from Foulkeways Reading

I liked going to college, but first of all I couldn’t afford it, and second of all I had to go to work to support my household.
--from an interview with Tahija Elison



Chapter 32

A few times that summer and fall I drove past the small paved park near Palethorpe longing for a glimpse of the triplets; they were never there. A friend of Kaki’s told her about a law giving visitation rights to any adult in whose house a child had resided for a year or more. We appreciated this validation of our relationship to them, but didn’t want to demand visitation rights. It was hard to imagine Tahija cooperating, and I think, too, we were afraid of making ourselves vulnerable again. The boys were young, they would forget us. It was better this way.

That New Year’s Eve, the last of the millennium, we were surprised by a call from Miss Millie Ellison wishing us, “you girls,” as she always called us, happy New Year. A few days later Diane Ellison called to see how we were doing and say hi. We hadn’t spoken since the fast, but it felt as if we’d been playing roles then, and now we could play ourselves.

I told her I was worried about Tahija. “You know welfare cut her off.” I’d heard it from Stefanie, who came still for reading practice. I dreaded the thought of Miss Congeniality coming up against a new roll-cutting caseworker without us watching her back. Not that she didn’t know the system much better than Kaki or I knew it; it was just that she had this bad habit of assuming herself worthy of a basic level of respect.

“She told me,” Diane said. “It’s hard times all around. They’ll be alright. She’s been acting grown so long, let her find out how hard it is.”

And if it was too hard? I’d seen enough of the walking wounded to know the answer to that.

“But three two year olds!” I said. “What if it’s all too much?”

Diane answered with words I had heard many times from Tahija. “Well then that’s on her.”

And if she wasn’t in our house, it wouldn’t be on us? On me?

I’d known Lamarr walked a dangerous edge, being a young black man in an America whose leadership is just now apologizing for its failure to outlaw lynching. But as I woke up more and more to reality, I began to see the edge Tahija walked. I had thought it was poverty. Though poverty, to be sure, is a cold, gusting wind that buffets her non-stop, the edge she walks isn’t poverty. God help her, I fear it’s insanity. Over the years, Tahija would be diagnosed with depression, paranoia, bi-polar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She agrees with the last diagnosis and is seeing a psychiatrist regularly.

Walk with her. It’s what I had been guided by. But how far, for how long, to where?
Once, standing beneath a cherry tree in the park, I was asked by a little girl to give her a boost up. I made a stirrup of my hands and she stepped into it, grasping the forked trunk. Just then something in my lower back gave, but I wasn’t about to drop her. I held her until she’d found her foothold.

Did I pull back too soon from Tahija’s higher-stakes climb? Was Palethorpe a dangerous fall, or the lower branches of a long climb? When we said yes to her living with us, and yes to legal guardianship, Kaki Nelsen and I took on the responsibility of asking such questions, and, if they couldn’t be answered, of carrying them with us forever.


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In early spring Millie Ellison surprised us with another phone call inviting us to family and friends day at her church. We accepted gratefully.

The appointed Sunday was a rainy day. We’d given up the car, and so went by bus to Millie’s church, which was about eighteen blocks west of Palethorpe. We wore our best — dresses, hose, and heels, my shortish hair blow-dried into something semi-feminine, Kaki’s held back by side barrettes.

Once in the church, we had trouble finding Millie Ellison because the white-gloved woman usher who greeted us knew her as Miss Mary. When we had that clarified and she was leading us up the middle aisle — all the way up, to the second row — I worried she might think us presumptuous, using the family name as we had. And did Mary Millicent Ellison even want us to sit with her so far up? Did we appear to be expecting special treatment? Were all guests led to their seats in this way?
We were reminded of the mindfulness and humility members of the dominant majority need when we accept invitations into the places that have been havens from us, and which, like the African Methodist Evangelical (AME) Church, arose in response to segregation and exclusion. And if we should find ourselves excluded, for a time, or in some cases forever, we can choose to see that as payback or we can take it as a test — an opportunity to show that yes, despite our dismal record, we from the excluding class can bear up under a little exclusion. Humility goes a long way, and opens doors in what had appeared to be walls.

When we found Millie Ellison, Miss Mary, near the front, it seemed appropriate to sit in her row, but at the outside end. We admired her beautiful hat (she’s known for them) and greeted Diane and her husband Jules. Little Diane, who was close to Tahija and had stayed over at the house a few times, was happy to see us. We also knew and greeted the four-year-old twin boys — the triplet’s uncles.

“This does feel a little like family,” Kaki whispered to me.

“I guess we earned it,” I whispered back, speaking not out of pride so much as fatigue. When we met her Tahija’s life was an island in the path of a hurricane, and we had stayed.

The men’s choir processed slowly up the center aisle, its resonant cadence raising a “that’s all right” from several in the congregation. As the pews filled and the women’s choir entered singing, “I will glor-i-fy the name of the Lord,” Kaki and I looked often to the back of the church hoping to see the faces we knew so well.

Even without her great-granddaughter Tahija, born Dianna, and her great-great-grandchildren Damear Donovan, Mahad Dante and Lamarr Lamont, Miss Mary Millicent Ellison had more members of her family in attendance that day than any other family in her large congregation. Kaki and I had supposed we were there as friends on this “Family and Friends” day, but when the minister called for the Ellison family, Millie gestured for us to follow her into the center aisle. And so, with scores of others, we promenaded past the altar to be counted among four generations of the Ellison family.

It was a moment and a day I will treasure forever.


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The first time I saw Tahija again was at the post office near Palethorpe. We’d talked by phone a few times, and Lamarr had been over (with nary a triplet). I was working full time on the magazine and most days walked or biked to the post office to pick up submissions and subscription orders.

So one day on the phone I suggested to Tahija that we meet there, and she said, “We can,” and we did.

An alley ran behind Palethorpe’s few houses and ended alongside the post office. Tahija was waiting there with Stefanie. She wore her biege outergarment, black kemar pinned tightly under her chin. It had been six months since I’d seen her, two years since we’d first met.

We hugged, and stood in the alley catching up.

Big Lamarr had been sick, back and forth to the emergency room, and had finally been diagnosed with Type II, or adult-onset, diabetes. The doctors couldn’t get it under control. He allowed himself to be admitted to the hospital, where, with his sugar levels perilously high they had put him on an insulin drip. In the middle of the night his insulin level crashed and he woke with every muscle in his body paralysed. A nurse who noticed tears on his cheeks may have saved his life.

This did permanent damage to his liver, and still nothing seemed to work to keep his levels stable. One day of manual labor took him three days to recover from. And the pay was so low after taxes and mandatory transportation costs (you were required to take the company van to work), seeing his paycheck made him feel, Tahija told me, as if he’d been raped. His months at Phame helped him secure a good factory job, but he passed out one day while operating a metal-stamping machine. His supervisor liked him (nearly everybody does), but said he couldn’t keep him on without a doctor’s note verifying that he was fit to work around heavy equipment. Lamarr’s doctor would not sign such a note. He encouraged him to apply for Social Security Disability Insurance. He did several times and was rejected each time.

Tahija was not well either. Heavy hemorrhaging and pain, caused by her polycystic ovarian syndrome, had led two different doctors to recommend hysterectomy. I phoned the mother of the boy whose nanny I’d been — she was a gynecologist now — and she told me she had never heard of a hysterectomy being recommended for that condition in a woman so young.

“That’s what they said,” Tahija insisted when I asked her. “And they said I need to stay off my feet, told me I can’t work. But I have to work.”

After moving out, she had managed to complete fall-term classes. Then her benefits had been cut, because she’d changed districts, she was told. It took two months to get the paperwork in place, and when she did the new caseworker informed her that she had to leave school and find full-time work if she wanted to keep benefits. She began a nine-to-five training program that mainly involved designing a resume. Design it to death, I thought, still it wasn’t going to have a high school diploma on it, or the AA degree that had been within reach, or any job other than the flower-shop job she’d had in ninth grade.

This pulling her from school seemed to me symbolic of so much, and frighteningly arbitrary. The new act behind TANF dictated that states could allow up to 20 percent of those on welfare to count college as work-related training. But which 20 percent? Didn’t an enrolled sixteen-year-old with two semesters of good grades behind her and three children to feed look like a good bet? Apparently not. And when I later saw studies indicating that education and other discretionary benefits, such as travel stipends, were given more to white welfare recipients than to black, I was angry, but not surprised. All along my walk with Tahija I had seen how the broken glass of racist bias littered her already difficult path. I had heard about the caseworker who said — the first words out of her mouth when Tahija sat down in her cubicle —

“Three? You must be one of those girls can’t keep her legs closed.” And then there was the one who cut off her cash benefits and neglected to inform her that the family still qualified for food stamps.

A five-year entitlement didn’t entitle you to anything more, Tahija has said, than “five years of being hassled down.” I could see the effects of it on her face, in her eyes. There was a deadness to them. The whites were veined with red, and the dark rings were back, wider and lined. She joked that no one at her job believed she had just turned eighteen. She could have passed for thirty.

Tahija wasn’t philosophical or political about having to leave college. She was realistic. “I liked going to college,” she wrote, “but first of all I couldn’t afford it, and second of all I had to go to work to support my household.” She’d keep her textbooks, and later encourage friends to enroll, coaching them through registration and placement tests. But it just wasn’t possible for her.

I took her out for a belated birthday dinner and heard about her new job in an elementary school cafeteria. She liked it. One of the women there was truly psychic, the scary supervisor turned out to be softhearted, and the kids were adorable. She told me about a little freckle-faced boy who asked for a peanut butter sandwich every day.

“I mean every day, Kathryn. Now you know those sandwiches, how we make them is we lay out the bread when it’s frozen and spread peanut butter on, going down the row.”

“Easier that way,” I said.

“Right. But the bread thaws out all soggy and them sandwiches nasty. So I tell him,
I say, try something else baby. But he won’t.”

“Hardheaded.”

“Exactly.”

Tahija worrying what this hardheaded little white boy ate made me so mad. What was going on in her that nurturance flowed so easily in his direction? What was going on in this country that a young, intelligent black woman in poor, rapidly deteriorating health was commuting three hours a day, gone from can’t-see to can’t-see, as the slaves used to say, in order to feed the well-fed children of white women while her own children languished, underfed, underweight, under the weight of decades of policies that moved the jobs to the suburbs while segregating hourly wage workers in the inner cities.

If I sound angry, I am. Head Start’s few incredibly effective federal dollars threatened by “restructuring.” Library funding slashed all over, by 50% in Pennsylvania, when so often the library was the only safe the kids in my neighborhood could go after school. College grants and loan programs slashed, rungs in the ladder out of working poverty cut away by people who took college and grad school as givens, and don’t seem to intend to give anything back. Making cuts in not enough leads to less than not enough, and less than not enough has a face for me now. Three faces.


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When the school year ended, and with it her cafeteria job, Tahija found and enrolled in one of the for-profit training programs springing up in the wake of welfare reform. In eight weeks, the brochure promised, she could become a Certified Nurse’s Aid. Then she’d be able to earn the state-mandated minimum for CNA’s — $11.00 per hour. While still in this program, she found work through a job fair at a nursing home in the suburbs. The starting pay was only $6 an hour, but there would be opportunities for overtime, she was told, and once she was certified the higher wage would kick in.

She woke before dawn and rode two busses out to Christian Home. She liked the work, and the residents liked her; she indulged them in small ways: a foot rub, lotion for their hands, a few minutes of listening. . . . They had so many stories, so few visitors. Though she often worked twelve-hour shifts, occasionally double shifts, because of the way the hours were allocated the promised overtime rarely showed up in her check, which hovered just under two-hundred dollars.

The day finally came for her certification examination. She called us from the new house to tell us about it. Kaki and I listened on the same phone.

She’d been very nervous. She arrived at the testing place early and waited with about ten others from her training program. She did well on both sections of the test — practical and written. Although everyone else who took the test that day failed, she passed on the first try with a near perfect score, and the one question she had missed — Kaki and I both agreed — was a judgment call, plain and simple. You might tell a resident that another resident had died, or you might not, depending.
She was so proud. I worried about a training program that managed to pass only one of its students, but I was glad she had been the one. She thought she might go into nursing, or maybe counseling, something where you helped people.

Then the blow came.

The week after the big test, at about the time she was expecting to see the higher wage boost her paycheck up over two-hundred finally, she came into work to find her name missing from the schedule. Was she fired? Laid off? No one would say. When pressed, her supervisor, a Karen, told her she simply was not Christian Home material.

Last week she was but this week she’s not?

Tahija thought it was because she was Muslim. Several times this Karen had remarked on the white kemar Tahija wore with her uniform. It seemed to me that the higher wage might have had something to do with it too. Kaki researched it and encouraged Tahija to go to legal aid and fight the firing. But Tahija was too disheartened to do it, or anything, in her own behalf. It was same-old, same-old — the strong exploiting the weak, the system outdoing her at every turn.

I had often felt that Tahija’s hopelessness and defensiveness aggravated or even caused most of her problems. If she could only be more positive, more cooperative. . . . But then a Karen came along, and her hopelessness seemed logical, her defensiveness sensible. Tahija and Lamarr operated in a dimension where gravity had a far greater force than the gravity I knew. Really, in the end, I could not know what they were going through. I could only listen when they tried to describe it; listen and resist the urge to jump into that mightiest of North American rivers, de-nial.

We tried to advocate for her at the nursing home but were stonewalled. The human resources office blocked unemployment payments for months by refusing to file the needed paperwork. This also kept the family from getting TANF benefits reinstated, since Tahija couldn’t prove she had been fired. The unemployment office launched an investigation, got nowhere, and then caught someone from human resources lying during a three-way phone call. Declaring that Tahija had been unfairly terminated, they awarded her back benefits. These were extended twice during the recession that followed September 11th.

A teacher at the CNA training program told her she had had a similar experience with the home.

“I had them two years in court,” she told Tahija, “and lost. Just forget it.”

Tahija couldn’t forget it. That day when her name had disappeared from the schedule she’d felt so betrayed. They wouldn’t even let her get her things from her locker. She sat on the stone steps of the home for a long time, crying and crying, looking out over the lawns and winding walkways she knew well. The residents liked her, they said so. She had tried so hard. She remembered washing the body of a dying woman . . . the breaths coming at longer and longer intervals, the sunken chest barely moving. The head nurse had looked in, telling her to hurry up, the family was on its way. She chose the best nightgown, slid it over the pale, thin shoulders, working the cloth down, as she’d learned to do. And when the last breath came, she was there.

She stayed a long time on those steps. All the disappointments came back to her, the abandonments, broken promises, betrayals. Security would come soon and escort her off the premises. But for now she sat. Had you been driving by you might have noticed her, a heavy-set young black woman in a white uniform, waiting for no one, expecting no ride home.

copyright 2009 E.K. Gordon