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Top Stories Book tells harrowing tale of abuse
Top Stories Book tells harrowing tale of abuse
| Book tells harrowing tale of abuse |
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| Written by Beth Pleming |
| Thursday, 15 October 2009 19:07 |
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Mary Messer has mixed feelings about her childhood. She remembers time spent with her father, working his tobacco fields and helping to drag bundles of bark down a mountainside to be sold.
But mostly, she remembers being terrified of what the abusive moonshiner would do after he got drunk on his own white liquor. She had seen him do it numerous times before. When she wasn’t cowering from her father’s blows, Messer often saw her mother beaten, several times nearly to death. In those days, such cruel behavior was considered a family issue, a community secret most were afraid to share, she said. Today it has a name: domestic violence. Like a recurring nightmare, Messer said, decades later she still vividly recalls the abusive hell induced by her father’s drunken temper; the shriek of her mother’s voice screaming for help; the chill of a frozen winter ground on her cold bare feet as she, her mother and three young siblings ran through the night to take refuge from their father in neighborhood barns; the midnight sound of her daddy clicking open the barrel of his shotgun to load another shell. Women and families who were abused many years ago had few outlets for escape. Today that’s not the case. Propelled by the pain of her past, Messer has a message for victims who are enduring the abuse she once knew, and others who may be witnessing the effects of abuse without recognizing them. In her book, “Moonshiner’s Daughter,” to be published this winter, Messer’s message rings clear through the memoir of her painful upbringing. “I want to help children and women who are being abused because I’ve seen enough blood on the walls and under the tables, I know how horrible it is,” said Messer. “My daddy beat me so bad I was close to death, and he beat my mother like that, too. …This family abuse needs to stop. But it’s still going on just like back then.” Messer will share part of her story on the courthouse lawn today. Today’s event will make clear that Messer’s tale is one of many life stories tainted by the horrors of abuse. Her story is different only because she’s lived to tell about it. “I’m very lucky to be alive,” she said. “I am a survivor. I’m truly a survivor of a lot of things that went on. … My life is a miracle.” Born and raised in “shacks all over Haywood County that (one) wouldn’t have a dog living in,” Messer said her father made his living growing tobacco, logging, selling tree bark to the Waynesville tannery for dying cowhides and working as a dairy farmer at what was commonly called “the test farm.” “But mostly, he made moonshine whiskey,” she said. “He sold about 90 percent of it, and the other 10 percent he drunk. That’s the reason he liked making it so good because then he could drink all he wanted to. …All our early life, mostly what we remembered of him was being drunk, away at prison or making moonshine.” He was a hard worker, Messer said, and physically very strong. But when he wasn’t working, he was drinking. And when he drank, he became a very different, violent man. “He would work hard, then come home and drink moonshine. When he was drunk, that liquor made him mean, real, real mean. He didn’t care to kill anything. He would kill you; it’s as simple as that. He would kill,” said Messer. “But when he was sober, he was a good daddy. Even though he didn’t supply many of the material things, clothing and stuff like that, we did have some bread and milk and sometimes some beans.” She recalls one occasion when she and her siblings pounded on the door of their home, trying to get inside to where their mother was being beaten, until their hands and arms were raw and bleeding. “But what I remember the most was the abuse and terror that happened during the winter because it was so cold outside,” she said. “We would wake up from a dead sleep when we heard daddy loading the shotgun, and usually we ran out without shoes. We wouldn’t take time to get shoes, coats, sweaters or anything; we just went out in whatever we were sleeping in. One night we ran to Waynesville and slept on wooden benches inside the courthouse and were so grateful because it was warm in there. What a sight: My mother — her nose and mouth busted up — carrying a child on her hip and three children following, running through town in the dead of winter to the courthouse. We only did that once. Other times we slept in every old barn in Haywood County. When we got there, our feet were so cold and numb we couldn’t walk. It’s a wonder we didn’t get frost bit. It was just a terrible thing. …The next morning, when Mother thought Daddy might be sober, we went home.” At age 13, Messer left her parent’s home and, thanks to Sam Queen Sr., whom she called “Grandfather Queen,” she was hired by his son and daughter-in-law to help in their tourist business in the summer and be a mother’s helper for his grandchildren. “I never went back,” she said. “I wasn’t about to go back.” Messer moved with the Queens to Washington, D.C., then to Arlandria, Va., and eventually to New York City. She returned to Waynesville a few years later for a holiday visit and met “the love of my life,” she said, of her late husband of more than 20 years. Today, she continues to run her bookstore on Mauney Cove Road, which she has owned for more than two decades. While Messer’s abusive upbringing can’t be changed, she said she intends to use her story to help others find hope. “If I can only help one woman, one family to get out of an abusive life, it is worth the time and heartache from remembering it to put my story, ‘Moonshiner’s Daughter,’ out there. … Back in my childhood days there was no help for abused women and children. Whatever went on in the shack behind closed doors, stayed in the shack behind closed doors. The law did not touch those things — that was a family thing, if they ever even found out about it. They let (spouses/families) sort it out and hardly ever gave the woman and children any assistance. When daddy beat mother until she was almost dead, there was no one but us children to hear her screaming,” said Messer. “He never even took her to the hospital.” Today, things are different. “Abuse survivors today do have help,” Messer continued. “There are all kinds of safe places to lay your head and not in some freezing cold barn. When you get that first hit or degrading words: ‘You are a whore. You are nothing. You cannot live without me. I am your god. You are fat. No one else will ever want you,’ you must wake up. Get out. Take the kids. The law has changed so very much.” Once the abuse starts, it often won’t change, said Messer. “When an abuser begs his victims not to leave, promising not to ever abuse again, don’t listen,” she said. “Don’t be suckered back into it, because he’s going to do it again, and the next time you may be killed. That’s the way it is with abuse. Women get so far into the marriage, they think, ‘Oh my God, what will I do if I leave him? Where will I stay? I can’t raise my children without him.’ There are resources today, just reach out for them.” |
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