EXCERPT: HISTORY
Mar. 26th, 2013 01:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apanthropinization
"EVERY TOUCH, WORD FROM THOSE TWO WAS LIKE THE KISS OF JUDAS. SEEMS SO SOFT, SWEET WHEN IN REALITY THE INTENTIONS WERE MORE OF CHOKING POISON AND BRITTLE CRUELTY." |
| G.M Morris was born on September 18, 1921 to Rosemary Madeleine Morris (nee Woodrose) and Henry Peter Morris in Houston, Texas. Her father was much older than her mother at the time of G.M’s birth, his thirty-five against her twenty-one at G.M’s birth, and was not a kind man. He used to be a thoughtful religious boy who held a bright eyed look to the world and hoped to be a loving family man one day but things changed when the Selective Service Draft came to be on June 5, 1917. Henry, having turned twenty-one a month back, was in the ideal age to be drafted. He was sent to northern France in time to be entrenched in the middle of the Spring Offensive. Forced to fight and to see the horrors of war, it traumatized Henry and he clung harder to his religion as it was the only crutch he could depend in those dark times. He continued to serve his country until he was forced to return home after losing his leg during the advancement of the Hindenburg Line. Henry came back home as a changed man with only the bottle and his religion to cling on to for what he had done and had happened. He was aggressive, gruff and not hesitant to swing his fists when in his dark moods. He only had his moods when drunk which happened to be most of the time as he was an alcoholic. Rosemary still fell in love with him when they met in 1919 at a Sunday mass, those being the rare days Henry was sober, and thought she could change him. They later on married but it led to only disaster with him not only harming Rosemary but also G.M when she came along. G.M spent most of her childhood in fear and anxiety with her being an outlet for Henry’s anger issues. There were days he was kind, gentle but they were far and in between with him somehow putting the blame on G.M for whatever injuries he laid on her. Rosemary would tend to their wounds the best she could but also made sure there was a guilt trip waiting for G.M when tending to the bruises, wiping away the blood. If she hadn’t been so noisy this wouldn’t have happened, her mother would tell her. If she hadn’t gotten in the way of papa, eh wouldn’t have gotten mad. The little girl believed this since this was the only life she knew of and no one told her otherwise. The bullying, mild taunts and kids not wanting to be near her, she would receive when she was at school only served to confirm her depressing thoughts. The neighbors, despite knowing what was going on in the Morris household, refused to acknowledge it since it wasn’t their problem. Why should they have the anger of a drunkard be turned to them when they don’t even know this girl? They have their own things to deal with after all. There was one person who didn’t turn a blind eye to what had happened to her. His name was Edward Clyde, a person who moved all the way from England just to study at University of Houston in 1931. A literal ‘gentle man’ as G.M would describe him later on in life, Edward could not stand by to seeing a child harmed and tried to do what he could to help her. He first tired to help by contacting the police, which proved useless since an army friend happened to work in the station and helped cover up the abuse, and then by inviting G.M to his place if she needed a sanctuary from her parents. She came to the house often, always floored and overawed at the genuine generosity and affection Edward held for her when she visited be it to hide from her parents or ask for help in her homework or to simply spend time with him. It was Edward who discovered G.M’s love for writing and helped encourage her talents and her dreams to be an author after he asked her what she wanted to be. He ended up helping her finally feel worthy, feel like she was something full of potential. She never felt like that at home and as the years passed since meeting him, he began to eventually open her eyes that she deserved better than what she had and she did not deserve to be treated the way Henry and Rosemary were treating her. At the age of sixteen, G.M ran away from home when she finally decided she wanted to get out of that toxic environment and all consuming, enabling behavior between victims of violence and despair that were both her parents. They never tried to look for her, chalking it up as their ‘troublemaking daughter’ trying to get attention from them and will later return home sooner or later. That wasn’t the case with G.M as she ran straight to Edward for help and he was more than happy to aid her but couldn’t at that time himself, needing to go back home to care for his ailing mother since he was an only child and his father passed away in 1936. Having made a close friend there who always wanted a daughter of his own, he drove all the way to Austin just so the friend and G.M could meet. The two hit it off well enough and he left her under the man’s care and promised to come back for her when he returned from England. They could be a real family after that, he promised her on the day he had to leave. She believed him and waited, wanting to start a new chance in life with the closest person she could call a father. It was never meant to be. WWII began in Europe on 1939 and he would be one of the many causalities. Edward was drafted as a private and later on stationed in Singapore to fend off attacks against the Japanese. He ends up dying on February 15, 1942 due to the Alexandra Hospital massacre, one of the many injured patients who was rounded up and forced to march to an industrial area despite having a badly infected leg that was meant to undergo removal. Anyone who fell or stumbled to the ground were to be bayoneted to death by the enemy soldiers for being weak. He fell. Not that G.M knew. She believed that he was alive during the entire war, nothing could harm someone like Edward after all, and waited for any message, any note from him to come. They never did but she never gave up hope, thinking that he was just waiting for her to become successful like he thought she would always be. She studied under a series of private tutors given to her by Edward’s friend but later decided she wanted to make her ambitions of being a writer become real. She left for New York in 1940 after getting the friend’s reluctant approval. Never a sociable girl, she kept to herself and continued to try and improve herself and thus earned herself a sense of mystique from others in the underground publishing world with her extreme aloofness in the real world and her sharpness in her written words. It was there in the City That Never Sleeps that she learned the genres of confessional and surrealism that later on became her signature styles. Poems of black eyes and clear tears and stories of little girls having their mouths sewn up by vengeful angels with firepoker fingers were published and she soon became a popular author to read by those who were also disillusioned by the ‘great American society’ that she also made scathing comments in her publications now and then. And yet Edward still didn’t write to her or make any contact with her. G.M only later learned of his demise after a few weeks of the official end of WWII, with her having just turned twenty-three at the time. She learned the truth when she finally obtained contact details of several of Edward’s relatives and wrote to them, pleading for knowledge on him in a vain attempt to find out what happened to the man. An aunt replied to her letter a month late, apologizing to her and explaining his death that occurred three years earlier. A devastating blow for the girl, she delved deeper into herself and her works, becoming more and more of a recluse. She wrote and wrote and wrote, finding solace in that one thing. She cut off contact with everyone that showed a remote interest in her or genuinely cared for her, like Edward’s friend who she never heard from again, and she bitterly thought once or twice that she would end up dying alone. Then she learned of Anna. Annalise Mary Way, nicknamed ‘Anna’ by almost everyone, is G.M’s half sister and the daughter of Rosemary Madeline Way and Christopher Marc Way, an entrepreneur with a thriving business. Rosemary remarried a few months after Henry committed suicide via gunshot wound to the head one Sunday morning and the little girl was born on October 31, 1944 in Houston, Texas. G.M only learned of Anna’s existence when she decide to make a final visit to Houston in 1946 to properly say goodbye to her father, even if he was reduced to ashes and a tombstone, and the caretaker of the cemetery made a passing remark how she looked a lot like ‘Rosie and her little girl’ as she was leaving the place. Shocked, and worried, at the news of this, G.M set out to find her mother and this new kin of hers. She tracked them down, basically forced herself into their house to have dinner with them and everything seemed to be different. A white picket fence, a gorgeous two story home with lavish furniture and items thanks to Christopher’s successful work. She thought for a second maybe her mother had changed, broken away from it all. The alarms in her head were raised at last when she finally met the little girl who happened to be sporting a red mark on her cheek. Suspicious of her mother who claimed it was from hitting the door while roughhousing by herself, she heard that excuse before, G.M cornered Christopher and managed to extract the truth from him: Anna was being abused by Rosemary. Furious with the revelations that her mother was doing this to someone else, and the fact Christopher was letting this happen and even trying to pin the blame on Anna, G.M blackmailed the two in handing over custody of the girl to herself or she’ll reveal not only the abuse of Anna but what she went through as well. Fearing for his reputation and not wanting to take chances of this, Christopher relented and forced Rosemary to. G.M became the guardian of Anna and the women took the little girl away back home in New York. Awkward with Anna and the same being the same for the two-year-old, it was difficult to navigate at first their uncertain relationship. Eventually they bonded, first over the hardships they felt as Anna grew older and over genuine feelings of sisterhood and kinship. In 1947 it all changed again. A friend she made during her early days in New York was blacklisted from Hollywood thanks to the actions of the HUAC, who believed the friend and nine others to have some sort of connection with the Community party. This caused the group to have a difficult time getting work in Hollywood as no one wanted to be associated with them in fear of gaining attention too. Remembering their kindness in the past, and perhaps feeling guilt for pushing people away some time in the past and wanting to find some way to make it up for them, G.M did not fear the HUAC and publicly stood up for them by sending money to their family so they can have help in supporting them and dismissing the charges as fearful nonsense. HUAC found out about her actions and asked for her to come to a hearing for possibly having sympathy for possible Communists and for her then latest published works that insulted the 'crumbling rock of American society'. She refused the first time, citing herself as too sick to be able to go on the day of the hearing. It was true as her health never was the best due to her negligent nature of not watching for her own health as she was in a writing binge and did feel faint that month. A person of the HAUC came to visit her flat one day and hinted she must come the next time they called for her or, perhaps, someone might consider her unfit enough or dangerous enough to take care of her little sister considering her young age. Furious with the threat of being torn away Anna, the one person she loved with all her heart, G.M refused again and this time published her most controversial work yet: ‘The Scrouge of America’ An excerpt of it: “… We have fallen so far from Glory’s grace and are forever tumbling down, our skin breaking,She continues on in the four page poem, her message to the world basically meaning that men nor women should be judged by any creed or religion or color they have. Rather, they should be judged by the hard work they have done and nothing else should matter. Naturally she caused a roar of controversy with her work, earning disgust and admiration for her stance on this. It seemed to garner her enough admiration from Andrew Ryan because, on 1948 in the early months of it, she received an invitation from the man to come to a place where she would not be censored others, where her works would flourish and be met with approval by those who thought the same way. Initially thinking it as some sort of joke, G.M did not bother to reply to it and did not think much about it until October 31, she and Anna went out to celebrate the young girl’s birthday. As they were walking back home, the time being late at night for having spent the entire day out, they were suddenly accosted by a stranger who harassed and insulted G.M for her controversial poem, taking personal offense for what she had wrote. The two girls were just trying their best to ignore the person and shake them off, walking faster and faster until G.M decided to make a run for it and make a break for it. Anna became scared and started to the cry as they ran down the sidewalk and the stranger chased after them and reached out, grabbed the girl by the arm and pulled her back, deciding to take their anger out on her since their words had an effect on her at least. They had a few, heart-stopping seconds to hold the little girl and threaten her and her beloved older sister with death. G.M got her sister back in her arms and scared off the stranger when revealing a gun she kept in her purse at all times. The effect of that night left a mark on her however. She shook the foundations too much and this is one of the harmless people getting back at her. What if the not-so-harmless came around soon? G.M didn’t trust the police, never did thanks to the friend of Henry all those years ago, and thought she had no one else to turn to in this dire situation. When the realization that the world was truly no longer safe for her and Anna, she reluctantly accepted the invitation and went down to Rapture, becoming one of the many people part of the ‘The Vanishing’ that took place from 1946 to 1952 as people like G.M were given a chance to leave their lives for something better and they took the chance. Albeit with more eager than she expressed, with her being a skeptic of everything to this day. There in Rapture, comfortably settled in an apartment located in Plaza Hedone, she continued to publish her works though the reception for them was considerably more cool, with the wealthy wishing to focus on the splendid and the common class wishing to focus on a fresh new start but still selling well which is how she got there in the first place, her words to be constant reminder that the surface is a place they can no longer trust nor believe in. Not batting an eye, she continued her works and kept to herself. Tutoring the brilliant, clever Anna the best she could over their years of being in Rapture but allowing her sister to make friends with the other children here. Even with the upheavals that have been happening for the last few months, with the arrival of the new people/things in the city and the death of Fontaine and more, G.M continued to keep to herself and write but never touching on the matters of Rapture like most thought (or hoped) she would. Because as much as she uses her writing to voice out her opinon, she knew if she kept her head down and out of trouble, she and Anna little sister will be safe from the dangers that were there. Then the twelve-year-old girl, always a curious young one with a thirst for any and all knowledge, expressed an interested in these newcomers a few days ago… |
