I started walking but for some reason in the opposite direction of my Bronx apartment. I look up and saw a marquee—Church Service 3 PM—on an old, grand movie theater in Washington Heights north of Harlem.
It was what is now known as the United Palace cathedral, the creation of charismatic Evangelical minister Reverend Ike. His weekly radio sermons were carried by hundreds of stations around the country, and he became famous in the African American community for his prosperity theology, flamboyance, and slogan: “You can’t lose with the stuff I use.” There were numerous services throughout the week but the one that Susan stumbled upon was going strong that Sunday afternoon. Her restrictive Catholic-school training might have made her keep walking past the Palace, but not that day.
I’d been trained to dress up for church. That day I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. But some force that I didn’t understand then pulled me into the back of the sanctuary, where I heard a sermon that changed my life. The Reverend Alfred Miller, Reverend Ike’s assistant minister, whose memorial service I just spoke at last year, was speaking passionately to the congregation. “The Holy Spirit is alive in you! God is alive in you!” he shouted continuously. “With your mind you can change the world!” He continued saying that our minds could change our world. He said that no matter what our troubles, if we put them aside for a moment, focus on possible solutions, and imagine a joyous future and work toward it, we would find a peace within, and positive experiences would begin to unfold.
What I began to embrace after that sermon is that life will sometimes bring you to the edge in order to make you wake up. Sometimes we think we’re being punished for our mistakes. Our God is not a punishing God. By whatever name we may call the Divinity, all the pain that we endure is an awakening for us to understand that we’re more than we seem, that we’re human and divine. We really do have the power to do what needs to be done as single mothers. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible if we don’t fold within ourselves, but go within ourselves for where the illumination and light are. After that service I gathered up the little pamphlets, walked home with the $5 I needed to buy milk and cereal so I could feed my little Shana that week. Five dollars could stretch that far back in the day!
The next morning, rather than lying in bed, or getting up reluctantly with fear grabbing me, I just said, “I’m going to do what that minister told me to do. I’m going to get up, I’m going to have faith, I’m going to sit in quiet for a moment and allow God to speak to me.” I don’t know if I sat there for three minutes or thirty minutes, but something just said, “Why don’t you call the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm?” Ophelia DeVore was a very well-known woman who trained want-to-be models.
After nine AM, I made the phone call. To the woman on the other end of the phone I said, “My name is Susan Taylor, and I’m the beauty editor of Essence magazine. I’d like to know if you’d be interested in my teaching your students how to put on makeup and fix their hair.” I was transferred to a woman named Jackie Wellington, who said, “Well, we don’t know you, but we surely do know the new magazine Essence.” She said, “We’d love to have you.”
With that one phone call, my life changed. My monthly income increased 40 percent. Reflecting on that experience over time, I saw clearly that Divine Order is always at work. So if I’d had a little more money that Sunday, I would have taken public transportation and not set out on foot. If not for the pain in my chest, the blessing of an anxiety attack, I wouldn’t have gone to the emergency room, where I learned that I wasn’t dying. If my car wasn’t broken I wouldn’t have stumbled across that church, but driven past it as I had many a Sunday. In time, I would come to see that the breakups, the shakeups, the fears that continually bite at our heels—and that some say unhealed, are the cause of all of our crises and those in the world—these are a natural and important part of life. They teach us to look beyond the physical world for information, to turn within to our spiritual world for confirmation. Realizing this is how I began to change my life, how, as a single mother and still today, I manage to keep overwhelm and fear at bay and practice having faith and looking for the larger spiritual cycles that are always at work.
Susan embraced practicing daily gratitude and the belief that our thoughts create our reality, and faith is an active partner in shaping that reality.
With her reawakened reliance on her faith came the blossoming of her career at Essence. Within months, then editor in chief Marcia Ann Gillespie recognized her drive and talent and Susan went from part-time beauty editor to full-time fashion and beauty editor. In 1981, at age thirty-five, she was named editor in chief. She also enrolled in college and earned her degree at night from Fordham University—all while working full-time, hosting the television program, becoming a sought-after public speaker, and dating the man who would become the love of her life. While some called it an unconventional and meteoric rise to the top, Susan said her goal was to continue growing a world-class magazine while maintaining her personal and spiritual life as well as a presence for her daughter, no matter what else was going on.
But with her increasing fame came a reminder of what was missing in her formal spiritual training. A Catholic-school girl, she read her catechism every day and in elementary school, attended church seven days a week. She believed that sanctity rested in the beautiful statues of saints in the sanctuary, and that the nuns and priests had a direct line to God. Until that day in the United Palace cathedral, she never really connected to the understanding that the power actually resided within her. An incident one night when Shana was about twelve years old brought this realization into sharp focus, and it marked the beginning of Susan’s new approach to single mothering.
One Friday night, I was working at my desk and Shana’s calling every few minutes, wondering when I was coming home. “Sweetie, I’m coming, sweetie, I’m coming,” was my rote response to each of her calls. Our offices were in Times Square and it was very seedy then. “Coming, sweetie.” It’s eight o’ clock. Nine o’clock. “I’m coming, sweetie.” It’s ten o’clock. I arrived home at about ten thirty that night and my Shana was putting on her coat and on her way down to Times Square to meet me. I was horrified and said, “Shana, what are you doing?” She responded, “You’re Susan Taylor and you have fancy stuff, and I thought somebody might hurt you. Nobody was going to bother me, so I was just coming to get you.”
Whatever it was that I was doing at my desk could have waited. Or I could have brought the work home and attended to it with Shana doing her homework right by my side. After that incident, I had to teach myself to come home from work and focus on Shana first. I had been arriving and complaining about Shana’s undone chores and stepping out of my heels and into the kitchen to fix dinner. I remember asking her one evening, trying to focus more on my daughter, how her day in school went. “You don’t really care, Mommy,” she responded. It hurt and also woke me. I started coming home from work differently, ignoring things out of order in our apartment. I’d go into the bathroom, close the door, sit on the edge of the tub, and let go of Essence. I’d take some breaths and just resolve to be present for Shana. Our children need our presence. They don’t need the presents, more stuff. They need our listening ear, our affirmation, to know that they are important and loved.
Soon it became a habit, taking a few minutes to resettle my mind, sitting with her and just saying, “Tell me about your day.” At first, she didn’t believe I cared. “Mommy, you don’t really want to know. Come on.” With my consistency, Shana began to trust that I cared about her, and both our lives changed. My beloved went from being a failing student to the valedictorian of her high school graduating class. The change needs to happen in us as parents first.
Susan realized that she needed to apply the same focus and listening skills that elevated her faith to her parenting. She became determined to create a work environment where there would be no conflict between doing a good job and being a good parent. She brought toys and books into the office so
that when the staff’s children came to the office because of minor illnesses or days off from school, they would feel welcomed.
In many ways her experiences at home and in the workplace are what helped fuel Susan’s passion for mentoring, which began as Essence Cares while she was still editor in chief. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she saw so many children suffering, so many single parents profoundly stressed out, not having the support they needed to provide the presence their children required to rebuild their lives and sense of security. In 2006, she transitioned Essence Cares into the National CARES Mentoring Movement so local CARES affiliates could begin building the movement in under-resourced communities.
From improvised single mom to legendary editor in chief to founder of one of the nation’s preeminent mentoring movements, Susan L. Taylor has chartered her own spiritual journey and ministry—a lifetime of excellence, grounded in her faith. She has been presented with thousands of honors and awards in appreciation of her efforts, but not surprisingly, there’s one recognition she treasures above all others.
There’s nothing more important, or that I take greater pride in, than a daughter who has raised her own daughter well. As I say to Shana, “We survived me,” a single mother, who wasn’t highly educated, who initially wasn’t making a lot of money, and who didn’t always make the right choices. My granddaughter is now in college and our extended families have emerged into a great loving and trusting unit where we take care of one another in ways that are needed. That gives me permission to keep doing the work that I have to do in the community.
LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Have faith in your inner resources; they are there to be tapped if you believe in your own skill set.
Sometimes the pressures and challenges of today make thoughts of tomorrow mind numbing. With faith, however, we know that a force bigger than ourselves will guide us beyond today and into a brighter tomorrow. And if we can get beyond tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, we can start thinking about what our strength, resolve, and resiliency mean to our children.
Susan says sometimes, when stresses come all at once and life becomes overwhelming, even she forgets what she knows is true. Even though, as she admits, “I have written four books and twenty-seven years of editorials about this, still I forget under stress and forgo practicing my ritual—taking quiet time, time to listen in, time to exercise, time to remember these truths.” She concludes that this is when we can begin to focus again, find the light deep within ourselves, and “see the things needed to care for ourselves and our family, to live our lives fully, all at our fingertips. Call this synchronicity! Divine Order! Truth!”
Presence of Courage:
The ability to boldly move out of a comfort zone to respond to emergencies, seize opportunities, or take unexpected risks to ensure better and brighter futures for our children.
IV
Presence of Courage
Introduction
Believe in yourself. You are braver than you think, more talented than you know, and capable of more than you imagine.
—Roy T. Bennett
Many people, especially single mothers, are just like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz: braver than we think. Presence of Courage is not only about finding ways to talk yourself into something you are afraid to do, or jumping in with both feet without a life raft. Yes, there are times for blind bravery, for when our adrenaline takes over and we lift cars like superhumans or run faster than a gazelle to save a child. The true essence of courage, though, is to discover that it already exists inside us; to learn that the foreign, uncomfortable circumstances delivered to us are there to help us remember our courage and exercise it for the betterment of our lives and our children’s.
If you are a mother, I presume you have been in situations that found you freaking out over something—maybe a mouse or traveling by plane or even leaving the closet door open at bedtime (it still bothers me)—but when it comes to how you act around your child, you put on that brave face, calmly explaining that “there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Then you might silently scream in the bathroom later or scratch yourself silly after killing a barrage of ants, but you grow a little, because c’mon, that brave face was pretty impressive, and (1) you worked through your own fear, and (2) you helped break a cycle or at least tried to not give your baggage to your child. That intent alone is brave; putting a strong example in front of our kids ahead of our own fears is the definition of Presence of Courage.
The Courage to Let Go
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
—Winston Churchill
The year was 1968 and the country was still smoldering from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and subsequent explosion of urban rage. I spent that summer before college working for the National Council of Churches (NCC), headquartered in what was affectionately called “the God Box”—the Interchurch Center in New York City. My job each morning was to clear the reams of Telex reports sent in by ministers around the country about the unrest in their cities the night before. Once I condensed the individual reports, I disseminated the summary throughout the NCC network before day’s end. It was a sobering summer, as I read reports of communities burning and destroyed by rage, disinvestment, hopelessness, neglect, and indifference. When I walked onto the campus of American University that fall, I was highly politicized and eager to prepare to make a difference in a nation that I saw imploding before my eyes.
I had been on the campus a little over a week, but had quickly learned that the hub of student life nestled in Mary Graydon Center. That’s where everyone hung out between classes, where you could always find a bid whist card game going on, where lifelong friendships were started, and, in my case, where romances began. One day I walked in and saw a bunch of students clustered around four guys who were in an animated conversation about the state of affairs for black students and workers on campus. I soon learned that they were the leaders of the Organization of African and Afro-American Students at the American University, commonly called OASATAU.
Out of respect for the private lives they now live, I’ll simply call them the Magnificent Four, all seniors and icons on campus. Even though they were the strong and vocal proponents for black history classes, equal distribution of student affairs activities dollars, and greater recognition of the need to recruit and retain more professors and students of color, they were still friends of the administration. As the fall of 1968 heated up, when the more radical students who were against the Vietnam War took over one of the buildings, the administration asked the men of OASATAU to help keep the peace and make sure the building wasn’t damaged. I loved the fact that they could fight for a cause but still maintain a working relationship with those who could actually change policies. That was a skill I wanted to learn, and one of the four—whom I’ll call Bill—became my willing teacher. With him as my inspiration and partner, I jumped into the movement with both feet. I helped start and began writing for the OASATAU newspaper, UHURU, organizing strategy for budget hearings and running a Saturday-morning breakfast program for kids in Northeast Washington, DC. With him, I felt like I was making an enduring difference. Activism for the cause on campus evolved into our personal passion at home, and by December we were engaged.
But like many women in love, in the year and a half before our wedding, I ignored the red flags. I looked past the fact that a good part of Bill’s popularity was linked to the ease with which he scored weed. Let’s face it. It was the late 1960s and there was always the distinctive smell of marijuana in the air, in the dorms, in the stairways, and on the quad. My classes were going well and I was having an impact on things bigger than myself, so having a joint with him and friends occasionally was fun and made me a full member of the influential inner circle. But as time went on, I found myself becoming more and more concerned by Bill’s increasing and more regular drug use and the impact it was having on his moods. When he was high he was the life of the p
arty, full of jokes and conversations ranging from the state of world affairs to the newest Jimi Hendrix album. In between joints he was controlling, demanding, and almost OCD—going around the apartment on cleaning binges and demanding that nothing be out of place. Even more disturbing was that his moods were affecting mine. When he was up, I felt down. When he felt down, I was up. We were on two totally different tracks, and rarely did we intersect.
In the months before our wedding I often thought about calling the whole thing off, but I felt trapped. The invitations were mailed, the bridesmaids had their dresses, and my mother was almost finished making my wedding gown. Besides, I reasoned, as other graduates were faced with the reality of having to find jobs and grow up, most of our friends were moving on from even occasional drug use. I convinced myself that he would too, that somehow a marriage license would make him the man I needed him to be.
I was wrong.
Neither a license nor the birth of our daughter Nikki a year and a half later made any difference. If anything, it emboldened him to be even more controlling and entrenched in his ways without regard for the impact on our young family. There were still people coming in and out of our apartment regularly, and I found myself escaping to our bedroom and shutting the door as soon as I heard the front door ring. He wasn’t dealing drugs in the menacing traditional sense, but he was always ready to share what seemed to me and others a bottomless supply of joints of grade-A grass.
The Power of Presence Page 12