“If you get pregnant, strap that baby on your back and keep going.”
Ew, mom.
“Well. I’m just saying!”
My mom started giving me really straightforward life advice when I was about 12 or 13 years old.
Most folks in my hometown Columbia, South Carolina, were preaching abstinence and so-called virginity. But Pat saw things differently.
“I watch you get out of this car every morning with that saxophone case in your hand and that big book bag on your back, and you walk into that school looking so determined. I want you to keep that attitude, always!”
“So if you get pregnant, don’t worry about it. Strap that baby on your back and keep going. You got to finish. Just always remember that: FINISH.”
Strap a baby onto my back? I laughed so hard on the inside. What in the world? And she gave me this speech at least once a quarter. Even after I enrolled at Howard University, I still heard it on a regular basis — perhaps even more often than before.
Here’s the reality: I was a 5'10" band geek. My celebrity crush was Bill Withers. So let’s just say… she didn’t have much to worry about. I was a late bloomer.
My mom’s speech mostly just grossed me out. But as I grew up I came to understand.
My mom had watched respectability politics swallow so many Black girls alive. So many were pushed into dark corners of shame, physically and spiritually, never to be seen again.
As the director and then owner of a preschool, she often hired these girls, who were now women facing way too much scrutiny and way too few opportunities. She learned the preschool business from her mentor Georgia Jones Elam, who had started Columbia’s first Black-owned day care center while also teaching at historic C.A. Johnson High School. Mrs. Elam was a beloved mentor to many across our community, including music star Angie Stone.
And also, my amazing mom.
My mom started working for Mrs. Elam in the ’90s, fresh off the Reagan era’s inescapable “welfare queen” narrative, a vilification of Black reproduction and womanhood that continues to poison the air and harden the ceiling for girls who dare to own our Blackness and our bodies. My mom wanted me, and every young woman she encountered, to know that pregnancy is never a scarlet letter and that Black girl dreams are always worth pursuing.
When I finished college and began figuring out my destiny, I heard mom’s voice in my head all the time. We would have talks where she’d listen to my problems and then reply, “Okay, but what did I tell you?”
“Strap that baby on my back,” I’d groan. “Finish.”
By this time I realized that the “baby” was just a metaphor. My mom wanted me to remember that no matter what happened, I could always keep moving forward.
And now more than ever, I realize the power and necessity of that remembering.
Today I woke up with yesterday’s tears dried on my face and new ones already falling because my mama is suddenly gone. I spoke to her on a Saturday three weeks ago. By Sunday night she was gone. No illness, just a sudden passing. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
I’m lost in darkness and it takes a lot to get out of bed in the mornings.
But I’m writing down stories and trying desperately to remember everything she said, so hopefully I can find a way.
Thanks to her speech — which felt so over-the-top at the time — I’m thinking she wants me to strap some determination on my back.
So for you mama, I will keep getting up and I will keep going. For you, mama, I will finish.
