With the Rice case so much in the news, and the video out there for us to see with our own eyes what actually happened, countless other stories have emerged, people writing in to explain why they stayed or why they left in similar cases.
In my sister’s case she is no longer there to write down her story or explain why she remained with a man who eventually killed her. She no longer has this possibility, and so I will have to try to do it for her and for the other women in her position: dead.
This, all too common outcome does not seem to be much discussed, and yet it is frequent. I have seen the warnings in the subway, the picture of the man with his flowers apologizing and then the flowers on the coffin. There is an escalation of violence which can lead to death. Yet this possibility is not often brought up.
Many of the commentators on the subject stress the economic ties between the super-rich athlete and the wife who has little education or possibilities of making anything near the salary of the husband; they stress the economic dependency which makes a woman hesitate to leave her man. Yet this, too, is not always the case.
In my sister’s story it was, if anything, just the opposite. It was she who came from a distinguished and wealthy English South African family, and he who came from a large poor and Afrikaans speaking tribe. There were many siblings and little money, and the mother often used the hairbrush on the backsides of her many children.
My brother-in-law did have education and even the prestige of his profession. Ironically the man was a heart surgeon and had worked with Christiaan Barnard, the cardiac surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human-to human heart transplant. Yet he never paid for anything, or as my sister once told me, “not even a bottle of beer.” It was she who bought the big house and beautiful garden and paid the numerous servants whom her husband used to hold her down for his beatings.
So why did my sister stay? I think she was frightened, afraid this man would follow her to the ends of the earth, would never let her go. He needed to have her in his complete control, had her followed by a detective, and kept the children’s passports so that she could not leave the country.
She did come and spend a last holiday with me with one of her children and that is what she told me: that she was frightened. I don’t think I understood her fear and the control this man had over her life, or to what lengths he might go. She felt helpless in the face of such violence. This was in the seventies in South Africa. Today, fortunately, there are places where women can go if they need to hide.
Of course, I don’t think this is the whole story. There is always hope, that old harpy, that comes to the human heart: “This will be the last time,” the wife thinks, hope and a belief that love can triumph over all. But what is love? Can we say a man who beats a woman is worthy of such an emotion?
You can read the whole story of my sister's life in an article in The American Scholar called "Silences."
Sheila Kohler is the author of many books including Becoming Jane Eyre and the recent Dreaming for Freud.
She will teach a class at the Center for Fiction on The Writer in Fiction. Sign up for the first class by September 17.
Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) by Sheila Kohler Penguin Books click here
Dreaming for Freud: A Novel by Sheila Kohler Penguin Books click here
