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| Me and my mom, Sallie — my first teacher in radical generosity. |
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My mother, Sallie, though fundamentalist in her faith, was a radical woman in her acts of kindness and generosity. Here is one example across a lifetime. I remember so vividly the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. These were dark times. Every sector of society was impacted, but Black men living with or dying from AIDS were especially abandoned. Resources were scarce, and fear and stigma were everywhere. People living with AIDS were treated like lepers to be avoided.
One day, I came to my family home, after being away for a period, to find my mother in the kitchen with her Dick Gregory cookbook, juicing carrots into mason jars and baking her famous apple pies. She asked me to go with her on an errand. I didn’t know where we were headed until she pulled up to a house in West Philadelphia known as Calcutta House.
Inside were four or five beautiful Black men, who were thin, frail, some in wheelchairs, all clearly ill. This place was a kind of hospice where people came to die. When my mom walked in, whispers filled the room: “Miss Sallie, Miss Sallie is here.” Some even called her Mom. A nun appeared to help her carry in the pies and juice, and soon one gentleman asked for one of her famous scalp rubs. My mother washed her hands, slipped on latex gloves, and with extraordinary care, began massaging his head.
We were in a living room space, and while my mother worked that gentleman's head, she told the residents about her flower garden, the birds she had watched that morning in her birdbath, and the pies she baked for them. She refused to let their world be defined only by fear and sorrow. She came there with her singular, Sallie joy.
She asked for the Langston Hughes book she had given them, and one of the men went to retrieve it. After finishing the scalp massage, she removed her gloves, sat down among them, and read aloud one of her favorite poems by Hughes- "The Negro Mother". She had discovered Hughes when I was a student at Overbrook Elementary, under the guidance of the great teacher Mrs. Rose Martin. Some of the residents also took turns, reading aloud passages they loved or reciting poems they remembered learning in school. For a while, the room was filled not with fear, but with words, memory, and the affirmations of poetry.
Before leaving, she promised to go to Sears, to buy them a birdbath for their yard, so they too could begin their mornings watching the antics of birds. And she did.
My mother’s compassion was radical because it defied fear as was the compassion of those devoted nuns. At a time when people recoiled from touching those living with AIDS, my mother, hugged them, massaged their scalps, baked them pies, and read them poetry. She believed joy was a right, even for those whom society had abandoned.
Her example reminds me why I fight today for Yero and other detained Black immigrants. Too often, their stories go untold, and they are left invisible. But just like my mother showed, dignity, compassion, and solidarity are not optional; they are acts of survival.
“We are each other’s harvest:
we are each other’s business:
we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks
Please support Yero’s campaign and learn about his fight for his freedom. Share it, donate if you can, and help us widen the circle of care.
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