Black & Blue

BLACK & BLUE

by Anna Quindlen

 

Nomination: Oprah Book Club 1998, Women's Prize Longlist 1998

 

Date Read: June 5, 2021

 

I personally have no experience with spousal abuse but I believe all of the complexities, heartbreak and love would look very much like this account. What a messy and complicated state this is – the choices to be made, the guilt, the powerlessness, or worse yet, the false belief that you have power to be perfect and, therefore, change the outcome or appease your partner into non-violence. And then you add a child or children into the mix and the whole situation is so much worse.

 

We have a tendency to look upon abuse survivors as weak and place so much blame on their already fragile shoulders. What we all fail to recognize is that these women (and sometimes, rarely, men) are in an impossible situation that very well could end up in death or the feeling of death if you lose your child the way Francis did here. Losing your child is a fate almost worse than death – a perpetual limbo that will possibly never end.

 

Francis, in my opinion, did everything right. She stayed for what she thought were the right reasons and she left for what she believed were the right reasons. And allowing yourself and your child to be “disappeared” to start a new life as completely different people takes a type of courage few of us possess. The fear she constantly lived in with Bobby didn’t vanish once she was away. The fear simply morphed into the fear of being discovered, the fear that her son had already experienced too much of that violence to march ahead unscathed.

 

So many women in Fran’s situation do not have the privilege that she has. Fran has an education with a definitive career. She has access to a network of women that are able to assist her logistically as well as financially. Too many victims are literally trapped because they have absolutely no money to leave, no skills to work and don’t know where to go that they wouldn’t be found.

 

Quindlen did a fantastic job of showing how much love there was between Bobby and Fran, how much more complicated it was with Bobby being a police officer, how much she wanted to keep her family intact but ultimately realized that someday he would probably kill her. I found myself rapt, wondering what decisions I would make if I were in her situation. Bless my stars that I’m not nor will I ever be.