I was doing a little Reminiscing and thought about...

laurenbyrne's Thinking Woman

*Ms. Bonnie. You know how we've all heard it said that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. Although it has been universally practiced, also universal is the condemnation of the prostitute. So negatively viewed, it makes you wonder why anyone would freely choose such a profession. One Memorial Day weekend (some years back), I went home to Memphis and capitalized on the chance to find out (from a reliable source) what prostitution is really like, or at least I attempt to. Ms. Bonnie, a friend of the family that I have known for quite sometime, had just retired from twenty years of “selling the goods.” She is a nice woman, pretty and intelligent. She graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science in pharmacology. She had always talked about her “other life” openly with my mama and those who know her intimately and I wondered if she would talk to me.

The first time I met Ms. Bonnie, I knew what she did for a living. It wasn’t because she dressed in fishnets, a black mini, pink halter top and knee high boots. Ms. Bonnie didn’t dress in that stereotypical fashion at all. She wore colorful tees and dark denim jeans or shorts on the weekdays and simple, pretty dresses on Sundays. She often wore her brown-spiraled tresses down or in a ponytail pulled through a collegiate ball cap. I knew what Ms. Bonnie did because she openly talked about it. She was a “working woman” she would say with a pride that those who were just meeting her for the first time might consider misplaced.

Never ashamed by the career path she had freely chosen, Ms. Bonnie always held her head high, although family and close friends tremendously disapproved.

“To come to grips with the fact that you’re a prostitute isn’t easy to do. My grandma used to call me a ho to her friends and a whore to our family, as if it made a difference,” she recalled with a sigh. “It hurt like hell at first but I got over it. I always did.”

Ms. Bonnie is a petite woman, about 5’4 with a chestnut complexion and large deep-set ebony eyes. She has a youth appearance that fools the eye into thinking that she’s much younger than thirty-eight. She tells animated stories about life in general that make you laugh uncontrollably but it is the stories about her own life, especially her twenty year experience as a “lady of the night” that offers an intimate portrait of Ms. Bonnie.

“When I saw that movie Pretty Woman for the first time, I laughed at the shit cause I knew it wasn’t real,” Ms. Bonnie chuckled in between taking bites of a Mitchell’s burger. She ordered a burger with everything and I’d just bought some gum and a blue Fanta.

Ms. Bonnie and I had just stepped through the doors of Mitchell’s corner store and out into the blinding sun of Memorial Day weekend. Mitchell’s is a mom and pop store that has sat at the corner of Chelsea Avenue and Pope Street for decades. The building is an awful shade of purple now and its color changes seasonally. This corner is just one of the many corners in the Douglass community that Ms. Bonnie used to frequent on weekends for almost twenty years.

“You know when Richard Gere first meets Vivian and he’s in the expense car?” Ms. Bonnie asked me, as we started to walk down Chelsea Avenue, a lengthy street lined with churches, big and small, vacant lots and buildings and a few houses and duplexes here and there.

I nodded at Ms. Bonnie because I knew exactly what scene she was thinking of. In fact, I knew that entire movie, scene for scene because it was one of my favorites.

“Well sugar, it was plenty of times that I was standing on these streets hoping for a car like that to roll up to me,” she said as she pulled an onion from her burger and tossed it on the ground. “I just got the usual in their beat up Caprice Classics and old Ford trucks.”

Chelsea Avenue runs through the neighborhood I lived in for seven years. As we walked, Ms. Bonnie asked me how my classes were going, if I was getting close to graduating and commented on how difficult it must be for me to be away from my family for so long. It seemed as if she were the one giving the interview and not me. I answered her questions but I knew that I had to take the attention off myself and place it on her.

“Ms. Bonnie, I don’t want to keep you out here all day walking around the hood. I’m sure you’ve got barbequing you want to get to, so let me get to asking you some questions. I have to know, how could you spend endless weekends out here for twenty years?” I asked. I waved my right hand around at the open space the surrounded us.

“Sugar, that’s a good question. Nice place to start. Well, let’s see. Most of the time, I did it cause I needed bus fare for the trip back to school, for books, even groceries. But then there were times that I just wanted to get away from the responsibilities I had at home,” Ms. Bonnie replied. She took a bite from her burger, chewed a little then swallowed.

The “responsibilities”, as she explained later were those she felt that her grand mother, Odessa, had placed on her. Odessa was a stern woman who had expected Ms. Bonnie to make perfect grades, go off to school, get a degree then make her way back home to support Odessa and her sisters.

Born August 10, 1964 to Jesse, a neighborhood mechanic and Silvia, an elementary school teacher, Ms. Bonnie was the oldest of four girls. In the next three years, each of her sisters was born, the last being brought into the world only to see their mother slip from it.

“For a year or so after my mama died, my daddy did his best to take care of us and keep us together. He did everything from combing hair to hemming dresses to helping with homework. If there were a problem with any of us, he’d stop working on a car and hurry to us. But it wasn’t enough, I guess,” said Ms. Bonnie. “My sisters and I got sent to live with Odessa while my daddy went in search for a better job, so I was told.”

Ms. Bonnie later learned that her father had found a better job, a fishing gig, down somewhere in Louisiana but that better job cost him his life only after working there for six months. So Ms. Bonnie was raised by her grandmother from the age of seven to eighteen when she left to attend school at Duke University.

“Odessa was this huge woman. She had to have been at least six feet tall. She was very dark skinned and her voice was deep like a man,” Ms. Bonnie let her own voice drop a few octaves lower so that she could imitate the voice of her grandmother. “Growing up with her wasn’t easy cause she was strict. There were no boys, sleepovers, jeans or tennis shoes. I had my own room but she took my door of the hinges, so I didn’t have any privacy. There was no such thing as a curfew. In Odessa’s house, you had to be in as soon as the sunset. I used to say to myself that I couldn’t wait to get out of her house so that I could be normal because I felt that there was nothing normal about the way she raised me and my sisters.”

In the fall of 1982, on a full scholarship, Ms. Bonnie entered into Duke. She wanted to be a HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) chemist for a food science laboratory of some kind.

“I just thought that if I got my degree and made some money, I could get my sisters and take care of them myself and not have to worry about what my grandmamma had to say or what she thought was the proper way to raise children,” said Bonnie. “My grandmamma, lord rest her soul, she didn’t know how to show affection to us. Well, to me mostly. And when she found out about what I was doing in my spare time, and ounce of compassion she ever had for me went right out the window.”

Weeks into her first semester at Duke, Ms. Bonnie immersed herself into all that the campus had to offer. She attended recitals, film showings, and lectures. She participated in the student government and volunteered with several community service groups in the city. As the holiday’s loomed near, Ms. Bonnie dreaded having to return to Memphis, her grandmother’s house and her rules.

“I got so used to the freedom I had at school. I could come and go as I pleased, hang with whoever I wanted to, and Odessa didn’t have any say at all because I was in one place and she was in another. Most importantly, it became certain that Odessa didn’t care about me as a person. She didn’t write or call me to see how I was. From a letter that my youngest sister wrote me, I found out that my room had been turned in a mini library so I knew I didn’t have a place to rest,” Ms. Bonnie said as she looked across the vacant field in front of us. “There was no home, I felt, for me to come home to.”

It was during her first Thanksgiving break from Duke when Ms. Bonnie tried prostitution. She recalled a time in her life were the last thing she wanted to do was go home to Odessa’s house. As she began to tell me about her first time, her eyes glazed over as if she wanted to cry but no tears spilled down her cheeks. Quietly, I sat and listened as Ms. Bonnie told her story.

“I didn’t know that the university was going to close down my resident hall during the break. I was counting on staying there in my room and not having to go back to Memphis, even if it was just for a few days. The bus ride to Memphis took hours and during that time, I thought of a million things to do to keep me from going to my grandma’s. Engaging in a sexual activity for payment wasn’t one of them. When the bus pulled in the Greyhound station, sadly, I got off, got my bag and I headed for a pay phone. Originally, I was going to give my grandma a call and let her know I was there, but instead of stopping at the row of pay phones, I kept walking towards the automatic doors of the terminal. I remember walking down to this restaurant at Union and Main named Hughey’s and that’s where I met my first customer.”

Ms. Bonnie’s first customer, and certainly not her last, was a thirty something white male named William she met while sitting at the bar. She remembers he had long dark hair braided into a ponytail and was wearing a faded Kiss t-shirt that seemed too small for him and stonewash jeans. Moderately attractive was William or Will, what he’d told her to call him once he introduced himself to her. They talked for twenty-five minutes while he drank three Coors lights and Ms. Bonnie had a cherry Coke and fries. She doesn’t remember whose idea it was to get a room at the Days Inn just around the corner, but that’s where they headed before Will could even motion to the bartender to give him his fourth beer.

“It never crossed my mind Will might have been some kind of lunatic luring me to my death. He talked a lot, was very articulate, quite kind and cute. I noticed how cute he was when once we got into the room,” said Ms. Bonnie as a slight smirk crept over her face.

“He was talking a mile a minute, asked me if he could help with my bags, took them and placed them in a corner. He asked if I cared if he turned a lamp on, asked if I wanted to watch some television, even asked what side of the bed I preferred. I was getting tired so, I mumbled another sure to him and took my tennis shoes off, got on my side of the bed we were sharing that night. The minute my head hit the pillow it dawned on me that he paid for my soda and fries at the bar, paid for the room that I’d be staying in for the night, and he let me have the side of the bed that I think he was accustom to sleeping on. I started thinking that he might want something in return, but the only money I had on me was bus fare back to school. I started thinking fast and the next thing I knew, I told him that I appreciated him getting the room and that I didn’t have any money to give him but that I didn’t see a problem with giving him something else in the form of compensation. And, well, you know what happen after that.”

“So you mean to tell me that there was no coercion of any kind on this Will’s part?” I asked in disbelief.

Ms. Bonnie started to laugh and I wasn’t sure if she was laughing at the memory of her first time or my reaction. “He didn’t threaten me or nothing, Sugar,” Said Ms. Bonnie. “If anything, I had to coerce him.”

My mind wandered as Ms. Bonnie continued her story. I expected to hear her relay a narrative about some bizarre, painful and disgusting ordeal with a sadist or something. The Will that Ms. Bonnie spoke of seemed like a normal, regular guy, not someone shopping around the streets of downtown Memphis for a girl to pick up. I had my own romanticized thoughts of what prostitution was like. They evolved around performing all kinds of sexual acts, no matter how life threatening or perverse, for the cheapest amount of money and then having to take that to some pimp that laid claim to you, who would in turn give you nothing at all.

Ms. Bonnie looked at me, started to shake her head and then asked me, “It’s not what you expected to hear, huh?”

It took me a minute to answer her. I was attempting to arrange all the thoughts in my head in hopes that I would remain tactful as I began to express my disappointment in the things that I’d heard.

“Ms. Bonnie,” I began as my words mumbled from my mouth. “I kind of thought you’d tell me about sacrificing your body and your emotions for a man’s pleasure, about the violence you faced, having to fight for your life in a less than glamorous profession. You just described to me something you seemed to enjoy. I just don’t understand that.”

What I did understand and could sympathize with Ms. Bonnie on was that feeling of not having a home to go home to. I knew what it was like to dread holidays and taking that long, butt numbing Greyhound bus ride to Memphis. I often felt that there was no room for me at the inn. Of course, selling myself was never an option that I could ever accept. I went home with roommates instead or stayed in my apartment alone, but I never thought of prostitution as a way to avoid making the trip.

“No one ever does, Sugar. Folks claim that they really want to know, want to understand why I did this for twenty years, but they turn up there noses, contort their faces into awful looks when I tell them I’ve had sex with over forty-five men, given close to about one hundred hand and blow jobs and that I was okay about doing it, except for about three instances, but ultimately I was cool about it. I think folks can’t handle my form of truth since it doesn’t necessarily coincide with their own.”

The truth that does not coincide with Ms. Bonnie’s is that “prostitution is an act of violence against women which is intrinsically traumatizing” (Baral 405). A study of 475 people in prostitution from five countries (South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA, and Zambia) showed that 62% reported having been raped in prostitution, 73% reported having experienced physical assault in prostitution, 72% were currently or formerly homeless and 92% stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately. Women in prostitution often suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder that is a psychological reaction to extreme physical and emotional trauma. Sixty-seven percent of the women in prostitution from five countries met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD. This rate was similar to that of battered women, rape victims, and state-sponsored torture survivors. Moreover, I shared these findings with Ms. Bonnie. She was quiet for sometime. She bit her lower lip as she seemed to be contemplating the things I had said.

“Contrary to popular belief,” began Ms. Bonnie as we took a seat on the porch of an abandoned house where she used to wait for customers. “All prostitutes, street walkers, whatever folks want to call us, aren’t poor, crack head, alcoholic, women who’d been sexually abused and scammed into the business. Maybe those statistics makes up the majority but, I’m talking about the few of us who made the conscious decision to what we do or what I used to do. I am not emotionally messed up in the head. I’ve never been dependent on a pimp. I wasn’t feeding a cocaine habit or any other habit for that matter. I did use this as a means to escape parts of my life that I didn’t want to experience and that’s the honest truth. Folks may find it hard to believe but it’s never been about what other folks believe, but about what I know to be true for me.”