Parent Nation by Dana Suskind

Author:Dana Suskind [Suskind, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

• PART THREE •

THE WAY FORWARD

• EIGHT •

LIFTING OUR VOICES

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

—ALICE WALKER[1]

The events of Saturday, April 6, 1968, loom large in my family’s lore. At the time, my parents were living in Baltimore, where my father was a pediatric resident at Johns Hopkins and my mother was a social worker. My mother worked full-time directing a community outreach program that was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. On that fateful Saturday, the country was on edge and Baltimore was, too. Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. The mayor called an emergency meeting with community leaders and organizers such as my mother. The long-simmering anger and frustration of Black residents over racism and economic oppression was boiling over. The first plate-glass window—in a hat shop—was smashed around 5:30 p.m.[2]

While she was still downtown, my mother was summoned to the phone. It was my father, who was across town in the Johns Hopkins Medical Center complex. Neither of them can remember how he tracked her down, in that time before cell phones. But since he didn’t usually call Mom while she was working, she knew when she heard his voice that it must be important.

“You need to come home now,” he said.

The situation in the city was rapidly deteriorating. He was watching it on the news. My mother’s main concern was the safety of the people she worked with and for, but she understood that her own safety was also at risk. She knew my father believed deeply in her and her work. Asking her to come home wasn’t something he would do lightly.

She was also nine months pregnant with me.

Mom got in her car to drive home. Pulling into the street, she looked in the rearview mirror. The world behind her was enveloped in flames. Baltimore was burning. As she crossed the city to get home, the fires continued to flare.

Mom was frightened, but she was also frustrated and heartbroken. She recognized a piercing truth: While she was able to drive to safety, the people who lived in the neighborhood she served, and her colleagues who lived there, too, could not. Their neighborhood was going up in smoke.

She got home, had an anxious dinner with my father, went to bed . . . and went into labor. I was born the next day, on April 7, 1968.

The fires and riots lasted several more days, an expression of rage, grief, and frustration that shook the city.

Two weeks later, my mother went back to work, determined to help in the aftermath. She took me with her, something that would be unusual even today and was downright amazing in 1968. She cleared out a tiny room near her office and made it a nursery. Then she hired a young man to sit outside the room so that when I cried, he could alert her. Mom would come feed me and rock me, and then once I went back to sleep, she’d get right back to work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.