Week 11 Story: Jemmy Dawson

Image Information: Jemmy Dawson before he turned too bad. Web Source: flickr.

Jemmy Dawson. I'll never forget that name.

I grew up with Jemmy. We were the same age and went to the same school all of our lives. Well, there's only one school around here, really. We're from a small town in Texas. And by small, I don't mean lack of wealth. Jemmy's family had lots and lots of money.

Growing up, he was an ornery kid and nobody liked him at all. I knew him but we were not friends. In fact, he was really mean to me growing up. I never really saw him bully any of the boys. Instead, it seemed to be just us girls that were the problem.

I remember he pushed me on the playground one time when we were younger. After he pushed me down, he yelled, "You ugly piece of crap! You look like a dog, Reagan!!!" Reagan, that's my name. I remember I cried so hard after he said those terrible things to me. He got sent to the Principal's office after that. Of course, he got out of it though. Jemmy's parents owned about half the town so they had a lot of power. Jemmy could get away with anything.

This only got worse as he grew older. He had friends that were boys because he was still nice to them for some reason. His verbal and physical abuse only ever happened with girls. I don't know why but that's just the way it was. He started getting more violent the older he got. By the time we got to high school, some women had made sexual assault claims against him. But before the story could spread too far, the girls would suddenly claim they were wrong. They would say that they had made a mistake. This made a lot of us very suspicious as to his parents' involvement in the situations. We all thought they must have paid them off.

He also got arrested a couple of times for physically assaulting women. But, of course, the charges were dropped against him. I remember the one time his mother was a victim of his aggression. Obviously, she didn't press any charges, but she did end up in the hospital.

I'm not sure why his parents always covered for him. Maybe it was because they wanted him to take over the family business one day. Or maybe it was the hope that he would follow in his father's footsteps and go to Harvard. If the latter was the motive, I'm sure they were very relieved when he finally got accepted to Harvard.

The town was nice and quiet when Jemmy was away at college. Women weren't afraid to go out on the town with him gone. They didn't have to worry about getting knocked out cold at a bar for no reason. I could tell that everyone felt at peace.

I thought about what might happen to the girl Jemmy married. If he ever married. Most people in the town never even thought that was a possibility. They figured no girl would be that brave or stupid, for that matter. You can imagine how everyone felt when Jemmy came back from college and announced that he was married. The whole town feared for her.

Author's Note: My original source was very short. It consisted of four lines: 

BRAVE news is come to town;

Brave news is carried;
Brave news is come to town
Jemmy Dawson's married.

From this, I interpreted that it meant that the fact that Jemmy Dawson is married was a bad thing. I gathered that it meant that whoever married Jemmy Dawson must be brave. The inspiration from my story just came from my attempts at understanding what it was that the original source meant. In order to bring better understanding, I chose to write a back-story to Jemmy Dawson. More specifically, why marrying Jemmy would be such a bad thing. I did not have much material to work with so it gave me a lot of room to be creative. I knew I wanted him to be a troublemaker. However, I decided to take it one step further and make him violent towards women and only women. I also wanted to make it even worse that he was never punished for his actions because of his parents' power and wealth. I chose the image of a young boy who appears to be very angry. I used this to portray the violence and aggression that dwells within Jemmy Dawson.

Bibliography: Nursery Rhymes-Love and Matrimony by Andrew Lang, link to the reading online.
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