Back in 1975 when my mother was pregnant with me, she caught
the bus to visit a white Catholic school in a white Catholic neighborhood. Integration
had finally trickled down to the South, and my mother was ready. She was
Baptist, but she had heard that this school was one of the best schools in New
Orleans. My mother was 40 years old, poor and determined. She was determined to
give her baby every opportunity she did not have.
My father did not want me to go to this white Catholic
school in a white Catholic neighborhood. My father didn’t have much faith in
integration, and he sure didn’t have faith in white folks. He had heard that
there was a black Catholic school in a black Catholic neighborhood, and it was
one of the best schools in New Orleans. My father was 53 years old, poor and
proud. He was proud of his people and too proud to let white folks play games
with his baby’s head.
The argument between my mother and father was legendary in
my family. My mother told it and retold every time I made the honor roll and
every time one of my many white teachers told her how exceptional I was. My
father, who had not finished sixth grade (or was it ninth grade), reluctantly
accepted this white school, but he warned me. “White people say one thing and
mean another,” he said. “They think they’re God,” and “No matter what, don’t
forget who you are and where you come from.”
I often think about that argument and how it helped
determine the trajectory of my life. I attended comfortably middle-class
colleges where I attained comfortably middle-class degrees, I work a comfortably
middle-class job, I am married to a comfortably middle-class white man and I am
painfully aware that my parents’ lives were so much harder than mine.
I remember when I was 10 years old, my mother spread white mayonnaise
over white bread with the slow, sacramental precision of a priest wiping the
inside of a chalice that once held the blood of Christ. We thanked God for our
meal and ate mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner. We ate silently. We ate in
reverence because we had nothing else. We had to eat mayonnaise sandwiches at
the end of the month every month for 18 months because how else would my mother
pay my father’s hospital and in-home care bills? How else would she cover the cost
of hospice and a proper funeral? There was no way in hell my mother was going
to ask my white principal for a scholarship to cover part of my tuition because
she wasn’t gone have white folks treating her little girl like some welfare
case. I remember when I was in high school, my mother cried behind the closed
door of her office because she had been passed over for yet another promotion.
Her boss had told her she wasn’t qualified; she had scarcely finished the tenth
grade. She was, however, qualified to train all the white people who were hired
in her stead. That day in her office, my mother stood by the cork board on her
wall and fingered the ribbons and newspaper articles that displayed my name.
With tears in her eyes, she told me for the um-teenth time how she started out
washing dirty commodes in that hospital and how she had worked her way up to be
a supervisor with her own office, with her own computer and her own staff.
My mother said, “The only difference between then and now is
that white folks smile and call me Mrs. D where before that just called me a nigger
to my face. But you gone get that piece of paper no matter what. They ain’t
gone treat you like shit. They ain’t gone be able to ignore you. You gone make ’em
know who you are. You gone make ’em know you somebody. You gone make ’em know
where you come from. You gone make ’em know we ain’t stupid. You understand
me?”
This was not a rhetorical question. It was a military
command, and I answered in accordance to military protocol, “Yes, Ma’am.”
I almost always did what I was told. I almost always did
what was expected until my father’s first, second, third, fourth stroke. I lost
count. My A’s dropped to B’s then to C’s. My mother begged me to try harder. My
many white teachers did what they had always done; they told me what a smart
student I was and what a bright future I had ahead of me. My C’s dropped to D’s
then to F’s. I was still doing all my homework. I was still studying every
night. My brain simply stopped working. I pushed myself through those years of
grief for my mother. I forced myself to do better in school because that is
what she wanted. She had been through
enough. She had endured 18 grueling months of working full-time, going to
parent-teacher conferences, spending time with me, doing laundry, ironing, going
grocery shopping, cooking, feeding my half-paralyzed father one spoonful at a
time, and washing away his feces while his emaciated body slumped over hers,
and she never uttered as much as a, “Damn, life sure is hard.”
I forced myself to get back on the honor roll and to play
sports and to join clubs and to ignore the white and black girls who said I was too black or wasn’t black enough. I forced myself to smile and contain
my rage. I forced myself to pummel those girls with my words instead of
pummeling them with my fists. I forced myself to be a charming, well-behaved daughter
because my mother needed to believe I was okay. I forced myself to go to
college because that is what my mother wanted. And if she could endure Jim-Crow
racism and watching the love of her life waste away to nothing, I could endure
taking 15-credit hours each semester at the whitest white school known to man
while being depressed.
My mother was the reason I graduated from college. This
comfortably middle class life in this comfortably middle-class whiter-than-white
state is the life my mother wanted. If I had it all to do again, I would go
back to my senior year in high school and choose to go to an HBCU then move to
a city with a half-way decent sized black population instead of going to a PWI
and being brainwashed into thinking that white environments were superior
environments. I would go back 15 years to when I met my husband and stop my
heart from beating, and if that didn’t work, I would extract my heart and stump
it to a pulp because the agony of not having my loving, beautiful husband in my
life is equal only to not having my loving, beautiful people in my life. I would
go back to my 30’s and marry a loving, beautiful black man, and we’d live in
a black city where I could buy hair products in an actual store instead of
having to order them online. I would attend black festivals and go to black
dinner parties and have more than one black Catholic church to choose from, and
I wouldn’t feel so excruciatingly isolated in this white homogeneous
environment. I would go back to when I was eight and somehow stop my father
from having a stroke. I would go back to when I was 10 and somehow stop my
father from dying. I would tell my mother and my many white teachers to stop
treating me like I’m an academic automaton—stop telling me how smart I am, stop
saying how exceptional I am. Just let me mourn my father’s death. I would go
back to being a fetus and bend the universe, so my father would win that
argument. I would go to that black Catholic school in that black Catholic
neighborhood and live an entirely different life, a thoroughly black life.
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