The old picture reveals the truth about my mother’s missing

I could not depth her challenge until I was in the mid -fifties of my life, when I did something I hadn’t done before: I traveled to her childhood house in Baltimore.

On a summer morning, cloudy, I traveled to Mail HillMy mother’s childhood community. Long live on Wilkins Street, on the perfect Baltimore block from the steps of glossy marble, elegant row homes and wisdom St. Benedict Church, Where my mother was confirmed. I stopped my rented car and walked to the place where my father was assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother for more than 50 years. I wiped the street to see the white, black and brown neighbors talking to each other from their front steps and hanging together in the corner bar.

I was surprised by something other than the racist mix. When I looked at my smartphone application, I was stunned to discover that my former father’s house was only 4.1 miles. I had no idea that the distant eggs and blacks had lived near each other. The racist separation was very firm when my parents met that their families may have lived in separate solar systems. Paltimore was not racist; It was also ethnic. The Jews, Italians and columns kept their neighborhoods. The strangers, especially those who have a “wrong” color, risk harm to walking in the wrong area.

When she stood in front of my mother’s childhood, I first imagined what she should be for her. The contemporary scene was dissolved in Wilkins Avenue, and Wilkins Street appeared in the early 1960s. She saw her – a fine white woman and a young woman with a hairstyle of a beehive – closed the front door and walks towards someone to meet people who have been asked by her family and society to hate.

I stopped outside my car and shook my head with admiration and confusion.

the curseI thought. Why do you bear such a risk??

I am still completely sure. Was my mother’s relationship with my father driven by the young rebellion and the attractiveness of the forbidden relationship, or was it early symptoms of the disease that would swallow her? Or was love really? I learned through others that my parents remained close after adding the institutional character to it. My father visited my mother routinely and continued to take care of her even when his health began late in his life.

What I know is that she did something very important: I refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of the forefront of black, brown and eggs who would shatter taboos against relations between races that were devoted as a law for several centuries. They did not wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to inform them of those who love. I was born four years before the loving decision.

Like most big changes, small, with countless invisible courage works of ordinary people. My mother’s decision to walk from Wilkins Street to my father’s house.Send the small hope of hope“This ripple feeds on another person, which led to others by doing the same. This was the same dynamic that gave us equality in marriage.

When I went back to my car and got out of Wilkins Street, I smiled. I felt a good warm feeling in my chest, and something else that I did not feel before my mother: pride. Pride that I was her son. It was not a hopeless reason. It was stronger than I realized. She, and others like her, helped make Osha Vans and Kamala Harris possible.

The historian and activist Howard Zain He said there tendency Among the people “to believe that what we see at the present time will continue.” He said that people often forget the number of times throughout history, as people were surprised by unusual changes in people’s ideas, through an unexpected eruption of rebellion against tyrants, and “through the rapid collapse of the force systems that seemed invincible.”

He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their ability to act.

“And if we act, no matter how small, we should not wait for the future of the Great Utopia,” Zain, Zain books. “The future is a series of infinite gifts, and now live as we believe that humans should live, in challenging everything that is bad around us, it is in itself a wonderful victory.”

***

After Wilkins Street, I changed my visits to my mother. She drew her nails. She asked her to sing “Qi Serra Sera”. She asked her to see some dance movements. She laughed with her because she did a little hips. I stopped housing what I lost; I became grateful for the rest. I noticed my wife.

Terry one night told me: “I used to embrace your mother as if the egg shell was frustrated when you could not talk to her the way she wants,” Terry one night told me.

“And now?” I asked her.

“You embrace her more compact, and you are not afraid of silence when you talk to her.”

During one of my recent visits with my mother, Terry took a picture I cherish. We stopped from the home of the Baltimore mother group on a bright summer day with oak trees in full flowering. That visit followed the same text: an episode of the door bell, and calm the footsteps behind the front door, and my mother screams with joy, “O my Lord, my Lord!”

The smartphone camera picked up Terry what happened after opening the front door. He bowed forward and caught my arms around my mother, binding her face to my shoulder, a contented smile on her face.