by Tavis Smiley
I pray for Joy every day. My dear friend helped me be who I am today. In this small way. I want to give back to her what she has given to me: acceptance of self and Black love. A candle burns every day for you to continue to heal and gain strength. Continue to grow, my sistah!
INSPIRATION
BROTHER HOGAN
Tavis Smiley
When I was thirteen and growing up in Indiana, there was a man named Douglas Hogan Jr. who lived in the same town as I worshiped, Kokomo, Indiana. Douglas Hogan was the superintendent of the Sunday School at our church, New Bethel Tabernacle. Because I was very active in Sunday School, I got to know Brother Hogan rather well.
As it turns out, Brother Hogan was also a member of the city council in Kokomo. Prior to meeting Brother Hogan, I had not been interested in learning how the political process worked. But when I started spending time with Brother Hogan, I began to understand the impact he had in empowering Black folks in his district. It became clear to me that Brother Hogan was making an important contribution to the community, making a difference in the lives of the folks who were his constituents.
I started spending time at Douglas Hogan’s house and worked with him at his office while I was still in junior high school. I opened his mail and tried to help him respond to citizens’ complaints, concerns, and requests on his behalf. The majority of the requests focused on the usual—getting potholes fixed and trees trimmed, locating government assistance checks that had not arrived, and helping kids find summer jobs. Not only was I able to see how good it made Brother Hogan feel by working in the community, but in working with him, I began to feel good myself about the impact I was having in helping to respond to the concerns and needs of the community.
Working with Douglas Hogan taught me how the political process really worked. It was my first understanding of the greater good involved in public service, and my first opportunity to witness someone determined to make a difference in the community, fighting for the things the people believed in. The more time I spent with the councilman, the more I became intrigued by the political process and the more convinced I became that public service was a worthy cause. I came to believe that service to the community is the price we pay for the space we occupy—the rent we owe for our place on earth, if you will. Most of all, I enjoyed the feeling I received by helping Brother Hogan help other people.
I learned a lot over the years I worked with Doug Hogan. I learned that Black people want the same things as whites from their leaders in the community. People want leaders to have the courage, the conviction, and the commitment to do what is right. I learned that being of service to others is tremendously rewarding. I learned that when it comes to sharing and caring and mentoring and community, each of us has to find a way to give back.
Mentoring has become one of those politically correct words; who is opposed to mentoring? The reality is, however, that there aren’t enough of us who spend quality time with a young person on even a semiregular basis. There is no greater challenge facing our community than the challenge to mentor our young people to achieve to the best of their ability, and to give back to their community. And there is no greater reward.
I learned about mentoring because I was fortunate to have had Brother Hogan mentor me. I gained a passion for helping the community because I worked with a man who cared deeply about the community. Some of the best experiences of my young life were those times when I got to hang out with Douglas Hogan. I wish that every kid had the opportunity to spend time with a leader in the community who is really making a contribution. It was the leadership and mentorship of Douglas Hogan that was the impetus for the mentoring work I engage in through the Tavis Smiley Foundation. Thank you, Brother Hogan—and thanks to all the unrecognized brothers and sisters in towns across our nation who are helping to shape our communities in a positive way, and to guide and mentor our future generations.
UNSELFISH LOVE
Tavis Smiley
I have often been asked what I value most about my mother and my father and what traits and characteristics I gained from each of them. My mother Joyce happens to be a Pentecostal evangelist; from her I inherited my abiding faith. From my father, Emory, I inherited my work ethic and my discipline. He is, undoubtedly, the hardest-working man I’ve ever known. But what inspired me most about them was their example of selflessness that I saw daily.
In the early seventies, my mother and father had three sons, and my mother was pregnant with her fourth child. (She went on to give birth to a total of six sons.) While she was pregnant with her fourth child, she learned that her sister had been murdered in Mississippi. She left behind five kids—three daughters and two sons; the two youngest children weren’t in kindergarten yet. Social services prepared to make arrangements for the children to be taken care of, and since there were five children, the agency couldn’t find a family that wanted to take in all five. Their solution was to split the kids up by sending them to different foster homes.
My grandmother, Big Mama, had been born and raised in Mississippi and still lived there at the time of my aunt’s death. Even though my grandmother’s health was failing, she could not bear to see her grandchildren split up, and decided to take four of the five children herself. The father of the last child came to retrieve his daughter and raised her.
Several years later, Big Mama’s health began to deteriorate further. She was no longer able to raise four grandchildren. Social services once again prepared to step in and split the children up.
It was at this juncture that my mother and father decided that, rather than have these children split up and be sent to foster homes, they would become the legal guardians of my deceased aunt’s kids. So they set out on an eighteen-hour drive from Indiana to Mississippi to retrieve the four children.
My mother and father raised all of us as if we were brothers and sisters from birth. None of us received any more than the other; we were all given equal amounts. This was true for love as well. My parents loved us all the same; they disciplined us all the same; they shared with us all the same; and they sacrificed for us all the same. And never did I hear my parents complain, not even once, about the extra responsibility they had taken on, despite the fact that my parents’ income hadn’t increased and the space in the trailer we lived in hadn’t gotten any bigger. My father had a full-time job as an Air Force officer, and at one time he was working six part-time jobs just to make ends meet. And these weren’t even his kids; they were his nephews and nieces by marriage.
A few years ago, I was preparing an acceptance speech for an award I was about to receive. My parents were scheduled to be in the audience that night as I accepted the award. While preparing remarks for the occasion, for the first time in my life it struck me what my parents had actually done. I did the math and discovered that when my parents became the guardians for my aunt’s kids, they were only twenty-seven and twenty-eight years old! They were still kids in many respects. I am thirty-seven years old now, and I still don’t have a wife or any kids (as my mother so often reminds me!). To think back on what my parents had accomplished completely overwhelmed me. They never complained, nor let us complain. They raised us together as one family.
Years later my grandmother’s health deteriorated further and my parents took her into our home as well. In the end, we had thirteen people living in one small trailer in a trailer park. And, in spite of it all, I never heard my mother or my father voice a note of regret.
So when people ask me, “Who inspired you as a child?” it’s an easy question to answer, because nothing inspires me as much as the sacrifices my parents made around the issue of family. It brings home to me what the notion of sacrifice is really all about.
RUN ON ANYHOW
R. Lee Gamble
Even in a hospital bed, my mother found a way to appear regal. There she sat, back straight, head held high as she listened to the words her doctor spoke. The prognosis was not good. The tests had confirmed that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At sixty
-eight my mother was facing her mortality.
I sat back in the chair stunned. There had to be a mistake. I asked the doctor if they were sure, but he told me they had ruled out everything else. He turned to my mother and told her that he was going to set up a schedule for her to begin chemotherapy treatments right away. My mother, without even the slightest change in her demeanor, thanked the doctor and told him she trusted him to continue taking care of her.
My sister, Carol, and I looked at each other; we felt the air in the room getting heavier. Carol said she was going to go get a soda, and left my mother and me in the room.
I had no idea that this brief moment alone with my mother would, for the rest of my life, define who she was for me. Out of all of the times we had shared, nothing was as poignant as the moment she and I together faced the fact that she was dying.
“Okay, puddin’,” she said in her serious voice, which let me know she expected me to be as straight with her as she was about to be with me. “What is this non-Hodgkin’s thing?”
I was determined in that moment to show my mother that she had raised me well. I was going to be strong and tell her exactly what I knew about the disease.
“It is a form of cancer that attacks the lymph nodes,” I replied. “There is a lot of research being done, and a lot of medicines are available to treat it.” I paused at this point, wondering if I should go on or just leave it like that. It was the look in my mother’s eyes that decided for me. She wanted the truth, and she wanted it from me. “It’s not curable, but I am going to make sure that you receive the best treatment that is available,” I said.
My mother smiled at me, and it was as if all the thickness in the air had just evaporated. She kept smiling as she straightened the covers and fiddled with the remote to adjust her bed. I sat on the edge of my seat and waited for her to break down. I wanted to scream for her. She was too young to go through any of this. This was my mother! I’d expected her to live to be a hundred, and now I was realizing that she might not make it through the year.
I wanted her to fall apart. I wanted her to be angry. I wanted her to give me an excuse to feel all these things. My eyes started to sting as I tried my best to fight back the tears. I struggled to find the right words to say to her.
Turns out my mother said it all. “Don’t you start worrying about me. You and I both still have too much living to do. Besides, you know what I have always told you—no doctor or anybody else can decide what will happen in your life. Only two people can determine that—you and God. This is between God and me now. You know, it’s like the song we sing in church all the time—sometimes you just got to run on anyhow.” She never mentioned the word cancer again.
Run on anyhow is exactly what she did. My mother walked out of that hospital and went on with the business of living. Five years later she was still maintaining her life as if that day in the doctor’s office never happened. Although she was undergoing chemotherapy and didn’t always have the energy she used to have, she still tried to live her life as she always did.
She continued to baby-sit a little girl she had been taking care of since the child was an infant. She still cleaned her home and cooked her meals. I saw her or spoke to her every day, and every day she would let me know she was running on.
In the summers she traveled—one year to St. Louis, another year to New York. She even attended her high school reunion in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia.
Amazed, I watched her and I learned. She taught me that living or dying is all a state of mind, and my mother’s mind was set on living for as long as she had breath.
On the day that I gave birth to my third child, her eleventh grandchild, she had a chemotherapy treatment scheduled. I spoke with her on the phone to let her know that her granddaughter and I were fine. She told me to rest and that she would see me later. I thought she meant when I got out of the hospital. Chemotherapy usually left her weak and tired, so I knew she would need to go home and get her rest.
Later that evening, as I began to try to force down what the hospital called dinner, I heard the voice I had recognized since the day I came into the world. There she stood. She looked thin, and her once plump face had started to sag. But the beauty that was my mother still radiated around her. “Where is my baby?” she said as she walked in with my sister and nephew in tow.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, stunned. “You should be home resting.” I looked at my sister, bewildered.
My sister looked at me, shook her head, and said, “She insisted.”
“Of course I insisted,” Mother said in her huffy tone. “Nothing was going to keep me from seeing my grandbaby.”
As we walked down the hall toward the nursery I had no idea that we were heading into the last stretch of our time together. My mother’s health began to rapidly deteriorate after that day.
The chemotherapy was being given in stronger doses, and her hair began to come out. Not one to let anything just happen to her, she took control of the situation and cut the rest of her hair off. She called me and told me to come over and see her hair. My husband and I, along with the kids, piled in the car and headed over. I was preparing myself to cheer her up about losing her hair, and instead she flipped the script on me.
When I walked into the house she was sitting in her favorite chair at the kitchen table. How sick my mother was becoming was made clear to me when I walked up those stairs into the kitchen and saw her with peach fuzz across her scalp. It took everything in me not to run and hold her and beg her not to leave me.
Instead I composed myself and told her that she looked like a newborn baby. My daughters ran up to her, asking could they rub her scalp. They giggled as they looked at their grandmother, which made her laugh. “You don’t recognize your grandmother without her red hair, do you?” she asked, laughing.
“How do you feel about losing your hair?” I asked her. Anybody who knew my mother knew how important her hair was to her. She’d always kept her hair looking good. I had already told my husband that we were probably going to have to spend the afternoon cheering her up about it.
Instead, she said very matter-of-factly as she hugged the girls, “I would rather be here with all of you with no hair than be lying in a coffin with a head full of hair. Losing my hair is a very small price to pay for this.”
At that moment I thanked God for my mother and for the experience he was giving me. Although it was difficult to watch her illness finally get the best of her, I was comforted by knowing that she treasured every day God gave her to share with us.
When I knew that the end was drawing near, it was the strength that she had shown throughout her illness that gave me the courage to pray with a clear conscience the hardest prayer of my life—for the Heavenly Father to take her home so she could rest.
On the day that my mother passed I left the hospital and came home to my husband and children, who were waiting to comfort me. My oldest daughter was four at the time, and through tears she asked me, “Mommy, what are we going to do without Grandma?”
Picking her up, I held her in my arms and I rocked her. I told her that we were going to do exactly what Grandma would expect us to do. We were gonna run on anyhow.
THE LIFE AND SPIRIT OF NATHANIEL BRISCOE
Donnella L. Rucker
My father, Nathaniel Briscoe, was a community man in Washington, D.C. When there was nothing for the boys in our neighborhood to do, he started the Pioneers boys’ club in our area in 1961. Our house was literally open to the neighborhood. He set up football, basketball, baseball, boxing, cheerleading, and track teams. He raised money through donations for uniforms and equipment. My father and the neighborhood boys would go door to door asking for donations. The boys that he worked with were labeled “the worst of the worst.” These young men had no fathers in their homes and were headed for jail or the grave. My father was the only father that a lot of these guys ever had.
After a few years, the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department start
ed to sponsor the programs. Through my father, his friends, and the Metropolitan Police Department, they were able to help these young men complete high school. He was even able to get some of them into prestigious high schools and colleges in the D.C. area. He worked within our community until 1989, when he retired.
My father also raised five children. Two of my sisters became involved in drugs. My parents never stopped supporting and encouraging them. After many prayers and much support, my oldest sister received the job that she has always wanted, teaching in the D.C. public school system. She started her job one month before he died.
In March 1998, for my father’s seventieth birthday, we decided to give him a surprise birthday party. We invited all of the guys he helped and nurtured over the years. Some even brought their wives and children to meet him. These loving Black men, most now in their late thirties, forties, and fifties, came from as far away as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago to celebrate his life.
They told my father what he meant to them and what a positive effect he had had in their lives. Some claimed they owed him their very lives. They were now businessmen, teachers, ministers, police officers. Even those who hadn’t done as well for themselves came.
Less than a year later, these men returned for my father’s funeral, grieving and loving alongside my family. One of my father’s “mentees” who is now an ordained minister led the prayer program at the wake; everyone wanted to be an honorary pallbearer. My father left this earthly life on August 5, 1999, but I continue to speak of him in the present tense—because his spirit and life are all around me.
