Category Archives: Women

Day 3: Losing It, Part 1

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Photo Credit: Miss Hag, flickr.com

I fell apart.

I was driving on the freeway and an 18-wheeler speeding next to me lost control of his rig and headed toward me. I kept driving. I didn’t slam on my brakes or turn away from the truck. I kept driving straight in my lane as the 18-wheeler was coming into my lane.

I fell apart.

I didn’t think about my baby, my husband, my mother. Not my father, my sister, nor my brother. I didn’t wonder about friends, my students, my church. I just wanted the truck to hit me, to kill me. I just wanted to be with Jesus.
This wasn’t the first time I fell apart. There was the time when I snapped at my husband for turning the light on so I could see. Then there were the times of bursting in tears and staring in space with periodic screams to fill the silence. I would rock back and forth while sitting on the edge of my bed or walk aimlessly around the house.

I fell apart.

I fell apart at these times, but the 18-wheeler time was different. This time I was beyond despair. My depression had gone from tears to tainted thoughts of a different life, the afterlife, one away from the pressures of life. One with Jesus.

I had never been suicidal before, at least not since my teen years. After the 18-wheeler regained control of his truck I returned to normal: I burst into tears, stared into space and screamed periodically. I wondered how I—a Christian, wife, mother, college professor, church leader, daughter, sister, friend, counselor, had gotten here. How had I gone so far as to want to kill myself?

I had a “perfect” life: A wonderful husband, a precocious little boy, a tenured job, leadership positions at my church and lots of friends. I was a writer who enjoyed scripting and presenting poetry. How had I gone so far? I had a wonderful, full life. Why did I want to kill myself?

Maybe the answer seems clear: My life was too full, weighing me down until I felt I could no longer go on. I had too much going on in my life; I was trying to be too much for too many people. I was taking on assignments and not completing them well. I was forgetting appointments, staying up late and getting up early. I was driving all over town to meet obligations and had a host of stress-related issues to tend to. The pressure was tough, but I felt I had to do it. This was my life. This was my lot. I was falling apart from the pressure of being a strong black woman.

Copyright 2006-2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Day 2: Strong Black Women Rubbish

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Since the time of black American slavery (some even dare say before, on the continent of Africa), black women have been considered the center of the black family. Matriarchy, the argument goes, has been necessary because black women have been in the position to support the family without being a threat, as the black man is, to the white power structure. Black women’s leadership, regardless of the reason, has led to us being what writer Zora Neale Hurston called the “mules of society.”

Our hard work has also generated many stereotypes, including the domestic and domineering Aunt Jemima and mammy, and the sassy Sapphire. As a result of these stereotypes, many see black women as overbearing. Some of us don’t consider ourselves domineering; we choose to call ourselves strong black women (SBW). Like some blacks who have reclaimed the word nigger as a term of endearment, black women have embraced the label strong black woman without fully recognizing its detrimental effects. This is the reason I have written this book: To tell us that it is no longer time for us to believe our strength is in sitting on the term strong black women.

I believe that the SBW that emerged from negative stereotypes is a myth that black women have welcomed to their detriment. I am not the only one who argues this; Scholar/writer/activist/feminists Angela Y. Davis and bell hooks, and others–including most recently Sheri Parks in Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture–advocate controlling, perhaps destroying, the mythical SBW. They say believing this myth has led to black women, indeed, being the “mules of society” and have left them mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally unhealthy. Some suggest a humanist approach to self-healing and creating healthy families, including lesbian homes. But I know the only way healing and healthy families come about is by following God’s design for family and the woman, without giving priority to race.

Black Christian women have embraced the SBW, a label that even leading feminists are rejecting. Buying into this myth has caused many black Christian women to become deluded to the point that we compete with each other, have been deceived by each other, are haughty, and lack submission. Unfortunately, we have taught our daughters how to be SBW, and the satanical cycle will continue if we don’t recognize the source of contention in our homes.

This book exposes how the SBW myth is still being peddled in the media and is wrecking havoc in black Christian women’s lives—personally, with each other, with our boyfriends and spouses, and with our daughters. Black Christian women need to continue to rid ourselves of pride, covetousness, envy, and competition, which I believe largely stem from the notion of what it means to be a strong black woman. Destroying the Myth of the Strong Black Woman gives clear direction in how to shed the myth and embrace what God labels a strong woman.

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Right that Strong Black Woman Book

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As promised on Friday, today I begin posting excerpts from a draft of my book on the strong black woman. If you look over the course of my life, this book has been in the making since I was about 5. I began writing it, however, about 10 years ago. Over the decade there has been a host of articles, talk shows, lectures and books on this topic. Most recently, Sheri Parks published Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture and Hasani Pettiford published Why We Hate Black Women. While these books deal with stereotypes surrounding strong black women and even delve into areas of spirituality, neither offers a Christian worldview. My work does. If you have been following this blog, you know that I believe Jesus Christ is the author and finisher of my faith. So any conclusions that I come to about who I am have to be words based on what Jesus says. So from my book with the working title Destroying the Myth of the Strong Black Woman, I present to you a portion of the foreword:

    “Their strength is to sit still. Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever. . .” Isaiah 30:7b-8.

When God tells you to do something, you better do it, even if the task is harsh; you think people won’t like you, that people will attack you. Such was the case with completing Destroying the Myth of the Strong Black Woman. I didn’t feel this way in the beginning. I first thought, “God gave me this book to help set black women free. This is going to be good. I and so many women I know have these issues. People need this book.” And hundreds of women and men I talked to and interviewed supported my thinking. So did one mainstream publisher whose only apprehension was backlash from the black community. A white editor wanted to know what the black community would feel about some of its dirty laundry being aired. This sentiment kept them from publishing my book. But now here I am, because when God tells you to do something, you better do it, even if the task is harsh, you think people won’t like you, that people will attack you.

So, this is a forewarning. You may think what I have written is harsh; you may not like me; you may even attack me. I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is the repercussions of God showing me something so clearly, telling me to write it, and disobeying Him for fear of man. This book is my debt to my God who entrusted my limbs to deliver a message, one that is hard-hitting but redeeming for me. When I examined the history of my independence and pride in being a strong black woman I recognized little of my walk had been with God. . . .

More of my story from the book next time

Copyright 2006-2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Loving Kim

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Yesterday educator and civil rights icon Dorothy I. Height died. She was there with Martin Luther King. She was there before him fighting for racial and gender equality. She was on the frontlines. Among several involvements, Height was a member and past president of the National Council of Negro Women, a member and past national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and a presidential adviser. Height was 98. With her death and the recent death of former NAACP leader Benjamin Hooks, someone asked the question, “Who will lead us?” And I thought of my girl Kim, one of my oldest, closest and dearest friends.

Me and Kim at the airport on her way to South Africa-February 1996

Kimberly Ann Trent is a civil rights icon in her own right. Currently a director for Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, she’s worked for two members of US Congress, been a journalist, is extremely active with the Democratic Party and Delta Sigma Theta’s political action committee, organized the campaign to keep affirmative action as the law in Michigan and sits on too many boards to name. She is a true Renaissance woman who does what she does not to be seen and heard but so others can be seen and heard. Though she comes from a highly educated middle class family and has studied abroad in Finland and South Africa, she has a heart for the oppressed, whatever the oppression is. She’s been this way for as long as I’ve known her and that’s been since we were 14, but we didn’t get close until college.

While at Wayne State University in Detroit we dreamed of a better world and what our role would be in it. We were young, certainly not dumb but we wanted to be deeper than we were. A voracious reader, Kim mostly decided what we would read and intellectual bell hooks was at the top of our list. Some Saturdays (depending on what we did Friday night) we would sit and read and then discuss what we read. I remember taking Sisters of the Yam on our trip to Jamaica and between sightseeing and beach parties, we actually read on our hotel balcony and while chilling on the beach.

Our reading together, trips together, working together (summers at The Detroit News), and ‘all the time’ talks together created a deep bond that some just couldn’t understand, especially our sorors (I am a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.). We would say we were going to be national president of our organizations and seek to implement joint national programs. And to get each other’s attention across campus we would mix our sorority calls (Skee-oop, I would say. Ooo-skee, she would say). This was the late ’80s and ’90s. In this last decade we haven’t hung as much because our lives leave little time for leisure. But Kim in all her busyness never forgets her friends. She never forgets me. She always celebrates my birthday and has helped to host my baby showers. We talk at least once a month and even hung out for a few hours last Friday without a big rush and without our children. It was then that I felt we were young again, and I remembered my poetic tribute to her. I share this with you now to celebrate one of my best friends, civil rights icon Kimberly Ann Trent:

SISTER LOVE
For Kimmie

A stash of my sashes, those tools to prop me up,
are in medicine cabinets and books, the bible to be exact.
But there’s one place I find comfort, where books don’t compete
or taking drugs, when I’m fiend, leaves me feeling incomplete
I need to push a button, the one marked primary
at the top of my telephone
to send an alert to my friend, the one who keeps me moving,
strolling, yes, staying strong.
Always on the case, my saving grace,
she perfects the race to be young, gifted and black.
She got my back from way back,
that’s how I know she’s beautiful.

And I told her, her statuesque body
taking command as she stands and I delight
in her insight and share her thoughts with others.
And no joke, this is not for the rhyme but my brother
said one time, “What doesn’t Kim say?”
I blushed and agreed because I did repeat
a lot of what she said
like with a childhood crush
or results of a sugar rush to the head
I was and still am impelled by Kim.

Sounds like a love story, that’s right, it is.
Sister love is the theme and Kimberly Ann Trent has laid out the scene
Even when she’s moody and doubtful, I remember the laughter, same wave lengths, talking all night, all of the trappings of great friendship.
She is solid, solid as a rock, my rock and she better know it.
She is good medicine. And I’m glad I have her to help save my life.

By Rhonda Anderson
February 17, 1996

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

One Lesbian Speaks

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On Saturday, April 10, 2010, Equipped for Life, the radio broadcast of my church, Evangel Ministries in Detroit, hosted Answering the Challenge, the broadcast’s evangelistic outreach ministry, with the topic “The Questions of Homosexuality.” It was my church’s attempt to reach out to the homosexual community in a civil manner, particularly offering hope through Jesus Christ to those struggling with homosexuality and wanting to change. Love flowed through the sanctuary of heterosexuals and homosexuals who all had varied stories. The event organizer asked me to deliver a poem. I prayed that God would show me what message He wanted me to deliver. He gave me a piece from a lesbian’s point of view. The gay community, like no community, is not monolithic, so this poem is Just One Story,* the name of the piece:

He beat me

And I scrambled, not wishing to handle the situation ever so delicately

So others could see we were the perfect couple.

He beat me so I ran to her and she cared for me, again, like when he broke that bottle over my head

Said he wouldn’t do it anymore

But there WAS more

More of his insecurity

More of his seeing me as the enemy

His trying to control me

His love shown in excuses and apologies.

He said he wouldn’t do it anymore.

But there was always more.

More of his lies

My cries

His drinking and stinking up the place

My seeking an escape in tiny corners, the small space under the bed, the clothes closet, against a door, a wall, a window, underneath the kitchen table.

He was always able to charm me back to him.

But he beat me again.

So I ran to her

And she held me close

She took me in

She let me weep

She let me talk

She cleaned and bandaged my wounds.

I stayed.

Though I wondered if I should

Cuz I never thought loving her would be right

But I prayed in the small spaces that one day I wouldn’t have to explain my face:

The shut black eye

The red swollen lip

The deep cut cheek

The bleeding mouth

When I ran to her

she held me close

She took me in

She let me weep

She let me talk

She cleaned and bandaged my wounds.

I stayed.

No more beatings

No more pain

No more apologies and excuses

The love here is sane.

I don’t have to explain anything.

She just knows.

Now I know what love really is

I know it didn’t start right.

I’m not sure that it is right.

I know it just feels right.

I understand the fight for gay rights

I hope the whole country changes its mind

Sees this lifestyle, my lifestyle, as just fine.

I hope they do cuz it’s natural for me.

I’ve never known a love so true.

I’m really happy.

And I know that God would have me to be happy.

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

*Listen to this on my YouTube Channel (though it looks like a badly dubbed foreign movie. I’m working on getting the video right, but the sound is great.)