That story illustrates my mother’s character. She was not a person who would allow the system to dictate her life. Mother had a clear understanding of how things would be for us boys.
My mother is an attractive woman, five feet three and slim, although when we were kids I’d say she was on the plump side of medium. Today she suffers from arthritis and heart problems, but I don’t think she has slowed down much.
Sonya Carson has the classic Type A personality—hardworking, goal-oriented, driven to demanding the best of herself in any situation, refusing to settle for less. She’s highly intelligent, a woman who quickly grasps the overall significance rather than searching for details. She has a natural ability — an intuitive sense — that enables her to perceive what should be done. That’s probably her most outstanding characteristic.
Because of that determined, perhaps compulsive, personality that demanded so much from herself, she infused some of that spirit into me. I don’t want to portray my mother as perfect because she was human too. At times her refusing to allow me to settle for less than the best came across as nagging, demanding, even heartless to me. When she believed in something she held on and wouldn’t quit. I didn’t always like hearing her say, “You weren’t born to be a failure, Bennie. You can do it!” Or one of her favorites: “You just ask the Lord, and He’ll help you.”
Being kids, we didn’t always welcome her lessons and advice. Resentment and obstinance crept in, but my mother refused to give up.
Over a period of years, with Mother’s constant encouragement, both Curtis and I started believing that we really could do anything we chose to do. Maybe she brainwashed us into believing that we were going to be extremely good and highly successful at whatever we attempted. Even today I can clearly hear her voice in the back of my head saying, “Bennie, you can do it. Don’t you stop believing that for one second.”
Mother had only a third-grade education when she married, yet she provided the driving force in our home. She pushed my laid-back father to do a lot of things. Largely because of her sense of frugality, they saved a fair amount of money and eventually bought our first house. I suspect that, had things gone Mother’s way, ultimately they would have been financially well-off. And I’m sure she had no premonition of the poverty and hardship she’d have to face in the years ahead.
By contrast, my father was six feet two, slender, and he often said, “You got to look sharp all the time, Bennie. Dress the way you want to be.” He emphasized clothes and possessions, and he enjoyed being around people.
“Be nice to people. People are important, and if you’re nice to them, they’ll like you.” Recalling those words, I believe he put great importance on being liked by everybody. If anyone asked me to describe my dad, I’d have to say, “He’s just a nice guy.” And, despite all the problems that erupted later, I feel that way today.
My father was the kind of person who would have wanted us to wear the fancy clothes and to do the macho kind of things like girl hunting—the lifestyle that would have been detrimental to establishing ourselves academically. In many ways, I’m now grateful my mother took us out of that environment.
Intellectually, Dad didn’t easily grasp complex problems because he tended to get bogged down in details, unable to see the overall picture. That was probably the biggest difference between my parents.
Both parents came from big families: my mother had 23 siblings, and my father grew up with 13 brothers and sisters. They married when my father was 28 and my mother was 13. Many years later she confided that she was looking for a way to get out of a desperate home situation.
Shortly after their marriage, they moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Detroit, which was the trend for laborers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. People from the rural South migrated toward what they considered lucrative factory jobs in the North. My father got a job at the Cadillac plant. So far as I know, it was the first and only employment he ever held. He worked for Cadillac until he retired in the late 1970s.
My father also served as a minister in a small Baptist church. I’ve never been able to understand whether he was an ordained minister or not. Only one time did Daddy take me to hear him preach — or at least I remember only one occasion. Daddy wasn’t one of those fiery types like some television evangelists. He spoke rather calmly, raised his voice a few times, but he preached in a relatively low key, and the audience didn’t get stirred up. He didn’t have a real flow of words, but he did the best he could. I can still see him on that special Sunday as he stood in front of us, tall and handsome, the sun glinting off a large metal cross that dangled across his chest.
I’m going away for a few days,” Mother said several months after Daddy left us. “Going to see some relatives.”
“We going too?” I asked with interest.
“No, I have to go alone.” Her voice was unusually quiet. “Besides, you boys can’t miss school.”
Before I could object, she told me that we could stay with neighbors. “I’ve already arranged it for you. You can sleep over there and eat with them until I come back.”
Maybe I should have wondered why she left, but I didn’t. I was so excited to stay in somebody else’s house because that meant extra privileges, better food, and a lot of fun playing with the neighbor kids.
That’s the way it happened the first time and several times after that. Mother explained that she was going away for a few days, and we would be taken care of by our neighbors. Because she carefully arranged for us to stay with friends, it was exciting rather than frightful. Secure in her love, it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t be back.
It may seem strange, but it is a testimony to the security we felt in our home—I was an adult before I discovered where Mother went when she “visited relatives.” When the load became too heavy, she checked herself into a mental institution. The separation and divorce plunged her into a terrible period of confusion and depression, and I think her inner strength helped her realize she needed professional help and gave her the courage to get it. Usually she was gone for several weeks at a time.
We boys never had the slightest suspicion about her psychiatric treatment. She wanted it that way.
With time, Mother rebounded from her mental pressures, but friends and neighbors found it hard to accept her as healthy. We kids never knew it, for Mother never let on how it hurt her, but her treatment in a mental hospital provided neighbors with a hot topic of gossip, perhaps even more because she had gone through a divorce. Both problems created serious stigmas at the time. Mother not only had to cope with providing a home and making a living to support us, but most of her friends disappeared when she needed them most.
Because Mother never talked to anyone about the details of her divorce, people assumed the worst and circulated wild stories about her.
“I just decided that I had to go about my own business,” Mother once told me, “and ignore what people said.” She did, but it couldn’t have been easy. It hurts to think of how many lonely, tearful times she suffered alone.
Finally, with no financial resources to fall back on, Mother knew she couldn’t keep up the expenses of living in our house, modest as it was. The house was hers, as part of the divorce settlement. So after several months of trying to make it on her own, Mother rented out the house, packed us up, and we moved away. This was one of the times when Dad reappeared, for he came back to drive us to Boston. Mother’s older sister, Jean Avery, and her husband, William, agreed to take us in.
We moved into the Boston tenements with the Averys. Their children were grown, and they had a lot of love to share with two little boys. In time, they became like another set of parents to Curtis and me, and that was wonderful for we needed a lot of affection and sympathy then.
For a year or so after we moved to Boston, Mother still underwent psychiatric treatment. Her trips away lasted three or four weeks each time. We missed her, but we received such special attention from Uncle William and Aunt Jean when she was gone that we liked
the occasional arrangement.
The Averys assured Curtis and me, “Your mama is doing just fine.” After getting a letter or a telephone call they’d tell us, “She’ll be back in a few more days.” They handled the situation so well that we never had any idea how tough things were for our mother. And that’s just how the strong-willed Sonya Carson wanted it to be.
CHAPTER 3
Eight Years Old
Rats!” I yelled. “Hey, Curt, lookey there! I saw rats!” I pointed in horror to a large weeded area behind our tenement building. “And they’re bigger than cats!”
“Not quite that big,” Curtis countered, trying to sound more mature. “But they sure are mean-looking.”
Nothing in Detroit had prepared us for life in a Boston tenement. Armies of roaches streaked across the room, impossible to get rid of no matter what Mother did. More frightening to me were the hordes of rats, even though they never got close. Mostly they lived outside in the weeds or piles of debris. But occasionally they scurried into the basement of our building, especially during the cold weather.
“I’m not going down there by myself,” I said adamantly more than once. I was scared to go down into the basement alone. And I wouldn’t budge unless Curtis or Uncle William went with me.
Sometimes snakes came out of the weeds to slither down the sidewalks. Once a big snake crawled into our basement, and someone killed it. For days afterward all us kids talked about snakes.
“You know, a snake got into one of those buildings behind us last year and killed four children in their sleep,” one of my classmates said.
“They gobble you up,” insisted another.
“No, they don’t,” the first one said and laughed. “They kind of sting you and then you die.” Then he told another story about somebody being killed by a snake.
The stories weren’t true, of course, but hearing them often enough kept them in my mind, making me cautious, fearful, and always on the lookout for snakes.
A lot of winos and drunks flopped around the area, and we became so used to seeing broken glass, trashed lots, dilapidated buildings, and squad cars racing up the street that we soon adjusted to our change of lifestyle. Within weeks this setting seemed perfectly normal and reasonable.
No one ever said, “This isn’t the way normal people live.” Again, I think it was the sense of family unity, strengthened by the Averys, that kept me from being too concerned about the quality of our life in Boston.
Of course, Mother worked. Constantly. She seldom had much free time, but she showered that time on Curtis and me, which made up for the hours she was away. Mother started working in homes of wealthy people, caring for their children or doing domestic work.
“You look tired,” I said one evening when she walked into our narrow apartment. It was already dark, and she’d put in a long day working two jobs, neither of them well-paying.
She leaned back in the overstuffed chair. “Guess I am,” she said as she kicked off her shoes. Her smile caressed me. “What did you learn in school today?” she asked.
No matter how tired she was, if we were still up when she got home, Mother didn’t fail to ask about school. As much as anything, her concern for our education began to impress on me that she considered school important.
I was still 8 years old when we moved to Boston, a sometimes serious-minded child who occasionally pondered all the changes that had come into my life. One day I said to myself, “Being 8 is fantastic because when you’re 8 you don’t have any responsibilities. Everybody takes care of you, and you can just play and have fun.”
But I also said, “It’s not always going to be this way. So I’m going to enjoy life now.”
With the exception of the divorce, the best part of my childhood happened when I was 8 years old. First, I had the most spectacular Christmas of my life. Curtis and I had a wonderful time Christmas shopping, then our aunt and uncle swamped us with toys. Mother too, trying to make up for the loss of our father, bought us more than she ever had before.
One of my favorite gifts was a scale model 1959 Buick with friction wheels. But the chemistry set topped even the toy Buick. Never, before or since, did I have a toy that held my interest like the chemistry set. I spent hours in the bedroom playing with the set, studying the directions, and working one experiment after another. I turned litmus paper blue and red. I mixed chemicals into strange concoctions and watched in fascination when they fizzled, foamed, or turned different colors. When something I’d created filled the whole apartment with the smell of rotten eggs or worse, I’d laugh until my sides ached.
Second, I had my first religious experience when I was 8 years old. We were Seventh-day Adventists, and one Saturday morning Pastor Ford, at the Detroit Burns Avenue church, illustrated his sermon with a story.
A natural storyteller, Pastor Ford told of a missionary doctor husband and wife who were being chased by robbers in a far-off country. They dodged around trees and rocks, always managing to keep just ahead of the bandits. At last, gasping with exhaustion, the couple stopped short at a precipice. They were trapped. Suddenly, right at the edge of the cliff, they saw a small break in the rock—a split just big enough for them to crawl into and hide. Seconds later, when the men reached the edge of the escarpment, they couldn’t find the doctor and his wife. To their unbelieving eyes, the couple had just vanished. After screaming and cursing them, the bandits left.
As I listened, the picture became so vivid that I felt as if I were being chased. The pastor wasn’t overly dramatic, but I got caught up in an emotional experience, living their plight as if the wicked men were trying to capture me. I visualized myself being pursued. My breath became shallow with the panic and fear and desperation of that couple. At last when the bandits left, I sighed with relief at being safe.
Pastor Ford looked out over the congregation. “The couple were sheltered and protected,” he told us. “They were hidden in the cleft of the rock, and God protected them from harm.”
The sermon over, we began to sing the “appeal song.” That morning the pastor had selected “He Hideth My Soul in the Cleft of the Rock.” He built his appeal around the missionary story and explained our need to flee to “the cleft of the rock,” to safety found only in Jesus Christ.
“If we place our faith in the Lord,” he said as his gaze swept across the faces in the congregation, “we’ll always be safe. Safe in Jesus Christ.”
As I listened, my imagination pictured how wonderfully God had taken care of those people who wanted to serve Him. Through my imagination and emotions I lived that story with the couple, and I thought, That’s exactly what I should do — get sheltered in the cleft of the rock.
Although I was only 8, my decision seemed perfectly natural. Other kids my age were getting baptized and joining the church, so when the message and music touched me emotionally, I responded. Following the custom of our denomination, when Pastor Ford asked if anyone wanted to turn to Jesus Christ, Curtis and I both went up to the front of the church. A few weeks later we were both baptized.
I was basically a good kid and hadn’t done anything particularly wrong, yet for the first time in my life I knew I needed God’s help. During the next four years I tried to follow the teachings I received at church.
That morning set another milestone for me. I decided I wanted to be a doctor, a missionary doctor.
The worship services and our Bible lessons frequently focused on stories about missionary doctors. Each story of medical missionaries traveling through primitive villages in Africa or India intrigued me. Reports came to us of the physical suffering the doctors relieved and how they helped people to lead happier and healthier lives.
“That’s what I want to do,” I said to my mother as we walked home. “I want to be a doctor. Can I be a doctor, Mother?”
“Bennie,” she said, “listen to me.” We stopped walking and Mother stared into my eyes. Then laying her hands on my thin shoulders, she said, “If you ask the Lord for something and believe He will do i
t, then it’ll happen.”
“I believe I can be a doctor.”
“Then, Bennie, you will be a doctor,” she said matter-of-factly, and we started to walk on again.
After Mother’s words of assurance, I never doubted what I wanted to do with my life.
Like most kids I didn’t have any idea of what a person had to do to become a doctor, but I assumed that if I did well in school, I could do it. By the time I turned 13, 1 wasn’t so sure I wanted to be a missionary, but I never deviated from wanting to enter the medical profession.
We moved to Boston in 1959 and stayed until 1961, when Mother moved us back to Detroit, because she was financially on her feet again. Detroit was home for us, and besides, Mother had a goal in mind. Even though it wasn’t possible in the beginning, she planned to go back and reclaim the house we’d lived in.
The house, about the size of many garages today, was one of those early prefab post-World War II square boxes. The whole building probably wasn’t a thousand square feet, but it was in a nice area where the people kept their lawns clipped and showed pride in where they lived.
“Boys,” she told us as the weeks and months passed, “just wait. We’re going back to our house on Deacon Street. We may not be able to afford living in it now, but we’ll make it. In the meantime, we can still use the rent we get from it.” Not a day passed that Mother didn’t talk about going home. Determination burned in her eyes, and I never doubted that we would.
Mother moved us into a multifamily dwelling just across the tracks from a section called Delray. It was a smoggy industrial area crisscrossed with train tracks, housing little sweatshops making auto parts. It was what I’d call an upper-lower-class neighborhood.
The three of us lived on the top floor. My mother worked two and three jobs at a time. At one place she cared for children, and at the next she cleaned house. Whatever kind of domestic work anyone needed, Mother said, “I can do it. If I don’t know how right now, I learn fast.”
Gifted Hands Page 2