She was born with an optimism that even the most vile and violent offender couldn’t destroy.  What he could do, however, is lock the child into a constricted prison, an incarceration built by manipulating her innocent understanding of life—of how it works and how to stay alive—so that all that was strong, and powerful, and lovely in her childhood heart was frozen in a secret place deep down inside—waiting. Waiting until it was safe to come out. Hiding until it was safe to run. .

Excerpt from: The Girl Among Thorns

A Note From the Author

The story you are about to read really happened to a girl by the name of Chelsey Ann Davenport.The behaviors of the participants in this story, the dialogue remembered, and the joys and sorrows experienced are depicted just as Chelsey remembers them. Many of them have been confirmed by other family members who were present when the events occurred, and by others whose stories connected with Chelsey’s as life unfolded in the Davenport home.

Many people, more than you may suppose, in our nation and around the world, share parts of Chelsey’s story.  Maybe you read the account of Elizabeth F, the woman in Austria who was hidden in her father’s basement for twenty-two years, and you wonder why she didn’t find a way to overpower him and escape her confinement.  You may have read, also, the story of Jaycee Dugard, the eleven year old girl who was kidnapped by a man and his wife and forced to live in a hovel behind their house where she was repeatedly raped, bore the man’s children, and remained captive for eighteen years. How do these things occur?  What are the dynamics that hold a child hostage to her abuser long after she has reached the chronological age of an adult?

We think Chelsey’s story will answer some of these questions if you read between the lines.  We hope it will encourage other victims to break free from their bonds and rise above the debilitation of their childhood. 

Preface

You’d never know Chelsey Ann Davenport was the girl in this story.  Life always changes a person but extraordinary lives have a way of making extraordinary changes in the people who experience them.
 Chelsey told me that it’s hard for her to keep the timeline straight on the events in her story and I told her that’s all right.  I wanted to her to tell it as she remembered it, and I believe that’s just what she did.
 Memory is a tricky thing.  People don’t choose what they’ll forget or what they’ll remember. It’s almost as if the memories themselves choose to hide or to disclose themselves when the time is right.  Chelsey told me her memories have become her friends because they help her understand who she is and how she came to be that way.
 All the names have been changed in Chelsey’s story to protect the identity of those who lived it with her.  Everything else is just as Chelsey told it to me.
 The story I’m about to tell you really happened.  It happened to a girl by the name of Chelsey Ann Davenport.  Chelsey would tell it herself, but something happened that made that quite impossible, so I promised her that I would tell her story, just as she told it to me.

Chapter One
I hate bridges.  They start on one side of a gaping hole and don’t stop until they reach the other side.  Sometimes the hole is dry and you can look down into a gash in the earth.  When it’s like that, the bridge looks like a band-aid laid over the gash and there is always a danger that some drunken fool will meet you halfway across and send you plunging through the rail that runs along its sides.   
 Sometimes the bridge spans a river and that is the kind I hate worst.  A watery death seems like an awful way to go.  Maybe that’s just because I stared death in the face on the water more than once, but I’ll get to that later. 
I liked bridges at first.  But that changed when I was about three.  Until then, I have vague memories of walking across a bridge with my great grandma whom I thought was pretty wonderful and my big brother Dustin, whom she thought was the best thing that ever happened to our family.  We were right smack in the middle of that bridge when I realized that she loved Dustin more than me. 
How do you figure out something like that at three?  Maybe it was because she took his hand every time he offered it and didn’t seem to notice mine.  Or because she didn’t seem to hear a word I said while everything he said made her laugh or reach down and tousle his hair. 
 Don’t get me wrong.  I loved my big brother.  He was eleven months older than me and my only playmate.  It’s just that I knew, right from the beginning, that everybody else loved him, too, and I just wished some of that love could be left over for me.  Anyway, I never liked bridges much after that. 
 As much as I hate bridges, I love open fields, especially when they’re filled with cotton-pickers.  I don’t think they have those anymore, but I used to watch them  moving slowly along the row, paying no mind to the sharp casing as they dug the round white boll out of it.  Some of them sang but all of them looked like their back hurt.  By the time the Arkansas sun was high in the summer sky, they started looking bent, as their canvass sacks filled out, trailing behind them like long tails between the rows.