Sweeter Than Honey (27 page)

Do we truly understand that our purpose is not about a job or what supplies a paycheck? It’s not about outshining another human being, accumulating more wealth than we know what to do with, or human adoration or praise. It is about the spiritual path, the journey. And what a journey it has been.

It took the approval of several angels and ancestors for us to be here on the earth at this time. My being here is no accident, no coincidence. Your being here is in Divine Order. Through it all I can say I am worthy. If you really think about it, all experiences considered, you can definitely say the same.

©2007 Naleighna Kai is the author of
Every Woman Needs a Wife
. Visit her online at www.NaleighnaKai.com.

Gloria Mallette

I like who I am, inside and out. Well, maybe I don’t like my overly wide hips and big shapely legs so much. They’ve always been standouts, drawing many a gaze my way, but then again, I guess I adore them. They drew my husband to me, so I have to give them their due. Still, I know who I am, I know what I’m about. I didn’t always know, I had to find out.

It’s been a while, more like fifteen years, but I’ll never forget the look in my best friend’s eyes when she said, “I don’t understand. Why do you always get everything you want?”

I was the one who didn’t understand. Nothing in life was ever given to me. I had to work hard and still do for everything I have.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“You. I’m talking about you. You wanted a car, you got a car. You wanted a computer, you got a computer. You wanted a husband, you got a husband. You wanted a house, you got a house. I want all those things. I don’t have them. Why you? How come you get everything you want?”

I was speechless. At that very moment, I didn’t know how to answer that question. I didn’t even know if there was an answer to that question, and in truth, I had to ask myself whether my “best friend” was my friend at all. Whatever I had was no different from what half the world had acquired. I think what my friend was really saying was that I wasn’t deserving of anything I had, which hurt.

You see, I shared everything with “Tia.” I told her all about my past, and as well about my hopes and dreams. After all, next to my husband, Tia was my best friend and she was closer to me than my own sisters. Not to mention that we worked together. So you can see how I didn’t understand where Tia was coming from, especially when she had just about everything I had. She had a car, she had a computer. She traveled, she had money. Tia didn’t have a house, but she did have an expensive co-op apartment. What Tia also didn’t have was a husband, at least not a husband of her own. Tia had someone else’s husband and she was madly in love with him. In Tia’s bed, her lover committed adultery. In his wife’s bed, he made love, he made his babies, he went to sleep, and he woke up to her stank morning breath, which he willingly inhaled and snuggled up to.

When Tia said those words to me, I wondered, was she jealous of me? Did she hate me because I had a man who had pledged fidelity to me? Or was she just angry that I had acquired or accomplished anything at all in my life? I questioned Tia about what she’d said, and she said she meant nothing at all, that I was being “too sensitive.” Admittedly, my feelings were hurt, and if truth be told, I was sensitive and I had every right to be. I wanted to lash out at Tia.

I wanted to say, “Why don’t you stop sleeping around with married men? Why is it that you can’t get a man of your own?”

That’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I don’t have an evil spirit. Oh, I’ve told Tia before that it was wrong to go out with married men, that she should respect the sisterhood, and more important, I’ve told her that she deserved a man of her own who’d respect her and their relationship. But be that as it may, I took Tia’s words personally, but I didn’t stop speaking to her. I kept my feelings to myself, but I was more restrained with what I shared with her.

But then, two months later I accidently ran into Tia and her new “special” friend, whom I’d never met.

“You’re very attractive,” he said to me. “You must have had a lot of boyfriends loving you.”

While I was flattered, the shocked look on Tia’s face was nothing compared to the demeaning words she cruelly uttered. “You must be blind.”

Both Tia’s friend and I were stunned. I pulled my “friend” aside and asked, “What the hell did you mean by that?”

Without hesitation, Tia said, “You’re so fat and black, I don’t see what’s attractive about that.”

When I finally closed my mouth, I opened my mind. I finally understood my “best friend.”

You see, as quiet as it’s kept, through eyes like Tia’s, I’m not supposed to have anything. Whereas Tia is supposed to have everything. I’m not supposed to be anything. You see, my skin isn’t scorched brown from the sun; my dark chocolate skin comes courtesy of my birth. Just as Tia’s high “yalla” skin comes of her second-generation mixed race parentage.

In this day and time, it’s hard to believe that many, even in our own African-American community, see beauty in shades of skin tone. And me being short and dark, and, oh, not to mention at the time, well over two hundred and fifty pounds, I wasn’t supposed to have a husband, much less a husband who was tall and as fine as wine, educated, and quite successful. Tia, who was slim and damn near white in complexion, couldn’t understand how any man would find me attractive. Wow, go figure. But then again, as Tia well knew, until I was fifteen, I thought just as she did.

My mother died when I was two and a half years old. I am one of five children left to a young father who was ill-equipped experience-wise and financially to raise five babies—the youngest being eight months old and the oldest six years old. It was my father’s sister who took us from him and from our home in Gadsden, Alabama, and brought us to the promised land of New York City. One would think my aunt, Auntie, as we called her, was going to give us a chance at the life my unskilled father was unable to. That was so far from the reality of what our lives would be with Auntie.

Auntie wanted her brother’s motherless children because she was unable to have children of her own, and her husband wanted children. Through the court system, Auntie legally stole us from our father and then forbade him to ever see us. She put us up in a big house in Queens, New York, and to the world outside our front door, we were a loving, churchgoing family. We were blessed, our minister said, because Auntie had taken us in and given us a beautiful home. While we may have been blessed on one hand, on the other, we were damned. You see, behind closed doors, the Auntie we knew was so unlike the Auntie our minister, our neighbors, or our teachers knew. The Auntie we knew was the devil incarnate.

With my father out of the picture, and my uncle silenced by Auntie’s vicious tongue, Auntie abused us. She beat us with electric cords, she deprived us of food, she locked us away in closets, and she kept us out of school. She had us so afraid of her, we knew she meant it when she said, “I’ll kill you if you ever tell anyone what goes on in this house.” We never got a pat on the back, a kiss on the cheek, or a kind word of encouragement. Our self-esteem was destroyed before it was even developed. We were three girls and two boys at the mercy of an aunt who herself had suffered the indignities of a childhood that had destroyed her self-esteem and planted the seeds of vindictiveness and anger in her soul.

In turn, Auntie took her anger out on innocent souls. She not only lashed us with the whip of physical abuse, she beat us down with her tongue of degradation. Auntie told my sisters and me that we would grow up to be whores and that men would use us and throw us away like day-old trash. According to Auntie, we would amount to nothing and no one would ever give us a helping hand. And me, in particular, the darkest of my siblings, no man would ever find me attractive, and no man would ever love me.

Oh, did I mention? Auntie was a light-skinned woman. Her father had been white. My father was her half brother; their skin color was not alike. If Auntie could have scrubbed the black off my skin, as she most definitely tried, she would have.

Auntie called me black when we as a people were still called Negroes or colored. As a ten-year-old, I was hurt by that word
black
and shamed as if it were a curse word. In the white elementary school I attended, I kept my eyes lowered, my dark arms covered, and if it had been at all possible, I would have covered my black face. For it wasn’t just the white kids who taunted me, it was also the “colored kids.” The lighter ones called me “tar baby” and “black.” The few other kids who were as dark as me said nothing in my defense, for they too were called those names. We couldn’t help each other, nor could I tell Auntie what was going on in school—she would not have cared.

I said my prayers, I talked to God, I asked him to see us through. I asked for a miracle that was not destined to come overnight. As young as I was, I understood that God might not answer my prayers when I wanted him to, but that he would answer when the time was right.

It wasn’t until I was fifteen when my siblings and I got the courage to free ourselves. We ran away from my aunt and went to live with my mother’s sister who was undoubtedly the answer to my prayers. My aunt Jimmie was our saving grace. She didn’t take us to church as Auntie did, she took us to her heart—she was no hypocrite.

That fateful summer of 1968, James Brown had a hit song called “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” With all my heart, I felt that James Brown was singing that song just for me. From the first time to the hundredth time I heard that song, my whole outlook on who I was and how I looked changed. That summer, when I looked into my mirror at my black shiny face, I saw someone I had never seen before—a beautiful, bright-eyed black girl with short picky hair looking back at me. For the first time in my life, I smiled at my reflection. I wore my Afro with pride and reveled in my newfound freedom. Throughout that summer, I discovered me. I found a beautiful, strong, confident girl who would soon be a woman in control of her life. And to this day that is who I am.

I am God’s child. Auntie didn’t break me. I am a woman whom no man or woman can destroy. So to my “friend” Tia, I say, “Beauty is so much more than the face we see. Beauty is in the heart and soul of man. Look inward and discover the beauty you ought to be.”

©2007 Gloria Mallette is the national best-selling author of
If There Be Pain, What’s Done in the Dark, Distant Lover, The Honey Well, Promises to Keep, Weeping Willows Dance, Shades of Jade,
and
When We Practice.
Visit Gloria online at www.GloriaMallette.com.

Marissa Monteilh

They said, “You’ll never sell your book, it’s too much like
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
.” They said, “You’ll never get an editor to buy your work, it has too much sex.” They said, “You can’t afford to self-publish, it’s too expensive.” I say, tell me something I can’t do and I’ll show you something I can do.

The true essence of who we are is uncovered through the actual journey of discovery of who we are. Questions like who are we, what is our truth, what do we believe, what is our gift, what is our love, and what is our life’s purpose, all come to mind. All because we are a discovery in progress as we find the lesson in each and every experience. Even in the worst of times, in the deepest of criticisms, we’re being led to a higher good.

At an early age, though I was abandoned by my famous father, my mother, a strong black woman, raised me and my two older brothers on her own. As a strong black woman, she worked three jobs and still managed to continue her education, later becoming an entrepreneur.

I found myself widowed at the age of thirty-three, yet, as a strong black woman, I raised three kids, all the while finding myself challenged by the fact that the essence of who I was did not match well with all that corporate America had to offer.

Once I discovered my love of words, I sat down to write my life story after burying five family members in ten years, and ended up with a novel. I researched and wrote and inquired and focused and eventually, in spite of all the naysayers, I self-published. Six months later I signed a two-book deal offered by an editor at a major publishing house, and before I knew it, that dream some said would never happen, the dream to one day see my novel on the shelves of bookstores, was realized. And I became a full-time author. I followed God’s pattern and sat in the manifestation of what was architecturally designed, which all unfolded in Divine order.

Surely the strength of my mother’s independence planted ideals to never settle for less than what my spirit yearned to accommodate. I thank my mother for sparking the fire that burns inside me when I write, the same fire that warms my soul when I see women like Mary B. Morrison make profound strides in the world of publishing. Through it all, I have found out what my heart knew to be true, and I no longer have that divine discontent that nagged at my soul.

I, Marissa Monteilh, deserve success and happiness because I am worthy. I am worthy because along this journey, I have found my God-given gift.

I am a writer.

I have found my purpose.

My purpose is to create characters that people can see themselves through. And in having the courage to write my own personal book of life, the story of my own life journey, it is my dream that it will inspire and motivate others to say to themselves, “I too can do that.”

The responsibility that comes with that is to pay it forward. We are blessed so that we can be a blessing to someone else. As we let our light shine, we give permission to others to do the same.

And as for my offspring, I have told my daughter to tell her daughter, to tell her daughter, that God has a bigger vision than was once thought of for colored girls. But in order to live God’s dream for us, we must have faith, do the work, and stay ready. You must be in position to receive the possession.