Put on Your Crown

by Queen Latifah

  The best part of having Rita Bray Owens in my life is watching the way she treats each day as a gift. She just turned sixty, and on her birthday she saw her first hockey game and took her first yoga class. She’s learning tai chi, and she started piano lessons because she has a big ol’ grand piano in her living room and she decided she wanted to be able to play it. Next on her list is dancing lessons. Mom is a young soul who loves being a work in progress, and the day she stops learning, growing, and discovering is the day she stops living.

  My mother has a wood carving in the entranceway of her house in New Jersey. It says simply, “LIVE.” She looks at it every day to remind herself. She really studies it. She asked me, “Have you ever noticed that if you read ‘live’ backwards it spells ‘evil’? Because to not live, to do the opposite and waste this life God gave us, would be evil.” To live—that’s her creed.

  Mom is the reason why, as I approach forty, I’m not afraid of growing older. She’s a perfect example of how to age gracefully and stay vital. Her life is in full flower. For the first time since she and my father divorced, my mother has found a good man, Bobby, a former police officer and the guy who heads up security for the mayor’s office in Newark. My mother wasn’t looking. She was too busy living her life, and in so doing, he found her. Now she’s planning her wedding. She decided to take her time in finding a life partner, and she didn’t mind being single one bit. Her independence was too precious to give up until she found the man who truly deserves her.

  Not everyone has a mother who’s still around, and some mother/daughter relationships are full of tension. I can understand how hard that must be. I’ve always had my mother to turn to. She was always there to comfort and advise me, without ever passing judgment. And my world is filled with many other amazing female role models—my mother’s mother, Katherine Bray, is eighty-one and still active in the community. Nana must make some forty pound cakes a year for her church bake sales, neighbors’ birthdays, funerals. She still drives, hangs out with her church lady friends, and keeps a clean house with pots on the stove simmering something delicious for all the children and grandchildren who come to visit.

  Nana Owens, my father’s mother, was another important maternal figure in my life. Street smart, tough, glamorous, and fun loving, Nana loved life until the end. Another powerhouse personality, my aunt Elaine Owens, was also a huge influence in my life. She was the one who showed my mother the ropes when she wasn’t much more than a child herself, struggling to take care of a newborn and a toddler. Mom had just moved up to New Jersey with my father. She was from the South and didn’t know a soul, so Aunt Elaine took her under her wing. These were women who knew it takes a village. It was how they lived.

  Someone to Lean On

  If you can, find a nurturing relationship with an older, wiser female, like an aunt, godparent, grandparent, or friend and grab hold of it. Open yourself up to their love. If you haven’t found it yet, it’s probably there, coming from some unexpected place. Maybe it’s an old schoolteacher, a neighbor, or a friend. Maybe it’s not even a female figure in your life. Maybe it’s your father or a male friend or relative. You may not think anyone has your back, but someone does. Someone is willing to be there for you. Someone will listen. It’s up to you to let that person in.

  Meanwhile, I’m setting aside the rest of this chapter to loan out my own mother to you, to share some of her own moments and spread the love. Mamma O will take it from here…

  RITA BRAY OWENS

  I think what my Dana is saying is that you are not alone. Even when you think you are, or you are convinced that no one understands you, there’s always going to be someone watching and caring. You are loved, and the decisions you make will have a ripple effect on all of the people in your world. Good or bad, your actions will have an impact on the lives of those around you, because you matter.

  I’ve been blessed. I come from a long, unbroken chain of love through the generations. My mother, my mother’s mother, and my great-grandmother were all a big part of my life when I was a little girl. Granny and her mother were housemaids in white households in the South. In fact, my mother grew up in the home where her mother, who was unmarried, worked as part of the household staff. My mother was raised alongside the white children who lived there, and they treated her like family.

  The only time my mother felt different from her white brothers and sisters was when they went to school. There was still segregation back then, so my mother had to be bused out to a separate school for black children. It bothered her a lot. That’s why education became so important to her. She was married and pregnant by seventeen, but she and my father, a military man, still made sure they got their high school diplomas, even in the middle of struggling to raise a young family. So for us, education was non-negotiable. If we had free time, we were expected to go to the library and read. Anything to broaden our horizons. It was imperative that we excelled in school. Every night before dinner, we had to sit at that table and do our homework, and if we didn’t have any, my father could care less. Sergeant Bray would give you his own homework assignment, and you could be sure it would be a lot harder than anything the teacher could dish out!

  Life in our home was strict. With seven children and my father often posted far away from all of us for long periods of time, we each had to pull our own weight and contribute to the chores. With just my mother and grandmother to care for us and make ends meet on my father’s small salary, our home had to function with maximum efficiency. Responsibilities were parceled out to each child, and even the youngest among us understood how important our roles were. We knew we were a part of the success of the house until Daddy came home a year from now or whenever the army decided.

  Bubbles of Love

  But there was so much love. As strict as my mother, father, and grandmother were, they never yelled at us. For us, the knowledge of disappointing our parents was far worse than any punishment they could deliver. That bubble of love I lived in protected me from a lot of what was happening in the world around me. Whenever my mother and father got to be in the same country together, they never fought. Voices were never raised, towards each other or towards their children. They were always loving and respectful. I got to see how a man should behave as both a husband and a father. It was a good benchmark to keep filed away in the back of my mind.

  We were a tight-knit family. We had our own little community within a community, living in the protected environment of an army base. I was so sheltered. My life consisted of friends, family, school, and church. I’d heard about racism in the abstract, but I was never really exposed to it in a direct way on the various army bases where we lived. Then one hot summer day when I was about eleven, I left the base to walk to the local swimming pool a mile or two away. A group of white guys driving down the street in a Chevy rolled down the window and yelled, “Go home, nigger!”

  That was a life-stopping moment for me. I was petrified. And confused. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t know those people. Why did they hate me? It shook me to my core. I ran home, crying. The ugliness of it was like a physical shock. My father dried my tears and explained that there were two kinds of people in the world: the ignorant and the educated. He took me to the library and enlightened me about my African-American heritage. He gave me the courage to never let the violence and aggression of other people’s hateful language and gestures change who I was or infect me with anger. Hatred was their problem, not mine.

  The foundation I had from my parents and grandparents, being part of a generational pattern that was encouraging, nurturing, and loving, stayed with me, even at times in my life when I felt lost. That kind of love and example has real power that can’t be underestimated, because it gets passed on to your children and your children’s children.

  Broken Chains

  These days, I see so many examples of how that chain is broken. Kids feel isolated, often with single mothers, not even welfare moms, working long hours and struggling to survive. The
ir role models are their peers; their influences are whatever dangerous garbage they see on the Internet or whatever the alpha boy or girl in their crowd tells them they should be doing. When I saw more and more pregnant teenage girls in my school, I was disturbed but not surprised, because they’re just following the pattern of their own mothers and fathers and whatever they see around them. They have no guidance—no one to be living examples and teach them right from wrong. I still marvel when I meet gems and pearls in my classroom—young men and women who are incredible human beings, despite coming from broken homes. All they need is a little love and guidance to break them out of a bad cycle.

  Even with the stability of my wonderful family, I sort of fell through the cracks. I was very much the middle child, and artistically inclined, so that put me in a weird place. As an army brat, moving from base to base, I felt even more isolated. I was always having to pick up and make new friends. I retreated further and further into myself and my fantasy world, focusing on nature and beauty, painting and creating wherever I could. My father recognized this. My parents would buy me paints and brushes for Christmas and birthdays, and whenever my father wrote letters to me from Germany, he’d make his own beautiful drawing for me. Through his own talent, he showed this unspoken appreciation for my artistic side. I remember those letters so poignantly.

  There was potential inside me that needed to be tapped. And yet I went straight from being Sergeant Bray’s daughter to the wife of Lance Owens, a dashing young soldier in the Honor Guard, fresh from his tour of duty in Vietnam. We met at a little service club in Arlington, Virginia, where my father was based at the time, and I didn’t know what hit me. I had acceptances from Howard University and Spelman College, but I gave it all up to move up north to New Jersey and be with my husband. Like my mother when she started having children, I was little more than a child myself when I fell pregnant. I was just an innocent and unworldly country girl. I plugged straight into Lance’s network of female family members—his mother and his sister Elaine—and I thank God every day for them. I didn’t know a soul in Newark, and as a young mother I was too far away from my own mother to lean on her for support.

  Lost in the Cracks

  But I really did disappear for a while. My role as wife and mother had overtaken my life. It was only when my husband and I divorced, some ten years later, that I really got to know who Rita was. That’s one reason why, to this day, I don’t like being referred to as Queen Latifah’s mom, aka “the Queen Mother.” I fought so long and so hard for my own identity. I’m Rita Bray Owens, Ms. O, Mamma O, teacher, artist, proud mother, and many other things besides—things that I’m still in the process of discovering.

  Studying, going to conferences, plays, galleries, exploring new ideas, and discovering the artist in me again was an awakening. At Kean College, where I got my teaching degree, I found mentors and benefited from their brilliance. I met Dr. Elaine Raichle, who saw my potential and believed in it before I did. And Mary Jane Austin, an art education administrator who encouraged me in my creativity and always made me aim higher. I saw how successful, strong, and independent women of my generation could become, particularly in a nurturing community of educated and enlightened individuals.

  Every child starts out in life with that potential and the self-confidence to realize it. But then life tears them down. They get distracted and lose their way. I’ve been through a lot of what these kids are going through now. I was also a teenage mother. I know how hard that is. I’ve made my own share of mistakes. I’ve lost my way. But I went through what I went through for a reason. Because when they say, “Ms. O, you don’t understand!” I can say, “Oh yes, I do!”

  I’m an adult who’s navigated through this crazy thing called life, and talking to the younger generation about the things they should be looking out for on their own journey is the right thing to do. That’s why I wanted to teach. To repair some of those broken links in the chain. To look at each individual child in my classroom and make him or her feel like they’ve really been seen.

  Fixing the Links

  Sometimes that’s all it takes. Just noticing someone, and talking to them like a person of value, can make a huge difference in their lives. My kids were so shocked when I’d remember some incidental detail about what they did or said, like a pair of shoes they wore the week before or an interest they showed in a particular period of art. Half the time they couldn’t even believe I remembered their names, the classrooms at Irvington High were so rowdy and overcrowded. When I remembered one girl’s name in the first few days of the new school year, she asked me, “How do you do that, Ms. O?” I said, “Because I love you!” She was so giddy and embarrassed. It’s a word a lot of these kids don’t get to hear very often. They’re used to being just someone’s pain in the butt. So I made it a point of telling them every day.

  My classroom became a sanctuary for those children. But out in the hallways it was another story. As an educator, I can’t tell you how many times I had to walk down the hallway and ask, “Is there a problem?” This one boy had his girlfriend jacked up against a locker, getting ready to smack the daylights out of her. Even girls would brutalize each other, fighting over a man! And over the years, it got worse. Our nice middle-class community got fractured by drugs, poverty, and the isolation of immigrant families struggling to adjust to a new culture. Kids from Haiti and the Dominican Republic didn’t know where they fit. Bright students in their own countries, they had to suffer the humiliation of being put back a couple of grades here because there was a language barrier. Girls and boys joined cliques and gangs, usually divided up along ethnic and racial lines, so they felt like they belonged somewhere. But it never solved the problem. Instead it created an unhealthy outlet for rage and violence.

  Some of these kids have so much anger inside them. They want to fight each other all the time for the slightest thing, even if it’s just a kid accidentally brushing past another down the hallway. But the rage is not just about that fight over something trivial they’re about to have. It’s about their father who’s never there for them, or their mother who’s been bringing home a string of no-good boyfriends, and all those things that are happening in their world that they feel helpless to correct.

  It got so bad in the Irvington High community that several students had become homeless, and they were faking it so they could stay in school and graduate. More and more, my students were coming to me with overwhelming problems. They’d say, “Ms. O, can I talk to you?” I’d say, “You need to talk to me right this minute?” They’d say, “Uh-huh.” I’d invite them into my “office”—a broom closet, but it did nicely for these purposes. In the privacy of that little room, they’d tell me about some school bully who had plans to beat their heads in after school. Girls would talk about boyfriends pressuring them into all kinds of unthinkable situations, like having group sex with their friends for money. Boys and girls would talk about being smacked around and sexually abused at home. When it was that bad, and laws were being broken, we’d take certain steps to intervene. Most of the time they already knew in their hearts the right thing to do, but they needed someone to listen to them without judgment, so they could think through the situation without the noise and pressure that existed outside that closet door. You’ve got to give yourself some space and time to quietly contemplate, and if you can find a wise, neutral third party to give you some perspective, even better. We should all remember that when making our own vital decisions. It might save your life.

  The key is to be gentle. Young women, and men, have fragile self-esteem, and they get knocked down plenty already by their parents and their peers. Some of these students dress so raw. Girls get especially wrongheaded notions about what to wear to be part of the cool crowd. One young lady in particular caught my attention in the hallway. She wasn’t in my class, but you couldn’t help but notice her because she was a big girl who was busting out of her blouse. Even worse, she had on a miniskirt that was so short, you could see the color of her u
nderwear. As she headed up the staircase, I caught up to her and whispered, “I just wanted you to know that everyone has a full view underneath that skirt of yours, especially when they get behind you going up the stairs.”

  She looked shocked. “Ms. O, I didn’t know. Nobody told me!”

  I was worried that if she didn’t adjust her dress sense, it could set her up for a heap of trouble, so I said, “Girl, you blessed back there! You don’t need to be too revealing, because you already have those beautiful curves. Bring the hemline down an inch or two and be a little more mysterious. You got plenty going on. You don’t need to be trying that hard!”

  “Oh, thank you, Ms. O.”

  She toned it down the next day. All it took was a gentle nudge. I just couldn’t help myself. Saying nothing and letting her go on exposing herself like that would have been the unkind thing to do. And yet her friends, parents, and teachers didn’t seem to want to deal with the awkwardness of that conversation. Or they simply didn’t care.

  I See You

  I decided to start an after-school program for these children. I wanted to create a safe place where kids could come and talk to each other in a constructive way. We started with 12 students and ended up with more than 120 in just a few weeks. It became a lifeline for so many kids with nowhere else to go. We did fun stuff like skits, role-play, and exercises to help them in interview situations for jobs and colleges. One time there was a shooting outside in the schoolyard after hours, and we were in our classroom, listening to music and having a good ol’ time talking about life. When we stepped outside and saw the local news camera there, my kids asked, “What happened?” A drug deal had turned deadly, and a boy was killed. They were blissfully unaware, because they were safe inside. I shudder to think what would have happened if they’d been hanging around outside.