“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” - Zora Neale Hurston.
Growing up, we would sidestep anthills to climb the welcoming fragrant magnolia tree with its pink-white flowers near the gray fence in Grandma Alphair’s front yard. Tonya, Shea, and I would create stealthy challenges: who could climb the tree the highest? Could we jump down quickly before Grandma caught us?
Hot Carolina summers were spent on Susie Road, eating dust and gnats, playing basketball with Chris and Matt on the goal above Chris’s dad’s garage. We’d run morning to midday at the Alvin Community Center, playing tag and basketball, while Grandma ran the summer lunch program. Carting us home on the back of a Dodge Ram, Grandma would fly down Highway 45, never losing her passengers before her last stop at the intersection of Susie and Greentown roads. Greentown Crossroads. Our crossroads. The Crossroad.
Afternoons would turn to evenings, with Great-great Uncle Addy chastising us to stop jumping over the septic tank. Daring each other to go further down the dirt road near the Millers’ property, where older cousins said a man was hung from a big mossy oak. I sweat–happy and insect-bitten, listening for the call of the crickets to nudge me across the dirt road to Grandma’s house.
As an adult, my childhood on the Crossroad called out to me, my memories reminding me that the fast-paced life I was currently living was unsustainable. My life let me know that it wanted to create more moments of my youth. Small spaces of time and being that would become mementos.
There were hallowed moments of quiet, like stillness after storms. Sometimes it was just me and Grandma after school. The television would be off, and Grandma would tell me to set the checkerboard while she tended to the stove’s eye; dinner was almost ready.
She was always cooking: if I was lucky, stewed chicken, maybe a perleau with her macaroni and cheese, and buttery-warm, comforting cornbread muffins.
If I was unlucky, organ meat–the aroma of liver and onions, or gizzards, cartoonishly forming a vapored hand that would tap me on the shoulder, pat the wooden stool, then wave an “uh-uh” finger side-to-side, to let my young self know that I’d be sitting at the bar a long time–tasked with cleaning my plate.
At times I’d sit at her feet, listening to this slight woman recount stories from her past. Sharing memories of her grandparents, Willis and Susie/Papa and Mama, the first free generation in our family. How she sat by Papa’s bedside, afraid to tell him that she was pregnant with Aunt Alonia when he already knew–maybe a dream had told him.
I wanted to share my stories and confidences with my children.
To one day nostalgically reflect on playing Minecraft and Mario Party with them;
To recall playing basketball and board games with them, reminiscent of my youth.
But my life had no room for spare moments of joy. Everything was done hurriedly with an awareness of time ticking.
I always needed more of my own time because it was overcommitted. Servant leadership had become an identity I valued more than my other identities–wife, mother, daughter, sister, granddaughter, and friend. In part, this was difficult because my husband kept sourcing my pro bono woes, and I kept committing myself to friends’ endeavors at community uplift.
In my youth, I learned that Jesus’s washing the disciples' feet showed humility and utility– something to emulate in my life. The actual examples of my grandmothers, mother, aunts, and family members serving in the community and church reinforced this ideal.
But I always remember serving alongside them; my mom volunteered with my Girl Scout troop, and on the Athletic Booster Club when I played sports and after, and for the band and in church, and my grandmother at church and the community center for over half a century. I associated community uplift with God’s calling and saw that there was always room for making memories with loved ones amid work.
Evenings of my youth were spent in the pink front room where Grandma Alphair would play back the cassette of a song she’d recorded after a request to the local gospel radio station. We only had one grocery store and later one stoplight, but we had a gospel radio station in town, where my aunt was an on-air personality.
Grandma would record a song to take to choir rehearsal for practice. Listening to her practice at home was both exciting and comforting.
She’d sing a verse,
back herself up in the chorus,
verse,
bridge,
chorus,
then practice again.
I’d sometimes back her up— singing chorus in our pink-carpeted studio sessions.
Pride would beam up in me, hands ready to clap on Sunday’s downbeat, knowing she would get to lead a song once the choir had it down-pat. Service was always done to and for God, in and with community and family.
In my life, I’d grown used to sacrificing time away from my loved ones to be of service. I saw my grandmother’s example but didn’t have a congruent one that fit my life. When I went to college, law school, and after, I’d balance giving of myself, my time, and my skill, with the other necessary work of making life function–and not very successfully. I stretched and stressed myself. It was fulfilling and challenging work. The reward was when I saw the difference I was making.
When I stopped working in public service in 2012, I still volunteered.
My family and faith legacy was community service, so even after having children, especially after, I felt called to honor in service. Since my day job was not in public service, the only time I had to volunteer was my personal time. And I was already stretched–working outside of the home, caring for small children, and still having to do the unsexy regular life maintenance–it was a full plate.
I found myself responding to others' needs and emergencies by doing favors for a friend of a friend of a friend before I could attend to my own life; community service, the dignity, and benefit of serving others began to feel exhausting, especially when I had little control of when people would call or come over, or how many meetings I had to attend for a friend’s community work and later nonprofit. My overwhelm frankly turned into resentment when I saw that I was missing key moments in my life because I did not place a limit on how much I helped others. A sarcastic WWJD echoed in my brain.
I thought back to where I’d learned everything else, on the Crossroad. I remembered when the belching mechanical doors of the golden bus would release us after MaryLee, our cousin and school bus driver, pulled a handle. We’d hail Taha and Sister Florence, our great-great aunts who sat on the porch peeling oranges or knitting, listening to the radio, or humming. Sometimes we’d stop and sit.
Grandma would always send one of us two houses down with plates of food for Taha and Sister Florence. Later, when Sister Florence moved to Baltimore with her children, Taha would sometimes amble over to Grandma’s house to sit and eat. I think she missed the everyday company. When she got too ill, Grandma took her in, and she died in Grandma’s house.
Sometimes after getting off of the bus, we’d mischievously rush to pick unripe plums from the plum tree in Uncle Addy and Aunt Ruby’s front yard–waiting for the “Y’all ch’ren leave them plum alone!” bidding a warning from behind the mesh of the screen door.
Aunt Ruby had great timing. Unseen and all-knowing, she could pause our greedy little fingers grasping plums before we could pluck them. Enough time to catch us before we could take the fruit or deny the intent.
I wondered how I was creating time for my children to run outside, sneak fruit from trees, visit their elders, and be in and serve our community. I was showing them that service was something Mommy did by herself. This was my skill set; it wasn’t a community or family-based approach. I was selling them (and myself) short.
I felt guilt because God and the ancestors made my way to become a lawyer, so that meant that Black liberation through lawyering was what I was supposed to do, right? Being married into the Latinx community meant providing support was also my calling. Coming from a family of Black farmers meant I was supposed to dedicate hours of meetings with clients, government, stakeholders, and hours of de-briefings after, where I deprioritized my family and myself because my work would be a more significant contribution, right? I was wrong.
What I gained in believing myself to be a good person, a selfless advocate, I lost in time and memorable moments with the people who mattered most. I created pockets of isolation even from my inner self and what it wanted.
When I confronted myself, I had to ask whether the service I saw in my earlier life reflected the service I was giving now. Was this truly servant leadership? I was in my life but at its mercy. I was not living in love.
Love is not people showing up on your doorstep unannounced, interrupting playtime, dinner, bathtime, or bedtime, waiting while you spend hours preparing immigration, tax, and employment forms for them; love is not attending endless Zoom meetings for the foundations that fund the non-profit you knew wasn’t your vision, but your friend said was critical to our mission as movement lawyers.
That my legacy was not the trifles of small moments with my family but the more important work I could do for others. Intellectually I accepted this, but there was always a growing dissatisfaction within me that said that what I longed to do–writing and drawing might be as meaningful one day as collective liberation–that maybe there was liberation in my creative work–for me and others. I’d never find out if I didn’t make time for it. I’d never give myself the space and time to live in love consistently.
To me, love is waking up with one of my daughter’s limbs stretched across my neck;
Coltrane’s blissful transporting in A Love Supreme;
growing up watching Grandma washing string beans in a large gray tub on her screened-in back porch;
James Jamerson’s familiar bass line;
Mommy in Grandma’s living room preparing to tell a hilarious story;
my boys laughing together in conspiracy when they beat me in Smash Bros.
I wanted love to abound more in my life–to create more space for it. To touch and taste it, to hear its laughter and smell its warm aromatic aura. To feel it all around me.
To take moments and make memory in this love.
Everyday.
I wanted reflections only stillness could bring.
I wanted pauses,
deep breathing.
Deeper laughter,
food and music,
loving hugs,
and reminiscing circles where we gathered.
Little could I know that in the season of covid–with death all around us, surrounding my family in particular–I would get all these things.
Such tender words and beautiful memory. Thank you for sharing this amazing story and reflection, Dekera!
The stories you tell are beautiful and liberating. Many us of needed this reminder.