by Ida Keeling
ZONDERVAN
Can’t Nothing Bring Me Down
Copyright © 2018 by Ida Keeling
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546
Epub Edition January 2018 ISBN 9780310350644
ISBN 978-0-310-35143-6 (audio)
ISBN 978-0-310-35064-4 (ebook)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Keeling, Ida, 1915- author. | Diggs, Anita Doreen, author.
Title: Can’t nothing bring me down : chasing myself in the race against time / Ida Keeling with Anita Diggs.
Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : Zondervan, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017041065 | ISBN 9780310349891 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Keeling, Ida, 1915- | Runners (Sports)--United States--Biography. | Women runners--United States--Biography.
Classification: LCC GV1061.15.K395 A3 2018 | DDC 796.42092 [B] --dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041065
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The Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Cover design: Curt Diepenhorst
Cover photo: Elias Williams
Interior design: Kait Lamphere
Interior background image: © RoyStudio.eu/Shutterstock
First printing December 2017 / Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. September 1982 DAY BY DAY
2. Way Back When WINTER BLUES
3. From School to Work WINTER’S DECORATION
4. Standing on My Own Two Feet
5. Mommy Dell
6. Daddy THE STARS
7. Finding My Way MOTHER’S DAY BLUES
8. Single Motherhood DRUG HORROR
9. Civil Rights and Wrongs THE STICKUP MAN
10. The Way Things Might Have Been
11. Mothers and Sons: A Pain So Deep SOAP STORY TO ALL MY CHILDREN
12. The Start of Something: By Cheryl “Shelley” Keeling SOAPS
13. A Lane of My Own
About the Authors
Photos
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my literary agent, Dan Strone;
my collaborator, Anita Diggs; my editor John Sloan;
and my two wonderful daughters, Laura and Cheryl.
But most of all, I owe my greatest thanks to God.
CHAPTER 1
SEPTEMBER 1982
When the solution is simple, God is answering. I believe it was a smart man named Albert Einstein who said that. For me, it was my daughter Cheryl who came up with a solution to my problem. If she had not, I would probably be dead today or have a quality of life so low it wouldn’t matter if I was alive.
Cheryl dropped by my place one day while I was trying to watch a soap opera. It was hard for me to concentrate because I was feeling so blue. I’m not even sure what soap opera was playing on the screen. Sometimes it seemed like the characters were moving in slow motion and nothing that came out of their mouths made any kind of sense. I guess that’s because my psyche had slowed down and it felt like I was moving around in a bowl of thick oatmeal. Not a pleasant feeling, but me and the icky sensation were becoming well acquainted. Too well.
“Mommy, I need a favor,” Cheryl said.
“What kinda favor?”
“I want you to go somewhere with me.”
Oh no! I didn’t feel like getting dressed and going nowhere. It was all I could do to reach out and change the channel on my TV set.
“Cheryl, I’m not up to it.”
“Please, Mommy. I really need you to do this.”
There was desperation in that please. I turned around to look at her, and my motherly instinct rose up. My baby girl needed my help.
“Okay. I gotta get dressed.”
“Oh, we’re not going right now. I’ll let you know the date.”
“Date for what?”
“I need you to go to a cross-country race with me.”
I knew all about racing, even though I had never even considered being in a race. Cheryl was a runner and a competitive racer who always told me about her adventures. I enjoyed hearing them but wondered where she got the energy. She had just finished a clerkship for State Supreme Court (Manhattan County) Judge Thomas Dickens and started a fitness business which offered fitness training in the workplace. She also held down a part-time job in real estate and was raising her son, all while running for miles at a time.
But the big question now was why, all of a sudden, Cheryl needed me to go to a race with her. What was going on? Was she sick and needed me to be there in case she fainted or something? Was someone stalking her? Lord, have mercy! Was one more of my children at risk?
“Cheryl, what’s going on?” I knew my voice sounded shaky as I asked the question, but I just couldn’t help it. I had only two children left, and if I lost one or both of my girls, it would be more than my body, mind, and soul could bear. I would just die.
“Mommy, you look like you’re about to cry. What’s wrong?”
“Something is going on and you’re not telling me. Why do you suddenly need me to come see you run?”
She shifted from foot to foot as she figured out how to tell me what she needed to tell me. I never took my eyes off her face.
“No, Mommy. I want you to run.”
And then I laughed.
“Please, Mommy. Something has to be done about you.”
Fall is cross-country running season. That doesn’t mean that you run across America. Cross-country just means running outdoors, usually 3.1 miles. It is very different from running indoors. When doing cross-country, you can find yourself running through grass, over a log, and in the rain, with your shoes squishing through mud.
I didn’t know any of this when I ran my first race. It was September 1982, and I was sixty-seven years old. I didn’t care whether I won the race or not. I didn’t care whether I survived it or not. The only reason I was in it was to satisfy my youngest daughter, Cheryl. She was worrying herself to death about me. She now tells people, “The smiles had gone off her face. A light had gone off inside of her. I watched this for eight months after Charles’s death. Her appetite wasn’t the same. She was lost inside herself. And it just bothered me. Mommy was always on my mind.”
Cheryl is right. I was lost. Somebody had tied my eldest son’s hands behind his back and then hung him. Nobody had been arrested for the murder. Somebody had beat my other son to death with a baseball bat in broad daylight and no one would step forward to let the police know
who did it. The witnesses were too afraid. Telling would mean testifying. Testifying would mean danger to the witnesses’ families. There is a saying now in poor communities that “snitches get stitches.” My boys were dead, and no one was going to answer for it. The pain was just too much to bear.
It never occurred to me that I would bury even one of my children. It goes against the natural order of things. My children were supposed to stand in a cemetery and watch sadly as my body was lowered into the ground. Not the other way around! It was crazy. Sometimes, even after the funerals and burials, it seemed like none of it could really be true. Both of them had been in the service. War might have broken out and they could have been mortally wounded. That didn’t happen. They had survived. Growing up as black, male teenagers in a big-city housing project meant that they had both been at risk every time they walked out of the apartment. They had survived that. They had both lived to marry, father children, and see middle age. I wasn’t supposed to be worried about them anymore.
I remember Charles as a baby in my arms, wrapped up in a blue blanket and staring at me. I imagined he was wondering what my next move was gonna be. I thought to myself, Don’t worry, baby boy, Mama is gonna find a permanent home for you. I knew that would prove to be easier said than done. The real deal is that landlords don’t want to hear about cute, chubby babies in warm flannel blankets. They only understand two words: rent money. If you don’t have it, you have to leave. But I didn’t voice my thoughts aloud to my baby even though I knew he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I didn’t say it because it’s such a hopeless thing to put into a small child’s head.
Both my boys clung to me when they were tiny infants. I wish that I would have had more time with them when they were that age, but money was always the most important thing because we had little to none of it. So work came first. Hugs, cuddling, and kisses were in second place, I guess.
Mothers didn’t explain what they were doing when my boys were small. Perhaps today a mother might sit her toddler on a chair and say something like, “Now, Timmy. Mommy loves you, but she must go to work to buy you crayons,” or something like that. But I come from the “children should just do as they’re told” era. I’m not sure one is right over the other, but like anything else, it probably varies from place to place. By place, I mean a house with wealthy parents in it or a house with poor parents in it. Poor parents simply don’t have the energy to go into lengthy explanations most of the time. Getting money to eat and pay rent is paramount.
I was a few short years away from my seventieth birthday, and I didn’t feel like I needed to be on guard anymore, like I had to try to protect my sons from the evils of the street. I was supposed to be living a life of ease during my retirement. I was supposed to be secure in the fact that my children were going to be just fine. I had watched over them when they needed me to be there, and now they would take care of themselves, right?
Wrong. Two of them were brutally murdered, leaving me to wonder what I could have done differently so that they would have made better choices.
As I grappled with the loss, it occurred to me that no parent is ever really safe. We can never really relax and let our guard down, can we?
I was retired and no longer an employee of any company, so there was no way for me to lose myself in my work after the tragedies by doing every minute of overtime that I could get my hands on.
I tried to remember the agony of losing my mother many years ago and how I got through that. If I could remember the way I got through that pain, would it save me now? There were no answers, and my thoughts just went round and round. I had known a lot of people who had passed on, but thinking about how I managed to move on after those losses did not help me at all. As much as I loved all of those people, I did not give birth to them. This was different. This was some type of hell that I couldn’t come to grips with.
It seemed like every time I closed my eyes, I saw one or both of my boys. They were babies in their carriages, which I pushed through the streets of Harlem. Then they were toddlers, the three of us in a homeless shelter until I could find us a home. Then they were running for exercise at the armory, competing with each other and laughing real loud and free. They were sitting in church with me as I warned them not to squirm.
Grown-up Donald drawing remarkably good portraits of people, places, and moods.
Grown-up Charles at the stove, stirring pots while the aroma of the food he was cooking wafted around the room.
Both of them dancing in the living room while their sisters looked on, happy that their older brothers were having a good time.
When Cheryl showed up at my door on the day of the race, I told her to forget the plan because I didn’t have any sneakers. She pulled a pair out of her bag.
I squeezed one foot inside. “It feels too snug.”
Cheryl’s lips tightened and she reached back into her bag. “Try these.”
She had come with two pairs of sneakers!
The look on her face told me that she had come prepared for every objection that I might make. It never dawned on her that I might not be able to run 3.1 miles (about sixty-two city blocks) and finish the race. Cheryl probably couldn’t afford to let herself think like that because she was determined to save my life.
The race was called the Big Red 5K Mini Run, and it was being held in Brooklyn, New York. Big Red was a black newspaper, and they had managed to get more than two hundred people to run. There were many people aged from fifteen to sixty. I was the oldest and probably most reluctant participant. But I ran that first race for my daughter. Just so she would stop looking so worried and scared.
I ran, not knowing what was waiting for me at the end of the road, just as my parents, Osborne and Mary Potter, had done when they left the island of Anegada for America, way back when.
DAY BY DAY
I sit while my mind wonders
about things that used to be
or others that might have been.
So much has passed me by.
All I do is sit and sigh.
CHAPTER 2
WAY BACK WHEN
It has been said that “God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless he has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty.” My father, Osborne Potter, clearly believed this because he faced one setback after another without losing his stride or even slowing down. An asthmatic since the age of seven, my father was always working. He worked doing physical labor when he first came to America. He worked through the death of my mother, the eviction of our family, and the loss of our grocery store. He was able to keep going because of his firm belief that God knew what was best for him and the rest of us.
My parents were both born and raised on the island of Anegada, a fifteen-square-mile island in the Caribbean. The first people there were called the Arawak and they lived there for hundreds of years in peace until Christopher Columbus saw the island in 1493. You can kinda figure out what happened next, right? Mr. Columbus reported the find back to his bosses in Spain and they claimed the island. Then in 1625, the British took it.
Some years after that, enslaved Africans were forced to come to lots of the Caribbean islands to work on sugar plantations. Many of them were worked to death. That was no problem for their masters. The plantation owners just purchased some more African people to take their places. This went on until 1833 when the British people freed all the slaves in their empire, twenty-nine years before Abraham Lincoln freed the enslaved black Americans.
But Anegada’s hard times were not over. In 1853, cholera struck the island and killed almost 15 percent of the citizens. Luckily, my mama and daddy’s people survived all of that or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.
Where my parents came from, food came off the trees and out of the ocean. They had to fish or pick whatever they ate. There were no grocery stores.
Daddy was about five-nine and slim, with a smooth brown complexion, and looked like a Native American. Mama was five f
eet tall and stout, with light skin and jet-black wavy hair. She was pale because her father was white, a British man named Peter George who settled in Anegada and married a black woman named Zora. They had Mama and three other daughters. Peter George built the Anegada Reef Hotel before the black folk told him to “take his machines and go home.” There must be a big story behind that expulsion, but I don’t know the details. Zora was left to finish raising her four girls but had plenty of community support. I also don’t know why Zora didn’t take Mama and her other daughters and go to England with him.
After Mama and Daddy married in 1912, Daddy came to America to work in the navy yard and raise money for her journey. She joined him in late 1913.
Daddy arrived in the United States to find a dangerous kind of racism that he had never known about before. Lynching had become an American epidemic. In many places, lynchings were major public events. People would hear about a lynching coming up and pack food and drink to attend like they were going to a concert or something. In a lot of cases, local law enforcement either turned a blind eye to what was going on or participated in the event. No amount of pleas for mercy, cries of agony, or appeals to God and humanity could stop an excited and eager lynch mob.
Anyway, Mama and Daddy stayed with friends until they found a place to put down roots and raise a family.
Daddy could not grasp the concept of rent. It both fascinated and repelled him. There was no such thing as paying rent on the island of Anegada. Who would pay money each month to own nothing? Of all the American customs he encountered, this one baffled him to the end of his days. Early on, he decided that he would stop paying this thing that Americans called rent as quickly as possible. It would be smarter to become a landlord and collect this rent from anyone foolish enough to participate in such a system.
