Waving the Battle Flag
First History Lesson
I didn’t know the difference between the Stars and Stripes — and the cross and stars.
I was 7 or 8 years old when I had my first real history lesson. The lesson I never forgot. The lesson I have been too embarrassed to talk about — until now.
The lesson that made me woke.
It was late Spring 1978 or 1979.
My mother took me downtown to the Smithsonian area where we visited the Air and Space Museum. A decade earlier, she herself had landed at Washington National Airport. Traveling alone, a 34-year-old Jamaican mother of six would meet a white woman, the wife of a prominent white politician who had sponsored my mother’s immigration to the States. My mother arrived as the live-in domestic help. At the airport, she would meet her sponsor, who embraced her and said to her that, “I kept asking every negro woman at the gate: ‘Are you Lauretta?’” My mother was in America. Her new residence would be suburban Maryland where she, in her own description, “cooked food for dem and washed dem dutty baggy.” Arriving in late spring, weeks after the MLK uprisings, she wasn’t really prepared for the pending winter, for being called (and treated like) a “nigger” for the first time in her life.
America, in 1968, was her new home. And she was in bliss.
