I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation.
We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty.
Most of us lived in a state of constant calibration, tweaking one area of life in hopes of bringing more steadiness to another.
I felt it then – the power of what we were doing, the significance of the ritual – as we stood there with our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we said our vows.
I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.
I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.
They were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could be.
If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.
I knew what mattered to me. I didn’t want to be some sort of well-dressed ornament who showed up at parties and ribbon cuttings. I wanted to do things that were purposeful and lasting.
Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done conscientiously and at every opportunity.
It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?
I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to “angry.
Nobody who has the words “first” and “black” attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into favor.
I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately – even alone.
Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s the power of using your voice. I tried my best to speak the truth and shed light on the stories of people who are often brushed aside.
My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school.
When I thought I had a good idea about something, I didn’t like being told no.
This is doable, of course – minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time – but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.
My friends made me whole, as they always have and always will.