I Had a Right to Remain Silent: Can You Hear Me Now?

By Sylvia Cooper

Sylvia takes us on a journey from her life’s childhood to being an adult. Her private battles in and out of the public’s eye, and her struggles were full of highs and lows. One night, she suffered another beating that led to two black eyes and a knot the size of an egg on her forehead. She was extremely exhausted from all the tossing, banging and hard blows to her body. She could barely get out of the bed, and she was a scheduled panelist for the CT Commission on Women discussing HR Bill 5207 Ban the Box. There were great panelist on the program, including a CT State Representative sitting right next to her. How would she explain all the bruises to her face? She applied as much make up as she could, but there were no hiding these scars. This problem was closing in on her, and she felt as if she was losing not just the battle, but the war. Who was this abuser? Her silence had now turned its back on her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662433665

Book preview

The Epilepsy Earthquake

Iremember waking up lying on an ambulance stretcher on my porch. I had an IV in my left arm, and I heard a voice saying Her blood sugar is normal. The ambulance attendant said to me, "Your children called the ambulance. I thought to myself, Who is this man dressed in a uniform standing on my porch? I was startled and looked like I’d seen a ghost. Ma’am, I know I’m white, but you had a seizure in your sleep, and we’re taking you to the hospital. I was disorientated and looked around at all these strange people. It sounded like the fire department (paramedics) and ambulance attendants were still trying to figure out how they were going to transport me to the hospital due to all the snowbanks that were piled up on my street and the amount of snow that blocked the driveways. The difficulty was getting the ambulance and fire truck back down the street.

The winter of 2013 was cold, and Connecticut had experienced snowstorms after snowstorms, and to make matters worse, the temperature was below zero. The city and state were on high alert for the weather condition, and most of the streets hadn’t been plowed, and some of the cars were buried in snow. One of the fire paramedics suggested that they back the ambulance down the one-way street to get me to the hospital.

I had several seizures in the months before. The ride in the ambulance had become somewhat familiar to me. I was still trying to gather my thoughts together, and I could hear the cardiac and EKG machines beeping. The ambulance attendant was waiting for the printout results from the machine. There was a loud static noise that came from the radio dispatcher asking the ambulance technician which hospital they were taking me to. The ambulance attendant asked my daughter which hospital I was going to, and she said, Take her to St. Raphael’s. My daughter didn’t ride in the ambulance but told me she would come to the hospital once the streets were plowed.

St. Raphael’s was only a few minutes away from my house in New Haven, and I had a connection to it. Although Yale New Haven Hospital had recently bought St. Raphael’s hospital, I still thought of St. Raphael’s as being just that, St. Raphael’s. It was a Catholic hospital established in 1907. The Sisters of Charity worked hard to develop a caring and loving environment to administer healing not just through medical care but also through caring and compassion. I had worked there for nearly fourteen years in the mid-eighties to late nineties in a host of jobs, beginning as a radiology file clerk to making my way to the HOPE (Having an Opportunity to Prepare for Employment) program coordinator. I felt a spiritual connection to the physical space. I delivered all my children there, and I liked the smaller, intimate environment.

It had only been four months since my epilepsy diagnosis, and it had taken a year before that before the doctors to find out what was really going on with me. I felt frustrated and exhausted, and my life was turning upside and inside out. I would soon learn that I was no longer in charge of my life.

As a born-again Christian, we know spiritually that it is important to know we are never in charge of our lives and that we are always to rely on God for everything. But I did have my own agenda, thinking I had total control over my life. But lately, I hadn’t been doing a good job, and things were spiraling out of control fast. And just as the ground shakes with an earthquake, my world was shaking, rattling, and things were falling all over the place.

Epilepsy did not ask my permission to come into my space. It came and didn’t even ask me who I was and what I was all about. I was already facing struggles, and I had a life, past, present, and a future I hoped for, and I didn’t need something (condition) to make matters worse. I was a single mother with six children who was in the process of losing her house after being in it for fourteen years. I was fighting hard, and I had to make decisions and fast.

Epilepsy was forcing me to come out of my silence. The place where I kept my emotional baggage and dark secrets. I would have to face the pain of my past and the insecurities of my current situation and deal with unhealthy relationships with the people in my life, and from where I was lying on that stretcher, things didn’t feel or look good for me.

Once the ambulance attendant rolled me in the back of the emergency room, they asked me to sign a consent form for treatment and wished me well, and off they went to another call. My entire body ached, and I felt like I was hit by a truck. The lights were shining bright and making me dizzy. Due to me having epilepsy, my brain wave pattern and equilibrium are affected by certain sounds and bright lights. I laid in a totally vulnerable position.

The emergency room tech came into my cubicle and said that he needed me to get into a hospital gown. I was used to the drill, getting into those complicated blue-spotted Johnny coats with the complicated buttons. I thought to myself, This is a joke since I can’t move my body, and I just had a seizure. He read the expression on my face and asked me if I needed help with putting on the hospital gown. I nodded, and he assisted me. He was quite gentle and respectful and helped me remove my clothing items while my sagging breasts were hanging from both sides.

A nurse came in and introduced herself and asked me a few questions about my medical history. I tried to answer, but I couldn’t. I have sharp fang teeth, and when I have seizures, my jaw clamps down tight and punctures my tongue and creates huge holes the size of large pebbles. This causes my tongue to inflame. I licked my tongue out, and she said, I’m sorry. It must be painful for you to talk. The doctor will be in to see you soon.

There are some people with epilepsy who have seizures while they’re awake, and in the past, they used an object to prevent them from biting their tongue. Nowadays, they don’t use anything and just monitor the person to make sure they don’t bump their heads or cause serious damage to their body. My problem is that I have seizures in my sleep, and I’m not aware that I’m having them, nor do I have any memory of them after they’ve happened. But there is plenty of evidence left behind. My life was like a murder mystery for a long time. A crime was being committed, and there was plenty of evidence, but nobody couldn’t catch the perpetrator.

They started me on IV fluids right away. Since I depleted all my electrolytes, the seizure convulsion caused muscle contractions, and my body was like a wet washcloth with all the water squeezed out of it. I was lying there, waiting for the doctor to come in and give me the results of what was to come. This would be my second hospitalization within two months, and I feared I would be staying for a few days. My neurologist told me that I could be on a medication roller coaster until they found the right dosage that would regulate or lessen my seizures. The problem with this was that the higher the dose, the more side effects I could experience.

I was not looking forward to blood draws every six hours and the bruises on my arm that followed afterward. The groups of student doctors (no offense) would come into my room and ask me the same questions that I had just explained to a group that came a few hours before. I hoped I wouldn’t have to share my room again like my last visit. My neighbor passed gas all night long and snored like there was no tomorrow.

This was another reminder that I was no longer in control and that this condition was somehow calling the shots. I would have to make arrangements at home for my twelve-year-old son, Jonathan, who has autism, and this meant no driving for another three months. I would have to become dependent on people to drive me to work, store, church, anywhere, and slowly but surely, I feared I was losing my independence.

Being a patient in the hospital gave me a few options: I could focus on my sickness and getting better, I could feel sorry for myself and grow bitter, or I could just simply think. During the day hours, there were many distractions. I could hear the nurses on the floor speaking medical terminology or talk about their families or their plans for the weekend. I had plenty of visitors, like my family, friends, and pastor. My children were terrified because they didn’t know what or how to deal with this condition. I was so used to keeping everyone together.

I could always tell when the shift was changing because the nursing staff or patient technicians would say Who’s taking care of what patient? I could smell sterilization in the air. The patient transport staff would come on the floor in their uniforms to pick patients up either in wheelchairs or stretchers to take them for testing. The volunteer staff delivered flowers and cards to patients daily. You could tell the difference between the volunteer staff and regular employees because volunteers wore red jackets with their volunteer tags, and they wore it with pride.

The housekeeping department would come by and empty the waste can baskets and mop the floors and clean the bathrooms all day long. But silence appeared between all the doctors, nurses, visitors, and employees. It was more evident at night. And that silence once again was calling me.

Does silence have a voice? For years, it was my favorite voice, but now it had come to place me under arrest. My life always read me my rights just as someone who was being arrested by the police. In my case, I only remembered the first line of being Mirandize: You have the right to remain silent. That was the question for me.

Coming to New Haven

My grandmother, Marie Whitfield Cooper, was a tall brown-skinned woman who, in my eyes, was the greatest woman that ever walked this earth. Her skin was so soft it felt like silk. She was a skinny woman but well-endowed in her bosom area (something I inherited from her). I can still smell the peppermint candy (her favorite) on her breath as though it was yesterday. My great-grandparents, Joseph and Belinda Whitfield, were sharecroppers in Salters, South Carolina, during the early 1900s, and my grandmother was the eldest child out of twenty-one children. My grandmother had two children, Uncle Herman and my mother, Annie Bell.

My Aunt Margaret (grandma’s sister and our family’s historian) said, Uncle Herman was cared for by my great-grandparents for a short period while his father, Charlie Cooper, went off to fight in World War Two. My grandmother moved to Charleston, South Carolina, with her girlfriend to find work during that time. She met a man by the name of Monroe McCray and got pregnant with my mother and moved back to Salters, South Carolina. She ended up marrying Charlie Cooper when he returned home from the war, and he raised my mother as his daughter.

My great-grandparents had children the same age as my mother and uncle, and they’re actually older than some of their aunts and uncles. They all grew up like sisters and brothers. My great-grandfather, Joseph Whitfield, was a very tall and handsome man. He was over six feet tall. I always knew him to be an old man since I was a little girl. He was born in 1900, and I was born in 1965, so he was already old when I was born. He walked with a limp because of his hip and was a man of very few words, but his smile was warm and welcoming. He married my great-grandmother, Belinda, when she was a teenager. They were an odd-looking couple (nice-looking but odd) since she was very short. My great-grandmother was small, feisty in spirit, and didn’t play when it came to her family. You wouldn’t believe it by looking at her that she gave birth to all those children, but she did. Unlike my great-grandfather, she was a woman of many words. She was going to tell you how she felt and what she was feeling at the time, and you better back up out of her way if you didn’t come correct. She did have a gentle soothing side to her and loved her family.

My grandmother’s sister, Aunt Mae, was one of the first siblings to leave South Carolina in the late fifties and early sixties and moved to the north. She was the reason why most of my family lives in New Haven, Connecticut. My mother and others soon followed her to Connecticut in the mid-sixties to find a job and make a better life for themselves.

Annie Belle (that’s what I called my mother when I was a young child) decided to leave me and my sister Rose behind with my grandmother when she left South Carolina. My sister Rose is one and a half years older than me, and when my mother left South Carolina, I was a little over six months old. Her plans were that once she arrived in New Haven and found a job, she would settle down and send for us. Rose was a puny little girl with light brown skin, and she wore box braided plats. She and I have a tiny mole on our right cheek that you can barely see, but I used to think it was something we had in common, and we could identify ourselves as sisters. The two front teeth in her mouth were huge. I guess they weren’t her permanent teeth because they were smaller in size once she got older. I found comfort in sucking my fingers, especially my right thumb. We both did. Rose and I both sucked our thumbs for years! (Don’t judge us.)

The next time I saw my mother, I was going on three years old. When it was time for my sister Rose and me to join our mother in Connecticut, I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I was close to my grandmother. After all, she was the first mother in my life. I felt like I was losing a piece of who I was. I had already bonded with her, and coming to a strange place to meet a strange woman was a big transition for me.

My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Sonny (Attorney Nathaniel Whitfield), drove us to Connecticut. Once we arrived, Grandma was holding me and Rose by the hand, and she began walking us up a flight of stairs, bringing us into an apartment. The place certainly didn’t look familiar to me. At that time, I was too young to know that it was Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, a huge neighborhood in New Haven. I learned that from my mother later in life. The place was nice and clean, the living room had a huge window in the front room, the kitchen was small, and there was a long hallway that led to the backrooms that contained a big bed (probably my mom’s) and two beds in the back for my sister and me. My mom welcomed us to our new home, but I didn’t make any eye contact with her. My focus was on my grandmother, and I was watching every move she was making. There were a few items in the backroom for Rose and me to play with, but I was too preoccupied with what was going on in the front room. I could hear a conversation between my mother and grandmother about her bus leaving and how much time she had before she had to go to the bus station. We arrived by car, and I didn’t understand why she was talking about taking a bus. She also talked to my mother about her concerns for us because she was just as attached to us as we were to her (I was spoiled!).

My mother had concerns as well because I didn’t walk that great because my grandmother had spoiled me so much (carried me on her hip everywhere we went), and my mother was telling her, Marie, I’m not going to be holding her all the time. She’s big enough to walk. My grandmother was so nervous, and I heard her say, I know this baby is going to suffer when I leave her. My grandmother’s remarks (in my three-year-old mind) was talking about not harming me, but she was saying that I wasn’t going to be receiving the type of attention that I normally received when I was in South Carolina.

The conversation lasted only a few minutes before a few family members and friends arrived for a quick visit while my grandmother was there. I definitely knew something was going on, something different. Things were about to change for the rest of my life. I didn’t recognize any of these people. I barely recognized my own mother. She was a dark-skinned woman. Her eyes looked familiar, much like mine, but she was still a stranger to me. Annie Belle (that’s what Grandma called her) had a short-layered haircut and tapered bangs across the front of her head. My sister Rose was tough. She was running around playing, getting used to her new space. I, on the other hand, wanted to know what was going on and what was about to happen. Although the woman, Annie Bell, seemed nice and was actually my mother, I didn’t recognize her. The only person that I knew and who has hugged, kissed, and comforted me was Marie (Ma-ree was what everyone called her, including my mother). Rose was still playing throughout the house, and I’m walking on pins and needles. My grandmother kept talking to my mother and asking her how she was feeling and if she was going to be okay. After all, my mother was pregnant. The final hour had come, and my grandmother must leave to take her bus back to South Carolina. The adults in the room started whispering to each other. I believe that was on my account. My grandmother asked Rose and me to come over to talk to her for a minute. She gave us a short speech about her having to leave to go back home. Now I know that something really is wrong. Rose takes it like a champ, but I know she was being strong for me. I saw my grandmother pick up her luggage. I knew I was right! The one person I loved and who loved me was leaving me. I belted out the loudest cry ever as she walked out the door. She was in just as much pain as I was. The beautiful brown-skinned woman with silky skin, big boobs, and peppermint breath was walking out on me. I ran to that big window in the front room, and I watched her get into the car. I was completely devastated. She faded away. All during the day, I would go to that window and cry out her name, Marie, Marie, Marie! as if she was going to reappear. I cried so much I could feel the rawness in my vocal cords. My sister Rose comes up to me with a gentle and simple gesture. She grabs my hand and says, Marie will be back. She went to cousin Cina’s house to get us a bag of potato chips. Cousin Cina was a place in South Carolina where folks bought soda pops and chips. I stopped crying, and I began my life with my mother, Annie Bell, in New Haven.

I Noticed Something about Myself

Time passed, and the transition with Rose and me being with our mother went well. I still called her by her first name, Annie Bell, but I was getting used to the fact that she was my mother. We went to the park just about every day, and she took good care of us. We wore dresses all the time. Rose was in blue, and she dressed me in pink. My brother Vincent had already been born, and we were now a family of four. My Uncle Sonny and my mom were close. He would come by and give her rides to the store and help whenever he could. I always caught a break too because he would pick me up and carry me. Not too long after the birth of my brother Vincent, my mother became pregnant with my brother Robert. My grandmother came to visit (yeah!) to help while my mom was in the hospital. We were two years older by this time, and things changed a little bit. I knew who my grandmother was, but by now I was getting used to my new home. One night while my mom was in the hospital, Rose and I were arguing over a rocking chair. My grandmother settled the argument by taking it away from both of us. Rose, being who she was, grabbed me and said, Sylvia, she’s not our mother. She can’t do that. She went to my grandmother and said, Give my sister back her rocking chair. The nerve! We were just fighting over this chair, and this is the woman who raised us since birth. My grandmother must have given Rose one of those looks. Rose goes on to say, That’s my sister’s chair. My grandmother says, No, you all were fighting over the chair. Rose convinced me (notice I said convinced) to get our little shoes, and we started throwing our shoes at her because she took away the rocking chair that we were fighting over. Now Grandma was not having that, and that’s all I’m going to say. We didn’t have the rocking chair at the end of the day.

My mom brought Robert home (baby number four) from the hospital, and he was the cutest baby you ever wanted to see. My grandmother stayed in CT for a while before returning to South Carolina again. I wasn’t as devastated this time around when it was time for her to leave. By this time, Rose and I had already started school. My mom managed to enroll Rose and me into a program where city kids were bused out to schools in the suburbs. We attended Hamden Co-op. My mom dressed us up like we were going to church. Every day we wore dresses, Bobbysocks, and patent leather shoes.

My grandmother’s sisters, Aunt Mae and Aunt Shang, really helped us out a lot. My Aunt Shang lived in New York, and she would send special boxes or deliver them herself on the weekends that she visited. Aunt Shang was a free-spirited kind of woman. She loved life and a little joy juice every now and then. She was a highly educated woman and spoke intelligently. When she arrived, she came with goodies and clothes, but most importantly, she brought a wealth of knowledge with her. During one of her visits, she taught me how to tell time. We stayed up late one night until I knew the short and long hand on the clock. By the time I went to bed, I knew how to tell time on the clock, and I made sure that everyone in the house understood that I could do it too. Aunt Shang didn’t have a southern accent, although she was raised in South Carolina most of her young life. Her speech sounded like she was a professor in someone’s classroom. Well, that is until she guzzled down a few drinks, then she spoke in a language that pretty much everyone could understand.

Aunt Mae would take my mom shopping for our school clothes as well. She helped many people in our family, a very generous person. Aunt Mae was like a missionary doing work for her family. Not because she had to, but because she loved us. Neither Aunt Shang nor Aunt Mae had husbands or children, and I guess they adopted all of us. Lord knows the Whitfields is a huge family, and we have many generations. I loved Aunt Mae’s voice too. She spoke with a soft, extremely low tone, but there was a high pitch to it. She had a smile like Cicely Tyson and was humble like Rosa Parks. However, don’t get it twisted. She did carry her a piece of steel in my Tyler Perry’s Madea’s voice. My great-aunts certainly are (were) their mother’s daughters. My great-grandmother, Belinda Whitfield,