When I was young and a group of guys hollered rude comments at me and my friends, we reacted in three different ways: flight, freeze, or fight.
A few of my friends tended to scoot away from the situation as fast as their legs could take them, but most of them pretended not to hear, kept their eyes straight ahead and seemed to hold their breath until the problem went away.
The third reaction was confrontation.
From the time I was eight years old, my reaction to street harassment was not violent, but it was violently loud.
I stopped. I screamed. I threatened. They never came closer and I did have to go home feeling like a victim.
Then the bad thing happened.
A stranger broke into my friend’s house and attacked me. He strangled me until he thought I was dead; until I thought I was dead.
A doctor later told me that people can flat-line when being strangled and that any loss of consciousness is associated with some degree, no matter how tiny, of damage to the brain.
But more upsetting than actually being strangled or potentially having brain-damage was calling 911 and having no one show up.
Ever.
That’s right: I called 911 twice, and no police officer ever came.
I wondered if all this would change me.
It did.
I wondered if it would make me afraid.
It did not.
If a part of my brain sustained damage, I suspect it was the amygdala: the seat of fear.
Not too long afterward, the friend whose house had been broken into – in whose kitchen I had been attacked – was walking down the street with me in New Orleans – rather slowly, because she was pregnant – and her feet were giving her fits. A stranger ran up from behind and grabbed my friend between her legs so hard that she came up off the ground screaming. He grabbed her so hard it hurt.
I took off my sandals and chased him down
St. Charles Avenue. When he looked behind him
and I saw the fear on his face, I could not stop chasing him until he turned down an alley only suitable for drug deals and Jack-the-Ripper. Hundreds of people saw me chasing him, heard me yelling, “That guy just sexually assaulted my friend.”
No one did a thing but stare.
Judging by my walk back to where my friend, now joined by others, I had chased the guy about a mile.
Some friends asked where I kept my superhero cape. Others told me that this kind of behavior is going to be the end of me.
One asked if I had learned anything from chasing a sexual predator down a busy street for 15 minutes.
I did; I learned never to wear shoes that do not lend themselves to running.
Robbi Pounds is the staff writer for The Graham Star. She can be reached by phone, 479-3383 or email, rpounds@grahamstar.com.