I was six years old.

Mommy, as we call her, had some local mothers over along with their kids. We played outside. One of the kids, Billy, blindsided me with a board that had a nail that cut into my scalp. My hair has not grown on that spot since. I ran inside, accompanied by some of the kids. Mommy remained serene and never showed any sign of outrage; I wanted her to be an angry Black woman. I was an adult before I began to appreciate how much fear my mother had living in a nearly all-white world, even in California’s Bay Area.

When I was around fifteen, I joined a local Black consciousness/empowerment group for youths. There I met a lot of other great high school students. We prepared a song, drama, dance and spoken word show for the public at the largest auditorium in the county. While my dad was frequently gone as a military parent, Mommy was eager to attend and support me.  

When the show ended, my mother pushed through the swarm to take my arm and lead me directly to the car. She was angry. She was mortified. Because some of her white friends were there, she was embarrassed by this bold display of beautiful blackness. 

Mom grew up in Jim Crow North Carolina, white faces were always a mortal menace. Black folks were still fleeing the apartheid South. The Great Migration ties Venezuela as the largest refugee crisis in the Western hemisphere. But many of the people who migrated only did so physically. They left Jim Crow, but it would be much later before their minds migrated, too. My mother is a survivor of societal abuse. Because she overcame, her children live strong in the world.