Gloria J. Quinney
I Am My Sister’s Keeper
The best mirror is an old friend.
George Herbert
The Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season conjures feelings that I do not have at any other time of year. I live in the Midwest, and there is always a chill in the air and plenty of warmth in the spirit. The contrast is exhilarating, and the stimulation causes my heart to pump wildly from the expectancy of this wondrous holiday season. Inevitably it delivers a joy that is inexplicable. When I was a child, my mother stressed using this season to convey appreciation to those who had impacted your life during the year, and to this day that is the focus of my giving. There is the mailman, the dry cleaners, the person at the corner store who speaks to me, the doctors and their staffs, and the list goes on. I usually find that my energy runs out before I reach out to all those who have blessed my life. But, for years, there was a “forgotten” group that never crossed my mind.
I had lost both of my parents by the time I was twenty-four, and because I had married and moved away at twenty-one, the distance slowly erased my memory of those people who had been so significant to my “growing years.” Time went by, and it was not until nearly thirty-plus years later when I attended a family member’s funeral in my hometown that one of the women I had known, Mrs. T., came to me and was overjoyed to see me. I was stunned, and a reality pervaded my soul. It had been eons since I had seen her and many others from my childhood years.
“Oh, my God,” I said to her. “I didn’t know you were still with us!”
Her son had died when he was thirty-six, and she was now over ninety years old. She remembered me like it was yesterday. Her son and I were great friends. We had gone through elementary, junior and senior high, and graduated together. Back in that day, every parent looked out for you, and you had the same kind of respect for them as you did for your own parents.
This encounter rocked my very being. I had run into several other elders in recent past years, but none matched this connection. When I saw my first Sunday school teacher from my home church, he nearly cried. I promised him I would write. And I did. I had seen others from time to time whose emotional response was similar and I embraced each and then wrote them. But the depth of the lesson did not hit me until I followed my Spirit in reaching out to Mrs. T.
It was the holiday time, and as usual, I was reflecting on the year. I realized I had not written to Mrs. T. for a few months, so I decided to give her a call. She answered the phone and was quite excited about my being on the phone. Now she does not like talking long distance no matter who is paying for it. She always says it costs too much, so you have to hurry through your conversation. I got the gist of how she was doing and that things were going well except for a “little arthritis.” Her demeanor always reminded me that life was about the business of living and giving. She was still driving others around who needed her help. She started telling me about her church’s anniversary and how thrilled she was to be wearing a long dress and going to one of the city’s finest hotels. I listened, smiled to myself and hung onto the wisdom of her every word.
As soon as I hung the phone up, I began to reflect and felt a prompting in the Spirit to order her a corsage for her special event. I told the florist that she was ninety-three, and to make her something beautiful, but simple. I hung up the phone and quietly thanked God for her, the opportunity to show my appreciation, and for the love that we have for our churches. They have always been our refuge.
Two days later on Friday morning, I played my messages and Mrs. T. was on there—very, very emotional. All I could hear was my name over and over—and how shocked she was to get the flowers. I tilted my head to the side and smiled, and felt that feeling that occurs when your giving touches “that place” in someone. I felt as if God had chosen me to be the lucky one to deliver this joy. As I moved about my day, the same Holy Spirit urged me to call her. She could not stop telling me what the gesture meant to her and how surprised she had been when the flowers arrived.
Then she said, “Now why did I have to wait until I was ninety-three years old to get my first corsage!”
In that moment, I’m not sure which of us felt more blessed.
Nikki D. Shearer-Tilford
Meeting Maya
We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets.
Olaudah Equiano (1745?–1801), slave autobiographer
San Francisco is an autumn town, but it was July and it was scorching. I had flown to the Bay Area from San Diego, where I had been living for five years. Being born and raised in Philadelphia, the change from the Northeast to the Southwest coast was dramatic for me. So far, I had found San Diego to be a beautiful but sleepy work environment. I had cut my writing teeth in New York City and was a bit bored in San Diego. I was anxious to fly to Oakland to meet a longtime friend who was in town to promote her first book.
I had been writing seriously for over twenty years and published many times. There were also well-attended performance readings in New York City, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, San Francisco and San Diego. For several engagements, I performed with a band. My writing paid my rent more than once. It lived in me and helped me live.
Somehow during the trip to Oakland, I had an epiphany. I would stop writing the poetry I had loved to write since I was eight years old. I surmised that this would somehow make me feel better and solve the problems I’d been experiencing in San Diego.
When I shared my thoughts about giving up writing, my friend was alarmed. “You are poetry!” she said.
“Poetry is for the birds. There is no job description, lousy pay and long hours,” I said.
Despite our conflict, we had a wonderful visit. I was very proud of her. For myself, I felt it was getting too late to publish a book. Obstacles such as poor health, mobility and money were preventing me from furthering my work.
After my friend flew back to the east coast, I spent the afternoon with a young married couple. My flight was leaving from Oakland later that evening. On my way to my friends’ house in Berkeley, we stopped at my favorite supermarket-deli-bakery. The deli makes a turkey breast sandwich with Swedish lingonberries. The combination of sweet and tart is pleasing, especially on the hard roll that the juice soaks into. This is the food that soothes, preparing me not to be a poet anymore.
At the checkout stood only a stately black woman, half-through purchasing a rather large order. Something seemed to tell her to turn around as I approached the line. She turned. She smiled. Maya Angelou! It was Maya Angelou in line in front of me at Andronico’s Market.
Without saying hello, she asked my name. I spoke as if in a Twelve-Step meeting, “My name is minerva [pen name, small ‘m,’ after the goddess of wisdom] and I am a poet,” I said.
By this time my friends had joined me in line. Later, they told me what they were thinking: “Maya Angelou! Wow, minerva knows everybody!”
Maya was majestic, even in the Sunday afternoon “buy me” lights of a grocery store. She was regal, leaning over her stick of French bread. Dressed in earth tones, she reminded me of the Earth Mother I imagined her to be.
When Maya Angelou heard me say that I was a poet, she beamed. She placed the divider down for me to put my groceries on the conveyor belt. With a welcoming motion of her hand she said gleefully, “Well, step on up!”
We started to chat, briefly musing about hunger and choices and the price of food. I told her that I was buying snacks for the plane trip back to San Diego. I also mentioned that I visited two women’s prisons with my friend to talk about writing. My friend had served time and ended up becoming an award-winning journalist. Maya’s reaction was strong. She cried a sincere thank-you and loudly professed that the inmates were her sisters and daughters.
The few minutes we visited together were magical and divine. I wanted to get as close as I could to her side. It was as if we had this sacred space carved out just for us, for this particular point in time—a crossroads in my life.
As
Maya Angelou gave the cashier her credit card, I noticed that the cashier and the other shoppers didn’t seem to have a clue as to who our national treasure was: poet, actress, singer, professor and so much more. This was the author of President Bill Clinton’s inaugural poem: “On the Pulse of Morning.” Well, that’s poetry for you, I thought.
Ms. Angelou was kind enough to write me a message on the back of my pocket computer’s manual (the only thing quickly available for her signature).
“Poet on in Joy!” she wrote. And I did.
When I returned to Southern California, I was a writing fool. What wonders have emerged from what at first seemed a chance meeting in a Bay Area supermarket-deli-bakery. Some blessings from God are not in disguise.
minerva
also known as Gail Hawkins
Food from the ’Hood
Success is when your cup runneth over and your saucer too!
Nathaniel Bronner Sr.
I was in junior high school when the verdict came out: The four policemen filmed beating Rodney King were acquitted. South Central Los Angeles exploded in riots. I was outraged at the looting and burning that took over our city. I thought, Why burn your own neighborhood?
At the age of fourteen, I had experienced some tumultuous times myself. There were times I didn’t know where my next meal would come from, but I had never been driven to the point of violence. The events of that spring made no sense to me.
The next fall I enrolled at Crenshaw High School, one of the most notoriously gang-ridden high schools in South Central L.A. One day, my biology teacher, Tammy Bird, asked a few students to meet her during lunch hour. She introduced us to Melinda McMullen, a business executive who was looking for a way to help rebuild our community. Together, they proposed that we turn the abandoned plot of land behind our classroom into an organic garden. With Ms. Bird offering extra credit and Melinda offering pizza, it was an offer too good to refuse.
For the next few weeks, about a dozen of us spent our time after school cutting down the weeds in the garden, most of them taller than we were. The ground was so hard and dry that we had to take an extra Saturday to prepare the soil. Then we planted herbs and vegetables. Before long, we were growing more than we could eat—so the idea of selling our bounty was a natural.
In September 1993, we held our first official business meeting. We named ourselves “Food from the ’Hood” and decided to use our profits to fund college scholarships.
That April, we took our vegetables to Santa Monica’s Farmers’ Market, which is in a pretty ritzy part of Los Angeles. At first we felt out of place. People ignored us. I don’t think that they knew what to make of a bunch of Latino and African American teenagers at a vegetable stand touting “Food from the ’Hood.” Finally, one of the guys bounced out of the booth and walked up to people saying, “Hi, I’m Ben Osborne from Crenshaw High. We’ve grown some organic veggies that are just too good to pass up!” People started buying our produce like crazy. For the rest of the school year, we had sell-out weekends.
But even with the success of our farmers’ markets, we ended the school year with a profit of only six hundred dollars to put toward the scholarships. (Farming is so expensive!) It was clear we had to find an additional route to profits if we wanted to go to college. That’s when we decided to go into the salad dressing business. After all, as my friend Karla Becerra said, “We grow ingredients for salads, so why not make what goes on top?”
Our next step was to develop a recipe. Our first priority: low sodium. High blood pressure is a serious issue among minorities in our community. Our second priority: low fat. We wanted to make people healthy, as well as make money!
That December, we had a tremendous surprise. Rebuild L.A., a nonprofit organization formed out of the riots, gave us startup funding of fifty thousand dollars. Armed with our seed money, we found someone to manufacture our dressing and made our first large batch. We also used the money to buy office equipment and set up shop in a storage room near the garden. Also, we hired Aleyne Larner, one of our adult volunteers, to be the company’s full-time advisor.
I’ll never forget our first sales call. It was with the senior vice president of Vons, one of the largest grocery store chains in California. The room was full of men in suits and us—a group of kids from South Central! We told them about our product and how well it would sell, and they agreed to stock it. Other large grocery chains also decided to carry our dressing.
On April 29, 1994, on the second anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, we announced to the community that Food from the ’Hood’s Straight Out of the Garden salad dressing was available in two thousand supermarkets. No one had ever dreamed we could be so successful.
Soon after that, we heard that England’s Prince Charles would be visiting Los Angeles. Carlos Lopez, our fourteen-year-old PR manager, wrote and invited him to visit us. We didn’t know it at the time, but Prince Charles is a huge fan of organic gardening and has his own company that helps build economic empowerment in the inner cities of England. No one thought that he would come. But a few weeks later, we received a call from a representative of the British consulate saying, “The prince would be delighted.”
Three weeks before the prince was scheduled to arrive, our office was vandalized. All of our computer equipment, fax machines and telephones were stolen or destroyed. Some of us burst out crying. But Ben said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” We decided to come back stronger than ever. Many people from the community helped with repairs, and a few businesses donated money to replace the stolen equipment. Our school district even donated a telephone. We were back in business.
The day of the prince’s visit finally came. I shook hands with the Prince of Wales! Karla, who used to be really shy, showed him around our garden. There were lots of reporters trying to crowd around, but Prince Charles waved them back and said, “I’m afraid you’re trampling on their lettuce.” He had lunch with us and ate an entire plate of salad with our salad dressing on it. Then he said, “Your garden is truly remarkable.” After the prince’s visit, the British consulate gave us a gift: a company delivery truck. We call it the Chuck Wagon.
Today, Food from the ’Hood is ten years old and the biggest success ever seen at Crenshaw High School. Our salad dressings—we now have three flavors—are sold in grocery and natural food stores in twenty-three states. To date, we’ve had more than 120 student-owners participate in Food from the ’Hood. Most have gone on to pursue higher education. This year, many of us are graduating from colleges all over the United States, including UC Berkeley, Stanford and San Diego State.
I feel like I owe a lot to that quarter-acre plot in back of my old classroom. We all do. The garden is where it all started. Ms. Bird always said one of the most important things about gardening is composting—how you can take leftovers and garbage and turn them into fertile soil for growing great things. Well, truer words were never spoken. I’ve never seen a bigger waste than the riots—and look what great things we grew out of that!
Jaynell Grayson
One Miracle at a Time
Remember, luck is opportunity meeting up with preparation, so you must prepare yourself to be lucky.
Gregory Hines
In July 1996, I began to lose weight rapidly and was not eating much. I lost so much weight my clothes began to fall off of me. The following November, I experienced a migraine headache for the first time, and it scared me. I went to the doctor to have it checked out.
A week later my nephrologist told me that I had end-stage renal disease. My kidneys were failing and I had to have emergency surgery to be prepared for dialysis— either hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis.
I went home and jumped on the computer to research renal disease. I discovered that end-stage renal disease is when the kidney does not filter out the waste products in your body. It allows the waste to get into your bloodstream and causes toxicity. Once this happens, a person will eventually die if preventive measures are not taken, such
as dialysis or a kidney transplant. I joined the National Kidney Foundation and did research on dialysis. I found out that over 150,000 patients on dialysis with ESRD are awaiting a transplant either from a live donor or a cadaver.
I soon went on dialysis and started the search for a kidney donor. I continued to live my life to the fullest. I traveled, played softball and enjoyed my life as much as I possibly could.
Then in December 2000, I did something that would change my life forever: I enrolled in a three-part series of self-development courses. The first class allowed me to discover who I truly am and understand what I am all about. I was able to come to grips with my relationship with my son and realized what I could do to make that relationship stronger.
The second class of this series took place in February 2001. I wanted to take the class, but wasn’t ready to shell out the $650 it was going to cost. However, God works in mysterious ways, and something just told me to hand over the credit card and take the class. So reluctantly, I agreed.
Once inside the class, I noticed approximately a hundred people of all races, creeds and colors. I was quite comfortable in the class, but one of the requirements presented a dilemma. The instructor said that no one in the class would receive credit until we were all in attendance for four consecutive days. That meant arriving at 9:00 A.M. and staying until midnight, which created a problem for me because I had to go to dialysis the very next morning at 5:30 A.M. and would not be able to make it to class until after 10:00 A.M.