Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  I didn’t have hours to spend reading these stories, and I certainly didn’t have the money to buy books when the girls were young. So occasionally, I would stop and listen to a few minutes’ oration from the young, nameless men who somehow learned these stories and just preached them on the streets of Harlem.

  Benjamin Banneker’s story was not as dramatic. I just couldn’t understand how a poor boy, a son of a free black and an ex-slave, could become a mathematician and astronomer. It made me feel lazy and unaccomplished by comparison. While my background was lacking in many ways, I certainly could not claim to have been as low on society’s rung as Mr. Toussaint or Mr. Banneker, yet they had accomplished amazing things and I had not. What was it that made these people so much more ambitious than I ever was or aspired to be?

  These were the kinds of stories that I only heard in stolen moments of time as I went about my business of working hard and child rearing. I wanted to learn as much as I could in this area after I retired and had all the time in the world on my hands.

  I planned to start with Harriet Tubman. Out of all the stories that I had heard, hers stuck in my head for a very long time. She was born in slavery but managed to run away and stay free. Then she decided to come back more than once to rescue others and show them a way out of slavery. I wanted to know where she got that kind of courage, bravery, and determination. I admired her more than I could say. Once I retired, I was going to treat myself to reading every word about her that had ever been published.

  Visit family and learn history. Those were just two of the things I wanted to do once I had plenty of leisure time.

  The year was 1977, and I was sixty-two and three years away from retirement. I was working at Harlem Hospital, a clerk in a department where over two hundred people were responsible for the care and maintenance of patients’ records. The work was simply routine, not challenging at all. After all I’d been through, it was sort of fine by me that I didn’t have to work my brain too hard to do a good job. What got on my nerves was the cattiness, pettiness, silly little jealousies, gossiping, and backbiting amongst my co-workers.

  I wasn’t really able to do anything to improve my situation. I was too afraid to take early retirement and quit. What I was most probably going to do was complain about the ridiculous mini-dramas that occurred in that department each day and long for three years to go by so that I could really feel safe enough to let go of a steady paycheck.

  Well, most of the time it is something small that tips the scale. Something that doesn’t seem like much to an outsider but is just what you need to do.

  That day came for me when my daughter Cheryl, who at this point called herself Shelley, stopped by the record room. She was well groomed, clearly educated, and maybe had a fancy way of speaking, I don’t know. She came to take me out for a surprise lunch.

  I expressed my delight regarding her thoughtful invitation. Cheryl smiled and said, “Come on, Mom. I’m double parked.”

  In other words, my Cheryl had a car!

  Some of my troublemaking co-workers wanted to know where Cheryl worked. I told them that she was a law-school student who was home for Easter vacation.

  This was too much for that jealous crew. Most of their adult children had not gone to college, let alone law school.

  They didn’t know that Cheryl’s car was a ragged Oldsmobile that she was hoping would last till graduation.

  Five words: “I’m double parked” and “law school” caused jealousy to kick in.

  Suspicious, someone asked, “Don’t you have two daughters?”

  “Yes,” I answered proudly. “Laura is at Washington University getting her PhD..

  This was way too much for them.

  A woman named Nora promptly told me that I shouldn’t be working in the record room. I told her that I was fine and that maybe she shouldn’t be there either.

  The whole thing was ridiculous.

  After that day, I could hear whispering when I passed. Once again, it was assumed that I thought I was better than everyone else just because I had taught my kids to look beyond their surroundings and at the blue, limitless sky above.

  I started waking up feeling sad. Then I began to see the scenes for the ridiculous theater that they were and started making believe that I was off to the circus.

  So after Christmas of 1977, I finally filed the papers. It was official. I was going to retire.

  What did I need the headache for?

  I was proud of my girls. Laura would go on to head two separate chapters of the National Urban League. Cheryl would become a successful businesswoman specializing in high-end real-estate transactions in addition to her job at Fieldston and races of her own.

  I was very proud of my girls, but it was time to focus on myself. I made my list of things that I would do in my retirement, and I assure you that becoming a professional runner was not on it.

  I had been working in the records room at Harlem Hospital for many years by the time I was sixty-two. During my time there, I remember hearing lots of stories about patients who never received any visitors in homes for the elderly. Imagine being unable to care for yourself but still mentally fit. In other words, perhaps hanging off the edge of a wheelchair and remembering your children, friends, and old neighbors. Imagine wondering if everyone in the world has forgotten that you exist. Stories like that used to make me tear up something awful. I vowed to visit people who could not leave the facilities and didn’t have any anyone to come see them. I would talk to them, and, hopefully make them laugh just a little bit.

  I also wanted to be a volunteer in some way for the Democratic Party. I didn’t know how to go about doing that, but I figured they must need people to answer phones and stuff envelopes or something. I’d been a Democrat since 1933 when I decided that Franklin Roosevelt was a good man and it was time to give back or maybe find a way to get more Americans to vote Democrat.

  But most of all, I wanted to have time to go to the gym, then come home and write poem after poem after poem. I had fallen in love with poetry in elementary school and let the interest go by the wayside during the years after we left the shelter, when just keeping a roof over my young boys’ heads was a big accomplishment. I never really went back to it until I retired, and then I bought a few books of poetry. I even wrote a few poems myself.

  At the time, I didn’t know why I liked poems so much. I’ve thought about it a great deal since those days and I think it was because the poems that moved me emotionally were always about something hard, something sad, or some great wish. It feels good to know that others have tussled with sadness and won, or that others have great dreams that they can talk about in ways that feel like trees waving. I think that I loved it because in a story, the writer tells you straight out what he means. The poet doesn’t do that. The poem means something different to everyone who reads it. I found that the hard part of writing a poem was figuring out a way to suggest something. I never learned to talk around a subject or to hint at something. With poetry, I had to learn how to hint.

  The House

  It was a lean-to shack

  not far from the railroad track

  overcrowded for its size

  underkept

  badly in need of repair.

  The roof leaks.

  Ceiling sags.

  The floor squeaks and walls

  crack.

  Windows rattle.

  Knobless doors open after a battle.

  The house that once held plenty

  of love and controlled finance.

  A lot of laughter.

  Is now a house of chance.

  I must take into consideration

  the lengthy cast of moderation.

  Be it ever so humble.

  There’s no place like home.

  Today’s world

  filled with druggies and junkies of all ages, sizes, colors

  abusing anyone they can to fulfill their corrupt diet. I get

  the feeling someday soon

/>   everything will calm down to

  an unbelievable quiet.

  Before I could sink into my hard-won retirement and fully indulge my love for both history and poetry, family duty called again. But this was something I was overjoyed to do for one of my nieces. My brother Nolas had a married daughter named Lydia who had been going to college trying to earn a bachelor’s in sociology when her husband, a career military man, accepted a transfer from Missouri to San Antonio, Texas. The couple was raising their thirteen-year-old daughter and Lydia’s younger sister who was a freshman in high school. The four of them moved to San Antonio and Lydia enrolled in a college there. The only problem was they would not let her transfer all of her college credits from Missouri. Lydia needed to go back and finish her last semester, but her husband traveled a great deal and there was no one in San Antonio to stay with her girls.

  When I heard about Lydia’s predicament, I thought, Here we go again. I remembered back to the time I was so close to earning my high school diploma, only to have it snatched away from me. I remembered Cheryl getting accepted to a top tier school like Smith College but being unable to go because I couldn’t afford the eight hundred dollars. I did not want to see this happen again. To make matters worse, Lydia had married young and I had heard that it wasn’t a good union. It would be a monumental thing if I could help her out, because clearly getting an education was very important to her. I had learned the hard way that women should have their own professional careers that paid well enough for them to have freedom. I didn’t want Lydia to be trapped and financially dependent on this man or any other man. I needed her to know that her Aunt Ida understood her striving to accomplish something.

  Without hesitation, I contacted her with an offer. I would go take care of her husband and children in San Antonio for six months while she did what she needed to do. Once she earned her degree, I would come back to New York and she could take over the care of her family.

  Happily, my niece agreed and off (the year must have been 1978) I went.

  San Antonio is located about seventy-five miles southwest of Austin, the state capital. At that time, the population was something like 650,000 and black people made up a miniscule part of the population. When I arrived, it was a mild winter although it got very cool at night. I can only remember a few times when the temperature dipped very low, although it never reached the freezing temperature that I was accustomed to in New York City. San Antonio had a lot of military bases and I think someone told me that there were more bases there than anywhere else in the United States.

  Lydia’s husband had been in active Air Force duty in Missouri and was going to be doing the same thing in San Antonio. They got me a temporary military ID card so that I could use the commissary. Since I am a pretty sociable person, I got to know the neighbors and often visited with them. Since I didn’t know how to drive, they took me wherever I needed to go when Lydia’s husband was out of town. Lydia’s friend Carol was simply wonderful. She took me and the girls to the movies and did lots of other fun stuff for us. I didn’t have to worry about their transportation to and from school because there was a school bus which serviced the subdivision where Lydia lived. They didn’t live on Randolph Air Force Base where the husband was stationed. Instead, they owned a pretty and spacious house in a section called Universal City.

  Once Lydia received her degree, her husband got an overseas assignment. She decided to use her degree to get into the military and they gave her an age waiver. There were not a lot of minority women, but she went overseas with him as an officer and not a dependent wife. I clapped my hands and shouted when I got the news. At first, she intended to stay in the service for only four years, but she ended up doing the entire twenty years and retired as a lieutenant colonel. She also got out of the bad marriage. Lydia met her second husband while on active duty in Germany and they have now been married for twenty-nine years.

  CHAPTER 11

  MOTHERS AND SONS

  A Pain So Deep

  From before the dawn of time, it was decided in the councils of heaven that the bond between mothers and sons would be one that could withstand any test, overcome any trial, endure any hardship, suffer all setbacks, navigate any complexities, hurdle all obstacles, triumph over any number and variety of foes, purify the most perfect love, ingest and digest all insults, forgive all wrongs, embrace in all seasons, times, and circumstances, and grow ever stronger, broader, and deeper.

  For even in those cases where mothers and sons are bound together in such relationships that may appear toxic to observers, the roiling waters of those connections are still governed by the glue that has united mothers to the hearts of their sons and sons to the hearts of their mothers since the beginning of time.

  Attempts to quantify or qualify the origins of the love that a mother has for her son are worthy but, ultimately, fruitless exercises. All that can be said with any degree of accuracy is that a mother’s love for her son is consigned to the realm of mystery, wonder, and admiration. For along stories of mothers who perform what strikes observers as superhuman feats of strength to protect her children, that strength is multiplied exponentially when that child is a son. Likewise, when a father is protecting his daughter, the reality of his protective instincts moves the blood in him to surge with greater power to fulfill the role assigned to him long ago when humans were sitting around fires in caves, learning the fundamentals of their species.

  How else can one explain the stories of parents charging into harm’s way to save their children?

  In the year 1856, Margaret Garner, an African American slave woman in Kentucky, attempted to escape with her family across the Ohio River into the Northern state of Ohio. Slave hunters were hot on the family’s trail, so Margaret and her loved ones took refuge in the home of an ally of the Underground Railroad. As the serial-raping, man-stealing, cradle-plundering, women-whipping, soul-stripping tyrants closed in on the family, Margaret Garner cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter. She wounded the other three of her children, but they survived.

  The love that compelled Margaret Garner to spare her children’s life in misery in exchange for bliss in death was, and is, but a sample of the depths to which a mother will go to save her son. Go to any courtroom in America, and there’ll be mothers pleading with officers of the court to spare their sons even spending one day being caught in the merciless grip of the US system of jurisprudence.

  Visit any military cemetery across the great expanse of the American homeland and there’s a great possibility of seeing a mother crying fresh, bitter tears for the son she bore who gave his last full measure for a nation that may not even remember his name.

  Eavesdrop on any household where an enraged, inebriated father turns his abusive intention to a mother’s son, and listen to the whirlwind of courage and conflict that ensues when the son’s mother comes to his aid and rescue. Likewise, if that father moves to heap abuse onto the mother, if the son is old enough, strong enough, and feeling the quickening of his own dawning manhood, he won’t hesitate to position himself between the abuser and his mother, and willingly commit to a battle royal to spare from harm the one who literally gave him birth.

  Move quietly through any hospital ward where a mother sits anxiously at the bedside of her male child. With agony bottled up for fear of shouting the roof down, and with eyes red from tears cried from depths unknown, and a tongue tired from imploring heaven to intervene, that mother will be united in a spiritual plane inhabited by her and son and intolerant of anyone else.

  When the mother-son connection is healthy and thriving, it serves as a great incubator of hope and happiness being prepared for that woman who will someday, one day, share the son’s life as his girlfriend, and possibly, wife. For any woman seeking to know what her life might be like with the man of her dreams, she should look first at the relationship that her dreamboat has with his mother. If he treats Mom well, loves her, respects her, and seeks to ensure that she’s cared for, protected, and otherwise fre
e (as much as possible) of worries, then a future wife has been gifted with a preview of how such a son will be when he becomes her husband.

  There are no examples in all the recollections of the world that perfectly demonstrate the pureness of love between mother and son as that which existed between Jesus, the Christ, and his mother, Mary.

  From the moment she was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and conceived, Mary’s motherhood was to be unique from all mothers who’d come before her and all those who’d follow. The stellar nature of her character, her purity of heart, and deep, powerful well of faith had not slipped the attention of God who chose her to be the vessel who would bear his Son, the Savior of the world.

  The circumstances of Jesus’ birth, entering the world in a ramshackle barn while being sought by some of the wisest and wealthiest kings of the day, bespoke the peculiar nature of the life Jesus would live. By all accounts, this son of a carpenter was like other children. He played. He could be mischievous. He could be a handful. And he was precocious.

  The elders of Israel discovered soon enough that Jesus was not just another child. He understood the laws of Israel and obeyed the customs and traditions of his people as someone who’d been their author as much as he was their practitioner. Mary could not help being proud as her young son grew into manhood, and as the prophecy foretold, first assumed his place among his people and then launched a movement that challenged his brethren to love the Lord their God in a new way.

  Mercy was the new rule of the day. Grace, the unmerited favor of God, was the longed-for ground of assurance that God had staked out in the living embodiment of his son. Love was the first, last, and only worthwhile measure that could completely capture the attention of the Savior. His words inspired the down-trodden to have hope, the wicked to reform, the hopeless to lift their eyes, the outcasts to know they were preferred among his friends, and the beleaguered of this world to find refuge in him.