I was playing with toys on the floor as I did most days. On my way to the kitchen, I heard frantic knocking at the door, forceful raps on the wood that I didn’t recognize.
I wasn’t supposed to open the front door without permission, but I’d found a way to satisfy my curiosity of who came around and avoid getting in trouble with my grandmother: Locking the screen door, the first line of defense to the house’s entrance.
My grandmother’s house was at the beginning of a dead-end street. Every car that turned onto Willow Street passed her house, entering and leaving. It was also next to the Jook, a meeting place for the five towns of the area that had been co-oped by their five gangs.
I opened the front door to see a white* man with a bloody face and his jaw askew. It was dislocated and looked like it hurt to use. As soon as the door opened, he lunged for the screen door handle and tried jostling the mechanism to come inside.
That’s why I wasn’t supposed to open the door without permission. People often tried to come inside.
He was more than twice my size, as I was a small thing for a five-year-old. Judging by the force of his knocks, I thought there was a chance he might break the screen door and force his way in. I shut the door and ran to get my grandmother.
“Grandma, grandma, grandma! You have to come quick! There’s a man at the door!”
I had practice with situations like this. The last time it happened, I heard knocking at the back door and when I opened it, the man came inside, bringing his blood and dirt with him, and grandma had to beat him back out.
Here is something that to this day, I don’t understand: The broom was on the other side of the fridge. When did she grab it? I called to her from the living room, and when I turned around, she was already moving me out of the way so she could open the front door, broom in hand. I have several memories in which I am certain my grandmother bent reality to her will, such as curving a shoe around a corner to hit my cousin. In mere moments of me calling for her, she was making her way outside.
It could only have been twenty or thirty seconds since I called her, but by the time grandma opened the door, the white* man was on the ground. His antagonizers had caught up to him and resumed beating him, punching and stomping.
Grandma went into the crowd, broom in hand, and began swinging her weapon.
“Stop! Yall not gonna kill him in my yard! Yall should be ashamed of yallselves. Go home!” She yelled as she broke up the fight.
Grandma was a clever woman, and she knew how to keep people in order. She wasn’t just waving her broom around to scare the men. She was nailing targets: Hitting hands that curled to punch and stopping men that failed to listen. Grandma had gone into defensive mode. I don’t know why the fight began, but the white* man was fortunate for my grandmother. When she stepped away after the brawl, he used the strength he had left to pathetically crawl to her feet as if he feared what would happen if he was caught too far from his savior.
Many people might be surprised to hear that a woman in her sixties managed to stop the fight of men a third her age, but I wasn’t. There was a reason she was known as the Angel of Willow Street.
Then it was over. I remember looking down at the near-dead man on the ground who didn’t look like us. He was red and purple all over with bruises blooming on his pale skin, a swollen eye, and blood seeping out of open wounds. As as adult, his condition reminds me of the worst loss I have witnessed in the UFC multiplied by ten. Movies try to depict this type of gore, and fail to mimic reality.
“You saved his life,” my grandmother told me. “I wouldn’t have heard him from the room.”
The cops and the paramedics came, and then it was time to go to bed. Grandma returned the broom to its home by the fridge, and I wondered again how she had summoned it in the first place.
Looking back on this experience, it’s hard to believe I just went to school the next day and life continued as normal. There was no therapy or trauma support, time off of work for the adults, or time off of school for me. If we stopped to “process” every time something like this happened, nothing would have gotten done. A lot of the children I grew up with internalized the violence they witnessed and never moved beyond it, finding themselves in fights of their own or addicted to substances. Many of them died before they turned 25, and I think of them sometimes and wonder how different the area would be if they survived.
My survival didn’t “just happen.” It’s the result of making the same choice over and over: Move forward. I turned my experiences into lessons, and ultimately developed an approach to personal growth that’s focused on turning challenges into opportunities. Now, I have tools to thrive, and aid others in surviving through hard times.
If you would like to learn more about my approach and apply it to your own life, take my personal development classes. “Empowerment and Self-Esteem” will help you strengthen your internal constitution so you can face challenges with confidence. “Happiness versus Positivity” will help you stay grounded and remain productive in difficult times.
*white man
I added an asterisk next to “white” because I don’t believe color-based racial categorization is a fair way to describe people. Race itself is a construct based on arbitrary characteristics, and subjective to our personal understanding of what a race looks like. For example: Using our current system of describing people, we would refer to the majority of Africans as “Black,” even though Africa is known to have the most genetic variation among humans on the planet. There are 54 countries and over 1-billion people on the continent, yet we use a single word to homogenize the large population. I believe this terminology breeds stereotypes and stigmas that keep people apart.
I used “white” to refer to the man in this piece because I grew up in a highly racialized area, and my community suffered for it. The people on my street were “black,” and this man stood out because he was “white.”
Writing this piece reminded me how much I miss my grandmother. To learn more about the spectacular woman who raised me, you should read The Pearl of Zellwood and my book.
When you need a speaker for your next event, book me today.
This is a wonderfully enveloping story that easily draws the reader in very quickly. I appreciate how you put an asterisk on *white man and for the reasons you explain. I happen to agree and believe the colorizing of people limits our ability to see them, their past, their cultural experience. And yes they are all based on colonialistic constructs of ‘race’, people. Archaic and out of date. As if they ever were. It’s high time we evolve from them.
Also the thing about daily traumas, if you don’t have the luxury to stop and asses, heal oneself you don’t. You keep going. Sometimes it works out, sometimes, often it leaves invisible scars on the psyche that then affect one’s compass throughout life. It’s amazing that you were able to direct yourself in a way that worked healthily. I wasn’t. But a lot happened to me as well as around me. And even after years of moderate peace, more happened so there were many layers. It takes time to clean those out. Everyone does the best they can.
Great story!