Tag Archives: Strong black woman

My Leadership Shero

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My Aunt Alfredine

It was the summer of 1984, a sunny day filled with hope for what the fall would bring as a ninth grader at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School. Excited to be joining my sister, Sharon, and cousin Lillian, I still had some angst about being a “Freshie.” “Be careful of upperclassmen trying to sell you elevator passes; hide your Men and Nations book; and don’t look scared or lost,” they warned. Though I knew I wouldn’t be a sucker and buy a pass and was confident that I could keep my freshmen government book in my bag, I wasn’t so sure about not looking lost in this school of a few thousand. So on this sunny day, Cass’ guidance department head at the time, Mrs. Wiley as she was known to most—but my Aunt Alfredine because she was my mom’s best friend from college—invited me and another nervous would-be freshman to tour the halls of the eight-floor magnet school for the academically gifted. Because each floor’s design was basically the same, I was able to make mental notes of paths to the easy to find rooms and those in the dark, dreaded back hallways. I don’t remember having any anxiety the first day of school and I wasn’t targeted as a Freshie. My freshman experience was pleasant, and this was due in large part to the opportunity Auntie gave me that summer day in 1984. My continued confidence in life, especially in the area of leadership, comes from several opportunities from my awesome auntie, Alfredine Jordan Wiley.

Those who know Aunt Alfredine know that you truly believe you can fly when she talks to you. Always speaking in terms of “we,” you know she will have your back in whatever joint endeavor. But the event doesn’t have to be joint; if she knows she can help you and is available, she’s there, with a word, an action or a referral. In high school, she gave me my leadership start by allowing me to be an office aide and encouraging me to run for senior class secretary and president of AKA Teens (which I won), but she also encouraged me to try out for cheerleading and to run for Pep Club president (which I didn’t make). Whether good or bad she’s always made me feel I could achieve. As she moved her pointer finger slow like a gavel and her head shaking the same way with one eye closed and telling you her truth through pursed lips, she would always say something like, “You can’t win them all, but you know you’re good, Rhonda. You know you’re good.” And because she believed I was a good leader, as president of our sorority’s chapter she appointed me as co-chair and then chair of our founders’ day celebration, encouraged me twice to run for our chapter’s executive and foundation boards (which I won) and had me serve on a bunch of other committees. Often we were roommates (sometimes without my mother) at sorority conferences. We talked, shopped and dined together during these times and outside of them because our love for one another extended beyond leadership. She just knows how to make people feel special, and this she has done for me.

I thank her for teaching me how to mobilize and motivate people and love them unconditionally. And she taught her daughters to love that way, too. Never once did Lillian or Jennifer, my cousins and my sisterfriends, make me feel that I didn’t belong to their mother. They always called me the third daughter. I love Lillian and Jennifer because of our own bond but I appreciate them for sharing their mother with me and always knowing she had enough love for us all. Their capacity to love and share comes from a mother who has always wanted the best for all, even if that meant her going without. This educator, friend and leader is my Aunt Alfredine and I am proud to call her my shero.

Copyright by Rhonda J. Smith

Your Sweetness

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Granny hosting a birthday party for a relative

For Brunice Lewis, Granny, on her 78th birthday
December 12, 2004

She is high and lifted up
Because she looks down, picks others up
You know who I’m talking about
Granny, Bern, Sybil, Ma, Auntie
No matter what the name
They are all the same
We talkin’ ‘bout Brunice Lewis
Cooking pies and cakes
Making dinners
Keeping dates
For Rob and Holmes
Whatever event
Call her home
She is there to make others happy and f(ph)at
Fortune and far-reaching fame
Aren’t her claims
Though money could be
If she didn’t share it with you and me.
She’s a saint
A local queen
Sits enthroned on Marlborough street
reigns supreme to meet your needs
You know who I’m talking about
She is your sweetness
The neighborhood piper
The wet eye wiper
You need a place to stay
You need an ear to hear
You need a voice to speak
You need a word to keep
You need cash in hand
You need a ride to get there
You go to the throne of sweetness
My sweetness
Your sweetness
She is royalty
Queenly inside and out
A heart overflowing
Hands and feet showing lots of love
She is your sweetness
My granny, your granny
Everyone’s sweetness
And we praise her
Your sweetness.

Copyright 2004-2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

My Hustler Granny

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We’ve all heard the saying, “They don’t make them like that anymore,” talking about some appliance or person whose value is great because of perfection or endurance. This is what I can say about Granny, formally known as Brunice Lewis. I wrote about her when I started this blog in 2008. Granny was my husband’s grandmother but she was my granny too.

Granny, Andrina and Me, 1998


Granny liked me from the start, offering me her bed the first time we met, which was during the hour of my afternoon nap. I liked her, too, lying on her linen with little fear of saliva-scented and otherwise soiled sheets. From the beginning, being with Granny felt like home, and she taught me how to make a better one.

She came to Michigan from Alabama when she was 15, finding day work with a rich family in the old money city of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Her day work often turned into night work, cleaning, cooking and caring for her employer’s business and children. She wasn’t ashamed of her work but let it work to her advantage. Though she was hired to cook, she learned additional culinary skills and put them to use as a caterer. Granny learned how to invest her money and used it and her time to invest in people. She taught me how to garden; I know when to plant what, how to dead head and pull weeds, and how to separate overgrown plants and transplant them and other plants. And because of Granny, I know how to make homemade sausage and Red Velvet cake. I met Granny because of my husband, but our relationship went beyond him.

Like with her daughter, Andrina, my mother-in-love, Granny and I shopped, talked on the phone and dined together. Most times it was Granny, Andrina and me. And sometimes they would call me on the three-way and say they wanted to buy me an outfit, just because. Other times Granny would just make me some beans and cornbread or a Red Velvet cake, just because. But I know her service wasn’t just because, it was because she loved me. And, oh, how I loved her.

I admired her for her grit and her wit and for just being an all around hustler. She knew how to make a dollar because she couldn’t depend on any industry. She was her own industry, making and selling pies, cakes, single dishes and whole dinners, and cleaning homes. Even with her busyness until her ailing days, Granny had a tremendous capacity to love. Her memory challenges me to step it up, keep it up and never forget about people. And for that she was truly my shero.

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Identity Crisis

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A little more than a year ago my 7-year-old son, Joshua, had an identity crisis. He said the pretty ladies were white and he wanted to be white. Oh, you know my heart sunk. My son didn’t think his momma was pretty. He despised how his grandmothers, aunts and friends look. Blinking to hold back tears, catch my breath and move the lump from my throat, I asked him did he know what he was saying meant. I asked him did he know that he was saying that he didn’t think his momma was pretty. He thought for a second and then said, “Yes. The pretty ladies are white. You don’t have clothes like the ladies at the casino.”

Joshua, 7 years old

I couldn’t hear what Joshua was trying to say. I saw little children picking the white baby doll over the black baby doll. I thought, “How could this happen? He has an Afrocentric mother, parents who love him and affirm his blackness. He’s around positive and progressive black people. He owns and reads books with black images. And he doesn’t watch that much TV. How could a baby like mine say he wanted to be white?” And I felt like a failure. I hadn’t instilled cultural pride into my child and now he was telling me so. After the nanosecond of these thoughts flooding my mind I thought to ask him WHY he wanted to be white. He reasoned: “All the white people wear nice clothes. The black children on TV don’t have food and clothes and hell is dark. I want us to be white.”

With his one hour of television a week, which included pleas to help poor children in Africa, casino billboards with fancy dressed white people, and lessons on salvation, Joshua had ascertained that all things white must be good and all things black must be bad, and he didn’t want any of us to have any part of anything bad. And though what he was saying revealed a bad situation, I was relieved. At 6, my son was a critical thinker and he wanted what he perceived to be the best for him and his family. Now the task was to teach him about propaganda meant to entice and make him feel less than others.

I thought I would deluge him with the history of black oppression at the hands of whites, saturate my home with more Afrocentric images, become involved in former activities where he would see me dressed in formal clothes and be around those I knew who flaunted their money and status. But as a strong black woman in recovery who is healing from racial and social pride, I knew these were bad ideas. They would perpetuate in Joshua what I was trying to get rid of in me. So I did what I should have done in the first place: pray.

In the middle of the night, Proverbs 6:25 came to my mind and I knew God was giving me the answer to help my son and others who may be competitive to the point of being covetous. “Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids.” This ‘her’ was the ‘strange woman’ in verse 24 and though the strange woman here is interpreted whore, the Hebrew word also means “foreign; someone not like you.” And the word lust is the same Hebrew word for covet. Joshua loves the Bible and constantly looks for applications in his life. I knew we needed to revisit The 10 Commandments, specifically “Thou shalt not covet” because God was saying at the root of Joshua’s identity crisis was an issue with covetousness. Joshua was coveting his neighbor’s skin color and possessions, and I was convinced that Joshua would get this. He did.

On his own, Joshua said, “I’m telling God, ‘I know you gave me this skin color, but I don’t want it. I want white skin.” Then he looked embarrassed and curious, like he had just been scolded and knew what the consequences would be if he didn’t stop coveting. Joshua learned the lesson immediately and there has been no more talk about wanting to be white. This lesson, along with teaching that God created ‘all nations of men,’ has helped Joshua understand that his being black was no accident but an intentional incident, and because of that he has no reason to covet. Joshua is my hero because he took the word of God and immediately applied it to his life. Also, Joshua now is quite proud to be black, constantly expressing awe and joy when discovering blacks’ accomplishments. I’m just working on his ability to love all the nations of people God has created and not seek to return hate for hate. As we reflect on the state of black people during this Black History Month, I think Joshua’s lessons are good for us all.

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Fight to the Death

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Civil Rights Activist Fannie Lou Hamer

In one of my undergraduate black studies courses, my end of the year project was a presentation on someone in black history. I chose sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. I liked her grit and grassroots efforts to bring equality to her state of Mississippi and the country. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Mississippi to tell black folks they had a constitutional right to vote, Hamer was one of the first to go to the courthouse to register. She was beaten, jailed, and continually threatened but none of those evils stopped her. She was fearless as a SNCC field secretary and traveled the United States telling black folks that poll taxes and tests to vote were illegal, and she registered them to vote.

In 1964, as a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), she stepped on the broader national scene when she challenged the seating of the Mississippi delegation—all white—at the Democratic National Convention. Her speech that had the oft quoted phrase “sick and tired of being sick and tired” helped to grant others MFDP delegates the right to speak and special seating. This mother and activist also worked with other groups to improve the lives of the oppressed. Hamer often sang Christian hymns in the midst of her work, seemingly connecting her physical battle with a war in the spiritual realm. In 1993, this freedom fighter was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

I related to Hamer. And even though I hadn’t seen the newsreel of her speech, my teacher said that my role play voice sounded just like Hamer. In my early 20s, I had had my share of discrimination. From being under the watchful eye of retail workers to professors discounting my classroom contributions to potential employers assuming my experience had only been granted because of a quota system, I knew the sting of racism. And though my sting was real, nothing compared to what Hamer and thousands of other blacks felt during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. That’s why I could only play the part of a Fannie Lou Hamer. She fought for her rights because “The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember,” she said. Not being under the overt daily threat of death, the least I can do is to vigorously fight for justice in the sphere that the Lord has given to me. I challenge us all not to be comfortable in our Christianity, but to stand in the face of adversity and to speak out against those who seek to silence our voices. Fight for your freedom, whether racial or religious. This is what we are called to and must do to honor the memory of folks like Hamer and to give honor to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith

Sources: ibiblio, National Women’s Hall of Fame and Wikipedia