The following is an excerpt from my own copywrited material, from my autobiography, racheltracks. I was molested by my uncle, raped by my biological father and robbed and raped by a man with a gun at my head. I am retelling these stories from three chapters in my book. These chapters in the book are not in sequence and when I knew it was time to tell about my uncle, I thought people might be sick of sex stuff, so I decided to tell it this way. The first paragraph in this diary is the last paragraph in the previous chapter.
"We have a very old Florentine street lantern on a table next to the bed. At night we burn a candle in it and transform an ordinary bedroom into a land of magic and fairy tales. I love fairy tales, but not all of them are always so nice. Which reminds me, I haven't told you about my uncle."
Once upon a time there was a little girl, a very princess little girl with fair hair, a dark complexion, an almost but not quite turned up nose and electric blue eyes. She was the youngest daughter of a King and Queen who lived in a land called Georgia.
Because she was the youngest and also, as many said, the most beautiful Princess of the King and Queen, she was worshipped by many. There was even a man in her land, a merchant, who kept one drawer in his desk especially for toys and candy for this Princess. Each time the Queen would take the Princess into his office, this man would let her choose whatever she liked from his store of goodies, and although the Princess is grown now and cannot remember what this merchant looked like, she does remember she loved him very much.
Some people worshipped the Princess because she was so beautiful and others because she was lively and fun to be with. But there was one man, a man who in fact was related to the King and Queen by marriage, who worshipped the Princess only because she had the body of a little girl. No one is quite sure when this uncle began to bestow certain favors and attentions on our Princess because it was secret the things he did to her and no one was supposed to know. The uncle is dead today and cannot be asked for details and our Princess, who has an excellent memory, only remembers that she cannot remember a time early enough in her life when this uncle did not worship her body.
She does remember what he did though, and she remembers very clearly the time she found out this particular form of worship was not a very nice thing to do. It was the summer when she was eight years old, or more correctly the summer when she was seven years, eleven months and some days old. It was about th4e same time of the year it is now and the Queen and the uncle's wife were out together that night, with this uncle acting as official baby sitter for the Princess since there was no one else at court this particular evening. That happened often actually, that this uncle was the official baby sitter.
This night the Princess was wearing a pair of pale yellow cotton pajamas, or rather, the Princess wasn't wearing a pair of pale yellow cotton pajamas. She had them on when the Queen left, but as usual, they were soon off her body and lying on the floor by the throne of her uncle.
Our Princess, who wasn't wearing any clothes at all, was sitting on the lap of her uncle, who was wearing all his clothes. It wasn't ever necessary that the Princess worship the uncle too, that wasn't part of the game. It might have beenh, if he had lived long enough because once, just before he died, he asked the Princess if she wanted to see 'his thing.' She told him no, that she had seen the King's and seeing one was quite enough for any little girl. The uncle persisted for while, saying he bet the King's wasn't as big a his, but fortunately for the Princess, she was rescued by a car driving into the driveway heralding the arrival of other members of the court and the uncle zipped up his trousers before the Princess was face to face with another thing like the King's, only one that was perhaps bigger.
But back to the night in question. The uncle had his finger at the secret place, as he called it. Sometimes the uncle would put his finger insider her, in a special hole that the uncle had told her was built especially for him. At other times the uncle would rub a place above the hole, a place he told her was built especially for her, because when he rubbed her there it made her feel good and not just in that one place, but all over her body, sometimes even to her toes it made her feel good.
On this August night, as usual, the uncle had made use of both places many times, making himself feel good and also our little Princess. When he was once again about to make one of them feel good, they saw the lights of the big black Cadillac coming up the drive. (In those days the official transportation in the land was cars, having replaced the horse many years before.)
When he saw the lights, the uncle reached down for the lying-there-by-the-throne pajamas of the Princess. He put them back on her and when he did he told her this, "This is just between you and me now and you don't ever tell anybody about what we do."
The Princess remembers that even though she was standing still in her place by the side of the throne, she felt as if she were walking through a door. She walked through this door and entered a world she had never been in her entire life, and she was never able again to get back in her old world. The new one she didn't like so much because she felt bad in it and unhappy. She cried a lot and got terrible headaches. The King and Queen were worried at the change in their Princess and they called in well-known and respected doctors from all over the land to see if they could find out what was wrong with the Princess. After all their tests and consultations proved nothing organic was wrong, they began to whisper the word 'psychosomatic.'
It was not until many years later when the Princess was thirteen and the dead uncle was mentioned in front of her one night and she went into hysteria and began screaming and was incoherent and was taken to a hospital, that people found out that psychosomatic was really uncle. And guilt. And hands of men, old men in particular. And fantasies. Terrible fantasies she would have at night when she tried to go to sleep, fantasies that usually centered around someone hurting the Princess.
The fantasy she had the most and never, never told anyone was so simple it reeked of pathos from the depths of her young mind. She was an indentured servant in the fantasy (she was young, our Princess, but she was smart and read muchly, so she was able to supply many different kinds of backgrounds for this new world of torture she lived in). Every night in the fantasy the man who held her bond would want to get something from the top of a canopy bed. He would take off the Princess's clothes and tie her naked, stomach facing upward, over a chair. He would then step on her as if she were a stool to reach what he wanted. It was all there in living technicolor. An old man, a bed and punishment. Punishment for all the times the special place had been rubbed and brought the special pleasure. And the toes, even the toes, that had sometimes felt tingly from the rubbing of the special place, now they were tied down tightly to a chair where they could feel nothing.
Like the rest of her which felt nothing for many, many years and the special place also, where she held all the feelings unto herself and no matter how many times it was later touched she never let herself feel pleasure there, only if she were the one doing the touching. It was a different form of punishment this, different from the headaches and the fantasies, but punishment nonetheless, and although she always thought she
was punishing the men, who, because they were men became like her uncle, she was punishing no one but herself.
She grew, our Princess, older and older in years, but inside she stayed like a very young girl. When she was thirty-six and a half she began to get worried that she would never grow up, even though she was growing older. And though, of course, she didn't blame the whole thing on her uncle, she did hold him responsible for some of it. She thought perhaps when he opened the door of the grown up world too early for her that something inside her stuck in time and she closed her eyes and her mind to adulthood because she didn't think she would ever be ready to see the rest of what that world had to offer.