The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  This was the more sophisticated version of the era’s notorious Orchard Park Projects, without an apple tree in sight. My new address on Northampton Avenue could be said to have been the Harvard of the ’hood. It was a springboard to my future beyond my term as a ward of the state that would teach me about survival in the real world—and then some.

  At first blush, it was easy to observe that Rosa, true to her name as a stunning flower among the thorns, seemed not to belong in such a setting. But on further observation, it was apparent that her radiant presence had been earthbound on purpose—right there in the ghetto, sent from above to impart her womanly secrets of beauty to all. Literally. Rosa Turner was an Avon representative, in the truest sense of that vocation. She was the perfect palette—breathtaking, with smooth cinnamon skin and auburn hair and a dainty spray of freckles on her high cheekbones. Rosa’s stark beauty was the kind you see in ghettos all over the world and wish Scavullo or Demarchelier or VanderZee could be there to capture in a photographic essay. That was Rosa Turner.

  What was the fragrance that surrounded her at all times? This was a question I pondered that first night as I settled in for the night.

  The answer came a few days later. Rosa smelled like fresh air. Pure, wholesome, feminine. Her bedroom was a shrine to womanly beauty products—lotions, creams, balms, scented emollients specially concocted for elbows and feet, hair shampoos, conditioners and treatments, sprays and splashes, colognes, perfumes, soaps, makeup. She wasn’t the Avon lady for nothing, and, boy, could she move some Avon.

  There wasn’t a person in the vicinity of Roxbury, including the patients and staff at Boston City Hospital, who didn’t know Rosa Turner. Black, white, Hispanic, struggling, affluent, women, and men. I met individuals in the upper tiers of Boston’s elite cultural circles who somehow knew Rosa.

  What was she doing in the chaos of the ’hood? Adding more by fostering me?

  This wasn’t easy to answer initially, because Mrs. Turner hadn’t signed on to sit me down and tell me the story of her life. Over time I had a chance to take a peek at some of her secret coping skills, like her passion and talent for bowling. I was invited along with Rosa’s family to cheer her on as she made an appearance on a local television show called Bowling for Dollars, a program that paid out big prize money if you bowled a strike. Watching Rosa hurl her bowling ball down the center of the lane, I knew it had to be about more than a strike; it was a personal victory.

  My job was to learn everything that a fourteen-and fifteen-year-old could about living in the ’hood and being a lady about it, but first, I had to attempt to learn how to fight. In the middle of the busing insanity, I defended my Italian friend, Debbie DePalma, and then, as a result, got jumped by a gang of black girls I knew. This was survival of the fittest, where adapting to unfolding circumstances gave you the keys to the kingdom. It was where my dance training helped in leaping onto roofs of parked cars in order to escape stray Doberman pinschers; where leathahs and leathers were two entirely different things. I saw movies that only real life can script: Pimps with processed hair more laid out than their women, in full-length mink coats and wide brim hats cocked perilously to the side. Cadillacs and pinky diamond rings. Where fires were set because people were poor, angry, or just plain cold.

  Inside the Turner household, there was another kind of fight to learn. If I wanted something, I had to speak up for myself, and I sure as hell had better put my things back where they belonged. Rosa ran a kind of pawn shop or pound operation, charging twenty-five cents to get back personal items from her that we didn’t put away. If I couldn’t afford to buy them back, she tossed them after a certain amount of time.

  This was all I needed to make sure that I wedged part-time jobs in between schoolwork and ballet classes, singing my own fourteen-year-old’s version of “She Works Hard for the Money,” which that Bostonian Donna Summers would make famous. I waitressed at Howard Johnson’s and then took a job scooping ice cream at Brigham’s, a popular restaurant chain in and around Boston; my location was in the red-light district.

  Did I like walking down sidewalks with the crush of last night’s broken beer bottle glass stuck to the soles of my shoes? Hell, no. Not at the time. But it was also the best learning experience I could have been given.

  To every lipstick-smeared prostitute who made his or her way past the manager’s watchful eye, I gave a little extra ice cream. Agatha had taught me not to judge, only to be of service. There but for the grace of God. That was only one lesson.

  In a greater sense this period was teaching me independence, letting me know that ultimately I alone needed to be responsible for my things and my welfare. In the meantime, however, I wasn’t without the constant concern of Agatha, who never stopped checking up on me, knowing full well that teenagers need pocket change and a feeling of autonomy. She would say lovingly that she sensed I wasn’t “flush with money” and would send me a little something. When she couldn’t be there to protect me completely, she put me in the hands of God, fully and faithfully, writing to me in this era:

  I know you’re going to call me square but if you find yourself in a precarious position, make an act of perfect contrition. You are sorry for your sins, not because you will be punished for them but because you have offended God. That will get you into Heaven, if you say it meaningfully. Don’t forget the Virgin Mary, She’s marvelous…the souls in Purgatory need your prayers and so do I. I love you very much.

  And so I kept pluggin’ away, slipping chocolate-mint ice cream to the disenfranchised, saving my pay and tips in a shoebox full of coins that I spent hours rolling into paper cylinders, while starting a permanent coin collection with the foreign and old coins.

  Rosa taught me well. She didn’t want me losing my hard-earned savings to my own stupidity. Or as she said, “I don’t want your ‘dippy’ twenty-five cents.” It was tough, constructive love; a love that required arm’s-length distance, not gushy, lovey-dovey love, but the kind that forced me to take an honest look at my reality.

  Rosa was my heroine. Fatherless, she made her own way in spite of the odds stacked against her. She did it her way, too, in the ghetto, as a mother of ten not including me—a provider, fighter, supporter of the arts, bowling ace, foster parent, Avon lady. An entrepreneur and a teacher as well, Rosa encouraged and mentored me to become an independent contractor for Avon, layering what Agatha had already taught me about being a businesswoman.

  I decided to sell Christmas candles in the neighborhood, a process that meant riding up and down elevators in the projects, holding my breath so as not to inhale the stale smells of urine and garbage, and praying not to be jumped for my commissions. When I struggled in filling out my first sales spreadsheet, Rosa helped me with her expert math skills. More important, I saw by her example the rewards associated with commerce and the repercussions of being disorganized.

  Eighty-six Northampton Street was Roxbury’s Grand Central Station. Teeming with family, children and grandchildren, a grandmother we all called Nana, extended family and people who called themselves family, and more men in the household than I’d experienced before, the law of the land was basic: I had to find my place by following directions and not adding to the drama. When testosterone was in overdrive, and when verbal and physical violence flared, I had to learn to keep my mouth shut and get out of the way.

  The art of pressing introduced to me by Ma at Forest Edge was taken up several rungs at the Turners’, where I proved myself by pressing a crease you could slice bread on in the Turner boys’ jeans. Not that they couldn’t do it themselves. Most men in the ’hood, I learned, could press clothes like nobody’s business. It was part what their mommas taught them and part vanity. Still, I liked to show my stuff, licking my index finger and touching it to the iron, listening for the sound of that sizzle to know that it was red-hot and ready to go.

  Lauren, my foster sister and best friend, was my tour guide in the mysterious world of the opposite sex, letting me know how the flirting an
d dating thang was supposed to go down in the big city. I learned about rent parties, an innovation the Brahmins might have referred to as fund-raisers—basically, ingeniously designed open houses to help the hosts make their rent. By paying two dollars at the door, I could find my place in the crowd, any unclaimed floor space where I could move my hips to artists who became part of this era’s amazing inheritance: Aretha, Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell, James Brown, the Intruders, the O’Jays, the Four Tops, the Floaters, the Chi-Lites, Tavares, LaBelle, Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, the Whispers, the Escorts, Martha and the Vandellas, New Birth, Nancy Wilson, Billy Paul and Billy Preston, Earth, Wind & Fire, Johnny Mathis, the Temptations, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie, Isaac Hayes, Rose Royce, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Fifth Dimension, Al Green, the Commodores, Average White Band, and the Jackson Five. That’s what we called havin’ a par-tay.

  A lavender florescent light backlit my supercool partner’s blown-out ’fro, in which he had planted his pick—complete with black power fist attached to it. There was nothing like a laid-out brother from the ’hood. He smelled as good as he looked. Cocoa butter mixed with Afro-Sheen was the neighborhood cologne. Nobody went anywhere without the influence of Madam C. J. Walker or John Johnson’s hair care products.

  My education was vast. In the year or so that I was at the Turners, I learned about getting my period, the medieval belt and straps and what tampons were, about bursting hormones, having a boyfriend and a first kiss. Also: how to slow dance and grind, to feel the male anatomy because I wanted to, not because someone was forcing me to. I learned the definition of a fox. No, a foxxx! About what fine really meant. About getting in trouble, being tough, and daring to be.

  Mrs. Turner was explicit about where to walk and how to carry myself with a don’t-mess-with-me attitude, making sure she repeated every time I left the town house, “Walk on the opposite side of the street and don’t pay those fools on the corner any mind!”

  Sometimes I couldn’t resist walking down the more dangerous side of the street, for no other reason than the ability to stand on the same ground as the other inhabitants of these woods. In my periphery, I picked up on the dance that black men dance when walking down the street, owning it with an inimitable beat used only for that purpose. Aaand-a-one, aaand-a-two, aaand-a-three, aaand-a-four, the right shoulder tipping ever so forward, an indecipherable skip in his step. I liked that dance these men did. It was called tippin’.

  On the corner, my street corner, there was the local bar. Broken green glass and men playing dice. With pints of something, especially on Fridays, they’d lean on the only thing keeping them upright—buildings, lampposts, each other—slurring their much rehearsed: “Hey baby, come mere and give Daddy some of that suga’.”

  The daddy thing came up in all kinds of ways. If it had dawned on me that my lot in life was to have many mothers, it was probably right about here that I started to think maybe I wasn’t ever going to have any male parent, surrogate or otherwise.

  The metaphor for the void created by the lack of a father was the handcrafted leather wallet I carried from a very early age, and still do. It had been made for me with only love by Mr. Collins Taylor of Gray, Maine, my first foster father. Inside the wallet were my most important identification materials. There was my prized blue Social Security card, reminding me of my institutional government patriarchs, a library card, and my CIA ID card. Having nothing to do with being an agent in central intelligence, this was a social club from school. The initials stood for Christ In Action. Among my various pieces of identification, carefully concealed in my wallet, everywhere I traveled, was an unsent letter to my phantom father.

  The drift to becoming my own daddy continued. After all, the priests had me calling them my Father and the drunks called themselves my Daddy; hell, I might as well fill the slot myself. I’d answer to any name—Pa, Pops, Papa, Dad, Daddy, Dada. Warrior, provider, protector of me.

  To formalize my ascension as my own father, I started to collect clothes with which I later cultivated a look and everything: men’s suit vests cinched in at the waist with a belt, and a brim to top off the outfit. Whether or not someone else found my apparel odd was beside the point. This was me having a shred of power, a chance to reclaim something—someone—lost to me forever.

  Rosa Turner didn’t hover, because she didn’t have time to. She had her own family, with some of her kids grown and some not. She had to navigate the drama, like the violence that exploded one evening where her defense was a bottle of Tabasco sauce that she broke over her husband’s brow. I had no idea if the blood that spilled from Mr. Turner was real or Tabasco sauce.

  This was the same man who had complained about the meager support check they received as foster parents, when he said to Rosa, “She’s only bringing in $87.00 a month and drinks too much of our milk.” I heard that with my own ears.

  Something happens to a child when they hear themselves scornfully valued by a dollar amount. They either let it affect their esteem or they don’t. I had to keep telling myself not to own those words, not to be dependent on dollar amounts, which were just paper, remembering that I had emancipation three years around the corner.

  But where was I supposed to turn with those feelings? I didn’t want to complain. It wasn’t my place.

  When there were violent episodes, Rosa must have observed that I didn’t judge, run away, or tell my social worker or Agatha, and she decided, maybe not even consciously, that she could trust me with her secret—one of the few ways outside of prayer that she allowed herself to channel her pain. It was something called opera.

  Rosa read that the Metropolitan Opera was coming to Boston to perform Madama Butterfly at Hines Auditorium in the Prudential Center and invited me to go with her. Madama Butterfly? My classical music knowledge notwithstanding, I had never been to see an opera, and as a recently more toughened up teenager had no idea what to expect. Rosa assured me that the singing and the story would stay with me forever. That was an understatement. Over the space of less than ten miles she delivered me from out of the chaos into the magnificence and splendor of the opera. A miracle.

  I was transfixed by the elaborate production set up in a convention center, as well as the metamorphosis of the cavernous space that I had seen once before—with Agatha, when we attended the Boat Show, without the intention of buying our own yacht, but just as an excursion out of Roxbury and to enjoy lofty dreams.

  More than what I saw onstage from the upper balcony where we sat, I would never forget the transformation of Rosa and her intense focus on the miniature performers far below. As if on some internal cue, she reached into her purse and retrieved a little case that held what turned out to be opera glasses, which I had never seen before. Rosa, unaware of me watching her, allowed tears to cascade down her perfect profile. Suddenly she returned to the moment, self-conscious, and apologized with a small smile for her indulgence, even though she knew she never needed to apologize to me or anyone for who and what she was.

  Here I sensed Rosa’s other secret, a form of defiance against any force that would stand in the way of her entitlement. Part escapism; part redemption. Whether it was the Metropolitan Opera, the Bolshoi, or taking me by the hand to see Alvin Ailey at the Orpheum Theater, to experience the brilliance of Judith Jamison or Donna Wood, she was entitled. By taking me, so too was I. It was beyond comprehension to me that these weren’t final performances. How could perfection be repeated, night after night?

  The crowning glory for each performance was always the curtain call. How did prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya have any energy after performing the demanding role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake or in Spring Waters? As I looked through Rosa Turner’s opera glasses, I began to understand the invisible miracle of energy begetting energy. On one knee, with what seemed to be fifty pounds of red roses in one arm, the other outstretched, every lithe muscle extended to the very end of her long fingertips, Maya spoke words without words, expres
sing her thanks as though she was speaking only to me.

  When standing up and applauding wildly wasn’t enough, I couldn’t help from joining with the rest of audience in verbalizing praise, borrowing Rosa’s Italian, which I had first heard her use for Madama Butterfly.

  “Bravo!” I called quietly in my fourteen-and-a-half-year-old voice. I liked the sound of that. “Bravo!” I called even louder, then shouted, “Bravissimo, Maya!”

  How did my foster mother Rosa, living in the projects, know how to speak Italian? How had she so seamlessly taught me, without me even knowing it?

  In these surprising ways, Rosa Turner introduced me to theater, on and off the stage. Experiences as dramatic as Greek tragedies and as electrifying as Duke Ellington’s Liberian Suite, or as conventional as a trip to Disneyworld over spring break, where I joined Lauren, Rosa, and her mother. Seeing the fearlessness of women in pyramid formation on water skis left me speechless and wanting to return to the ballet studio and practice being unafraid. Rosa contributed another meaningful chapter in my education about the need for defiant courage—the insistence to be counted, to show up at the opera, the ballet, or Disneyworld; to show up in life, without apology or justification.

  Rosa and I shared a history of illegitimacy, as we were both born to unavailable fathers. Unlike my story of never knowing who my father was, Rosa grew up knowing that she was the daughter of jazz legend, alto sax player Johnny Hodges—but was hardly acknowledged. I remember how somber it was at the Turner household when Mr. Hodges died. Although Rosa was noticeably nervous about going to the funeral, where all the jazz luminaries would be in attendance, she girded herself and traveled to Harlem, anyway.

  She defied convention by asking for one of her father’s saxophones but was flatly denied it by his widow. Rosa didn’t like having to tell that story, partly because it revealed her vulnerability and mainly because the last thing she wanted from anyone was any kind of pity.