Here is what I would have said to both of them:

Speak these truths aloud, for it is only in silence that horror can persist. The courage to call a thing by its true name galvanizes the human spirit to address it. If that condition serves one’s desires, it will be embraced with a full heart. If it is destructive to one’s path, it will be deliberately dismantled over time.

And so it was that instead of facing the truth of our demons, my family went on in silence year after year, our days routinely punctuated by bursts of violence. After an argument over something mundane—who had misplaced the car keys, who would pick up the girls after school—my father threw punches at my mother. Over time, my brother, John, whom my classmates regarded as if he were a part-time print model and part-time professional athlete, grew into a muscular man of five foot ten with the physical power to intervene. My father was just shorter than the average American male, and fat: It was his emotional instability and not his build that was intimidating. John would pull my father off my mother and then the two men would begin to tussle.

Once, in my early teenage years, I flung myself into an argument that my father and my brother were having in an effort to protect John, but as I was just five feet tall and weighed not even one hundred pounds, I grossly misgauged my strength. When a punch careened against my arm, I was thrown back onto the floor. My mother screamed for me to move out of the way and for my father to stop. John then flipped atop my father to wrestle him into submission, every muscle in his young body pinning the madman to the floor. I scooted back and ran to my room for some type of weapon. Could I use a book or one of my larger troll dolls to pummel my father? What if I missed him and hit my brother? What if that gave the monster the advantage and then none of us would be safe? Yes, I thought about calling the police, but in that neighborhood, you didn’t call the police on your own family.

With the final DC home, house number three, we had arrived on the “Gold Coast.” Areas colloquially referred to as the Gold and Platinum Coasts of Washington, DC, were so named because they were historically home to Washington’s black elite. I landed there in the fourth grade with a new status, at a new private school for girls, the National Cathedral School. Like all elites, we didn’t expose our private, upper-middle-class shame to the public sphere. Why would we have? After all, we had worked too hard to get here to risk a crack in the fragile fa?ade that fronted our legitimacy. All elites knew the code: Take your pills with your cocktail, use your cosmetics to cover the blemishes and bruises, clean up quickly, whatever it takes so you can present a smiling, perfectly coiffed and clad self to the world.

I broke this code of privilege only once. I was a tween when, one Saturday afternoon, I fled the melee in the second-floor master bedroom where my teenage brother was fighting my father to protect my mother and as my mother was fighting my father on the periphery to defend my brother, and my sister was somewhere unidentifiable but not visibly in the fray. I ran downstairs to the phone docked on the wall outside the kitchen. Tucked in the dark where no one would see me, I desperately dialed.

I heard: “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“I’m at home. We’re not safe. My father is hitting my mother. He’s fighting with my brother. We’re not safe here!” I whispered into the phone.

“Where are you located?” the voice asked.

I looked around and, with my hand over my mouth, stealthily told them where I was calling from and what was happening.

“We’ll send a unit right out to you,” the operator said.

“Please, please hurry,” I begged before hanging up.

I ran upstairs to my parents’ room. As my father and brother fought and my mother swatted my father with her shoe, I managed to yell out, “I’ve called the police. They’re on their way!”

This was my leverage. The beating stopped, but the threats continued to fly. My father threatened to have my brother arrested. My mother retorted that she would never allow such a thing and that it was my father who should be arrested.

They were still arguing when the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs to open the front door. Two male DC police officers were standing there. They adjusted their gaze down from the iron grate peephole to see a little girl framed in the doorway. One officer had a hand on his holster; the other officer stood with his arms crossed. As if in stereo, they fired off rounds of questions at me.

“Did anyone here call nine-one-one?”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Is there a disturbance here?”

“We received a call about a domestic dispute.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but standing on the doorstep looking out into my quiet, placid neighborhood, I found the answers hard, so hard, to utter. I saw the police car parked on the street in front of my house. I wondered if the Fraziers, next door, were home. I wondered if Sammy, my crush who lived around the corner, would ride by on his bike and see the police car and me with my side ponytail and favorite striped dress. At least I was well dressed, I thought, for my unexpected guests and any unsuspecting onlookers.

“Miss,” the police officer on the left said, jolting me back to attention. “Did you call the police?”

It was as if he had asked me to recite the complete value of pi. I could have given him a basic idea of its beginning, but I had no idea in what order it unfolded and no clue about how it might end. I could feel my breathing accelerate as I thought about what I might say, but then the adults rushed to the door, whisking me aside.

I stood in the corner of the foyer as my mother, brother, and father spoke to the police. As far as I could hear, each of them was frantically interjecting his or her version of the story. Emboldened by the police presence, my sister and I chimed in to corroborate our team’s account.

The police listened quietly and with little patience. Finally, they said, “Well, if you all want to stay with your stories, we’ll just have to arrest you both,” indicating both my father and brother.

I could feel my sister’s heart sink with my own. How had these officers parsed the blame to dismantle justice in this way? How did my father’s account equal the collective account of us four? How had my call yielded their indifference instead of assistance, which was yet another punishing blow?

My mother spoke up right away, her voice filled with dread. “No, no, no, I don’t want my son arrested”—and because she couldn’t risk my brother being jailed, she then said she didn’t want to press any charges against my father, either.

And that was the end of the police involvement. The two officers looked at my parents and, without saying anything else, turned and went back to their cruiser.

After they left, I realized that there really wasn’t anyone we could turn to. There was no law here. No help. When assessing the danger, the police had not differentiated between my father and my brother. They had not asked me or my sister if we were safe. Without so much as a verbal censure to my father, they had simply abandoned a woman and her children to a clear danger in their house.

Worse perhaps, I had broken the code of how “good” families behave, only to find that traditional avenues would neither protect nor serve me.

We never spoke of the 911 call—no one ever mentioned it—and I never dialed those three numbers again. When my parents fought—and they continued to—I just prayed to my angel that it would all end well one day. And one gorgeous fall day years later, it did end—in a way. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that on that gorgeous fall day to come, I was able to see a way out.

Years after I called the police, the usual battle was raging as I cowered in my room, contemplating, once again, what I might use as a weapon to protect myself and my family against my father. Then I heard someone leave the house, the door slamming shut. My father had stormed upstairs and thrown clothes in a bag. He then got his car keys and left the house without saying a word, driving away for what all of us hoped would be forever but collectively knew would be for only a few days.

I hesitantly emerged into the hallway. My mother stood there holding my brother’s hand; he was bleeding from a deep wound in his left thumb. Our father had bitten him while John had had him pinned to the floor.

As my mother ripped the hem of John’s frayed shirt to fashion a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding, I couldn’t help but wonder: What kind of animal bites a fellow human being, his own son, like this?