Welcome, this is your host Zayda Sorrell Medina with the Voice Podcast.
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I was awakened by a loud thump in the middle of the night. I opened my eyes wider and could see a tall man holding my eleven-year-old brother Jonathan, mercilessly by the neck.
Jonathan’s long and lanky legs dangled in midair. His cinnamon-brown face slowly turned pulsing red. He scratched the tall man’s face to fight him off, but the tall man squeezed harder. Jonathan’s arms fell to his side and his legs grew limp.
The tall man grinned.
In my three-year-old mind, nothing made sense. The bustle of the St. Louis ghetto that normally bled into the night was nonexistent. The world around me stopped. The piercing sound of my eldest brother gasping for air echoed in my head. He could not breathe, and there was nothing that I could do.
My brothers and sisters were at home that night: Austin, Ricardo, Jona, and Ariana, who were ten, four, two, and one year old, respectively. Austin dashed into the other room and came back with a hammer. My mother, weighing probably no more than one hundred pounds, grabbed the hammer from Austin and stared dead into the tall man’s eyes. I could only imagine what she was thinking, or what she was going to do with that hammer.
She aimed the hammer at the tall man’s head. He stumbled backward, his cheeks landing firmly against the floor. Blood oozed from his head.
My mother stepped over the tall man’s body. Then she looked at Jonathan, who lay on the floor gasping for air. She crouched to her knees and cradled him in her arms.
“Come on,” my mother said, swiftly rising from the floor. “No one comes between me and my children!” My siblings and I ran outside, down the crumbling steps of the front porch, across the empty lot, past the willows, under the St. Louis sky. We ran and ran and ran.
We ended up at my grandparent’s house around the corner. That night, my mother was restless. She stood by the window in the living room peeping through the blinds. I pretended to be asleep, but from the slit of my eyes, I studied the geometry of my mother’s face. Her yellow copper skin filled with freckles, high cheekbones, and paper-thin lips. Her deep brown eyes stared fiercely out the window, making sure that the tall man didn’t find us.
***
My mother was a mixed woman of African and Latin descent, reared by Christian and Catholic parents with a strict streak about them. They forced her to marry when she was about 18 years old. Not to mention, she was pregnant. She birthed her first child in 1980, in St. Louis, Missouri, named Jonathan. Married to her high school sweetheart, she was more than unsatisfied with the arranged marriage.
A few affairs and struggles later, my mother fell victim to the 1980s crack epidemic like many other Blacks and Latinos residing in urban cities across the United States. The urban ghetto of that era as we observe today, is the result of a long history of racial discrimination in the United States. This includes, for instance, the Black Codes in the 19th century which excluded recently enslaved Blacks from full engagement in the political economy while perpetuating their enslavement; New Deal policies and practices, which systematically denied Blacks and Brown persons access to relief thus providing Whites a structural economic advantage; and housing practices such as redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and blockbusting which safeguarded communities of the Caucasian race while hyper-segregating Blacks. The scarcity of formal jobs in ghettos combined with the lack of inter-generational capital to draw from led people to turn to the recently introduced crack cocaine market. One either tapped into the market to sell drugs to make ends meet or they used the drugs to self-medicate to deal with their oppression.
On this bitter day, my mother realized that her crack addiction was getting to the best of her and by extension, her children. She was on and off of drugs, had married and gotten separated, and had six kids all before her thirties. It was time to stop and to release herself from her drug habits. She picked up the phone, called her friend William, and asked him to take her and her kids to the child welfare office.
She couldn’t take care of them anymore. It was too much. She wanted to surrender her children to the state so that she could focus on getting herself together. William said yes, and off they went, on a spring day to the child welfare office.
My mother opened the child welfare office door and was greeted with stares and whispers among white faces. Who was this woman, with her tawdry clothes and children hanging from her hips and thighs. It was clear to her in that moment, that the child welfare office, which supposed to be a haven for children, was in fact, open to the public but closed off to drug addicts. Then my mom opened her mouth to articulate what she perceived as a need.
“I would like to know if you all could take my kids,” my mom said to the white lady sitting at the desk. “I need help. I am trying to get off of drugs. I want to go to a rehabilitation place, but I can’t go with the kids. Can you all take my kids while I get better? Please, can somebody help, ma’am?”
The lady, whose face I cannot recall, must have looked like the devil if the devil were to have a face. She laughed hysterically, and so did the other White lady sitting next to her. Their laughter echoed the child welfare office, the hallways and administrative offices.
A tear fell from her eyes and rolled down her freckled cheeks.
“We cannot do anything for you and your kids,” the woman said plainly, with a smirk on her face.
“Get out of here.”
My mom, who was not a cold woman, walked off with her six children into an uncertain future.
***
Thank you all so much for listening to the Voice podcast. This is your host, Zayda Sorrell-Medina. I am a professor of social work, and in this podcast, I combine story-telling and research to shed light on urban and social work topics. I
I want to close out this episode with two takeaways.
The first takeway: Don’t be afraid of your story. I used to be afraid of my story. Growing up as a foster and homeless youth and having an unconventional family lead to me to conceal this part of me. I bounced back and forth between the ghetto and the suburbs with families and friends of different class, race, and ethnic backgrounds. I found myself in between worlds and spaces where I felt that I didn’t fit in and my peers could not relate to me. This created a sense of shame. As I grew older, I began to accept my story and release the stigma associated with it. And in this amazing journey, I’ve come to realize, that we all have stories and some of our stories are adversity stories. I would like to invite you to inspect your relationship with your story. How do you perceive your story. Have you come to terms with your story? To what degree do you share your story others? Adversity happens to all in different ways. I invite you to take a strength-based approach by reframing your story and extracting from it, the positive.
The second takeaway: Interrogate the words that you use. Words are powerful. Words reflect our belief systems and words perpetuate ideologies that help to either dismantle or perpetuate stigma, stereotypes, and other elements of oppression. Words are the building block to narratives that shape social reality. I would like to invite you to interrogate the words and stories that you speak. For example, words like crack-baby, crack-head, and drug-baby center on the deficit of an individual and ignore the historical, urban, policy, and structural factors that gave rise to those deficits in the first place.
Thank you so much for listening to the Voice Podcast.
Stay tuned for more episodes.
To learn more about my work, visit zaydasorrellmedina.com.
Until next time.
