FAMILY LOVE
Black Love Is Black Wealth
My childhood was full of love, it not only held me together; it still sustains me even today
I had the idea to write this even before I read, “Black Love is Not Dead,” by Q U I N T E S S A, as a continuation of my homework for the tackling writers’ block, workshop given by Jolie A. Doggett. Yet, it was her piece that got my brain working in a different direction. I then asked myself, “What was it like growing up in a Black universe?”
Of course, we still were surrounded by whiteness, but it didn’t seem to factor much into our world.
“It only matters that everybody is together.”–Nikki Giovanni
Breakfast
Just like in the cartoons, the white hand of the aroma of breakfast, tickles my nose and drags me out of the bed. I half sleepwalk downstairs there is no teeth brushing or pajamas changing.
My Aunt Mary is so busy making breakfast, she doesn’t even notice me. Neither does my mother or my grandmother. They are busy, cleaning in silence. I sit down at our kitchen nook, and Aunt Mary puts a plate of food in front of me.
Mind you, my aunt and grandmother have homes of their own, yet, it was always so strange to me, that they would get up, leave their own houses and come to mine and cook. I am realizing, this was just something they did.
I am happy, because, otherwise it was a hot dog on a fork charred over an open flame on the stove, a mayonnaise or mustard sandwich. That was how I made breakfast if I happened to wake up before everyone else or needed a midnight snack.
This time, it’s fishcakes, grits, eggs, and Red Hots. All my favorites. It’s first come first serve-no waiting for everybody to get up, you sit and eat, it’s the kids table anyway. As the oldest, and if I do say so, myself, the favorite, I got the best of it. My little sisters, didn’t eat much anyway.
Afterwards, I open the back door and stand on the steps to check the temperature. It’s hot and a great day to play in the yard. This meant chasing my sisters in circles, digging up worms, and swinging on our swing set from Sears and Roebuck. We played on that thing so hard, I don’t know how it didn’t’ tip over.
The Garden
“Don’t run outside barefoot, you’ll catch a hookworm,” my mother used to shout from the kitchen window. I never believed her, but after I learned biology, I found out, she was right.
My back yard must have been less than 25 yards long and 15 yards wide, but it was the world to me and my sisters. Every day, we’d be out there playing our hearts out.
Eventually, my mom would join us and putter around in her garden which lined both sides of the yard, and a large portion in the back. She grew everything. Tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, peas, corn and yellow squash. “Don’t you love the green smell?” she’d ask. “No,” I’d think to myself. It was gross. Of course, I didn’t tell her. I just stared and said nothing, as usual. And now, whenever I smell freshly cut grass, remember how much she loved it.
“You gotta turn the soil,” Mr. Eddie, our neighbor used to say. Every March, a month before planting, he’d be out there with his pitch fork digging in and flipping mounds of dirt. We learned a lot from him. Next, my mother would have us out there turning the soil with a little hand shovel. Eddy was a good guy.
He used to dressed like the guys in the black and white movies starring Humphrey Bogart. He also taught me how to say, “No,” in German. He was like our grandpa-always giving us useful advice, like, “Don’t rub your eye, you’ll irritate it.”
Aunt Mary
I always wondered why aunt Mary was always in our house doing stuff for us; she had five kids of her own, they were teenagers and we were not even in middle school yet. At the time, she only had two living with her, so I guess she had time.
I think, the she was second oldest. She was quiet, lean, and seemed to always have had white hair, even though she was quite young. When she came over, we ate food my mother would never make, like Rice-a-Roni. It was the weirdest thing, rice in a box, that you just added water to. Duh, I obviously didn’t know how to cook rice at the time; that’s because, we hardly ever ate it.
Our diet was definitely the soul food diet. Greens, chops, biscuits, ribs, potatoes and on Sunday, chicken and dumpling or chicken and rice and other types of stews. Nothing fancy, like the foodtainment of today.
Our Kind of Love
We never got hugged or kissed or coddled or heard “I love you,” every ten seconds, like kids today, but we knew we were loved. And though, she never once said, it, I am 100% certain, my Aunt Mary loved me. She told me stories and taught me things-like how yawns are catchy, and if you pop a blister on a burn, it will heal faster and not leave a scar and “If it’s nothing but a rag, keep it clean,” She’d chimed every time I stood watching her clean in amazement.
Super Star
Sometimes, I’d go over to her house, which was nearby, and admire my cousin, Sharon she was like a movie star. She was two feet taller than me, she wore lipstick and eyeliner and played cool records. She used also take me around with her and her girlfriends downtown and around the neighborhood.
I know, it sounds like some kind of Black Leave-it-to Beaver life, but it wasn’t. Of course there were fights, black eyes, calls to the police, and caster cans of sugar or boxes of soap powder thrown, from time to time.
But that didn’t matter.
What mattered was the smiles, playing kickball with my cousins in the street, using Vaseline to cure ashy legs, getting your hair straightened so that you can go to the Apollo Theater and see Michael Jackson sing A-B-C-1–2–3.
And most of all, listening to crazy stories, that began with “Remember that time when…” in the front room, as I sat on the top of the stairs listening to grown folks talk. Most of them were made up, but man, they were great.
You Just Didn’t Know
If you saw my life from the outside, you would think I had a rough childhood-like the school nurse, who accused my parents of abusing me and sent the authorities to my house.
That broke my father’s heart.
He thought I accused him, but I didn’t. I tried over and over to to tell them, it was my fault, but they wouldn’t listen.
With oil costing nearly two hundred dollars just to fill our furnace for a month, we had to boil water to take baths. I got angry at something my sister said and quickly dropped the bucket down on the floor, causing the scalding water to splash on my leg. I didn’t tell anyone. I was always getting hurt, so, I didn’t think to anything of it.
It was no one’s fault, I tried to them, but they only saw stereotypes-a poor black girl, with bad parents.
“It is well with my soul”-James Cleveland
It’s like in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, Nikki Rosa:
“I really hope no White person never had cause to write about me, because they’ll never understand that Black Love, is Black Wealth. They will only talk about my hard childhood, but all the while, I was quite happy.”
This was my life. One, filled with family, friends, joy, pain, and weird, funny moments. I wouldn’t change it for the world.
