Abstract
The Clothesline has many colors— Yellow or Beige For survivors of battering Red, Pink, and Orange For rape and sexual assault Blue and Green For incest and child abuse Purple and Lavender The colors of homophobic hate
White in remembrance of those we have lost
My t-shirt is blooming with color but why is there no color for sexual harassment? You know, when your boss squeezes your butt and you just accidentally pour hot coffee in his lap?
I need a color for the jokes my ex-husband made when I told him my childhood was blue, green, red and orange and for the time his jealousy held me hostage in a motel room because another man was stalking me. You know I divorced his ass.
And what is the color of poverty, growing up cold and ragged a girl child in rural White America forced to endure every man’s and boy’s sexual perversion then hang out their laundry bleached of any memory with frozen fingers on that other clothesline of my past?
What would be the color of my desire if it had never known how fear tastes and terror smells? That little girl still screams in the night dreaming of the beauty and pain of that faraway farm land. How much did my silence cost? And what is the sound of my voice now?
Strong enough to break the sound barrier
some 60 years later.
What is the sound of racism when it sneaks up late at night in your college dormitory and slips a hate message under your best friend’s door?
I know that White was the color of the mob that surrounded my car in Providence, Rhode Island broke my windows with bricks throwing their hatred at me and my lover. Brutal was the laughter of the police when they refused to see the courage it takes to love across the color line.
And what is the color of justice in America when it sits in a grey cinder block jail cell where my nephews were beaten raped and left for dead where America warehouses its poor and dark-skinned women, men, boys, girls, refugees . . . in cages stacked upon each other? What is the color of their human rights?
Yes, some of them hurt some of us
and we hurt some of them. We wear the colors to prove it, our guilt and innocence bleed together. I want to see the color of a new kind of justice one that makes us all safe and whole again no need for cages to keep the harmed from harming.
We will never know how strong we are until we know specifically how each one of us suffered alone in silence and shame for what we had to do just to survive.
If I listen I can trace the headwaters of outrage
that feed the river of our dreams.
I carry buckets full of color from that river I live out loud now know the sound of my own desire. Light is the full spectrum of color and violence cannot survive in the light.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
The Clothesline Project (
) honors those who have been lost and those who have survived domestic violence and sexual assault by inviting people to make t-shirts that speak out against violence. The t-shirts are often color-coded according to the type of violence experienced. These lines were composed after making my t-shirt and realizing that I had run out of colors to name all of the types of violence I had experienced.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.