Mama Bear

by Shirley Smith

  We received so much love and had so many people praying for us. The fact that we opened up and shared with the world, knowing we were not exempt from hardship, helped us immensely. People from all over the world were praying for Dakota, praying for our family, and I know that is what helped us to have some sense of normalcy while everything else was chaos. Sleepless nights, sometimes hungry because I was too stressed and exhausted to have an appetite, trying to keep the marriage afloat, trying to keep Demi sane and normal. Just chaos.

  During those times, I would send my bishop pictures of Dakota. One day, she was at her church meeting with her leading pastor and others and they were all sitting around a table. She showed them Dakota’s picture on her phone, and all of them reached in and placed a hand on Dakota through Bishop’s cell phone to touch Dakota and agree and pray for her. I saw the video of this, and it warmed my heart. Everybody was standing in the gap for us in the way that I now stand in the gap for so many other families.

  We were going to need that love to sustain us through the next 107 days of the roller-coaster ride. At the time, we could have never imagined all that was to come.

  8

  Custom-Fitting Faith for My Young Adult Years

  I feel like my bishop has always been in my life, always part of my community of love. I have known her as a mother and grandmother in the community since I was five years old. I used to play with her granddaughter Quianna. But when I look back to see how I got to know the spiritual guide she is, I remember myself reaching to find something new at a brand-new time in my life.

  Hillside, New Jersey, 2000

  My sophomore year in high school, I was not afraid, or closed up, or soft-spoken like that little girl Lynette had found in the convenience store. Lynette and Kimberly and I moved to our own apartment in Hillside near my mother’s great-aunt Frances, the matriarch of the family. She was my grandmother Shirley’s sister, the only person in our family at the time who had a whole house. I had family and friends, and Hillside was wonderful because it brought me even closer to my friends from Myrtle Avenue’s Middle School who also went to Hillside High and closer to family. Aunt Frances, Uncle Danny, and my aunt Frances’s daughter, my cousin Danica, lived upstairs, and my great-uncle John lived on the first floor. Danica was a little bit older than me but we went everywhere together.

  One day, I was telling Danica how I didn’t feel like going to our family’s church, Bethlehem. We got to talking about how this just wasn’t it, like wearing stockings and being one way on Sunday when we had music in our heads and dreams about who we wanted to be. It just wasn’t us to remain in the house of worship that we grew out of. My childhood friend Quianna’s grandmother, Barbara Glanton, was a bishop at a church in Newark, the Love of Jesus Family Church (LOJ). We were constantly invited, and decided to give it a try.

  On the way there, we were passing by abandoned homes, all these crack fiends, and the police. It was in the hood! There were potholes in the street, panhandlers, and a guaranteed chance you might get a random police stop. I was like, “Danica, I’m not sure. This is in the hood hood.” But we walked in and were hooked. It wasn’t mega, but the perfect size to freely congregate and fellowship. Everything was purple to represent royalty: the chair cushions, the wall behind the pulpit, the stole draping the pulpit; purple was everywhere. There was a media area, where they played music through the speakers. It was like the nightclub of churches; they were playing gospel music with a two-step. We was like, “Hey, hey.”

  Women in there had on jeans, hoodies; and some had on their Sunday best; it was a great mix. At Bethlehem women had to wear dresses with stockings, and you didn’t dare walk in there with pants on. The old folks at LOJ were more conservative, but you could wear whatever you wanted; they called it “come as you are.”

  Once we mingled with people, I found my spot boppin to the music. They played six or seven songs and had praise dancers, these teens my age who were doing Alvin Ailey–type modern dance to the songs. Music was near to my heart, and having that as the first part of the service was right for me. Then came the announcements, and then the bishop came to the mic and brought the house down with the Word.

  Reverend Jackson from my other church, bless his soul, had that stern voice, but here, I was relating to everything Bishop said, because she was a Black woman. That day, I tapped into my spiritual side not worried about anything except for being me. My mother once said to me, “I would spend all my money to chase that first high that I would never feel again,” but this was a good high to chase. Here, I got what I needed every time I showed up.

  This was a big part of my sophomore year. I had my Bible and my notebook every time I went, and the Word was so on point, I couldn’t take notes fast enough. And I never worried about going hungry, there was actual food there and food for my spirit. To this day, I still sit in the same spot, the back row to the left in front of the media sound booth, where the TV ministry records. When I turn around and look up, Danica is right there because she is in the music ministry now. I can’t tell you how important it is that I just joined forces with Danica and decided to break camp from my main family church and find this new church home. Bishop ended up being there through every up and down with my struggle to keep my daughter healthy and to keep her in this life.

  She was also there from the beginning. God put her in my path as a spiritual mother of sorts for a reason, because a couple of years after I started going to her church, the pillars of my new home started to crumble under all sorts of weight.

  I was discovering myself as a young adult, about to launch off from high school out into the world. I was just happy and things were happening for me. I applied to Morgan State, was getting good grades, and prom that year was one of the happiest moments of my life. Lynette saw to it that I looked like a princess, and I felt like one too. I got my hair done and pinned up on my head, had the most beautiful burgundy formal dress, and even wore pearls. You couldn’t tell me nothing. I had come a long way since that day Lynette saw a quiet little girl that she barely recognized in the convenience store looking malnourished with her hair all matted. I don’t know how it’s possible, but my smile turned into her smile, bright and happy. I guess if somebody looks at you like a mother, smiling for long enough, you take on the same smile. My mother wasn’t there to see me off for prom, and I had gotten used to that. I couldn’t predict when I might hear from her with a call that said, “Shirley, I’m getting myself clean,” which just felt like a way to say, “I’m thinking about you” before she disappeared into the next high. But that day, I wish I had gotten a call so I could tell her the good news. I won prom queen.

  Hillside, New Jersey, 2002

  The next summer, I was preparing for my senior year, chilling with my family and friends. Aunt Frances had one of her usual cookouts. It was one of those times where everybody comes together. We might have been a family like any other with problems—this one not liking that one, this one out in the streets—but we always came together for cookouts, and for some hard-core laughing and music. This time Tokunbo’s father let him come. Every time I saw him, it was like time hadn’t passed, because we were all each other had at one time, and we were the two who saw Mama at her worst. He just got a little taller every time, that’s all. Not in a saggy diaper, but tall and chubby with still a little sag, but this time in his jeans.

  It was unusual that his father let him come, because his dad was a little above us. He didn’t know not to associate my mother’s addiction with the whole family. Everybody was chilling in the backyard: cousins, aunts, and uncles. The grill was sending up that charcoal smoked-meat smell. Uncle Walter was the only person allowed on the grill because he knew how to “put it in the air,” and his ribs are to die for. The music was playing Mary J’s “Family Affair”: “It’s only gonna be about a matter of time, before ya get loose and start to lose ya mind. . . .” Danica was the dj for real, keeping the music going. Whenever my family got together it was always a damn good time.
>
  I was dancing around in the backyard with my plate and Lynette got serious like PopaAuntie. “Come here Shirley. Sit down.” She had her plate too and I sat on the back-porch steps next to her. “Shirley, I’m moving back to Irvington to an apartment there. I found a little two-bedroom place.”

  I was a year from graduating. I was about to tell her that I didn’t want to leave my friends in Hillside to go back to Irvington High, but she was like, “Shirley, I’m not leaving you. Finish up at Hillside High and then we’ll all be able to move back together.”

  By then she had Kimberly, Keyera, and Kalynn. There was no room for me anyway. I saw myself graduating and going on to Morgan State. I was feeling good, everything was all hopeful. I didn’t want to feel left out, so I was like, “It’s cool,” and it was. I liked the idea of staying at Aunt Frances’s with Danica and moving on from there. Lynette was a mother to me, but Irvington was close enough to Hillside. It would be good to just have a little bit of distance and try out my independence. I didn’t let myself connect anything negative to my feelings back then, just happy-go-lucky Shirley.

  When graduation rolled around, me and Danica were so excited, because high school graduation wasn’t accomplished a lot in our family. I was so happy, but things were kind of itching in the back of my head that I wished were different.

  PopaAuntie, Lynette, aunts, uncles, and cousins were there. I was wearing white under my burgundy robe, white to mark a new beginning in my life. It was on a football field, that bright green against the royal look of all those burgundy robes, a really big deal. My mom wasn’t there and at that point I wasn’t tripping. I was thinking more about the sorrow that I would feel when I would soon be separated from my friends, and the joy of throwing my cap up, not like some character on TV, but me, Shirley. I actually felt my heart soaring around in my chest, feeling so damned good and so sad at the same time.

  My high came down after the outfits and the lights were gone and we didn’t have to get up and go to school the next day like the underclassmen who weren’t finished with the school year yet. Everything just slowed down, and the excitement went away for me but stayed there for my friends. They were all going to universities and I was headed to Union County College. That was embarrassing. I had applied to Morgan State, but they lost my high school transcripts. I didn’t feel it often, but in those days that slowed down after graduation and left me with no routine, or no place exciting to head off to, I felt embarrassed.

  I wanted one of those parents who focuses on you, sits with you, and fills out all the paperwork and gets in people’s shit if they lose your shit. I didn’t feel like I had that; Lynette was a good guardian, but she also had her own kids to take care of. I didn’t feel motherless often, but when I realized all my friends were leaving me and going to universities, and no one was pushing for me to get what I needed, it sank in. I just didn’t feel like I mattered.

  I tried to draw on my mother’s voice like she was there. I remembered mostly the bad days, but I remembered my mother saying, “Shirley, don’t ever do crack. You’ll end up like this.” I took that in as the motherly advice I needed. I knew that I wanted to stay in school and stay away from drugs and the streets. I told myself, Shirley, be grateful County College is still college where you can take it to the next level.

  Problem was, I couldn’t just stay up in Aunt Frances’s house when her own daughter was dj’ing and becoming a successful entrepreneur, so eventually I called Lynette. “Can I come live with y’all?” Something in my pride didn’t want to go back. I was a young adult. I didn’t want go backward, but at the same time, I was really feeling lost. I needed home.

  She had moved to an even bigger apartment with a first floor and a basement. She was still working in medical records and had a tight handle on her three daughters. I just wanted to be folded back up in that grounded reality. “Girl you know my home is your home.” She was like, “Shirley you can have the basement and fix it up like your own apartment.”

  “That’ll work.” I breathed relief. I got a job at Mi Ohn Style hair salon on Chancellor Avenue in Newark and, with school, I got seriously busy. I didn’t have time to fix up the whole basement, but I took one of the rooms down there and fixed it up like a little dorm room with my IKEA furniture, 2Pac posters, and my matching comforter and beige sheets. Yep, I got a big TV. Remembering my days with the mini TV and bed in the bottom of the closet, I had always envisioned having a big-screen TV, and I finally did.

  I was determined and went to school every day. On Sunday me and Danica went to be in fellowship at LOJ. Nice people greeting you, and music, and good food. It was the highlight of my week. For two years, I kept up my routine with school, my job at the hair salon during the week, and church and family on the weekend. I knew the regimen in Lynette’s house. I got up in the morning, got my turn in the shower, and was either in a cab, at that bus stop, or waiting for my ride from my boyfriend Lateef if I hadn’t borrowed Danica’s car. Things were going smoothly, and I was about to reach the associate’s degree level. I knew that with determination and God’s grace that I could go all the way and get my bachelor’s degree.

  Irvington, New Jersey, Fall 2005

  One day, I was down in my little basement room studying with my glowing lava lamp lighting up the walls and my TV on BET in the background, and Lynette came down there and said, “Shirley, the phone is for you.” I ran up the stairs thinking it was Lateef. It was my mother.

  She sounded so weak. I remembered her voice and felt eight years old, like no time had passed. I got a knot in my chest and wanted to be near her. She said, “Shirley, I’m in rehab.” I said, “Oh, Ma that’s so good,” but I had gotten calls like this before.

  Darryl, Tokunbo, and I had that call so many times. We’d see our mother go to rehab then back to the streets, and had learned not to invest in any of that back-and-forth. But this time was different. I was more of a woman and knew I could mother her, or at least I thought I could. I thought I could tell God that I would take it from there and nurse my mother back from all the damage she had done to her body in my absence. I was about to start my junior year of college and I was going to do it all. School, handle things with my mother, everything that needed to be done.

  I told Bishop Glanton, “My mother’s trying to get clean. I know she can do it this time. She just needs people believing in her.” We prayed on it and she found my mother a transitional house for getting clean in Brooklyn, Anchor House.

  At first, my mother couldn’t have visitors and we had to write letters to each other. She wrote me that she went to Great Adventure for the first time. “Shirley, I was so proud of myself. I had a little money on my card, and I got to spend it doing something fun. I can’t wait until you can come visit and see what I got for you, a stuffed animal I named Jesus.”

  You know how it is when you are in love, feeling hopeful and looking at everything like the greatest wishes are going to come true, and everybody around you is seeing things for what they really are? Yeah, that’s where I was.

  Anchor House had monthly dinners for family members. The aunts, cousins, and my brothers and I made shirts for going to the dinners, “Team Bertina.” I was so happy that things were beginning to change.

  Anchor House used to go around to sing at different churches. I went one time when Mama sang with them, and they were coming to Love of Jesus. I told the whole family and we packed the church. She was singing her lungs out. We were like, “Look at Birdie.” She had on a green two-piece dress suit with gold trim and a jacket. They sang Donnie McClurkin’s “I Call You Faithful.” There’s a part when he says, “Yes, yes, yes,” and she was up there so happy. She was so little, and seeing her family there to support her, she was just beaming. It was one of her proudest moments and one of my proudest moments as her daughter. Every time I looked at her, I smiled.

  The reality was that Mama was so frail, like a paper doll, paper thin, fragile. She kept saying, “Shirley you have never seen me clean. I want you to
see me clean.” I could see in her eyes all of this sorrow that I never saw before. I knew she meant it and that just made me more hopeful.

  I went to school and did my classes, went to my second job at Branch Brook Park Roller Skating Center in Newark, and in the evening went to the Anchor House in Brooklyn. I hustled to mother my loved ones the way I learned from PopaAuntie and Lynette. I would come and spend time talking with my mother while playing in her hair. During this time, she was going through a great deal of emotions, and I sang and brought the light. My mother was getting clean.

  One visit, she did that move that Lynette did at the barbecue. “Shirley come here.” She had the photo album of the family that I made for her on her lap. “Come here.” She patted her skeleton hand on the sheet, and for the first time, I saw what everybody else saw. My mother had a foot in the grave, but I shook it off and kept singing that R. Kelly mother-love song, “Sadie”: “Early one Sunday morning, breakfast was on the table. . . .” She told me the truth, right while I was singing and turning the photo pages and letting her lean on me. “Shirley, I have lung cancer.” I heard her, but I kept singing.

  I told her, “That’s why we gonna keep the recovery going and make sure you’re eating right.” I told her, “Your body is just weak and rebelling after the drugs. When we get your immune system on point, everything is going to be back on track.”

  Some part of me was along for the ride of her wish to get clean and to have her children experience the real Bertina Marie Harris. I needed that. There had to be some kind of way for God to work and make that happen. I told myself that the guilt and shame was the thing that made her stop, helped her have a rock bottom, and now she would get better.

  I got into nurturing her the way I always wanted her to nurture me, and it was working. But I only know from looking back that I was in denial. My mother also had the AIDS virus.