Today is my 100th birthday. I thank God for the
opportunity to live such a long life, and for the opportunity to see so much
throughout my lifetime. It has been a long road and journey to get to where I
am today. However, I have always remained obsessed with one thing throughout my
life, my obsession with cars and travel. I still remember the first time my
father brought home a car to our little Eatonville, Florida house. I was just
eight years old and although it was the middle of the summer, it felt as if it
were Christmas. I marveled at the engineering, the incredible knowledge that
went into creating and building this machine, and idea of being able to freely
travel the land like never before. From that day, it became my dream to work in
a factory to build these cars.
I remember one of the first road trips I took on my own. I
was working in Detroit at my dream job at the Ford plant, but I decided to take
a trip to New York City to visit my sister in Harlem. It was a typical cold February
weekend in New York, but I had the time of my life going to all of the jazz and
dance clubs in Harlem. Black people exuded wealth in Harlem unlike anything I had
ever seen before. The next morning, we decided to attend Abyssinian Baptist
Church and listen to Rev. Adam Clayton Powell deliver the Sunday sermon. The
sermon was unlike anything I had ever heard in my church back in Detroit and
certainly more different than anything ever preached in Eatonville. The sermon
was filled with Rev. Powell pleading the congregation to help those who were “the
least of these” in an effort to uplift the race as a whole. After the service I
managed to run into an idol of mine, writer Richard Wright, who wrote my
favorite book to this day, Black Boy.
He signed the back of my program and introduced me to his companion, a lady
named Simone. I was struck immediately by her beauty and her thick French
accent. I was shocked that a white lady would decide to come to church in
Harlem, but applauded her for wanting to experience what black church was like.
I asked her if she enjoyed the sermon and she nodded in approval.
“I loved the message.” She replied in her heavy accent.
We exchanged our good-byes and then I soon had to get back
on the road to Detroit. I had to be at work the next morning, and a 10-hour
drive was ahead of me. However, I loved the road so the daunting drive ahead
gave me little anxiety. That was one of my favorite weekend road trips in my
life, and meeting one of my idols was a moment I would never forget.
My mother also loved Richard Wright, and, if I remember correctly, she got to meet him that day in the Abyssinian Baptist Church, too. We were in Harlem visiting family, and we all went out to church together. We sat right behind Mr. Wright during Rev. Powell’s sermon. She liked the reverend a lot too. He was mulatto like her children and successful—a congressman, imagine that! But her attention was primarily focused in front of her, watching and listening to Mr. Wright and the white woman he had with him. She was from out of the country, and he explained to her the way church worked in Black communities. There isn’t a minute in a black person’s life that isn’t penetrated by social consciousness, he said. Amen, my mother intoned to herself as she looked over at her children, dreaming of a world in which she could walk through the city with us, and not be presumed to be the maid.
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