I wasn’t in a fucking gang.
I was a Princess, adopted by my stepfather’s family, and taken care of like a little girl who had the whole world waiting to see what she would become. I remember once a boy raped me, my grandfather’s family’s form of revenge wasn’t to go to the police. It was much worse than that. The boy never touched me again.
When I moved to BC I was “Introduced” to the idea of loyalty by way of having people demand it. No one got my loyalty, except a trio of brothers I love very much, because against all odds, they tried at least, to protect me when no one else did.
The men who raped me, the boys they used to rape me, demanded loyalty, but they did nothing to earn it.
They didn’t keep me safe.
They didn’t love me.
They didn’t treat me with kindness.
They believed – wrongly – that I would remain devoted to them because they drugged me and convinced me to let myself forget what was happening. I was fourteen.
Throughout my life they have come back, more than once, to rape me again and again, they’re supposed to come back in two years to end the cycle by ending my life.
The reason I’m here is that I don’t want my life to end. I haven’t – ever – had a chance to live. This is the first time in my life I’ve had some semblance of “Freedom” and yet I feel like there’s a ticking timebomb waiting for me and I don’t know how to stop it, because the people who could stop it, don’t fucking believe me.
Loyalty? To what? Rape? To whom? Pedophiles? I think the fuck not. I was raised by white people who thought they could kiss and slap and hit and kick and beat and rape me because I didn’t have a “Black family,” to protect me. It never occurred to any of them that I’d find a way to protect myself.
My journey may seem psychotic to some people, but I am not the reason that my path has been filled with insanity. I was a child, and I wanted to be a rapper, like Rihanna, whom I’d been introduced to by Babu, my Haitian grandfather.
I wanted to sing and dance, and teach other people about the life I’d seen, I never thought that my dreams would be derailed by grown ass white men who considered me less than human because of the color of my skin.
I grew up not knowing how to recognize racism as racism because everyone around me was so toxic and mean I just chalked it up to them being assholes. It was only my abusers I saw as white supremacists, I never considered the kids I went to school with deserved that label, not until, like Persephone, I rose from my past like a bat out of Hell, and took the time to look back and really see what I had been through.
I have what I truly believe is a form of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but because I can’t find a doctor willing to listen to all the parts of me when I need them to, I can’t get a proper diagnosis, and what scares me is that I am not going to make it.
I don’t give a flying fuck if I end up famous and rich, I just don’t want to die in misery. I want to build something that is worthy of looking up to, I want to show other Black and Biracial girls that they can do something with the pain the world has given them, that will turn into something beautiful.
My loyalty is to you, friends. It’s to all of you beautiful readers who have taken the time to read the parts of my pain I’ve shared with you and have told me that it doesn’t make me ugly or unlovable.
I save my loyalty to give to folks who have shown me that they won’t throw it in my face, or use it to hurt those I care about. You don’t deserve loyalty because you exist; you earn loyalty because of who you are as a human and, more importantly, who you choose to be.
If you are a rapist, an abuser, a torturer, a person who brings evil into the world for the sake of saying you did, then no you don’t get my loyalty. You get to watch me as I continue to build Loud Mouth Brown Girl and the empire she will encompass, and you get to wish for the rest of your life that things were different.
I don’t. I did. I used to wish that A hadn’t been the one to rip my heart of my chest, and that M hadn’t betrayed me so deeply, and that so many of them hadn’t been involved, but they made their choices.
And so I’ve made mine.
Sending all my love to the little girls who need it most,
Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 