Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul (19 page)

It would have probably remained that way, our sista-hood fragmented, if our mother hadn't become critically ill. She had been suffering from a debilitating heart condition for years, and her prognosis wasn't good. When the doctors finally told us that our mother had only days to live, my sister and I began a vigil in her hospital room. We talked about everything, but it was talking about childhood memories that lessened our pain. We talked about those times that we wished could have lasted forever, knowing that we were beginning a new chapter in our life, life without our mother. “You remember when . . . Girl, I will never forget the time! . . .” our words long held began to freely tumble out. As our mother drifted off into a deep sleep, our conversations continued in the near-empty hospital cafeteria over a late meal that always ended with a piece of cake as we laughed about having our mother's sweet tooth. We began to realize how much we missed each other and how this was the best send-off we could give our mother.

After our mother died and we buried her beside our father, my sister and I knew we had an unfinished painting to complete, and we finally understood the process. True sistahood was an art. Its canvas had to be brush-stroked with the vibrant colors of our presence, the deepest hues of our forgiveness, and most of all the fiery splash of our love in order to become a masterpiece so aptly entitled, “Sistahood.”

Jeanine DeHoney

Who Is Helping Whom?

H
ow far you go in life depends on your being
tender with the young, compassionate with the
aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant
of the weak and strong. Because some day in life
you will have been all these.

George Washington Carver

The apartment door unlocked as usual, I let myself in.

Viola was not there, at least not where I typically found her, in her wheelchair in the living room. I followed the light through the half-opened bedroom door. There she sat on the floor beside her bed—with no way to get back up.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No,” she replied with a smile, “just my feelings.”

I thought of my first visit as her physical therapist. She had been propped up in bed with a thick crocheted blanket over her two short stumps of legs. But no one would have noticed, she postured herself with such dignity.

I learned she had been the pastor of a church while she raised two girls and stood by an alcoholic husband. At night while her family slept, she remained on her knees. In the end they all prospered and called her blessed.

Years later, cut down by diabetes, her stature remained just as tall. In contrast, I had recently experienced my second divorce and the weight of it had bent me over. As I trudged along inner-city streets to provide home health care, seldom did I look up to smile at passersby. I felt more worthless than the local drug addicts.

“I'm so embarrassed,” said Viola, bringing me back to her present needs. “Somehow, I just slipped off the side of my bed, but I'm fine, really I am,” she said, her eyes bright. Despite her words, I knew she had landed with a terrible bump. Her hospital bed stood high off the floor, and she had had no way to break her fall.

I reached in her direction. “Let me help you.”

“It might hurt your back to pick me up,” she said, “and I don't want to be a burden to you.” She seemed like Joan of Arc in the flames, more concerned about her executioner being burned than herself. “My son-in-law will soon be here to lift me.”

Although my eyes gazed downward at her, my heart looked up to her. I realized she was debilitated in body, certainly, but not in spirit.

For many weeks I continued to provide therapy. As I exercised Viola's muscles, strength not only flowed into her body but into mine as well. Eventually she met all her treatment goals and the sessions ended—but not the friendship.

Like a moth around a Tiffany lamp, I was drawn to her radiant pecan-colored face. She spoke of her life and her family. When she spoke of her Lord, it was not as a preacher would, but as one who had had a personal encounter. I visited her often and even brought my children to absorb her light.

“What did you think about Viola?” I asked them.

“She is a lady without legs—but with love that can't be taken away,” said Karin, my daughter, who liked to “sit at her feet” and listen to her talk.

“It wasn't what she said, Mom, it was how she said it,” my son, Norm, added.

“Yes, I know,” I said quietly. She called Norm “her boy.”

He brought her gifts and she served him lunch. Together they chatted like family.

In time the call came—Viola had passed away. It seemed as if the entire city turned out for her funeral service.

As they carried her casket past, I remembered the day she lay on the floor, from her operation only four-feet tall, but through her strength and conviction she was a giant in spirit. If this fine woman accustomed to preaching from a lofty pulpit could maintain her self-respect from a fallen, demeaning position, then surely so could I.

Imagine, I was hired to help assist and strengthen her when it was
my soul
that needed help, and
my strength
that was weak. As I sat with the seemingly thousands of lucky people who got to be in Viola's presence, I realized, that in her passing she gifted me with her faith, conviction and independence. She had opened the door of my caged soul and set me free.

I dried my tears and left the church ready to start again—it was in that moment that I noticed that I had already begun to stand up and stand out again, especially because I had the only white face in the congregation, and I felt right at home.

Margaret Lang

Merry Christmas, Emma

I
t's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I
think that's what I get from these older black
women, that every soul is to be cherished, that
every flower is to bloom.

Alice Walker

Emma was a seventy-year-old patient who received home care from our nursing agency. She lived alone in a three room, unpainted and uninsulated house that sat in the middle of a pasture just west of Shreveport, Louisiana. Six of the biggest, ugliest, hungriest mongrels in west Louisiana stood guard around her. Inside the pasture there were several cows and a bull, which all ran to the gate whenever we approached to make our weekly visits. The roads leading to the gate were unpaved, and the gate was made of logs and barbed wire. Opening the gate, driving through and closing the gate without letting the bovines loose was as great a challenge as finding the house in the first place! For this reason, we usually went in pairs.

Emma, who had no telephone, always tried to come out onto the porch when she heard us approaching. She warned us not to get out of the car until she got the dogs settled down. Emma would say, “That one there, that Jake, he'll eat you right up if you get out of that car before I tell you to!” We never tested the truth of that statement.

Once the dogs calmed down we could begin whatever work we intended to do. We visited every week or two to draw blood samples for lab work and to evaluate the status of her condition, multiple myeloma.

One of Emma's three rooms was a huge kitchen, housing a massive wooden table and nothing else. All her cooking was done on a potbellied stove in the living room. This little black, cast–iron heater was fueled by coal or with logs from nearby woods. Every time we visited her, whether in the scorching heat of August or in the chilly damp of December, she had a pan of cornbread cooking on top of that little stove. “That is for the dogs,” she always said. Her bed had no sheets and only one rough blanket with U.S. Army stamped on it. She was tall and thin, as brown as chocolate and as imperious as a queen. Visits to her were the highlights of our weeks, and we watched helplessly as her health and strength waned.

When Thanksgiving came she was admitted to the hospital for blood transfusions. We visited her every day, as our office was on the ground floor of the hospital. Her Thanksgiving dinner was almost untouched, but she ate what she could.

After the transfusions she went home again, and our first December visit found her rolled up in that one blanket in that cold and drafty little house. The little stove would never be enough to keep her warm, especially with the blood condition she had.

We nurses chose her as our Christmas Angel that year, the one whom, out of our many patients, we most wanted to recognize. We all chipped in and bought her a set of flannel sheets and another blanket and pillow, planning to take them out on the next visit. However, the following week she called us from the doctor's office and told us not to come as he was drawing blood for the lab work for that week. She wept as she told us that she had paid someone half of her monthly check to take her to the grocery store and to the doctor, and that somewhere between the two places she had lost her purse and what was left of her money.We decided then to make a special trip right before Christmas to take the gifts.

The week before Christmas we wrapped the things we already had and added a flannel gown, a woolly robe, some fuzzy slippers, a nightcap, a pair of gloves and a pretty book. The day before our planned visit her doctor called and said he had received her lab report and was going to readmit her to the hospital and try to keep her through Christmas.

On Christmas Eve we decided to take her gifts upstairs to her hospital room rather than wait till Christmas Day, as most of us would be off duty then. We filed into her room singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and laid the gifts on her bed.

As she opened the first one she said, “Y'all don't know this, but this is the first wrapped-up present I ever got.” She lingered over each pretty package and caressed each item as she unwrapped it, trying on the ones she could. She kept the nightcap on.

Before we left one of the nurses asked about the care of the dogs. Emma said her landlord was throwing food over the fence for them, she guessed. The nurse who lived nearest to Emma said, “I'll send my husband out with some food for the dogs if you think they won't eat him up!”

Emma grinned and lowered her eyes. “Aw, them dogs wouldn't hurt nobody. I just tell folks that. Keeps the bad peoples away.” As we left she said, “Merry Christmas, y'all.”

When we came back to work the day after Christmas we were glad we had given Emma her gifts when we did, for we learned that during the night on Christmas Eve, she had gone home—to her final home.

Emma lived her life standing tall on her feet in the face of adversity, and she died with great dignity, without a whimper. Never once during our service to her did she utter a word of complaint about her feelings, her living conditions or her station in life. Her gracious acceptance of her first wrapped-up presents and her last words to us, “Merry Christmas, y'all,” were gifts far more precious than anything we could have bought for her in her last days with us.

Mary Saxon Wilburn

Elegant Ladies . . . Again

T
he kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get
kind that comes from within—strength, courage,
dignity.

Ruby Dee

When we were young, my sisters and I used to leaf through magazines choosing outfits for ourselves and each other.We loved pretty clothes. I have a hazy memory of taking an oath over cherry Kool-Aid and brownies to become elegant ladies when we grew up.

Now, years later, I was returning home, a divorce statistic at thirty-four. I had a résumé patched with a fragmented college education and dead-end jobs. I also had two little girls to support and two suitcases between us. Dreams of elegance had been long forgotten.

Except for the occasional phone call and one brief get-together, my younger sisters and I were well-intentioned strangers who'd led separate lives for almost thirteen years. They didn't know that I still cried at sappy movies. I didn't know if one still had a childlike delight in wishing upon stars or if the other still loved to lounge in a hot tub like an undiscovered pearl. My sisters had stepped forward with their hearts open and arms outstretched when I called home.

They bought our eastbound train tickets and promised to be waiting. As my daughters and I traveled through golden California, I tried to remember what my sisters and I used to talk about. As the scenery gradually passed from arid to the wildflower-dotted fields of Pennsylvania, I wondered what we used to laugh about. I couldn't even remember how to laugh.

They had told me to send my clothes ahead, but I couldn't bear for my sisters to unpack my meager wardrobe. My secondhand jeans and T-shirts represented how I felt about myself: too tired to care, struggling to hold my girls and myself together by mere threads.

As we stepped off the train, Jan and Sue were there.

Glowing. Beautiful. Perfect.

“Kar! Look at howmuch those little girls have grown!Give me some love!”Well, some things hadn't changed. Asmy sisters swooped on my little family, tears and laughter intermingled as easily as clouds drifting across a summer sky.

“Wow! Do you two dress like this all the time?” Their carefully accessorized outfits awakened a twinge of pure feminine longing. My confidence waned a little bit more.