006 Fighting Alethea
In spite of having earned my first kyue (first degree brown belt) in Shotokan four years earlier, I wore a white belt when I started tae kwon do. I was surprised when Mr. Hong gently told me that he would not recognize my rank because the two styles were so different, but I agreed instantly to his decision and I put on the white belt. At least, I thought, I would advance through the lower ranks more rapidly than other new students.But I had another surprise waiting for me on my first night. The one person I had feared all through college walked in the front door. She had a green belt around her waist.
I was there with my friend Karen, who had enrolled with me. "Hey," Karen said. "Isn't that Alethea Conner?" She turned big eyes to me.
"Yes," I said, and it just figured that Alethea outranked me even here.
Before college, I'd grown up under an abusive father. In many ways, I had to raise myself. My father disowned me when I converted from his faith to evangelical Christianity. So my decision to get away from my home and start a new life had been pretty easy to make.
Bible college was a place with lots of rules, lots of innocent people, lots of discipline, and lots of stability. For me, it was the very place I needed to grow up. I was a loud person, often rude, and held most people in contempt. But in college, for the first time in my life, I was consistently and kindly confronted about my behaviors towards other people and made to change. And I wanted to change.
In spite of my faults, I was honest, and honesty went a long way at a Bible college. I was befriended by a class mate, Beryl Rimmer, whose father, Bert Rimmer, was the head of campus security. Beryl encouraged me to apply for a job, and I was quickly accepted. Women who worked on Security received the same South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SCLED) training as the men, but our jobs were much more limited. A woman always attended any ambulance call to the girls' dorms, and we did a lot of dispatch work. But we stayed in the front office, a glass building called the fishbowl. The men went out on patrol and ran the shifts. At the time I was hired, Beryl Rimmer had been working for two years on Security, and another girl, Kelly, had been on for a year. We all liked each other and got along well. Our job title was Assistant Gate House Watch, or AGHW.
I loved the Security department and must confess that sometimes I could be accused of going to college just so I could work on Security. Every day I was busy going to classes, and then I would go to work, where I was part of a close-knit team. I was making friends for the first time in my life, and I felt that I mattered, that things ran more smoothly because I was there.
My idyllic life was knocked slightly askew when I met the wife of Sergeant Conner, the second in command of our department. I was introduced to Alethea Conner at a Red Cross meeting, and the woman simply turned and walked away from me. I thought there must have been some mistake in my perception of her rudeness, so at the first coffee break, I went up to her and spoke to her, asking her some polite thing or other. She turned away without answering.
At this time in my life I had managed to alienate so many people because of my own rudeness, loudness, or obnoxiousness, that I assumed that somehow I had offended her. I tried a third time, later on, and was once again rebuffed. Really at a loss, I went to Beryl Rimmer and confessed my sin. I wasn't actually sure what I had said or done, but I was sure that Beryl would tell me the truth and help me mend matters with the Sergeant's wife.
I was so sure that it was my fault that Beryl asked me to give her a detailed account of everything I had said to Mrs. Conner, and I did. When I had finished, Beryl just rolled her eyes. She threw a look at her father's office in the back of the fishbowl. The door was closed. She said, "Kelly can tell you more. Alethea Conner was really rude to me only once, and then she found out that my dad is Bert Rimmer, her husband's boss. So she's not so bad with me. But she's been just awful to Kelly."
The next day I asked Kelly about it. Kelly was a PE major, with bright, incredibly dark eyes, her face and figure just faintly chubby enough to remind one of a teddy bear. She was pretty with a fresh, country girl prettiness, and was very earnest in her bearing with people. To my surprise, she just wilted up as soon as I mentioned Alethea Conner.
"What did you hear?" Kelly asked. "Did she say anything about me?"
I told her what had happened at the Red Cross meeting. When I was finished she nodded, but she didn't tell me anything. She was clearly afraid of Alethea Conner.
One of the men heard us talking, and later on he told me the full story. Mrs. Conner had been picking on Kelly ever since Kelly had started the job. She'd leveled several complaints against her and was openly rude to her.
In fact, one day, Mrs. Conner had come to the fishbowl to sort out the way Kelly did her work. Mr. Rimmer had walked in to find Kelly in tears, Alethea storming at her, and the young man on duty unable to do anything to fix the situation. Rimmer ordered Alethea out. Later, Mr. Rimmer told both the Conners point-blank that if Alethea Conner ever walked into the fishbowl again, her husband would be fired from Security.
Obviously, the smart thing to do was avoid Alethea Conner. School was an authoritarian place: students obeyed faculty and staff members and treated them with deference. The system worked really well most of the time, and to be honest, I would have to say in ten years of working on that campus in one capacity or another, Alethea Conner was one of only two people I ever saw abuse that authority. But she got away with it. For a while, anyway. She stayed out of the fishbowl, but she made it her job to be unkind to the AGHWs at every other opportunity.
Kelly and Beryl graduated. I became senior AGHW, and Kelly's younger sister Rhonda and another girl Darla were promoted to the uniform ranks. Rhonda had her first run-in with Alethea Conner early in her career and was reduced to tears. Darla, far more down to earth, was just flabbergasted by Mrs. Conner. "That woman sure has some problem!" Darla exclaimed to me, right in front of everybody on shift. "I think she needs Schizophrenia medication!"
The years went on. If we saw Alethea Conner in public, she put us down, ordered us away from herself, was rude, and watched each of us girls with severity. At times she leveled complaints against us. She even went over Mr. Rimmer's head to his boss. Fortunately, Rimmer's boss had less patience with her than Rimmer did. But every one of us girls learned to be afraid of her. We knew that if she could bring us down, she would.
Graduating ended my problems with her. I had been accepted as a graduate assistant at the college and was already doing grad work that summer. In the fall, I would be teaching Freshman English.
So when Alethea walked through the door of Hong's Tae Kwon Do School and saw me, I just nodded and smiled. In the course of class, Alethea and I were put with each other as partners, and as we worked she seemed friendly enough. As we went back and forth, practicing kicks, I called her "Alethea." She instantly snapped right back at me, "That's Mrs. Conner to you, Jeri."
It stopped me cold. For crying out loud--I was on English faculty and this woman worked in the campus print shop. But I nodded and simply didn't speak again to her.
The class dismissed, and afterwards as I was stalking to the girl's room, still mad, Alethea came up to me and said, "I hope you aren't angry about what I said, but I believe you need to respect me."
I turned on her, incredibly surprised, and said, "Respect you? I don't respect you! I've never respected you! You're nothing but a bully, and you always have been! I despise you!"
And I turned to go into the girls' room.
"I make people respect me," she said. "And I won't respect you until you earn my respect."
"I don't care if you respect me or not!" I went into the dressing room.
I already knew what was really going to happen. Sooner or later, Alethea and I were going to spar with each other. It didn't matter that she outranked me. It didn't matter that she probably was in better athletic shape than I was at the time. I'm six feet tall. Alethea tops out at five foot five or five foot six. And I'd fought--really fought--as a kid before I became a Christian. She had no idea what I could do to her if I chose. And that was my choice. My adversary of three years, whom I had never wronged but who had wronged me at every opportunity, was at my mercy. And she was so stupid she didn't even know she was at my mercy. She was so proud and arrogant and full of herself she didn't even know that it was in her best interest to make peace with me as quickly as possible.
I thought about it all through the next day, and into the evening. And on the second day I thought about it some more. And then it was time to go back to the training hall. I knew we were going to spar. Girls always got put together first And when Mr. Hong taught, everybody sparred from the first week of enrollment. I brought along my old shin pads. This was back in the days when shin pads were not made well--at least not for women. My shin pads pulled up over the foot like a sock but were too big and flopped around on my shins. One result of their loose fit was that if I smacked anything fast and light with my shin, the shin pad, even though it was made of foam, would clap loudly against my shin. It didn't hurt me. It just had very good reverb.
Alethea was there and she nodded to me, determined to keep me in my place and yet treat me with the courtesy demanded of us in the training hall. I worked with Karen that night in the partners session, but once the sparring began, I was put with Alethea. I had my shin pads on.
We bowed on command. There were several pairs sparring, and so nobody looked at us, and for a long moment, I was at a complete loss.
I still wasn't sure what to do. A hoard of Sunday School teachers stood in my mind, like some heavenly host, telling me that revenge is always wrong. Another part of me told me that I had the power to end Alethea's career as a bully. I still didn't know what to do. A powerful motive urged me not to hurt her and not to humiliate her. Another powerful resentment urged me to pound her into mud, because I could.
Alethea made the decision for me. She round kicked to my chin. Enlightenment came: I could easily make it sound like I was pounding her and yet not ever really hurt her at all. I could make it so that she could never touch me, and I could frustrate the daylights out of her. The shin pads won. I knew exactly what to do.
Kicking with the shins was frowned upon at the tae kwon do school, but new students needed so much correction and guidance that shin kicks were low on the list of things to prevent.
I skirted out of the way of Alethea's forward motion, picked up my right leg, and smacked the shin pad into her ribs as she went by. Clap! She was startled and came right back at me, her hands ridiculously low.
I picked up my foot, heel out, and lightly thrust it into the front of her hip, against the bone; I pushed. It sent her flying back but did not hurt her. Indeed, it was really a push and not a kick. She was mad by then, and she knew exactly what I was doing and why. She rushed right at me, hands down, and I lightly but loudly peppered her with the shin pads, always moving back, moving away, not hurting her, but making the shin pads clap against her. Clap, clap, clap! It sounded like I was beating the crap out of her, and I was glad. I wanted it to sound that way. Everybody in the whole room could hear it. Clap, clap clap!
Alethea was frantic, and I remained silent. But she never got a kick off, and I don't think I ever even bothered to block her. I certainly never used my hands, and I never went to her face or head because I did not want to hurt her. I just peppered her as she came in, and she kept coming. Finally, the associate instructor came up and stopped us. "Here Alethea," he said to her. "Let me show you how to fight."
It was the most telling blow against her. He meant it to be kind, but to her arrogance and superiority it must have been more crippling than the worst insult. I settled down into a stance and refrained from leering at her. In fact, I met her eye with no expression, and she knew perfectly well that no matter what he told her, or how he instructed her, the minute he stepped out of the way, I was going to do it again. But after he finished instructing her, he clapped his hands and ended the match. We moved to different partners.
After class, Alethea snatched her things and went straight out. In the girls room, Karen was practically rolling on the floor laughing. All the way back home, Karen was laughing, and I was laughing.
Over that weekend, Alethea made the rounds with phone calls, seeking support, but at last there was none. I had, she insisted, targeted her breasts and struck her hard, several times, in the breast. Mr. Rimmer called me up to get my side of the story. I told him the truth. Yes, it was unavoidable the way she had charged in with her hands down that the shin pads had hit her chest, but not one of my kicks had been hard--just loud. I told Rimmer that if I had wanted to hurt Alethea, I would have knocked her out easily with a solid kick to the head, and she knew it. Rimmer knew it too.
He told Alethea that as far as he knew, I was participating with her in a class in which we both knew the possible consequences, and so it was not a matter for either Security or the school administration to handle. If Alethea and I had a problem, we would need to work it out.
I did sweat it a little bit, but everybody that Alethea appealed to made the same decision. If you do tae kwon do, you have to abide by the consequences of tae kwon do.
On Monday morning, Rimmer called me up to his office. When I got there, he said, "Alethea wants you to meet with her."
It was a stunning declaration, and I did not expect it, and I made an instant decision. "No," I told him. He was surprised. I was suddenly surprised at how very angry I was. "For three years that woman bullied me and made me feel like she could do anything she wanted to me. And she's not sorry now; she's just caught, and she's scared. I'm not going to her. When she comes to me, apologizing for what she's done, then we'll talk. Otherwise, I have nothing to say."
Rimmer tried to say something about the benefits of compromise, but I told him, "There's no compromise with this. What she did was wrong. And now it's come back to her. You can tell her that. We aren't talking because there is no agreement to reach. She picked on Beryl, Kelly, Rhonda, Darla, and me. And I am now putting a stop to it."
That ended the meeting. Alethea was duly told all I had said. She never apologized and she never came to me to talk. The next time we were in class together to spar, I said to her, very calmly, "You will ask me to teach you how to fight, or I will fight you like I did last time."
Her mouth tightened up. We bowed on command, and I said, "Okay Alethea, we'll fight like we did last time. Get ready."
And then, stammering from her lips, came the words: "Will you--teach me--how to fight?"
I smiled at her. "Sure, Alethea," I said. "The first thing you need to know is how to keep your hands up."
It would be great to say that Alethea and I became friends after that, but it would be dishonest. She stayed long enough to get her next belt. We sparred on the test, and I went easy with her and let her throw some kicks.
I called her Alethea and she never objected again. In some odd way, I think I actually did win her respect by seeming so remorseless to her. Where three years of kindness, meekness, and obedience had failed, three days of firm resolve, determination, and the appearance of being ready to hurt her succeeded. She never earned my respect, but she has earned my pity.
I still don't know the rightness of what I did. I never hurt her, though I let her troubled mind believe that I would hurt her. After the first sparring match, I tried to go on without grinding her face into the floor. I never forced her to apologize for the years of unkindness. In fact, I never forced her to apologize for anything. I just never let her get away with continued nonsense.
But now I do realize that in refusing to go to Alethea, I took away from her the vital moment of truth when she might have changed forever. The most amazing thing about Alethea Conner is that she thought she had every right to treat us badly. Nobody had ever told her otherwise. And I could have but did not. I do regret that. I was changed because people were willing to confront me. I had no right to refuse to confront her.
Years later, I was riding to church with a friend named Judy, and we talked about the incident. Judy, several years older than I, had been a senior English faculty member when all this had happened.
"I really regret it that I refused to meet her more than halfway," I said.
She nodded. "And fighting her didn't even feel good, did it?" she asked.
I was stunned at the question. "It felt great!" I told her with complete honesty. "It was one of the best moments of my life!"
My honesty really annoyed Judy. She snapped her mouth closed and glared at the road as she drove. I just stared at her. I do regret not helping Alethea after I had taught her the truth of her frailty. But fighting her was great. In fact, it was terrific.
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