More about my mother
My Mother
My mother… she pretty much got along with everyone.
Black, white, brown — it didn’t matter. She had this pin she wore that said “No cop ever called me Whitey.” And she meant it. She lived it.
I remember the fliers she put on our little yellow VW Bug — fliers about an injustice with the Black race. She wasn’t quiet. She wasn’t scared. She was a mother raising biracial kids in a time when the world had opinions about that. And she made sure we knew who we were.
I was just a little girl, marked with a GTCI press pass, and she took me to Huey Newton’s funeral in Oakland.
I didn’t fully understand it then. But now I know: that was History.
History was also going to the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations in San Francisco. I hope that was the right year — but I know what I saw: President Clinton speaking, and me riding in the press bus with famous columnist Herb Caen.
San Francisco was good to me, too.
Being featured on Straight Talk N Teens with KGO-TV.
Being featured on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner Evening Edition.
I was always in the newspapers — from Contra Costa to San Francisco.
And it was my mother that helped me up.
She didn’t have much. Government programs. A hustle. A yellow Bug with fliers on it.
But she had vision. She put me in rooms I had no business being in — unless God put me there.
She gave me a press pass before I had a voice. She gave me history before I had homework.
People see the butterfly now.
But my mother? She was the wind that lifted me.
She taught me that brokenness from divorce doesn’t have to break you.
That you can love justice and still love people.
That you can raise kids alone and still raise them up.
I’m not in Pittsburg anymore. I’m not that little girl in the backseat.
But I carry her — my mother — in everything I do.
Because God used her to get me out.
Out of Pittsburg. Out of silence. Out of small.
Thank you, Mom. For the pin. For the press pass. For the fight.
For putting me in the room… so one day I could speak in it. 🦋💛
