by Saeeda Hafiz
* * *
Months later, my savings account was starting to go into the red. I did what I could to keep the creditors, student loans, and other bills at bay. I felt and looked sick and exhausted, which was troubling since I was supposed to be a representation of health and wellness.
Then the phone rang again, and this time it wasn’t Essence magazine, or a friend, or a new client, or even a bill collector. It was Child Protective Services, also known as “CPS.”
“Are you related to Rahima Hafiz?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m her sister.” I felt the juices in my stomach churn.
My heart boomed a Japanese taiko drum sound.
“Ma’am, your sister gave birth to a baby boy that she left in the maternity ward. And then did the same thing with twin girls.”
“I see.” I felt my lungs tighten. No one had seen or heard from my sister since summer 1992. She had abandoned us all, and her Pittsburgh children missed her dearly.
“Ma’am, the children are in the process of being adopted and we would like you to provide us with some medical background.” She paused. “Can you meet us?”
“Uh, yea. Sure.”
“The family that is adopting the boy would like to be there. Is that okay?”
“I guess so. Sure.” My eyes were full of tears. My throat closed. My lungs felt like they did during an asthma attack from my youth.
The caseworker talked to me for about thirty minutes. I put the phone down like a bomb squad member who had just inadvertently released the triggering wire, which would make everything go BOOM.
* * *
The CPS office was in DeKalb County. The offices were a lot like our banking cubicles, but the clients were children whose parents couldn’t love them properly.
As we sat in a conference room, I looked at Shirley, the adoptive-mother-to-be. She was a lovely, professional-looking black woman from the South who couldn’t have children and wanted to adopt a child to complete her happy marriage. The caseworker was a young white girl trying to put the puzzle pieces together.
“We want to make sure that Malik has all known information on file in case he needs it. This way we can give him the best care.”
I cooperated and told them as much as I knew. The last time I had talked about my family’s health history was in my senior year of college when I was trying to go on the pill. Planned Parenthood wanted to know my family’s medical history to make sure the pill would be safe for me. That is how I learned that, even though I was skinny, I suffered from high cholesterol.
I told Shirley and the caseworker about our family. I included my high cholesterol, asthma, and eczema. I included my maternal grandmother’s diabetes and my paternal grandmother’s alcoholism and all the other family ailments I could remember, just like I did when I was deciding to go on the pill.
As I told them everything, I realized that I was having conflicting thoughts. Should I try and raise my sister’s kids? Am I being selfish? Am I uncaring for not taking the first child she abandoned? I could have raised Daoud. Perhaps that was a reason to stay at the bank, so I could provide for my extended family. What am I doing anyway, trying to run a business in line with my spiritual beliefs? Are ideals like having a life purpose not meant for people like me? Did I really mean what I said to my sister when she came home at 3:00 in the morning, “I will never again watch your kids.” Am I a bad sister?
“Can you tell me what Rahima was like before this?” the new mother asked.
I pulled out the last correspondence I had received from my sister and started there. I thought it would be important to have some evidence that my sister was a smart woman who made some mistakes.
“She seems really bright and the letter is well-written,” the new mom said. The caseworker agreed.
“She was a good mom,” I said, thinking about how she ended up in this situation. “She taught me many things growing up. I looked up to her.”
Shirley smiled at me empathetically.
I continued, “She had the odds stacked against her with the domestic violence and all.” I was privy to some of my sister’s life-changing events, but I was certain there was more to learn. Like so many families, I’m sure we had plenty of painful secrets that were never discussed.
While the social worker was preparing a few things, I stared down at the table and softly said, “My sister didn’t used to be like this. My sister, being ten years older than me, was kind enough to host my twelfth birthday party at her apartment. She paid for the cake and helped me entertain my friends.” I felt myself softly smiling at these memories.
Then I mumbled to myself, “But how can this same woman leave her children?”
I looked up. There was silence in the room. The caseworker then shuffled through a few pages and said, “Ahh, just to let you know, there’s a warrant out for your sister’s arrest because she abandoned her children.” “Ummm. I see.” But I didn’t see. The sick feeling returned to my stomach. How did we all get to be so bad? Rahima and Samir, my older brother, are both on drugs and have abandoned their children. They don’t contact us and we don’t know where they are. Omar, my younger brother, is drinking too much and not taking care of his family. And am I fucking up my life, too, thinking that I can run a business? I’m a failure, too.
* * *
Weeks later, the phone rang, with more disturbing news.
“Saeeda, this is the caseworker from CPS. We just wanted you to know that…” she paused, “…we learned that Rahima was picked up for shoplifting and is now in the Atlanta county jail.”
“I see….Do you know if I can visit her?”
“I think so. I don’t see why not.”
I put the phone down, patting it gently. I felt like the sister I had known had died.
On Tuesday, I went to the jail to reconnect with my sister, not knowing what or whom I’d find. The last time I’d her seen her was about three years ago in Pittsburgh.
I arrived at the jail and stood in a long line, waiting, briskly tapping my foot and mentally chanting my sister’s name. Then I sat for a long time in the waiting area, visualizing her in divine light. At last, my number was called. I went to the window, only to be told, “Oh, honey, you can’t see her today. You’re a local resident. You have to come back over the weekend.” I explained my situation, but the woman didn’t seem to care. She just said, “Honey, come back on Saturday.”
So I returned on Saturday. Again I waited in the long line and sat in the waiting area, listening for them to call my number. This time a man said, “We released her on Friday. It was a petty shoplifting offense.”
“But there was also a warrant out for her arrest for abandonment.” “Sorry. She’s no longer here.”
Footsteps heavy, I walked back to my car. The sun was bright. The Atlanta air was warm. I opened the car door and slid in, wishing my car was a coffin to bury my already dead-feeling body. I closed the door and thought, “This Black Mecca pilgrimage is killing me.”
* * *
Early summer 1995, I stood in line at Sevananda, Atlanta’s main health food grocery store. It was several weeks after unsuccessfully trying to contact my sister in jail. I was depressed. My family was in a sad state, especially my sister, who felt lost from us. I felt like she was dead and I was a person in mourning, with no body or funeral to soothe my grief. With all this, I attempted to run my business and appear to be normal.
I refocused on the present. I was in the store to buy ingredients to make vegetable sushi and cucumber lemonade for an opportunity I had to teach yoga and healthy cooking to the kids in a local art enrichment program. In my shopping cart, I had cucumbers, carrots, short-grain brown rice, ginger pickles, brown rice syrup, brown rice vinegar, nori sheets, wasabi, and lemons.
While standing in the checkout line, doing an unassuming tree pose, first on the right leg then on the left leg, I started to mentally revi
ew the order in which the cooking and chopping needed to happen for the kids’ class to run smoothly. As I pushed the cart forward, I visualized the different jobs I wanted each kid to do so that everyone could participate. I put the items on the conveyor belt, feeling confident that I had all the bases covered.
“That will be $32.38.” I handed the cashier my credit card, still thinking through my class outline.
“Ma’am. The card was declined,” the cashier said, breaking my train of thought. “Do you have another one?” she asked quickly. I assumed she was trained to respond that way in this kind of situation.
I pulled out my banking card, she swiped it, and then the cashier said, “Do you have another one?” Her face looked embarrassed for me.
I didn’t have another card. I was out of cards and money. I left my groceries on the conveyor belt, walked to my car, and got in. The bright sun turned into a spotlight glaring down on me. I was clearly on stage—the stage of shame.
“What am I going to do? I can’t show up there with no food. I can’t ask anyone for money. Fuck!” I said aloud to myself, closing my eyes and putting my head on the steering wheel.
I sat in the car for thirty minutes or so. The class time was approaching quickly, and I was frozen. Tick. Tick. Tick. I just sat there, staring out of the window, sweating in the Atlanta summer heat.
I turned on the ignition. I drove home slowly. I pulled into the driveway and walked into the house, head down all the way. I opened the door to my bedroom. I pulled on the cord to close the window blinds. I didn’t want any light seeping into my room because everything in my life was going black—dead. I got into bed and pulled the covers up to my neck. I felt heavy and sank into my futon, and then pulled the covers over my head. I stayed there, long after the time for my scheduled class had passed.
The next day, my good friend Susan called. “What happened to you?” She was concerned, but also embarrassed. Susan was the one who had referred me to the director of the kids’ program. As it turned out, there were outside visitors who came to observe the program that day, and I was not there. My actions had embarrassed the director.
I told Susan that I had fallen into a depression and just couldn’t move. Susan didn’t seem mad at me; instead, she expressed a weird kind of empathy. But all I could feel was shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.
* * *
Days later, my friend and employer Craig came to my door.
“I know you’re under a lot of pressure with starting your business and all,” he said, “but I feel like there hasn’t been enough cooked food in the house anymore.”
“Yeah. I know. I need to sort out a few matters,” I said. “Can we talk more about this tomorrow?”
Craig nodded and closed my bedroom door and walked away.
It had been twenty months since I had moved in with Craig to be a live-in chef. I went there to be a part of his healing, but now it seemed like I was hurting him. That night I knew I had to tell Craig that I was no longer fit to do a good job. I lay awake, staring out of the window through the mauve-colored blinds. Faint moonlight hit the warm summer grass. I couldn’t sleep. It was a long night. I questioned everything. After a long, long while, I finally fell asleep.
The next day, I woke up at four in the morning. The sun had not yet graced the horizon. I got out of bed, still in my pajamas, and I went to the kitchen. I grabbed some paper towels and walked out of the front door. I removed my shoes and began to walk barefoot on the grass covered in morning dew. I shivered a bit. In my holistic health classes, I’d learned that walking barefoot on the morning dew is a way to keep us humans connected to the earth. Ancient teachers believed that it could help rebalance the human spirit, and my spirit needed some rebalancing. I roamed through the grass for about ten minutes.
Later that day, I was home by dinnertime. I walked into the house and told Craig that I needed to end our arrangement. He was disappointed, but he agreed. We discussed a move-out date, and then I went to my bedroom, thinking, Shame on me. Damn!
I was confused. It was hard for me to project how much money I would need to live on and how much money I would need to run my healthy food and yoga teaching business, especially with my income being completely unknown. I had a business plan, but it only looked good on paper—a dream I fantasized about. I had forgotten the business rule that says for the first five years businesses usually don’t make money; they are lucky to break even.
In my room, I sat on my futon and gazed at my appointment book. I started thinking that perhaps I was just too weak to run my own business. Maybe I couldn’t do anything emotionally hard. Maybe that book Emotional Intelligence was right. People can be intellectually smart, but they lack emotional intelligence, thus preventing them from achieving traditional success. Maybe I am that kind of person, one who has experienced some trauma and cannot get it together to do anything complex. Maybe coming from my impoverished, dysfunctional family has damaged me too much. Not to mention the subconscious messages seeping into my psyche regarding where a Black woman should be placed in America….
The holes in my education are abundant. I’m not entirely sure how I made it through college….Perhaps I am at the point now where I am too weak to live. Now I am hurting people in the process. Perhaps this should be the end of my road less traveled?
* * *
I created my first paying job when I was nine years old by going around to the neighbors and asking if they had any odd jobs for me to do. One woman hired me to come in and dust her furniture every week. This job was very important to me because it meant that I would be earning my own money, and it was one less thing for my parents to fight about. I was then, in my eyes, independent. I earned my own money and I could spend it any way I wanted to. But I reinvested it by buying penny candy at the local store. At my elementary school, I sold each piece for a nickel.
At eleven, I sold newspapers. At twelve, I babysat. At thirteen, I sold Avon in school. At thirteen and fourteen, I worked government summer jobs. At sixteen, I was a birthday hostess at Chuck E. Cheese. At seventeen, I was awarded my entrée into corporate life, the high-paying internship in computer science at the bank, where I made more per day than my mother made driving a school bus in a week. I knew how to make money, and I was just as comfortable, materially, as any girl in school with two working parents who gave her an allowance. I had always made enough to live the kind of life I wanted to live. I had done it all my life.
So what was happening now? Why was it so hard to build a business? I started feeling that my greatest strength had become my greatest weakness. Optimism was good for getting me out of bed, but I could have used some realism when it came to managing my books. For the first time, I was not earning enough to live the kind of life I wanted to live. I was failing.
The sound of the phone ringing defined my life. It was usually someone wanting the car, or a school loan or credit card payment. Or they were calling about some bill or another. Occasionally, it was a prospective client.
Back when I told my grandfather that I did not like my banking job, he gave me the strangest look and said, “Like? Like a job?…Jobs aren’t to be liked. What you like is that you have a job. What you like is not getting a pink slip.”
When I remembered this, a light bulb went on. I was the descendant of my grandfather, who believed in hard work. I was the product of my ancestors’ struggles just to survive. I was now in a privileged position where I could choose to like or not like a job, and to take risks with my future. I had the luxury to follow the philosophies of books like The Road Less Traveled. I was afforded an opportunity to dream and believe that I could be anything! The books I was reading told me that it is my right, by divine order, to be happy, fulfilled, and to do work that speaks to my inner soul. But New-Agey thinking was not my grandfather’s thinking.
Historically, my people made it through the atrocities of the Middle Passage, then made it through slavery, then Recons
truction—forty acres and a mule. Then the civil rights struggle, and now, for some, corporate American assimilation, where you could choose to be anything you wanted to be. I had these thoughts often. I was failing, and falling into a darker and darker place, especially because I was defining success as work = my innermost personality. How does anyone function in the midst of all this? Perhaps this was the same overwhelming feeling my sister had when she needed to soothe her mental pain with drugs. She was between a rock and a hard place.
How could I be screwing up this much? I am the successful one in the family. Everyone else is either using drugs or alcohol, or not working. I am the only child left that my mother depends on to save her from her poverty. I can’t afford to screw up. I have responsibilities. Who is going to be there for my sister’s kids, my two brothers’ kids? I was supposed to be the independently wealthy one, the success story featured in Essence. The more I thought about this, the more I dropped lower and lower into a mental quagmire.
I went to bed that night thinking, “Perhaps this is where I start to degenerate. It has happened to nearly everyone in my family. We’re jinxed.” My half-sister Sharon and I used to jokingly say that we were all cursed. She and I were both superstitious at times. “Dad’s family is cursed,” she’d say. “How else can you explain all this deterioration?” We’d always chuckle because it felt like we’d both just spoken an honest truth about why our family was becoming so messed up.
Regularly, we would swap stories about dad. When Sharon was in college, she’d tell friends and her boyfriend, “Y’all don’t leave until my dad gets here, because he might not ever show up. I need a Plan B to get home just in case he doesn’t come to get me.” I knew that feeling all too often. My dad had a habit of not showing up.