JUANITA

When I learned of the “Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote” blog site, where writers share pieces about people they’re honoring by not voting for the Donald, I knew immediately whom I’d honor.

I am aware that a white woman writing about “the black woman who raised me” raises the eyebrows of those who find these portrayals condescending, idealizing, and presumptive. I’m also aware that, as a child in the fifties in the racially segregated, white-dominated South, the black woman who raised me was my only up-close encounter with a member of a “race” deemed by the adults around me as so much lower than mine, she might as well have been another species. Without this woman, I don’t know how I would have learned that these adults were dangerously wrong.

Juanita M was my caregiver from when I was five till I was twelve. She was in her early twenties, quite grownup to me. She was large. Her hair was a short kink. Her skin was a dark, glossy brown. A safety pin held her cotton skirt together, and the navy blue bandanna she wrapped around her breasts showed at the neckline of her blouse. I’d seen where Juanita lived when my mother drove her home to “Colored Town”, and I always wondered how it felt to live in a small shotgun house of dingy white wood sitting on a barren patch of dirt.

My mother worked as a secretary, and Juanita took good care of me from Monday through Friday, seven o’clock till five. When I hated my frizzy permanent wave, Juanita tied a scarf around my head and flattened my curls to my cheeks. In the sweltering days of August, she ordered me to “come in outa that ole hot sun before you burn yourself flat up”. I sat with her as she ironed my family’s clothes, talking to the TV screen when we watched soap operas, or, as she called them, “The Stories.”

“Unh-unh,” she’d say, shaking her head when a character was mean or dishonest. “That is not right. Not right, and you know I mean it.”

Juanita was smart, I figured. And kind. But what impressed me most about her were her strength and her dignity.

I saw Juanita’s dignity when we got on the city bus to go to the park in Tupelo, Mississippi. She deposited me in an aisle seat, and, though there was an empty seat next to mine, she kept on walking. I turned and watched her broad hips in her wrinkled skirt all the way to the very back row, where she sat. I saw the sign over her head–“Colored to Rear”. I was dumbstruck. Something was so not right in some way I did so not understand. And I remember how straight Juanita sat, and how high she held her head, and the look in her eyes I didn’t know words for but now know was tormented pride.

I saw Juanita’s strength one afternoon after a loud, scary thunderstorm that made her stand at the window, frowning, shaking her head. When the storm stopped, Juanita and I sat at the kitchen table, where she shelled peas into a bowl. I asked her if she was scared of storms when she was a little girl. She told me she’d had ten brothers and sisters, and that eight of them were killed in the terrible Tupelo tornado I’d heard about since I could remember. I stared at her, unable to grasp the magnitude, the horror. “Your brothers and sisters?” I said. “Yes,” she said. Tears filled her eyes, but just for a second before she sat up with that same grace and strength and went back to shelling peas.

I saw Juanita’s dignity and strength the time I betrayed her. When she wouldn’t let my friend Lisa and me walk to the drugstore for milkshakes without my mother’s permission, Lisa got mad and taunted her. “You ca-ant make us. You ca-ant make us.”  I, at the peak of pre-teen snottiness, joined in. “My mama will be mad at you,” I said, “for not letting us go.”  Lisa said, “Yeah, and she’ll fire you.” Juanita went still and then said, “Don’t nobody have to fire me. I can quit anytime I want to.” I wanted to crawl in the nearest sewer. I saw her dignity the next day when I dragged my hangdog self to the kitchen and said, “I’m sorry, Juanita.” She was polite and distant. And then, over time, she forgave me and fixed me eggs in a toady hole.

It took fortitude for Juanita to become not tough, but strong. And to hoist her dignity to such graceful heights in the face of the crushing blows she endured as a poor black woman in the south. She taught me that that we all share a common humanity, and that quality comes in every color. I dedicated my No Trump vote to Juanita for manifesting all the dignity and strength the Donald doesn’t.

Juanita moved to Chicago in the early sixties. I hope she flourished. I don’t know if she’s alive and knows that Trump was elected President.  If she knows, I can see her now, torment in her eyes but holding her head up high. She’s saying, “Unh-unh. Unh-unh. He is not right. Not right, and you know I mean it.”

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