By Mansfield Frazier
Back in 1967 I myself was a victim of domestic violence. And, viewed through the lens of hindsight, I can tell you it was complicated — very complicated.
I’d gotten married far too young at age 17, but back in the ’60s if you knocked a girl up you married her … at least that’s what happened in the world in I was raised in. But the fact was, while I happened to really be 17, the person I married, Christine, was 17 going on 40. She was light years ahead of me in terms of maturity, but isn’t that always the case, that females mature much sooner than males?
Nonetheless, due to the upbringing I’d received from a wise father and caring mother, I left home at age 18 (after I graduated from high school) with a wife and a baby and I never looked back. They’d schooled me so well — instilled such values in me (things like a tremendous work ethic) — I was completely capable of handling the financial responsibilities of father and husband hood … but wasn’t so well equipped to handle the interpersonal aspects of marriage. Alas, in reality, I was still somewhat immature.
After about seven years of being pussy-whipped (OK, I’ve finally said it) I finally grew up and attempted to renegotiate the terms of our marriage, but Christine was having none of it. Her attitude was “Go back to sleep little boy, things are going just fine the way they are.”
But they were not.
As I attempted to take the rightful place as the head of my household (by then we’d had a second child, a son, Alan) she resisted strenuously. We even went to marriage counseling, but as in most cases it was too little too late. After a year our counselor whispered in my ear as we exited his office for the last time, “You have to leave, it will never work.”
I think I already knew that. But breaking up — when you appear to the outside world as this perfect young couple — is very hard to do.
Our relationship had grown very contentious, and I had taken to using sarcasm to counter Christine’s frequent verbal assaults … on my manhood, or any place else she could stick her knife.
One morning as I was exiting the bedroom she was berating me for not cussing out the school bus driver for being late in dropping our daughter off. It was in the dead of winter, snow was piled high, and I said, “Look, that bus driver wants to get all of those kids off the bus as soon as possible so she can go home to her own family. She’s not being late on purpose.” When she responded with some comment about “what a real man would do” I laughed at her and started down the steps.
The next thing I knew she, enraged, was rushing down the steps behind me and landed a haymaker to the back of my head, knocking me down the remaining few stairs.
You see, Christine was one of 11 children (by four different fathers) and her old school Mississippi-raised mother (a really mean old bitch I might add) had physically abused all of them. It was her way of parenting. Trust me when I say that physical abuse is most often generational … passed down like an ugly family heirloom … or sick tradition.
On the other hand, parents who really knew what they were doing had raised me. They rarely raised their voices, and striking my brother or me was almost out of the question. I might have received a spanking or two growing up, but nothing more. Violence, I was taught, never solved anything.
As I tried to regain my senses after being cold-cocked, Christine was rushing down the stairs, fists flailing. We fell to the floor, and in a fit of rage I grabbed her by the throat with both hands, and when I finally came to my senses she was literally at death’s door. I’d almost strangled her to death. As I released my grip I recall thinking, “My god, I don’t love this woman that much.”
The thing is, she was old school, of the Mississippi “graveyard love” variety … which, to her mind, meant that one of us was going to the graveyard, and the other was going to prison for life for the murder. And, in her demented way of thinking … it didn’t really matter which one of us ended up where. As hard as it is to believe there still are some twisted people out there who think the exact same way.
But, thanks to my parents. I wasn’t one of them.
She bought a pistol. I took it out of the house. She bought another one. It wasn’t long after that I left, crying bitter tears as I backed out the driveway late one night while my family slept. It was killing me, but I knew I’d never be coming back … no matter what.
Like I said, it was so complicated that, for the first six months, it almost drove me over the edge. I wouldn’t wish the pain associated with domestic violence on my worst enemy.
Love isn’t supposed to hurt, but it sometimes does.
Which brings me to Ray Rice controversy. To characterize the assault he perpetrated on his then-fiancé as anything other than a cowardly criminal act (that he should have been strictly held accountable for in a court of law) is to minimize a very serious offense. Rice should have gone to jail … but not for forever and a day (six months would have been sufficient) and then he should have been allowed to resume his life and career, assuming that he had honestly mended his ways. A second offense should net him years behind bars. You just don’t hit women, period.
But now, thanks to the media circus, Rice is going to be punished not only for what he did, but, also for what NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell knew or didn’t know, and what he did, or didn’t do about it … and that isn’t fair. But make no mistake, the league soon will have a policy that doesn’t attempt to protect players involved in serious charges, especially those involving violence.
In hindsight the NFL now wishes that Rice had been sentenced to six months behind bars and released after serving three months of the sentence. Then everyone would have been satisfied, and he would have been back on the playing field before the home opener. Maybe the new commissioner (whomever that might be) will move to revamp their policies that place profit over people.
But as my nephew, Jahi, a positive hip-hop performer, educator and mentor to young men of color stated, “What the hell do we expect? We glorify the violence on the playing field every week, actually revel in it, and then expect it to stay there. It spills over into the stands where fistfights often breakout, and then we expect players to leave the violent behavior they’ve been trained to perpetrate on the field after the game is over. Just like with the secret of concussions that everyone in football knew about for years … it’s also an open secret that NFL players beat up on their wives and children (as Adrian Peterson did) at a higher rate than any other professional athletes, and the owners know about it, but they’re only interested in protecting profits, not women.”
He continued by saying that we should quit compounding the felony behavior by blaming women. “So what if she spit on him? Players treat each other far worse than that during every game, and they simply accept it because they all are relatively equal in strength, but when someone weaker acts aggressively towards them they go totally off.”
Sports gods, whether they like or realize it or not, are role models that young men idolize and attempt to emulate. We’ve created these monsters, and it’s past time they learned they cannot violate societal rules with impunity. This simply has to stop.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.