I am third in a cycle of black women who became mothers of four children, each of us having two daughters and two sons. Both my daughters had declared their intent to break the cycle, my eldest by having two sons and the younger a daughter. This intertwined herstory of how motherhood, specifically black motherhood, has played out in my family reveals both our glorious triumphs and our significant challenges in overcoming the racism, sexism, classism, violence against women, and plain ignorance we experienced all at once in an immediate, noncompartmentalized, intersectional—as in the personal is always political—kind of way. As June Jordan reminds us, “To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.”1 These are the stories we black womenfolk often hesitate to or dare not talk about in the “mixed company” of our menfolk (it would shame too many, enrage a few, and distance others), let alone with our white sisters (most, but thankfully not all, of whom would miss some of the subtlety and complexity). So we might figure, “what would be the point?” but if we are lucky enough, we do dare to share our truths with other black women and other women of color who, all too often, have their own stories to tell.
The First Movement: My Maternal Grandmother (1930s)
My maternal grandmother, Coretha Flack Lovell, married my grandfather, Walter Raleigh Lovell Sr., when she was twenty-three years old. He was thirteen years her senior and their union would be his second of three marriages. Coretha’s mother died when she was a young girl, so with the help of assorted female relatives, Coretha practically raised herself into her young womanhood. Given her modest upbringing, she was considered fortunate to have caught the eye and become the wife of her former teacher and a prominent minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In addition to raising their four children and managing her household responsibilities while her husband traveled the country as a “church builder,”2 Coretha served on several church and community volunteer boards. On occasion, she hosted a virtual who’s who of black intelligentsia and entertainers performing on the Chitlin’ Circuit who were unable to receive accommodations elsewhere in the Jim Crow South. Trained from an early age in music and oratory, my mother and her brothers and sister were frequently called upon to perform for the famous guests—including Louis Armstrong and Earl “Fatha” Hines—who passed through their Charlotte home.
In 1951 Coretha learned that her absentee father had died in Los Angeles, and made plans to travel across the country for the funeral. At that time, it was uncommon for women to travel alone without their husbands. On the day she embarked on her journey, my grandfather asked to kiss her goodbye and bit down hard on her lip until it bled. Her oldest son, my uncle Walter, grabbed his father’s shotgun and held him at bay until she could safely leave their home. Realizing that it was unsafe for a woman to travel alone cross-country, she dressed in a man’s suit and hat and set off for California in her Ford Falcon with her youngest son, my uncle Jesse, in tow. With her child-rearing years nearly over and no interest in returning to a husband who disrespected her, she decided to make a new life in Los Angeles, where she worked as a domestic while studying to become a licensed practical nurse. She eventually returned to Charlotte where she worked as a nurse at the height of the Asian flu epidemic of 1957–1958 and later in rehabilitation services. After divorcing my grandfather, she became a persona non grata within the church community, especially among the other women, but she had discovered a new spiritual community in the Bahá’í Faith while in Los Angeles. Her new faith expanded and reinforced a vision of a world community that upholds the equality of all humankind, irrespective of race, gender, nationality, or class. She continued to dedicate herself to worthy causes like petitioning the local authorities to install a stop sign after several accidents, including a fatal one involving a young child.
I only met my grandmother once during my childhood, and her visit in the summer of 1966 would become one of my fondest memories. She and I shared my single bed with a thin mattress that could be folded up and rolled in or out of a closet upon short notice. This bed had wheels, and in the room I shared with my older sister that made it very convenient for me to pull it closer to her stationary bed whenever I had nightmares and would, to her annoyance, inveigle her to hold my hand under the covers. Until my grandmother’s arrival, it had never been used for company. When my grandmother and I slept in my bed together on those hot summer nights, with her feet at my head and mine at hers, I was ever mindful not to toss and turn for fear of kicking her in the chest as I found comfort in the sweet-and-sour smell of her feet. With a simple flourish of a few blueberries, my grandmother lovingly transformed my breakfast cereal into the most heavenly ambrosia, far superior to any box of Lucky Charms I had ever coveted on the grocery shelf. She left with me two gifts: a strong impression of what a spirituality grounded in love and goodness looks like in a living, breathing person and a yellow, hardcover Bahá’í children’s prayer book. The cherished talisman was lost years later during a family move, but her loving human spirit was permanently etched upon my five-year-old soul.
Less than a year later my grandmother would die alone in her Charlotte apartment at age sixty-four when an aneurysm burst in her brain. It may have been the result of her untreated pica—a nutritional disease characterized by developmentally inappropriate craving and eating of nonnutritive items such as dirt, clay, starch, and chalk, historically associated with pregnant, poor, and rural women—which I would later learn about while a student at Howard University. My grandmother was known to consume large quantities of cornstarch and blocks of magnesium, even long after she was of child-bearing age. That the medical research on pica and its long-term consequences is rather scant might have something to do with who is most affected by it: poor women of color around the globe and through the ages. Whatever the exact cause of her death, my beloved grandmother did not live to enjoy her retirement and never received any Social Security benefits. Without realizing it at the time, she was the first woman warrior for justice, albeit a quiet one, I had ever met.
The Second Movement: My Mother (1950s–1970s)
More than a decade before that summer visit, my grandmother had tried to discourage my mother, née Constance Garnet Lovell, from marrying my father, Robert Wakefield Roberts; at least not before earning her college degree. Her eldest daughter, my aunt Ida, had previously dropped out of Howard University to marry her college sweetheart. My grandmother considered an education the best insurance against her daughters having to engage in menial work such as cleaning toilets, a job my mother once performed to augment her college scholarships. My grandmother’s high aspirations for her daughters were grounded in not wanting either of them to ever be dependent on a man. Convinced that her sons could always find work without an education, or at least join the military, she urged both daughters to earn college degrees and become self-sufficient. To her point, Uncle Walter joined the Marines and later completed a correspondence course in architecture and engineering, and depending on whom I speak to, her younger son, Uncle Jesse, either just attended courses or earned a college degree from UCLA. While still a student at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles, Jesse fathered twin boys who, as infants, became child actors in the 1957 film Something of Value. My grandmother was the only one who kept in touch with the young mother and her first grandsons. There is a photo of the twins perched on the lap of a white Santa Claus in my mother’s family scrapbook. I may never know the story behind that photo—whether my grandmother took the boys to see Santa or if their mother sent the photo to my grandmother as a thank you for her support or to beseech my uncle for his. What I took away from this photo is that my grandmother claimed them as hers. Knowing that she did not deny them would matter to me when I became a mother and grandmother in nontraditional and socially unaccepted ways.
My parents first met as children when she was nine and he was thirteen—my grandfathers were close friends who worked in the post office while also serving as AME Zion ministers. They met again as young adults, and married in a civil ceremony during her junior year at Howard University in June 1952. According to my mother, their first child, my eldest brother Michael, was conceived on her graduation day in June 1953 and born the following March in Philadelphia, where my mother had gone to stay with her sister-in-law, my aunt Bettyelee, and her husband, Bishop Cameron Chesterfield Alleyne. Bishop Alleyne was a close friend with the famed orator, actor, singer, and freedom fighter Paul Robeson. Indeed, one of our family’s most prized possessions is a photo of Robeson holding Michael during a visit that fell somewhere between his travels to Russia.
Racial segregation and discrimination in hospitals were common during this period. The laws were slowly changing in the decade leading up to the landmark Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital case in 1963 that would prohibit segregation of hospitals receiving Medicare funds. Nonetheless, although my mother ultimately delivered all four of her children in hospitals in the nominally integrated North, she was sometimes treated with neglect or such contempt that she might have had similar or even better birth experiences in the more segregated South. It was through my parents’ connections to Bishop Alleyne that Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens, the first African American woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons, was chosen as my mother’s obstetrician. While Dr. Dickens would later serve a long tenure on the staff of the integrated Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia and as professor emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, in 1954 she was denied admitting privileges to the Woman’s Hospital, thus was not able to attend to my mother during the delivery. Instead my mother was forced to self-admit to the hospital where she gave birth to her first born under the gaze of gawking interns. Indeed, because of Dr. Dickens’s stellar reputation and dedicated service in the black community, she had barely had enough time to see my mother during her pregnancy (my mother recalls having only one prenatal visit with her), but it was an even greater disappointment for her own doctor to not even be allowed to be present in the delivery room. It would be at another integrated hospital in Pennsylvania, St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, while screaming in pain during a difficult labor prior to my cesarean birth, that my mother vividly recalls a white nurse slapping her harshly in the face and telling her to just be quiet, and further suggesting that she should suffer silently “like a good nigger.”3
My father had previously interrupted his own studies at Lincoln University to enlist in the Eighty-Second Airborne of the US Army. Upon his discharge in 1954 and at the behest of his father, he became an ordained minister. In 1955 the young family moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where my father resumed his studies at Lincoln University while serving his first pastorate. Needing to supplement the modest salary provided by the church and with my father focusing on his studies, my mother was turned down for a factory job for having too much education; the owner explained to her that the white women who worked there would be offended if an educated (translate: uppity) black woman was paid more than they were.
Appalled by the meager living conditions provided by the church, my maternal grandfather insisted that my mother and brother temporarily return to Charlotte with him. He appealed to the church leadership to arrange for another assignment for my father, and in 1956 the young family moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where my father assumed the pastorate of St. John’s AME Zion Church. Once again, my father terminated his studies, and ultimately would never complete his degree, despite his eligibility for the GI Bill. The new parsonage had sufficient space, a backyard, and they were now able to afford a washer and dryer with the additional income my father earned as a shipping clerk at the local textile mill. Three more children would follow: my brother Gary in 1957, my sister Pamela in 1958, and then me in 1961, just one year after the first oral contraceptives were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and four years before the Griswold v. Connecticut decision established a married couple’s right to contraception. With two toddlers still at home, my mother was not prepared to have a fourth child; in fact, none of her pregnancies had been planned. Her only method of contraception was to douche after sex. Emphatic that she never considered an illegal abortion, my mother recalls privately praying for a miscarriage and attempting to naturally abort me by walking up and down stairs and lifting heavy things during her pregnancy, to no avail.
Although many others had applied in the decade before her, my mother was not hired by the Bethlehem Area School District as the first negro teacher until June 1963. That same month, President John F. Kennedy gave his radio and television address “Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” proposing that sweeping legislation be drafted to ensure equal rights and protection of all citizens regardless of their race.
Having spent nearly ten years as an at-home mother, she entered the classroom that fall and I would become my mother’s first and only child to attend preschool. This was to the relief of my grandmother, who, according to family folklore, had chastised my mother for, in her mind, not making better use of her education, saying, “I did not work hard to send you to college to have all these babies.” My grandmother might have been projecting her own regret that her education was interrupted by an early marriage and child-rearing, and it might also have been a reflection of her increasing awareness and support of women’s rights as she embraced her new religion.
In the year 1964 a lot was happening nationally, locally, and within my family. The nation was still healing from the assassination of President Kennedy, and just as Bob Dylan declared with his epic album The Times They Are A-Changin’, the newly sworn-in President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction into law. By that time, both my parents had become significant community leaders in the Lehigh Valley. It was in 1964 that the Bethlehem US Junior Chamber honored my father by naming him “Young Man of the Year” for his strong record of community service and civic engagement. He cofounded the Bethlehem Community Civic League, a multiracial and interfaith organization that strove to advance equal opportunity and mobilized to desegregate housing and investigate discriminatory hiring and advancement practices within Bethlehem Steel, one of the most significant employers in the area, indeed the nation.
There were other significant events that year. The first Christmas I can recall was spent with virtual strangers. In what can only be described as a desperate act fueled by the despair of learning that my father was having an affair with a white woman and she was allegedly pregnant with his child, my mother deliberately turned the gas stove to full blast on Christmas Eve in an attempt to end her life and those of her four children. Fortunately, my father returned home in time, and my mother was subsequently institutionalized in the local state psychiatric hospital for the holidays while my siblings and I were dispersed to relatives and, in my case, the mercy of my father’s friends. These events would be replayed again and again in arguments between my parents over the course of their marriage, and I would string together fragments suggesting that either the “other woman” was planted by the FBI to disrupt my parents’ marriage and derail their activism (my mother’s preferred version) or that the affair was my father’s only recourse when my mother’s attention was increasingly devoted to her career and the care of her children (my father’s preferred version). Neither explanation—my mother’s quite plausible conspiracy theory nor my father’s likely self-serving rationalization—was pleasing to my childhood ears, but both would inform my understanding of how systemic racism and patriarchy intersected and combusted in the lived experience of our family.
After my mother’s “treatment and recovery” at Allentown State Hospital, my parents reconciled enough to purchase a new home and move us from a working-class, ethnically mixed neighborhood on the south side of Bethlehem to an all-white, newly annexed suburb across town. I do not believe my mother was ever treated, at least not with compassionate care, at this hospital, a foreboding institution known then for its abuses. And how can someone ever fully recover from the trauma of being led to a despair deep enough to want to end their life and those of their children? To my knowledge, the white woman and the alleged love child were never seen nor heard from again—she may have gotten an illegal abortion with the help of my parents’ friends. In other words, she disappeared as quickly as she had arrived; the damage to my parents’ marriage was done and the sanctity of our family forever changed. During the summer of my beloved grandmother’s visit in 1966, she went for a ride with my father in his sporty little red MG. According to my mother, my grandmother, who was not known for raising her voice, cautioned my father while holding a pot of hot grits in her hand, “If you don’t want her, then I will take her with me!” Privately, she told my mother, “If you have elected to stay with him, then learn to keep your mouth shut!” Based on my observations during wakeful nightly vigils spent listening at their bedroom door, my mother never learned nor opted to do that.
I must have heard every accusation, every shout, every whisper exchanged between them. I witnessed domestic violence on multiple levels and in both directions: from the physical abuse of my father holding his .32 revolver to my mother’s head and playing Russian Roulette or my mother throwing an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol in my father’s face to the emotional abuse of my mother belittling my father’s sexual prowess or my father calling my mother a whore and denying one of my brothers was his. There were the daily rituals of presenting to the outside world that everything was all right in our home by camouflaging my mother’s physical bruises with stylish clothes and drowning her emotional ones with alcohol, and redirecting my father’s anger to the indulgence of cigarettes and flashy sports cars and resolving his educational insecurities with avid model railroad and electronics hobbies. Theirs became a loveless, thankless marriage preserved at high costs to both of them, and for the sake of us children.
With all the challenges in their marital lives, my parents continued to thrive in their respective professions, at times seemingly in competition with each other. My mother became a highly regarded and respected teacher and sang in the esteemed Bach choir. My father left his pastorate shortly after his father’s death to become the executive director of the local War on Poverty programs for the Lehigh Valley, and later headed the Pennsylvania Council of Farmworkers in Harrisburg and the Afro American Cultural Center in Allentown.
It would be another decade before my mother heeded her mother’s words, and like her mother before her, she eventually opted, at my urging, to leave my father, her home, and her job. I was sixteen and the last of her children still living at home. I thought it was the best move for her to make at that time. I told her that I feared for her safety; if she did not leave I was certain it would be only a matter of time before someone got seriously hurt, perhaps even killed. She asked me if I wanted to come with her, but I chose to stay with my father. I cannot say my motives were all pure. My mother had been the strict disciplinarian in our home, in stark contrast to the permissive parenting style of my father. I was dating a young man three years older than me at the time, and like many teens, I often sought opportunities to be away from my mother’s constant gaze. Spending time with friends and a boyfriend provided refuge from my parents’ loveless and often volatile marriage and emptying nest. I also knew my father, with whom I had always been close, would need someone to keep him company—we could not both leave him. Besides, my mother had met someone, a soft-spoken gentleman who treated her well. After years of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse, she confided in me that she had fallen in love, and it was the first time I had ever seen her happy. She left our home in the midst of a teachers’ strike in fall 1977, cashed in her retirement, and moved to Washington, DC, where she stayed with an aunt. She never returned to our home.
My mother was not only fleeing the anguish of a very troubled marriage; she was also escaping a legacy of institutional racism that had always simmered beneath the surface during her years in the Bethlehem Area School District. As she told an interviewer at an NAACP banquet honoring her in 2009, “It was not easy being a token!” It all bubbled up in a pivotal moment when my mother overheard her immediate colleague refer to her as “that n-word” after a faculty meeting in which my mother was defending a bright black female student’s right to remain in the classroom despite a tendency to get into physical and verbal fights with teachers and other students. In an era when public school teachers across the nation were increasingly lamenting their need to become “social workers in the classroom,” my mother earned her master’s degree in guidance just so that she could be a better advocate for the black and brown students like this unapologetically black girl named Penny. Feeling defeated at work and at home, it was as if my mother surrendered and lost any will to fight the twin oppressions of racism and sexism that permeated her world and denied her dignity. She would never return to the classroom.
The Third Movement: Me, Myself, and I (1970s–Present)
As a mother, I have had four movements of my own, which I will call submovements.
I. Preamble to Motherhood
The first leg of my maternal journey began even before I became a mother during my adolescent years in the Lehigh Valley. When I was seven years old, just before my beloved grandmother died, I sacrificed the innocence of my childhood to become the only one of my siblings to keep vigil at my parents’ door as they battled each other every night. I thought if I kept watch, they would not say or do anything to hurt each other. I heard and saw things no child should be exposed to at such a tender age. I became a confidante to both my parents—they told me what they could not tell each other. I grew up much too quickly and became a parentified child, a psychological term I later learned about in college. Between the ages of nine and eleven, I served as a “parent helper” for two preschool-aged girls in the neighborhood whose mother, a stay-at-home white woman, was overwhelmed with their care. Like my brother had done for me, I taught the girls to speak clearly and to read. So even before I became a parent, myself, I often acted in loco parentis to others. The extent to which black children are socialized at young ages to assume adult roles and responsibilities has been well documented, but few have theorized about the root causes of this more explicitly than Joy DeGruy:
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) is a condition that exists when a population has experienced multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery and continues to experience oppression and institutionalized racism today. Added to this condition is a belief (real or imagined) that the benefits of the society in which they live are not accessible to them.4
II. Becoming a Teen Mom (1979–1988)
After my mother’s departure/escape to Washington, DC, my father sold our house and the two of us resettled into a two-bedroom apartment on the west side of town, within walking distance of the same state psychiatric hospital where my mother had her already wounded spirit broken. At fifteen, I took my first job working the seven-to-three shift at a nursing home every Saturday and Sunday. I also cleaned the apartment, did the grocery shopping, and cooked meals. My father was the executive director of a popular cultural center in nearby Allentown that held dances until 2:00 a.m. every Saturday night, and this is where I met and fell hard for Donald, a young man who exemplified everything both my parents might have warned me against had they been paying closer attention. Ever since his first heart attack at age forty-eight, my father was beset with medical problems, including prostate cancer and complications from an untreated military injury that resulted in a colostomy. Whenever my father was hospitalized, which was frequently, I took responsibility for managing the household and ensuring the bills were paid on time. I felt grown and, in many respects, I was. I would later come to realize that I should not have had that much freedom or responsibility and that I surely could have used a lot more guidance from the adults in my life.
I felt entitled to explore the rights and privileges of adulthood, including driving a sporty car (my father’s red MG now replaced with a gold Pontiac Trans Am) and the pleasures of sex with my boyfriend, who, being three years older than me, could already be considered an adult. Unfortunately, my junior high sex education was limited to Cosmopolitan and the minimally mandated instruction from a male health teacher who was also my mother’s colleague so, naturally, I assumed any probing questions I asked in class would be reported to her. I also knew about Planned Parenthood, as did all of my close girlfriends in high school—all of whom, by that time, were black and Latina—so we educated ourselves and sought services about sex and birth control and, when necessary, abortion.
Despite the abrupt end of my childhood innocence, my parents also managed to sprinkle the joys of learning, a passion for music and the arts, and their commitment to social justice and service on behalf of others throughout my childhood. This sense of social justice was one of several factors that drew me to the young man who would become the father of my first child. First and foremost, I was drawn to his undeniably black masculine sex appeal (think Idris Elba at eighteen) that sparked immediate chemistry the moment he spotted me on the dance floor. When I discovered he was one of ten children born into an extended family of former migrant farm workers who had “settled out of the stream” in the Lehigh Valley, I recognized him and his people as the same folks my parents were always defending. I fell for him hard and quickly and also slowly fell out of love with school as the center of my adolescent world.
By the time I entered high school in 1976, my interest in being educated exclusively by white teachers had already waned, but as someone who had always made the honor roll, I quickly lost my respect for any and all school systems that ignored or passed along mostly black and Latino students like my boyfriend, Donald, who at eighteen could barely read or write. Any prior sense I had of my parents’ and my suffering as black people in the United States paled in comparison to what I witnessed Donald’s family experience being black and poor. I saw no value in living a black middle-class life in a predominantly white community that did not accept us, however accomplished we were. If my mother with all her degrees could be seen as “that n-word,” then what was the point of aspiring for anything in a system that did not value black people?
It would be two years of dating with heavy making out before Donald and I became sexually active. He was not my first boyfriend, but he was my first lover. I was not his. I never felt pressured to have sex before I was ready, but when my father was hospitalized for long periods of time, it was convenient and comforting to have him spend the night. I was clear that I did not want to use birth control, the pill, for fear that it would harm my body, and condoms were not readily accessible nor any more popular with young males in the years before HIV/AIDS than they are today. I felt confident I knew when I was ovulating and tried to time our intercourse accordingly or at least immediately after my period ended.
By my seventeenth birthday in July before my senior year of high school, we were pregnant. I kept this a secret for five months before my family found out and before receiving any prenatal care. During that time, Donald and I discussed our options. He was adamant about not wanting me to have an abortion. Most of the time, I was scared, confused, and alone. I sometimes spent hours in the tub and contemplated ways to self-abort. I avoided going to Planned Parenthood myself although I had accompanied girlfriends who had the procedure. I continued to work every weekend at the nursing home, which involved lifting patients, some of whom were much heavier than I was. One day I experienced a bout of morning sickness at school and went to the nurse’s office. My father was called and when they could not determine what was wrong with me, I was sent home with him. To this day, I am not sure if the school nurse suspected I was pregnant, but I was certain my father was clueless. That would be my only contact with a medical professional until I was sent to live with my mother in DC—a decision made quickly by my parents as soon as my father discovered I was pregnant. It also relieved me being pregnant in the community where I expected to be shamed and ostracized like other young, unwed pregnant girls had been. By the time I was first seen by a doctor I was past twenty-six weeks. An abortion was no longer an option, and my mother briefly explored the possibility of sending me to a home “for unwed mothers” where I could give birth and then place the child for adoption. I felt like I had brought shame to the family and she wanted me to be hidden away so no one else had to know this ever happened. Being separated from Donald left me with mixed feelings of anger, abandonment, and hurt as I realized that this was my problem and he was not there to form a united front with me, but also some relief that he could not interfere with any decision I made on my own. In short, I was an emotional mess and I did not have any one to talk to about it.
Although her disappointment was palpable, my mom provided support the best way she knew how. She connected me to prenatal healthcare and social services and enrolled me in the neighborhood high school where I arrived with enough credits to graduate. I quickly learned what it meant to be regarded as what Joseph A. Califano Jr., then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, called “one of the most serious and complex social problems facing our nation.”5 In March 1979, less than one month before my daughter was born, a report appeared in the Congressional Research Quarterly (CRQ) declaring teen pregnancy an epidemic with dire consequences:
The birth of a child usually is an occasion of great joy. But for thousands of teenagers, especially those who are unmarried, childbirth can usher in a dismal future of unemployment, poverty, welfare dependency, emotional stress and health problems for mother and child. “The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90 percent of her life’s script written for her,” population expert Arthur A. Campbell has written. “Her choices are few and most of them are bad.”6
Prior to this CRQ report, the Carter administration had previously convened a task force to explore the problem of teenage pregnancy and introduced legislation in response to concerns that teen parents and their babies were at high risk for pregnancy and birth complications, dropping out of school, facing unemployment, and being a long-term burden to tax payers. This political rhetoric has continued to this day.
Of course, I was unaware of these reports or their implications at the time, but I saw the news and magazine headlines on grocery store racks, and heard the whispers and felt the stares as I traversed the corridors at school or sat in waiting rooms without a ring on my finger, and heard the deafening silence of my family members. The one solace I found was in a classroom at Eastern High School with other pregnant and parenting mothers and a supportive teacher—a black woman—who did not shame, blame, or demonize us as “babies having babies” but rather treated us as young women becoming mothers in need of a little help. I made two friends in the class, another pregnant student named Jackie and her friend Mark, who voluntarily took the class to show his solidarity for her and other girls in our “situation.” They formed a united front and became my shield in the cafeteria at lunchtime and whenever I walked the stairwells—where rumor had it pregnant girls had been intentionally pushed. Their friendship made up for the lonely nights spent wondering how painful the labor pains would be, or the stress of being snowbound for a week after an unprecedented blizzard, or the massive task of figuring out the future. Nothing quite prepared me for what happened when I awoke at 5:35 a.m. on April 9 with my first labor pains. After describing what I felt to my mother, she determined this was it and called my obstetrician’s answering service as I got showered and dressed. She drove me to Howard University Hospital, where, after I was examined, the nurse told her she could go on to work and they would monitor me and call her as things progressed. I spent the next several hours on a gurney in a hallway waiting for an X-ray to ascertain my pelvis size to determine if I would require a C-section because the baby was too large. My attending physician, Dr. Lennox Westney, was also the Chief of Obstetrics and considered an expert on high-risk pregnancies at a time when DC had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country. Apparently no one considered that a first-time mother (of any age!) might benefit from having someone at her bedside before going into major surgery. Exactly ten hours after my early morning wake-up call, my daughter was delivered by C-section, but I would not get to see or hold her for another twenty-four hours due to a mild fever. I was not greeted by a lactation specialist extoling the benefits of and providing instruction on breastfeeding. Instead, I was given a shot of something to stop my lactation and samples and coupons for infant formula. As a young patient, I was expected to accept whatever was done to me without question. I recall being disappointed that my doctor performed a vertical incision on my abdomen instead of the more common horizontal cut along the pubic area, known as the “bikini-cut” most favored by young women. I suspected his choice of incision might have been a paternalistic way to discourage me from baring my midriff in public, and thus controlling my body and sexual expression rather than a medical necessity. While I was thrilled to be treated by a black doctor in a historically black college and university (HBCU) hospital predominantly staffed by black people, I did not escape the patriarchal norms of the medical profession.
Patriarchy would also hit me closer to home. Donald wanted to get married and for me to move back to the Lehigh Valley. When I informed him I had plans to go to college, he was taken aback. He had no framework to conceive that my going to college would be preferable to being married and taken care of by my man “like a queen.” Unlike my own and those of most others in his extended family, Donald’s parents were still married although they struggled, through thick and thin, to take care of all ten of their children without ever relying on welfare. I had no framework with which to conceive being a kept woman and not pursuing a fulfilling career even while raising a family. All the women in my family worked outside of the home, with the exception of my paternal grandmother, who had raised seven children, and one of my aunts who married a dentist but did not have any children. We had reached an impasse and would never speak about this again.
When I tried to call Donald to share the news that our daughter was born, I learned he was in jail and I was heartbroken. I had known that he smoked weed, but it was not something he did when we were together. I admired him because he was always working, taking any construction job he could find as an unskilled day laborer with the equivalent of a third-grade education. It was a disappointment, but not surprising, that he was supplementing his sporadic income by selling weed.
My daughter and I were discharged on Easter morning, and I spent those early days applying all I had learned about parenting a newborn from my teacher at school and guidance from my mom. I found a babysitter in the neighborhood from the bulletin board in the local AME Zion Church, and three weeks later I returned to school, and graduated with honors and plans to enter American University as a business major in the fall. These plans changed at summer’s end upon realizing that I was not prepared to leave my daughter to focus on school full-time. I requested a deferral at American and became a stay-at-home mom while receiving a modest (since I lived with my mom) welfare check. During that period I was recruited to participate in a research study on teen parents conducted by Howard University, having been identified through my hospital record, and I agreed out of curiosity and for the stipend. During the interview, I was asked all kinds of questions that I would eventually learn were measuring my self-esteem, locus of control, and self-efficacy related to my sexual behaviors, reproductive health, and family life. By the end of the interview I was intrigued enough to ask the graduate student about her program of study and decided to apply to their undergraduate program in human development. I was accepted and enrolled the next fall.
I arrived on Howard’s campus excited to be in a stimulating learning environment that centered blackness for the very first time and proud to be the third generation in my family to attend a revered HBCU. This is also where I first became formally radicalized. I learned from fellow students and scholars in the Pan-African movements sweeping the country and globe. My reproductive justice lens developed under the tutelage and mentorship of radical black women scholars like social anthropologist Beverlee Bruce, a human rights advocate who later served as chair of the International Women’s Rescue Committee; gerontologist Jacqueline Johnson Jackson, who coined the term “ethnogerontology” and with a joint appointment at Duke flew in weekly to teach us about black aging; and I did my work-study assignment as an assistant to child psychologist Ura Jean Oyemade, chair of the Department of Human Development and principal investigator in the teen-parent study in which I was first a subject and later ended up coding the data.
As a commuter student with a toddler, I was very focused on my studies but also found time to make a few friends and occasionally date. For the most part, I was enjoying my college experience up until the time I was raped during my senior year. I could say he was an acquaintance, but he was really a stranger. We met one afternoon in the student center and he invited me on a date that evening to hear some jazz. After we left the club, he drove me to his apartment where he locked the door behind us, opened up a sofa bed in his living room, and without either of us saying a word, no kissing, no foreplay, we had sex. I was terrified to say no since I had no viable means of escape. Afterward, he closed up the couch and drove me home as if nothing had ever happened. I never told my mother for fear she would not believe me or blame me for going out on a date with someone I had just met, for not resisting, for not keeping my legs shut, for everything! I showered and crawled into the bed I shared with my daughter. The stranger had not used a condom, and since I did not have my diaphragm with me, I spent the next weeks waiting and praying my period would come. Thankfully, it did.
I graduated magna cum laude and applied to several graduate schools because with my love of learning reignited, I wanted my independence and thought having a graduate degree would increase my chances, and knew I needed to leave my mother’s home and to raise my daughter on my own terms. I still needed her support, but I realized if I stayed in her home, I would be stifled and prevented from living the life I wanted for myself and for my daughter. When I went to the DC welfare office to have my case closed, my white caseworker was incredulous upon learning I was heading to Cornell University. He said to me, “I didn’t know you could do that!” While there were no prohibitions (like “workfare”) against attending college while on welfare, there were also few incentives and no caseworker had ever encouraged me to do so. Indeed, I had to learn about my welfare rights by taking classes in public policy and administration where we analyzed how Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) went from being an entitlement program for the deserving widows and children of white war veterans to a punitive means-tested program for unwed mothers and children falsely presumed to be black, lazy, and unworthy. I considered my diploma from Howard and my scholarship to Cornell as a small victory in the War against the Poor that had been waging as the meager gains of the War on Poverty were being replaced by Reagonomics. Becoming a teen mother and getting my radical black education at Howard had saved me from a life of mediocrity and despair that engulfed me as a result of the racism in the Lehigh Valley. These were the two things I knew could not be taken away from me as I prepared to leave the oasis of the “Chocolate City” for another enclave of whiteness in Ithaca, New York.
III. Becoming a Married Mother with Children (1988–2000)
During my first year at Cornell, my daughter and I lived on campus in student family housing where we were warmly embraced by an international community of mostly married students with children who supported each other with childcare and potluck dinners. I originally went to Cornell to get a master’s degree and received a tuition scholarship and living stipend for my first year. The summer afterward I worked as a research assistant, but had no clue how I could continue to pay for my studies in the fall. I quickly enrolled in an MS/PhD program after learning from one of my black professors that there was funding available. Even with a fellowship, it was a challenge to make ends meet while raising my daughter. I applied for Section 8 and moved into an off-campus apartment. It was in Ithaca that I became immersed in a vibrant Bahá’i community and bonded with a fellow graduate student who was also a single parent with a young daughter.
It was also in Ithaca that I met and married my husband. Chris was getting his master’s in healthcare administration and we were both part of the same social circle. Our first date was a picnic with my daughter during which he made clear his desire to be married and have a family. Eventually we became lovers, but I was still more interested in my studies than marriage, although he provided a lot of practical and financial support during times when having an alcoholic parent (even at a distance) became emotionally draining. When I spent weeks living in a migrant farm labor camp on the border of Canada to collect data for my dissertation, he stepped up to help care for my daughter in my absence. Despite his awkwardness with parenting, his consistency in being there for the two of us eventually wore me down and we easily agreed on a few core principles of marriage: I would not change my last name, we would both pursue careers of our choosing, and we would share equally in all aspects of rearing children and household responsibilities. To my mother’s chagrin and against my beloved late grandmother’s advice, we got married on a beautiful day in June 1988 overlooking Cayuga Lake when I was ABD (all but dissertation)—in other words, before completing my doctoral degree. We moved to New York City where he had already landed a job. We were what could be described in more ways than one a blended family comprised of a third-generation African American Baha’i, a brilliant free-spirited nine-year-old daughter, and a self-described white Irish-Scottish Protestant with agnostic tendencies.
All the while, my eldest brother, Michael, was dying of HIV/AIDS in an era when people did not live long past their diagnosis. I got a job as a research interviewer on an NIH-funded study on HIV and fertility decision-making where I learned first-hand that women were impacted by HIV/AIDS in ways that were not being presented to the general public. I became immersed in the fight against AIDS, which led to a job with the state Department of Health coordinating HIV-prevention and support programs for women and youth. When my brother died of AIDS complications in January 1990 on the eve of his thirty-sixth birthday, I had lost my early protector, my first teacher, so I channeled my grief into completing my dissertation—an ethnographic study of migrant farm-worker families in upstate New York—and earned my doctorate exactly one year later on the anniversary of his death.
My privilege of earning an Ivy-League doctoral degree in human service studies and my exposure to the inner workings of the government and not-for-profit worlds fast-tracked me to an opportunity that I could not resist. At the recommendation of a former boss, I was invited to become the director of a new program in Harlem to support women and families impacted by the crack cocaine epidemic that had gripped impoverished black and brown neighborhoods of New York, the same communities who were rapidly dying from the stigma and neglect that accompanied HIV/AIDS. In the First Steps program, we created an oasis for mothers, their children, their partners (both men and women), and sometimes their parents to heal and grow together. As an outpatient drug treatment program licensed by the state and funded by the city welfare agency, we provided individual and group counseling that we augmented with home visits, case management and a full range of supportive services. Our staff of eighteen women and men, queer and straight, from across the African- and Latin-descended diaspora were carefully chosen to reflect, but more importantly embrace, the families we served and protected. While the mainstream media was busy demonizing mothers and labeling their children “crack babies,” we were busy engaging in the revolutionary act of “mothering—creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life” as described most recently and fiercely by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams in their book Revolutionary Mothering.
Between 1990 and 1995, First Steps and nineteen other programs collectively known as the Family Rehabilitation Program (FRP) spread throughout NYC neighborhoods (there were five in Harlem alone). They had been on the budget chopping block each year during the David Dinkins administration, but were spared through the advocacy of then NYC Councilwoman C. Virginia Fields and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, our patron godmothers. Within one year of Rudolph Guliani’s first term as mayor, the city funding was cut entirely from several programs, including First Steps, despite mounting evidence that these programs not only preserved families but also saved money. All eighteen staff members and I were without jobs, but more tragically, fifty-five Harlem families and many more citywide were left without a safe harbor. Refusing to close our doors without a celebration, we gathered and raised the roof of Riverside Church in honor of all the families who had taken their first steps to recovery with us. To my knowledge, there has not been a city initiative since FRP that centers low-income black and Latina women and their families and provided support rather than punishment for their drug use.
Three years prior to the closing of First Steps, Chris and I contemplated whether to have more children. Our teenage daughter was increasingly independent and had a social life that rivaled the two of us combined, so we decided to refill our emptying nest. Sadly, my first and only planned pregnancy ended prematurely as the result of an ectopic pregnancy that required two surgeries. While recovering we made the decision to adopt, and before the child we had conceived would have been born, we welcomed our first chosen child, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, to our family. Two years later we would welcome our second chosen child, a four-year-old girl, who was the same age as our son. They were both removed from the care of their birth mothers due to substance use and alleged neglect. Our son’s birth mother was using multiple substances during her pregnancy and cared for him for his first five months while living in a shelter. Our daughter’s birth mother used cocaine while parenting her and an older sister and was also living with HIV/AIDS. She lost her parental rights, and while she was engaged in choosing adoptive parents for both her daughters, the sisters were separated because the state agency reasoned that the older girl was acting as a parentified child by caring for her sister. The agency placed our daughter in foster care and the older sister was placed with members of their birth mom’s church family. The adoptive mother chosen by our daughter’s birth mom changed her mind just weeks after the placement. Our daughter’s birth mom died shortly after our adoption was completed and the only knowledge she has of her birth mom are the stories passed on by her older sister. Both our children’s birth moms reflect the stories of the countless women programs like First Steps were designed to help. For far too many of them, their stories will never be told.
IV. Becoming a Divorced Mother with Children (2000–present)
Chris and I did not have a perfect marriage, but it was working up until I no longer felt he supported me as a mother. Parenting our three children together had always presented challenges to us. Our eldest daughter never fully embraced Chris as her stepfather, and when she was twelve, she told me she wanted to know her father. I found a phone number for Donald’s mother in an old address book and she was able to connect me with his family. He was married with two children and a stepson. I reached out to his wife, and she was very receptive to having our daughter visit for family reunions and took her and her half siblings to visit their father who was incarcerated in a Pennsylvania state prison. As her relationship with her father was rekindled, albeit from behind bars, the distance between her and Chris only widened. Chris placed all of his energies into being a father to our son, but his approach was markedly different than mine.
Our chosen children each grappled differently with being separated from their birth families. Our son had no interest in knowing his birth siblings (all of whom were being raised by their paternal grandparents) while our younger daughter delighted in having regular visits with her birth sister. We went through a brief honeymoon period with each of them, but eventually the signs of primal loss manifested in behaviors that school psychologists and other therapists were quick to label as “oppositional defiance,” and, for our son, the catch-all diagnosis of the decade, ADHD. Chris and I could not agree on the best approach to parenting or treatment; he was a permissive parent and more comfortable with pharmaceutical cures whereas I preferred to ride it out with firm but loving discipline and talk and play therapy as needed. The joys of parenting far outweighed any of the challenges, but I was not prepared for the toll it would take on our marriage to battle each other in addition to the various systems that intersected our children’s lives.
When our eldest daughter was halfway through her senior year of high school, Chris made the decision to get a vasectomy—our nest was full—and the surgery was scheduled for early March, after Valentine’s Day. As it turned out, we were too late. I discovered we were pregnant in February. Although it was unplanned, I wanted to have this child for several reasons: unlike with my first pregnancy, I had the means to support a child; I was older and more prepared as a parent; and being married, I looked forward to sharing the experience of pregnancy and childbirth with a supportive partner and without the societal shame. Initially, Chris assured me that he would support whatever decision I made, but once I made it, it was evident that he did not want to have this child as much as he had wanted the pregnancy we lost five years earlier. He did not think we could afford the expense of caring for an infant while sending our daughter off to college, and was concerned that our two chosen children would be negatively impacted by our having another child, especially a birth child. While I shared some of his concerns, I wanted to continue this pregnancy. Despite his feeble attempts to be supportive, my husband of nearly ten years was emotionally absent the entire pregnancy, including the delivery. For the second time, I had an unplanned pregnancy and still went through it alone. I was devastated, and on top of all the other challenges of our raising a family together, I could not forgive him for that. It was the beginning of the end of our marriage.
My only consolation was that my older sister was pregnant at the same time with twins that she and her husband had gone to great lengths and tremendous debt to conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF). It was their second IVF pregnancy; my first nephew was born the same summer we adopted our son. Black women like my sister who experience infertility are seldom discussed in the context of reproductive technology, yet they, too, can experience shame and disappointment within themselves and their families and often suffer in silence. In the end, my sister and I have both raised children who are not biologically related to us, albeit under different circumstances, different choices.
The Fourth Movement: My Daughters (2002–present)
Both of my daughters are now mothers, and between the two of them I have been blessed with two grandsons and two granddaughters (the cycle resumed). My daughters have become pregnant and mothers in both planned and unplanned ways, with and without the support of partners, and each of them for varying reasons considered the reproductive choices before them: to have an abortion, to continue their pregnancy, to place a child for adoption, or to become a stepparent. During each of their decisions and beyond, I have done my best to be the supportive parent I wish I had had when I was younger, and do not want anyone else (including the state) to interfere with the choices that are theirs and theirs alone to make. While their choices may not have been as constrained as those of my grandmother, my mother, my sister, nor myself, each generation continues to face significant obstacles to reproductive justice. With both of them coming of age in New Jersey and one now living in Maryland, neither of my daughters has had to worry about having access to a safe and legal abortion unlike their counterparts in numerous states across this country. Had the Affordable Care Act that extended my health insurance coverage to my twenty-something children not been passed and upheld, it is likely that one of my daughters would have died during her pregnancy as a result of a gestational condition known as HELLP syndrome that she developed without any warning. Despite these modest gains in public policy and their middle-class privilege, both daughters have had to struggle with choosing between childcare and making ends meet (one daughter’s partner gave up his full-time job while she worked because they could not afford day care, while the other daughter was fired twice from part-time jobs because she did not have a reliable source of day care); with having medical procedures delayed (a preferred private gynecologist has a six-month wait for a primary care nonemergency appointment) or denied due to insurance gaps (our local Planned Parenthood in New Jersey does not charge a copay for a pap smear exam but requires Medicaid patients to pay two hundred dollars for the lab kit); and with restricted or coercive contraceptive access (one daughter experienced tremendous pain with an IUD, but her complaints were ignored and she had to change doctors in order to have it removed).
Across all four generations of motherhood in my family, black women have had to struggle to become mothers, to not become mothers, to mother the children we birthed, to mother the children other mothers were denied their right to mother, and to mother other mothers. I share our stories as testimony to our individual and collective strength and perseverance, our resistance, and to prepare a way forward and toward reproductive justice for all of us who mother whether it be our own or someone else’s child, each other, or ourselves.
Notes
1. June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 280.
2. A church builder is a pastor who is skilled at fundraising to have new churches built, often by giving rousing sermons that inspired congregations to dig deep and often into their pockets, and is designated by the church leadership to travel to various communities for this specific purpose.
3. Constance Garnet Lovell, in conversation with the author, April 2014 and August 2016.
4. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland, OR: Uptone Press, 2005), 125.
5. Alan Guttmacher Institute et al., 11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done About the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States (New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1976).
6. Sandra Stencel, “Teenage pregnancy,” Editorial Research Reports 1979 (Vol. 1) (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1979), http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1979032300.