I Am A Domestic Violence Survivor

(This is an excerpt from my upcoming book "Out of Bondage.")

I don’t know what I said during the interim of me trying to get him off me and to even stop him from hitting me. I’m quite sure I was vocalizing something, I just can’t remember what it was. After he slapped and I somehow wrestled my arms out of his grip because at that point he was hitting me with his fists. He was real crafty with how he would beat me. He would never beat me where I would have a black eye, or busted nose or busted lip. He would always hit me with his fists about my body. He would hit me with his fists all in my head—and God is great because I could have been killed at any point with the blow to the right part of my head. If he had hit me in my temple I would have died probably. Like I said about my body, where I would be bruised up and all that kind of thing. And just so you know, I used to be an athlete. I used to play softball, volleyball, tennis, I swam. I was pretty athletic so I was very, very limber. So with him hitting me and having me held down like that, I managed to get up. I was smaller. I only weighed at that time 129 lbs, and here was this man, 6’1” / 6’2”, probably weighed every bit of 185, 190, he was hitting me like I was a man. You know. I knew I had to get up from there and I didn’t think anything at that time but to get free and to stop this whatever was going on.

     And we lived in a framed house. I wasn’t brick or anything like that, and it wasn’t two stories. It was simply a one-story home. There were two windows in our bedroom. One window was at the head of the bed right by the closet, and the other one was at the foot of the bed, on the opposite wall of the door. I don’t know what got into me, it was a hot night, I jumped out the window. I didn’t jump from a glass window, I jumped through the screen. The window was pulled up and, I don’t know, I kicked the screen out or something. I don’t really remember how I got out that window, but I got out that window before he could get me or came back in the room. I think—now that I remember correctly—he got off me for some reason and went to the bathroom as if everything was normal and I remember running down the street and not stopping. My ex-mother-in-law lived a few miles from us, and I remember, that was the only place in my mind I knew where somebody that I knew was close to me that could possibly help me. Because you know when you’re in a situation where something bad is happening to you, something traumatic, you’re trying to get to safety, and this was maybe 1 o’clock in the morning, so there weren’t really a lot of people driving. I didn’t see any police because I’m quite sure had I seen police they would have picked up a half-naked woman.

I ran over to my mother-in-law’s and, mind you, this was the first night, the very first night that we lived together married. I had left the kids in the room because, like I said, all I thought about was escaping. When I got to my mother-in-law’s house and it’s in the middle of the night so she’s terrified to answer the door because, you know, this is Detroit. Middle of the night, somebody ringing your doorbell, it might not turn out good for one of y’all. But, thank God, she didn’t come to her door with a gun, I sure do thank her for that because she had a light—it was like a motion sensitive light that would come on if you came to her door, either the front door, the back door, the side door. So I came to the side door because I knew this was the door she always accepted guests in and it was the door I guess that was easiest for her to get to, you know, from her room. 

(Look for the book "Out of Bondage" coming soon 2018!)