Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 01 - Blood on White Wicker (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE, 1983

When I was 16 years old, I began to uncover, not only some of the horrors, but also something quite wonderful about my childhood.

My name was Victoria Masters, but my stage name was Brandy, and I had always done whatever I needed to do to survive. I have a police record. The crimes took place before age eighteen, so those records are sealed. My rap sheet for during that time is almost as long as my leg, which is quite long and includes grand theft auto, soliciting, and shoplifting, to name a few.

When I was 15, I ran away from the foster home where I had lived for three years. My foster parents who were supposedly raising me and five other kids were drunk all the time. They didn’t have any real jobs but made a living taking in foster kids. For some reason they were never caught. The youngest kid they had was 3 years old.

The night before I ran away, my foster father came into my room in the middle of the night, drunk, and raped me.

There was nothing seductive about it. He came into my room, jerked the covers off me, ripped my gown and panties off, climbed on top of me and grunted like a pig while he raped me. When he was finished, he fell on top of me and started snoring. He was so heavy and smelled so bad, I thought I was going to throw up. I got out from under him around 3 a.m., packed everything of mine that I could fit in a paper bag, stole his wallet from his hip pocket, and took off.

In the small town of Bishop, Georgia, everyone knows everyone. I was afraid of someone in town seeing me. I hiked through the hilly woods until around noon. When I came to a highway, I hitched a ride with a semi-truck into Athens. From there, I took a greyhound bus that was about to leave. It happened to be going to New Orleans.

The ride was long and I kept thinking I was going to be sick, due to the cigarette smoke, the motion of the bus, and thinking about what that pig left inside me.

Several times I jumped up, ran to the back of the bus, to the bathroom, and dry heaved. When the bus got into Atlanta, the functioning part of my brain was amazed at how big this city was. We left there with a bus load, and I didn’t get to stretch out like before. There was a tiny, little gray-haired woman sitting next to me who was a chain smoker. I decided I would pretend to sleep so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. She got off in Tallahassee, Florida. From then on it seemed like folks were getting on and off every few miles until we finally reached New Orleans.

New Orleans is probably one of the worse places for me to end up, but if I hadn’t ended up there, I would never have discovered the things that I did. So here I was just out of Hicksville, 15 years old and in one tough city. I was standing there counting my money, ($2.11 total) and wondering if I had enough for food, when I felt someone’s arm go around my waist.