"Nobody's Child" (7)

While flipping through my Vogue magazine on the flight to the Cayman Islands, expecting to find add after add and read a few mindless articles, I came across one of the most shocking articles that I have read in awhile. It was the story of an author, Taylor Stevens, and how she had been raised in a religious colt since birth. It explained the rules of the colt and her life as she progressed through it, hoping in the end, to remove herself from the colt, and the struggles she had after she did remove herself.

A man that went by the name of David Berg founded the colt that Stevens was born into. He did not want his followers to find jobs, maintain a family consisting of a mother, father and children, or stay in one place for a long period of time. Family bonds were broken, children did most of the work, and privacy did not exist. Steven’s, at age fifteen began begging in Osaka, and talked about how that it was the dead of winter and she was wearing flip flops, but that “no one cared. I belonged to a colt, and I was nobody’s child.” Stevens mentioned that her most prized possession was a cassette recorder that played Greek classical music. Because music and reading of any kind was band, she often played her cassette recorder at night on the lowest volume possible. When she “craved diversion,” this was her escape.

In the late 90’s, Stevens got to choose the next place she wanted to go and she chose Africa. She chose Africa because she wanted to distance herself from the colt. She then married a man from Europe, who was also a part of the colt. She said that they didn’t have the best romantic chemistry but then followed with a very interesting sentence. “We were the only two members of a similar age in the area. As I like to say, did Adam really have a choice about Eve?” 

Once they had their first daughter, Stevens realized that she did not want her daughter to live the same life that she had. They finally left the colt.

“I will never forget how elated I felt the first morning I woke up in our own small apartment, finally free of the eyes that had been watching and judging me my entire life. Going to the grocery story, buying clothes, scheduling doctors appointments—All the ordinary things most adults take for granted—Were frightening and novel experiences for me.”

After reading this article, I began to see similarities between Steven’s story and The Handmaid’s Tale. Steven’s had a loophole, her cassette player, when she needed an escape. This is similar to Ofred and her tricks to keep her sanity. She might not have had anything tangible like Stevens did, but in the scheme of things, it was an escape. One of the things that I found most interesting about this, this article paints a picture of what life out of Gilead would be like if Ofred had escaped. Terrifying. Just doing daily tasks by herself, without someone watching was frightening. The Handmaid’s Tale left us to create our own ending and I feel that if Ofred does get out of Gilead, that she would succeed, like Stevens. She worked so hard to keep her sanity so that if she did get out of this society she would be able to survive.

Stevens is now 38 and has only been educated up to the sixth grade level but has “succeeded.” In the article she talks about how everyone was told that if they left the colt that something bad would happen to them. Well, in Stevens’ case, this was not true, and because she took the risk and left all she had known, she wrote an amazing story. Yes this is only the story of one colt, but this could happen anywhere, just like in The Handmaid’s Tale, and if it does, we are going to want as much knowledge about those situations as we can get. We have a lot to learn from Taylor Stevens.

http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/nobodys-child/