I Know Why Prosperity Carter Sings
By Nathan Hare
Click here to support How To Get Off The Shelf by Prosperity Carter
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Prosperity Carter, poet, rapper, singer, journalist, author, Minister of the First Poets Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Revisionist
photo by Jim Dennis
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The Honorable Dr. Nathan Hare, Sociologist and Clinical Psychologist, father of Black and Ethnic Studies, first chair of a Black Studies program on a major white university campus at San Francisco State University. Dr. Nathan Hare was the center of the storm when students went on the longest and most violent strike in US academic history to establish Black and Ethnic Studies at SFSU.
photo Adam Turner, The Movement Newspaper
Prosperity Carter puts me in the mind of Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Iyana Vanzant, Jill Scott and Mary J. Blige. Not only could they have been blood sisters; they all have suffered the horror of childhood and adolescent sexual molestation and its devastating but ambiguous shards of victimization, compelled to wrestle with a complicated invasion of their very person when they were too young to know or understand what’s going on in the dark and dirty secrecy of a lonely and ill-begotten nocturnal encounter with some pleasure seeking older male.
All the way back to the slave trade and slavery in the antebellum South, when slaves not only were bred like cattle and sometimes black male slaves were kept for the function of breeding other slaves (called “Jackass Niggers”), black women have lived somewhat like caged birds. Today many may understandably feel subject to be molested at any moment. In any event today, any black woman you see, more likely than not was raped or molested in childhood experience (60 percent, some figures show).
What makes it worse, in nine out of ten times, ten to one, the penetration came at the hands of someone close to them, somebody who may have cawed that they loved them in the middle of the involuntary and confusing act (which is sometime mixed with attacker-induced and yet forbidden feelings of pleasure from the confusing force of the uninvited but seductive “finger fucking” techniques employed by the physiological invader in the usurpation of an ill-fated black girl’s revered virginity, jarring and shattering her sense of right and wrong.
Leaving all other sociology aside that has befuddled and concerned black intellectuals, the experience of sexual abuse is likely to devastate a young rape victim’s relationships in later adulthood love life. They may be left unable to love, to feel loved, to love themselves, and therefore any other. Beyond that, they may be inclined to mistake sex for love.
Most are threatened and cajoled into accordance with a culture of silence, which keeps them from getting the help and treatment they will need. Without medical and psychiatric help, they may lose and miss their very courage to heal.
Then, in adulthood life, when they can no longer keep all the bitterness in, they are prone to take up a self-defeating mission to get their mother or family to admit that they’ve been wronged. At that point, the family may not believe it or may not want to break up or even shake up their own love relations, to take up a war against an otherwise honorable family member. In the classical case, the sexual victim has grown up and now wants her embarrassed mother to announce it to the world that she has married a scoundrel for a man and then to turn against the man she loves, her long devoted husband who has done nothing to her and nothing she has witnessed to anybody else. To his own daughter? She may well not believe it, let alone assume that it is true.
I used to wonder when I was growing up in rural Oklahoma and a mother would be going away to the hospital or to visit her mother or whatever reason in another state, the old folks would say: “Don’t leave your daughter with your husband (this said especially if he was a stepfather or a drinker) because people will talk about her.” I finally came to the sociological conclusion that they didn’t want to suggest that Mr. Jones would do such a thing, but they wanted to prevent the possibility.
Watch your children. Don’t leave them with anybody at anytime and place that might leave them exposed to the peril of being sexually abuse. We can’t prevent all sexual abuse anymore than we can prevent all car wrecks, but we are nevertheless admonished to drive safely.
Too many black girls, as things now stand, are left to languish on dusty shelves of despair and degradation.
But while most victims of childhood sexual abuse are relegated to prolonged and silent suffering in the dust -- their hopes and dreams and self-worth languishing on the shelf, diminished by their unfortunate ordeal, any good they have to give to be taken at the pleasure of someone else – others, like Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey and Prosperity Carter will sublimate their unrequited rage in artistic and socially useful endeavors entertaining and helping others, sometimes to considerable acclaim from society as a whole.
Through their art and service they are able to connect with others, including other victims. Imagine the healing power of the simple notion, just to know that you are not alone, that you are not the only one and, moreover, that you can get together with others and move to get yourself clean off the shelf – indeed, by harnessing and invoking the inviolate but largely untapped power of the group, that you yourself can begin to lead the way.
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Excerpt # 3:
The Low Down Dirty Truth
I thought that I would never be sexually molested again but I was wrong. When I was fourteen I was sexually molested at our cousin Vicky's house. She lived in Long Island City and our family went over for a cook out. I loved going to her house for a family function because we had so much fun. Sometimes we would not go home but spent the night. My mom would never spend the night but the rest of us stayed except my little brother who went home with my mom. My mother thought that my father's side of the family got crazy when they drank and smoked marijuana because they would start arguing and fighting. As crazy as my mom was, she was right on this issue.
On this occasion, the adults were drinking, talking loud and dancing. Sometimes one of our older cousins would sneak me and my cousins a drink. A cousin snuck me a drink that was so strong it burned my throat but I soon asked for another. I started getting dizzy and everything was funny. As I started dancing by myself, I noticed Vicky's husband Joe standing apart from the crowd with a drink in his hand and his eyes on me.
When it got late, I was told to go upstairs to my cousin's bedroom to sleep. I took my clothes off except my panties and Vicky handed me a large t-shirt to put on. She said, "Goodnight" and shut the door. As I tried to go to sleep I heard footsteps coming towards the room. It sounded like someone was stomping. The room door opened and Joe entered. He said, "Come here I want to ask you something." I walked to the door scared because I had been molested before when I was eleven by my father's friend. I was apprehensive about Joe entering the room because his speech was slurred and I could see the cup of liquor in his hand. He said, "I'm going to the store, would you like anything?" I said, "Sure, you can get me a soda and some M&M's." He said, "Ok, I will be back."
It seemed like hours before Joe returned. I had fallen asleep with my head under the covers but awakened when I heard Joe open the door. He said, "Shhhhh", then proceeded to pull the covers off me slowly and then we made eye contact. He handed me soda but did not have my M&M's.
When I popped open the soda and tried to take a sip, he put his hand over my mouth and said, "Shut up, don't say nothing!" Then he forced me to kiss him on the lips and then stuck his whole tongue into my mouth. His breathe was foul and hot with the smell and taste of alcohol. He was disgusting. Then he grabbed my breast with his hands that seemed huge. My breasts were small like lemons so he played with my nipples, arousing me. I could feel my pussy getting wet. He pushed my panties aside and started finger fucking me. I didn't know what or how to think but his finger felt good in my wet tight pussy. I was still a virgin so I felt violated by everything he was doing to my body. I wanted to kill him.
As he finger fucked my wet tight pussy, he pulled out his dick and said, "Touch it, go ahead, hold it." I said, "No, I don't want to touch it." His aggression intensified. He grabbed my wrist and forced me to hold his dick. I wanted to rip his dick off as I was holding it. It was my very first time holding a grown ass man's dick and I said to myself, "Damn, his dick big, long and hard." He said, "Stroke it faster, I love you and always thought you were sexy." So I did and soon he shot cum all over my t-shirt. After his cum had shot everywhere he said again, "I love you baby." He pulled out some money and said, "Take this and don't tell nobody." Then he pulled out his gun and stuck it in my face and said, "If you tell anyone I will kill you, you little bitch!" I was scared to death. He kept on trying to give me the money but I refused to take it. Finally, he took the money and left the room. I could not sleep but cried all night.
When morning came he drove my brothers and I home. I was petrified of him and did not want to get in his car. He told my brothers to get in the back and told me to get in the front seat. So I sat in the front and he turned up the music really loud so my brothers couldn't hear, then said to me, "Remember what happened last night? It never happened, right? I will kill you and your brothers if you say anything." I said, "No, it never happened." It seemed like he was doing 90 miles an hour in and out of lanes. My brothers and I were clinging to our seats. When we finally got home and got out of the car, he got out too and tried to give me a hug. I refused to hug him and ran into the house straight to my bedroom and fell on the bed exhausted and disgusted. I was terrified that he would kill me and my brothers, so it was years before I told anyone.
Click here to support How To Get Off The Shelf by Prosperity Carter
By Nathan Hare
Click here to support How To Get Off The Shelf by Prosperity Carter
Prosperity Carter, poet, rapper, singer, journalist, author, Minister of the First Poets Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Revisionist
photo by Jim Dennis
The Honorable Dr. Nathan Hare, Sociologist and Clinical Psychologist, father of Black and Ethnic Studies, first chair of a Black Studies program on a major white university campus at San Francisco State University. Dr. Nathan Hare was the center of the storm when students went on the longest and most violent strike in US academic history to establish Black and Ethnic Studies at SFSU.
photo Adam Turner, The Movement Newspaper
Prosperity Carter puts me in the mind of Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Iyana Vanzant, Jill Scott and Mary J. Blige. Not only could they have been blood sisters; they all have suffered the horror of childhood and adolescent sexual molestation and its devastating but ambiguous shards of victimization, compelled to wrestle with a complicated invasion of their very person when they were too young to know or understand what’s going on in the dark and dirty secrecy of a lonely and ill-begotten nocturnal encounter with some pleasure seeking older male.
All the way back to the slave trade and slavery in the antebellum South, when slaves not only were bred like cattle and sometimes black male slaves were kept for the function of breeding other slaves (called “Jackass Niggers”), black women have lived somewhat like caged birds. Today many may understandably feel subject to be molested at any moment. In any event today, any black woman you see, more likely than not was raped or molested in childhood experience (60 percent, some figures show).
What makes it worse, in nine out of ten times, ten to one, the penetration came at the hands of someone close to them, somebody who may have cawed that they loved them in the middle of the involuntary and confusing act (which is sometime mixed with attacker-induced and yet forbidden feelings of pleasure from the confusing force of the uninvited but seductive “finger fucking” techniques employed by the physiological invader in the usurpation of an ill-fated black girl’s revered virginity, jarring and shattering her sense of right and wrong.
Leaving all other sociology aside that has befuddled and concerned black intellectuals, the experience of sexual abuse is likely to devastate a young rape victim’s relationships in later adulthood love life. They may be left unable to love, to feel loved, to love themselves, and therefore any other. Beyond that, they may be inclined to mistake sex for love.
Most are threatened and cajoled into accordance with a culture of silence, which keeps them from getting the help and treatment they will need. Without medical and psychiatric help, they may lose and miss their very courage to heal.
Then, in adulthood life, when they can no longer keep all the bitterness in, they are prone to take up a self-defeating mission to get their mother or family to admit that they’ve been wronged. At that point, the family may not believe it or may not want to break up or even shake up their own love relations, to take up a war against an otherwise honorable family member. In the classical case, the sexual victim has grown up and now wants her embarrassed mother to announce it to the world that she has married a scoundrel for a man and then to turn against the man she loves, her long devoted husband who has done nothing to her and nothing she has witnessed to anybody else. To his own daughter? She may well not believe it, let alone assume that it is true.
I used to wonder when I was growing up in rural Oklahoma and a mother would be going away to the hospital or to visit her mother or whatever reason in another state, the old folks would say: “Don’t leave your daughter with your husband (this said especially if he was a stepfather or a drinker) because people will talk about her.” I finally came to the sociological conclusion that they didn’t want to suggest that Mr. Jones would do such a thing, but they wanted to prevent the possibility.
Watch your children. Don’t leave them with anybody at anytime and place that might leave them exposed to the peril of being sexually abuse. We can’t prevent all sexual abuse anymore than we can prevent all car wrecks, but we are nevertheless admonished to drive safely.
Too many black girls, as things now stand, are left to languish on dusty shelves of despair and degradation.
But while most victims of childhood sexual abuse are relegated to prolonged and silent suffering in the dust -- their hopes and dreams and self-worth languishing on the shelf, diminished by their unfortunate ordeal, any good they have to give to be taken at the pleasure of someone else – others, like Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey and Prosperity Carter will sublimate their unrequited rage in artistic and socially useful endeavors entertaining and helping others, sometimes to considerable acclaim from society as a whole.
Through their art and service they are able to connect with others, including other victims. Imagine the healing power of the simple notion, just to know that you are not alone, that you are not the only one and, moreover, that you can get together with others and move to get yourself clean off the shelf – indeed, by harnessing and invoking the inviolate but largely untapped power of the group, that you yourself can begin to lead the way.
Excerpt # 3:
The Low Down Dirty Truth
I thought that I would never be sexually molested again but I was wrong. When I was fourteen I was sexually molested at our cousin Vicky's house. She lived in Long Island City and our family went over for a cook out. I loved going to her house for a family function because we had so much fun. Sometimes we would not go home but spent the night. My mom would never spend the night but the rest of us stayed except my little brother who went home with my mom. My mother thought that my father's side of the family got crazy when they drank and smoked marijuana because they would start arguing and fighting. As crazy as my mom was, she was right on this issue.
On this occasion, the adults were drinking, talking loud and dancing. Sometimes one of our older cousins would sneak me and my cousins a drink. A cousin snuck me a drink that was so strong it burned my throat but I soon asked for another. I started getting dizzy and everything was funny. As I started dancing by myself, I noticed Vicky's husband Joe standing apart from the crowd with a drink in his hand and his eyes on me.
When it got late, I was told to go upstairs to my cousin's bedroom to sleep. I took my clothes off except my panties and Vicky handed me a large t-shirt to put on. She said, "Goodnight" and shut the door. As I tried to go to sleep I heard footsteps coming towards the room. It sounded like someone was stomping. The room door opened and Joe entered. He said, "Come here I want to ask you something." I walked to the door scared because I had been molested before when I was eleven by my father's friend. I was apprehensive about Joe entering the room because his speech was slurred and I could see the cup of liquor in his hand. He said, "I'm going to the store, would you like anything?" I said, "Sure, you can get me a soda and some M&M's." He said, "Ok, I will be back."
It seemed like hours before Joe returned. I had fallen asleep with my head under the covers but awakened when I heard Joe open the door. He said, "Shhhhh", then proceeded to pull the covers off me slowly and then we made eye contact. He handed me soda but did not have my M&M's.
When I popped open the soda and tried to take a sip, he put his hand over my mouth and said, "Shut up, don't say nothing!" Then he forced me to kiss him on the lips and then stuck his whole tongue into my mouth. His breathe was foul and hot with the smell and taste of alcohol. He was disgusting. Then he grabbed my breast with his hands that seemed huge. My breasts were small like lemons so he played with my nipples, arousing me. I could feel my pussy getting wet. He pushed my panties aside and started finger fucking me. I didn't know what or how to think but his finger felt good in my wet tight pussy. I was still a virgin so I felt violated by everything he was doing to my body. I wanted to kill him.
As he finger fucked my wet tight pussy, he pulled out his dick and said, "Touch it, go ahead, hold it." I said, "No, I don't want to touch it." His aggression intensified. He grabbed my wrist and forced me to hold his dick. I wanted to rip his dick off as I was holding it. It was my very first time holding a grown ass man's dick and I said to myself, "Damn, his dick big, long and hard." He said, "Stroke it faster, I love you and always thought you were sexy." So I did and soon he shot cum all over my t-shirt. After his cum had shot everywhere he said again, "I love you baby." He pulled out some money and said, "Take this and don't tell nobody." Then he pulled out his gun and stuck it in my face and said, "If you tell anyone I will kill you, you little bitch!" I was scared to death. He kept on trying to give me the money but I refused to take it. Finally, he took the money and left the room. I could not sleep but cried all night.
When morning came he drove my brothers and I home. I was petrified of him and did not want to get in his car. He told my brothers to get in the back and told me to get in the front seat. So I sat in the front and he turned up the music really loud so my brothers couldn't hear, then said to me, "Remember what happened last night? It never happened, right? I will kill you and your brothers if you say anything." I said, "No, it never happened." It seemed like he was doing 90 miles an hour in and out of lanes. My brothers and I were clinging to our seats. When we finally got home and got out of the car, he got out too and tried to give me a hug. I refused to hug him and ran into the house straight to my bedroom and fell on the bed exhausted and disgusted. I was terrified that he would kill me and my brothers, so it was years before I told anyone.
Click here to support How To Get Off The Shelf by Prosperity Carter