We Celebrated That Mother in Baltimore. Now, Are We Willing to Face Our Own Hypocrisy?
Very good read.
I remember the day she beat him with a broomstick.
My oldest brother Donnie had been caught hanging out on the corner with the “wrong crowd,” puffing on the filtered butt of a Kool cigarette. He was 14, some nine years older than me, and already stood much taller than our mother. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, weighing all but 90 pounds.
The year was 1973.
My father was murdered a few months later and, I suppose, Mama was afraid that her first-born son was traveling the same road. She would’ve done anything to save his life. That I know for sure.
snip
We lived in East St. Louis, Illinois then, a township known even to this day for its debilitating poverty and pervasive, violent crime. The distance between the schoolhouse and the jailhouse was not long, even then. Too many of my friends left in the back of a hearse, in a casket surrounded by flowers.
My mother, a young divorcee raising children on her own, never received formal child support and was too ashamed to go to down to the welfare office. She worked double-shifts as a cocktail waitress at a hotel near the St. Louis airport—some 20 miles away, which made it harder to see after her children. After taxes on her meager tips, her paycheck sometimes read “zero dollars.” She retired from that same company after 37 years, having worked her way into management, without a pension. Her 401 (k) was drained over the years. Much of it was spent bailing my brothers out of jail.
Read more: http://bluenationreview.com/we-celebrated-that-mother-in-baltimore-now-are-we-willing-to-face-our-own-hypocrisy/#ixzz3Yki2KStb
Do not judge unless you have been there.
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