“Little fella,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do. Let me speak to a parent because I want to come and meet you.”
My mother gave me the okay and I gave him the address, but I reminded him that our club meeting was for young people not old people. He told me that, “Old people can teach you a thing or two, but that’s all right. Always speak your mind. You don’t waste folks’ time and they won’t waste yours.”
An hour later, I was dressed in my Sunday best and waiting outside my apartment for his van to drive up. People in my neighborhood rarely called airport shuttles unless they had to travel to fly out for a funeral, so I knew I wouldn’t have a hard time spotting my welcomed visitor. Soon a yellow and brown passenger van came slowly down my street as if it were driving in a school zone. I met the driver as soon as his door opened.
“I’m Mr. Perry, the owner of this company,” he said. He held out his hand. My eyes bugged out of my head from the pain when that gentle giant closed his hand around mine. He apologized for his strong shuttle-bus driver handshake grip.
“Little fella,” he said. “There are two types of firm handshakes— the white collar handshake and the hardworking man’s handshake. You’re gonna have to have both to make it in this world with the competition that is out there now. None of the big boys are going to give you shelf space.” He seemed to like the way I was listening to his advice. After a few minutes of discussion, he agreed to personally pick up the members of UNEEC every Saturday morning and return us home after the meeting.
“I wish my boys had listened to me when they were younger,” he said with a sad look on his face. “We could have a fleet of vans by now.” Then he asked me, “Farrah, can this old man sit in to see what goes on with your club?”
I remembered what he said earlier about older people knowing a thing or two. “Sure, Mr. Perry,” I said. “You can come and speak to us about your life as a businessman.”
“Little fella,” he said, “you may scare off your club members if you tell them about something they don’t know anything about.”
“What’s that, sir?”
Mr. Perry said, in a tone as strong as his handshake, “Hard work.”
Mr. Perry received a pick-up call on his walkie-talkie. He said he’d be back Saturday morning to pick the club members up, then opened the driver’s side door and hopped in with lightning speed. I thought to myself, He moves fast, just like my grandmother. Old people moving faster than young kids—wow! I was impressed!
UNEEC’s first meeting was a great success; the second week I invited Mr. Perry to speak. No one was surprised to see him since he picked all of us up, but we were surprised to see two grown men in the back of the room.
When Mr. Perry stood up to speak, he needed no introduction. “I’ve been working hard all my life,” he began, “and I like what I see in you all. Since I was your age I’ve been working. I’ve been my own boss since I moved away from home in Baltimore and caught a train, living like a hobo until I arrived here in Chicago.” We hung on his every word. Mr. Perry was not reading from a book but telling us the amazing experiences in his own life. He touched our minds and hearts with his triumphs over trials and tribulations, and how he reared himself up to be a good man, a good father and a hardworking business person.
There wasn’t a dry eye, including the two men in the back of the room, who turned out to be Mr. Perry’s grown sons. They told me their father had asked them to come and hear the stories of his life, because he had always worked so hard that he never had time to tell them before. Now, at last, they finally understood their father and what he had gone through to give them a better life. That day, Mr. Perry was no longer an airport shuttle driver; he was no longer just a dad to these two men. Mr. Perry became our hero; he became our possibility. Mr. Perry became our way out of the ghetto. His story of hard work, dedication, sacrifice, integrity, and a strong handshake moved each one of us to the point of tears and inspired us. We never saw him the same from that day forward; we knew his ride to the Ramada was really a ride to our dreams come true. The only person not crying was Mr. Perry. He closed by humbly thanking us for the opportunity to speak publicly before an audience for the first time in his life.
With his first handshake, Mr. Perry had reached down and pulled me up. His words lifted me to an even higher plane. His strength made me strong. I knew that with an example like Mr. Perry in my life, I couldn’t go wrong.
Some would be amazed that I made my first million by the age of fourteen and that now, at the age of nineteen, I am the majority owner and publisher of InnerCity magazine in partnership with the oldest African-American owned media conglomerate in America. Yes, some would be amazed, but I’m not. After all, I learned to do three things very well in my young life: work really, really hard, know when I’m being blessed with a lesson and how to maintain a strong and confident handshake.
Farrah Gray
©2003. Reprinted with permission of Jerry Craft.
Consider This
My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces.
Wilma Rudolph
• Basketball superstar Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
• Rafer Johnson, the decathlon champion, was born with a clubfoot.
• Early in her career, Whoopi Goldberg worked in a funeral parlor and as a bricklayer while taking small parts on Broadway.
• Sidney Poitier was told at his first acting audition that he should stick with dishwashing.
• Beyoncé Knowles says she was the really shy, quiet kid in school.
• Eddie Murphy was once paid one dollar per minute as a stand-up comedian.
• Wesley Snipes installed telephones before getting his first movie role.
• It was not until he reached his fifties that Morgan Freeman become a movie star.
• Alex Haley received a rejection letter once a week for four years as a budding writer. Later in his career, he was ready to give up on the book Roots. After nine years on the project, he felt inadequate to the task and was ready to throw himself off a freighter in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As he was standing at the back of the freighter, looking at the wake, he heard the voices of his ancestors saying, “You go do what you got to do because they are all up there watching. Don’t give up. You can do it. We’re counting on you!” In subsequent weeks, the final draft of Roots poured out of him.
• Wilma Rudolph was the twentieth of twenty-two children. She was born prematurely and wasn’t expected to survive. When she was four years old, Wilma contracted double pneumonia and scarlet fever, which left her with a paralyzed left leg. At age nine, she removed the metal leg brace and began to walk without it. By thirteen, she had developed a rhythmic walk, which doctors claimed as a miracle. That same year, she decided to become a runner. She entered a race and came in last. For the next few years, every race she entered, she came in last. Everyone told her to quit, but Wilma kept on running. One day, she actually won. From then on she won every race she entered. Eventually this little girl, who was told she would never walk again, went on to win three Olympic gold medals.
• In 1962, four young women started a professional singing career. They began performing in their church and doing small concerts. Then they cut a record. It was a flop. Later, another record was recorded. The sales were a fiasco. The third, fourth, fifth and on through their ninth recordings were all failures. Early in 1964, they were booked for Dick Clark’s show, American Bandstand. He barely paid enough to meet expenses, and no great contracts resulted from their national exposure. Later that summer, they recorded “Where Did Our Love Go?” This song raced to the top of the charts, and Diana Ross and the Supremes gained national recognition and prominence as a musical sensation.
• Scottie Pippen, who won four NBA championship rings and two Olympic gold medals, received no athletic scholarship from any university and originally made his small college basketball tea
m only as the equipment manager.
• Renowned photographer Howard Bingham flunked his college photography class and was fired from his first job as staff photographer at a Los Angeles newspaper. He went on to become one of the top photographers in the world, working with such notables as Bill Cosby and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and circling the globe with Muhammad Ali.
• One of the most beautiful speaking voices on stage and screen belongs to James Earl Jones. Did you know that Jones has long battled a severe stuttering problem? From age nine until his mid-teens, he had to communicate with teachers and classmates by handwritten notes. A high school English teacher gave him the help he needed, but he still struggles. Yet there is no finer speaking voice than his.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
There is no paycheck that can equal the feeling of contentment that comes from being the person you are meant to be.
Oprah Winfrey
It was the telephone call that every mother dreads: “Something’s happened—there’s been an accident.” In one instant, life as I knew it changed. I stood in my office cubicle clutching the phone while my entire world plunged into a long tunnel of darkness.
The woman running the in-home day care center had been ironing clothes. She had gone to the bathroom for just a second. My precocious six-month-old baby had crawled away from the play area, and pulled on the dangling cord. The iron fell, missing her infant skull by a millimeter. But the hot water . . . They told me to brace myself for what I’d see when I got to the hospital.
There was no time for tears or hysteria. Adrenaline shot through my system as I grabbed my purse with shaky hands, dropped the telephone and dashed out the door—ignoring the pleas from coworkers to let them drive. Before they could catch up to me, I’d reached my car, jumped in and screeched out of the company parking lot. During the interminable drive to the hospital, my thoughts ricocheted between cold logic and bargaining with God.
It was just an iron. How bad could it be? Okay, she might have a dark patch on her skin when she grows up, but if it really bothers her, we’ll have it removed with plastic surgery. Lord, please don’t let it be worse than that.
I saw her innocent, doe-brown eyes first. Eyes that had cried so much there was a nurse applying drops to keep them from drying out. My baby looked up at me, too worn out to even whimper. But her eyes said it all, “Mommy save me. Make it stop hurting.”
In that moment I realized how powerless I was. There was nothing in my upbringing to prepare me for this. Nothing in my formal Ivy League education offered answers. Nothing I’d ever experienced caused the level of helplessness and pain that seeing my infant in this condition created.
I fought against the immediate instinct to sweep her into my arms as my eyes raked my child’s body, searching for the wound. This took milliseconds, but it felt like it was happening in slow motion. Then I saw it. The doctor was talking in the background, but the ringing in my ears drowned out his words. Everything he was saying sounded like the parents in the Charlie Brown cartoons: “Blah, blah, blah, waah, waah, waah.”
My beautiful, perfect baby, born just six months ago, looked like a cherry bomb had exploded in her hand. The water had run out of the iron, and her fleece outfit had held in the heat. The veins beneath her butter-soft skin had fused and imploded internally. The doctor was saying something about amputations . . . God and I had talked—He could not be allowing this! All that was left of the tiny, perfect, beautiful long fingers that used to touch my face when I nursed her was a bloody stump. That’s when the room went black.
In the minutes I spent on my knees, my entire life flashed before me—every act of vanity, everything I’d ever done wrong, came back to haunt me with the question, was this why? Then I began questioning my career as a six-figure-salary sales executive for high-tech firms. As I knelt on the dirty hospital floor in designer hose, a stunning Ellen Tracy navy-blue suit, pearls, silk blouse by Liz Claiborne and shoes by Fendi, but with a marriage that was teetering on the edge, I blamed myself for every conceivable aspect of failing as a mother. I would have traded every accomplishment in the world to have my child in one piece. That’s when the tears became blended with wails so piteous that I was sure they weren’t coming from me. The people talking to me just didn’t understand that I was having an out-of-body experience.
All I could envision was a young girl, a teenager, hiding her body beneath clothes, unable to freely go to the beach, unable to find someone who would look beyond the scars to see her beauty. My mind tortured itself until I shut down all thought of the future. I sat in a chair by the window, too numb to even cry.
Then came the lawyers. Eventually, I found out there was no legal case to be had, no settlement to insulate my family from financial burden while we suffered. The day care center had no substantial assets to claim in a civil case. Eighty percent of the medical costs would be paid for, but that left a whopping 20 percent that was my responsibility to pay—which wiped out ten years of stocks, bonds, 401(k) plans and everything I’d so-called put away for a rainy day. This was beyond a rainy day; this was a biblical flood. The difference was that Noah was prepared; God had at least warned him. I was caught off-guard in the downpour.
Next came the corporation’s executives. Their voices were consoling, but their message was chilling: They couldn’t leave my territory fallow. It wasn’t personal—just business. I could either choose to be laid off, so that I’d have some monies coming in, or I could take parental leave for a year without pay. I took door number one, the lesser of two evils.
My survival instinct kicked in while I sat in the hospital, living like a quiet ghost for endless days . . . months. It was clear—I had to get my child home. But I knew I couldn’t leave her in the care of anyone ever again. I just wasn’t ready for that. So I consolidated and reorganized all my debt. I remembered what my mother used to say, “Pride goeth before a fall.” I fell on my sword before every place that I owed money—utility companies, the mortgagor, the credit lenders—and I made arrangements. But soon, I knew my unemployment would run out, and I wouldn’t even have those revenues to fall back on.
What could I do from home? How could I make money and watch my baby at the same time? I knew how to write good business proposals, and I realized that small nonprofit agencies needed to raise money through grants. What I quickly began to see emerging within my life was a pattern of skills and support groups that I’d taken for granted. I started a home-based business as a grant-writing freelancer. My struggling marriage had finally collapsed, and divorce was imminent. Child support was spotty, at best. But after a few years I could take small adult-education teaching assignments, as my daughter’s wounds had healed and she could now tie her shoes.
Meanwhile, I scoured my dwindling magazine subscriptions, knowing that each issue would probably be the last since I hadn’t paid the bills. Then I saw a short story contest in Essence magazine. My goal was to write ten pages of drama in hopes of getting the twenty-five-hundred-dollar prize money. That effort turned into seventy-five seemingly useless pages of action adventure that I gave to my friends to edit down. We laughed at my foolishness, and they implored me to finish the story that they’d copied and passed around the office, even if for nothing more than my own therapy and theirs. Six weeks later I had 780 pages of a steamy romance with a dashing, Latino James Bond and a daring, strong African American heroine. Then I threw the story in the bottom of my closet and forgot about it for a year.
My friends, however, refused to believe this wasn’t a book, and they insisted that I go to New York City to attend a writer’s conference. That’s when my life changed again. I found an editor and an agent at the same conference over lunch. The conversation ultimately turned into a two-book deal for Kensington Publishing’s new Arabesque line, and the rest is history.
Ten years later, I have a solid reputation as an economic development consultant and sixteen novels and four novellas under my belt. I’ve remarried my high school sweetheart. My da
ughter is a laughing, happy twelve-year-old with a busy social schedule. No one would ever know what we’d gone through, except to glimpse her hand . . . and I’m at home, full-time, doing what I love: writing.
Mercifully, the light at the end of this tunnel wasn’t an oncoming train. It was daylight. Pure, joyous daylight.
Leslie Banks
And He Looks Just Like Me
There should be no “Negro History Corner” or “Negro History Week.” There should be an integration of African American culture in all of its diversity throughout the curriculum.
Janice Hale Benson
Every cell of my body quivered. I was about to step into unknown territory; I was terrified and alone. On the outside I looked great. My mom had made sure I was dressed superbly, but on the inside I was shaking. As I sat on the bus that early drizzly morning, I looked at the faces of the people around me. No one seemed to notice I was gripped with fear.
Today was “Youth in Government Day” in San Francisco, and I had been chosen to represent my high school. I had never been to City Hall, and now I was going to be a politician for one whole day. Everyone told me how lucky I was and that this was a great opportunity, but none of this soothed me.
We didn’t have a car, so I was on my own during the morning rush hour. As I boarded the second bus that would deliver me to City Hall, I had a panic attack. My knees started to shake, and I felt sick.
Clutching my umbrella, I approached City Hall determined to be okay. There was a steady line of cars dropping off other kids. My heart sank because no one looked like me. I walked into the reception room desperately looking for a familiar face. I was disappointed again. Out of two hundred high school kids, approximately ten were African American. We acknowledged each other with that Oh, I am so happy to see another black face nod. We were all feeling displaced, and I knew that we all held the same wish inside. We were hoping that Judge Kennedy was our city government official. He was the only African American in city government at that time, and we would feel safe with him.
Chicken Soup for the African American Soul Page 12