My mother showed me what’s possible by doing. Her life was hard, but she never claimed to be a victim. As a single mother,
she worked around the clock to put herself through college to become an art teacher and give her two children a better life.
She clipped coupons and made personal sacrifices to make sure we got a good education. She made sure our home was always well
kept, no matter where we lived. She stretched out every meal and used every resource she had to make sure we never felt deprived.
My brother and I didn’t have everything we wanted, but we got everything we needed.
But it was the nurturing she gave to our souls that made me who I am today. As an artist with a passion for beauty and self-expression,
my mother taught us about primary colors, took us to museums, and kept books around the house with artwork by Salvador Dalí
and Romare Bearden. She brought home culture magazines and
The New York Times
. She took us to plays and musicals, always making sure we knew there was a bigger world beyond our four corners in Newark.
My mother encouraged me to make up songs, dance, bang on stuff, and do whatever I could to be creative. She gave me my prized
possession—the small eight-track cassette player that sat in the middle of my small bedroom. Our home was always filled with
music, love, and joy.
Her greatest gift to us was her willingness to always listen. Mom took the time to get to know my brother and me as individuals.
Even as babies, we weren’t just little creatures to be cared for. She was curious about who we were. As the middle child between
five brothers and two sisters growing up on army bases in
Maryland, my mother got lost. She blossomed later in life than most
because as a kid she didn’t quite know who she was. But she was determined to bring out our best selves from an early age.
She’d get down at eye level and talk
to
us, not
at
us. When we misbehaved, which was often, she didn’t yell. She’s soft-spoken and gentle, and I’ve never known her to raise
her voice.
But she made sure we knew when we were wrong. She was clear about the rules, and the worst feeling in the world was knowing
we’d disappointed her. She had the same effect on some of her roughest students at Irvington. She made those kids want to
excel. Mom—Mamma O or Ms. O to the kids in her class—always had a way of instilling in you the desire to please her and meet
her highest expectations, and that’s a powerful thing.
Today, my mother is the most precious person in my world. She is my best friend and my greatest ally. She helps me run my
management and production company, Flavor Unit. She’s in charge of the day-to-day business of our scholarship program, the
Lancelot H. Owens Scholarship Foundation. She provides inspiration for many of my acting roles, especially when the character
I am playing is feminine but strong. There’s a lot of my mother in August from
The Secret Life of Bees
—this gentle, educated woman who takes care of the people she loves.
Whenever I decide I’m going to try something new, Mom’s the one in my corner, encouraging me to take the leap. Even when she’s
afraid for me, she doesn’t try to hold me back. She understands I have to take risks, make my own mistakes, and do me. And
I always know I’m going to get honest feedback from her. She knows I don’t need another fan.
When I did my first jazz album,
Trav’lin’ Light
, I asked her advice about rerecording the song “Poetry Man,” because I knew it was her favorite. I was nervous, but Mom said
I should go for it, and I was giddy when she told me how much she loved what I did. There’s always going to be that little
kid in me who wants her mother’s approval.
The best part of having Rita Bray Owens in my life is watching the way she treats each day as a gift. She just turned sixty,
and on her birthday she saw her first hockey game and took her first yoga class. She’s learning tai chi, and she started piano
lessons because she has a big ol’ grand piano in her living room and she decided she wanted to be able to play it. Next on
her list is dancing lessons. Mom is a young soul who loves being a work in progress, and the day she stops
learning, growing,
and discovering is the day she stops living.
My mother has a wood carving in the entranceway of her house in New Jersey. It says simply, “LIVE.” She looks at it every
day to remind herself. She really studies it. She asked me, “Have you ever noticed that if you read ‘live’ backwards it spells
‘evil’? Because to not live, to do the opposite and waste this life God gave us, would be evil.” To live—that’s her creed.
Mom is the reason why, as I approach forty, I’m not afraid of growing older. She’s a perfect example of how to age gracefully
and stay vital. Her life is in full flower. For the first time since she and my father divorced, my mother has found a good
man, Bobby, a former police officer and the guy who heads up security for the mayor’s office in Newark. My mother wasn’t looking.
She was too busy living her life, and in so doing,
he
found
her
. Now she’s planning her wedding. She decided to take her time in finding a life partner, and she didn’t mind being single
one bit. Her independence was too precious to give up until she found the man who truly deserves her.
Not everyone has a mother who’s still around, and some mother/daughter relationships are full of tension. I can understand
how hard that must be. I’ve always had my mother to turn to. She was always there to comfort and advise me, without ever passing
judgment. And my world is filled with many other amazing female role models—my mother’s mother, Katherine Bray, is eighty-one
and still active in the community. Nana must make some forty pound cakes a year for her church bake sales, neighbors’ birthdays,
funerals. She still drives, hangs out with her church lady friends, and keeps a clean house with pots on the stove simmering
something delicious for all the children and grandchildren who come to visit.
Nana Owens, my father’s mother, was another important maternal figure in my life. Street smart, tough, glamorous, and fun
loving, Nana loved life until the end. Another powerhouse personality, my aunt Elaine Owens, was also a huge influence in
my life. She was the one who showed my mother the ropes when she wasn’t much more than a child herself, struggling to take
care of a newborn and a toddler. Mom had just moved up to New Jersey with my father. She was from the South and didn’t know
a soul, so Aunt Elaine took her under her wing. These were women who
knew
it takes a village. It was how they lived.
If you can, find a nurturing relationship with an older, wiser female, like an aunt, godparent, grandparent, or friend and
grab hold of it. Open yourself up to their love. If you haven’t found it yet, it’s probably there, coming from some unexpected
place. Maybe it’s an old schoolteacher, a neighbor, or a friend. Maybe it’s not even a female figure in your life. Maybe it’s
your father or a male friend or relative. You may not think anyone has your back, but someone does. Someone is willing to
be there for you. Someone
will
listen. It’s up to you to let that person in.
Meanwhile, I’m setting aside the rest of this chapter to loan out my own mother to you, to share some of her own moments and
spread the love. Mamma O will take it from here…
I think what my Dana is saying is that you are not alone. Even when you think you are, or you are convinced that no one understands
you, there’s always going to be someone watching and caring. You are loved, and the decisions you make will have a ripple
effect on all of the people in your world. Good or bad, your actions will
have an impact on the lives of those around you,
because you matter.
I’ve been blessed. I come from a long, unbroken chain of love through the generations. My mother, my mother’s mother, and
my great-grandmother were all a big part of my life when I was a little girl. Granny and her mother were housemaids in white
households in the South. In fact, my mother grew up in the home where her mother, who was unmarried, worked as part of the
household staff. My mother was raised alongside the white children who lived there, and they treated her like family.
The only time my mother felt different from her white brothers and sisters was when they went to school. There was still segregation
back then, so my mother had to be bused out to a separate school for black children. It bothered her a lot. That’s why education
became so important to her. She was married and pregnant by seventeen, but she and my father, a military man, still made sure
they got their high school diplomas, even in the middle of struggling to raise a young family. So for us, education was non-negotiable.
If we had free time, we were expected to go to the library and read. Anything to broaden our horizons. It was imperative that
we excelled in school. Every night before dinner, we had to sit at that table and do our homework, and if we didn’t have any,
my father could care less. Sergeant Bray would give you his own homework assignment, and you could be sure it would be a lot
harder than anything the teacher could dish out!
Life in our home was strict. With seven children and
my father often posted far away from all of us for long periods of time,
we each had to pull our own weight and contribute to the chores. With just my mother and grandmother to care for us and make
ends meet on my father’s small salary, our home had to function with maximum efficiency. Responsibilities were parceled out
to each child, and even the youngest among us understood how important our roles were. We knew we were a part of the success
of the house until Daddy came home a year from now or whenever the army decided.
But there was so much love. As strict as my mother, father, and grandmother were, they never yelled at us. For us, the knowledge
of disappointing our parents was far worse than any punishment they could deliver. That bubble of love I lived in protected
me from a lot of what was happening in the world around me. Whenever my mother and father got to be in the same country together,
they never fought. Voices were never raised, towards each other or towards their children. They were always loving and respectful.
I got to see how a man should behave as both a husband and a father. It was a good benchmark to keep filed away in the back
of my mind.
We were a tight-knit family. We had our own little community within a community, living in the protected environment of an
army base. I was so sheltered. My life
consisted of friends, family, school, and church. I’d heard about racism in the abstract,
but I was never really exposed to it in a direct way on the various army bases where we lived. Then one hot summer day when
I was about eleven, I left the base to walk to the local swimming pool a mile or two away. A group of white guys driving down
the street in a Chevy rolled down the window and yelled, “Go home, nigger!”
That was a life-stopping moment for me. I was petrified. And confused. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t know those
people. Why did they hate me? It shook me to my core. I ran home, crying. The ugliness of it was like a physical shock. My
father dried my tears and explained that there were two kinds of people in the world: the ignorant and the educated. He took
me to the library and enlightened me about my African-American heritage. He gave me the courage to never let the violence
and aggression of other people’s hateful language and gestures change who I was or infect me with anger. Hatred was their
problem, not mine.
The foundation I had from my parents and grandparents, being part of a generational pattern that was encouraging, nurturing,
and loving, stayed with me, even at times in my life when I felt lost. That kind of love and example has real power that can’t
be underestimated, because it gets passed on to your children and your children’s children.
These days, I see so many examples of how that chain is broken. Kids feel isolated, often with single mothers, not even welfare
moms, working long hours and struggling to survive. Their role models are their peers; their influences are whatever dangerous
garbage they see on the Internet or whatever the alpha boy or girl in their crowd tells them they should be doing. When I
saw more and more pregnant teenage girls in my school, I was disturbed but not surprised, because they’re just following the
pattern of their own mothers and fathers and whatever they see around them. They have no guidance—no one to be living examples
and teach them right from wrong. I still marvel when I meet gems and pearls in my classroom—young men and women who are incredible
human beings, despite coming from broken homes. All they need is a little love and guidance to break them out of a bad cycle.
Even with the stability of my wonderful family, I sort of fell through the cracks. I was very much the middle child, and artistically
inclined, so that put me in a weird place. As an army brat, moving from base to base, I felt even more isolated. I was always
having to pick up and make new friends. I retreated further and further into myself and my fantasy world, focusing on nature
and beauty, painting and creating wherever I could. My father recognized this. My parents would buy me paints and
brushes
for Christmas and birthdays, and whenever my father wrote letters to me from Germany, he’d make his own beautiful drawing
for me. Through his own talent, he showed this unspoken appreciation for my artistic side. I remember those letters so poignantly.
There was potential inside me that needed to be tapped. And yet I went straight from being Sergeant Bray’s daughter to the
wife of Lance Owens, a dashing young soldier in the Honor Guard, fresh from his tour of duty in Vietnam. We met at a little
service club in Arlington, Virginia, where my father was based at the time, and I didn’t know what hit me. I had acceptances
from Howard University and Spelman College, but I gave it all up to move up north to New Jersey and be with my husband. Like
my mother when she started having children, I was little more than a child myself when I fell pregnant. I was just an innocent
and unworldly country girl. I plugged straight into Lance’s network of female family members—his mother and his sister Elaine—and
I thank God every day for them. I didn’t know a soul in Newark, and as a young mother I was too far away from my own mother
to lean on her for support.