The Red Shoes

I'm a Literary Goddess of the highest order. Eat Your Heart Out Jane Austen!

Me at Suzy Vitello’s writing retreat in Hamilton, Montana, last weekend. Photo credit: Suzy Vitello

I just returned from a writing retreat in Montana with Suzy Vitello & Natalie Hirt. I met with them Saturday after classes finished to receive one on one feedback on the draft of my memoir I’d submitted.

Suzy wrote four typed pages of notes for me including:

“Here’s the line that absolutely gobsmacked me:

All the sadness of the kids I grew up with who were harmed was shaking off me, falling away like clay crumbling, my soul being reborn.”

I stared down at the page a bit starstruck. I don’t remember writing that line. It’s gorgeous and true and I love the imagery of being reborn in the fire, the kiln, the flames making us new and unearthing the sturdy eternal part of of us buried beneath, our solid center which remains when all else falls away, but I have zero recollection of writing those beautiful words.

My first husband Frank says one of my superpowers is my ability to stick my neck out, my Joan of Arc nature. The older I get the less afraid I am. I turned fifty last month, glad to have arrived at my Fuck You Fifties. Hallelujah! Kiss my grits! The powers that keep us silent are are the bars of our own self imprisonment.

As Assata Shakur says “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

I first wrote about one of the many pedophiles on the commune, the Farm, where I grew up in a Medium article, Albert Bates Is A Child Rapist, in May of 2019. When I wrote the article, I couldn’t stop dancing. It was an odd reaction to all that sorrow and pain from decades of him sexually abusing children. I felt like the girl in the folk story, The Red Shoes, where a girl has magical red shoes and whenever she puts them on she can’t stop dancing. Her foster family tries to pull them off of her feet but they won’t come off. They take her to a church, they beat her, they chastise her endlessly, but she just keeps dancing. Finally they chop off her her feet. They murder her to make her stop dancing. No one knew why she she couldn’t quit dancing, but now I know why. Dancing was her way of fighting back against the abuse.

Five years ago when I broke the spell of silence by writing about the active pedophile, Albert Bates, hiding out on the Farm, I was tired of burying my friends who’d committed suicide after having been abused. When I published the article, I couldn’t stop dancing. There was joy pouring out of me. Inexplicable exaltation, rocket fuel, an overpowering feeling of being unstoppable. They can try to kill me, but they can’t ever take my joy, the love that’s keeping the Stars apart.

As Maya says, “I come as one but I dance for 10,000.”

This past May, the Farm, held a community wide meeting where they read statements from a dozen kids Albert has molested. Eight of the cases were from testimonies from files that the Powers That Be on the commune, the Second Foundation, had buried back in 1985.

Our Queer Black Prophet, poet James Baldwin says “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.”

I’m wearing my Crown. Already Royal. I always was, I’m taking my power. My power isn’t granted to me from on high, it’s claimed because it always belonged to me. It’s my voice, my strength. My Crown is my fearless love for myself and all of us.

My friend Rosie Kellman who I grew up with on the commune calls the Farm “The Sex Cult.” Rosie says I should publish a book as an antidote the Farm’s flagship book Spiritual Midwifery which Albert owns the royalties to. My birth story is in the first edition of Spiritual Midwifery. Rosie says my book should be called Spiritual Pedophiles!

They finally kicked Albert off the Farm last month. Hallelujah! Now he needs to be behind bars.

“Touché! Spät hippies!” my German first husband Frank says.

Frank says “PS, You still can visit Albert at the Bates Motel!”