trigger warning: religious trauma and abuse!
alice grew up in biloxi, mississippi in 1901. while canonically, her father was a jeweler and pearl trader - my headcanon is that he was also very religious - and came from a line religious family members. her mother started out not very religious, but over the years of living with her husband and enduring his abuse, she herself turned towards his religion as an act of attempting to please him and stop the abuse.
alice’s visions enraged him. she endured such heavy beatings due to her visions that she soon kept them quiet, though the townsfolk was already abuzz. during this time, alice’s last beating involved her tumbling down the stairs and breaking her leg.
it was two and a half years later that alice spoke up again, to warn a friend about a terrible premonition she had had - a premonition that her friend was going to be in a great train accident. her friend hadn’t listened, and when the accident game true, alice was branded as witch and changeling by the townspeople. her punishment for this: a black eye, broken nose, slit lip, and four months spent locked in a windowless room with a small, pathetic bed, a desk with a chair, and a bible to keep her company. twice a day, her mother would bring her meals.
by this time, alice had retreated so far into herself that her eyes were dark, a smile never graced her face, and she rarely spoke - when she was rarely did, there was no lightness or happiness to be found in her voice.
a year later, alice tried to warn her cousin not to board the rms titanic, for she had a strong vision that it was going to sink and result in many deaths. he didn’t listen to her, and he died. the townsfolk, and her family, placed the blame solely on alice, all under the impression that she had cursed him.
for three years, alice was kept in that solitary room again. her father would visit her every night, demanding her to quote verbatim from the bible - if she failed or made even a small mistake, he would whip her. he also frequently brought in priests to perform painful exorcisms on her, with the mistaken belief that he could cure her of her “evilness” and bring her to the light.
after her three years spent in solitary, alice rarely left her house, preferring to spend much of her time in the gardens surrounding their property. at least once a week, alice’s father would once again demand bible passages from her, and he would occasionally bring priests for more experiments.
alice kept quiet for nearly 2 years after she escaped solitary confinement. she only spoke up when she started having visions of her mother’s death, and for months her mother was cautious, but her father didn’t believe any of it. after months of precautions with nothing serious happening, her mother put her guard down, and was eventually killed. while alice saw it happen and tried to explain that it was murder, her mother's death was declared accidental, and her father silenced her.
her father remarried within 6 months, the whole thing having been planned for over a year before her mother passed. alice has another vision, this time revealing the face of her father behind her mother’s murder. this vision shows that alice is next, and she flees to her aunt and uncle’s house, though they do not welcome her in, still under the belief that she cursed their son.
alice’s father and step-mother quietly pay to have alice taken to the insane asylum, and tell all the townsfolk that she had died. this put an end to her religious trauma from her father, but is far from the end of her story.
