The Day I Was Enlightened
Up until the age of 13 I had no thoughts or feelings about African Americans. All the ladies I knew, including my mother, had Black cleaning ladies who would sometimes take two buses at the crack of dawn from the Hill to come and clean. All I knew was that our cleaning lady came on a certain day, and when we would come home from school we were told to not walk across the kitchen floor; Ardella, the cleaning lady, had just mopped it. I would feel this little twist in my heart about the situation; there were no words. I just felt bad about this quiet lady having to do all of these hard physical chores, then walk from Windermere Drive all the way to Swissvale and get the 61B bus to downtown. I had walked that way many times myself. But when I took that walk I hadn’t spent eight hours on my feet, standing on a ladder, washing windows.
About this time I was invited to go to a friend’s house after school. There were four girls there, sitting around a kitchen table. A Black cleaning lady was standing on a kitchen chair, wiping down some shelves. I barely noticed her. The four of us started to talk and gossip about other girls at school, their clothes mostly, but also their personalities and what boys liked them. Suddenly I looked up and saw this cleaning lady leaning her head against one of the shelves, shaking with laughter. It was obvious that she wasn’t crying; she was laughing and SHE WAS LAUGHING AT US. Shame poured over me at that instant when I replayed in my head our silly chatter, the gossip, other girls’ clothes.
As is obvious I was never the same after that day. I didn’t even have to tell anybody about it; I knew, in full, the heart-wrenching story of African Americans
and the white people, in a flash. These realizations do happen in dramatic ways. Soon after that, I met Mrs. Virginia Lewis, our choir teacher, my first black teacher, who was destined to play a pretty big role in my young life. Mrs. Lewis is a woman who has earned the right to have a blog entry all to herself.
After the day of my enlightenment I stopped gossiping. I stopped talking about other girls behind their backs, even if I occasionally hated them. I carried the shame of that moment of our bubble-headed remarks having been overheard by an overworked Black woman, and her response being helpless laughter at the ridiculousness of life.
lgmwriting 