That Mean Old Yesterday
An Abused Girl's Fight for Survival
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
'So there I was - a twenty-one year old black female university student walking down a suburban street with a gun, no shoes and murder on my mind. I was going to kill the past. I didn't know what else to do with it'
Stacey Patton today is a vibrant and impressive young woman with a promising career in journalism. Yet her childhood was a battleground of bullying, abuse and mental torture.
Abandoned by her birth mother, Stacey was placed in the New Jersey foster care system and was apparently lucky to be adopted by a hardworking, God-fearing African American couple. Yet something else was going on in this immaculately kept home - punishment in terrible ways, physical, emotional and sexual. Her mother was tyrannical and her father, either so in love with or in fear of his wife, turned a blind eye to the abuse she heaped on their love-starved little girl. Stacey survived by channelling her energy into her school work and her education raised her from the shackles of her unhappy home. Drawing parallels between her own childhood and the treatment of black slaves brought to America, Stacey Patton weaves the moving story of her own painful upbringing with the shameful slave history of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patton, a graduate student at Rutgers, was a baby when she entered New Jersey's foster care system. Five years later, she was placed with a middle-class New Jersey couple eager to adopt. Myrtle and her husband, "G," were both African-American, like Patton, but also deeply committed Pentecostals. While G was laid-back, Myrtle was a mean woman who believed she needed to beat and whip Patton to make her "submissive," to prepare her "for the modern realities of being a little black girl growing up in America." All the black children Patton knew "got whipped whenever, wherever, and with whatever. This was part of our identity as black children." Patton believes this behavior came from the slave experience: "It was what their parents knew and what their parents' parents knew. It was a behavior that had deep roots in the plantation legacy." Patton intercuts the story of Myrtle's abuse with vivid descriptions of the torture and beating of antebellum slaves. Unfortunately, G, "helpless and emasculated... like many slave men," couldn't stop Myrtle's abuse. Eventually, Patton ran away, lived in youth shelters and won a scholarship to a good prep school. Patton's account is brutal and will likely become controversial, as her racial stereotypes, particularly her assertion that most black children are abused by their parents, may raise eyebrows.
