Who Gets to Tell the Story?

Now I've told this story before, but it's the kind of story that grows heavier every time I tell it.

I remember sitting in a social service office with my mother, and then we stood to get in the line, and my grown mama, a mother of three, she couldn't read the forms that were handed to her.

And I watched her try to hide it.

And I watched her try to ask the lady at the desk some questions to try to figure out what she should do with it.

I watched her try to look confident.

I watched her try to pretend she understood what that white woman behind the desk was saying.

And then I watched that woman, younger than my mother, have her life experience talked down to her.

Slow her words like she was speaking to a child.

Tap the paper with her pen like my mother was being difficult.

My mother wasn't being difficult.

She was embarrassed.

So when we left that desk, I read the forms for her.

A little black boy reading government paperwork because his mother couldn't.

And I remember understanding that this is what being poor feels like.

Not criminal, not addicted, just unseen, unnoticed, unconnected.

My mother worked jobs that kept us alive, but never got us ahead.

Housekeeper, domestic, whatever you want to call it, maid, babysitter, house cleaner, day's work.

The kind of work where white people younger than you tell you what to do.

The kind of work that keeps your hands busy and your dreams deferred.

We burned coal, wood, and kerosene in the winter.

We dried our clothes by the stove.

We ate government cheese, the kind you had to saw through, but boy was it good.

There was a grayness to being poor.

Not hopelessness.

Just the constant weight of knowing you're just surviving.