Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul Read Online Free PDF Page B

substituting homemade lemonade for “I’m glad to see you,” and bowls of ice cream for “I love you.” But on this sun-scorched afternoon,Mama, stung by my new, short Afro and sassy ways, finally blurted out what was in her heart.
    I could hear the pride in her voice as she talked about how she’d raised me and rescued her marriage. After so many years of living a lie, it seemed to free her to dump our family’s secrets on a table and slice them open. But I was angry at her, angry at Daddy, angry at Grandma Eva, angry at Aunt Minnie and angry at anyone else who’d known the truth but kept it buried.
    After six or seven months, I finally packed away my anger, dried my tears and began using the journalistic skills I’d learned in the news rooms, hammering Mama with questions about my birth mother. The state of Alabama had never been able to find a birth certificate for Betty Jean DeRamus, the name I’d always believed was mine. However, state workers quickly found one for Betty Jean Nesby, a baby girl born on the same day and year as I was. The story was as true as rain and as real as Grandma’s Bible.
    Now I understood why Mama had always forgotten my birthdays. Now I understood why her all-consuming love seemed to change at times to resentment once I reached my teens. Her remarks about my long, lank hair, my tan skin and my full lips—all so different from her own—made sense, too. I could even forgive her for once telling one of my friends that it was too bad I lacked her beauty. She’d been watching me become her worst nightmare, a young woman who looked like her rival.
    Yet I was still knee-deep in sorrow and still churning with questions. According to my newly acquired birth certificate, my birth mother came from Monroe County, Mississippi, and already had another child when she gave birth to me in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And according to Mama, my birth mother had willingly handed me over to my dad. I don’t think I’ll ever know where my father found the courage to bring me home to his wife. Or why Mama, childless though she was, agreed to raise her husband’s love child by another woman. But the two of them had indeed leaped aboard a train in Alabama and got off it in Detroit, a city where they created a life for me without bothering with any uncomfortable paperwork or truths.
    But a funny thing happened while I was packing my bags for a trip to the South that I hoped would enable me to pick up the trail of my maternal relatives, including, perhaps, my biological mother. I woke up that morning with a familiar phrase dancing in my head—“It takes a whole village to raise a child.”
    I recalled that during the slavery era there had been honorary “aunts” and “uncles” on every plantation, ready to wrap their arms around youngsters separated from their parents and school them in the art of survival. Those traditions endured in the twentieth century and beyond.
    My friend’s mother raised the daughter my friend had when she was sixteen. The child grew up believing her mother was her older sister. And just about every black family I knew could tell stories about “cousins” who were actually family friends and “mothers” who were really open-hearted neighbors.
    Mostly, though, I remembered those times when Mama had shown up at my elementary school in the middle of the day, bringing raincoat and boots to protect me from a simmering storm.
    I thought about how she used to lean out of windows to watch me play hopscotch and hide-and-seek, smiling so much I worried that she would crack her face. I remembered all those pork chops and slabs of chocolate cake she’d stuffed into my lunch boxes. And the fact that she and my working-class dad had paid for my weekly piano lessons and sent me to a tuition-charging Catholic school.
    I also thought about all those evenings when Mama had taken me to the movies, too weary