A Father's Shadow

GROWING UP, AARALYN ONLY REALLY KNEW HER IMMEDIATE BROTHERS AND SISTERS, the ones Helen had with James Bevel. Bevel's other offspring might pass through her life once every few years, but those sightings were brief, and few relationships were ever built. So, Aaralyn didn't know that her older half sister Chevara Orrin, who lived in Memphis, had accused their father of molesting her one night when she was 10. Or that Chevara's younger sister Bacardi Jackson, then 8, had had to take Chevara into the bathroom to wash the ejaculate off her leg, not even understanding what it was. Nor did any of them know the things that had happened to other sisters, some of whom are still reluctant to share details.

Bevel was challenged about his behavior a few times. When Bacardi was a student at Yale Law School in 1996, she wrote her father a scorching letter, accusing him of molesting Chevara. In response, he suggested that the three of them hold a mock trial to see if his daughters could prove that he'd done anything wrong. Bacardi and Chevara decided to participate, but the "trial" fell apart when Bevel spent an hour challenging them on their definition of the word "rape." Charles Bevel also remembers questioning his brother about his behavior twice, once in the mid-1980s, after hearing Chevara and Bacardi's story, and later in the mid-1990s, after hearing rumors about Aaralyn and one of her sisters. Each time, James Bevel thundered his denials.

It wasn't until 2004, when Charles shared his suspicions with Douglass Bevel, the son of James and his first wife, fellow civil rights leader Diane Nash, that the children began to collectively confront their secrets. At the time, Douglass says, he had just met Erica Bevel and his half sister. Immediately, Douglass loved the little girl. She had such bright eyes and laughed so easily. Now he began to worry: Had anything happened to her?

He called Aaralyn, asked to visit and then bought a plane ticket to Washington. They met in her apartment in Silver Spring, where Aaralyn was living at the time. Over the next few days, her story spilled out. Douglass called the other sisters and heard similar stories.

Douglass told them about the sweet little girl living with Bevel. They had to get her out, he said. A series of conference calls were arranged that involved 14 of Bevel's 16 children, along with Charles, Nash and Chevara and Bacardi's mother, Susanne Jackson. For many of the women, it was the first time they had discussed their abuse with other family members. The calls were emotional. They debated for weeks what to do about their little sister before deciding to directly confront Bevel in Alabama. Bacardi, now a practicing attorney, suggested each sister write an affidavit detailing the abuse. Then, after presenting them to Bevel, they would insist that he and Erica relinquish custody of their daughter to Erica's mother in New Jersey. They also wanted their father to promise to seek counseling.

They chose a weekend and made arrangements to fly to Alabama, only to discover that they had picked the very night that Bevel was being honored with a plaque at the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute, just feet away from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was an awkward moment, but the children sat through the ceremony.

The next day, they presented their affidavits, challenging Bevel about his incest as a group for the first time. He read the written accounts and then said, according to those present, "I don't contest these charges."

They asked him to give up custody of their little sister. He refused. "You would have needed a huge knife to cut through the tension in that room," Chevara says. "Everyone was sobbing."

Eventually, Bevel stood up, left the room and came back with a chalkboard. It was time for a lesson, he said. And he began drawing the familiar figure eight connecting the six institutions: church, government, business . . .

A few weeks later, they tried again, this time with Bernard Lafayette, one of Bevel's best friends from the civil rights movement, mediating the meeting. Lafayette says he was brokenhearted to hear about the allegations and wanted to broker a resolution in which Bevel would seek help. "He had some psycho-logical problems. It's obvious," Lafayette says.

When that attempt also failed, some of Bevel's children hired an attorney to try to get their sister removed themselves. Not all the siblings agreed to participate.

Douglass's sister Sherrylynn Bevel, who has spent a great deal of time working on projects with her father, says she was uncomfortable with the anger being expressed by some of her sisters. "I became very concerned, concerned for everybody in our family," Sherrylynn says, describing the operating motive as: "I want to hurt you, and I want to humiliate you. I couldn't work with anyone like that."

Even Aaralyn's brother Enoch Bevel, who lived with Aaralyn while he was in high school and is now a student at Georgetown University, had reservations. He says he adored his father growing up and has fond memories of the meals his father cooked for him and the Frisbee games they played. He still finds it hard to reconcile the hero of Birmingham and Selma with the man accused of molesting his sister.

But Bacardi, Chevara and some of Bevel's other daughters refused to back down. To bolster their custody petition, they began researching where they could file charges of their own against Bevel. But each state they approached had a statute of limi-tations for felonies such as child molestation. Then someone discovered Virginia had no such restrictions, and they turned to Aaralyn. She would have to be the one to file charges and confront their father in court.

Bacardi prepared her for what would follow: the testimony she would have to give, the embarrassing questions that would be asked. She might be attacked, scorned, perhaps even derided as a traitor to her race. Aaralyn thought about all those things and then shrugged. She had already endured far worse. She needed to do this for her little sister, she says she decided.

Before she went to the police, she took a long hike with a friend -- someone she had confided in about her father -- to go over the story, to be sure she could repeat it in an orderly fashion. Then she drove to the station in Leesburg.

AARALYN'S CHILDHOOD WAS A BLUR OF CITIES. For years, her mother followed Bevel around the country, from Cleveland to Chicago to Washington, to Omaha and Memphis, taking her children with her.

Aaralyn says she grew up with very little adult supervision. In Washington, she remembers, she and her mother stayed in an apartment with Georgetown students. She told the students she was a senior in high school so that she could attend their parties. She was 12. In Memphis, at 14, she dated both a drug dealer and a football player who had just been picked in the NFL draft. She says she smoked pot and drank constantly. By the middle of high school, she considered herself an alcoholic.

Helen Bevel remembers her daughter being impossible to control at that time. Aaralyn recalls her mother as oblivious to what was going on. Then, suddenly, they were no longer welcome at the Memphis house where they'd been staying, and Helen told the children they had to find other places to live. With nowhere else to go, Aaralyn chose to move in with her father in Leesburg, which is where he'd moved to work with LaRouche.

Despite what had happened in Chicago, this seemed like the best idea. It had been years since the day Bevel had come after her with a broom. She was older, more aware, had been with men. She was smarter. Plus, the apartment promised stability, which she desperately wanted after so many years of moving from city to city, house to house. When she arrived, they talked: father and daughter. She asked him why he had touched her, and he told her he had been abused as a child himself. He apologized.

Then it started happening again.

"I look back, and I see I fully didn't understand, I was just really a kid," Aaralyn says. "I thought I was older, and I thought I was more mature, and I had all this exposure and could handle things. Now I see I wasn't able to deal with him and his manipulation and stuff. He started playing on this idea [that] because I cared about him -- I didn't hate him or anything -- that 'Oh I need you,' and I'm the only person who can understand him . . .

"And the abuse started up again on the basis of I was helping get rid of the pains he had in his heart. He had all these weird habits, screaming at night, all because of the pains in his heart, the trauma from when he was being abused. And I bought it wholesale."

In the summer of 1993, her sister Bacardi came to Washington as part of an internship and stopped by the apartment for a visit. Bevel told her that Aaralyn loved to write poetry and asked Aaralyn to read one of her poems. Aaralyn fetched her notebook and began to read a morose poem about a tear. As Bacardi listened, she was struck by the sadness she saw in her sister. She wishes now that she had asked questions. But her life was consumed with school, her internship and her own anger with their father. She left it alone.

"On reflection, she was going through a lot with him," Bacardi says. "He was being her tormentor, and he was also being a monster. She is the daughter of James Bevel the most. She experienced him the most and perceived him as the monster the most."

The case against Bevel rested on a single day in the Leesburg apartment. Told in court, it was more than a single day, of course. It was something that had been building, from the trauma room to the broom under the bed, to the howls of anguish, to the manipulative pleas to his daughter, James plus an e, that only she could make him right again if she would do this one little thing for him: if she would let him penetrate her as a husband would do his wife. He read from the Bible. He told her that Lot slept with his daughters. He told her that God wanted this. After weeks of his persuasion, she finally relented.

When it was done, he sent her to the bathroom where he had already assembled a douche, an old-fashioned one, she recalls, a big red bag with tubes. He told her she had to use it, she had to clean herself out. Once she had, she realized how duped she had been.

"It was premeditated," Aaralyn says with disgust. "It was him knowing exactly what he was going to do."

On the tape made in the Leesburg police station, she asked her father about this:

Aaralyn: "I mean what was the motivation behind you, you know, having sex with me and then, you know, rushing me up to go and douche? What was the motivation behind that?"

It took him a moment to answer.

Bevel: "Because I had no interest in getting you pregnant."

LAST SUMMER, A FEW WEEKS AFTER HIS ARREST, Bevel appeared on a Monday morning at the Loudoun County Courthouse to request a court-appointed attorney. He cast a regal figure as he ascended the stairs to the second floor in a black minister's shirt and jacket with an African prince's hat on his head. His beard looked even grayer in the morning light.

Despite having just turned down an interview request at the end of the previous week -- something he would repeatedly do, always citing his lawyer's advice even when he didn't appear to have a lawyer -- he nonetheless was delighted to be recognized and immediately led a reporter into the courtroom and sat down on a bench.

He talked about Tolstoy and Gandhi. He talked about Myles Horton, the educator who mentored King and Rosa Parks, and said this was the man who had introduced him to nonviolence.

After he'd talked for a while, Bevel was asked why he would request a public defender for such an important case. He waved his hand. "You only need an expensive lawyer if you are trying to stay out of jail," he said.

But wouldn't that be the point? He was, after all, facing the real possibility of going to prison for the rest of his life. Wouldn't an attorney with more time, more staff to work up the best defense possible be better than someone who is burdened all day by pleading out petty robbery cases?

He shook his head.

"Have you ever been to jail?" he asked. "Jail isn't that bad; it's just a place with a lot of guys who need educating."

Then he offered that he welcomed a trial. There are many kinds of sex, he said, and "if I'm unable to convince a jury of my peers of that, then I deserve to go to jail."

ON A MARCH NIGHT IN 1995, Aaralyn sat outside a motel in Selma and wondered how she should kill herself. She had a friend back in Virginia with a gun collection. Maybe she could slip into his house when he was not around, pull a gun out of its case and fire a bullet into her skull. A more likely possibility was to step out into the middle of the street just as a truck came barreling into town. However she did it, it had to be quick. It had to be fatal.

Earlier that day, at a celebration for the 30th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, she'd met Selma's mayor, Joseph Smitherman, who had also been the mayor in 1965. She was standing with her father when the old adversaries came face to face. The mayor told her that of all the civil rights leaders, her father had scared them the most, far more than King. It was supposed to be a compliment, but his words sent a chill through Aaralyn. Until that moment, she'd always thought of her father as crazy, a genius with mental problems. Then, standing with the mayor, he seemed to her like something else. Something sinister.

She had nowhere to go. Her mother's home in Chicago, where she'd returned soon after that day in the Leesburg apartment, was no longer an option. The neighborhood where Helen lived was violent. One time, a group of young men had jumped Aaralyn, pushed her to the ground and beaten her with their fists. Afterward, she'd returned to Leesburg out of desperation. But in Virginia, she had to fend off her father's sexual advances. There seemed no way out.

Yet in that very moment of despair, Aaralyn says, a man appeared outside the motel where she was sitting. She does not know what he was doing in Selma or even who he was, just a white man who said he was from the Washington area. He saw the gloom in her face and told her he had a daughter about the same age as she was. Aaralyn was fortunate, he said. Her life still stretched out before her. Though she didn't tell him about her father, she took comfort in his concern for her. She thinks he saved her that night, this man whose name she never learned. She did not run in front of a truck or go in search of a gun. Instead she went to bed and dreamed of her escape.

It came in the strangest of places: in western Pennsylvania on the grounds of a pacifist religious community known as the Bruderhof. She moved there a few months after the Selma celebration when she met several Bruderhof members at one of her father's peace events in Philadelphia. For a time, it was the perfect place to reinvent herself.

The Bruderhof was a pacifist community founded in Germany. Its members fled to the United States after refusing to fight for Hitler's army. It was a calm place, Aaralyn says, and though the group was nearly all white, she didn't mind. She took on the typical role of an unmarried woman in the Bruderhof, serving as a sort of nanny for a large family. The tensions of the previous years disappeared the first night when she stood outside and stared into a sky of stars.

"It's like you are in this horrible place in your mind . . . and you are in this situation where you see no way out at all, no light at the end of the tunnel, and then there is a way out," Aaralyn remembers. "It's this instant where you say, 'Whoaaa, this works!' . . . It was a whole new world, a different life."

When she left the Bruderhof more than a year later, so much of the past had become a distant memory, she says. She even moved back to the Leesburg apartment. Her father wasn't there. He was off with another group, pursuing some new cause. In a whirlwind, things happened. She moved to Washington, found a job as a waitress in a bar, fell in love with one of her co-workers. They married, moved to the Maryland suburbs and had a baby boy. And then, as the normal arguments of marriage became daily occurrences, they fell out of love and divorced.

That's when she met Nathaniel. And, like everything else in her life, falling for him seemed so incongruous. Nathaniel Mills was an elite speed skater who'd made three U.S. Olympic teams. Afterward, he'd sailed through Georgetown Law School, passing the D.C. bar on his first try. But instead of practicing law, he wanted to teach peace education. For a while, Aaralyn says, they were just friends. She trusted him enough to tell him about her father, a story she almost never shared with anyone outside her family.

Nathaniel was working as a teacher and running a skating club for underprivileged children in Southeast Washington. In the summer of 2006, he was asked to go to Abu Dhabi to teach peace education to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. While he was gone, he needed someone to run an event for his skating club that featured the speed skating star of the 2006 Olympics, Shani Davis. Aaralyn agreed to help. And somewhere in the planning for the Davis appearance, they fell for each other. Neither can really explain it. Aaralyn calls it "a spark." One day, while in the United Arab Emirates, Nathaniel sent her an e-mail with the words "We are marrying." She immediately replied, "Yes!"

Two months later, they were wed. Last month, they had their first child together, a little girl. They called her Athena. The Greek goddess of wisdom, war, the arts, industry, skill and justice.

TWO WEEKS AFTER GIVING BIRTH, Aaralyn, sits on the witness chair in a Loudoun County Circuit courtroom and tells her story. She talks about the nights in Chicago, the letter to her mother, the broom under the bed and, finally, the day in the apartment in Leesburg. She describes all this in the same soft, detached voice that she has told it in the past. Several times, the judge instructs her to lean into the microphone so the jury can hear her. Prosecutor Nicole Wittmann will say later that Aaralyn is one of the best witnesses she has ever had in a case like this.

And when she is done, Aaralyn steps down and waits in the hallway outside with her baby and seven family members for a verdict.

Her father watches her testify with an expressionless gaze, using a pen to trace the outlines of his beard over and over again. But when Wittmann plays the tape of Aaralyn's phone call, and the jury listens for an hour and a half to Bevel's raging and swearing, Wittmann steals a few glances at the defendant. He appears to be smiling.

Bevel spends much of his day on the stand explaining his unconventional views on sex and education. He acknowledges being what he calls a recovering sex addict. But he denies that he ever penetrated Aaralyn and suggests that he is the victim of a conspiracy. "Someone has plotted to destroy my reputation, my being," he tells the jury.

In the end, he cannot escape his own words on the tape. His comment about not wanting to get Aaralyn pregnant dangles in the air. After only three hours of deliberation, the jury finds James Bevel guilty of unlawful fornication.

In those first few moments after her father's conviction, Aaralyn is called back to the stand to describe the impact of Bevel's crime before the jury hands down its sentence. And the woman whose voice has never wavered, who has never seemed angry or sad, who has never expressed hate toward her father, does something she has never done in telling her story.

She sobs.

Her shoulders rock. She dabs at the tears that roll from beneath her glasses. She says that all she wants now is to be a good mother and wife. "The hardest part is I love my father, and I wish he loved me as much as I love him and had the humility to put some effort into understanding that."

Bevel, who is about to be sentenced to 15 years, simply stares at the daughter who is sending him to prison. It is as if she is a stranger. Not his child at all.

Les Carpenter is a writer for The Post Sports section. He can be reached at carpenterl@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Tuesday at noon.