I Will Find You

  New Bedford was also the site of a brutal barroom gang rape in 1983, the rape at the center of the 1988 film The Accused. The title referred not to the rapists but to the victim, who was drunk that night and wore a skimpy outfit. Even the prosecutor, a woman, initially thought this meant she’d asked for it and could not possibly claim she was raped. The movie was a hit. Critics loved it; Jodie Foster, who played the rape victim, won an Oscar. Even so, I could never bring myself to watch it.

  The morning after we arrived, Lisa and I stayed in the Boston area to check Charlene’s addresses there. One led us to vacant lot that had become a neighborhood dump. Among the litter, a rusted grocery-store cart, tipped on its side, held some beer cans and a soggy piece of clothing.

  Next door, two men were bent over the engine of a car. I asked them if they knew anything about the family that lived in the house that once stood there.

  “They say there was a fire, but it was years ago,” one of them said.

  This was where Millie, the mother of David Francis and seven other children, died in 1984, trapped on the second floor in her wheelchair while smoke filled the air and the fire—rumored to have been set by her husband—burned on.

  We drove on to Brockton and then Dorchester, where the family lived when David was growing up. Martin Luther King Jr. lived not far from them in Dorchester in the 1950s, when he was getting his PhD at Boston University. The Dorchester house had been torn down, and in Brockton the house was vacant.

  We drove down to New Bedford in the afternoon, into neighborhoods that looked just like Hough in Cleveland. Abandoned houses covered with plywood and spray-painted graffiti shared blocks with homes families still occupied. It was a Saturday, but no one was outside. No kids played, no one sat on a porch to catch the last warmth of the day. At one of Charlene’s many addresses, a row house, the front door hung open on one hinge. Inside we could see a few pieces of furniture and some clothes and toys on the floor, left behind when the last tenants moved out.

  Lisa did the driving on that trip, and as we rolled through these clusters of poverty in New Bedford she pointed out that our rental, an ugly, elongated orange SUV, could be a problem. “It’s a clown car!” she said. I laughed, picturing dozens of clowns emerging from the back, but Lisa was serious. She took photos of it and sent them to a friend.

  I didn’t know her before we started working on the story together, but on this trip we got on like we’d been friends for years. I’m solitary by nature and had not wanted anyone working with me at first. I didn’t want to share any decisions or have to explain myself to anyone, and when the story became a Plain Dealer story I worried that they would assign a male photographer, to “protect” me. But I saw early on that Lisa was a perfect counterpoint to me: She laughed a lot, charmed strangers, and had the kind of carefree confidence I had always wanted. Now she wasn’t quite as carefree.

  “We’re not exactly inconspicuous here,” she said. This was indisputable. She had cameras and other equipment she lugged with her at each stop, afraid to leave it exposed in the back of the SUV.

  For once, I was the one who was not afraid, which struck me as odd but fantastic. Even with Lisa beside me, I should have had that familiar, adrenaline-fueled queasiness in my gut. Instead I felt removed from what we were doing, as though I was watching myself impersonate a reporter in a movie about two gutsy women investigating a story. I’d found courage in the place I felt safest: my disassociated state.

  When we ran out of addresses in New Bedford to check, Lisa pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot to regroup. I had three phone numbers, two for Charlene that Nexis had listed as disconnected, and one I found online for a Willie Blakney, who may or may not have been related to her. Nexis was correct on the first two numbers. On the third number, a man answered. I told him I was a reporter, I was looking for Charlene, and that I was writing about her brother David.

  “Where did you get this number?” he asked.

  I told him I found it online. He said, “Uh-huh,” in a way that told me he didn’t believe me.

  I asked again about Charlene. “Do you know how I can reach her?”

  “I’ll tell her you called, but I don’t think she’ll want to talk to you,” he said, and cut the connection before I could thank him.

  “I think that was her son, but I don’t think he wants me to talk to her,” I told Lisa. We sat in the car, wondering about our next step. I didn’t want to call him back for more hostility. It looked like my only option, though. I could not return to the newsroom without finding and talking to Charlene.

  A couple of minutes later, my cell rang. I answered to a woman crying.

  “Do you know what happened to my brother?” she asked. She could barely get the words out. “I tried to find him. I knew he was dead, but I’ve never known what happened to him.”

  It was Charlene. After I told her that her brother had died in prison, and I was a reporter from Cleveland doing a story about men who died in Ohio prisons, she said she would talk to us. She gave us an address that was not on my Nexis list.

  On the way, I told Lisa I wanted to bring some flowers to Charlene. After about ten minutes of driving around we came to a grocery store. When we went in, I could see that it was the kind of store that overpriced everything and sold bruised produce and bread past its sell-by date to poor people who had no other options for shopping. I didn’t really expect it to have flowers, but it did, a little collection of plastic-encased bouquets in buckets off in a corner. I grabbed a thin bunch going brown at the edges and paid $10.

  Charlene was waiting for us at her door on the second floor of an apartment building, sniffling into a wet tissue. I introduced Lisa, handed Charlene the pathetic flowers, and followed her to the dining room, where open moving boxes filled with clothes lined the walls. A dinette table sat opposite an aquarium without water, its light glowing on a collection of plastic coral and ocean plants. Above it hung framed school pictures and family snapshots.

  “I’m so sorry about your brother,” I said, as though he had just died. She put the flowers on the kitchen counter without comment, offered us water, and then sat across from me at the table.

  Seeing her there, sitting in her apartment, I was excited and ashamed at the same time. I’d found David Francis’s sister, doing investigative work I’d never before attempted, in a city I didn’t know. I’d done it. My story was coming together, right here.

  But I was lying to Charlene, taking advantage of her grief. I was afraid to tell her the real reason I wanted to know about her brother. Before I talked about the rape, I wanted to see how she talked to me, see if she was as hostile as her son had been on the phone. My hands shook just a little when I put a digital recorder on the table between us and hit Record.

  Charlene looked at the recorder. Neither of us said anything.

  Lisa filled the silence for me. “Wow, that’s a big fish tank,” she said.

  “I had some goldfish, but they died,” Charlene said, her voice flat. She had stopped crying. “So we gotta fill it up again.” She made it sound like filling up that tank and buying goldfish would take more energy than she could ever muster. Lisa and I nodded, smiling.

  There is something almost deranged about what journalists do, meeting a stranger and immediately asking questions about her life. I once toured the county mental health hospital for a story. A mild-looking man, dressed in street clothes, approached me. “How old are you?” he asked. “Have you ever had sex? Do you think you’re pretty?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” the guide had said. “He’s harmless.”

  I always think of him at the awkward start of interviews.

  “Look at all these pictures!” I said. (Here I pause to tell you that I cringe when I listen to these recordings and hear this enthusiastic woman—me—chirping inanities.)

  “It’s all my kids,” Charlene said. “And my kids’ kids.”

  “How many kids do you have?”

  “Me? I have eight, and eleven grandk
ids. Soon to be twelve. I have a great-grandchild coming.”

  “Wow!” I said. Charlene had no comment to that.

  “So, you were the oldest of your brothers and sisters, right?” I said.

  “Yeah. It was me, then there was my brother Heavy—”

  “‘Heavy’?”

  “Well, his name was Clifford but we called him Heavy. He was murdered in Boston.”

  “Murdered?” I said. I had already seen that on his death certificate.

  Charlene didn’t stop to explain. “Then there was my sister Linda. Ummm. Who’s next? It was Philip, Joseph, Laura, and Neamiah.”

  “What about David?” I asked. “Where was he in the lineup?”

  “David was right after Linda. So he was like the fourth.”

  “Were you close growing up?”

  “He was my favorite brother,” she said, sniffling. “Yeah, we did everything together. Got in trouble together, got locked up together—we did a lot of stuff when we were little.”

  “Locked up for, like, serious stuff?”

  “No, for stupid little stuff, like stealing candy. I never got into any serious trouble.”

  Her voice caught when she said, “Everybody thought we was twins, we looked so much alike.”

  I looked closely at Charlene. Twins? She did have her brother’s eyes—eyes that were both watchful and utterly weary. If he had lived into his fifties, and not gone to prison, David might have looked like Charlene, who was now fifty-seven, with an ample body that had gone soft and round at the middle, a face etched with years of drugs and alcohol and trouble, and those big eyes that missed nothing. Even though she was crying off and on, she unnerved me. I saw David in her eyes.

  I stole a glance at Lisa, who sat on the floor over by the aquarium, listening to us and smiling. She hadn’t started taking photos yet. She didn’t look scared in the least.

  I took a deep breath and told Charlene that I was writing about men who had died in prison without a family, or anyone else to bury them. I was looking for those families. I told her I knew David had died of cancer in 2000, in a prison hospital, and was buried in a prison cemetery in Ohio.

  She started crying again. “I wrote to him in prison. He wrote back and told me he had a little girl. The second time I wrote, they said he had been released. Next time I heard, he was in Lucasville [prison], and he wrote back saying he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Then they wrote me back saying he had been released, and that’s the last I heard from him.”

  She got up and came back with a handful of tissues. “Last time I called the prison, they told me David had died and been buried. I said, ‘You had all my information, why didn’t you call me?” Cause I wanted my brother’s body. They told me he was buried in some damn debt place, and nobody knew where he was at. I was pissed off and tried to sue them, but I couldn’t find a lawyer to do anything about it.”

  Charlene had buried everyone else in the family. Her mother first, in 1984, after the fire. Then Heavy, murdered in 1994. Then her father, cancer in 1995. Then Linda. Charlene said she died when she was forty-two, but she didn’t tell me the year.

  “It was mesothelioma,” she said. “They think it happened in the fire that killed my mother. She was living at Linda’s house, and Linda was there and her lungs got burned or something.” She sighed. “After my mother died, we all just stayed drunk. So me and Linda used to party all the time, and she started getting so she couldn’t breathe.”

  Charlene stopped and wiped her tears. “That almost broke me, burying my sister. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

  I was quiet. “It sounds like you’ve had to do a lot of hard things in your life,” I said.

  Charlene nodded. “I used to tell people this family was cursed.”

  Then she told me about all the curses of her childhood.

  “Your daddy’s a pimp.”

  Charlene was thirteen when another kid told her that after school. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she said. “I thought maybe it was cool, since my daddy always had lots of money and owned houses and cars and this and that.” Then she found out what it meant. It meant that the other women who lived in their house—sometimes two women, sometimes three, with all their kids—worked for her father.

  In Charlene’s telling, Clifford George Francis emerges as a mythical figure, a colossus who stomped through the world, destroying the women and children who feared and despised him.

  Charlene’s memories emerged in the form that our brains store them—disconnected and random. She spoke with a stream-of-consciousness flow, and when I listened to the recording later, I realized that for almost an hour I did not ask her a single question. I barely made a sound, other than saying “Really?” or “That’s terrible.” I was like a child listening to a bedtime story, a story filled with witches and graveyards, bags of money and black magic, poison and murders. And, as in so many fairy tales, this one featured an evil spirit that took the material form of parents.

  Charlene started with her father.

  “When I was little, they used to call him T.C., for Top Cat. He used to take me to the pool hall, and he used to hit the street numbers all the time. I remember a couple gangsters coming and walking us home, ’cause he had won all this money. He had a bagful of money. That’s when he bought the first house, and a brand-new Cadillac. Lime green. Three days after he brought it home, David stole it and tore it up.”

  T.C. weighed more than five hundred pounds, Charlene said. “He was huge. He told us he was a full-blooded Narragansett Indian. He and his brothers all had this long hair and this high-red skin. And he had Indian superstitions, like he wouldn’t let anyone take his picture because he said it captured your spirit. It should have told you something when he drank the fire water that something was wrong with him.”

  His mother, their grandmother, was a witch. “She practiced black magic,” Charlene said. “She had these bull horns over her front door, and she confessed to me, right before she died, that she had given her soul to the devil. She was a horrible person.”

  Prejudiced, too. She didn’t like Millie or her kids because they were black. As a full-blooded member of the Narragansett nation, she looked down on them. Once she asked her youngest grandchild, Laura, “What color am I?” When Laura answered, “Black,” she locked her in the basement for hours.

  “I remember the day my daddy brought the first woman home,” Charlene said. “I was seven or eight years old, and I was outside, jumping rope, when he pulled up with this lady in the car. He went inside the house, and I heard a lot of yelling between my mother and my father. That was the first time he hit my mother, far as I know.”

  The lady’s name was Beverly, but everyone called her Mary. “She had a baby sister, Theresa. She was fifteen years old when he brought her home to the house. They lived with us.”

  Over the years, Beverly/Mary had five children and Theresa had three, Charlene said. T.C.’s older children must have moved on, and I knew that some of them, including David, went to juvenile detention. Even so, it was hard to imagine, all those children and mothers living together in one house. Charlene was on a roll, so I didn’t stop her to ask how they managed this, or why Beverly was called Mary, or what their last names were.

  “I thought how we lived was normal,” Charlene said. Then the kid at school told her that her daddy was a pimp.

  “So when I did find out what that was, I asked him, ‘Why would you do that to my mother?” Cause he used to beat up my mother, beat up the other women. It was a big mess. I guess you would call us—what do they call it now?”

  “Dysfunctional?” I guessed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the word. We were real dysfunctional.”

  The other women never brought the johns back to the house, she explained. “They went out and did their stuff and brought their money back. I never seen any of the guys they went with. My mother didn’t prostitute. She and this other woman, Mary, they’d go out and steal things for him—you know, ge
t clothes, food, jewelry, all this other stuff—and bring the stuff back to him.”

  T.C. wasn’t just big—he was mean, Charlene said, especially when he was drinking, which was most of the time. When he beat their mother, Millie, sometimes he made her children watch. He beat the other women. He beat his boys—Clifford, Joseph, David, Philip, and Neamiah.

  Charlene paused for a sip of water.

  “Oh God, he was real mean. He’d hang them up on hooks and beat them with belts, and kicked them. My brother Heavy had a broken hip for almost two years and nobody even knew it. He would walk funny and nobody knew why until they took him to the hospital. It wasn’t broken, it was out of place, and it was due to him beating Heavy.”

  He didn’t beat the three girls—Charlene, Linda, and Laura. But T.C. abused them in other ways. “He told us we were worthless, we were stupid, that we weren’t nothing but a bedsheet for men,” Charlene said. “He was cruel.”

  Once, she remembered, when Laura and Neamiah were still little, he told them to get dressed. “You’re going to go talk to your grandfather now,” he said.

  “Granddaddy’s dead,” Neamiah said. They all knew this. T.C. didn’t say anything, he just put them in the car and took them to a graveyard. It was dark out by then. He took them to their granddaddy’s plot and left them there all night.

  “Me being the oldest, mostly I ended up taking care of my brothers and sisters, because when they was down there drinking and fighting, I would take the kids upstairs and we’d sit in bed and I would try to read the Bible to them. I became their second mother, and after she died, they would come to me with their drama. I just took over the family.”

  She paused. “They left me to bury everyone.”

  There was more. When they were little, Charlene said, she would go without eating to make sure the other kids were fed. “My appetite still isn’t normal,” she said.

  She remembers once all of them were together in a bedroom, plotting how to kill T.C. Charlene wanted to put poison in his food and watch him eat it. But David was the only one to act on his plot. “One time, he tried to murder my father,” Charlene said. “It was funny as hell. He locked my father in a room and set the room on fire. He didn’t die in it, he ended up jumping out the window, and David took off in the brand-new Cadillac. He was about twelve or thirteen. I didn’t see much of David after that.”