You may not have been aware of it, but April has been "Sexual Assault Awareness Month" (SAAM) in the United States. The best place for White readers to acquaint themselves with this issue is our own frontier history. The following is drawn from my recent book, Rape Hate: Sex & Violence in War & Peace
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| Interracial rape victim: Catherine German |
The little bottle lay on the sand. Nearby, waves lapped softly against the beach. How long the bottle had been laying there no one knows. Whether it was the tide or a storm that placed it, we do not know that either. This much we do know: At some point, someone walking along the sand spotted the bottle and instead of breaking it or hurling it back out to sea, they stooped to pick it up. We also know that when the finder uncorked the bottle he discovered that a note was folded inside. After fishing out the note and reading the words on the paper, whoever held it must have been dumb-struck. Finally, we also know that soon after the finder read the note and recovered from his shock, word quickly spread.
Thus ended one of the most remarkable journeys ever recorded.
The little bottle's story began somewhere on the high and dry plains of northwest Texas or eastern New Mexico, hundreds of miles from where it was found. Here, at a camp of the Southern Cheyenne Indians, a ragged and frightened young white woman secretly brought out her hidden treasure—a bottle, a cork, a pencil, a piece of paper—then nervously scratched out a note, a desperate plea for help. The girl quickly folded the paper into the bottle, corked the end tightly, then tossed it into the headwaters of the Brazos River. In this arid region, the Brazos during the best of times is a mere trickle of water; at worst, it is just a sandy draw. Nevertheless, this bottle and the tiny trickle that floated it were the best, and perhaps last, hope for freedom that the young woman would know.
