By Rodney Beard
pastorbeard@comcast.net
I was raised to be a real man by a man who was a real man…my father. He wasn’t just a real man, but a gentleman as well who put my mother on a pedestal when they met at Tuskegee Institute in 1941 and he never took her off of it.
My parents loved and honored each other daily, my father literally “worshiped” my mother, she loved him madly and cared for him to perfection, seriously. They kissed on the lips in the morning as my dad would be on his way out; they kissed when he got home. They kissed in public; they even kissed outside in the backyard. And every time they kissed, they smiled at one another.
Did they ever fight? My goodness, they had some knock-down, drag out arguments for sure. But even in those rare times they kissed and made up right in front of us kids, every time. But such was not the case right across the street.
Mr. Hogan would get drunk on the weekends and start talking crazy to Mrs. Hogan who would fire back at him and before you know it he was beating her up. Back then most men folks thought that maybe she had it coming because she would “cuss him from amazing grace to a floating opportunity” and he’d slap her around a little bit to put her in check. But not my dad, he would be sick about it and always let his neighbor know (after he sobered up) that “that ain’t right” or acceptable. Then lecture me and my brothers on how horrible it is for a man to ever put a hand on a woman.
Mr. Hogan actually got a revelation one day and stopped hitting his wife for good. “What happened was that” he must have been too drunk to slap her around as usual that Saturday afternoon, she got the upper hand with a cast iron skillet in it, chased him out of the house, and hit him in the back of the head with it. I saw the whole thing. I didn’t just see the hit; I heard the “boing” sound clearly. Mrs. Hogan began to scream and cry out loud saying “Oh Lord, I done killed my man!” and it was so sincere, “my man” the one that had been slapping her around all my life.
My dad doused Mr. Hogan with water (that’s all we knew to do back then) and he was born again. That lick should have killed him, but he survived with a new lease on life and he never hit her again, ever. One would never know that it ever happened, other than the fact that one of Mr. Hogan’s eyes was a bit askew from then on.
In my 60’s neighborhood of maybe thirty homes, that was all I ever knew about domestic violence. I am sure that Mr. Hogan wasn’t the only one who beat his wife because it was a hidden and forbidden occurrence back then, so who knows how many other women were being abused when I was a kid.
Almost 50 years later the horrific wave of violence has grown and spread according to the American Bar Association as Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races. The number one killer of African-American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner. And The World Health Organization reports that violence against women is a “significant public health concern.”
Approximately 40% of Black women report coercive contact of a sexual nature by age 18 (our girls), and in a study of African-American sexual assault survivors, only 17% reported the assault to police which means that 83% suffer silently in shame.
Domestic violence against our women is an epidemic that must be stopped now. As a people we must now begin to protect, honor, and cherish our mothers, wives, daughters, significant others, and female neighbors from the evil system of violence that we have allowed to go virtually unchecked for far too long.
Mrs. Hogan solved her problem with a cast iron skillet upside the head of her abuser. Unfortunately violence begets violence, and that certainly isn’t the answer, but maybe real men learning to be real men by real men, may be an excellent starting point for us Brothers.
We are going to talk a lot more about this because enough is enough!