to Latte

Through a haze reeking of alcohol, I could see your insides. I could see your hands grasping desperately to hold the very end of a rope. Tears poured down your face as you told me of the hands that have always pulled you down when you tried to do something—anything—other than survive while the world wrote poems about you and stood up in coffee shops, shouting into the faces of people who might be you but also might have never, ever held the hand of a person whose insides looked like yours.

Whose outsides look like yours.

Whose latte-colored skin reminded me of swirling hips and bright colors, which in another time and place might have sounded like the marimba or steel drums or a djembe pounding out over the space while you danced (I’m sure you were dancing) and raised your arms (I can feel you raising your arms) to the sky in praise of rain.

The same rain that fell on the women of whom I am made, rain that soaked half of them through their chadors as they protected their hair and faces and honor

And the other half dripping through straw hats as they fed goats and grew tomatoes, necks burning ever redder in the Georgia sunshine.

I want you to know that I cannot feel the difference between us.

I want you to know that when I close my eyes as I hold your hand as you squeeze the raindrops from your eyes as the expert hands of a woman who sounds like my grandmother gently examine the scene of the crime

Probing, looking, gathering every detail

Taking pictures

Pictures that I’m sure look like mine. Because I am only a shade lighter than the latte that is your skin. Mine has only a drop more milk.

I saw your shoulders square.

And then I saw them curve inward when you put your hand out to help and winced as you were pushed apart, and put your hand out to stop or to not stop, as your mind fought with that hand and it just stayed there, frozen just above the sheet, holding onto the only thing that had ever been steady.

Itself.

I cannot feel the difference between us.

In that moment, I wanted to reach my hand into the center of your chest and grab your hand before you let go of the rope. I could see your fingers starting to tremble, your hand slipping off the end of the rope, eyes darting back and forth, trying to hold on, trying to make it look as if nothing was happening, covering your eyes, trying to push the tears back in, hide the raindrops, run.

I reached my hand out.

Insides screaming for you, I grabbed your hand.

Squeezed.

I cannot feel the difference between us. I can lift you. Come up to solid ground.

To S., High School Graduate (Who is Just Getting Started), With Love from His Ms. B

S. and I met each other about 4 years ago while I was still working in a group foster home.  I still refer to him and his younger brother lovingly as "my boys," although they are rapidly approaching manhood and never really were "mine."  

I am honored that they keep me in the loop of their lives and was happy to be given the chance to speak this bit to my dear S. in person at the celebration of his high school graduation this past Thursday.

*

These people, they don't know me, so I'm going to start with a line I stole:

"Excuse my French / Emotion in my passion / But I wear my heart on my sleeve like it's the new fashion"

I also want to set our stage with another phrase:

I am enormously proud of you.

(That one's all mine.)

I also stole this line:

"Know you are where you are not by chance, but by the design of your Creator, for your own development and for the development of those around you."

It reminds me of an article I read once.

There is a tribe in East Africa called the Masaai.  Wikipedia tells me that the Maasai are an ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. They are among the best known of African ethnic groups, due to their distinctive customs and dress and residence near the many game parks of East Africa.  They speak a language the name of which I cannot pronounce that is a member of the Nilo-Saharan language family that is related to Dinka and Nuer.  The Masaai are also educated in the official languages of Kenya and Tanzania: Swahili and English.

They have cultural traditions that look nothing like ours.  Or at least that's what it looks like when you just look with the eyes that allow you to see only the surface

The Masaai distinguish the men from the boys.  Becoming a Masaai man involves these special rituals with special clothes and special colors and music and behaviors.  The men in this culture tend animals, hunt other animals, and fight to protect their home, their women, their children.  They do that fighting with spears, with knives, and with their hands.

Now, back to my article. 

It was about a young college student named James Nampushi.  Mr. Nampushi said:

"I must work hard.  I must work hard.  This is a miracle to me.  To be here, is God.  I must work hard because I know where I came from and where I am now.  So I have to do something..."

S., there is something you have in common with this man beyond the fact that your skin color is much closer to his than it is to mine.

S., you must work hard.  You must.  That you are here, this is God.  You must work hard because you know where you came from and where you are now. 

The last part is the clincher: So you have to do something.

You and Mr. Nampushi.  You both have to do something. 

Mr. Nampushi grew up in the tribal Masaai community that taught him certain things about what it means to be a man.  He learned these things, and then he decided that the salvation of his people in a world that is growing by leaps and bounds involved, at least in some small part, continuing his education in a land far, far away from his comfort zone to learn things that the people in the culture he came from couldn't teach him.

Things that he had to learn for himself.

From himself.

From the rest of the world.

From people who were different from him.

Sometimes drastically different.

Ms. B, what's your point?  I can hear you asking with your eyes, kiddo.

Here comes the preachy part.  Get ready.

Know this:

As a Black man who grew up in an urban environment and finished growing up in foster care in South Carolina, the statistics that you face at this critical juncture of your life are damning.  Do not, do not, DO NOT LET THIS LIMIT YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF YOURSELF.  Push the messages of thug life, victimization, materialism, the voices of entitlement and violence, as well as the voices that tell you that because your skin is brown your brain was not made to process just as much information as anyone else walking around away.  Throw them away.  Ball them up, tear them into shreds, and incinerate them.  Open the windows of your life, and blow the ashes out into the breeze.

Know this:

God has done a lot to bring you to this point.  You and I can both think of times in your life when He could just as well have abandoned you in one way or another.  He didn't.  Think about that.  Think about what it means that the All-Knowing, All-Wise Provider and Creator of All decided to hang onto you.  Decided to provide the hearts of all of the people in this room to love you and believe in you and try to show you what you are made of.  Do you think that this was an accident? Think about it.

Know this:

You have been blessed with a voice.  You have choices about how to use this voice.  By now surely you have learned that people listen to you.  Consider what you hear, consider the biggest picture you can, and choose your words and actions wisely.

Know this:

Your academic achievement to this point has not been indicative of your capacity.  We both know that, and now so does everyone else in the room.  I get it; you were busy with other things.  Your childhood included more violence and loss than mine, and your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that makes plans and provides motivation, has been otherwise occupied over the past few years. 

I've got news for you.  You've landed.  From now on, not nearly as many things are going to be handed to you as you're used to.  You're going to have to prove that you deserve them.  You're going to have to put your shoulder to the grindstone and push.  Go show us what you can do.

Actually, forget us.

Show yourself what you can do.

I am proud of you.  I don't have enough words to be able to tell you what it does to my heart to see you graduated... to know what I know of your story, to see you tall and strong, to see your clear eyes looking off onto the next thing... proud isn't the right word.  I am blessed.  Blessed and richly favored.

Don't mistake this for a stopping point, though.  True, you get to pause, be congratulated, and look back at how much road you've covered... but, baby, it's so far from done.  It's really only the beginning. 

Go.

Go get it.

Go get into it and on it and all over it.

There's work yet to be done.

We're your tribe... we're your people... and we need you. 

And by we, I mean the world.

update of sorts

I'm so entertained by the previous/first post. Once I get past the typos (there are few things that bother me more than typos in things I’ve written and put out there, only to find them, I find them… *sigh* … flawed) I've already moved some on the inside... not that I won't make more typos... just that some things have moved and shifted in the not so much time already passed. I remember the events surrounding that message, and it’s interesting to see the progress and lack thereof.

Anyway, I was talking about blogs with a friend of mine who has recently started one, and I decided that I would like to try again. I work a job which presents some interesting confidentiality issues from time to time, but I think I’ll just have to work around them. There are things I’m learning which I’d like to put out there into the world. Additionally, there is the ever-present need to be heard… something which, although dancing around that button where the defensiveness about my capacity to handle my life lies (“I depend on me”), I can’t deny. I needed my sister to read the statement I had to write for the job promotion I’m up for at work. There’s still some bit of something about this that’s just about being received.

Speaking of the job, I got the one I hinted at. I work at a group foster home as a direct care giver to 10 high school-aged girls. They are amazing and wonderful, and I there’s something fire-like about how much I love them. I do not get paid nearly what I should here (no one does, system being what it is); I recently calculated and realized that I work 50.5 daytime and 32 night-time hours and thus make significantly less than minimum wage. In other words, there are reasons that I feel poor and pressed for time. This job is also plagued by those problems inherent in top-down administrative systems which generally make me furious, as I have so very little patience for such things. It’s a recurring theme these days in a few areas, people making decisions affecting others without the benefit of consultation. I have no idea why people would want to run an organization like this without true consultation. It sounds exhausting… and actually looks exhausting. Honestly they’re trying, working with limited resources, and have the best intentions at heart. Otherwise I’d have bounced long ago… but I haven’t. It’s been hell on wheels for long stretches of time, but changes were made, and everyone is the better and wiser for it. All of this by way of saying that, while I love my girls madly, this is surely not the last job I’ll ever have.

I’ve always loved diversity and learning about different cultures, but I have developed what I would explain as a somewhat child-like love of this particular segment of Southern black culture… child-like because I am so very ignorant and shamelessly inquisitive and openly delighted with the unending poetry of speech and action. Examples, examples… there are so many… my 4.5 billion questions about what my girls are doing to their hair and how and why… how amused I am at being affectionately referred to as “Ms.Bahiyyih with her big ole head” and being accused of “cake bakin’” (flirting) and hearing boys they don’t like told to “go sit down with all of that”… the looks on their faces when I turn up the radio for a song they expect me not to like… and then there’s what happens when we go to the devotional gathering on Tuesday nights.

I have kids I thought I was never really going to connect to. They responded with a massive attitude every time I said anything to them. They refused to speak to me except when absolutely necessary. They essentially pushed me away as hard as possible, and I couldn’t find an in. I took the last of them to Tuesday night dinner and devotions the other night, and they watched my brother kill that drum and me sing until my vocal cords were done (I think we were still popping from Sunday morning at Louis Gregory… more on that later). They shouted along with the songs, smiled their little faces off, and have been absolute peaches since then. They’re glad I’m around. They want to ride when I go to drop others off. They say good morning when they get up and good bye when they go to school. It’s not over, but the door is open. Prayer works.

You know what else works? LOUD prayer. When the volume is turned up on negative influences in life, the spirit has to be louder to even be heard. The noise of the break-down of the world is almost deafening. Baha’u’llah says, “A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.” I think that applies.

The world has dealt these kids hands that would make me throw in the cards and retreat into a corner of myself. They have not resisted most of these pressures necessarily, but my girls are not squashed. They are powerful. They meet the pain with over-flowing joy and/or a great big “f*** you” delivered with back straight and head held high. I live in a pretty permanent state of awe. It’s something that the rest of the world needs. Diversity is so healthy…

More on all of that later…