Black and Blue

In every book you read, there's almost always that one line buried somewhere deep in the text of the book which will strike you.

Reading Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, for me, that line was: "Nobody can tell me different," in a conversation between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law who had been subjected to domestic violence by her son:

"I want to ask you something," I had said that day to Ann Benedetto. "What was your husband like?"
"What kind of question is that?"
I didn't know what kind of question it was. It was maybe the first direct one I'd asked Bobby's mother, but I was emboldened by the tenderness in my elbow where I'd hit one of the dining room chairs after he shoved me, after I said I wanted to stay home Sundays, not go to Ocean Avenue.
"Was he good to you?"
"He was my husband."
"Did he ever hit you?"
She narrowed her eyes to look at me, and her dislike was an atmosphere, too, as thick as the isolation the two of in that clean, clean room, our distance from each other and from the man outside, calling to his son.
"My son is a good man," she said. "Nobody can tell me different."
Her face was hard then, and it was hard when opened the door to find me standing on her concrete steps, clean the way steps are when someone sweeps them everyday.

The book not only describes the violence in detail but also the woman's falling in love at the age of 19, the way her husband acclimatised her to his violence and tested how far her could go, the emotional upheaval, the effect of the violence at home on their son, her fleeing from her husband with their son, her new life without her husband in which she always had to keep looking over her shoulder, her falling in love again with a non-abusive man, her husband's eventually finding her and their son, his leaving her for dead (after assaulting her) and taking the child away, her inability to use the law to claim custody of her child, her husband's cutting her off from their son by remaining constantly on the move and not staying near anyone including his own mother, her son's trying to get back in touch with her without any success.

All of that, and the one line which I distinctly remember is: "Nobody can tell me different." A mother refusing to acknowledge that her son could be abusive. A mother-in-law effectively blaming her daughter-in-law for what had happened. A woman refusing to support another woman in crisis. Two mothers both cut off from their their sons because one of them was abusive.