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	Long Road to Redemption After Nearly Five Decades of Silence, Preacher Seeks to Heal Himself by Speaking out about Childhood Rapes By Desonta Holder Miami Herald [Miami FL] October 9, 2005 "I killed them over and over in my mind many, many, many times." That's how Abraham Joseph Thomas Jr. -- Miami husband, father, grandfather, man of God -- once dealt with the two people he says raped him at a Catholic boarding school in Louisiana. Now, after decades of soul-lacerating silence, he is opening his heart and his mouth, going public, taking his accusations to the pulpit, the police, the press. Cleansing his poisoned heart; healing his sick, woeful past. Thomas says he wants to help others who have been raped, to let them know they're not alone, that there is hope for recovery. After all he's been through, he says, he could have, maybe should have, gone crazy. But, "I'm still standing." His accused rapists, their faces seared deeply into his memory, are dead, and Thomas, at 58 an associate pastor at St. James AME Church in Liberty City, did not report the assaults to police until June, almost a half century after he says they occurred at Holy Rosary Institute in Lafayette, southwest of Baton Rouge. Lafayette police spokesman Mark Francis says that Thomas' complaint is the first his department has received about abuse at the co-ed school, which over the course of eight decades housed thousands of African-American children from elementary grades through high school. It closed, due to faltering enrollment, in 1983. Thomas has no corroborating witnesses, and he insists that he's not seeking vengeance or money, just trying to ratify the truth. In a complaint filed in June with the victims' coordinator for the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette, he asked only that the record acknowledge the details of the wrong that was done to him. The diocese chancellor forwarded Thomas' charges to The Society of the Divine Word, the missionary order in Bay St. Louis, Miss., which had run Holy Rosary. One of Thomas' accused rapists had been a Divine Word brother. "I have no opinion on the case," the Rev. Joseph Simon, the order's superior, says in a brief telephone conversation. "No corroboration, no story." Not so, Thomas says. Whether other accusers ever come forward, "God knows, and I know," he insists. "That's validation enough." On June 23, two days after The Herald published a story about "Emma," a South Florida businesswoman who as a child had been sexually abused by several male relatives, Thomas called executive editor Tom Fiedler. He did not want to talk about Emma's story but about his. He wanted to get it down, to get it out, and, unlike the pseudonymous Emma, he wanted his real name used. That he has come forward now, so long after the fact, might seem odd, even suspicious, but it is neither, says David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a Chicago-based organization dedicated to education, self-help and prevention. "It sometimes takes decades of failed relationships and deep depression" before victims can summon the courage to talk, Clohessy says, before they realize that "time alone won't heal the wound." And so Thomas sits talking now at the dining table in the tidy Miami Gardens house he shares with his second wife, to whom he has been married 31 years, and his mother-in-law. He is a towering figure with a commanding face, broad shoulders and extra heft around his middle. Although years of smoking have battered his lungs, and a furniture-moving accident years ago damaged his spine so badly that he uses a cane and walks with a painful shuffle, he still projects a loose-limbed, restless energy that makes him sometimes seem too expansive for the air he displaces. Before he became a minister 19 years ago, he had spent 22 years as a social worker, a professional listener and comforter with a practiced intensity and a habit of kindly words. Yet now as he speaks of his past, the long, low ribbon of his voice fluctuates, sometimes calm, sometimes hesitant, sometimes, in moments of deep, boiling emotion, loud and overbearing. This is his story. DAD'S ILLNESS Thomas' early family life in a house just west of Miami was unremarkable: schoolteacher parents with two sons. But when Abraham Sr. was stricken with a brain tumor and then blinded by surgery, everything changed. At 10, Thomas, the older child, the good student, the clarinet player, suddenly also had to become a caretaker, had to clean his father's urinal, comfort his wasting body, watch death rising in his eyes. As the house became flooded in sadness and tension, childhood evaporated. Thomas argued with his mother; he fought with his brother. One night after the boys had battled over which one had the right to earn some spare change by running errands for a neighbor, an uncle stopped by and, sour-tempered and pugnacious after a visit to his favorite saloon, badly beat the older boy. "My mama told him how ugly I had been acting, . . . " Thomas remembers. "I had welts all over me. . . . Seems like I became the whipping boy for everybody's frustrations." Overwhelmed by her husband's illness and not knowing what else to do, Thomas' mother sent her troubled son to Holy Rosary, which a family friend had recommended. In those days, the boarding and day school was famous among black parents striving to do well by their children, its lovely tree-lined campus "like heaven," says Gloria Linton of Lafayette, class of '51. But to Frederick Prejean, also of Lafayette, a student from 1960 to 1964, the school also "was sort of militaristic, . . . even during recess, when the girls had to stay on one side and the boys on the other." Young Abe spent just two weeks there before his father's condition turned dire, and he was summoned home. After the funeral, he wanted to stay in Miami. "My thinking was that after Daddy died, the pressure [of caring for him] was off Mama. . . . " But back to Louisiana he went, a heartsick, grieving, vulnerable seventh-grader. "I was crying. I was upset," he says, when an older boy, "under the guise of consoling me, took me to the back of the dormitory, pushed me down and raped me, and ran back telling everybody what he had done. . . . Everybody teased me and teased me and teased me. . . . I was physically threatened, scared to death." Days later, Thomas says, he was attacked again when another boy held a sharpened pencil upright as he sat down, the point striking him between his scrotum and anus. Though he had been too frightened to report the rape, this time Thomas went to see the brother in charge of the dorm. "He examined me," Thomas says, "and told me I was all right." But he was not all right. "That night," Thomas says, the brother summoned him to his room and raped him. He vaguely remembers the bed not too far from the door and a bathroom to the right. When Thomas realized what was about to happen, he "tried to resist, but [the brother] pushed me down and held me down with the palm of his hand." When the attack was over, 'he said, `Get up from there. Clean yourself up.' . . . He handed me a washrag and directed me to his bathroom. I was bleeding. There was physical and mental anguish. I cried myself to sleep night after night. . . ." Simon, the Society of the Divine Word superior, defends the accused brother -- a school photo shows a round-faced, fair-skinned man with a clerical collar, glasses and thinning hair -- as someone of "excellent character." Joseph Armelin of Houston, who attended Holy Rosary with Thomas in 1957, says he never witnessed any inappropriate behavior and characterizes the accused as "an excellent teacher in woodworking and mechanical drafting. . . . He was very demanding and very precise about the work we did." HIS SECRET Twice raped, humiliated, betrayed by someone who should have protected him, having to hide it all from the mother he could not bear to embarrass and not knowing where else to turn, young Abe turned inward. "I wanted to die," Thomas remembers. "Wanted to kill them. . . . I thought of [using] the knives and forks that we ate with." Instead, he did nothing, becoming, he says, an easy mark for taunts of Punk! Sissy!, picked on for weeks by bullies until he finally fought back. "I guarded up enough courage to fire off a left and hit [the other boy] in the nose. And he was shocked. And I just kept hitting him and hitting him. . . . From that day," Thomas says, his pounding fist punctuating every syllable, "no-body bo-thered me." Dr. Roy Sakker, a Fort Lauderdale psychologist, first treated Thomas in 1997, when he sought help for depression, but it wasn't until last November that Sakker learned about the rapes. "This abuse has been buried for so long," Sakker says. "It's a lot to deal with." This past Mother's Day, Thomas stood in the pulpit at St. James and told his congregation the story his mother had died without hearing. "One motivating factor of silence," says Clohessy of SNAP, "is not wanting to cause horrific pain." Some in the audience flinched as Thomas spoke that Sunday morning. "I was a little shocked, because I didn't think he wanted to reveal it like that," says childhood friend Bennie Dawson. "I knew because I was his friend, . . . but it surprised a lot of people." But Sunday school teacher Lydia J. Neasman understood Thomas' motivation. "He was telling mothers to make sure they listen to their children," she says. "And mothers should let their children know that they can always come to them no matter what." "I have to applaud him for coming forward, trying to get some closure," says the Rev. James H. Davis, St. James' senior pastor. "If it had happened to me, I don't know how I would have handled it." FAMILY SUPPORT Thomas' wife and five children were supportive when he told them about the rapes earlier this year. As a child, his son Delvin, now 26, never understood why Dad was "very stern and strict." Now he understands. "All the life lessons that he taught, I learned they were for a reason," says Delvin, a business education teacher for Polk County schools. And although he says Thomas was not abusive, he admits "he could have been nicer in his approach. We got whuppins. I had my share ... , but as an adult I'm not mad at him for it. I feel that it has kept me out of a lot of trouble." Thomas says that at the end of the spring term after his father died, his mother received a letter from Holy Rosary officials who stated her son was homosexual and alerted her that he would not be welcome back in the fall. Asked whether such a scenario could have occurred in those days, Carmer B. Falgout, the Diocese of Lafayette's victims' coordinator, said she is "not at liberty to speak about it." This is all Thomas knows: 'My grandmother says, `Son, they say you like boys.' I said, 'That ain't true.' She said, 'Then don't worry about it.' But how can you not worry? My mother never said anything to me about it, and I never said anything to her about it. . . . Now she has a son who is allegedly a ho-mo-sex-u-al," he says, beginning to bellow. "Scourge to the black community." And there was more trouble. At a Mississippi boarding school he next attended, Thomas got into more fistfights -- once when he went to the aid of a girl who was being harassed by a male student. He says he was wrongfully accused of being involved in a burglary and wrongfully suffered a razor-strop beating at the hands of the headmistress who considered him intractable. He then spent a year in Ocala with an uncle before coming back to Miami Northwestern, where he struggled academically. He lasted only one semester at Tuskegee Institute, only one more at Prairie View University. For a time he supported himself by washing pots. ' `Ain't nothing wrong with washing pots,' " he remembers thinking. ' `But is it what you want to do for the rest of your life?' " Finally, he landed at Bethune-Cookman, where he studied hard and earned a degree in sociology. Soon he was working with alcoholics in Liberty City and spent a lot of time persuading others to reach out to them, too. "He worked with me and worked with me till I understood," says retired social worker Patricia Archie who has known Thomas for 25 years. "They can't help it if they're drinking. Abraham was . . . very considerate of the people in the neighborhood. " A TURNING POINT In 1986, in the midst of a panic attack when Thomas could not catch his breath and feared he might die, his life veered again: 'A glow came into my heart, said, `I want you to pick up [your] Bible and go around telling people how good I am.' I said, 'Naw, naw, Lord. Ain't nobody gon' believe me. No. No. No.' And the spirit said to me, 'Abraham, when I finish with you, people gon' look at you and say, "If I can do it for Abraham, I can do it for them." I went and shared that with my pastor, and he told me, 'That's a calling to preach if I ever heard one.' " Thomas has been at St. James for 19 years. "He's a great motivator . . . , " says parishioner Herbert Hudson III, 22. "He's a person you can come to and talk about any situation or problems." Today, Thomas does not remember ever being hugged or kissed by his mother, yet when she became ill with Alzheimer's four years ago, he brought her into his house and cared for her until she died last December. He says that his brother, from whom he is estranged, wanted to put her in a nursing home, but that he could not let that happen. He knows what it is like to be helpless, what it is like to need forgiveness, and, suddenly, "I had a mother for the first time in my life. The Alzheimer's was taking away all the crud from this wonderful person." On June 4, Thomas went on a sort of pain pilgrimage back to Lafayette, back to boarded-up Holy Rosary. He saw the old gym, the girls' dorm, the orchard where the students picked pecans for cinnamon buns. He went back to put an end to the questions he kept asking himself: "Why aren't you going [to revisit the school]? Is it intimidation?" He came "to curse, to cry," but the old, dilapidated buildings held no terror anymore, and no tears fell. He says he forgives his mother for sending him to the school. He says he even forgives his attackers, and he hopes they sought some sort of forgiveness for themselves before they died. "The book I read says you have to forgive," he says, and, at long last, he doesn't think about killing anyone anymore.
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