Overcomer - The Journey by Judy Colella (top 10 non fiction books of all time txt) 📕

“I didn’t, of course, because I was ten, and wanted to know what was going on and where my foster-parents were. I should have run.

“I found them in the dining room lying on the floor surrounded by pools of dark red blood. Mr. Bolton’s face – some of his features had been caved in and there was a knife sticking out of one eye. Mrs. Bolton’s mouth was open, and from it was still oozing a thick stream of blood, and her face had been stabbed… a lot. I couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. I stared and stared, and then something inside shook awake and I went to the phone in the hall leading from the dining room, called 911 like they’d taught me to do in case of an emergency, and then, I believe, I passed out.

“When I came around, there were police all over, and ambulance workers and such. A policewoman asked me what had happened, if I’d seen anything. I – I believe that while I was unconscious, a kind of defensive wall had gone up in my mind, because I had no idea what she was talking about, and asked her why the police were there. I asked for my foster-parents, but she shook her head. Instead of answering, she brought me upstairs, asked me which room was mine; I showed her, and after telling me the Boltons had gone away, helped me pack some clothes. She said she was taking me to see the lady who came to visit us from foster care every few weeks to see how I was getting along. I think I was compliant at that point, didn’t argue or question anything, and went with her.

“The next day, the case-worker took me for a long drive. She was cheerful all the way there, and we stopped once for lunch, and again in the afternoon for ice cream. I remember she had kind eyes, and that I liked her. By the time the sun was beginning to go down we had reached a part of Georgia that was more barren than what I was used to, everything separated by wide fields with scrubby patches of browned grass and weeds. Miles separated one house from the next, the road was bumpy and broken in places, and had only two lanes. It felt like the rest of the world had disappeared and we’d entered some forgotten spot on the planet. Finally, a wood-shingled, two-story house appeared on the right. The roof was green, the white paint on the shingles peeling everywhere. It had a front porch reached by stairs that looked like they’d fall in if used by anything heavier than a squirrel.

“As we pulled into the driveway, she murmured something like, ‘Some vacation home!’ We got out, made it up the stairs without them collapsing, and knocked on the door. A boy who looked a little older than I opened it, and we went inside. A bar of light was hanging from the ceiling that somehow made the hallway seem darker. The wallpaper might have been pretty at one time, but I couldn’t really tell what the pattern was, and in places it was curling down off the wall.

“A woman was standing there, hands on her hips, staring at me and looking surprised, but then her eyes grew cold. The caseworker introduced me to them, put my suitcase down and handed the woman some papers.

“None of them answered, not the children nor the woman. It was weird. Miss Hunt – the case- worker – gave me a quick hug and told me to be a good boy, the whole time looking a little frightened. I asked her not to leave me there, but she was saying something to the woman who she told me was my new foster mother, and didn’t hear me. And then she said goodbye and left.

“As soon as the door shut, the woman began to look angry, and I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. Her daughter said she didn’t like me, and the woman said I was ugly. Then she brought me down the hallway toward the kitchen, but instead of going into it, she opened a door on the left, switched on a light, and led me down into the basement. She showed me a mattress on the floor by a small window high up in the wall, told me this was where I’d be living and not to pee on her mattress.

“She’d already said since I’d probably eaten, she wasn’t going to waste her good food on me. I was starving, but she terrified me so I said nothing. She went back up the stairs, turned off the light, shut the door and locked it. And that was the beginning. Every day she and her children told me I was too ugly to look at, and insisted that I never look directly at any of them. She claimed to be unable to figure out the right pronunciation of my name but never asked me to say it. Instead, she gave me a new one: Unacceptable.

“She removed all the mirrors except the one in the upstairs bathroom – which I was never allowed to use – and put black paint on everything that had a shiny surface. She said it was for my own good, because if I ever saw my face, I’d lose my mind, or... have a stroke, I think she said. I was told that I was too stupid to be alive, and should be thankful that they were willing to put up with me. So I lived in the basement, washed myself with water from the toilet in the bathroom that was down there, did all the laundry, swept, scrubbed the floors and walls, did repairs – some of them were beyond me at my age, but she made me do them over and over until I got it right, like hammering new wood onto the front steps, things like that.

“She was never satisfied with anything I did, and started hitting me within the first week or so. She let her son hit me, too. So while Retta’s job seemed to be to insult me every chance she got, Buddy was allowed to take his anger out on me, which was most of the time. Then one day I accidentally dropped the basket of wet laundry onto a patch of dirt as I was carrying it out to the clothesline in the yard, and she got so furious that she dragged me inside into the kitchen, told me to take my shirt off and hold on to the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and used an old electrical wire that she folded in half on my back. When you mentioned the telephone wire, Mr. KelIy, had a kind of ‘flash-back.’ I used to get them all the time, but the doctors showed me how to get past them, how to breathe and such. They don’t last very long, but they’re pretty intense. That first time, when I saw the blood splashing onto the chair’s seat, I was reminded of something... I know now what it was. Back then, though, I still had no recollection of the Boltons or the way they had died, but things were starting to come back.

“I hated that woman, and had decided years before that no matter how hard she hit me, or how badly it hurt, I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of crying or screaming the way I wanted to. That was a bad judgment call. I think she might not have hit me as often if I had. It seemed to make her even angrier that I didn’t react, and she would make me clean up the blood on the floor and chairs when she was done. I had to clean off that damn wire, too.

“Starting with that first night there, I’d been having realistic dreams. At first, I thought they were only that – dreams. They were so strange, yet involved people who were somehow familiar. You see, along with all memory of my first foster-parents, I had also blocked out everything else dealing with the way in which I’d gotten to Georgia. At that point, had someone asked me what I was doing at the age of, say, five or six, I couldn’t have said, even though I could remember my mother’s words, or certain moments with her or my father. When I was awake, my mind was a total blank about the truth regarding how long ago I’d lived in Ireland.

“About four years later, I recognized that they were not dreams at all, but actual memories, and I began to let myself consider them as such. Right after that, my former foster mother became furious with me about something ridiculous – I accidentally looked directly at her daughter.

I’d been hit with that damn wire at least a hundred times or more during those four years, but this time it was different. The beating went on for so long that, um, well anyway, it was worse than any of the others and I eventually passed out. I ended up in the hospital. Dr. Lee, the one who spoke to me when I woke up, said that Letitia told him I was self-destructive and a lot of other garbage that I can’t remember word-for-word, but it made me angry and desperate, so I told him the truth. Two days later he was dead. She’d made Buddy cut the brake line on his car, I’ve been told, and he died from injuries he got when his car hit a tree.

“When I got home from the hospital about two weeks later, she decided that hitting me like that wasn’t such a great idea anymore, so instead, she made a tape. And I’m sorry, Croghan, but I absolutely refuse to talk about that. All I’ll say is that not long after that I started trying to kill myself. I cut my wrists, tried hanging myself, thought of drinking sulfuric acid – they stopped me each time, of course, because if I was dead, the DFC might find out, so even if she convinced them my death was an accident, she wouldn’t get any more money from the State, and would never be allowed to foster any more children.

“Which is why they killed the Boltons, and why they wanted to be foster-parents in the first place. For money. She killed her husband, too, incidentally, the day after he’d murdered Mr. and Mrs. Bolton. She was afraid he’d tell the police it was her idea, so she, uh, poisoned him. Well, that’s the more pleasant way to explain it.

“To keep me from successfully committing suicide, even though they kept telling me I should, they would tie me up in the basement when I wasn’t doing chores. A few times a week, Buddy would come down there and start hitting me. He never hit me anywhere that couldn’t be covered up with clothing. I guess they still thought someone might accidentally see me. He was on the boxing team at school by then, and his mother told him to use me for practice. He also did other things to humiliate me and at that point, I really didn’t care. I was terrified of every sound, every movement, and had developed a bad stutter. Even when I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, they would play those tapes, and I – I had to listen because... because if… I’m sorry. I can’t – I’m sorry.

“Um, a few weeks after I turned sixteen,