My mother delivered her best sermons from the helm
of her blue Nissan Micra. Her audience, captive physically if not emotionally,
was unchallenging. Usually I was weary from a day negotiating playground
politics; often I was preoccupied with oddly, philosophical anxieties, such as what
if everything in the world were a figment of my imagination? Anyway, I knew the
theme and had heard many other arrangements of the song – the vastness of my
untapped potential; horror stories of immense failure, starring the tragic offspring
of friends of friends and finally, inescapably, her closing line, her
catchphrase - ‘You have to work ten times harder
than anyone else.’ By harder she meant faster, smarter and with a bigger smile
on my face. By ‘anyone else’ she meant white people.
Although I would roll my eyes and dismiss her as
old fashioned (at the time something I regarded as a senseless crime) I
believed her. I believed her before I even had a chance to understand what I
was believing. I imagine it is what it would be like to be born into a
religious household, to be told to have faith in something intangible. In some
ways it was my mother’s religion – she believed it and she thought that if I
believed, it could save me. My father tried to help; he had a sack full of
stories that he would recount over lengthy Sunday dinners - the injustices he
was subjected to as a young, black man in an unenlightened London. The
girlfriend’s father that wouldn’t let him past the threshold and the
over-zealous police officer that had taken him in as he made his way home from
a party. He told these stories with a chuckle and shake of his head, they were
both menacing and comforting - the Grimm’s fairy tales of my childhood.
Of course my life was not like that. I was born into
a brand new integrated London, where I was more likely to receive abuse from
the black boys on the bus than the sweet, old white man in the corner shop. Despite
my mother’s insistence, I did not need to watch my back or bite my tongue. I
did not need to work ten times harder, but I did. I did it in the way that
children grow into their parents even when, especially when, they are actively
trying not to. Even with her wild words, I trusted my mother just a little more
than I trusted the sometimes overwhelming world and, seriously, I never went to
any parties so what else was I supposed to do after Dawson’s Creek?
I wonder if it was the decision to heed her words
that made me start to see evidence that they were warranted. Unprompted, Mr
Mason my year ten teacher, pulled me aside to
tell me that I had developed a terrible attitude. I was no longer listening; I
was rude; I talked back. The tears sprang instantaneously to my eyes, as they
did and still do when I am confronted. My behaviour had been no more egregious
than any other hormone riddled teenager – did the colour of my skin make it
seem amplified? My school careers advisor was dead inside and very possibly outside, I didn’t check for a pulse. She read my
forms and listened to my dreams. I told her I wanted to be a
psychologist. I’d found it in a book,
‘1000 Careers and how to get them’. She suggested I look into nursing, a noble
profession but not the one that called me. I thought about all the kind brown
faces that had supported my father when he fell suddenly ill. Was nurse on the
approved list for ‘jobs black people do’? Perhaps if I wanted something
different, I’d have to work harder than anyone else.
Going to university wasn’t a decision, it was a
fact. I didn’t even feel pressure because pressure would suggest other
potential outcomes. A gap year was a near mythical concept entertained only by
white children – I was practically kept under house arrest from the moment I
left school until the first day of term. I had two years of fun.
I drank violently coloured alcopops, made friends for life; met my future
husband and a few guys that absolutely weren’t husband material. It wasn’t
until my final year that fear gripped me; out from under the examining eye of
my mother had I faltered? Had I forgotten the mantra? I spent my final year
working and crying and working, determined not to be one of the tragic tales
used to scare young, black girls in Nissan Micras. The day I received my scrappy
but official degree was a day of singular emotion – relief.
I went on to work in social care. My parents were pleased
enough. It was an easy job to explain with reliable hours and an all-important
pension. My mother had moved on somewhat, I think she felt that her job was
done and she needed more time to indoctrinate my siblings. I loved my job but I
wasn’t overly ambitious. In my twenties it wasn’t really noticeable, we were
all finding our feet, taking weird chances and drinking a little too heavily
but as the years went by and my friends slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to
change; to become serious, to embrace adulthood. At house parties people were no longer
temping or travelling but senioring and managing and then one day the house
parties just stopped. I was never overcome by ambition. The bit of my work that
I liked was the care taking. As a child I had enjoyed mimicking a picture
perfect home life. It was always mummies and daddies over doctors and nurses.
It should not have been a surprise when the desire to have a baby jumped out
from behind the shadows and slapped me round the face ten or twenty times.
My husband and I made plans. When the baby came I
would stay at home, babies need someone at home we’d
heard. After that we’d see what he or she needed and what we needed. It didn’t
take me long, perhaps an hour after the drugs wore off, for me to see that what
I needed was to be with my son and nowhere else. The first year was relatively easy, a lot of
women take a year. It was as my baby, stretched and morphed into toddlerdom
that the discomfort started. It was a growing feeling of being an imposter. This
position was for privileged, white woman, not girls
with something to prove. We went to visit my grandmother – mother to eight,
fools suffered zero. She asked me when I planned to go back to work and I
dodged and weaved, implying a not so distant future with me behind a desk in
it. She nodded briefly and said, ‘Good.’ Don’t grandmothers have a way of
saying so much with so little? To me that good said, don’t disrespect me by
sitting on the bum that I gave you, after all the work we’ve done.
At the toddler groups my uniqueness highlighted my
betrayal. As mothers admired my son’s bouncing curls I felt like a traitor rather
than a pioneer. In the duller moments of stay at home life I imagined an
alternative realm where I was beating a path through the corporate jungle, an
inspiration to young, black people. Whilst washing plastic cutlery I’d imagine
myself recruiting a black girl with a relentless black mother, saying to her
fondly, ‘you remind me of myself.’ In reality I was doing nothing to fight back
against the beliefs that immigrants are unmotivated. Beliefs that may have been
given a fresh coat of political correctness but still shone through in the
crime stats and the media or as a hot topic for internet trolls.
My mother just wanted me to be happy but I know she would be happier if what made me happy was smashing through a glass
ceiling, a glass ceiling made from reinforced glass. I cannot hide from my
truth that I feel I am letting them down. My parents did not tag team shifts so
that I can get enchiladas made before five. My grandparents didn’t migrate from a warm,
inviting island to a cold and hostile one so that I could pick up after a man,
a white man at that. I choose to make things harder for every young, black girl today being told
by an underinvested careers adviser that maybe she can’t.
Being a black and female in a predominantly white
society is a curiously awkward burden. It’s like holding a drink and a canape
at a cocktail party. When the host comes to greet you do you take pains to balance
both precariously or hold on to them steadfastly and refuse to accept a
handshake? I can’t tell you the answer, I’m still working on it because all my
life I’ve had to work ten times harder than anyone else.
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