by Diamond
Then, my mother said that she was taking me to the doctor the next day. I said “Okay,” and I got up and got ready for bed. While I was sleeping, I woke up to my mother’s hand on my stomach. I lay still with my eyes closed until she walked out of my bedroom.
The next day, my mother drove me to the doctor to get an exam and to get on prenatal vitamins. I could tell that the doctor’s office was used to seeing teenage pregnancy because while the receptionist was in deep conversation with my mother, the doctor was asking me a lot of personal questions while doing my examination. After the doctor’s appointment, we went back home.
I was five months pregnant, about to enter my twelfth-grade year. My parents took me to the high school to speak with the principal about doing half of the year in night school and the other half during the regular school hours after my baby was born. I decided to go to night school so that I could still get my credits without all of the hassle of going from class to class during the day. I was still able to work at the janitorial business every day after I got out of night school. Then, during the end of my seventh month, I went in for my bi-weekly checkup. During the examination, with the monitor on me to check for the baby’s heartbeat, something seemed strange.
The doctor asked, “Do you feel that?”
I said, “Feel what?”
She said that the monitor was showing that I was having contractions.
I told her that I wasn’t feeling any type of pain.
Well, they continued to monitor me and began to talk to me about a possible caesarean section. I had to call my parents to let them know what was happening. They wanted me to keep the baby inside of me as long as I could. They wanted me to rest. They allowed me to go to night school, but they didn’t want me to go to work. They wanted me off of my feet as much as possible. I stayed on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy. My mother did her best to get me whatever I was craving, especially when I craved fried okra with ketchup on top from Church’s Chicken, or extra-crunchy peanut butter right out of the jar.
My daughter came about one week before her due date. I had just eaten five extra-crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Oh, they were so good. I lay down, and, out of nowhere, I felt this light but sharp shooting pain. Then it happened again. I thought it was gas, so I lay there a little longer. All of a sudden, the same pain got harder and sharper. The pains started happening five minutes apart.
My younger sister called my mother to let her know that I was in pain. My mother rushed home from work while my father finished cleaning the buildings, and she drove me to the hospital. My baby girl was born at 1:11 that next morning, 7 pounds, 5 ounces, just four days before my birthday.
I had messed up in my ninth and tenth grade years; I even failed summer school the summer of tenth grade. By the time I got into the eleventh grade, I had to hunker down and play catch-up. Luckily, things in North Carolina were not moving as fast as the city life. I was able to calm down and focus on my studies.
Mother flew down to visit us around my sixteenth birthday. She bought me a birthstone ring, and she bought my brother a motorbike. She was also there so that she could start looking for a place for the family to stay once everyone moved to North Carolina.
When Mother arrived in North Carolina, she was surprised at how much I had grown. Then she got upset when she saw how my auntie had pierced my ears, allowing me to have a second hole in my ear. I remember Mother ranting and raving and telling me that I could not wear a second earring in my ear.
Finally, the eleventh grade was over, and it was summer. My brother and I were going back home to Detroit for the summer, and we were excited. I was so happy to be home. I had missed Mother and Father immensely, and finally I could satisfy my cravings for White Castle and Coney Island.
Gurl, you didn’t say, “White Castle and Coney Island.”
Gurl, yes, this was the kind of food that you could not get in North Carolina.
Mother seemed a lot more relaxed and not so rigid. I spent my summer helping to pack up the house because it was happening—we were all moving back to North Carolina for good.
Mother and Father had finally found a home in North Carolina, and right before my twelfth grade year, Mother and the rest of our siblings started the move. Father stayed in Detroit for another month or so to tie up loose ends. Silk and I stayed with him.
Mother and Father sold the church and the dry cleaners; they also had a janitorial service that they gave up. We were going to miss Detroit, but even though we did not want to leave the big city we knew deep in our hearts it was probably for the best. Once things were in order, Father loaded us up in his small, red, stick-shift car and drove us all the way to North Carolina.
Yes, he sure did.
Living back home under my parents’ roof always meant that things were going to be structured and strict. Despite Mother allowing us to wear makeup and pants, she had other ways of being controlling and domineering in our lives.
Yes, she sure did.
When we moved back to North Carolina, she opened a church, and, yes, again I hated it.
But we were still able to wear pants.
I was just going into the twelfth grade. My parents had moved to North Carolina, and for some reason people thought we were rich. That was the furthest thing from the truth. We stayed uptown in a house that looked regular to us, but others got the impression that we were rich.
I remember one time, my sister’s schoolteacher saw her walking in the neighborhood, and he assumed that she was doing something mischievous. He asked her what she was doing in that neighborhood, and she replied that she was walking home from school. He was shocked to learn that we lived down the street from him.
Coming from the city, our view of things was a little different from the attitudes in the South. People automatically assumed that my parents were supposed to work in manufacturing because that was what most parents in that area of North Carolina did. My parents were entrepreneurs, however. They opened up a store and turned it into a health food store.
Yes, they sure did.
Moving back to North Carolina to a small town, we felt the envy and jealousy. When my brother and I lived with my aunt, another one of my mother’s sisters would always let us know that we weren’t anything special. Some of my mom’s family members felt disdain for her and us because, I guess, in their minds they were like, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” What they failed to realize was that my parents thought differently. They didn’t do the norms; they always went against the norm.
Things really changed when Mother and Father starting buying airtime on television to promote the church and their health food store. The health food store grew, the church grew, but we, the children, got sucked back into setting the example again. I wanted to shut down and get away. I hated all the attention, I hated being on television, and I hated being photographed. I didn’t want to be a part of anything that brought attention to me in any way.
Hahaha. Now, that’s very funny because we are on TV, we are photographed all the time, and we get a lot of love, attention, and affection from our fans.
As for me, I was the choir director, the secretary, and I worked one of the cameras that was used to film the church services for the televised program. Every Sunday, I made sure that I gave 10 percent of my earnings. I was faithful, and I learned how to establish my own personal relationship with God.
Mother was very outspoken and dominating. I was in my thirties, still being told what to do and how to do it, with the fear that something would happen if I tried to do it on my own. Things had gotten so out of control that it was time for us to stand up for ourselves and start making our own decisions. I wanted change; we needed change, and that was the spark that gave us the guts to leave my mother’s church and utilize our faith to guide us the rest of the way. It was such a scary time, but we made it!
Yes, it was scary, but we had to step out on faith. If we hadn’t made a move, we would have been stagnated, at a standstill.
> That experience prepared us for this day. We awakened to what we wanted in life. In order to get what you want, you have to say no to what you don’t want. When we got sick and tired of being sick and tired, we walked out of that church, then off of the Democrat Plantation.
We left and never looked back.
Chapter 4 Overcoming Obstacles
I was seventeen years old, in the twelfth grade, and had gotten pregnant—but I was not about to let this ruin the rest of my life.
When my mother found out I was pregnant, she was adamant about me going to find a job. Her exact words were, “I’m not signing no papers for you to go and get on welfare.” I got a job working at Shoney’s Restaurant in Aberdeen, North Carolina, as a waitress and hostess–cashier. When I got hired, I told no one, not even the manager who hired me, that I was pregnant.
Every day after school, I would go home, do whatever homework I had, eat, and get ready for work. During the week, I would work from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and on the weekends I would work longer hours. Some days I would greet the customers, and on other days I would wait tables. For some odd reason, I absolutely loved it. The benefit of having a job was having my own money so I could buy my own clothes. I loved not being dependent on my parents for the little things.
My supervisor, a white woman by the name of Barbara, taught me how to run the register and correctly count change back to the customer. I remember one day a customer was checking out and paying his bill, which came to $11.51. The customer gave Barbara, who was hostessing at the time, $20 and a penny. For the life of me, I could not understand why he was giving her a penny if he had given her a $20 bill.
After the transaction, I mustered up the courage to ask her, “Why did he give a penny if he had already given $20?”
She turned to me, without judgment, and explained in simple terms that he gave the penny to keep from getting pennies back. She went on to say he gave me the penny so that he could get 50 cents back instead of 49 cents.
Wow, this seemed like simple math. I had been in school for twelve years, confined to the four corners of the public or the private school system, and no one had ever taught me this simple trick. Today, most Millennials don’t know this simple math. If you don’t believe me, test them by giving them a penny if you ever have a bill that totals up to the change being an odd number.
I learned a lot from Barbara. She taught me how to meet and greet customers, how to run hourly reports to see if sales were up or down from the previous year, and then record them. She showed me how to keep the menus and the front of the store clean, even down to the bathrooms. She would say, “Customers can tell how clean the restaurant’s kitchen is by checking the bathrooms. If the bathrooms are dirty, then the kitchen is dirty.” A lot of these tasks were easy for me because Father had taught me the importance of such things when he owned the laundromat.
When I worked on the weekends, I was able to wait tables. As a waitress, if the supervisor saw you just standing around, she would say, “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” It was a good day if you were able to make $60 in tips. Most days when I was waitressing, I would make just that.
The one thing I loved about my supervisor, Barbara, was that she never made me feel inferior or less than. If I didn’t understand something, she would explain it; if I needed something and she had it, she would give it. She did everything within her power to help me, and I trusted her wholeheartedly. And one day, after I was going into four months of being pregnant, she came right out and asked me directly, “Are you pregnant?”
Almost too embarrassed to admit it, I told her, “Yes.”
She never looked at me differently. She congratulated me and said she hoped it was a boy.
I worked the whole nine months of my pregnancy. Some mornings, I would have morning sickness because certain smells would make me sick. I would always push through and continue to go to school because my number one goal was to graduate on time from high school. I refused to be added to the statistics as a dropout, and I refused to let morning sickness or any sickness having to do with my pregnancy keep me from working. I kept going, and finally I was graduating.
After graduating from high school, I continued working at Shoney’s, and I was able to obtain more hours. Though I was getting bigger, I still went to work every day, and the people that I worked with had become my work family. They looked out for me because I was pregnant.
I remember wanting a baby shower, and Mother said that she was not throwing me a baby shower because I was having a baby out of wedlock. Things were a lot different back in those days. Being pregnant without being married was looked down upon, not celebrated. I wasn’t saddened by it; it was what it was. My colleagues at work took it upon themselves and gave me a beautiful baby shower. My parents did not attend because of their beliefs.
During my pregnancy, I went from 110 pounds to 180 pounds. There were days when I just didn’t feel well, but I kept pushing it. One day, while at a doctor’s appointment, the doctor looked at me and said, “You look like you are holding too much fluid.” She admitted me to the hospital to induce labor because my baby was not budging. Though it was time for him to come out, he was not ready.
When they admitted me into the hospital, they began giving me medicine through an IV to induce my labor, which had me experiencing contractions. The contractions were so painful, the doctors ended up giving me an epidural.
An epidural is an injection of a local anesthetic into the space around the dura mater of the spinal cord in the lower back region to produce loss of sensation, especially in the abdomen or pelvic region.
After that, I remember falling off into a deep sleep. The strangest thing is, I could hear my surroundings, but I was asleep. I remember hearing the TV show Dallas going off when my mother must have gone to get the nurse. She said she could see the baby’s head. After that, they were waking me up, ready for me to push. A little after 11:00 p.m., my son was born. It was official, I was a mother.
After about a week of being home with a newborn baby, I was ready to return back to work, and that’s exactly what I did. Mother thought I should stay in the house for six weeks, but I felt fine. Thank God for Mother because, while I worked, she took care of my son. Then, after a long day of work, I would have to come home and pick up the slack.
My son’s father was about to join the military. His mother called me and told me that he would give me fifty dollars a month in child support, and I should go get on food stamps. Damn that! I wasn’t interested in getting on any form of welfare, and I wasn’t just going to accept fifty measly dollars a month. So I sued him for child support. Once my son’s father joined the military, my son was able to receive an allotment. When he got out of the military, my son was able to receive child support.
I thank God for my parents during this journey in my life because they were able to stand in the gap when my son or I needed anything.
After my son’s father got out of the military, things started rekindling again. It was like old times but with a son. As we were dating, though, I started noticing his manipulative and controlling ways. He always had a problem with me being around my sisters; he would say they were coercing me into doing things he didn’t like. He was trying to keep me in this box where I could have no outside contact with anyone but him. One day, he saw empty beer bottles in Silk’s car and made it his business to go and tell my mom about it. Silk and I were livid.
The next thing he did was leave a note on my parents’ car, informing them that he and I were having sex. When I got off of work, Mother and Father called me into Mother’s office and sat me down to question me about it. I was pissed off and petrified at the same time. My mother looked at me and said, “If you’re going to be having sex, then you need to be married. We are pastors. How is this going to make us look when you’re out there having sex, and you’re not married!” She demanded that I get married.
I felt powerless and like I was being forced into something that I did not want to
do. Though I was sleeping with my son’s father, I did not love him, and I had already stopped liking him because of his manipulative ways. But I did what I was told to do, and it was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.
I don’t blame my mother; I blame myself for not speaking up on my own behalf and for not using my voice, which was my power, to say “No” to what I didn’t want. I went along to get along, and, in the end, I ended up all alone.
The marriage ended in divorce, and the experience left me so empty, I never wanted to be married again. In the end, life was giving me a crucial assignment that I had to keep repeating until I passed the test and learned the lesson.
Some may ask why I didn’t go to college. I could have gone to college; hell, I tried to go to college, but when I walked in that classroom and saw the teacher writing all of that stuff on the board, I didn’t know what it was, so I got my little book bag and walked right out. I watched my cousins go to college because their parents told them to get it on the wall. One cousin went to school to be a foot doctor, and we found out years later that she’s no more a doctor than Dr. Pepper.
Years later we also found out she couldn’t even pass the medical boards. All that money was wasted.
I was working at Shoney’s, but I still wanted to make more money, so I got a second job at McDonald’s. I started off there happy to work, ready to do my part. Only trouble was, McDonald’s wanted to have me work on the fry machine, but I had a Jheri curl.
Oh, God. We did have the Jheri curls with the activator and moisturizer, hahaha.
I did not want that grease popping in my hair and, all of a sudden, now we have a fire.
Hahaha. This wasn’t around the time when Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire from his Jheri curl, was it?
I can’t remember, but it probably was.
So I had two jobs: I had to make the salads for the next day, and then I would have to get on the fry machine. All was well until I noticed that when the supervisor hired for the cashier positions, he always hired white girls.