I have often wondered why the farthest out positions always feel so right to me; Why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan Running straight down a line in the unruffled middle. What I really understand is a particular kind of determination. it is stubborn, it is painful, it is infuriating, but it often works. My mother was a very powerful woman. this was so in a time when the word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white American common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind or hunchback or crazy or Black. Therefore when I was growing up powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply “woman” it certainly did not, on the other hand, equal “man”.

what then? what was this their designation?

As a child I always knew my mother was different from the other women I knew, black or white. I used to think it was because she was my mother.

but different how?

I was never quite sure there were other west Indian women around, a lot in our neighborhood and church. There were also other black women as light as she, particularly among the low island women Redbone they were called. Different how? I never knew. But that is why to this day I believe that there have always been black dykes around– in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women– who Would rather have died then use that name for themselves. And that includes my mommma.

I've always thought that I learned some early ways I treated women from my father. But he certainly responded to my mother in a very different fashion. They shared decissions and the making of all policy, both in their business and in the family. Whenever anything had to be decided about any one of the three of us children, even about new coats, they would go into the bedroom and out their heads together for a little while, Buzz buzz would come through the closed door, sometimes in english, sometimes in patois, that Grenadian poly-language which was their lingua franca. Then the two of them would emerge and announce whatever decision had been arrived upon.

"They spoke all through my childhood with one unfragmentable and unappealable voice"

After the children came, my father went to real estate school, and began to manage a small rooming-houses in Harlem. When he came home from the office in the evening, he had one quick glass of brandy, standing in the kitchen, after we greeted him and before he took off his coat and hat. Then my mother and he would immediately retire into the bedroom where we would hear them discussing the days events from behind closed doors, even if my mother had only left their office a few hours before.

If any of us children had transgressed against the rule, this was the time when we truly quaked in our orthopedic shoes, for when your fate was being discussed in the terms of punishment sealed behind those doors when they open, a mutual and irrefutable judgment would be delivered. If they spoke of anything important when we were around, mother and daddy immediately spoke into patois.

Since my parents shared all making a policy and decision, in my child’s eyes, my mother must have been other than women. Again she was certainly not man. (The three of us children would not have tolerated that deprivation of womanliness for long at all; we’d have probably packed up our kra and gone back before the eighth day— An option open to all African chid souls who bumble into the wrong milieu.) My mother was different from other woman, and sometimes she gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. But sometimes it gave me pain and I fancied it the reason for so many of my childhood sorrows.

If my mother were like everybody else’s maybe they would like me better?

But most often, the difference was like the season or a cold day or a steaming night in June. It just was, with no explanation or evocation necessary.

My mother introduced sisters with large and graceful woman whose ample body seemed to underline the air of determination with which they move through their lives in the strange world of Harlem and America. To me, my mother‘s physical substance and the presence of self possession with which she carried herself were a large part of what made her a different. Her public air of in charge confidence was quiet and effective. On the street people different to my mother over questions of taste, economic, opinion, quality, and not to mention who had the right to the first available seat on the bus. I saw my mother fix her blue gray brown eyes upon a man’s scrambling for a C on the Lenox Avenue bus, only to have him falter Midway, grin bashedly, and, as if in the same movement, offer it to the old woman standing on the other side of him. I became aware, early on, that sometimes people would change their actions because of some opinion my mother never others, or even particularly cared about.

My mother was a very private woman, and actually quite shy, but with A very imposing, no nonsense exterior. Full-bosomed, proud, end of no means size, she would launch herself Down the street like a ship under for sale, usually pulling me stumbling behind her. Not too many Hardy souls there cross her proud to closely.

Total strangers return to her in the meat market and ask what she thought about a cut of meat as to its freshness and appeal and suitability for such and such, and the butcher, impatient, Would nonetheless wait for her opinion, obviously quite a little put out but still deferential. Strangers accounted upon my mother and I never knew why, but as a child it made me think she had a great deal more power than in fact she really had. My mother was invested in this Image of herself also, and took pains, I realize now, to hide from us as children the many instances of her powerlessness. Being black and foreign and female in New York City in the 20s and 30s was not simple, particularly when she was quite light enough to pass for white, but her children weren’t.

In 1936-1938, 125th Street between Lenox and Eighth Avenues, Later to become the shopping Mecca of black Harlem, we’re still a racially mixed area, with control and patronage largely in the hands of white shopkeepers. There were stores into which Black people were still not welcome, and no black sales person worked in the shops at all. We’re out of money was taken, it was taken with reluctance; and often too much was asked. (It was these conditions which young Adam Clayton Powell Jr., addressed in his boycott and picketing of Blumstien’s and Weissbecker’s market in 1939 an Attempt, successful, to bring black employment to 125th Street.) Tensions on the street were high as they always are in racially mixed zones of transition. As a very little girl, I remember shrinking from a particular sound, a horse lea sharp, guttural rasp, Because it often meant a nasty glob of gray spittle upon my coat or shoe an instant later. My mother wiped it off with the little pieces of newspaper she always carried in her purse. Sometimes she fussed about low class people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter where they went, impressing upon me that Does humiliation was totally random. It never occurred to me to doubt her.