Chapter 21
Dionne Henry
Release It!
Iwas in church with my mom this morning, and I was taking the sermon pretty hard.
Guilt was eating me up this morning. Not only was I dealing with guilt, but the sermon that pastor Dukes was delivering this morning called me out, and I had been off and on crying since he started about fifteen minutes ago.
It was just my mom and I, and she continued to put her hand on my back, rubbing it up, and down, as I was having my moment.
I’d come to church already with a heavy heart because when I turned the news on this morning, the first thing that I saw being advertised was the death of Garrus’s wife.
I took that hard. Hard because I was blaming myself.
If I’d never had any dealings with Garrus, it wouldn’t have come to this.
It was also messing with me because she’d just called me the other day, while we were in Gatlinburg.
After our conversation, I kept saying how it felt so final.
She knew to call me, drop that heaviness on me, and then take her own life.
She knew it would disturb me, and that’s exactly what was taking place here.
I tried to come to church, and act like I wasn’t fazed by it, but then pastor Dukes had us stand, where he read the scripture, letting us know where the message was coming from this morning, and it broke me down even more.
The message came from Psalm 32: 3-5. To know that verse, is to know that it basically says, “when you keep silent, your bones waste away”.
You go on every day with the burden getting heavier, and heavier.
The bones that pastor Dukes was talking about, wasn’t the physical bones on our body.
Instead, he was referring to the trauma that I’ve been carrying, and the exhaustion that I’ve put on myself because I wouldn’t tell anyone what I was battling.
“Let me say one last thing before I close out because I feel like I’m talking to somebody in the room right now, and if I am, I just want to talk a little louder.
I feel like I’ve somewhat gotten my point across through my sermon, gave someone some sort of a break through, where their halfway ready to release the pain that they’ve been holding onto for a long time, so let me go ahead, and do a little more,” Pastor Dukes went on, and with the tissue in my hand, my head was down, crying, and my mom still had her hand on my back, rubbing it.
“Let me tell you that it doesn’t make you any stronger than the next person because you’ve kept quiet about your trauma.
Just because you get up every morning, and you take care of your outside, without tending to your inside, that doesn’t mean that you’ve healed.
Some of you are in this room, and your silently killing yourself.
I met a woman the other day while I was out having dinner.
Beautiful woman. Realllll fine woman,” he went on, and the congregation laughed.
“See, I saw her from the outside. She walked up on me, and she dropped trauma on me, asking me if I could pray for her. She said that her trauma dated back to almost twenty years ago. The way she had been dressing it up, you would have never known though. Not all of us want to do that though. Not everyone wants to talk about it. It’s a punishment that you put on yourself when you keep quiet about it.
You won’t get through this alone, my sister.
You won’t make it on your own, my brother. You gotta release it,” he said.
“Release it. Release it. Release it,” he kept saying, and it broke me down.
My cries were so loud in the sanctuary, filling up the entire church.
A few of the church women had come over, so that they could help my mom out with me, fanning me, putting hands on me, praying for me.
During all of that, my mom still had her hands on me, and I knew that she could sense that something was bothering me.
I felt it in the way she was hollering out, ‘Amen’, and her voice was cracking. She just didn’t know.
I cry in church pretty much every time that I come because I felt like the word was always speaking to me. It’s never been to this extent though.
Once pastor Dukes was finished with his sermon, he called any members up to the front that needed prayer.
I went up, solely because I knew that when I got in the car with my mom, that I was going to have to release it.
I had to. Tank had been on me for weeks about telling her.
I had kept it away from her for years, so I had to finally break my silence.
As much as I knew that it would break her heart, it had to get done.
After pastor Dukes prayed over me, and anyone else that had come up for prayer, service eventually ended. So many people came up to me after church, giving hugs to me, and quick prayers, and I was ready to run to the car because I hated this kind of attention.
I eventually made it out of the church with my mom, and we went over to her car. I’d rode with her this morning. I came to her house, leaving my car in her driveway. When we got in the car, we didn’t say anything to each other because she was allowing me to still have my moment.
We pulled up to her house about fifteen minutes later, and she parked in her driveway.
She put the car in park, and then turned her head around, so that she could look me in my eyes.
I looked at her beautiful face, and I dropped a couple of tears because I knew this moment was the moment where I was going to have to go ahead and say it.
“What is it that you have to release? It’s something, Dionne. Something is attacking you. Tell me,” her voice was firm.
It reminded me of that night that I was at her house with my sisters, and my nieces, and I stormed out of the house when they started talking about exes from her past. She had been on me that night, trying to get me to confess to what was bothering me, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t at the time because I wasn’t ready. I was somewhat ready now.
“You remember your ex, Torrence, right?” I asked her.
“Yes. What about him?” she quickly answered my question.
I could look at her chest and see how quickly it was rising. I knew from that, that her breathing had picked up, and she was nervous because she didn’t know what I was getting ready to drop on her.
“That’s Tank’s dad,” I started out with minor details before I dropped the bomb on her.
When I said that, she looked shocked. Shocked as if she didn’t believe that.
“What? When I was dealing with Torrence, he told me that he didn’t have any children,” she said.
“Tank is his only child, but the two of them don’t really have a relationship. He was pretty much nonexistent when Tank was a child,” I voiced, and she was looking me in my eyes, as if she was reading me, trying to figure out where I was going with this.
The heaviness, and the quickness of her chest moving up and down hadn’t stopped. It didn’t stop because my mom was smart enough to know that there was more. She knew that I was going somewhere with this.
“What else, Dionne?” she asked. That’s when I could feel the lump in my throat, and my chest matched hers with how quickly it was moving up and down.
“The night Tank took me to his mom’s house for dinner, he pulled out a photo album, so that I could see baby pictures of him. I saw a small picture of him, and his dad, and —”
“And what Dionne? What? And what?” she screamed. She knew. It’s like she knew where it was going, and that’s why she screamed.
“Ma, he raped me,” I cried it to her, and when I said it, her eyes immediately bucked, I could see her chest sink in, and she screamed.
She screamed so loudly in the car, mixed with her crying, and her reaction broke me down. I have never seen my mom break like this. She’s never been the type to cry in front of us. I think when Nivea died, that was the first time I saw her shed tears like that.
“No. No. Dionne, noooo!” she screamed, irrationally, and her screaming and crying didn’t do anything, but have me crying as well.
All these years, I never told her because I knew this would be her reaction. I knew it would cause her to spaz like this.
“When? When the fuck did he do this?” she screamed, tears falling from her eyes.
“New Years Eve. I was eleven,” she told me.
She grew quiet for a moment, and I’m sure she was trying to have her mind go back to all those years ago.
She probably didn’t remember much of that night because she had gotten drunk.
I’m sure she remembered the events that led to that night though.
We had something at the house that night.
Family and friends had come over. Torrence was over.
I remember she woke up the next morning, and she was sick, but now that I’m old enough, I know that it was a hangover that she had, and she wasn’t sick.
It’s like all that clicked to her, and she broke down even harder.
“Why… why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell meeeee Dionne? Why?” she cried. Through tears of my own, I shrugged my shoulders, not sure of why I didn’t tell her. There were so many reasons. It wasn’t just one.
“Look what… look what it did to you. I was scared,” I cried to her.
“What it did to me? Damn me, Dionne! Look what it did to you! This nigga touched you… violated you, and your worrying about me? You could have told me. Dionne… you could have told me this. You know I would have fuckin killed him. Why? Did you think I wasn’t going to believe you?
Why did you do thisssss?” she was irate, not being able to calm herself down.
I didn’t answer her questions because it was too heavy for me right now.
The seatbelt that she had on, she removed it.
Once it was off, she leaned her body into me, pulled me to her by the back of my head, and I broke down against her.
She broke down too, and during that, she kept telling me over, and over that she was sorry, and that I should have told her, so that she could have handled it.
She was living with so much guilt right now.
When she eventually let go of me, and she went back to her side, dropping her head in shame, and she broke down again, I knew that the guilt was attacking her, and that’s never the way I wanted her to feel.
“I’m thinking that… that I’m so close with my kids, and I know everything about them, when I don’t,” she cried, her head down. I never said anything.
Five minutes later, she spoke again.
“Ima kill him. I swear to God I am,” her words were cold, and I believed her too.
“He’s in jail, ma. They’re holding him without a bond. He was drunk driving, and he hit someone. The person is in the hospital, fighting for their life. You can’t get to him,” I let her know.
She didn’t say anything else after that. She just leaned backed in her seat, and I could feel that I was sitting next to a broken woman. I managed to break her with this, and that’s truly what had been my fear all along.