Room: A Novel and Three Captive Women: A Reality

Sandpipers Resort in Edinburg, Texas has a great book club.  We meet the second Thursday of each month from November through April, when our Winter Texans are in residence.  We have tea, talk about the book selection for that month and then enjoy a salad buffet and some wine.  Some people stay late to finish the wine.  [It’s like communion; once it’s been consecrated it has to be drunk.]  We enjoy good food, good fellowship and stimulating conversation.  This season we read an intense book, Room, by Emma Donoghue.  Not a member of our club could have heard the news this week about three women and a child being release from their bondage in Cleveland without thinking of that book. 

            First of all, I heartily recommend Room.  It is a remarkable book, written from the point of view of the child the enslaved woman bears in her captivity and tries to raise with some semblance of normality.  Mother love takes the form of her fierce protection of her child as well as her never-ending refusal to give up on her attempts to escape.  I thought the story would end at their escape, but, instead it continues with what happens in the weeks after their, “freedom.”  It seems that freedom of the mind is much more complex than freedom of the body.  This is a book that I started reading reluctantly.  I considered the concept too dark, too frightening for a mother of daughters and granddaughters.  Instead the writer’s skill and integrity in telling the story made the book not just readable and thought provoking, but impossible to put down. 

            Then we heard the news from Cleveland, Ohio.  Three women, Amanda Berry, who kicked out a locked screen door in a rare moment of solitude and sought help from a stranger; Gina DeJesus, kidnapped at age fourteen; and Michelle Knight, at 21 years old at the time of her abduction and still hospitalized.  These three women have had years stolen from their lives.  The child born to Amanda has had an entire childhood denied her.  Their treatment at the hand of these animals is something I don’t even want to imagine.

            Let us not forget that there are other children from this area missing and probably either killed or enslaved by these pigs.  There were other pregnancies by these women and what happened to those babies?  These three women are the tip of a horrifying iceberg of abuse at the hands of three men and possibly any fellow child abusers they run with. 

            We do know that the man in whose home they were enslaved, Ariel Castro, has a history of administering physical abuse to his domestic partner.  From the looks of him and his brothers, Pedro and Onil, they are the kind of men who clearly could only get a woman by coercion.  They are such monstrous and obvious losers that no woman would approach any of them by choice.  That is no justification for what they did.  My only hope at this point is that these troglodytes are put in general population in prison where they become everyone’s sheep. 

            The book, a work of fiction, is taken from a reality that keeps repeating itself.  Some humans are human animals, not human beings.  There is such a thing as evil in this world.  It is insidious and omnipresent.  Denying evil does not make it go away.  Seeking logical reasoning and humane understanding of evil does not make it knowable.  We can only stand guard against it, recognize it when it emerges, and purge it from society when we can.

            Guard the innocent and keep the faith. 

 

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