Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight - Hardcover

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of the nonfiction works Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World; Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things; and The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater; as well as two novels, Heat Lightning and Heart, You Bully, You Punk. She lives near Boston with her three children.

PART 1

HEART
SPEED BAG My first impulse was to dismiss her. Whatever my idea of how a boxing coach should look, it was nothing like this woman standing above me on the ring apron, elbows on the ropes, calling out to her boxer in the ring. She wore a pink tank top, red shorts, white socks, and black boxing shoes, and her hair, wavy and fine and light brown, was held back with a pink scrunchie, and her limbs looked tender and ungainly and very white. She was little, Raphaëlla Johnson, five-four and not much over a hundred pounds. But it wasn’t just her physical size, it was her voice, too, a girl’s voice, indelibly gentle and light.

“You’re dropping your hands!” she yelled. “Jab! Keep firing the jab! Work!”

In the ring, a teenage Latina girl was sparring with a white man in his thirties. The girl wore red headgear and gloves, and a thick white mouthguard that made it look as if she couldn’t suppress a smile. Her tank top said don’t even don’t even don’t even don’t even don’t even don’t even THINK about it. Her sparring partner, broadly muscular, wore black headgear and gloves. His bare torso was a gallery of sweat-glazed tattoos, the most magnificent of which—an American flag in the shape of the United States, with portraits of a woman and three children set inside the borders—rippled across his trapezius muscles and caught the light as he danced. Whenever the girl seemed to tire, the man would yell at her, provoke her, hit her in the face.

“C’mon, move!” yelled the coach. “Thirty seconds!” Clustered around her on the ring apron, variously standing or kneeling, were three other girls and a woman, all drinking in the spectacle with unchecked merriment, erupting in bursts of excited laughter, hoots of encouragement, and sharp exhortations that echoed those of the coach. Their obvious pleasure in the event seemed to me incongruous and complicated. But no more so than the sheer physical presence of the coach, to whom my gaze kept returning, even as the action in the ring commanded my attention. She was thirty-two, I would later learn, but she looked half that. She was so small, that was the thing. She was the size of me.
I’d never before been in a boxing gym. It was late October, late in the day, when I first pulled up, just a few minutes earlier, in the shabby lot behind the building. Through the windshield I could see a feeble growth of weeds, then cement steps leading to a wide metal door, with a sign forbidding its use. only entrance to boxing club gym, it said, above a long arrow pointing off to the left. Below that a second sign read no parking at all out back. Beside me, a couple of other cars and a pickup truck had been left on the chewed-up asphalt in apparent disregard of the warning. It had begun to drizzle. I considered the other vehicles for a long moment, and turned off my engine.

The windows had been boarded up and painted over, and save for the two rather stern signs, the whole side of the building was featureless. From the other side of the concrete exterior came a sort of pumping sound, impressively rhythmic, like machinery operating beyond a factory wall. I’d followed the arrow to an unmarked door, yanked it open. Smells of leather and sweat, a short flight up, then into a musty, unpopulated office with an open door at the other end, and I’d found myself quickening my steps toward the noise beyond that door, my timorousness overtaken by a building curiosity until I stood where I was now, astonished by what I was seeing.

I had come prepared to meet this woman boxer and the girls she coached, but I was expecting to find them—I don’t know, doing drills, stretching, throwing punches in the air, maybe, not actually sparring in the ring, battling, getting hit in the face, pounding their own gloved fists against another sweating body. When the time clock blared three times, signaling the end of the round, the girl fell to the floor for comic effect, and when her headgear and mouthguard were removed, she was grinning. But the next girl who climbed through the ropes and sparred with the man had something wild about her. She was frightening to watch, and at the same time I felt frightened for her; her pupils were dilated, and the force of her blows seemed fueled by something uncontrolled. Her gloves crashed against the man’s headgear with a wrecking sound. When her headgear came off at the end of sparring, it seemed the coach had to speak with her for a minute, touch her hair and make eye contact, rub her shoulders and hug her, before the girl resurfaced, like a small child returning to waking life by degrees from a night terror.

With the sparring finished, for the first time I took a look around the room beyond the ring. Everyone else in the gym was male. A handful of men and not-really-yet-men worked out in pairs or solo along the periphery of the gym, signaling with their inattention the relative normality of what had just happened in the ring. But it had my heart pounding, my breath shallow. I knew I had entered a foreign land.

The Somerville Boxing Club had been around for over twenty years, but on that first evening it had been in its current location, the back of a large stone church built in 1917, for only two weeks. Filling the rear sanctuary of what had most recently housed a Brazilian evangelical ministry, it looked more lived-in than that. The space projected a heady confusion of functions, a few sheets of plywood having transformed the altar into locker rooms of unequal size, one for each gender, with a weight-lifting area sandwiched between them. Three flags—Irish, Puerto Rican, and Italian—provided vertical drapes above the dais and evoked a certain theatricality. A couple of old pews, covered in blue velvet and leaking stuffing out the back, bordered, respectively, the weight area and the bloodstained ring, behind which hung a huge American flag and a dozen fight posters. The rest was equipment: heavy bags and speed bags, a double-end bag, a hook for jump ropes; some mats, medicine balls, cracked mirrors for shadow boxing propped against the walls; Vaseline, paper towels, water bottles; a greenish doctor’s-office scale; spit buckets rigged with plastic funnels and tubing and duct tape. The time clock beeped at clear, dispassionate intervals, and skin and leather connected soundly, beating out their own, more complex counterpoint. The boom box played salsa or hip-hop or techno or pop, or static when the dial slipped between stations and no one bothered to go tune it for a while. When I got there that evening, it was playing, of all things, “Calling All Angels.”

Now the coach was squirting water into the white girl’s mouth, which was tipped open in the manner of a baby bird’s beak. The girl’s hands, still gloved, hung limp at her sides. The coach spoke to her, too softly for me to hear the words, but in a tone that was tender and intimate. The girl, looking down, listened with all her being, nodding occasionally, panting a little. Their heads were almost touching. I got a better look at the coach’s face, which—even though what I had witnessed her boxers doing made it impossible to be dismissive—only completed my idea of an unboxerly persona: open, guileless, undefended. Raphaëlla’s features don’t seem set or sleek; there is a haphazard quality to them, an artlessness, which is her beauty. When she smiles at you, the smile floods her face, every muscle giving itself over to the action, and you feel yourself the recipient of something tangible, an actual object with heft.

Later I would learn that she was the first female New England Golden Gloves champion, that she was a painter as well as a fighter, that she was working toward a master’s degree in education, not with the intent of getting a teaching job but for the sole purpose of becoming a better coach, that she’d been to five funerals in the past year, that she had been harmed, that she believed everyone who made his or her way into the gym was in some way broken inside. That night it seemed all I knew was her size, and the knowledge was profound.

I was impatient to meet her and the four girls with whom she was obviously so intensely engaged. But even as the tattooed man stepped out of the ring (a former pro boxer, I later learned, he sometimes sparred with the girls as a personal favor to Raphaëlla), one of the younger girls stepped into the ring to work one-on-one with her coach. The other three girls moved onto the mats for push-ups and sit-ups, loosely overseen by the mother. So I bided my time, waiting for them to finish.

As the dinner hour ended, more bodies came through the gym doors, from wiry boys to grizzled men, and outside the heavy fire door, which was eventually propped open in defiance of a handwritten sign taped on it, a wedge of sky showed blue-black, throwing into high relief the light, the heat, the fleshly congregation within. Everybody, as he entered, fell wordlessly into the shifting landscape of activity. A boy with an orange bandanna around his head, one foot up on a velvet pew, wrapped his hands. A tall white man worked the speed bag, shifting his weight from one hip to the other with unlikely grace. A barrel-chested man in glasses, arms folded across his formidable girth, scrutinized a lithesome kid on the double-end bag. A couple of brothers jumped rope with the finesse and footwork of circus acrobats. Someone fed the boom box a techno CD and cranked the volume. A trainer greased up a guy’s face with fine, utilitarian speed: the nose, the chin, the cheek, the cheek. None of them betrayed the slightest interest in the presence of the girls training among them.

I turned 360 degrees, reading the motivational slogans tacked to the walls: victory goes to those willing to pay the price; the will to win is not nearly important as the will to prepare to win! I tried to eavesdrop on the bits of conversation between trainers and boxers, but the room was too loud. I cut wide swaths around the multiplying numbers of men working out on the main floor of the gym, so as not to get slapped by anyone’s jump rope. It was plain to me that I didn’t belong, yet the boxers’ attitude toward me seemed one of easy indifference.

At last the girls finished their workout and came tumbling down like cubs from the ring and the free-weight area. I met them then: Jacinta and Josefina and Candida Rodriguez, three sisters, ages fifteen, twelve, and ten, respectively; Nikki Silvano, also fifteen and Jacinta’s best friend; and Maria, mother to the Rodriguezes. Five people, and they seemed like a dozen that night, talking in bursts, reaching out to slap or pinch or muss one another even as they chatted with me. Maria talked to me as though well accustomed to speaking with reporters, which she was not, but she was roundly and assertively expressive, an agent for her daughters at all times. We were standing over by one of the speed bags, the one by the door to the parking lot, and she and some of the girls took turns swatting at it. Josefina, the middle daughter (known as Sefina), swung herself up on the recently erected wooden supports from which the gym equipment hung, and Maria interrupted herself to snap at the girl to get her butt down. She was telling me the story of the Women’s Nationals that August, how Raphaëlla had taken the two big girls down to Augusta, Georgia, and how Jacinta had come home with a silver medal and left her opponent a bloody nose and two black eyes.

Candida—Candi—at ten the littlest, and too short to hit the speed bag even at its lowest adjustment without standing on something, burst out, “I want to hit a boy!” She’d been training with Raphaëlla for eight months and hadn’t even had a proper sparring session yet: tough to find anyone her size.

Maria regarded her with proud amusement. “You want to fight a boy?”

“Hit. I said hit. Hit is different than fight.”

Jacinta calmly grabbed her little sister and turned her upside down. Candi, her knees hooked at Jacinta’s middle, her hands folded behind her head, began to do sit-ups from that vertical position.

“A moth!” cried Sefina. It fluttered on the floor. “Kill it! Step on it!”

“Don’t kill it,” said Maria, sucking her teeth derisively.

Sefina got down on her knees and poked at the quivering body.

Nikki told me she’d come home from Augusta with a bronze, that her legs were wobbling in the ring because she hadn’t been training that long, that the ref stopped her fight and gave it to the other girl, and that she’d been mad. She explained that she and Jacinta had known each other since attending the same day-care program as little kids, and that Maria had given them matching cornrows for their bouts in Augusta. “I’m five things,” said Nikki, ticking them off for me on her fingers: “Irish, Italian, Dutch, Cherokee, French.” She had a lightness of presentation and demeanor that made her seem deceptively uncomplicated.

Sefina came over, bawling hoarsely. Jacinta had given her a fat lip, playing. Maria rolled her eyes. “This one cries a lot,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Jacinta, laughter quivering all about her dark eyes and dimples.

“Shut up!” Sefina lunged for the older girl, who yelped in mock fright and darted out of range. “Mira, mira, Mami!” Gingerly she lifted back the injured lip.

“Callete,” shushed Maria, pretending to slap her with the back of her hand. Then, to me, “This one’s better at gymnastics. She can do flips and everything. Go, show her a cartwheel.” But Sefina had drifted over to one of the full-length mirrors propped against the wall to examine her wound.

Someone had switched the music from Top Forty to hip-hop, something with a lot of fuck you, bitch in it and a solid, galvanizing bass line, and the outside air sifted chilly and pinpricked with rain through the doorway, and inside the sweat ran and ran and the time clock rode on, insistent, above everything else, dictating intervals of work and rest. Jacinta hit Nikki in the back with a medicine ball, and Nikki pretended, halfheartedly, to be mad. I tried to keep up with Maria’s amiable, expansive narration of her own childhood, in Puerto Rico and Boston, and her own adolescent wish to fight, to box, to work out with the boys. Around us, the girls fought and played and finally retreated to the locker room to change.