THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410250483
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KAREN E. QUINONES MILLER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
LAUGHING IN THE DARK
From Colored Girl to Woman of Color - A Journey from Prison to Power
PATRICE GAINES
Crown. 295 pp. $24.
From middle-class school girl to teenage mother and heroin user to award-winning journalist, Washington Post reporter Patrice Gaines appears to have seen and done it all.
By age 26, she'd been married three times, raped twice, brutally beaten with a horsewhip and jailed for drug dealing.
It's quite a life that Gaines details in her autobiography, Laughing in the Dark, her professed journey ``from colored girl to woman of color - from prison to power.'' Her honesty is sometimes startling, sometimes disturbing. But Gaines bares her soul, she says, to show ``sisters'' that no matter how low they sink, they can still rise to the top.
Gaines was raised by a Marine father whom she apparently despised because of his complacency and a housewife mother for whom she shows little respect. She spent her early years at Quantico military base, the one place she seemed to be truly happy - gaily romping with two white playmates, almost unaware that she is any different. In fact when another African-American family moves on the base, Gaines and her friends shun the newcomers and disdainfully call them niggers. By age 10, however, she became painfully conscious of her skin color after she was the only girl at a rec-center dance not asked out on the floor.
At 12, she experienced her first incident of sexual abuse when one of her father's friends fondled her while she played the piano. Her parents were in the next room, unaware of the molestation, and Gaines was too afraid and ashamed to tell them. She told herself that the violation was her fault - a belief she held throughout many other violations in her life.
Gaines and her family moved to Washington, then to Maryland, where her life began its downward spiral. Never able to communicate effectively with her father, she increasingly looked to other males for love and respect but found neither.
Her first boyfriend, Ben, set her up for a gang rape, gave her a venereal disease and got her pregnant. Her lovelife went downhill from there.
Because of her lows (drug use and jail) and eventual highs (a job as a Washington Post reporter), Gaines would seem to be the perfect heroine. A good girl turned bad who makes good. But Gaines isn't the inspiring role model she would like to portray. She's not a woman who made it against all odds, or one who was dealt a tragic hand. She is a young woman who continually and willfully became involved in overpoweringly bad situations in which she survived.
Earlier this year, fellow Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall penned his autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, detailing his life of crime - robberies, gang rapes - growing up in Portsmouth. Although McCall says racism played a role in his life, he holds himself accountable for his actions. As a result, the reader likes him as a person while disliking some of his deeds.
Gaines, on the other hand, elicits some sympathy, but is more whiny than likable. It's difficult to excuse some of her escapades, perhaps because she too easily excuses them herself.
Her problem, she tells us repeatedly, is her poor choice of men, which was a result of her poor relationship with her father. She does raise a good and seldom explored point - the absence of a father can be just as devastating on a girl as a boy. The fact that her father was physically present was irrelevant; he was emotionally and mentally detached from his family. It's believable that such a father/daughter relationship could be psychologically damaging, but Gaines hammers the point so hard and so many times that she turns readers off.
Most of Gaines' problems seem to stem from poor life-choices, not just poor choices about men. She often jumped on whatever bandwagon was popular at the time and did whatever she needed to fit in with the crowd she was following. She straightened her hair with a clothes iron when hanging with white girls in school, then later sported an Afro and raised her fist with her radical African-American friends when Black Power was in vogue. She used hallucinogenics, speed and heroin when hanging with the drug crowd, and stole from department stores when she became neighbors with a veteran shoplifter.
Gaines says it wasn't until she learned to love herself and stop looking for love from others that she became a complete woman - one not drawn to physically or emotionally abusive relationships. Yet she ends her book planning to marry a younger man who once coldly rejected her in front of his family.
Still, Laughing in the Dark inspires because it proves that no matter what people do in their lives, they can still achieve their dreams. To go from convicted felon to award-winning journalist is no small accomplishment - and Gaines has to be commended on her ability to reach out continually for more. MEMO: Karen E. Quinones Miller is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by PETER A DAVIS
Jacket photo by BRETON LITTLEHALES
by CNB