Struggles of Childhood Trauma: The Princess Washington Story

Princess Washington (Photo by Wiley Henry)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first installment of a two-part series about childhood trauma that Princess Washington knows all too well.

 

MEMPHIS, TN – The probability of Princess Washington succeeding in life after experiencing childhood trauma — poverty, neglect, bullying, and merely surviving in a tempestuous household with her drug-addicted mother — is statistically unlikely in some cases.

Washington was seven years old and suffering ill effects from ACEs, an acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), about 64 percent of American adults had experienced one ACE. Women are impacted the most. 

While living in Section 8 housing with her two younger brothers in Clarksdale, MS., Washington’s ACEs were apparent: poverty, neglect, emotional abuse, etc. Despite this fact, even at her tender age, she innately assumed the role of caregiver. 

The choices Washington was compelled to make were predicated upon the harsh conditions that she and her brothers were forced to endure. Her mother, she explained, was battling her demons and often left them unattended.

“That was the norm,” said Washington, 43, whose father was absent from the home. But then her survival instincts kicked in. “I was trying to figure out what we were going to eat. Sometimes we ate. Sometimes we didn’t.”

Hunger pangs constantly gnawed at her. In addition to strangers coming in and out of the home, fear engulfed her as well — because crack cocaine, her mother’s demon, was wreaking havoc all around her.

Washington longed for stability, security, and a safe place to live. Her maternal grandmother, prompted to intervene posthaste, whisked her granddaughter away from potential danger. 

Her grandmother also lived in Section 8 housing with her son, Washington’s uncle, who struggled mightily with an addiction himself, she said. He is one of her grandmother’s 10 children.

“At some point, the state of Mississippi stepped in and wanted to remove my brothers from my mother's care,” she said. “They ended up coming to live with us.”

With her uncle in the home, Washington’s fears resurfaced. “He tried to kill everybody in the house,” she said. “He had poured diesel fuel all the way down the hallway. He had already blown all the pilot lights out and turned the gas on.”

Washington remembered him lighting a match to his bedroom. She said another uncle was on the scene and confronted him. “They were tussling in the hallway. By that time the fire had reached the hallway.”

The family was literally trapped, unable to flee. But Washington’s grandmother managed to hustle her grandchildren into her bedroom to fling them out the window to safety. But a heavy dresser, she recalled, was blocking their escape.

“There was nowhere else in the house we could go,” she said.

Washington’s grandmother was a praying woman — an evangelist in tuned to God. And out of the ether, the family was spared. Because of his dastardly deeds, her uncle was institutionalized, treated, and released.

After that harrowing ordeal, the uncle was allowed to return to the household. Years later, something stirred in him again. Washington’s older brother, who was raised by his grandmother, was there at the apartment when that same uncle went haywire.

“They started tussling,” she said. A cousin, who was there too, “took off running” and jumped out a bedroom window. Washington followed. They ran, screaming, to an aunt’s apartment nearby.

Washington was 14 when her mother, still battling drugs, birthed another child. Her grandmother would take in her baby sister as well. She said it was an added responsibility that her grandmother didn’t need.

Her grandmother, however, knew what to do in this predicament: pray. 

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