondering when the bus driver was going to get back, before I realized that Monique was quietly crying next to me. I know this is going to sound stupid, I’ve replayed it a million times in my mind over and over again, but I didn’t realize that Monique was black until that very moment. I mean, clearly I had eyes, but she was just Monique to me. My six year old brain hadn’t put together that black people came in many shades, and when I finally realized this and awkwardly tried to talk to her, she just buried her face against the window of the bus and didn’t say a word until we got off. Monique didn’t want to play that day. I went home early, clearly upset, and told my mother what had happened only for her to say “And you just sat there? You didn’t say anything?! You have to say something! You don’t want to be a coward in this life!” I remember feeling so much shame. The truth is, I was a coward. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself, let alone anyone else. It was a personal trait I hated about myself until many years later when I was well into my teen years, and had to learn how to physically fight after being bullied for quite some time. I was awkward. I’ve always been awkward. Maybe it’s because of the childhood sexual abuse, or maybe it’s because of my own personal temperament. I guess I’ll never really know, but I do know that Monique was one of the only good things about my childhood. She sat with me, she played with me, she made me feel safe at a time in my life when even my own family wasn’t a safe place to be. The next year my parents divorced and I never saw Monique again. We moved to a small town about 120 miles away, and although I have some of her drawings and stickers that we traded, I don’t even remember her last name. I only have amazing memories of both her and her mother, giving me love at a time when I desperately needed it the most. (Continued)