Being Amanda Berry
Our morbid fascination with the real-life tales of abducted girls
Amanda Berry in an undated photo provided by the FBI.
Berry, believed to have been held captive since 2003, escaped
yesterday.
Photo by FBI via Getty Images
Photo by FBI via Getty Images
The Internet is having a love affair with Charles
Ramsey, the man who helped Amanda Berry break down the door of the Cleveland
house where she said she was being held captive, along with two other women. All
three went missing a decade ago; Berry was 16, Gina DeJesus was 14, and Michelle
Knight was 20. It’s entirely understandable to focus on Ramsey in the giddy
moment of breaking news. He is forthright and funny in describing what happened.
(“I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black
man’s arms.”)
And what a relief to find a glimmer of help and humor in this macabre story
about missing women imprisoned in a house on an ordinary-seeming street of row
houses, with a young child who the police said is Berry’s daughter. According to
Ramsey, the owner of the home, Ariel Castro, appeared to be a normal guy who
attended backyard barbeques and chatted with the neighbors. Everyone wants this
to be a tale of hope. The Cleveland police chief said that finding the women
alive gives his department a boost and that they’ve arrested the men they think are responsible: Castro and his
two brothers, all in their 50s. The FBI saluted the women’s “survival and
perseverance.” A doctor in the emergency room where Berry, DeJesus, and Knight
were taken Monday night emphasized how amazing it is that the women are
physically healthy. "This is good,” he said. “This is not the ending we usually
see from these stories."
But this is not the ending, and surely little other than the escape will seem
happy once the facts begin to flow. That’s already clear from the frantic tone of Amada Berry’s voice when she called 911. How
were these women kidnapped and held undetected for so many years? Does their
story connect to the still unsolved disappearance
of Ashley Summers, another teenager who vanished from the same neighborhood
in 2007? Why didn’t the police or child-welfare workers see anything amiss when
they visited the address in 2000 and 2004, as the mayor said Tuesday? What about
the neighbors, especially given Ramsey’s description of Castro coming outside to
work on his cars? And most of all, what were these women’s lives like inside
that house? What were their relationships with each other?
I obsess about stories of women who are kidnapped and imprisoned: Elizabeth
Smart, taken in Utah when she was 14 and held for nine months; Jaycee Dugard,
taken when she was 11 in Lake Tahoe and held for 18 years; Natasha Kampusch,
held from the age of 10 for eight years; Elisabeth Fritzl, a captive of her
father in Austria for 24 years who had seven children with him. There are more. The pattern is hauntingly familiar: An older
man or men, sometimes with the aid of a woman, imprisons a child or a teenager.
Sometimes she is literally locked away in a cellar or in a closet. Sometimes she
has a bit more physical freedom, but she’s too afraid or psychologically
manipulated to identify herself. Almost always there is repeated rape, and often
children are born from it.
These ordeals are our gothic horror stories, our Bluebeards come
to life. I fight my own obsession with them because it fills me with morbid fear
and not much else. The disappearance that’s at the root of this is a made-up
story from the movie The Silence of the Lambs. When I saw that
movie as a college student, I was so frightened that I could barely crawl into
my car: I made the friend I’d gone to the film with look under every seat and in
the trunk before I would get in to cry all the way home. I tried to focus on the
bravery of Jodie Foster’s character, young FBI trainee Clarice Starling, because
at least in her the film has a female rescuer. But the scene I couldn’t shake
was the one in which the victim (whom Starling later finds in the dungeon
basement of a psychopath) gets captured. It happens when she helps him load a
couch into the back of his van. She makes herself vulnerable by giving a hand to
a stranger, and he slams the door on her. I could easily imagine myself as that
naive, trusting girl. The movie terrified me so much that I turned down a summer
job I’d wanted as a caretaker on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Suddenly I
couldn’t handle the idea of being alone and exposed.
This is the opposite of empowering. The stories of girls who have a chance to
escape, but don’t take it, darken the picture even more. Elizabeth
Smart walked around with her captor and his wife, dressed in a robe and
veil, without alerting the other people she came into contact with. I know
about the idea of traumatic bonding—the ties that a captor can establish with a
young captive (and a more scientifically supported term than Stockholm Syndrome). After her release, Jaycee Dugard wrote in
her memoir about how the man who took her, Phillip Garrido, used rape,
pregnancy, and the birth of their daughters to bind her to him. Eventually she
would answer the front door and talk to people without telling them who she was
or asking to leave. When investigators finally questioned her, at first she gave
them a false name, called Garrido a “great man,” and only identified herself by
her real name after he’d confessed to her abduction. In her book, Dugard reminds
us how young she was when she was taken, and how desperate she was to keep her
daughters safe. Like Smart, she says she was too scared to sound an alarm. "What
I knew was safe," she told Diane Sawyer on TV. "The unknown out there was
terrifying, especially when thinking about the girls."
It’s not clear yet what conditions Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle
Knight endured. The account Ramsey gave of Berry screaming to get out, and her
911 call identifying herself as the missing girl who’d been in the news for 10
years, show a strong desire to get away. Maybe this will turn out to be a story
of total, unrelenting captivity like Room, the Emma Donoghue novel that’s the best
thing I’ve read about kidnapping and imprisonment. Donoghue’s book is told
from the point of view of 5-year-old Jack, the boy born of rape to his captive
mother. Spoiler alert: The best part of this book comes after
Jack and his mother escape and have to figure out how to acclimate to the
regular world. He doesn’t know how to go up and down stairs. She has to deal
with parents who love her but have trouble accepting her son, and with a media
spotlight that turns into a harsh glare. “Now you have lots of help from your
family as well as lots of dedicated professionals,” a chirpy TV interviewer
reassures Jack’s mother about continuing to raise him. “It’s actually harder,”
she answers. “When our world was eleven foot square it was easier to control.”
She doesn’t mean she wanted to keep him in captivity. She means that the
transition is brutal. It’s a haunting, amazing book, a novel that somehow spins
literature from sensation.
Room doesn’t go to the Jaycee Dugard place of a victim who
surrenders her self-identity to her captor, and then has to win it back. But it
helped me understand how difficult it can be to come back from the presumed
dead, and how painful the need for explanation can be. Maybe the answers to my
questions about what the past decade has been like, day to day, for Amanda
Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight are none of my business. Maybe my
fixation from afar on these life stories can lead to no deep insight. At arm’s
length, I’m left only with the lesson I already know, the one I repeat to my
children every time a story like this hits the news: Never get into a car with a
stranger, because much as I wish it were otherwise, there is evil afoot in our
world.