Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul (5 page)

That night, at age forty-three, my mother was crowned “Mrs. Forty-Plus.” She was the first person in our family to ever win such a title. With this new woman, my mother was born again. She gave herself a new chance at life—as a model, a dancer, a mother and a friend. At age twenty-eight, I met my “shero.”

Lisa Nichols

What She Said

A
successful person is one who can lay a firm
foundation with the bricks that others throw at
him/her.

David Brinkley

The words Mama flung at me on a summer day in 1978 stabbed me in so many places I figured I'd ache and bleed forever.

“This is what I get,” she said, “for working my fingers to the bone raising somebody else's child. You wouldn't have done this if your daddy was still alive.”

I was stunned.
Had I heard her right?
“Whose child you raised?” I asked, puzzled.

“Your daddy's.
You
.”

We were sitting outside, lapping up lemonade and sharing a pint of vanilla ice cream. That was the way we communicated in those days, substituting homemade lemonade for “I'm glad to see you,” and bowls of ice cream for “I love you.” But on this sun-scorched afternoon,Mama, stung by my new, short Afro and sassy ways, finally blurted out what was in her heart.

I could hear the pride in her voice as she talked about how she'd raised me and rescued her marriage. After so many years of living a lie, it seemed to free her to dump our family's secrets on a table and slice them open. But I was angry at her, angry at Daddy, angry at Grandma Eva, angry at Aunt Minnie and angry at anyone else who'd known the truth but kept it buried.

After six or seven months, I finally packed away my anger, dried my tears and began using the journalistic skills I'd learned in the news rooms, hammering Mama with questions about my birth mother. The state of Alabama had never been able to find a birth certificate for Betty Jean DeRamus, the name I'd always believed was mine. However, state workers quickly found one for Betty Jean Nesby, a baby girl born on the same day and year as I was. The story was as true as rain and as real as Grandma's Bible.

Now I understood why Mama had always forgotten my birthdays. Now I understood why her all-consuming love seemed to change at times to resentment once I reached my teens. Her remarks about my long, lank hair, my tan skin and my full lips—all so different from her own—made sense, too. I could even forgive her for once telling one of my friends that it was too bad I lacked her beauty. She'd been watching me become her worst nightmare, a young woman who looked like her rival.

Yet I was still knee-deep in sorrow and still churning with questions. According to my newly acquired birth certificate, my birth mother came from Monroe County, Mississippi, and already had another child when she gave birth to me in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And according to Mama, my birth mother had willingly handed me over to my dad. I don't think I'll ever know where my father found the courage to bring me home to his wife. Or why Mama, childless though she was, agreed to raise her husband's love child by another woman. But the two of them had indeed leaped aboard a train in Alabama and got off it in Detroit, a city where they created a life for me without bothering with any uncomfortable paperwork or truths.

But a funny thing happened while I was packing my bags for a trip to the South that I hoped would enable me to pick up the trail of my maternal relatives, including, perhaps, my biological mother. I woke up that morning with a familiar phrase dancing in my head—“It takes a whole village to raise a child.”

I recalled that during the slavery era there had been honorary “aunts” and “uncles” on every plantation, ready to wrap their arms around youngsters separated from their parents and school them in the art of survival. Those traditions endured in the twentieth century and beyond.

My friend's mother raised the daughter my friend had when she was sixteen. The child grew up believing her mother was her older sister. And just about every black family I knew could tell stories about “cousins” who were actually family friends and “mothers” who were really open-hearted neighbors.

Mostly, though, I remembered those times when Mama had shown up at my elementary school in the middle of the day, bringing raincoat and boots to protect me from a simmering storm.

I thought about how she used to lean out of windows to watch me play hopscotch and hide-and-seek, smiling so much I worried that she would crack her face. I remembered all those pork chops and slabs of chocolate cake she'd stuffed into my lunch boxes. And the fact that she and my working-class dad had paid for my weekly piano lessons and sent me to a tuition-charging Catholic school.

I also thought about all those evenings when Mama had taken me to the movies, too weary from hours of maid work to stay awake but determined to give me a shot of joy. Daddy, who read Bible stories to me at bedtime and combed my hair on Sunday mornings, had been my heart. But Mama, I now realized, had been the person who made our little family possible, sheltering a youngster she could easily have despised.

“I'm
your
daughter,” I said one day after stopping by Mama's apartment to drop off bags of groceries. She didn't say anything, but her eyes told me that she knew why I'd never gotten around to taking that trip to Alabama to search for traces of my unknown family. My only regret is that I never really thanked Mama, in clear, direct words, for all she'd done.

When she died, I had engraved on her tombstone, “You taught me everything that matters.” One of the things she taught me is that life isn't some big-screen drama in which families thrash out all their differences in two hours and then blend their voices in a symphony of joy. Sometimes love is just a lunch packed with extra care, a shared dish of ice cream, a jug of homemade lemonade or a mother who fills her daughter's head with a stream of constant dreams.

And family? I know what that is, too.

It's whomever you're lucky enough to love for a lifetime.

Betty DeRamus

Getting to Know Miss Gladys

I
t's good when you've got a woman who is a
friend of your mind.

Toni Morrison

I recently remarried at age fifty after being divorced for fifteen years. My new husband had been divorced for twenty-five years, so it was not something we entered into blindly.

I married the first time at age nineteen, and my mother-in-law played a very traditional but special role. “Mother,” as she was called, was a strong matriarch. She was older and more domestic than my mother. She taught me how to cook, clean, take care of my baby, make herbal potions for everything from colic to cramps, to be a practical, functioning wife and mother at such a young age.

During our courtship, my second husband-to-be took me to his hometown in southern Virginia. He had told me his mother was in a nursing home, but when we arrived, I was emotionally unprepared for what I saw. A very small, frail body in a fetal position, a tiny childlike face with penetrating eyes lying on a pillow with a pink bow in her hair.

She had not spoken in three years. She had recently celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday, and her room was full of balloons and birthday cards. Above her bed was a loving collage of the many people in her life who wanted to acknowledge her and be remembered in some small way. It was obvious that she was loved.

We visited her quite regularly; her eyes followed me wherever I went.

I learned that she was able to communicate her likes, dislikes and even her opinion about things with those deep-set eyes. When my husband-to-be proposed, we went to tell her the news. When we arrived we thought she was napping so we sat, talked and waited for her to awaken. My husband gently stroked her cheeks and hair as you would a sleeping newborn and whispered softly into her ear how much he loved her. Her eyes slowly began to open and look around, and I realized she had not been sleeping but had been playing “possum” to hear what was being said while people thought she was asleep—something she was known to cleverly do.

I walked over to her bed and stood directly in front of her and said, “Miss Gladys, I am going to marry your baby boy, Charlie.”

Her eyes widened, and I saw a flash in her stare that only a powerful black mother can give—a look that at once warmed me
and
warned me.

My husband saw it, too, and commented, “Did you see that look Mama gave you?”

I not only saw it, I also felt it; I just wasn't sure exactly how to interpret it. I think it was a dual look of acceptance: “So you are the one that got him—okay, I like you,” mixed simultaneously with caution, “You'd better take care of him, 'cause he is
my
baby.” She let me know her expectations all in the flash of her eyes.

As we prepared for the wedding, we knew she would not be able to attend and thought to include her and my deceased mother in our celebration, so we planned to put a picture of each of them and a bouquet of flowers on their seats in the church. Two weeks before our wedding we learned Miss Gladys had taken a sudden turn for the worse. When we got there she was in the hospital surrounded by several noisy machines. Her eyes were closed, her breathing raspy. No “possum,” this time. She was passing away. My husband-to-be was shattered and began making arrangements for her funeral, to be held exactly one week before our wedding. While I didn't really know her well, I felt I was losing a wonderful mother-in-law for the second time in my life and wished that I had had the chance to learn from this woman. I knew that to be so obviously loved by so many, she had a wealth of wisdom to share.

For many weeks after our beautiful wedding and honeymoon, my new husband was quiet and withdrawn, had erratic sleeping habits and was always looking for something to do so that he wouldn't have time to think.

One rainy Saturday morning, watching him struggle, I asked, “Honey, what's wrong?”

He replied, “Nothing.”

I said, “You are grieving for your mother.”

He looked as if it had never occurred to him, “Is that what this is called? I thought that happened at the funeral.”

As if we had opened the floodgates, he opened up and started telling me story after story about “Mama,” Miss Gladys Gramps, Auntie, Sister Glad—any one of the affectionate names she had earned.

Every story was like opening a present; some were funny and involved him, his brothers and sisters, and her method of discipline. Others were about him and his special love for her as only a son could see his mother. Many were about her wisdom and levelheadedness in dealing in the world without being able to read or write in the Jim Crow South of the twentieth century. Story after story cascaded from him when we were riding in the car, taking our walks, waiting in line at the store, falling asleep, every day some mundane situation would bring a story that started “I remember when Mama . . .” and he would sink into that state of peace and comfort where fond memories take you like a feather bed. I would soak the stories up as I got to know the woman with the penetrating eyes.

Once my husband began sharing his stories, I could see his grief lifting.

I learned that Miss Gladys was born in 1913 in Virginia to a white mother and a black father. She was not schooled past the third grade. In 1931 she married and had eleven children. During the course of their marriage her husband would go back and forth between Virginia and Philadelphia every two years leaving her pregnant after each “homecoming.” My husband was “homecoming” number nine, and after number eleven she never let his father return. She did domestic work, picked cotton and tobacco. Her greatest personal pleasure was gardening. She would spend hours tending perfectly straight rows of seasonal vegetables. My husband laughs saying that he was a vegetarian until he was twelve and never knew it.

I learned that Miss Gladys prayed all day on her knees—in the kitchen, bedroom and in her garden. By any account she did an incredible job raising her children. When my husband became an adult, he asked her how she fed, clothed and cared for eleven children with no visible means of support, and she replied, “On the arms of Jesus, son, just leanin' on his arms.”

When one of her daughters was murdered by a serial killer, Miss Gladys, age sixty-four at the time, took custody of her four-year-old granddaughter and raised her until she successfully completed college.

In her seventies, my husband asked, “Mama, why are you always so tired?”

She said, “Son, when you climb up to this age you are going to be tired, too.” Her journey through life was certainly an uphill climb, and even her valleys were bumpy, not smooth, flower-filled, softly paved paths.

It has been three years since Miss Gladys passed. Still, on Sunday afternoons my husband takes a seat in his favorite chair by the sun-filled bay window and talks on the phone for hours to his sisters. The stories and the laughter start swirling in the room as they reminisce about Mama. I lie on the couch nearby playing possum and listen quietly as I get to know and love him and Miss Gladys a little more with each telling.

Bari-Ellen Ross

The Ring

Itwas January, and the birthday cards were already starting to arrive.When my mother got the first one, I turned to my sister and said, “It must be from Aunt Kat. You knew she was going to be the first to get her teasing in.”