You are demonstrating that we can stick together. You are demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
“I don’t want to say ‘Yes, ma’am’ to you anymore,” I told my mama one afternoon.
That got her attention. We children never crossed our parents. Back then—at least in my family—kids obeyed their parents, and that was the end of the discussion. But my mother was intrigued more than anything else.
“And why is that, Marie?”
In the Jim Crow South, it was normal for black people to address white people by looking down as they said “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, suh.” Until I was five years old, I always heard my mama and daddy respond to the white Abernathys in this way, and I just hated the deference they had to show those people. When I explained this to my mom, her face softened. To my surprise, she agreed with me, and I’ve never said “Yes, ma’am” to anyone ever again.
As I grew up, I became known as someone who stood up for various causes. When my mother’s brothers from Chicago visited, they were amazed at my fighting spirit. That’s a polite way of saying I was buck wild.
“Watch this,” my uncle said to another uncle. He pushed me down and I fell right into the dirt. His shove made me lose my breath, and I felt pain in my chest. Immediately I felt tears welling up inside my eyes, but I knew I was not going to give my uncles the satisfaction of knowing I’d been hurt. I jumped right back up.
“Look at this gal!” He hit me in my chest, and again I had to catch my breath. I jumped back up again. “Look how her shoulders are squared like she’s going to hit back,” one said, laughing. And so, they decided to teach me how to throw a punch, a skill they never showed any of my other siblings. “You might need this one day,” they told me, as they taught me how to box. “But don’t you tell Sallie Mae we taught you this.” They even taught me how to arm wrestle. I did all sorts of crazy stuff that they taught me on the cool. But the biggest skill I learned through my interaction with my uncles was how to swallow back my tears.
I got a lot more popular when I took on two mean sisters at school who always double-teamed everyone—and I won. Thinking back on those days, I’m surprised these fights never made it into my public record, but I assume that’s because my teachers respected my mother so much. Once I even fought for my brother in an epic battle that ended at our house.
Julius was in our neighborhood when some bullies started harassing one of our cousins. Since he was with his friends, he decided to stand up against them, but all his friends ran off. That meant Julius fought all five guys himself as long as he could, before returning home. The bullies followed him into our yard.
Big mistake.
We sisters saw the fight from the windows and could tell even from a distance that they’d really gotten Julius’s eye good. Before they knew it, we all bailed out of our house with brooms and sticks like an army carrying swords and shields. I went out there and beat those boys using those fighting skills my uncles had taught me. We fought tooth and nail, until we heard the door to our house slam.
We all looked at the porch, only to see my normally quiet daddy standing there with a shotgun. He shot that gun into the air, and those bullies scattered like cockroaches. I learned the lesson right then and there: even if our friends abandoned us, my family stuck together in hard times.
Plus, I learned not to sit back and watch injustice occur.
Part of that injustice was how everyone was artificially separated by color. When we went to the doctor’s office, there was a sign on the wall that showed which side was designated for colored people and which side was for the whites. Even after everything was supposed to be integrated, the sign stayed up and people stayed in their places.
Our town’s dentist was notorious for watering down the pain medication he gave to black patients. When I was nine years old, I needed to get a tooth pulled. I climbed into the seat, and he said, “Raise your hand if you can feel anything.” He started digging around in my mouth, and I could feel every single horrible move. I raised my hand, but he kept digging. I raised it even higher, but he continued to ignore me.
Finally, the pain—of the tooth being pulled and of being ignored—was too great. So, instead of raising my hand as instructed, I lowered it, wrapped my hand around that dentist’s balls, and twisted as hard as I could.
He jumped back and yelled in pain. Then he looked at me with contempt in his eyes and hissed, “Get this little n——er out of here and don’t you ever bring her back in here again.”
I was never allowed back, but it was worth it.
As the 1960s came to a close, this slow boil of the South’s racial tensions—long a staple of our lives—became unavoidable. In February 1968, a malfunctioning garbage truck crushed two black Memphis garbage collectors to death, causing over a thousand black men from the Memphis Department of Public Works to go on strike. News of these deaths was passed from the lips of people in my community in hushed tones reserved for tragedies. The local branch of the NAACP, a group to which my mama belonged, passed a resolution supporting the strike. This made my house a central hub of concern, activism, and activity.
I didn’t grow up hating white people. I guess that sounds odd in today’s polarizing world, especially since we lived through sharecropping and Jim Crow. Because my mama was revered for her cooking by both black and white, my parents had friends of both colors. She taught me to respect all people and—above all else—to be filled with joy instead of bitterness. But even we couldn’t escape the national racial tension simmering in the late 1960s, and we couldn’t turn our heads at injustice.
My mama’s friends dropped by at all hours to talk to her about how wrongly the sanitation workers were being treated. The following month, I heard Mama excitedly tell her friends that Martin Luther King Jr. himself had come to Memphis to stand in solidarity with the workers. Over 25,000 people gathered to hear him speak, the largest indoor gathering the civil rights movement had ever seen, and it was right there in my own backyard, across the Tennessee–Mississippi border. I didn’t dare ask my mother if I could skip school, but you better believe that the message of Martin Luther King Jr. was felt throughout the area like an earthquake.
He promised to return to Memphis a few days later to lead a peaceful, nonviolent protest through the city. On the day of the scheduled protest, a large snowfall blanketed the city, which delayed his travel. However, on the rescheduled day—March 28—an estimated 22,000 students skipped school to demonstrate, and the crowds soon erupted into violence. Though the civil rights leaders tried to call off the demonstration, it was too late. Looters broke into downtown shops, and police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old boy. To make matters worse, police officers followed demonstrators into a church sanctuary, where they released tear gas and clubbed people as they writhed on the floor gasping for air. The mayor declared martial law, and four thousand National Guard troops flooded the city.
Normally, my mama didn’t talk to us directly about these issues, but this was unavoidable. It was also important for us to understand. She was so upset that she walked through the house fussing over the state of our community. Now that we were older, she entrusted us with more conversation, and we got to hear her vent.
Dr. King almost didn’t come back. He eventually decided that it was important to come back to encourage Memphis to have a nonviolent struggle for justice. His decision to return was controversial, and it turned out to be the one that ultimately ended his life. As King was getting ready for dinner on April 4, just after six o’clock, he was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
I was almost thirteen. A collective wailing rippled throughout Memphis and the mid-South area. My parents cried as the television news reporters talked about his assassination. My siblings and I found ourselves crying, not really realizing the magnitude of what had just occurred. People came over to the house, to grieve with my parents, and this time we were allowed to be in the middle of the conversation. Everybody talking and grieving.
“What’s going to become of us now?” wailed one of my parents’ friends in the living room. Nothing seemed certain for black people in America at the time. King was perceived as our liberator, and his death was one of the most terrible events we had ever experienced. A hopelessness settled on us. “What’s going to happen next?” the friend continued. “Who’s going to lead us?” In my mind, a new civil war had broken out. On the news, I saw bombs going off in the street. Violence. Looting. Tear gas. This was my community, and it was going up in flames.
In a way, I got radicalized during these tumultuous times. I even thought I wanted to join the Black Panthers, an idea I tossed out to my mother.
“If you quit school to become a Black Panther, you’ll just be quitting school,” she said. “There’s no group to join. You better stop that crazy talk right now!” She was right, since we lived in rural Mississippi, so I’d have to go to Memphis to be a part of the revolution. Plus, my mama would never have gone for me quitting school anyway. I’d always been passionate about issues, but the seeds of activism took root in my heart after Dr. King was shot and killed.
Though King’s death was a national tragedy, it felt personal to me.
* * *
When I was fourteen, I learned that a church leader was fooling around on the sly. During revival week, I couldn’t bear looking at him standing in front of the congregation acting so godly in public but dancing with the devil in private. That sort of hypocrisy was too much for me.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped up and exclaimed, “There’s more to God than this!” The people in the church got quiet and turned to looked at me. I caught my mama’s eyes before I walked out the door. I made it to the parking lot before she caught up with me.
“What is wrong with you saying something like that?” she demanded.
I didn’t answer.
She made me go back inside. In my family, church attendance was not optional. However, in my heart, I left organized religion that day.
When I walked away from the church, however, I ran right into the chaos of the culture. Things seemed to be spinning out of control. It had been a couple of years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, but the 1960s also brought us the sexual revolution, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, riots at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, and a man on the moon. Things were changing, fluctuating, moving. I wanted to be a part of the revolution, something true.
In ninth grade, school administrators told us we’d be changing schools the following year. Desegregation. “Everything will be different,” they told us. “Life is going to change.” But things were already changing. My friends and I dressed modestly for school, but as soon as we got out of sight of our parents, we’d march straight to the bathroom and slip off our bras. We wore our modest pants or long skirts to get out of the house, but we slipped on miniskirts once we were out of our parents’ sight. I even wore high heels to basketball games. I always looked older than I was. My older sister Thelma was always embarrassed by me, since the male fans of the visiting team—people who didn’t know how young I was—always gave me more attention than I should’ve had.
I didn’t burn any bras, but I certainly wanted to be free of society’s restraints. The sexual revolution was gripping our nation, and Mississippi was not immune to its allure. I wanted to be a part of it. I wasn’t even old enough to date, but my mama and daddy had been so busy trying to make a better life for us they’d gotten a little lax with me. Though they restricted the comings and goings of my other siblings, they regarded me differently from the other kids. I was older than my years indicated. At least, I seemed to be. It’s almost as if they forgot I was only fourteen when I told them I wanted to date Charles, a guy in the band.
I played the French horn and the bells, and I was a concert oboist. Charles, who played the trumpet, loved to dance. On band trips, he and I had pushed the boundaries and danced with each other with abandon. He was two years older. I wish I could tell you some sweeping tale of high school sweethearts, our destinies intertwining forever. And, in a way, that’s what happened, but it was far from romantic. It was experimental. He was handsome and I curious about what all the chatter was about. I wanted to understand the songs about love and sex. I wanted to feel the cultural moment.
And so I did.
I was fourteen when I was in the car with Charles. He pulled over so we could kiss on the side of the road, just down from his house. At least that’s what I thought was about to happen. Normally, he’d come over to my house and we’d secretly make out on the couch, trying to kiss while keeping an ear out for my parents. My daddy used to pitch a shoe on the floor of the living room, from all the way down the hall. That meant, “It’s time for Charles to go.” But on this night, we were all alone in a car. It was approaching my curfew, but we had time for just a little romance.
We climbed in the back seat and began kissing, and pretty soon things got out of hand. I lost my virginity at age fourteen. Right after the act was over, I was filled with shame. What had I done? I was in a panic as I watched the dial on my watch meet, then pass my curfew. I’d never missed curfew before.
When Charles dropped me off and I walked up to the house, the lights were off. That was a good sign. I tried to slide into the house, thinking I could tiptoe back to my room and my parents would never know.
Then the lights turned on, revealing that my daddy was standing there with a belt.
“Where have you been?”
Normally I would’ve thought something up—but what I had prepared flew out of my head. I couldn’t even speak, because I was still in shock over what I had just done.
He gave me a whupping, but I didn’t cry. This upset my daddy even more, that I wouldn’t answer his questions about where I had been. Part of me wanted to get beaten. In my mind at the time, I believed I had made so much of a mistake that I deserved this.
He kept whupping me, until my mama stepped in. “Raymond, that’s enough.”
He looked at her, then at me. “Get out,” he said. I had taken my father to the breaking point and knew I had to obey. I walked out onto the porch, shut the door behind me, and sat down. Though he wanted me to leave, I had nowhere to go in rural Mississippi in the middle of the night. When my mama came out and I saw the kindness in her eyes, I started crying. She started crying too.
“Come on back in,” she said.
And I did. The next morning, I stopped wearing those fast-looking clothes. My “liberated” days were over. Even though I was no longer actually innocent, I wanted to look innocent. And I wanted to do enough good things to possibly cancel out the bad I had done. I did errands around the house: I washed dishes, washed the clothes, ironed my father’s clothes, and polished his shoes. My parents couldn’t come up with a chore I wouldn’t do.
I lost something about myself that night: my carefree spirit. Though I loved to make people laugh, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to live in sin. I still saw Charles, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t let him come over to the house, and I couldn’t go out, since I was grounded. We talked on the phone and saw each other at school. But even that was a bit too much. Every time I looked him in the eyes, he was a reminder of my shame. With thoughts of attending a new integrated school, I was thinking more seriously about my life. I’d never gone to school with white people before, and I needed to figure out exactly how I was going to live my life.
All my good efforts, however, couldn’t erase a tiny little reality that had begun that night in the back seat of the car. Three months after I turned fifteen, I suspected I was pregnant. I counted on my fingers, trying desperately to find some error of math that would mean I’d be okay. Being an unwed mama in rural Mississippi in the 1970s was not an option. Not in my town. It would have been such an embarrassment to my family. I was just so young. I would have to go forward at church and confess my sin of being an unwed mother. My high school would kick me out. This wasn’t a time when educators wanted to give pregnant teens the best chance at success in life. They believed that exposing others to such sin would be corrupting. Teen mothers were sent back home, usually without explanation. They would have the baby and then often live their quiet lives without a high school degree. Out of sight, out of mind. This would devastate my parents, who so valued education.
I put A Tale of Two Cities facedown on my bed, unable to focus on the Charles Dickens book I was reading for school. I fingered the edge of the quilt my mama had made. Panic rose in my chest as I plopped down on my pillow. On the radio, the Isley Brothers sang, “It’s your thing, do what you wanna do,” but I didn’t need them to tell me that. I’d been doing exactly what I wanted to do. That’s how I’d gotten into this mess.
I lay there as the evening turned to night, then morning. And the next day, I put on my clothing and went to school like nothing was wrong. I knew I was pregnant, but I couldn’t face that quite yet. I definitely couldn’t tell Charles. Maybe if I ignored it, everything would be just fine.
One week into my new school year, my mama appeared in the doorway. She looked at me knowingly, biting her lower lip. It was Monday. She was standing by my dresser. “Marie, you’re pregnant,” she said.
“No I’m not,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “You done messed around and got pregnant.”
I nodded, because there was no use in denying it. She and I both burst into tears.
By this time, my daddy had heard our raised voices and had come back to my room.
“What’s going on?” he asked, looking at her, then at me.
“She laid up and got pregnant,” Mama said. When she told my daddy, I felt sick. I am not sure what I expected his reaction to be. I didn’t expect him to start crying too. Then he simply walked away without saying a word. Mama left, so they could discuss my situation.
I could tell they blamed themselves for not being as attentive as perhaps they only then realized they should have been. Though we were a very tight-knit family, we didn’t sit down and have big discussions about the complications of life. Most of the “big lessons” I learned were through eavesdropping and—now, I guess I could add—“trial and error.” At one point, I tried to talk to my father, but he was so hurt he simply dropped his head. So I went to see if Mama would talk, but she looked away from me.
We’d had a big explosion, followed by silence. That silence was the hardest part. Mama would tell Julius, “Tell your sister to go get that kitchen clean.” Or she’d tell Patricia, “Tell your sister to do the laundry.”
For two excruciating days, my parents whispered, cried, and spoke in low voices. I just had to get out of the house. I walked outside and took a left turn out of our driveway, hoping the fresh air might miraculously help me feel better. That’s when a neighbor, in whom my mama had apparently confided, saw me walking. She pulled her car alongside me and rolled down the window.
“Marie, I heard what happened,” she told me. Then her voice dropped. “I can have that fixed for you.” Though I so desperately wanted to be a carefree kid, I couldn’t agree to an abortion. Not after I’d felt that little baby flutter around inside me.
Then, on Wednesday, the fog lifted. Daddy was going about his work, and Mama was flitting around the house. Normally she enlisted me to help her with housework, so I felt a relief of familiarity when she plopped down a stack of paper in front of me and said, “Fill these out. Address these envelopes.”
Eagerly, I sat at the table, looking at what I saw to be envelopes, along with a list of names and addresses. Those were the first words spoken to me in two days. Since she’d asked me to help her with a project, things couldn’t be all bad. Though I still didn’t know what to do about the baby, at least I could have my mama back.
I labeled the first envelope with the name I recognized as a neighbor, careful to use beautiful, cursive handwriting. I wanted to do right by my mama, to stay on her good side. I had no idea what my life was going to look like going forward, but I knew that this chore indicated Mama had accepted me back as a part of the fold. I wrote, making a tidy stack of envelopes on the table beside me as Mama was preparing food. When I saw her heading down the hall, however, curiosity got the best of me.
Silently and quickly, I opened up one of the envelopes to see what task I was helping Mama accomplish. To my astonishment, I saw the words “You are invited,” and then I saw my name on the card. And then the name of Charles Johnson.
A wedding announcement.
My own.
The card shook in my hands, and I hurriedly tried to stuff it back into the envelope before my mama caught me snooping. I laid the envelope on the table. I’d been inviting my friends and neighbors to my own wedding ceremony that I didn’t even know was happening.
Though I kind of loved Charles, I wouldn’t have selected him as my husband. When was I going to find out about this wedding? Would I have just awakened one day and been driven to the church? Would it even be at the church? Since I didn’t really know anything about the wedding that my parents—and apparently Charles’s parents—were hoping to pull off, I took a deep breath and slowly reopened the envelope. I slid out the invitation to discover the details of my wedding.
One detail, in particular, mattered more than the others. My eyes ran down the card and read the language under our names. I was going to be married at our house, not at the church. Then I found the detail I really needed.
According to the invitation, I was getting married on Saturday. In three days.
I had to run away.
When my mama left the house, I dialed the number of my mother’s sister. She lived in Houston, which seemed just far enough away to do the trick.
Please answer the phone, please answer the phone.
When I heard her voice, I let out a huge sigh of relief. “Aunt Jessie Mae, this is Marie,” I began. “You have to help me.”
“Slow down,” she said. I wasn’t sure how she’d respond, since she was, after all, my mama’s sister. After I explained the situation, I stopped talking and waited to hear what she’d say. Turns out, very few people in America were too thrilled about the idea of a forced marriage. Only after she agreed to help did I realize I had been holding my breath.
“I’ll buy a bus ticket for you,” she said, before hanging up. Olive Branch didn’t have a bus stop, but I could figure out a way to catch it in Memphis. Then I called my older sister Celestine, who lived in Memphis and could probably help get me where I needed to go. I loved spending some nights and weekends with her, to help her take care of her babies. Celestine was one of the only people to whom I would tell my secrets.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but getting married is probably the best thing,” she said after I told her my news. “You don’t want people calling your baby names.” I hadn’t thought of that, but unflattering nicknames aimed at a baby by uncharitable people were the least of my worries.
“I’m scared,” I said. I’d told Celestine everything about my life since I was young. Even though we were fourteen years apart, I felt like I could tell her anything. And so I did. “I’m going to run away to Houston.”
“Marie, you can’t leave,” she said, her voice certain. “That would hurt everybody.”
“I have to,” I told her. Whether or not she was going to help, I knew I was leaving. When I told her goodbye, I wondered when I would see her again.
After I hung up the phone, I ran to my room and shut the door. I rummaged through my drawers and swept up clothes. Would I miss Mississippi? My parents? Of course I would, but I had no choice. I swallowed back tears as I stuffed clothes and underwear into a suitcase. But in a few minutes, Julius showed up at my door.
“Going somewhere?” he asked, leaning on the door. I didn’t realize he was standing there, watching me. I jumped.
“You can’t stop me,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” he said. “Mama’s orders.”
“You better get out of my way, before I knock you out of the way.”
“I don’t fight pregnant girls,” he said, “but you’re not going anywhere.”
Celestine had called my mama just as soon as we’d hung up the phone. And—like dominoes falling—Mama had alerted Julius. Julius had showed up to stop me. I plopped on the bed, officially out of options and utterly depressed that Celestine had betrayed me.
Over the next few days, we bought cheap rings and made decorations. Something about all the activity made me wonder if this might be the right decision after all. By the time Saturday arrived, I had accepted my plight. I awakened when Mama knocked on the door and handed me a dress that my first cousin had worn for prom. It was white. Pretty, actually. It reminded me of getting baptized, but this was going to be a very different type of baptism. One of pain. I blinked back tears as I put it on and looked in the mirror. I looked good, like a typical bride except that I appeared even younger in the wedding dress. I’d never guessed that I’d be wearing one at fifteen years of age, especially since no one had ever asked me to get married. No one had asked me if I even wanted to get married.
“You ready?” my mama asked, smiling at me. And, in spite of all my plans for my future going up in smoke, I nodded.
We had made a chicken-wire arch that we filled with tissue paper flowers we’d made over the previous few days. We stood the arch on the front lawn. There, a minister friend of the Johnsons, the Reverend Clark, stood before all our loved ones. They were smiling, holding handkerchiefs, and looking at me through tear-filled eyes. My daddy took me by the arm, walked me to the front, and gave me away to this teenage boy best known for his trumpet playing and dance moves.
What have I done?
“We are gathered here today to join this woman and this man in holy matrimony,” said the pastor. No one laughed at his use of the terms “woman” and “man.”
“If anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.”
I took a deep breath and turned my head to look at all who had assembled on our lawn. No one objected to our marriage when the pastor gave them the opportunity to throw their hands in the air and say “Stop!”
Not even me.
* * *
My high school experience was quite different from my friends’.
The school administrators told me that I would no longer be allowed to attend school, and so I spent my days at home. Rather, at Charles’s home.
After the wedding, I had to leave my brother, sisters, and parents, and move into the home of Charles. Though his parents were kind to me, I was desperately lonely. I helped clean around the house and even began cooking for them. They weren’t used to good food like my mama had taught me to create, so they appreciated having this young girl living with them who could perform domestic tasks.
As a way for me to keep up with what was going on in the tenth grade, my friend Alma brought me her books and her old tests. I would teach myself the material and then take her quizzes myself. My pregnancy was relatively uneventful. On December 20, 1970, I had a baby girl. I named her Tretessa, after a French novel I’d been reading. After I delivered her, my husband and I moved into a house adjacent to my parents’ property so they could help me with the baby. But I couldn’t just sit back and accept the fact that the school board had banished me from school. I decided to approach them to plead my case.
“How am I supposed to have a future without a high school diploma?” I asked the school administrators.
I could tell by the looks in their eyes what was going through their minds: You should’ve thought about that earlier, young lady. Yet I was persistent.
“How old is your baby?” one of the board members asked. But I could tell by the edge in his voice he wasn’t asking out of curiosity. “You need to be home with that child.”
Since he was trying to get me to drop out, I didn’t even honor him with an answer.
“All right,” one of the administrators said. “You can go back to the tenth grade, but you can’t progress to the eleventh.”
But I was prepared for that fight. “I have enough credits to skip tenth and still be able to graduate.”
“You aren’t ready to be a junior,” he said.
“I know all the curriculum for the tenth grade,” I protested.
My mama vouched for me. “I’ve been seeing her hitting the books.”
Finally, with much reluctance, they agreed to let me take one test that covered all the material for the entire year. If I passed it, they’d let me move on to eleventh grade. It felt less like an act of generosity and more of a trick to get me to stop asking them. They didn’t think it could be done, especially since they scheduled the test for three days later.
The administration asked teachers from another school to put together a test on their respective subjects. Each subject had over a hundred questions. On the day of the test, I knew I could handle it. It took me four hours, and I made a 98 percent on it.
I was officially a high school junior.
Going back to high school and leaving my daughter was tough, but I had looked forward to returning for months. When I got there, everything had changed. My friends were obsessed with boys and fashion, while I was thinking about bottles and diapers. My friends didn’t tell me everything they used to tell me. And when they did, their gossip just felt childish. Of course, they hadn’t changed. They were exactly the way high school kids should’ve been. I was the one who had changed. There was no going back to the way life was before I was married.
Charles didn’t have the same feeling. He continued to go out at night, basically living the life of a single high school kid. I kept my head down and studied, making good grades and trying to be a good wife. In a way, my whole marriage was orchestrated to save me from the embarrassment of “going forward” at church, a “walk of shame” that ideally allows sinful Christians the opportunity to confess their sins. I, of course, would’ve had to confess that I’d had sex outside marriage, an embarrassment for me and my family (though in retrospect, it wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as all the drama that later came from my marriage). Though I knew that confession was good for the soul, I didn’t want to do that.
Since I’d turned my back on the church earlier in life, I didn’t take my children to church like my parents had taken us kids. However, they knew about Jesus, because I told them all about Him. I wanted a good, solid family, and even though I had a rocky marital beginning, I set out to create one.
When I was midway into my junior year, I realized I was pregnant again. Tretessa was only eleven months old. My baby’s new due date would be in August. This time, I vowed, I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I knew the principal would kick me out of school if he knew I was having another baby. (This is even though I was married.) And so I wore baggy clothes, studied hard, and kept the news within the family.
One month before my baby was due, my mama knocked on the door with a concerned look on her face.
“I just got off the phone with Mrs. Ray,” she said. “You should sit down.” I could tell by her stricken face that this was serious.
“What’d she want?” I asked. Mrs. Ray was the mama of a girl at our school named Joyce. I wasn’t close friends with her daughter.
“She told me Charles comes by the house all the time,” she said, enunciating each word. “And that Joyce is his girlfriend. She wanted to tell me in the hopes that he’ll stop coming around.”
My heart started thudding in my chest, my head started thumping, my throat went bone dry. I just couldn’t believe it. After I left my mother, I went into the bathroom and found some of her pills. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted the pain in my heart to go away. I took one, then another. I don’t recall how many I ultimately swallowed, but it was enough to make the pain stop temporarily. The next thing I remember, I was in the back of an ambulance with medics hovering over me.
“Wake up,” they said. “Open your eyes.”
The betrayal was too much to bear. When I asked Charles about the affair, he simply denied it. We had another daughter, who arrived on August 15. I named her Catina, but I kept the news of her arrival—her existence—within the family. Even my closest friends didn’t know I had two children.
By this time, I had enough credits to get out of school at noon. That meant that every afternoon, I was able to get on a bus and go to vocational-technical school. At the time, Sawyers Secretarial School was teaching a typing-skills class. I hoped that learning a skill would help me make a living, but I didn’t tell my husband. I knew Charles would object to these lessons, since he seemed generally opposed to anything that reeked of self-improvement and advancement.
By the time graduation rolled around, I had accomplished a great deal. As they were announcing the scholarships, they called my name. To my surprise, I had been given a band scholarship, because of my oboe skills. The idea of going away for a four-year college degree, of course, was so enticing. But even as I let my mind wander, I caught Charles’s eye. “Don’t even think about it,” he mouthed.
Then they went on to announce that Sawyers Secretarial School was giving me an award. Not only had I never missed a class, I could type ninety-one words per minute when I graduated. I walked up to the podium to get the award. My husband, sitting in the front row, shook his head in disbelief. Though the audience applauded for me, all I could see was the look of disapproval on his face.
After graduation, my friends gathered around to congratulate me. When they saw me standing with my family, they were shocked to see that I had two children.
After I graduated, I interviewed for a secretarial position at Keene Lighting, the same place my daddy had worked for years. When the boss there realized how quickly I could type, I was hired on the spot. The fact that I had an in-house job at this company was a source of great pride for my daddy and for me. Plus, I was the first black woman in Olive Branch to hold an office job.
I’d done it. I’d done everything that was in my control to create a good life for my husband and family.
But soon I’d learn that life sometimes spirals out of control anyway.