by Tavis Smiley
When my father did make it back home Sunday night, he came into my bedroom, turned the light on, got me out of bed, and proceeded to give me the beating of my life. But he didn’t use a belt or switch. He used an extension cord. He beat both my sister and me. He beat us so badly that night that the flesh on our bodies was ripped and torn. We were in so much pain that we couldn’t lie down on the bed after he finished beating us. We had so many open wounds that the sheets stuck to the bloody cuts.
The next day we tried to take a bath before going to school but could not do it. We were both in a great deal of pain and felt absolutely miserable. When it came time for gym class, neither one of us wanted to get undressed to put on our gym clothes. We were too embarrassed at what the other kids would see on our legs, arms, and backs.
Finally, I was sent to the principal’s office. Once there, I was ordered to take my clothes off. The teacher thought I was trying to hide something; indeed, I was. After they discovered the condition my body was in, they called Phyllis into the office and saw the marks on her too. The police and the ambulance were called. Phyllis and I were rushed to the hospital, where we stayed about seven days. Shortly after, social services became involved, and eventually the matter went to court, and both Phyllis and I were taken out of our parents’ home and sent to separate foster homes.
After months of living in the foster home and being away from my parents, I eventually went back home and stayed until I finished high school. It wasn’t always easy, because my relationship with my father and mother had been severely impacted. Indeed, when I went off to Indiana University five years later, our relationship was still so rocky that my parents refused to fill out and sign my financial aid forms. And when I left for school, they did not accompany me. Phyllis never returned home from the foster family she had been placed with.
To this day, Phyllis and I are trying to heal from this experience. It was a painful experience for us both, as well as an embarrassment to us as a family. When the police and social services became involved, the story was put in the local newspaper. We were from a small town, and everybody started talking about our family, including the people at our church. Phyllis and I both felt a deep sense of shame because we felt we had brought embarrassment to our family, even though we had been beaten for something we hadn’t done. My parents felt bad as well. It was just a horrific ordeal.
I often think about what happened, mostly because of my sister. The incident affected us in drastically different ways. I used the incident to motivate me, to empower me to never allow myself to be humiliated in the eyes of my community again. I decided that I would not let the scars on my body determine the destiny of my future. I ended up using the incident as a motivating force to achieve, achieve, and achieve, to the best of my ability.
Phyllis, on the other hand, allowed the incident to beat her down. Emotionally, she was never able to overcome the incident. Nor was she able to forgive my father for his actions. She went on to have a number of kids out of wedlock, and wound up becoming a crack addict. It literally wrecked her life. Her life spun out of control. She continues to live with scars all over her arms and her legs. In the summertime, she can never feel comfortable wearing short pants or a swimming suit because of the marks.
Sometimes we are able to deal effectively with the hurt and pain that others inflict upon us. Sometimes we exacerbate that pain and slow down our healing process because of our inability to forgive those who have hurt us. I believe that we have to forgive in order to live. My sister is not yet able to do this. (But as I write this she is doing well, working and staying clear of drugs.)
Healing is an everyday process. There isn’t a day that goes by in my life that I don’t think about this incident in some way. Many times, as African Americans, we try to avoid dealing with our pain; as a result, it makes it impossible for us to heal. We can’t ignore the hurt or the pain in our lives and expect ourselves to heal automatically. We have to deal if we want to heal.
I meet all kinds of Black folks who have gotten emotionally stuck for years over an issue or incident in their lives. They end up languishing personally, professionally, spiritually, and psychologically because they become afraid to acknowledge it, afraid to deal with it, afraid to confront others, afraid to forgive others, and afraid to let go of it. When we are afraid to address these issues of hurt and pain, we jeopardize our own progress.
My father and mother have profusely apologized to me, and we have worked hard to repair our relationship. In many respects, my healing has already taken place.
I continue to pray for my sister, that she will one day be able to heal and live the kind of productive life that I know she is capable and deserving of living. No matter how severe the pain in our lives, we must strive to do whatever is necessary to turn our pain into power.
A DREAM, NOT DEFERRED, BUT FULFILLED
Marilyn Smith
On September 10, 2001, I had just returned home from working three twelve-hour shifts at Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was completely exhausted. Even in my exhaustion, however, something in my spirit was troubled. When I lay down to sleep that night, I dreamed that I saw a whole bunch of people in a building and they were burning up. I knew it was a familiar building, but I couldn’t make out exactly which building it was. I am a nurse, and in the dream I was a nurse as well. I kept trying to get to the people in this burning building, but somehow I couldn’t reach them. Then I began to see the people disintegrating before me. I wondered what I had done to land myself in Hell, because that is where I thought I was in the dream. All of a sudden, the dream shifted and I found myself in the desert, high on top of a cliff as I looked down into a pit. I saw one familiar hand come up and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I’ve got to reach this one person.” As I reached down to help this person and grabbed their hand, I started to fall. Right before I hit the bottom, I woke up.
When I woke up, I was full of perspiration and I didn’t have a blanket or a sheet on me; they were strewn about all over. I got up to open the blinds and it was a beautiful day outside. I started praising God, because I realized I hadn’t gone to hell, that I was still alive and well. I had the feeling, however, that something was going to happen to someone I knew; I just didn’t know whom and I didn’t know what was going to take place. It was September 11.
Something said to me, “Call the firehouse.” So I called the firestation in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where my husband worked. When they put him on the line, he was his usual jolly self. He wanted to know how I was doing and how the girls were doing. Our twin daughters had recently enrolled in Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he informed me that he had just put some money in the mail to pay some of their expenses. I told him that I was tired because I hadn’t slept well the night before. He asked me if I had seen the news and I told him I hadn’t. When I started to tell him about my dream, he said, “That’s weird, because what you dreamed is what’s happening right now in New York. We’re being attacked!” I turned on the television just in time to see the plane fly into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I immediately started crying; I felt as though this was the dream I had experienced the night before. Just then, my husband informed me that he had to get on the fire truck and head down to the World Trade Center. The phrase he used was the same one he used whenever he had to answer a fire call: “We have to rock ’n’ roll.” In the midst of my tears, I begged him not to go down there, but I knew he had to. He had wanted to be a fireman since he was eight years old. Nothing was going to keep him from doing his job.
Before we hung up, I told my husband I loved him. During our twenty years of marriage, things had not always been perfect for us and we had been separated a number of times. “Leon,” I said to him. “I want you to know that I really love you and no matter what we’ve been through in life, you have always been my hero and you have always been our daughters’ hero. I’m going to pray for you, and I want you to pray before you leave.” Then
we said a prayer together and he told me he would call me later. When I hung up the phone, I couldn’t take my hand off the receiver. I felt as though someone had just cut me with a knife and the blood was running out of my body. I just knew that something was going to happen.
My husband and I had known each other since I was fifteen years old. When we got together as a couple, we made a promise to each other that we would never do drugs or engage in criminal activity, and we leaned on each other to keep these promises. In addition to working as a fireman in Brooklyn, Leon held three other jobs to raise enough money to send the twins to college. He was active in all kinds of charity organizations, he mentored kids in the neighborhood, and he had gained a reputation as the neighborhood mechanic, working on everybody’s car, including those of firemen at other firestations. In August 2000, I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, from Brooklyn to be closer to my daughters.
My daughters were contacted at the college and notified that their father had responded to the call for duty at the World Trade Center. I became concerned about their well-being and decided to make the one-and-a-half-hour drive from Greensboro to the school to see how they were doing. It was important to me that they know I was okay and that I was holding up. When I arrived at the school and found the girls, we exchanged prayers and hugged and I let them know that I was holding up okay and that I felt everything would be fine. But when I got in the car and started driving home, I just knew I was going to have that phone call that I had always dreaded would come one day as a firefighter’s wife.
When I arrived home, my answering machine had eighteen messages. I knew this was not a good sign. I did not want to listen to those messages alone, but since I had recently relocated to Greensboro, I didn’t really know anyone there. Finally, I went over to my neighbor’s house across the street and explained my situation to the woman who lived there. I asked if she would come home and listen to the messages with me. My neighbor left her kids and came over to the house with me. When we played the messages, there were calls from Leon’s mother, my brother and sister, and then the dreaded message from the firehouse. “Hello, Marilyn? This is the firehouse. Give us a call when you get this message.”
I started running around in the house like a crazy person. I held on to my neighbor as I made the call back to the firehouse. “Marilyn,” they said. “We are sorry to inform you that Leon and all of Brooklyn #118 went into the World Trade Center and they were in the building when the building went down. No one has been recovered yet and we do not know their whereabouts.”
I can’t tell you what happened immediately after that. All I remember is that I was on the floor, crying and hurting in a way I had never hurt before. After I calmed down a bit, I called the Greensboro Fire Department and spoke to the chief. He and several other firefighters from the station came over to the house to console me. He also sent some of his workers down to Charlotte to pick up my daughters.
For the next five days, I did my best to get to New York with the girls, but we couldn’t get a flight out. When we finally did get to New York, I knew that Leon was gone. I couldn’t feel his presence anymore, and I knew that he had left us. I went to the firehouse where my husband worked and it was like a nightmare there. Because Brooklyn Heights #118 lost all the men on the truck they sent to the World Trade Center that day, there was weeping and wailing all around. The Brooklyn Heights fire station had taken a big hit.
One night in Greensboro several weeks later, I was sitting in the family room mourning the loss of my husband, and trying to make some sense out of what had taken place in our family’s life. I thought about Leon and how much I missed him. I thought about how he would affectionately call me “little mama” or “sweet little mama.” It was about 11:30 P.M. and suddenly the sprinklers came on outside. I thought that was strange, especially since they were programmed to come on at 5 in the morning. Then I heard a noise; a book had fallen over on the shelf. I got up to set the book back up and noticed the title of the book was I Love You Mama. Finally, I went downstairs to see what was happening with the sprinklers. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, the most eerie thing happened. A huge spirit or dark form passed right in front of me. It happened so quickly that I thought I was going to run into it. Immediately afterward, I smelled Leon’s cologne; it seemed as though Leon had walked right through me. At that moment, I felt that Leon was there in the house with me, and he had come back to let me know that he was still with his family in spirit.
Since that day, the girls and I have tried to console one another. We would kid each other that we knew Leon was up in heaven bargaining with God to work things out for his family still on earth.
In the wake of 9/11, all I kept worrying about was how I would ever be able to afford to get my daughters through college. It turned out that Johnson C. Smith College was contacted by the United Negro College Fund to find out if there were any students attending the school who had parents that were lost in the 9/11 tragedy. My daughters’ names were submitted to UNCF, and they were selected to receive a scholarship. The scholarship was presented to my daughters by the First Lady, Laura Bush, in Washington, D.C.
The City of New York joined with the United Negro College Fund in contributing toward the scholarship my daughters received. We went to New York to attend another awards ceremony in which Mayor Giuliani and the governor of New York presented the girls with awards as well, just to let the rest of the world know that the City of New York was taking care of the children affected by the tragedy. The Red Cross made us recipients of their help, as well. I often thought back to the times when I would get mail from the United Way and the Red Cross, and would send some money back in those envelopes I received, even if it was only five dollars. I never dreamed that the money I was giving would one day come back to help me and my family.
In Greensboro, people started coming from all over the city to bring me food or to ask how they could help. I really appreciated everything that was being done for me and the girls. But, in my silent moments when no one was around, I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into despair. My daughters, who were still out of school, said to me, “Mama, we have to get back in school. We can’t allow Dad’s death to knock us down. We have to do well in school and become productive citizens in the community, and give back by pulling others up along the way. We have to fulfill the dream he had for us.” So after a semester out of college, the girls returned. Yolanda stayed at Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte. But Tiffany became too worried about me and chose to attend Bennett College to be closer to me here in Greensboro. Now that some time has passed, the girls have gotten back on track and are doing well in school again. They are carrying out their father’s dream for their lives.
When the girls were children, I began my study toward becoming a nurse. Leon encouraged me to pursue this course, and he worked three jobs to make sure there was enough money to take care of the household. I earned my associate’s degree in nursing, but Leon kept encouraging me to go all the way and earn my B.S. in nursing. I wasn’t able to continue on with my education, however, due to financial and time constraints. After 9/11, I received a call from the fire department; they were offering scholarships for the girls’ education, and they offered me a scholarship to pursue my education as well. In the midst of all the tragedy, it seemed as though I could hear my husband’s voice saying to me, “You get back in school, Marilyn. You go all the way and earn the nurse practitioner’s and the B.S. in nursing degree.”
I accepted the scholarship from the New York Fire Department and I enrolled in the University of North Carolina here in Greensboro. At the end of my first semester, I had earned all A’s. A feeling of inspiration arose in me, and made me hungry to achieve my goal.
I still feel like I am living in two states, traveling back and forth from North Carolina to New York. My husband’s mother still lives in New York, and Leon was her only child. She had just lost her husband in December of the year before. I try to be a source of support for her whenever sh
e needs something.
In spite of all that has happened, I am filled with feelings of gratitude and thankfulness. Whenever I am not in classes at school or studying for my courses, I do volunteer work in Greensboro. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to make you appreciate life and put things in perspective. I feel blessed because of what all the various organizations and the fire department did for not only me, my daughters, and my mother-in-law in our time of need, but for other dependents of firefighters, as well. In my heart, I feel like it is my time to give back to others, even if it is only an hour or so here and there.
These days I find myself trying to make decisions for my family that I know my husband would have made were he still alive. I have taken a lot of the insurance money I received from his death and placed it in a fund for his current and future grandchildren’s educations, because I feel that’s what Leon would have wanted. Because Leon always celebrated the twins’ birthday by taking them shopping at every store they wanted to go to, this year the girls and I are spending his birthday in New York with his mother, going out to dinner, and buying him a gift from us all. And I’m planning on planting a Japanese red maple tree in my backyard and placing a brass plate with Leon’s name on it in honor of him.
Today, I am taking joy in living a simple life. I am trying to teach my children to do the same. Tomorrow is never promised to any of us. Each of us has to live life to the fullest each day we are blessed to stay here on this earth. It’s not how long we live measured by the years we stay here, but it’s the quality of what we do with the time we’re allowed.
When I went down to Ground Zero, the most memorable scene for me was seeing the construction workers and the rescue workers. I had never seen such unity in all of my life: Blacks, Latinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Caucasians, sitting together, breaking bread, working, and hugging each other.
