“Thirty years ago, I lay in the room of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I never should have chosen.”

What a read. My First Thirty Years is the unvarnished and enraged truth of Gertrude Beasley’s life, and it deserves to be read. From the first line, which I’ve used as the title above, she is telling us to listen and to understand. In a country where a large chunk of the population is trying to revert us back to an idealized past, this is the actual truth of so much of that past. There is no magical historical moment where the nuclear family bubbled along contentedly. The late 1800s and early 1900s were worse than now on almost every level, and this drives that home. Beasley grew up in rural Texas, the ninth of thirteen children, in a wildly dysfunctional family. Her mother is forced to have child after child, and the household is full of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. She is sexually abused by her brothers and her father, and she recounts this unsparingly and openly, which I think is really necessary if we’re ever going to come to grips with how widespread and destructive childhood sexual abuse is. I was discussing this book with someone and their first response was that this must have happened because their family was poor, which is the opposite of Beasley’s message. She describes how other people in middle and upper class families that she knew faced the same abuse. It was striking to me that the desire to other the abuse continues today unchanged — that happens to other people who are different from us — while Beasley confronts us with the truth. Horrible things are happening all the time across class strata, and the power structure is set up to leave the most vulnerable with no recourse and no help.

Beasley works her way through her horrific childhood, with her mother eventually managing to get a divorce (pretty incredible for the time period). Even after the divorce, the family lives in fear that the father will come back and try to kill them. Beasley is a very sensitive person and spends most of her life in a state of near nervous collapse, occasionally having a complete nervous breakdown from how terrible and stressful her life is. She still manages to be the only person in her immediate family to get a college degree and she becomes a teacher. This is a further deep struggle for her, as she learns how to control the class through beating the children and teenagers, and at one point gets a gun in case she needs to shoot the angry teenagers and their family. The book really drove home to me how common place violence was in the 1900s. It’s just an everyday part of life and everyone supports her beating other people and potentially having to murder someone. Again, when we think of a Betsy-Tacy image of the 1900s, it’s comforting, but it’s also just not true for many people, and it does a disservice to all of the people who struggled to try to make a safer and less violent world for us, their descendants. Beasley’s story is one of endless toil to get out of Texas and to be independent and free, and she manages to get to Chicago to teach and earns a Master’s degree. She again flies in the face of pat narrative arcs by continuing to show us that Chicago is not a magical liberal safe haven either. The book ends with her managing to leave on her dream trip to Japan. She became a journalist for a time, but the publication of this book was so upsetting to the status quo that she was consigned to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. It’s such a horrible fate for someone who states throughout the book that she didn’t want to be alive and the systems in the world are corrupt and evil, to have all of it proved true and to be shuffled off as insane because of how honest her work was.

There are a lot of parallels with today that I drew while reading this, and I found it to be a powerful experience. I will say that she has very bad racist opinions about Black people and that was depressing. She is also not a comfortable read in general, but that was the point of the whole thing. I’m glad that the efforts to destroy the whole print run of this book didn’t succeed and that her voice has ended up being widely available now. Hopefully in some way that continues the efforts that she made to find freedom and truth during her lifetime.

Warnings for: physical, sexual, emotional abuse, bestiality, guns, violence of every kind