The police said her children were at home, by themselves, and they would take me there. Lucille had seven children. It’s been so long. The two youngest were still in diapers.
Ona told me that as she drove in the backseat of the police car to her daughter’s house, there was never any doubt in her mind what she was going there to do. It was her moment of unconditional clarity, although she’d never dreamed she would be taking these next steps well into her sixties.
They were still asleep when I got there. The oldest one woke up first. “Grandmomma, what you doing here?” [I said,] I’m looking for some clothes so you can come home with me. Then they were all awake and asking “Why? What happened?” I finally said, Your Momma’s been killed and y’all are coming home with me. They started screaming at once and I did my best to comfort them, even though I wanted to scream and holler myself. But I didn’t have time for that. I just kept saying to myself I don’t know how I’m going do it or what I’m going do, but as long as I’m living they were going to stay together. So that morning Janail, Brandon, Mitchell, Nicky, Corvette, Robert, and Austin came home with me for good.
I prayed all the way and every day and night after that, Lord, let me raise these kids, together, the best I can.
Ona remembered how she had to separate her own children to bring them one by one to Chicago. She was determined that her grandchildren would grow up together.
I was sick in my heart for a long, long time but I knew I had to pull myself together for the kids. For a while, some folks thought I was crazy. They said, “You can’t keep these kids.” No, they gonna stay here with me. They’re not going no place. “Well how you gonna do it?” I said, If I sleep, they sleep with me. If I eat, they can eat. We’ll make it some kind of way.
From then on I went to everyplace where they were giving out free food. My church helped and then I worked at the food pantry and stuff like that. I wasn’t getting paid but I could bring canned food home and I didn’t have to buy it.
Then I did what I did back in Mississippi. I grew food. I had a backyard so I grew tomatoes, peppers, okra, turnips, mustard and collard greens, and sage. I grew it all ’cause I knew how to do it. I even grew some cotton once, to remind me of where I come from.
Nights were hard but everyone had a place to sleep. I had two bedrooms, a living room, and dining room. I turned my dining room into a bedroom. I had a big bed on this side and a half bed on this side. I gave them my room and I slept on the couch. The two in diapers slept with me.
I did get help from the city. I went to the aid office and the lady who was helping me said she was on public aid herself. I think she was getting $700 and something a month. She said she got that much because she was the head of the house. I said, What the hell do you think I am? I bet you think I’m crazy, but when I get angry I have to speak my mind. I said, “I’m the head of the house too.” At that time they wasn’t giving me but $300 for all the kids. I may not have gotten past fifth grade but I know how to fight for my kids. After I opened my mouth, I finally started getting $500.
That was enough to keep clothes on the kids and a roof over our heads. And if anyone had anything to say about my kids, I said, If the kids can’t stay, I can’t stay either. And I never been put out. I’ve never been threatened to be put out or nothing.
I asked Ona what sustained her through her abusive marriage, raising her own children as a single mother, the death of her daughter, and the years after raising her second family of grandkids.
She told me about her aunt Alice, who was also a single mom making it on her own. Alice was always there to listen to Ona, encouraging her to leave her abusive husband and to stand up for herself and her children. Alice was a role model, showing Ona that it was possible to be independent and keep her household functioning. Ona also turned to her faith regularly.
When times were hardest the only thing I did, I just prayed for the Lord to help me. God helped me out of that marriage and got me here to Chicago. With my kids and later with my grandkids, I never had any real trouble with any of them. Lucille had her issues but didn’t none of them steal or take nothing didn’t belong to them or nothing like that. Ain’t never been in jail or nothing. I did my best, and I know it was only with God’s help.
I asked Ona if there was any one moment in her life that made all the sacrifices, all the planning, all the marshaling of resources to make her families, as mother and grandmother, worth it.
When I brought my grandkids home with me that morning, the next to the youngest one, Robert, was only two years old. Now remember, I didn’t get past the fifth grade. Well, two years ago I got to see Robert graduate from college. He’s the first in our family to do that. I didn’t want him to go away at first, but he got scholarships and loans and we made it work. He did real well too. When he walked across the stage and got his degree, he looked to me in the audience and pointed to me while he touched his degree. At that moment I was so proud! It made everything worthwhile.
You know, it seems like just right now I can go to sleep and I’ll have a dream about God. And I think back on my life and I’ll say, “The Lord helped me. Took me through this and that and brought me to be eighty-eight years old.” All through the day and all through the night I say, “Thank you Jesus. I know you won’t leave me now.”
Never has. Never will.
LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Embrace your strength and don’t settle for less than you deserve.
Despite her deep grief and advanced age, Ona had enough faith in herself and her God that her strength transcended reason, quelling any doubts that she might not be strong enough or be smart enough or have enough money to take in all her grandchildren. Ona heard her aunt’s voice in her ear from decades before that she could take care of herself and her children; just as important, she knew she did not deserve to be abused.
Advocating for the family can be a constant challenge. Ona was able to provide for her family because she got so creative about where she found her resources. She knew that income from her work wasn’t the only way to support the family—in fact, it would never be enough. So she expanded her search for resources—she wasn’t afraid to tend her garden or seek help from wherever she could find it, be it at church, from family, or from social services. She was determined to do whatever it took to get the help she needed and to fight for the resources she was entitled to. No matter what your circumstances, you must believe that you are smart enough, strong enough, and creative enough to succeed as a head of household, no matter who you are caring for. Like Ona, you must gather as much information as you can and be willing to fight for the resources that you are entitled to. According to the advocacy organization Generations United, there are more than 1.5 million grandmothers responsible for raising their grandchildren. Today there is increasing attention on how to help these “grandfamilies” thrive in the midst of economic hardships and the traumatic incidents that often cause the guardianship by the grandparent in the first place. For more on Generations United and the increasing role of and resources available to grandfamilies, please visit www.power-ofpresence.com.
But before Ona could have the confidence to fight for the well-being of her grandchildren, she had to fight for her own survival. What she learned from the words of her aunt was that you must not settle for an unhealthy home environment out of fear of not being able to be the head of a household. Staying in a dangerous or unhealthy relationship is simply not worth it. There are services and resources out there that can help. Most notable is the National Domestic Violence Hotline, which began operations in September 1994. As of 2006, the hotline had logged more than four million callers. This is a highly confidential and trusted resource for any person who’s a victim of physical, mental, emotional, verbal, or sexual abuse. Additional information can be found on www.power-ofpresence.com, but I think it bears repeating here. It is a national resource and will ask you only for your age, gender (yes, men get abused too), race, and location. It will help you start thinking about a plan to leave the abusive situation
safely. The number is 1-800-799-SAFE. The website is www.thehotline.org, but if you are still in your home, be sure to delete your browser history. The hotline also has an online chat feature that will not tell you what to do but will help you figure out what your options are and provide the local information to make it happen.
For Every Child There Is a Window
Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.
—bell hooks
As much as I wanted to maintain my independence after Wes died, I made the decision to move back home with my parents as a way to stabilize our financial situation and to expand the size of the pride that could help me with the kids on a day-to-day basis. It was a move that gave my budget some breathing room once all three kids were of school age. It also gave my children consistent male interaction that I hoped would be a mirror for what I believed men should be and how girls and women should be treated by men.
Living with my parents on a daily basis allowed the kids to see what a man has to do to keep a marriage going for almost half a century. They saw how a man works and provides for his family, yet can be present for the family’s important events. They witnessed little things, like the loving way my parents spoke to each other. They called each other “dear,” so the frequent question around the family when wondering where they were was, “Where are the dears?” My mother and father were always laughing with each other, sharing glances, and finishing each other’s sentences. Did they have arguments? Of course, but seeing how quickly and how well disagreements were resolved were lessons for a happy marriage in and of themselves. And when it came to keeping the household going, almost everything was done side by side. Chores were shared, like cooking in our tiny kitchen or their daily bed-making ritual: They would start with the sheets, blanket, and bedspread pulled to the bottom of the bed. Mom and Dad, standing at opposite sides, made sure each piece of cloth was hospital-corner-ready at the bottom. They pulled up each piece, one by one, to the top of the bed until each was flat and perfectly horizontal with the headboard. Then they would take the bedspread and fold it back to the size of a pillow plus three inches so that after the pillows were placed, they could tuck those three inches under them, creating the picture-perfect bed. To me, it was routine because I had seen it all my life, but for Wes its message was clear: There is no such thing as “man’s work” or “woman’s work.” Life’s a partnership.
A few months after we got to New York, my younger brother Howard and his wife, Pam, moved back to the Bronx and lived in our basement apartment. Life got even sweeter for Wes. Howard was intelligent, with an always ready smile, an air of sincerity, and a sexy swagger that made him an instant magnet in any room he entered. He made friends wherever he went, and people naturally felt comfortable opening up to him. And that’s exactly what Wes did. He and my brother spent endless hours exchanging views about sports, music, and the latest designers of men’s clothes. Because of Howard, Wes sought to adapt the styles of Hugo Boss, Gucci, Members Only, and Nike’s Air Jordan. Of course, he couldn’t afford the real things but the style was planted, ready to sprout whenever the opportunity connected with the money.
As Howard’s career in the pharmaceutical industry took off and he had to travel more, their time together became less and less. Around the same time, Grace Reformed Church in Brooklyn coaxed my dad out of retirement. As interim pastor, he and my mom began living in the church’s parsonage most of the time. As Wes turned eleven, he barely saw these two men who had become so important in his life. Once again, the reality of single motherhood presented its ever-present sobering dilemma: that no matter how hard we try, a mom can’t be a dad. We can teach our sons many things, but we can’t model the way a man walks through the world, or the way he shaves; we can’t participate in father-son events.
Suddenly on his own, without his primary male role models around, Wes took on the persona of the Fresh Prince of the Bronx, a man-child in a household of females. Things like cleaning up his room were beneath him. He would hold court on the phone: As one call with a classmate or neighborhood friend ended, another began. While it wasn’t until years later that I found out that he would pick and choose when he attended a full day of school, I could see that his grades were dropping. When I lectured him about a report card dotted with C’s, he said with a shrug, “Hey, I passed.”
I always told the kids that all they had to do was their best, and I would be okay with that. But I knew this wasn’t my son’s best, far from it. Plus, there was an anger and a hardness that was seeping into his personality, and that worried me just as much. He was crying out for a course correction, but all the punishments I devised didn’t have any effect. I met his defiance over doing homework with pulling the plug of his video games. I tried to limit his time on the phone but that wasn’t enforceable because I wasn’t at home during those critical afternoon hours. Our arguments were always the same:
“Wes, you need to give yourself a chance to see what you can do.”
“I know what I can do and I’m doing fine.”
“No one is paying you to be the class clown. You’re in school to learn.”
“Mom, I am doing the best I can.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am!”
I worried that I was losing my ability to influence him. The neighborhood around us was changing. I no longer felt comfortable walking the three-quarters of a mile from our house to the subway every day because so many of the shops on our main street were now gated and graffiti-adorned. I knew the kids he was hanging out with when he got home as most of their mothers knew my family, but there seemed to be more going on with them than any of their parents knew.
I thought I could counteract negative influences creeping into the neighborhood by his attending Riverdale Country, one of the most rigorously academic schools in all of New York City. The problem was I placed him in a vortex of perception and reality and forced him to wear a mask. He was learning more about rap at Riverdale than he was on the so-called mean streets of the Bronx! At school he had to play a role, and he was getting a thrill out of trying on the persona of a gangster. In the neighborhood he began to extend that persona, flirting with the gang life, tagging and hanging around the basketball courts with the kinds of older kids who lead the young ones into trouble.
There were also financial implications for the different masks Wes was wearing. At the time, Riverdale’s upper school tuition was about $7,000. There was no discount for multiple kids so I had to find that tuition—for him and Shani—every year, no matter what. I didn’t care how many jobs I had to work or how many hours it took, because the most important job I had was to provide the education the kids needed to chart their own course. As long as they were doing their best, I never resented a moment of working. But as Wes was becoming more and more disinterested in school, I began wondering why I was wasting my money on him. As his disinterest grew, so did my resentment.
As a result, our relationship started to decline. We seemed to be fighting all the time. He was never disrespectful to my parents because he knew that would be a line no one in the family would allow him to cross, but he was disrespectful to me. When I asked him to do something, he was deliberately non-responsive. As we edged into seventh grade, and I used my maternal guilt and persistence to get him off the couch, when he stood up I realized something. He was getting bigger than me, and he was physically stronger.
Now, it was drilled into his head that under no circumstances should he hit a girl. So while I never feared that he would consciously hit me, if ever rage took over I knew we were getting to a point where I was no longer a physical match for him. If I didn’t get control of him soon with my words and wit, I’d never be able to do so as he grew. I was terrified that he was slipping into a place and an attitude that was so harsh that if he got much deeper in, it would be impossible for me to reach him.
Honestly, I didn’t want to send him away, bu
t my mind was increasingly going to military school. I was also fearful of the kind of son I’d get back if he spent high school there. He was always such a fun-loving and playful boy, and most of the military people you see on television don’t smile. They seem rigid and aloof, which is something I didn’t see in Wes and didn’t want him to grow into. That was one fear, but the fear that I would lose him to the streets and that because of that he’d never fulfill his true potential was much greater. I would miss Wes terribly if I lost him to a boarding school, but I realized it would be a lot tougher to lose him completely. I saw the words of Frederick Douglass before me: “It is easier to raise strong children than to repair broken men.”
I started researching other schools. I talked to friends, relatives, and educators who knew Wes and who might know a school that would better fit his needs. About two weeks into my investigation, Doris Atkins, a longtime friend of my parents, suggested Valley Forge Military Academy, a school in Pennsylvania that had had a powerful and positive impact on her son, whom she’d also had to raise alone when her husband died. She suggested that VFMA’s summer camp could provide a simulated dry run for what school would be like for Wes. In two weeks I packed him up and his soccer ball and drove him to spend the next four weeks there.
Summer camp went great. When Wes got home, there was something about him that was decidedly different. He had filled out significantly, a testament to the daily calisthenics and sports. Beyond the physical there was a maturity of spirit that I saw. He no longer wore his defiance like armor. He was to begin Riverdale in a few weeks but if he failed to straighten up, Valley Forge would be there next year. I felt good that my threat of a future in military school now had a name.
The future, however, came one week later.
The Power of Presence Page 18