Teacher
By Roger Lovette
Going back to one`s hometown after a long absence can be a moving experience. Weeks after Christmas I visited relatives there. While I was home the lady who had kept us as children was celebrating her ninetieth birthday. I called her and an old familiar voice answered that took me back across the years. She had been our maid and nanny while my parents worked in the cotton mill. She took care of my brother and me. Later, when we were old enough for school she would move to the mill. Still after work she would clean our house. She was my first teacher and confidant. I would tell her things I would not dare tell my parents or anyone else. I would pour out my fears, my dreams, and my frustrations on that old round kitchen table that used to be in the center of our kitchen. I talked. Nancy, always in motion, washing dishes, preparing a meal, Cleaning or dusting, would listen. From time to time she would stop and respond: "Just you wait, Mr. Roger, just you wait. It`s gonna be all right." And when 1 would raise an objection, "But…" She would shake her head and raise her voice: "Didn`t you hear me? Just you wait."
I didn`t know then that she had five children of her own. 1 didn`t know how hard life must have been raising them as a single parent. I didn`t know she lived hand to mouth on the meager dollars we were able to pay her or the money she made sweeping floors in the mill. Neither did I know that she could not get the same job in that mill as the white women or that she would never make as much money as they. She never talked about her own frustrations and dreams as we sat around that kitchen table. But she listened as I talked and talked.
So when I asked her if l could come by and see her she said, "Come on; I`ll be here." I hadn`t been to her house in years but I could have driven there with my eyes closed. As 1 drove up I noticed the old three-story rooming house had not changed. The paint was still peeling off the outside walls. The yard held no grass–but was still swept clean the way Southerners used to do. All around were sagging buildings that had seen better days. A block away 1 noticed an old brick church. Two seedy-looking men leaned against a broken-down car and talked. One came forward as I turned off the engine. "What you doin` here?" I told him I was looking for my friend Nancy explaining that she had lived in that rooming house a long time. I le brightened. "Go right up the steps, through the door–you don`t have to ring the bell–she`s in the last apartment on the left." I followed his directions and found her door.
As long as I could remember Nancy had lived in that tiny apartment. I knocked on the door and heard a shuffle from the other side. "Mr. Roger, is that you?" I laughed and said, "It`s me." She opened the door and we hugged each other.
She motioned me to a chair, "You sit there." She would sit by the window. Sitting down I saw her wince. "It`s my arthritis," she said. Sure enough it was Nancy. Hair finally turned grey, she was smaller than I remembered. But still the Nancy I loved.
She told me she had been doing good. She had celebrated her ninetieth birthday in Atlanta with relatives. "Oh, did we have the food" she said and laughed.
We reached across the years an remembered. My Mother and Father long dead. We talked of her own children–two of whom had passed. She showed me pictures of her family–children and grandchildren. She told me where they lived and what they did. The roles were reversed. She talked, I listened. "Oh, we had some good days and we had some bad days but God was always with us."
We laughed about the whiskey my mother would send her to the liquor store to buy for the Lane cakes every Christmas. We talked about food and fun and kids and everything.
"I want to show you something," she said. She shuffled over to her dresser, opened a drawer and pulled out an old faded pink slip. "Your Mama give me this. This was the last present she ever gave me. Oh, she gave the nicest presents." She placed the faded slip back in the drawer as if it were a treasure.
"Come with me," she said. And we walked through her tiny living room and she pulled back the curtain. "See the back yard." It was swept clean. "I did that. I always clean the yard–who else gonna do it?"
Finally it was time to go. I hugged her once again and told her I loved her. There were tears in her eyes as she said: "I love you, too."
As I walked out 1 remembered the first book I had ever written. I send her a copy with the inscription: "To Nancy–Who always told me `Just you wait`. You were right. Love, Roger."
Moving down the hall, toward my car I was now the one crying. Those encouraging words of "just you wait", spoken again and again, had come from a lifetime of experience. Now, at ninety she still believed.
This is Black History Month. It is that time when we pause to remember not only the famous Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and Tiger Woods. The real heroes may just be all those silent ones who cleaned our houses and washed our clothes and raised their own families, enduring a multitude of daily indignities yet refusing to lose faith or give in to the injustices that continually surrounded them. I remember black Nancy whose name will never make the history books. Yet she was my first teacher and confidant. She opened doors and windows of my heart. She taught me that we really are, at bottom, all the same. The tears that ran down my face as I left that old house were tears of joy. That little ninety-year-old woman sitting in her chair by the window has immeasurably shaped my life.
