No luck.
I was escorted down the hall to meet Mr. Tax Assessor. When his secretary called to him that his student replacement had arrived, he came out of his office with a big smile that vanished when he saw me. He exchanged glances with his aide, while I read disappointment in his eyes. He was cordial to me—for all of five minutes before he dismissed me to his aide. I never saw Mr. Tax Assessor again.
Around mid-morning I was taken across the street for coffee and donuts with four local politicians. When we walked into the coffee shop, everything stopped. The people stopped talking, the waiters stopped waiting, even the coffee being poured stopped in midair. All eyes were fixed on this little black girl surrounded by four white politicians. I squared my shoulders, locked my knees, pushed my head up and glided across the floor with the biggest smile on my face. When we reached our table, the coffee started pouring, they started talking, and the waiters went back to serving.
“Well, Brenda, what do you want to do when you finish high school?” The conversation at the table turned toward me.
“I really like psychology, and I love to work with children. I want to be a child psychologist,” I declared.
They turned beet red and looked quickly at each other. After they recovered, someone cleared his throat and said, “Oh, my son is a child psychologist.”
Then another said, “Brenda, you seem to be a very bright girl. You will probably make a good secretary.”
The words in my head screamed, A good what? How dare you! Your son can be a child psychologist, but I can’t? How dare you try to dissuade me from my dream! But the words coming out of my mouth were said, calmly and with conviction, “Oh yes, I would make a good secretary. But I am going to be a child psychologist.”
They started to play the invisible game with me after that. You know—talking like you are not there. But I didn’t care. I had made my stand.
As the day rolled on, I longed for something to validate my existence. On several occasions I wanted to scream, “I am here and I matter! I am somebody!”
When lunch finally rolled around, I was grateful. Only one more hour and I would be free from this alien land. I sat at a table with two other students who looked more bored than me. The keynote address was going to be from the student mayor, but I wasn’t really interested in who was speaking or what was going to be said. I felt like I had been in a fight all day to defend my existence. All I wanted to do was leave City Hall and put this whole day behind me.
The “mayor’s” introduction was made, and everyone started to applaud. As I swung my chair around and looked toward the stage, my mouth fell open, my eyes widened, and my whole body swelled with pride. I was looking at the student mayor-for-a-day and he looked just like me!
His skin was mocha chocolate, and with his full lips and his parted afro he represented us, he represented me. He was the most articulate, well-versed young man in the place, and I loved him for that—for with him, on this day, we would be counted. I sat in my seat smiling and thought to myself, Look out, world, because here I come!
That day, I decided I was going to be successful no matter what anyone said or felt. I was just as good as anyone else, and I could be anything I desired to be—even if my skin was black, maybe even because my skin was black!
Forty years later, a black man chose to become mayor of San Francisco—and he did. A black woman chose to become the city’s tax assessor—and she did.
I did not decide to become a politician, nor did I decide to become a child psychologist, and no, I did not decide to become a secretary. I chose to become a child protective worker, and the most important part is that I chose—and I did!
Ahmon’dra (Brenda) McClendon
At the End of My Block
Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.
Jesse Jackson
My beautiful sisters, frying their brains, going insane, right at the end of my block.
My exquisite brothers, exterminating, terminating and self-assassinating, all for the sake of the rock, at the end of my block.
Mommas being robbed on my back doorstep;
babies being killed at my feet; brothers executing brothers on my front lawn; someone’s grandfather is dying from not enough to eat, right at the end of my block.
What is this bizarre, demented, deranged and insane occurrence? This is life, breath and existence in my world, at the end of my block?
Huh, no this ain’t no day in hell.
No, this ain’t no day in jail.
No this isn’t even a day down skid row.
This is a day on my block.
Should I run? Should I hide?
Should I leave? I want to cry.
Should I become a part of the problem?
Lord, how do I become a part of the solution?
Alls I know is that on my block, I am a part of, and I will stand strong and tall, not to buckle and not to fall, for I am a quilt sewn from the backbones of my great mothers. For I am not just a descendent of . . . I am a descendent of greatness, manifested from the pain, suffering, tears and lives of my great ancestors. For I am an all-purpose cleaner, working day and night to scrub away the spot, to eliminate the stain and remove the pain that sits at the end of my block.
Lisa Nichols
Excuse Me, Who’s Just Another Statistic?
As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
Proverbs 23:7
“Are you pregnant?” asked my eighth-grade teacher.
“Yes.” My answer was barely audible.
The full broomstick skirt I had made in my home economics class no longer concealed my protruding belly. At the tender age of thirteen, I was six months pregnant and had gotten that way the same day I lost my virginity. My teacher marched me to the principal’s office.
It’s been forty-nine years and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the expressions on my teacher’s and principal’s faces: a combination of sorrow and disgust. But, even more so, I will never forget their penetrating words.
“What a tragedy. She’s an honor roll student,” my teacher said, with tears in her eyes.
“And now all she will ever be is just another welfare statistic,” the principal responded.
Their words pierced my heart like arrows and echoed in my head, adding judgments and anger to my already overburdened load of emotions, “. . . just another welfare statistic.”
When Mama suspected I might be pregnant, she took me to the doctor for an examination. A single parent herself with five children and two jobs, all she needed was another mouth to feed. When the doctor suggested that because of my age I should have an abortion, my mother asked me what I wanted to do. What a dilemma! I didn’t want to be a mother, but the alternative seemed even worse.
My childhood hadn’t been easy and motherhood would be even harder, but I made my choice. In spite of her deep and understandable disappointment, Mother said, “Well, we are going to have a baby!” She supported me—no matter what!
This year I celebrated my sixtieth birthday. My son is forty-seven. Today, I am an ordained minister married to a wonderful man of God who is highly respected throughout the country. I have established numerous ministries throughout the city of Detroit and authored five books. We have received a Point of Light Award from former President George Bush for our community service work. I have mentored many single mothers and young girls over the past twenty-five years, emphasizing that they don’t have to be just another statistic.
If you’re going to count me among your statistics, consider this: that I graduated from high school with honors at the age of sixteen, have never been on welfare and this year was voted “One of the Most Influential African American Women in Metropolitan Detroit.”
Minister Mary Edwards
My Mother’s Gift
Diptheria swept through my neighborhood when I was a small boy and it took many lives, including that of my little buddy, a boy everyone
called “Gramps.” He and I contracted it about the same time and we became backyard buddies; we played together because no one else would for fear of contracting what we had.
When Gramps’s condition worsened, his mother got enough money together so that she could afford to take him to the hospital. He died there. It was my first exposure to the death of someone my own age. I had thought only old people died. I could not understand why Gramps would die, especially since, at the wake, he looked to be just asleep.
With the death of Gramps and several other neighborhood children, my mother became extremely protective of me. She was determined not to lose me. She refused to put me in the hospital because Gramps had died there. She talked the doctors into giving her the expensive medicine so that she could administer it herself. I can still envision how her hands shook when she gave it to me because she was so fearful of wasting any of it.
Mama did not sleep much during my illness but one night when she had gone to her own room to get some rest, I awoke to see a figure at the end of my bed. I recognized Miss Henry, an elderly neighbor whom I had often visited before her death several months earlier. Miss Henry loved me. I would sit by her bedside for hours and talk to her.
When I saw that it was Miss Henry who had come to my bedside, I yelled for my mama. “Mama! Miss Henry is in my room!” Mama came running. She was angry. My mama believed in stories of dead people who come back to try to take loved ones with them. After nursing me along, she surely was not going to let Miss Henry get me.
Mama came storming into the room cursing, “If she ain’t dead yet, she soon will be!”
I had NO idea how Mama was going to kill Miss Henry AGAIN! But Mama didn’t get the chance. When she came into the room and turned the light on, Miss Henry disappeared.
Mama kept cursing just in case she was hanging around somewhere. “Don’t you come in here ever again messin’ with my boy!” Mama said. “Stay outta this house!”
After her cursing wore down, Mama went to praying at my bedside and apparently the prayers did their work. In the next few days, the diptheria began to release its hold on me.
Then, just as it appeared that I was recovering, I came to her one morning after awakening and my voice was gone. Mama was devastated. After all she had gone through in dealing with my illness, she feared it had sneaked back in and robbed me of my voice forever.
That night, she set to praying again, “Lord, give the child my voice. I’ve talked enough in my life. I don’t need my voice no more.”
In the morning, I awakened and I called to my mother. My voice had returned. My mama said, “Thank God!”
Or she tried to say that. Her voice was nothing but a squeak. I swear it is true.
She went to the medicine cabinet and took some of my diptheria medicine herself, and in a few hours her voice returned. But always after that, if I sassed my mother or she heard me curse, she reminded me of that time.
She would say, “You talk like that again, I’ll take my voice back. I asked Jesus to give you my voice and he did. You use it like that, I’ll take it back.
“You know Jesus does what I ask of him!”
I intend to use my mama’s voice for good, lest I lose it for good. I urge you to use your talents and gifts to their fullest, too.
Les Brown
4
ACCEPTING
ME, LOVING
YOU
I find in being black, a thing of beauty: a joy, a strength; a secret cup of gladness, a native land in neither time nor space, a native land in every Negro face! Be loyal to yourselves: your skin, your hair, your lips, your Southern speech, your laughing kindness, your Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.
Ossie Davis
Who’s That Calling My Name?
Go home and tell your daughters they’re beautiful!
Stokely Carmichael
My real name is Vici, pronounced Veeshee. But most people call me Vicki or Vic.
In my younger days, when I wasn’t as bright as I knew I should have been, I was in a relationship with a real fool, and everyone knew it but me. This guy was so beautiful, prettier than handsome, kind of like Prince. He had long eyelashes, smooth tan skin and a rock-hard body. He was yummy and he knew it; he was also cruel and he knew that, too.
But I was in love despite his shortcomings, and I was going to be the one woman who would change him into the loving, kind man I desperately wanted him to be. He had his own ideas, one of which was to change me into a Halle Berry look-alike. We all know the only sistah who looks like Halle Berry is Halle Berry. But I gladly obliged because after my miraculous transformation, he was really going to love me.
“Vic, you got potential, you can look like a movie star, all you have to do is . . . ,” he began to convince me.
My mind told me to run for my life, but I loved him so I stayed with him.
He wanted me to lose about thirty pounds from my 150-pound, five-foot-five-inches frame, tone up my flabby midsection and get rid of my unsightly cellulite by starving myself and working out seven days a week.
Armed with prescription diet pills given to me by a quack doctor, a no-carb, high-protein diet, six days of hard cardio and four days of strength training, I was well on my way. The only thing that kept me from passing out was my fantasy of him being swept away by my beauty and grace after I lost the weight. I imagined the look on his face as he would take me in his arms and declare his everlasting love. All I had to do is get through about thirty step classes and fifty pounds of grilled chicken.
I lost seventeen pounds and I looked great.
“Damn, baby, you got it going on. All you gotta do is lose fifteen more pounds, and you’ll be a knockout. I can’t wait to show you off,” he said.
The fact that I was hungry didn’t matter because my man was looking at me like he never looked at me before. I had given up all my favorite foods, including bacon cheeseburgers from my favorite fast-food restaurant.
But one day when he wasn’t around I figured I could spare one nine-hundred-calorie meal. I decided to indulge my taste buds and just work it off with an extra workout. I went to the fast-food restaurant and ordered a bacon cheeseburger combo. It was hot and juicy; the melted cheese stuck to my fingers and the smell of onions overwhelming my breath—and the hot crispy fries were delicious! It was so good, I wanted to call on Jesus!
After I ate the burger I cried at the table. I tried to hide my tears from a group of elderly people drinking coffee across from me. If I gained another ounce my man wouldn’t want me, so I rushed to the bathroom and did what I had accused only white girls of doing: I stuck my fingers down my throat and gagged, but nothing came up. So many thoughts ran through my mind. Black girls shouldn’t be bulimic. I’m supposed to have a round, full figure.
Once again, I plunged my fingers down my throat; it was painful. It was really irritating me that I wasn’t being successful, but on the third attempt I finally released the contents of my belly. It was disgusting. I had a terrible headache from the gagging, my throat was burning from the stomach acid, I began to tear from the strain, and I peed on myself, not to mention the bad breath. Why would anyone do something like this?
When I saw my boyfriend that night, I told him that I had made myself throw up, hoping that it would play on his sympathy. Instead of loving me and telling me that I was okay being a size nine, he congratulated me on making a wise choice.
“Better in the toilet than on your thighs,” he said. But the worst part was, I was happy he was finally pleased with me, so the bingeing and purging continued for the next few months.
I always had a good relationship with the Lord. I was cool with Him and He was cool with me. But during this time I didn’t pray much because I didn’t need Him all up in my business and dropping hints about the low-down-dirty-no-good-dog I had on my hands. In other words, I was running away from the truth.
Now, I knew deep down inside that I was destroying myself and that I probably wouldn’t get the guy anyway. But see, growing up
I was never the pretty girl. I was the dork with glasses, and at last a beautiful man was interested in me and I didn’t care at what price. So the Lord could do all the whispering in my ear he wanted; I wasn’t listening because I needed to win this time.
One night at the neighborhood café, he said matter-of-factly, “I met this girl. She’s awesome, and she’s beautiful and she’s thin. . . .”
His cruelty felt like a dull knife gnawing a wound into my soul. I held my peace. Never let them see you cry; never let them know they got to you, the words of my sister’s advice echoed in my mind.
The next day, numbed by stupidity and pain and tight exercise shorts, I went to the gym to get in an extra workout; it was supposed to be my day off, but I wasn’t going to lose to the skinny girls.
While on the treadmill, I heard someone call me by my real name. “Vici.”
“Vici!” I heard the voice a second time. I looked all around but didn’t see anyone even vaguely familiar.
“Vici, leave it alone and give it to Me!”
It was the voice of God. Instantly I could feel my anxiety, my sadness and problems release from my body as if someone had pulled a plug from a drain. I realized I hadn’t been listening to the still voice of God for the two years I was with my boyfriend. I had pushed God aside. Now He came to my rescue to give me my life back and to claim me once again. I knew it was God who spoke to me that day because he called me by my name, he didn’t say “Vic” or “Vicki,” he said “Vici.” He spoke truth and reminded me who I really am and who I always should be: myself.
Chicken Soup for the African American Soul Page 13
