Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape

Charlotte Pierce-Baker (1998)

In the opening pages of this important and deeply moving book, author Charlotte Pierce-Baker, herself a black woman who has survived rape, writes, "There was a void... an absence... a silence. There were no voices. There were no structures of feeling or support. So I went in search of structures and voices - in search of community". Until the publication of Surviving the Silence, black women's experiences with rape had too often gone unacknowledged and unexplored. This book changed that, and in its pages Pierce-Baker collects the accounts of dozens of black rape survivors, and the black men - husbands, fathers, lovers, brothers -- who supported them. Many of these women had long been silent about the trauma that they had experienced, feeling that protecting themselves and their race from censure was their first duty. Surviving the Silence gave these rape survivors a place to tell their stories, illuminating our understanding of the intersection between race and sexual violence. Perhaps the most powerful narrative of all is Pierce-Baker's own, an unflinching account of her rape and its aftermath. It is a narrative that is at once painful, poignant and deeply honest, even when that honesty is difficult for the reader, and devoid of solution or resolution. This is not an easy book, but an important one, and a critical addition to our growing literature of sexual violence. It is perhaps telling that, with the exception of the author, all of the women featured in this book have told their stories without sharing their names or faces - a sad reminder that societal attitudes about race too often silence black survivors, limiting their possibilities for healing.

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