Volunteer Spotlight: Chauncey Stokeling

Breaking the Chain
by Chauncey Stokeling
I was born in the Southeast. My family moved to the Northeast with the hope of making a better life for their children. It would be better in the North without the pervasiveness of racism. My father was a good provider for our family, though he never spent any time with my brother or myself. And, he was an alcoholic, who ended up dying from alcoholism. My mother drank alcohol too, though only occcassionally. Both of them, though, were so wrapped up in their party lifestyle, they couldn't see what it was doing to their children.

The good times were few and far between. Violence became normal in my childhood household. Fights between my father and mother came to be expected by my sister and brother and me. By the time I was school-aged, maybe six or seven years old, my father had to spend a week in the hospital because my mother had stabbed him with a butcher knife during one of their fights. It had happened in front of us. After a few more years of my mother's running around and my father's continued drunkenness, they got divorced. By this time, they both had been sneaking around with other people, and dragging us along when they did it. I suppose we children weren't supposed to understand.

My mother became very abusive toward us after her failed marriage, even though she had been herself abused. She took my sister and went back down South, leaving my brother and me with my father. Eventually, she sent for us. The culture shock of the South in the late Sixties combined with my mother's mood swings and her physical, verbal and emotional abuse left us physically, emotionally and psychologically wounded. She would go from one emotional extreme to the next, alternating between tenderness and torture, joy and depravity. A good day was pleasant and uneventful - like a normal childhood. Bad days were like living in a minefield. You never knew if you would be able to navigate through the next hour, or even minute, without triggering some terrible consequence. For minor infractions, we were harshly punished or severely beaten. As we got older, we suffered worse beatings. They were no longer administered by belts but by electric extension cords, limbs from trees or whatever was close at hand whenever she became angry. Now we were being bound by our hands and feet when we were beaten - our cries and screams still haunt me.

Growing up and living with my mother and father, my sister developed an ulcer and I wet the bed. I understand now that we were under a lot of stress and strain, living in our own private hell. As we grew into teens, we all understood that we weren’t safe living with our mother. We believed that sooner or later she would actually kill one of us in a drunken blackout. It was time to escape the danger of living with her. My sister had to be hospitalized after my mother cut her wrist with a steak knife - and she doesn’t have feeling in two of her fingers to this day. I spent three months in the hospital because my mother poured boiling water on me after I ran away, suffering second and third degree burns to the left side of my body. Eventually, all three of us left, one by one. We left either by choice or, as in the case of my brother, because of the justice system - having been charged with a crime after he had run away.

If there had been gangs where we lived, my brother and I would certainly have joined one. There were none. So, we drifted into a lifestyle of drugs and alcohol as an antidote to the pain we endured and the loneliness we felt. Anything that could stop the pain for a little while was tried. It only made things worse. I struggled through high school because of my marijuana use. I finally gave in to the drugs and alcohol and dropped out of school, halfway through my senior year. I did that, in part, because I didn’t feel worthy of graduating. After all, I had been told most of my life that I was worthless and no good. I began to experiment with harder drugs, settling on cocaine. I was soon hooked, and came to be caught up in the crack epidemic of the late eighties. My addiction became so bad, I left, moved to another state to try to escape it. I floated through life incurring minor criminal offenses. In the meantime, I fathered two children. On account of my drug habit, though, I neglected them - even though I vowed to never hit them. Of course, I inflicted another type of abuse on them. I became my parents. I hated what I became.

I sit here in prison convicted of aggravated assault and aggravated battery of a household member, or domestic violence. I had truly followed in my parents’ footsteps. I’m now taking classes in anger management, family dynamics and parenting, to try to stabilize my life and prepare myself for the time when I get out. I also attend 12-step group meetings to deal with my addiction. Finally, I have started college here and will be very close to having a two-year degree by the time I get released. It’s taken all of this for me to realize I am not the worthless, no-good person I was told I was for so long.

The chain has to be broken. When I was a boy, I was told a story about a slave owner named Willie Lynch, who lived in the West Indies and had complete control of his slaves. The American slave owners wanted to know how he controlled his slaves. Willie’s technique became known as the Willie Lynch Syndrome, and it has plagued generations of African Americans for hundreds of years. Lynch said that in order to control the slave, you had to pit the older male slave against the younger male slave and the younger against the older male slave; the female slave against the male slave and the male slave against the female slave; and finally, the darker-sinned slave against the lighter-skinned slave. Distrust and envy had to be maintained among the slaves so that they would only trust their white owners. Lynch taught that the slaves would follow this pattern for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Today, we see black kids killing others for jackets or tennis shoes, or wearing a certain color of bandana representing a gang, standing on the corner of a neighborhood they will never own. We’ve been buying the lies when the truth is the complete opposite of what they have been telling us for hundreds of years.

As for me, I have developed a relationship with Jesus Christ. Now, I read my Bible regularly and I stand on one particular scripture: Psalms 27:10, which says, “EVen if my father and mother should desert me, then the Lord will take care of me.” I believe God’s love is unconditional and has the power to heal and set free.