“Not My Child”

It was summertime. My friend and I were riding bikes on the steep hill of our street when we crashed into each other. She was a big girl. We slid down the hill, her on top of me, a tangle of two bodies and two bikes –on my face. I felt my face scraping down the asphalt. When family and neighbors pulled us up, they gasped. Nothing was broken but the whole left side of my face was skinned and deeply cut up, grated as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it-- with bits of stone stuck in the pitted cuts.

My mother cleaned it out, applied antibiotic cream and bandaged it. She took me to a doctor, a dermatologist, I learned later. He said that beyond giving us some antibiotics, there was no more he could do, that my face would heal and eventually scar over. I am Black, so there was the chance of raised keloid scarring. I remember how casually he said that I could be disfigured for the rest of my life. My mother considered him cooly and took me home.

He was White, so maybe he did not know about cocoa butter. She did. It is a staple in Black homes for burns, cuts, and general moisturization. It is light-yellow and has a nutty, buttery aroma with a sweet top note. At the time, it came in little white metal tubes that pushed it up from the bottom, like push popsicles. My mother bought several tubes, dug them out with a warm knife and slowly melted the butter in a pot on the stove, until it was warm but not hot, the consistency of a lotion. Three times a day, she carefully cleaned my face and gently patted the butter thickly into the wound-scape of my face and covered it up with white gauze. My face was being soaked in butter because, she said, it was important that the skin never dry out. I remember that the look on her face was determined.

It worked. By the start of school in the fall, my face did not stand out among my acne-riddled peers. Eventually, it healed completely, with no keloids, no scars at all, and no discoloration. You could not tell it was ever so grated.

Not My Child.

At the start of 5^th grade, several teachers stood in the front of the room. They called up a group of us and took us to the classroom next door. We did not know what was happening but one teacher said, “We will show those white people.” School integration was to happen the following year. Comparing our work with that of the rest of the students, we soon realized that we were going much faster than they were. When they introduced 6^th grade books midyear, we realized that they were teaching us the 5^th and 6^th grade curricula.

When I entered the 6^th grade at the newly integrated David Miller Junior Highschool, I knew all the material, so I did not find it odd that I was ahead of my mostly White classmates. I was actually enjoying tutoring them and the teacher did not seem to take notice. One of my mother’s friends, a fellow teacher, walked by and looked in. She called my mother and asked why I was in the remedial classroom.

Not My Child.

My mother was there the next day. We had an after-school appointment with the principal, a White man. My mother did not mention that she, too, was an educator or that I had been a student at the same school where she taught. She told him that she believed that a mistake had been made. The principal assured her that there had not, that they had carefully reviewed all the incoming children’s files and I was where I was supposed to be. He smiled and said that many parents overestimated their children’s abilities. My mother got that look again. I remember that she settled back in her chair and said, “I’m not leaving until you pull her file.” He sighed. He looked tired. I guess he wanted to go home. He pulled my file. He’d had it in his desk drawer the whole time. He did not open it. My mother did. With one motion, she opened the file directly to the page where the standardized test scores were. She pointed to a section on the page. The principal did a double take and looked at me with surprise. When he recovered, he stood and said he would need to double check that the report was accurate. Still sitting, she turned the page and showed him they were consistent with my scores over the years and answered his unasked question, that yes, she was a teacher too. I was transferred to the “Gifted and Talented” class the next day.

Not My Child.

Years later, I was at a house party of Black professionals. A couple of drinks in, we started telling stories about our mamas. Others joined us until there was a circle of people. Every one of us had stories like mine, about our mamas saying “Not My Child.” One told a story about his mother after a White nun had hit his hand repeatedly with a triangular ruler. He was at the blackboard, working to solve a math problem when he made a mistake. She hit his hand with the sharp edge of the ruler, which caused him to make another mistake, another strike, another mistake, another strike, until his hand was swollen shut. When he got home, his mother asked what happened. She dragged him back to the school and found the nun, who tried to dismiss her and walk away. The Black mother grabbed her arm so forcibly that the nun’s head piece fell off. He had been absolutely sure that they were both going to hell. But the nun never hit him again.

Not My Child.

One by one, every one of us told a story of our mamas going up against White people, fighting for us, against poor treatment and low expectations. After the last one, someone said what we were all thinking, “What would have become of us if our mamas had not done what they did? If they had not pushed against the world’s intentions and assumptions about us Black children?

We don’t even know.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the fierce mamas.