Rebecca’s Story…

Thank you Elouise

http://tellingthetruth1993.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/where-is-my-mother-part-1/

for this comment which touched the heart of the story…”Southern culture. The look, the smell, the ungodly expectations and the heaviness of tightly guarded secrets. You’ve captured it so well.”   ajm

 

 

The story below was the inspiration for the book of poetry called “A Sachet of Poetry – Adoration, Anger, Asylum and Aspiration”. The poems with thoughts of adoration come from the possibility of love. The anger poems come from thoughts of being placed in a position of abuse. Asylum poetry is derived from the position she was placed in by her mother and the man she was forced to marry when only an innocent girl. Apparition became the final voice for Rebecca, her desires, her wishes, her thoughts on her life and how her innocence was lost behind the walls of an asylum in the mid-1950. Her goal, her most needed aspiration was her death, her death meant freedom.

Rebecca’s story is one of a developing collection and this is an excerpt from her story… 

Rebecca watched her father walked through the double door without looking back. Her mother and husband was telling the family doctor how she had been upset with her marriage and threated to kill herself. When she looked at her arm, the rubber tubing, the syringe was freighting then her mind froze in time. Her vision blurred and the fleur-de-lis wallpaper in her parent’s living room became waves of beige and gold swaying in an invisible breeze. The reason she was there dissolved into an ocean of oblivion.

Still dazed, she woke lying on an examining table in the Shelby County Medical Clinic, beside her was the doctor who had given her a shot and a nurse she knew. Standing in the corner of the room were her mother, husband and two sheriff deputies. She did not protest when the doctor gave her another shot of his magic that sent her to a place where she no longer cared. The wheelchair bumped over each crack in the sidewalk, each time giving her the feeling as if she was falling into a dark black hole. The doctor and nurse put her in the back of an ambulance as her mother began to tell Rebecca’s husband that his wife would never leave him. She steps into the ambulance, and in her own heartless way said in a low malicious voice…

“You see what happens when you try to disgrace me, putting you away for being insane will be more acceptable than have you leave your husband. You’re a southerner, southerners don’t leave their husbands”

Quivering beneath the threadbare blanket she fought violently against the straps confining her to a bed as her mind battled with drugged hallucinations. When she slept they became chaotic dreams. Mostly, she lay quietly watching other unwanted souls shuffle back and forth in a dimly lit hallway or being carted off to where the black box was kept.   She knew that she had been admitted to Challis Manor located at the edge of the Appalachian foothills it provided medical treatments for the mentally ill.   A place where wealthy Tennesseans paid to have members of their families placed to avoid embarrassment; Rebecca was not there because she had a mental or physical problem, she was there because she tried to leave her husband.

http://www.amazon.com/Sachet-Poetry-Adoration-Aspirations-Asylums/dp/1500483354/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406060183&sr=1-3&keywords=ann+johnson-Murphree