Contents

"A Word Before We Start:
Anna Mae and Me"

     The first Strong Black Woman I ever met was Anna Mae. We were introduced early one morning in June of 1961 in the maternity ward of Wilmington General Hospital. I knew from our first moment together that this forty-year-old, five-times-married, oldest daughter of eighteen in a small farming family in northeast Maryland, was indeed a Strong Black Woman. She had arranged for us to meet in spirit long before that day. After several months of being bedridden due to a difficult pregnancy and the looming risk of miscarriage, she did not want to miss a moment of the festivities surrounding my arrival and our meeting. She was so determined to have things go her way that she misled the attending nurses regarding the timing of her contractions so that they wouldn’t rush her into the delivery room and give her a shot of gas to numb the pain. Mom worked in that hospital as an LPN. She knew of several newborn babies who had suffered permanent brain damage due to invasive techniques used in the delivery room at that time. For many years after, she would say to me, “I wasn’t gonna let a little pain stop me from making sure that you were all right! I didn’t want those doctors using any clamps to pull you out.”

From the very beginning, my mother, like many Strong Black Women I know, often placed the needs of others above her own safety and comfort. She was more adept at survival than most of her contemporaries. Like Mom, Strong Black Women are master jugglers of life’s challenges.

How do these women do it all? Well, I can tell you how my mother did it, because I was there to watch her weave her magic into my life and the lives of everybody she touched. She did it through a lot of self-sacrifice. She sacrificed her dream of becoming a professional businesswoman for the role of housewife and mother. She suffered through years of an estranged and guilt-ridden relationship with my sister, her only daughter, who failed to live up to her expectations. She made her own clothes and bought day-old bread so I could take private violin and piano lessons. Looking back, I see the sacrifices she made were not commensurate with the benefits. But my mother, and millions of women of color just like her, found and cultivated her strength through selfless acts of love and protection. While one could say many things about Mom, you could never say she wasn’t a Strong Black Woman. This strength was both her virtue and her vice. It wasn’t until the very end of her life that she arrived at her ultimate realization: life is less about being strong and more about being happy.

I never knew much about Mom’s inner world. She was happily married to my father, husband number five—a loving and devoted man. She never talked much about her previous marriages except to refer to the negative things that had happened. In each situation, there was some straw that broke the camel’s back, at which point she left the marriage in an attempt to save her soul and reclaim her happiness. By the time I was born, when she was in her early forties, she had comfortably settled into her role as matriarch: the Strongest Black Woman in our family. Everyone counted on her for every little thing. Very seldom did the phone ring with an offer of comfort or guidance for her, but rather it was usually a request (or a demand) for her strength. She herself never learned how to ask for help when she needed it. Perhaps she gave up hope that anyone else could supply that help for her.

There were many things she kept hidden from the world. For example, I know now that she battled with self-blame, the unhealed hurt of past failed relationships and the numbing pain of being black and female in America. Her personal struggles at times made her controlling, jealous, obsessive, and insecure. Her strength came with the expectation that everyone she loved should be perfect, according to her definition. If they failed to live up to her expectations—and they often did—it was as if she had failed herself. She showed her love first through sacrifice, then compassion.

Over the years from childhood to adulthood, I was shaped by that sacrifice, and that strength. She was my Superwoman, my Get Christie Love, my Oh Mighty Isis. In time, I began to see the toll that being everybody’s everything was taking on her emotional, spiritual, and physical health. She showed a fierce game face to the world that counted on her, but few people really knew the conversations that were taking place within, between her head, heart, and soul. It takes a lot out of a woman to live a life in which she is always battle-ready. Being a Strong Black Woman meant that often she was both the soldier and the Red Cross nurse in everyone’s life but her own. The biggest lesson she had to learn about being strong didn’t come until about a year before she crossed over.

After a life full of caregiving, penny pinching, and worrying, Mom developed what I refer to as black folks’ diseases: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and a chronic congestive heart condition. Still, in their golden years Mom and Dad found a lot of pleasure in taking the senior citizen center’s day trip to the casinos in Atlantic City. Mom loved “workin’” the quarter slot machines. She would play three machines at a time while canvassing the floor to observe others she felt were “ready to dump.” On one particular day, she got lucky and hit the jackpot. The bells and lights, the jingle of the coins falling into the metal plate—it all overwhelmed her, causing a mild heart attack. Mom fell to the floor, her quarters, pocketbook, and personal possessions scattering in every direction. Unconscious, she was rushed to the hospital.

Being the tough old lady that she was, Mom survived that attack like she had so many other challenges. But this particular incident changed her life. A few days later, Mom told me that she believed she’d had a near-death experience. The last thing she remembered was carrying the coins in her arms and yelling for Dad to come help her guard the money she had won. “The next thing I knew, I was floating peacefully like a feather and I saw beautiful bright lights,” she said. “It was the most peaceful experience of my life. I had no fear, worry, or pain.” Fear, worry, and pain were conditions that had come to define much of the quality of her life at that point. “Toby, if this is what heaven is like, then nobody should be afraid to die.” In a strange way, this close brush with death completely changed the way she looked at life.

Over the following year, I watched Mom become another woman. Her brush with death altered her very essence.  It was as if she had finally figured out the point of her life and was freeing herself from all of the blame and pain that had defined her sense of self for so long. During the last year of her life, we talked openly and honestly for the first time about the things that really mattered. The often judgmental and over-protective tone that had always characterized much of her manner toward me was replaced with a newfound wisdom—that she had done her best to teach me what she knew about life, and that in the end, it was my life to live. I watched her cultivate the forgiveness she needed to end her lifelong strife with my older sister. She even forgave herself once and for all for the marital mistakes she had made.

And I began to see other small but powerful changes. She ended every conversation or visit with everyone by telling them how much she loved them, as if it were going to be her last opportunity to do so. She and Dad decided to give the grandkids their inheritance while they were both alive, so they could be around to see them enjoy it. More than anything else, she never missed a day of her favorite soap opera, and wouldn’t answer the phone when The Young and the Restless was on TV. She laughed, cried, joked, and loved like never before.

During this final year of life, Mom’s spirit seemed to transcend the torment of her rapidly failing physical condition. It was as if the problems in her body no longer mattered. She used to obsess about how her failing health stopped her from doing things that she needed to do (for everybody else). Now, she did what she really wanted to do. Thus, she discovered true inner peace for the first time. Watching Mom reach this level of self-acceptance, self-caretaking, self-love, and self-forgiveness was the greatest gift she could have given me. Being strong was no longer at the center of her equation for living. Just being happy was.

What happened during this time was simply a change in her belief system. She changed how she saw herself in relation to her world and to the people who shared it with her. She turned her sensitivity from self-criticism to self-caretaking. She allowed those she loved to find their own way in life, rather than follow the path she deemed best for them. She lovingly and gently forgave herself for her own faults, cherished her simple pleasures, and stopped denying her truth to the world. Why did she have to wait until almost the very end to claim this deeper sense of love, self-care, and joy? Wasn’t it there for her all along?

^top