Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks (@1996 by Gloria Watkins)

Mama tells us that it is fine to love our friends but they are not family. Family is more important than friends. We are used to family. We have grown up in family. We are not used to having friends that live nearby. Since we moved from the country to the city everything has changed. We can walk home from school with all the other kids. There are no buses. No one comes from miles and miles away. There is a girl in the third class that they say looks like me, only she has lighter skin and has long hair. Maybe it is because we look alike that we decide to be friends and stay friends forever. Like me she loves to read books, is smart in class, and sometimes wears glasses.

Rena lives around the corner from me. The first time I ask mama if I can go to their house she wants to know who her parents are, what they do. I do not know the answer to these questions, and I do not like them. I am not planning to play with her parents. I do not dare ask why it is important to know about parents as she could become angry and say no. She says yes. I am so excited and afraid at the same time. Rena lives at the very end of Younglove Street. She walks to meet me at the corner of Younglove and Vine. She lives in a house that is painted pink. I do not tell her how much I hate the color pink. She lives with her r grandmother and her mother. When I am introduced to her grandmother she wants to know all about my people. That is easy. When I tell her who they are starting way back, she tells me that Rena and I are probably cousins. This excites us as we want desperately to belong to one another. If we are cousins then we really belong.

We play croquet in the backyard, drink lemonade, and talk about books and boys. We talk about all the wonderful things we are going to do when we grow up. She is going to be a doctor and make sick people well, or a teacher, or a housewife with two children. She is an only child. She says that it is sometimes lonely. I do not tell her how lonely it can be to be one of many, especially if you do not fit in. Instead I tell her that I will be a librarian, a writer, and will never marry. She laughs at me when I say that I will never marry, and tells me of course I will. We have birthdays in the same mouth. We plan our parties together. Later mama says no. Birthdays at our house are for family. I am only a little disappointed. When I ask her if Rena and I are really cousins she says she cannot say, cannot remember that far back.

It does not matter if we are cousins or not. We g together. Even when boys tell us they like Rena better than me, or me better than Rena. We stick out our tongues and keep walking. We spend all our time laughing, talking about books and the future. We spend years meeting each other at the corner of Younglove and Vine.

I am most passionate in my relationship with mama. It is with her that I feel loved and sometimes accepted. She is the one person who looks into my heart, sees its needs and tries to satisfy them. She is also always trying to make me be what she thinks is best for me to be. She tells me how to do my hair, what clothes I should wear. She wants to love and control at the same time. Her love is sustained and deep. Sometimes I feel like a drowning person saved by the pulling and tugging, saved by the breath of air that is her caring. I want to tell her this but the gifts we buy on Mother's Day, at Christmas, on birthdays seem only to make a mockery of that love, to suggest that it is something cheap and silly. I do not want to give these gifts. I do not want to take these times to show my care, times someone else has chosen. She interprets my silence, my last-minute effort at a gift, as a sign of the way I am an uncaring girl. I want so much to please her and yet keep some part of me that is myself, my own, not just a thing I have been turned into that she can like, or do with as she will. I want her to love me totally as I am. I love her totally without wanting that she change anything, not even the things about her that I cannot stand.

We can tell that our mama is not like other mothers. We can see that she is working hard to give us more than food, shelter, and clothes to wear, that she wants to give us a taste of the delicious, a vision of beauty, a bit of ecstasy. Even so, she is moving away from her awareness of the deeper inner things of life and worrying more. I watch these changes in her and worry. I want her never to lose what she has given me——a sense that there is something deeper, something more to this life than the everyday.