Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul Read online

  Sunday I prayed that you come and learnme howtowrite.”

  I explained I had been busy trying to get other folks to register.

  “When I gots up this mornin’ I was feeling something extra good was gonna happen today. I cleaned my house real good. I felt so grand I come on down the road. I saw you, and I knew what that good was. Look what I cain do.”

  She bent down and picked up a stick. With a steady hand she wrote Rebecca slowly and deliberately in the sand.

  She was right, good things were coming, but they were much bigger than me.

  Sherie Labedis

  Legacy

  And so our mothers and grandmothers have,

  more often than not anonymously, handed on

  the creative spark, the seed of the flower they

  themselves never hoped to see —or like a sealed

  letter they could not plainly read.

  Alice Walker

  Somehow, it just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the way that I was brought up, but it was hard for me to say it. Although I felt blessed and honored to have the opportunity, I just had a hard time saying aloud that I was “a graduate student at Harvard University.” After all, I know good and well that I’m just a country girl from Sweet-water, Tennessee, who never saw herself as the Ivy League type, but what impression did that title give people who didn’t know me?

  I was not alone in this dilemma. Many of my black and Latino colleagues in the Graduate School of Education felt the same way. Several of us had to admit that when we told people we were going to graduate school and they asked where, we answered evasively, “Uh, Boston.” It wasn’t that we were embarrassed about being smart or weren’t proud to be there; it was just that the perception people have of “Hah-vahd,” conjured up images of privilege and snobbery. Many of us were first–generation college graduates from lower to middle-class families, and most of us were there because we wanted to give back something of educational value to the underserved students of color in America’s schools. We actually discussed more than once whether going to Harvard was an asset or liability when our goal was to return to the neighborhoods we came from, “keep it real,” and be taken seriously by regular folks. Would we build a “barrier of bourgeoisie” by having a Harvard degree?

  Very quickly it was June and graduation day arrived. An incredibly rich year of reading, writing and discussing educational issues had flown by, and I was standing outside in a processional line with my dorm mates and new friends-so-close-we-were-almost-family from the Black Student Union. I sat dazed in my cap and gown on the same lawn where I’d seen Nelson Mandela receive an honorary degree back in September. I sat in a row of brown faces on the lawn with its giant oak trees that had been there since 1636 and tried to comprehend what in the world I was doing there. While the platform dignitaries waxed eloquent, it felt surreal. I snapped back to reality when it was Hazel’s turn to take the platform. Hazel Trice Edney, graduating from the Kennedy School of Government, was my friend from the dorm and one of the sharpest sisters I have ever met. She had won the speech contest and was believed to be the first African American woman ever to give the graduate student address at a Harvard graduation. Hazel from Louisa, Virginia, who had grown up in a home with no indoor plumbing and became a single welfare mother at age fifteen, had managed to earn her college degree and risen through journalism in the black press, covering politicians like Governor L. Douglas Wilder. She would soon start a Congressional fellowship in Washington, D.C., in the office of Senator Edward Kennedy. Her delivery of the speech was flawless, and we were all proud to know her.

  Suddenly, listening to Hazel, proudly watching her represent all of us, it hit me. This wasn’t about me. I was there as a representative. I looked up into the branches of the centuries-old trees and thought about what they would have looked like back in 1636. I thought about where my ancestors would have been in 1636 . . . 1736 . . . 1836 . . . even 1936, and how remote the possibility seemed that any of their daughters would ever be at Harvard. I thought about Grandma Mildred, valedictorian of her Cook High class with her career options so limited. No, this degree was not about me at all. This was about standing on the shoulders of my black grandmothers who scrubbed floors and cared for babies—both theirs and others’. Black women whose potential went untapped and whose intelligence was so long ignored. Women whose great minds could have been idle, except they rerouted genius, pouring it into rearing the next generation. This degree was for my grandma, who was a farmer’s wife and a housekeeper, but never just that, like so many black women seen only as the shadow domestic by the outside world but who stood out as pillars of dignity in their own communities. This degree was dedicated to a woman who had to sacrifice many of her personal dreams as a young woman, but made sure all eight of her children had a respect for education and would ascend to the level of their own potential. It was dedicated to a woman who passed on heritage to her numerous grandchildren with old Ebony and Jet magazines, her gardens and recipes, family stories and photo albums. I was here because she could not be, but had the self-respect and insight to pass something significant on to her offspring.

  Sometimes I still have a hard time knowing just what to say when people ask me about graduate school, but right there in Harvard Yard, I made my peace with it. Grandma Mildred didn’t know it, but when I walked across that stage, I did not just get my own degree. I held in my hands her honorary degree in motherwit, holistic medicine, childhood development, home economics, culinary arts and botany earned by life experience. That degree was about stepping up to accept my responsibility to follow in her footsteps and pass something on. Thank you, Grandma, for your legacy.

  Jerilyn Upton Sanders

  Letters of Love

  Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  The doorbell rang, I moved the curtains back to see who it was and recognized the big brown truck before I even saw the UPS uniform at the door. I hadn’t ordered anything, but everyone loves to get packages, so I smiled like a kid at Christmastime as I opened the front door.

  “I have a package for this address, will you sign for it?” the deliveryman asked.

  I obliged him and said, “Thank you.”

  As I closed the door, I looked at the package and saw the out-of-state zip code in the upper left-hand corner and knew it was from my mother. I removed the thick brown wrapping paper to reveal a small, simple box with no letter of introduction. That was a strange action for my mother; she always, at the least, attached a letter saying “hello” and giving me the lowdown concerning the lives of the rest of the family. A little bewildered, I opened the box and stared at its contents. There were lots of letters inside, some in the handwriting of a small child, some with a more mature penmanship, but all were from me and addressed to my grandmother. Nearly every envelope was sealed with the phrase “In God’s Care” written on the back. A tear rolled down my face, and my cathartic journey began.

  Grandma had passed three short months earlier. It was a shock to the family, who all seemed to have thought that our “rock” would never leave us, but even more of a shock to me because I was supposed to be on a plane that very morning to go and visit her.

  The call came at 6:42 A.M. Central Standard Time.

  “Lori, I know you are on your way here, and I struggled with whether or not to tell you now or wait till you got here. I didn’t want you to be emotional while traveling, but I could not let you come here and be in a state of shock once you arrived. Grandma is gone. She went quietly in her sleep last night,” my mother said. I remember those words as if they are etched inside my eyelids for me to see every time I close my eyes. Those words haunt me.

  “Gone, gone where? What are you talking about? I know you don’t mean . . . gone as in dead? I’m on my way to see her; she can’t be gone!” was my reply. “Mom, this isn’t funny. It’s a cruel joke, Mom. Why would you say something like that? My grandma isn’t dead. I’ll see you in a few hours,
Mom.” My husband heard the back end of the conversation and saw my legs buckle, so he took the phone from me, and he continued the conversation with my mother.

  Even though I protested to the contrary, my grandma was gone.

  I got on the plane and returned to my childhood surroundings. I appeared strong to the rest of the family so that I could hold them all up. That was the way I was raised, taking care of others. As I walked in Grandma’s house, the smell was the same, kind of like soap and mothballs mixed with home cooking. The furniture was in the same spots as I remembered, and I immediately had visions of myself as a child running into the kitchen to sit near the stove and talk to her as she cooked, sing along to the radio and nibble on whatever masterpiece was brewing in the oven.

  Grandma was a great cook. The kitchen was always filled with the smell of fried bologna sandwiches after school and fried chicken, greens and sweet potato pie at dinnertime.

  Everyone in the house sat down together to eat at the same table and would actually talk to one another without the aid of the television set. And if the phone rang, it did not get answered.

  That vision was quickly shattered by the reality that the sound of her beautiful alto voice would never penetrate those walls again. I fought back the tears and helped with the funeral arrangements. I allowed my mother to grieve, and I took care and control of everything else. After all, it was my mother’s mother; I had to be strong for her.

  Everyone knew how close I was to my grandma. She was my world and my inspiration, so the few tears I shed instead of a more dramatic response was a telltale sign to all that I was in denial. Everyone knew I had not grieved; they were all waiting for me to break down, and secretly, so was I. I just never thought it would be at the hands of the UPS guy delivering a small box three months later.

  My denial seeped out of me as I looked in the box. It was an exorcism of sorts. The fact that no letter came with it explaining its contents allowed me to imagine that the box was delivered from heaven directly from Grandma. I had been in denial asking myself, Did you give her enough flowers while she was here? I had reassured myself that even though I lived thousands of miles away, I had showed her love across the miles, and I had always called a couple times a month, but a small voice inside me had been questioning, Could I have done more?

  I sat in the middle of my living room floor for two hours or more. As I shuffled through letter after letter, I saw it right there in writing. My whole life was chronicled out in letters that I had sent to Grandma, and now they were sealed within one small box. There were so many of them, and I sat and read them all—each and every letter. I cried, I screamed, I laughed, and I reflected on my life. Middle and high school were in those letters; army life, marriage and motherhood were in those letters. My thoughts, my hopes and my dreams were all encompassed in the words and pages of those letters. I was able to see that even though I was miles and miles away, I had shared it all with my grandma.

  There were things there that I had forgotten; thoughts I did not remember having or sharing. Some intimate feelings that most would not expect a young girl to be telling her grandmother, yet I told her. There were letters where I referred to my husband of fifteen years as “my boyfriend.” Thoughts of how I was going to get a raise at work and would make $1,000 a month, and how I thought that was a lot of money. There was happiness, fear, sadness, joy and pain, all in black and white and told to the special person in my life.

  As I sat there in the middle of my living room reading my life and reintroducing me to myself. I said a thank-you prayer to Grandma, sure that she knew I needed those letters, the letters she had held onto for so many years. She had reached down from heaven and used my mother and the UPS guy to deliver them to me so that I could release my guilt and my grief. It was as if she looked down on me and said, “Child, all is well in my eyes. I’ve always known that you loved me, and now I rest, as always, In God’s Care .”

  Lorraine M. Elzia

  Walking the Lessons of Life

  My family directly and my people indirectly

  have given me the kind of strength that enables

  me to go anywhere.

  Maya Angelou

  “Wake up, baby. We need to get ready to go before the sun gets too high up in the sky.”

  I heard Nanny speaking to me, but I did not want to move. My sheets were freshly washed, smooth and oh so warm against my skin. I tried to ignore her as I snuggled up closer to my Raggedy Ann doll.

  “Baby, we have a long walk today to get to cousin Mittie’s house.We don’t want to get caught out in that hot sun, now do we? Get up, girl, and I mean now, or I’ll leave without you!”

  At the thought of her actually leaving me behind, I ran to the bathroom and began to brush my teeth. I washed my face and ran to the breakfast table to sit down to eat.

  We walked out of the door just when the sun was rising, and our journey down 118th Street began. It was nice walking down the street holding hands. It had been six months since I had seen the person whom I loved most of all in the world.

  “So, baby, how is school? Do you like your classmates?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think I like them.”

  “What do you mean ‘you think’ you like them?”

  “Well there is a girl named Carol who is mean to all the girls. She is really mean to a new girl named Theresa.” Nanny took my hand and squeezed it to let me know she was really listening to me and that I could tell her what was on my mind.

  “Carol hangs around with a lot of other girls and they follow behind Theresa in the hallways and call her names behind her back. I feel so sorry for her because she looks so sad.”

  “What are you doing when the other girls tease Theresa?”

  “I try to look at her and smile. I even asked her if she needed a pencil one day, because I have a whole bunch of them that you bought me for school.”

  “That is nice, baby. Always treat people right, and before you say mean or hurtful things to others, remember to ask yourself if you would want someone to hurt your feelings in that way. I am sure your answer will always be that you wouldn’t.”

  Within just a few blocks, Nanny taught me to treat people the way I wanted to be treated.

  “Your yard sure looks nice,” Nanny said to the lady gardening.

  “Why thank you!” said the short, round brown-skinned lady. Nanny walked up to the fence and began carrying on a conversation with her. They talked about flowers and watering grass. Then they started talking about church and shopping. It seemed like she was standing there for hours.

  “Well Ms. Rose it was nice to meet you. Maybe I will see you again when I am walking by.”

  “It was nice to meet you too, Ms. Fannie.”

  “Nanny,” I said as I broke my silence. “I thought you knew that lady already.”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t know her already, but now she is someone I know.”

  Another block and Nanny taught me to be social, that talking to people makes new friends.

  Although I was the younger of the two of us it seemed as though Nanny’s energy was endless. She moved each leg back and forth with the strut of a broad peacock and the swish of a runway model.

  “Nanny, I’m hot. Can we stop and get some ice cream at the drug store, please?”

  “Girl, it is too early to be eating ice cream!”

  “I know, but I am hot and tired. Please, Nanny, please!”

  I begged.

  “The last time I bought you ice cream, you didn’t even eat the whole thing. You let it melt all over your hands and kept asking me to hold it while you played at the playground. You ended up throwing it away.”

  My lips began to poke out, and my face turned into the likes of a prune. I let her know that I was not happy with her comments and that I was not going to talk to her the rest of the way. I folded my arms in front of me and walked with my head up in the air. She just looked at me and laughed. She kept right on walking and never said a word for the rest of the block, bu
t during the course of that block, Nanny taught me to waste not, want not.

  Finally, we got to a bus stop bench, and Nanny said, “Let’s sit here for a while and rest.”

  “Nanny, can we please catch the bus the rest of the way?”

  “Why would we do that?” she asked with a smile on her face. “Exercise is good for your legs and your heart. I have been walking since I was a little girl in Alabama. I used to walk with my Grandma Harriet just like you are walking with me now, and I walked with your mama when she was a little girl just like you. I didn’t have a car, but I didn’t let that stop me from going where I wanted to go.” She sounded so proud and independent. Her life had taught her to stand on her own two feet and not to wait for anyone to take her where she needed to go. In the course of this block, Nanny had taught me those same things and that exercise is important and good for your health.

  We sat at the bus stop for about fifteen minutes then we crossed the street to go to the corner store to buy soda pop. Nanny loved soda, and she said that I could have any flavor I wanted for being such a good walker today. This block is where she taught me that persistence brings rewards.

  And in the last block she taught me the joy of accomplishing goals.

  “Nanny, I think I see cousin Mittie’s house!”

  “Are you sure? Do you remember what it looks like? You know you were a lot younger the last time we went to visit her.”

  “I think that is it because there is a lady standing on the porch waving at us.”

  She laughed at my reasoning, “Well, I guess you are right then.”

  As we approached the old white house we could see cousin Mittie standing on the porch with a big, loving smile on her face. You could tell that she and Nanny were related because they were both tall, with brown-sugar skin and high cheekbones. She came down from the steps to greet us with her arms stretched open to give us hugs and kisses.