Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [137]
“We all tried to tell her not to have that last baby. She said she was goin’ to no matter what. Well, she had him, and Dora took him. Took him right outta the hospital. See, you and Ray were your mother’s children. That little boy was Dora’s from day one. Sarah kept you in a dresser drawer right near her bed, but she gave that other baby away. It almost killed her to have that baby. It did kill her. She wouldn’t let them take her breasts off. She said she would die first. She said if God let her live long enough to see Ray turn three, she would never take another drink. Ray was gonna be three March thirty-first. She passed on March twentieth. She wanted to give him a party.
“It wasn’t until we got to the cemetery that we realized what was goin’ on. Your father had her buried in a grave with a whole bunch of other people. When I saw that, I fainted right out there on the cold ground in the cemetery. If only he had asked, we would have put my sister away proper. He never asked. He was Mr. Big Shot. Anyway, I wanted you to come live with me, but your daddy said no. Your mother wanted you and Ray to stay together. Since your grandmother wanted Ray and not you, you both ended up there because your daddy was there.”
“Did he really beat her?”
“Listen, your momma loved that man, and when she loved, she loved forever. Your momma could not live without love. We loved her, but she needed the kind of love she got from a man. I want you to be different. Love God. If you love God, he will bring you a man. I love God so much he gave me a husband when I turned seventy-six years old. I just married an old man with a bad heart. But he makes me very happy.”
We talked awhile longer, and Aunt Mabel gave me pictures of my parents and other family members. We both knew that I did not want to leave her, but Adeyemi was waiting for me. We were standing in the hallway, holding on to one another, when Aunt Mabel reached up, took my face in both of her hands, and said to me, “When you were born, your mother called me and said, ‘Snookie’—she called me Snookie—‘she is going to be something great. I can see it in her eyes. Maybe she will write. Or maybe she will be a great and famous dancer. I am going to put my mark on her, because she is going to be somebody one day.’ Your momma didn’t say that about either of your brothers. She said it about you. Your mother loved you. She and I both knew that you were some kind of miracle. She knew that you were born to do God’s good work. I want you to know that. I want you to know I love you too.”
I never saw Aunt Mabel again. She died ten days after I walked out of her house.
The similarities between my mother and me were amazing. Aunt Mabel’s words kept ringing in my ears, “You have to be different.” Until that moment, I thought there was something wrong with being different. I was trying to be like everyone else, but I had to be different. The other thing that kept coming up in my brain was “a proper burial.” My mother had not had a proper burial, and neither had Rhonda.
When I asked my husband to dig a small hole in the back yard for me, he told me I was crazy.
“It’s midnight. It’s freezing, and we don’t have a shovel.”
“Use a spoon. I don’t want to bury somebody, I just need a little hole.”
“Aren’t you taking this a bit far? What are you putting in the hole?”
“A lot of crap. I need to bury the crap.” I knew if I kept talking, he would figure a way out of it. I turned and left him lying across the bed. I went into my office and started looking for pictures of Rhonda.
I was trying to find pictures of myself at every stage of my life before Balé gave me my name. I found teenage pictures, pictures of me when I was pregnant, pictures of me with John. I found a picture of myself smoking