No Wedding Bells
On June 19, 1946, just two short weeks after the attack, we got married. From the very beginning, I was miserable. Every time I would think about it, I’d get physically sick to my stomach. It was nothing close to how I would have imagined getting married.
In a hazy, dreamlike state, I found myself looking at my signature at the bottom of that marriage certificate next to his, and, bewildered, I knew that it was indeed my own. We eloped in front of the Justice of the Peace, at the downtown courthouse in Birmingham.
After the ceremony, he told me he had to go handle some business, so he dropped me off and we went our separate ways. I crossed the threshold into my parents’ house—not being carried by my new husband, but alone. This was my introduction to my new life as a married woman.
I entered the living room, and fortunately Madea was in the kitchen shuffling dishes and cooking as usual. I could smell the pleasant aroma of one her world-famous “sock-it-to-me” cakes, all throughout the house. The familiar atmosphere reminded me of how things were back when my life was normal.
At that moment, I thought: This is not right. This can’t be how a marriage is meant to be. An indication of this startling reality was the fact that my parents didn’t show this kind of distant love that my new husband and I supposedly had. Love. I don’t dare even use the word. I didn’t even know this man. He had taken something special from me that I could never get back.
I suddenly began to feel as if I had made the greatest mistake in my life. Because, at that moment, I realized that when a rapist attacks you, he doesn’t love you, or even feel obligated to care for you. Now I agonized over this one thought: If only I had just stayed in the house that day, when I first saw him coming up my block.
A few years prior to the attack, I remembered going into our neighborhood corner store and seeing Wadean’s pictures hanging on the wall. Come to find out, the owner’s son, Sal, and Wadean were friends; after Wadean had joined the Navy, he’d sent Sal pictures of the places where he had been deployed.
During that time, I was a penpal to many of the soldiers who fought in the war. So when I saw his picture, I asked Sal for his address so I could write to him. But, for some reason, I had never gotten around to writing. I should have taken my reluctance to write him as a sign.
My brother Lee knew Wadean from the neighborhood, and on occasion I would see him in passing. At one of the rare neighborhood parties that I was allowed to attend, I greeted him through one of our associates. But simply because I regrettably engaged in a brief conversation with him on the porch, the following 30 years proved to be filled with grief and disappointment.
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