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BY SUSIE WILSON
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM. COM
SEX MATTERS
One is real; the other is fictional.
One is the subject of a book that won the 2009 National Book Award for Young People's Literature; the other is at the center of an award-winning film adaptation of a novel that is currently raking in millions of dollars.
One grew up black in central Alabama; the other grew up black in central Harlem.
One grew up amidst loving relatives; the other suffered extreme verbal abuse and sexual abuse from her mother and sexual abuse and rape by her father.
One excelled at school, and planned to go to college and become a lawyer; the other was told repeatedly that she was stupid and illiterate.One refused to give up her seat on a public bus for white people, thereby breaking the law and going to jail; one refused to return to her abusive home with her two small children, although she had no way to support them.
One changed the course of American history by testifying in a famous lawsuit that eventually ended segregated busing in Montgomery, AL – for a brief time, making her an important person in her city; the other felt that no one had ever loved her.
The first teen is Claudette Colvin, named by her mother for a movie star; the other teen is Claireece "Precious" Jones, named by the author Sapphire in her novel Push, in what must have been a brilliant moment of chilling irony.
Yet I believe Claudette is tied to Precious because these teens showed determination, resiliency, character, and courage from which we can all learn. They proved that "We Shall Overcome," the battle cry of the civil rights movement, applies to individual lives, too.
Claudette is central to Phillip Hoose's nonfiction book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice; the movie Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push' by Sapphire tells the fictional Precious' story.
On the afternoon of March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin was going home on the city bus when she refused to give up her seat to a white person. When she refused the bus driver's several requests to go to the back of the bus, the police were called and they dragged her off the bus backwards, threw her into a police car, and imprisoned her in the adult city jail.
As they insulted her with crude sexual talk, she kept saying, "It's my constitutional right!" Later she was found guilty of violating the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and "assaulting" the policemen. She was put on probation, but still saw herself as a criminal.
At first Claudette was hailed as a courageous young woman, but in time, black leaders in Montgomery and even her own school classmates turned against her. The leaders were searching for a person to be the "reputable" pubic face for their efforts to halt bus segregation, and they didn't see it in Claudette. She was often described as "mouthy," "emotional," and "feisty."
Sometime after the arrest, Claudette had a one-night sexual encounter that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. Feeling rejected by those who had initially hailed her courageous act, she met and grew fond of an older, light-skinned black married man, who was separated from his wife and living with his mother.
Claudette tells Hoose: "The first few months I hoped and prayed and pretended it wasn't true, but it was. I had so little information about sex. I wasn't sexually active at all. I had never gone very far with my boyfriend, and my parents never talked to me about sex. It had only happened once with this man."
However, Claudette rallied, had a baby boy, and kept fighting to desegregate the city's bus system. She testified in the lawsuit Browder v. Gayle, which the NAACP brought against the city.
As Hoose recounts, "She had been arrested, dragged from a bus, charged with breaking the segregation law, and jailed. She alone had fought the charges in court. She may have been only 16, but Claudette had more experience than anyone else when it came to challenging Jim Crow on the Montgomery buses.
"She didn't disappoint her supporters that day in federal court, the spectators, and those gathered outside the courthouse. Many told her, ‘You were great.'"
However, once again people turned away. Claudette tells Hoose, "I was shunned because I had gotten pregnant and had a light-skinned baby. It was made worse because my parents wouldn't let me just explain, ‘This is what happened and here is who the father is'... and there was no way the women in town would accept me, because they thought the father was a married, white man. To them, I was a fallen woman."
Eventually, Claudette moved to New York City, where she now lives, having retired after 35 years as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. There, Hoose found her and, with her cooperation, wrote the book that plucked her from obscurity and into the spotlight of civil rights history.
In his book, Hoose makes the airtight case that Claudette Colvin is famed Rosa Parks' rightful predecessor and deserves more praise for her courageous acts of desegregating public buses in Montgomery.
Precious, the movie about Precious Jones, is as hauntingly real as the book about Claudette Colvin. It is painfully sad, because of the amount of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse heaped upon this 200-pound, obese teenage main character.
Precious was repeatedly raped by her father, starting at age five, and bore his two children: Mongo-short for Mongoloid, as the baby had Down Syndrome-and Abdul. (Infected with the HIV virus, her father also passed the virus to her, but fortunately neither baby was infected.)
While her father rapes her, Precious splits into a fantasy world where she is the star of a movie, dressed in gorgeous gowns surrounded by cheering throngs and flashing strobe lights. On other occasions when she looks into the mirror, she sees what she thinks she wants to be: a thin, white girl with blonde hair.
The cruelty of Precious' horrible imprisonment is broken only by two people: a sensitive teacher in the alternative school to which she is sent after the school principal finds out she is pregnant for the second time, and a caseworker at the welfare office, who tries to get to the bottom of the abuse.
The teacher helps Precious keep a journal of her thoughts as stories and poems. Precious learns to read and write poems, and she wins a literary award.
But it is after her mother throws Precious' three-day-old son to the floor and then throws television at them as they flee the house that she finally decides to leave. This final break with her mother comes after she listens to her self-pitying explanation in the caseworker's office about why she did nothing stop her husband's and her own sexual abuse of Precious.
When her mother begs her to return home, Precious rises, takes both children, and walks away, determined to get her GED and care for them.
Claudette showed courage by refusing to rise from her seat on the bus; Precious showed courage by walking out on her abusive mother.
Hoose's Claudette Colvin belongs in every high school library and parents should buy the book for their teens. As for Precious, because of the multiple scenes of verbal abuse and the one rape scene, this is a movie only for adults, or older teens over 17.
Parents can see the film and talk about Precious to somewhat younger teens, and teachers can discuss it when talking about the surprisingly high incidence of rape and sexual abuse within families.
Surely, Claudette and Precious show us how to be braver, better people. They have joined my pantheon of heroines. How about yours?
Susie Wilson, former executive coordinator of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University's Center for Applied and Professional Psychology (now renamed Answer), is a national leader in the fight for effective sexuality and HIV/AIDS education and for prevention of adolescent pregnancy. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
