American Life in the South

By Amara Rose

One day when I returned from getting groceries, he wanted to know where I had been. “You know where I have been, getting groceries.” He was acting all crazy. He pulled a gun out of his shirt and pointed it at me. The kids were there, so I talked him into letting me call his sister to come and pick up the kids and then we could talk. After his sister left with the kids we got into this big argument. He kept waving the gun in my face saying “He was going to kill me and then himself”. I told him I wasn’t worth killing, that the kids would need one of us, that if he was going to kill me to go ahead and get it over with.” We sat for four hours with him holding the gun under my chin. Saying all the time, “He was going to blow out my fuckin brains.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664180543

Amara Rose

I have lived in the south all of my life and I don’t think I would be happy in any other place. I raised four wonderful children. I received my GED in 1976. I was able to graduate along with my son. When the children were older, they didn’t take up so much of my time. I started teaching myself how to paint. I would take pictures out of magazines and paint them. After a while I felt like I could show my own paintings. I sold quite a few but they were few and far between. When my sister had her book done, she asked if I would do her illustrations. I did and they turned out good. I never had any writing experience. I wanted to try my hand at it. It has taken me a long time on this book to do it like I did with my painting. I painted what I was seeing. With the book I would write what I was feeling. I wrote about my life as a child. I was hoping that some of the things I had to endure would help someone in the same situation. When they might feel the only option, they had to end it all. As time goes by you will be glad you didn’t take that wrong turn. I don’t sit around and blame what life has thrown at me. I am so glad that I was able to see my kids grow up, see my grand-kids and my great-grand-kids. Amara Rose

Book preview

Chapter 1

As I sit here. Listening to the rain falling lightly to the ground. My mind goes back to my childhood. Here I am in the Winter of my life, and nothing to show for it. No bank account, No home, and no man who might have loved me forever. I wonder how I survived for seventy-six years with nothing to hold on to through it all.

There were seven of us living in a two room house with dirt floors. Stanley was the oldest, then Shirley, Bobby he was born with just one leg, Art, me, Ronnie, and mama.

Grandpa would let us stay in one of his rented houses. Grandma would make a large pan of biscuits. Open a jar of canned peaches. If it had not been for grand dad, we would have starved back then.

Mama and daddy were divorced when I was young. The only thing that I remember about him was that he came by one day while I was swinging on an old rope swing. He and my Aunt Betty JO were talking. The next time he came to see mama. I crawled up into his lap and took two shiny dimes from his pocket which he promptly took away from me.

When I was three, someone sent mama this old man from Texas. He was a big man. He seemed to like me a lot. If they went on a date, I would get to go with them. It wasn’t long before they were married. We moved to a small town in the south.

I loved all the attention he gave me. He was always letting me sit in his lap, hugging and kissing me. If no one was around he would feel my private places. There were so many kids around that we had no problem slipping off into the woods. He would take all my clothes off of me. He would have me put my clothes back on and make me promise never to tell anyone what we had done. He said, They will take you away if you tell.

Sometimes, I wonder why mama never knew what was going on or she just didn’t care. Or she needed a man so bad that she just ignored it and pretended it never happened.

As I look back on things now and how things were then she must’ve been so unhappy. She tried to kill herself several times before I ever started school. Daddy was really mean to my brothers and my oldest sister. He would take the razor strap to her and beat her with the butt end of it, and my brothers he would take a big stick of wood and knock the shit out of them.

We were always moving from town to town. It didn’t seem like we stayed anywhere very long before we were moving again. When I was six, we were living in Clarenco. I remember picking cotton and I would have this 100lb sack pulling it behind me. At the end of the day I might have twenty-five pounds in it, but, every little bit helped.

I had this one dress that mama made out of a flour sack that I wore to school every day. The only time we had shoes was when it was really cold.

There were times when mama would get up coughing in the mornings and daddy would accuse her of slipping out at night and seeing other men to screw her. Every night he would wire the windows and doors with electricity to make sure she wouldn’t go out. There was no way in hell she could’ve gotten out of the house without him knowing it, but still every morning he would knock her around and accuse her of going out the night before and seeing some man.

By now daddy thought I was big enough to go farther with the abuse. I would get sick when that white stuff would get on me. I don’t remember him sticking it in my mouth, but my counselor said he probably did and I just blocked it out of my memory. Daddy would have me sleeping on a pallet beside his and mama’s bed. When mama would go to sleep, he would play with my private parts for a long time and I would have a climax. I was his baby, he treated me so special. I felt so loved because he was forever loving me.

They would take me to another town with them if we didn’t have food or money and we would beg on the street corners. People would give us quite a bit of money. It would be really cold and I didn’t have a coat or shoes to wear. Things had gotten really bad.

The day that the welfare people came to the house and told mama and daddy that if they couldn’t take care of us we would have to go to the orphanage. When they did come to take us to the home, I stared out the back glass wishing she would make them bring me back. I was still crying when we reached the home. I stayed sick the whole time. They said I was homesick. They still didn’t come and get me out of there.

One night we were in the Chapel watching a Christmas Program. When the program was over the pastor said he needed to see all the Rose children. He said, Our daddy had died and that mama would be coming to take us to the funeral.

After my real daddy’s funeral, we had to go back to the orphanage. We stayed there another year while they were figuring out my real daddy’s Soc. Sec. He had married again and his wife was pregnant but she lost the baby. So, that meant that his children from his first marriage would draw his Social Security.

Mama came and got us out of the orphanage and we moved into a little house. She bought us a television; bicycles; and clothes.

Daddy was still messing with me. I felt like he still loved me and it made me feel better.

I don’t know what happened but the next thing I knew mama and daddy was getting a divorce. I wanted to go with him, but he took my baby sister instead.

One day when mama wasn’t there, my two oldest brothers took me in the bedroom and locked the door. One would hold me down while the other one raped me and when he was finished he would hold me down and the other one would rape me. When mama got back from town, I told her what had happened, she just looked at me and said, Must’ve done something to make them do it. I was eight years old.

The next time we moved again. Mama found a job in this laundry. I know she worked hard and every evening she would come in, I would have her supper cooked and the house cleaned up so she wouldn’t have anything to do. I would clean up the kitchen too after supper. I would wash clothes and make sure everybody would have some clean clothes for the next day. This time it was only my two oldest brothers and my two younger brothers, my sister had wanted to stay at the orphanage, my older brother had joined the Marines when he was sixteen.

I went out for sports; I took band; and I kept up with my school work. On Saturday, after I had cleaned the house and did the ironing, mama would let me go to the movies. Pretty soon I had to drop out of band and sports, because I had so much work to do after school that I couldn’t make practice when I was supposed to.

When I was eleven, I met my first love. We went everywhere together. I would meet him at the movies where he worked as an usher. He would throw popcorn in my hair and flirt with me. I was mature for my eleven years old, he was seventeen. He had this old forty-nine Ford and we would go parking a lot. Sometimes we would come awful close to going all the way but we didn’t. We became so attached to each other that he never gave me any space. One time I told him, I had to go to my grandpa’s just so I could have some breathing room. After about a week I went to the movies to let him know that I was back and there he was hugged up with my best friend. I was so hurt. Later he told me that, "He had been missing me so much that he had sat down with her to see if she knew when I was coming back.

We kept dating until I met this other guy. I was twelve. It took me a while to get Lucas to notice me. Lucas and Tatum almost had a fight in front of my house one night. He told Tatum that If he ever caught him around me again he would kill him.

Mama had met this other man, his name was Oliver.

I did not like this man at all. But one good thing I can say about him is he never tried to put his hands on me or try to get out of the way with me. Before I knew it he was wanting us to move to another small town in the South so they could find better work. I didn’t want to go. I tried to talk her into letting me and Lucas get married, but she wouldn’t even consider it. Lucas promised me that he would come and see as often as he could.

Oliver was a drunk. He was mean to my mother. He would take her down to the coast and would pimp for her and they would come home fighting. I hated seeing him beat on her all the time. One day after they had been fighting, I was the only one there besides them. I couldn’t stand to see him hit her again so I jumped up and dove into him trying to make him stop. He doubled up his fist and knocked me against the wall, got mad and left. Mama was wiping the blood from the big gash over her eye, when she turned to me and said, If he leaves me I will never forgive you? Then she went out the door to see if she could find him. I sunk into a deep depression. I didn’t understand why she could say that to me, I was only trying to keep him from hurting her. That was the first time I tried to kill myself. I went to the medicine cabinet and found these heart pills my uncle had when he stayed with us. I took the whole bottle and laid down on my bed. The next thing I knew, mama was there trying to make me get up. I couldn’t stand, my legs were like wet noodles. Oliver picked me up and they carried me to the hospital. They warned me not to say anything about what had happened. In a few days I was feeling better so I tried to call Lucas to see if he would come and get me. I tried and tried but I never could reach him. The following week-end he came to see me anyway and I told him everything that had happened.

A few months passed, and now Oliver is wanting to go to California. Lucas was the only person I had and I didn’t want to leave him. Lucas and I pleaded with mama to let us get married but she kept saying no, that I was too young. Lucas told her, He would take good care of me. But Oliver made her realize that it would be one less mouth to feed. She finally consented and we were married before they left. I lied about my age, said I was 16 instead of the 13 that I was.

Chapter 2

Lucas’s family welcomed me with open arms. Lucas’s two sisters Eliose and Violet, his brother Liam and I became the best of friends. We had a lot of fun together. We would go to the big pond that was behind their house in the woods. We would set out catfish hooks and get up early the next morning to see if we had caught anything. We’d let his mother fry them up for us. Lucas’s family didn’t have a lot but they were very close. I never missed my family. I just considered Lucas’s family, all that I needed.

Five months after we were married, I got pregnant with our first son. The pregnancy was very easy. The doctor would fuss at me for being so young and being pregnant, he said, I was just a baby myself. I gained a tremendous amount of weight, but I gave birth to a healthy baby. When I was pregnant I bought this Dr. Spock baby book. I read that thing over and over so that I would be a good mother. Six months after I had the baby I had my figure back. We moved into this little apartment in town. We had these really nice neighbors. She had five kids of her own, so if I needed to know something, about what to do in a certain case, she would tell me what to do.

Her husband, on the other hand, was a real ladies man. He would come over on the week-ends and we would stay up all hours of the night playing cards.

Mason and I would play footsies under the table and if we got half of a chance we would steal a kiss. Pretty soon we were having an affair. I would tell Lucas that I was going to the movies, Mason would pick me up and then we would drive out of town and go parking in the woods. One night Lucas had gone to the movies to find me and I wasn’t there. He waited until he saw Mason put me out at the corner. Of course, Mason let me take all the blame, and said that, I kept chasing after him and wouldn’t leave him alone, that I couldn’t even make him raise a hard. That was a lie he would just about burst out of his jeans before we could get to a place fast enough. Lucas forgave me, but I lost a good friend in the process.

When Alexander was thirteen months old I gave birth to our second son Aiden. Two years after that I had our third son Ethan. Here, I wasn’t even eighteen and already I had three kids. I feel like I was a good mother to be as young as I was. I was going to give them the love I never had.

I had one affair after another and Lucas always took me back. The way people talked about me, I even had some I didn’t know about.

When Ethan was two, I began to have severe headaches and earaches. We were trying to buy a house. I kept getting sicker and sicker and the Dr. couldn’t find out what was wrong. It went on for eight months of me being in severe pain. They were giving me straight morphine. I was kept knocked out most of the time because I couldn’t endure the pain. They sent me to specialists in Shreveport, they still couldn’t find out where the pain was coming from. Pretty soon I had become addicted to narcotics. I lost so much weight that I looked like a walking skeleton. The Doctor had become very worried about me. He told Lucas that, I had become addicted to the narcotics and that I would have to get off of them. He said, No matter how much I wanted him to take me after a shot, for him not to give in to me. Lucas had his sister come and get the boys, so they wouldn’t have to hear what was going on. For the next three days and nights I went through hell. Lucas locked us up in the bedroom, I screamed and cursed him for everything he was worth to make him take me after a shot but he hung in there and wouldn’t give in to me. After the worst part was over, the doctor put me on tranquilizers. I guess three months went by and I began to feel better and I gained some of my weight back.

About the same time that I started to feel better I became pregnant with our fourth baby. It was a very hard pregnancy, and I had to stay in bed most of the time. I worried that it could’ve been from all the narcotics I had taken before I became pregnant but when I asked the doctor if, That could be the reason, he assured me that, I had probably gotten them out of my system before I got pregnant. I know I carried her for eleven months. When I did go into labor I was in hard labor for fourteen hours. She was turned the wrong way. She was going to be a breech birth. She finally turned the right way and I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. When they brought her in to me, I didn’t want anything to do with her so they took her back to the nursery. Even after I brought her home, I still didn’t want anything to do with her, so Lucas would have his sister come over and do the things I was supposed to do. I was very depressed and I couldn’t snap out of it. The guilt I was feeling for not taking care of the baby wasn’t helping any. I decided that I would kill myself, then Lucas could find the kids a mother that would take care of them the way they needed to be cared for. The doctor said that, I was suffering from Postpartum Depression. so he sent me to a mental hospital. I was there for two months. When I returned home, all I wanted was to hold the baby. The minute she saw me she knew who I was. I never had bad feelings towards her again.

After being sick so long, and then the hard pregnancy we lost the house and had to file for bankruptcy.

Things were really tough for a while. We had to move back in with his parents. Lucas wasn’t getting to work but two days a