Queenie Jenkins and Roy

Queenie Jenkins’s relationship with her stepfather Roy was shaped by abuse and neglect that began in childhood and undermined her sense of safety at home. In therapy, Queenie recalls how Roy’s arrival changed her close bond with her mother, subjected her to sustained cruelty, and eventually left her living by herself while still a child.

Childhood and Household Violence

Before Roy moved in, Queenie and her mother lived together in a tiny house in Mitcham and, in Queenie’s recollection, were intensely close: they had their own world and could scarcely go anywhere without one another. Roy’s arrival disrupted that intimacy. Queenie remembers him as mean, with a thick Jamaican accent that she could not always understand; he laughed at her speech and called her a “bounty,” invoking the chocolate bar to cast her as white on the inside and brown on the outside. When Queenie stopped speaking to him in the hope that he would stop mocking her voice, the mistreatment continued in other forms: he broke her belongings, falsely told her mother that she had insulted him or stolen from her, and made her sleep in the car. Over time, her mother spoke to her mainly to tell her to get up for school or go to bed, while the adults spoke to each other. Roy later made Queenie’s mother sell their small house and used the money to buy a new one with a garden, which had to be kept spotless. He also cheated on Queenie’s mother, disappearing for weekends; when she eventually challenged him, she returned to the flat with a black eye and split lip. Queenie says she was about eleven when Roy wanted her and her mother out and a flat was rented for them. Her mother soon stayed with Roy, leaving Queenie there mostly alone for a few months. In therapy, Janet identifies the arrangement as illegal and dangerous for a vulnerable child. Queenie insists that living apart from Roy had seemed preferable: she could no longer bear living with him or fitting into his warped idea of the home he wanted, and she felt he had made her mother hate her.

Witnessing Violence and Its Afterlife

The account also reveals that Queenie did not remain silent when Roy attacked her mother. In therapy, Janet’s question about whether she had spoken out brings back the scenes she says she had tried to interrupt: Roy pulling chunks of hair from her mother, pushing her down the stairs, and breaking her jaw. Queenie’s recollection is bodily as well as verbal; while describing the abuse, she digs her nails into her palm until they pierce the skin, and later returns to her grandparents’ home with dried blood on her hands. Her grandmother sees how exhausted she is and tells her she had not known Queenie had suffered so badly. The late disclosure makes the violence part of Queenie’s present, not simply a hidden history: therapy gives her a place to name what happened, while her grandmother’s response confirms that the extent of it had remained unknown even within the family.

Adult Intimacy and the Persistence of Threat

The remembered household violence continues to shape what safety means to Queenie in adulthood. At a party after her separation from Tom, she says he had been an ally and had made her feel safe from Roy. When another guest looks at her with disdain, Queenie shivers as she used to when Roy looked at her that way: a present-day expression recalls an old bodily response. The party is also saturated with alcohol, which Queenie uses to drown her sorrow; Darcy and Fran then recruit friends to build her an OkCupid profile because she is temporarily without a partner. The scene places the prospect of new intimacy beside her stated need for an ally and protection.

Later, Queenie describes to Janet how racialized and sexualized attention complicates the possibility of feeling loved. She says that people apply stereotypes to her as a Black woman and contrasts the dinner invitations her friends receive with men’s unsolicited sexual advances toward her. Her account does not reduce those experiences to Roy’s abuse, but it echoes the childhood insult he used to mark her as racially divided and the rejection she associates with being born as herself. For Queenie, the relationship’s afterlife is therefore not only a memory of violence at home: it is bound up with her difficulty trusting that intimacy can offer care without humiliation or threat.

Abuse, Minimization, and Disclosure

When Janet asks about Roy, Queenie initially weighs the abuse against details that might make the household seem acceptable: the house was clean, it had a garden, and Roy was a good cook. She also describes his cruelty as alternating between screaming at her and ignoring her. Janet challenges the minimization directly, telling Queenie that either response was important to her development. The contrast clarifies that the harm in Queenie’s relationship with Roy was not confined to spectacular acts of violence; fear and neglect were part of the everyday home she had learned to explain away. As the conversation continues, Queenie recalls that Roy’s treatment of her mother included severe assaults, and that she spoke up whenever she witnessed them. Therapy thus turns a history Queenie had framed as something she could endure into an account of sustained childhood danger, while exposing how long she had carried it without fully naming it.