Keeping the Faith

by Tavis Smiley

  I am almost fifty-five years old now. When I grew up in the fifties, there weren’t any programs about how to overcome dyslexia and learn to adjust to it. I was already tall, lanky, and awkward; having the dyslexia seemed to add the label of “dumb” to this list. I didn’t, however, experience the kind of peer pressure that can help destroy a child’s self-esteem. I guess this mainly had to do with the fact that, in the end, I went to all the dances and I still ended up walking home with the girls.

  One of the things that saved me early on was that my second-grade teacher recognized I had an affinity for numbers. The mark of a good teacher is his or her ability to encourage you by supporting the things you do well. This particular teacher was instrumental in recognizing the fact that I was good in mathematics, and encouraging me. When I would stand in front of the class to read, I would be miserable and scared, and outside of math, I did very poorly in school. But knowing that I was good in mathematics helped me to overcome my fear and maintain my self-esteem; it gave me something I could take ownership of. The fact that I was good in math became a saving grace.

  The other thing that gave me a sense of balance against low self-esteem was the fact that I had a tremendous capacity and willingness to work hard. Many of the jobs I worked were manual labor jobs. I had a paper route for five years when I was a kid that included a hundred customers. I worked this paper route with pride. I treated my customers as if they were special, and it gave me a great sense of pride and belief in myself. When I was nineteen, I was afraid to apply for a job as a bank attendant, but I washed dishes at a hospital and at a women’s college. Even though these were manual labor jobs, they still bolstered my sense of self-worth. I grew up in a family with four other siblings and my parents worked very hard to do the best they could for all of us. The fact that I could work a job here and there and help my parents out in the household meant a lot to me. All these things helped me to affirm and validate myself, and take attention away from my dyslexia.

  As a teenager, I discovered that I had some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain resulting in epileptic seizures. I started having seizures at fifteen and continued having them until I reached the age of thirty-five. But looking back, there were some good things that came out of this condition, as well. Because I had epilepsy, I had to take a medication that required I not drink alcohol. As a result, I never acquired a taste for alcoholic beverages, and to this day, I still do not drink them.

  I grew up during the time of the civil rights movement, and I actively participated in programs that helped to advance our civil rights. I also worked with kids in a tutorial program. Later, I attended San Francisco State University and became inspired by all the artists who read poetry aloud on the campus. When it came time for me to read Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth as a class assignment, however, my dyslexia cropped up again. I think I read it and struggled through the book at least twenty times before I was able to understand it. But I was encouraged to struggle through my reading assignments because of all the positive feedback from the civil rights activism I was involved in. Being able to understand this piece of literature, even if I did have to read it through many times, provided another source of validation for me. Though it took me longer than anyone else to read the literature and class assignments, I was able to overcome my learning disability and adjust to it. I was finally able to succeed in understanding written literature; going on to become a successful actor was just an extension of this process.

  When speaking to children today about overcoming dyslexia, I tell them that it is hard to do. But it gets a little bit easier the more you feel you have value and worth, and that you matter to others.

  COURAGE

  Linda Spruill

  To hear my brother James tell it, we were so poor, he had to walk to school with cardboard in his shoes. Being poor was the furthest thing from my mind when I was growing up. Always at the back of my mind was one question: What kind of mood is Daddy going to be in when he comes home? Is he going to come home with a beautiful white smile on his dark brown face, or is he going to come in resentful and full of anger?

  We lived in Williamston, North Carolina, right across the street from his mother, Grandma Ethel. I don’t have very good things to say about her because I learned very early that if he stopped by her house first, it would determine the kind of mood he was going to be in. When he came home angry and began a fight with my mother, she would always finish it. Martha, my mother, was the eldest of six children and the only girl, and she would fight with her brothers to the finish. I guess she carried that fighting spirit over into adulthood.

  One Sunday evening in late August 1968 after visiting Jean, a friend of Ma’s, for the afternoon, we had settled in for the night. A few minutes after Ma went to bed, Daddy pounced on her and started choking her. He was angry because she had taken us to visit her friend. He didn’t know that she had placed a wrench on the windowsill near the bed; as he choked her, she reached over and grabbed that wrench. That night would forever change my life and that of my nine siblings.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d hit Ma. It didn’t matter what Ma used to defend herself—you knew it wouldn’t just end with her getting a punch to the face or a fist in her chest, and she had the broken bones to prove it. I don’t need to go into the painful details of the fight, but for Ma it was the last straw. She had been saving paychecks and decided it was time for her to leave. I was twelve years old at the time and don’t remember the events of the rest of the night. I thought she had left us to stay in that house with Daddy. I cried most of the night and the next day. We had not heard from her and had no way of knowing where she was.

  About four days later, she called on the phone to say that she would not be coming back. She told my sister Valerie and me to dress the younger children and walk over to her brother’s house. Since Daddy could not bear to see us leave, he left the house before we did. He cried before he left but did not try to stop us. We walked the two or three miles to Uncle Garland’s house, passing familiar homes, the E. J. Hayes School, and so many other landmarks that we had seen at least a hundred times. Imagine ten children walking down a wooded path with just the clothes on their backs. This walk was very different from all the other times we had walked over to Uncle Garland’s house. We didn’t stop at the graveyard to tell ghost stories. We didn’t stop at the creek by the railroad track to pick up tadpoles. We didn’t run through the pile of peanut shells on the grounds of the peanut factory. We just kept walking, wondering what would happen next. When we arrived at Uncle Garland’s house, he gave us a bag of food, put us all in a station wagon, and drove us to the town of Windsor, where we caught the Carolina Trailways bus to New York’s Port Authority bus terminal. Garland told us that we would meet Ma in New York and that we would not be coming back to live with Daddy.

  Our lives began to look up again when we saw Ma waiting for us in the most massive, cavernous bus station I had ever seen. Growing up in Williamston, life was either Black or white, but this place held so many different kinds of people. I don’t think any of us had ever heard a foreign language or even seen an escalator.

  Since I was an avid reader, I thought the streets would be paved with gold and that it would look like Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. Instead, we ended up at my aunt Hattie’s apartment in a stinky, funky building in the Flushing Avenue projects in Brooklyn. We thought we were going to die from the stench as the elevator took us to the fifth floor.

  Well, to make a long story short, my mother, Martha Spruill, is sixty-seven years old now. She has taken care of her ten children, their children, and their children’s children. She was also a foster mother to three other children for about two years. Ma got a job at the New York City Board of Education School Lunch Services, earned her GED, got a driver’s license, and worked until retirement. She is a strong, proud, courageous woman who has survived in spite of all the odds stacked against her through the years. And she is the person who brought hope back into my life.<
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  DRAGGED THROUGH THE MUD

  Sandra R. Bell

  We owned a business, a construction company called BellincCo. We’d been in business since 1984, mixing concrete and doing other subcontract work. However, in 1991, with a federal freeze on new construction and a little cash in the bank, we decided to fish a little closer to home. We bid on and won two projects: a community building for the local Housing Authority and Fire Station #5 for the city.

  It was the beginning of a nightmare. The city council and the Housing Authority Board told us that we weren’t qualified to do the projects, although we had the performance and payment bonds for the projects. Most people think of construction bonding as insurance; it’s not. Bonding is like getting a loan from a loan shark; you sign your name and a company puts up a paper guarantee in the amount of the contract that you will perform. Then they put up another 50 percent that you will pay everybody. If the owner claims you aren’t doing either of those things, he can cash those bonds in.

  The powers that be did everything in their power to stop us, from forgetting to inform us that one of the sites was an old dump to telling our employees not to come to work and suppliers not to deliver materials and equipment. With costs mounting, we decided to stop working on the city’s fire station project until we could get compensation for the additional work.

  That night, a steeple wall above the bay doors for the fire station fell. It was blamed on us when in fact the design of the project didn’t have any bracing or ties to anchor the wall to the building.

  The next thing we knew, the local ABC affiliate was putting the story on the news. The mayor was out of town when the first, seemingly sympathetic story aired. Later, negative articles appeared in the paper. It was claimed that we weren’t working on the other job, even though the community center was well on its way to being completed. The Housing Authority director decided that the community center was not to be built by our company. In fact, he was quoted in the newspaper as saying that my husband had never had any intention of finishing the job and wasn’t a decent person.

  Not to be outdone, the mayor staged an ambush for my husband at the project site. The mayor showed up with his driver, the city attorney, and a full entourage of Black city councilmen. That night on the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news, there was our white mayor, at 6’6” towering over my 5’8”? husband, demanding that he do the job the city was paying us to perform.

  The stories continued. Our motives were assessed and our character was examined and attacked. We were informed by friends that “they’re going to get you and they’re going to get whoever tries to help you.”

  Another business owner told us some of them were going to get contracts as a result. He added, “Sorry it had to be at your expense.” All I could think of was how unfair it was for us to be treated this way. I had never felt so down.

  Then I remembered falling in the hog pen when I was a child. My grandparents had had about fifteen hogs in a fenced-in area. After a rain, a small tree had fallen from outside the fenced area into the pen, acting like a bridge. My cousins and I had double-dared each other to climb the bridge. When it got to be my turn, somebody shook the limb. Not too hard—just enough for me to land in the hogs’ mushy dirt.

  I got it in my eight-year-old head that I wasn’t moving. After I’d been out there sitting in the mud for an hour, Grandmomma came down the lane with her cane. Some time before, my uncle had sent Grandmomma a fancy cane from Liberia, and she always used it to walk to the mailbox, which was about a half mile from the house and only a couple of hundred feet from the hog pen.

  When I heard her coming, I told my cousins, “Now y’all going to get it.” To my surprise, instead of getting the plum switch, tearing off the bark, and giving them a beating, Grandmomma opened the gate and lit into me. She started beating me right there on the ground, until I came up out of the mud like a jack-in-the-box. Then she switched me all the way back to the house.

  Stripped, crying, and soaking in the big tub on the back porch, I couldn’t figure out why she had done this to me. “They pushed me,” I cried.

  She finally said, “Sandra, it doesn’t matter if you ended up in the mud because you were pushed, you accidentally fell, or you just got it in your head to jump in. It only matters that you get up.” “But that’s not fair,” I cried. She responded, “Fair ain’t got nothing to do with it. When you down, you got to get up. You got to pull yourself up, and just like getting out of that hog pen, it might be slippery, you might stumble and fall again, but you got to keep getting up.”

  Suddenly, I realized that all the bad articles, media coverage, half-truths, and misrepresentations of the facts had put me back in the hog pen. Right then I knew I had to get up!

  It took a few months to salvage something of our lives. My husband and I cut our losses and eventually moved to another city, where we reestablished ourselves. But our persistence and hope had carried us through.

  HAMS AND TURKEYS

  Billy Mitchell

  I’m often asked where I got my passion for advocacy. It came in part because of my grandmother, Addie Mitchell—Nannie, as her grandchildren called her. Her physical being left us three days shy of her ninety-fifth birthday, but her spirit remains to this day.

  One time Addie Mitchell was marching with the civil rights leader Reverend Joseph Lowery and others in Dickens County, Alabama, trying to help two women who were accused of voter fraud. All the two women had been doing was teaching sick folks how to cast absentee ballots and helping others to register to vote. But in the sixties in the South, civil rights were at best a novelty that African Americans did not enjoy.

  Their plans were to march from Pickens County to Montgomery, Alabama, tie up the traffic on the highways, bring attention to this injustice and Alabama’s intimidation tactics in general, and get the women out of jail. Word had gotten out that the sheriff of Pickens County was going out to all the Black folks’ homes, giving out hams and turkeys. He was telling them not to get involved with the march. “We’ve got good relations here in Pickens County,” he would say. My grandmother told me that at the time she thought it was nothing to worry about. Black folks would not sell their souls for a few hams and turkeys.

  They were expecting some three hundred people. But when they gathered at the place where the march was to start, there were only about fifty people there. My grandmother asked herself, “Could Black folks actually be selling their souls for hams and turkeys?” Recognizing that God was on their side, they decided to go on.

  It was February, and it started to sleet. When they finally got to their first stop, Aliceville, Alabama, people thought my grandmother’s face was wet from the sleet, but it was wet from tears of sadness, thinking that Black folks had sold their souls for food. She prayed for some kind of sign as to whether she should keep going, for it was a long, cold walk to Montgomery. When they turned the corner in Aliceville, there waiting for them were over four hundred others with their marching shoes on, ready to join them. And they had baskets full of ham sandwiches and turkey sandwiches to feed the hungry marchers!

  They went on to march to Montgomery and eventually got the women out of jail.

  LOVE AND SELF-LOVE

  Edith Ross Gray

  In the Name of Love,

  I sacrificed;

  In the Name of Love,

  I paid the price.

  In the Name of Love,

  I compromised;

  In the Name of Love,

  I accepted lies.

  In the Name of Love,

  I accepted infidelity;

  In the Name of Love,

  I believed what he was telling me.

  In the Name of Love,

  I accepted his excuse;

  In the Name of Love,

  This was only mental abuse.

  In the Name of Love,

  He treated me so unfair;

  In the Name of Love,

  It was more than I could bear.

  In the
Name of Love,

  He didn’t tell me this tip;

  That he had two daughters during our relationship!

  In the Name of Love,

  I allowed his mother to move in;

  In the Name of Love,

  I wouldn’t do that s——again!

  In the Name of Love,

  I swallowed my pride to raise his child;

  In the Name of Love,

  Where’s my sanity?—and that’s just to put it mild!

  In the Name of Self-Love, I got a divorce;

  In the Name of Self-Love,

  I made a better choice!

  In the Name of Self-Love,

  I rise;

  In the Name of Self-Love,

  No more compromise!

  In the Name of Self-Love,

  I went to counseling and began to take back, for myself, what he took;

  In the Name of Self-Love,

  I can now smile while I write this poem for this book!!!!

  YOU DON’T KNOW LIKE I KNOW

  Sonia Clark

  On January 17, 1995, my twenty-sixth birthday, my two children and I became homeless. My mother-in-law, without remorse or feeling, threw us out of her home.

  At that time, my daughter, Brittany, was three years of age, and my son, Ronald junior, was a year and a half. Besides my in-laws, I knew only a few people in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I was miles away from my parents, who lived in New York City.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked myself. I could not go back to my husband, because he had proven time and again that his attraction to women was more important than his wife and kids. I couldn’t go back home to my parents; I had been down that road before and was too embarrassed. Nonetheless, I called home. I wasn’t sure what my father was going to say, since we had had words during the recent Christmas holidays. Through my tears, I explained to him what had happened. To this day, every time I think of his advice, I smile from ear to ear. Without hesitation, he said, “Get your things and get out of there. Go to your sister’s place in Greensboro. I’ll be down in a few days to help you get situated.”