Source: Tom Williams / Getty
You could feel her power before she ever said a word, Michelle Obama, our Forever First Lady, alighting the 2024 DNC stage, in Monse and Jimmy Choos looking like she was the only woman the designers envisioned for that brave and beautiful new world pants suit, for those kitten heels so elegant and uncomplicated, both similar to and distinct from that sensual all-the-way-down-her-back single braid. But none of these rivaled that signature walk of hers: that walk that carries information, stories to be shared and stories.
And healing.
Had I ever appreciated that last part, the healing part, before this very moment? I don’t mean notice it. I mean feel it all the way down where our specific blood begins to flow its specifically free and intentional way to our own specific cells, our own specific heart, our own specific soul? That was what coursed, sudden and unbidden, through all the parts of me. Coursed the way my blood coursed. Coursed the way my love coursed through me, or else the way my sadness did. And something else: an emotion without a name, a sense as sure as touch but without tactility.
Mrs. Obama stood at the podium to minutes and minutes of booming applause. The staff assigned to help the crowd moderate their celebrations to keep the program on time, abandoned post, became the crowd. I was home in Brooklyn. I’d wrapped my arms around myself and after that, closed my eyes and was completely still. Listening.
And that’s when Mommy suddenly appeared. I felt her before I saw, before we curled up together the way we did sometimes, mostly when we were someplace away from home together. Our focus returned to Michelle Obama who Day 1 made Mommy smile this wide-as-the-Texas-sky smile every single time she saw the sister from the Southside who said, after moving into the White House, I live in a house built by slaves. Who said, When they go low, we go high.
Remember that Mommy, and how you said, brows slightly raised in that modest but somehow all-knowing kind of singsong way, That’s ri-I-ght. The extra “I” always held, a long soprano of a sound.
I leaned into Mommy like I did when as a small girl, like I did when I was a grown woman with my own small girl. Like I did when that small girl was headed into her senior year in college.
Me and Mommy Source: asha bandele / asha bandele
Three Years, Three Months, Nine Days, Eight Hours
By the time Michelle Obama took the stage on August 20, 2024, my mother, Dolores June Bullard, had been dead three years, three months, nine days and near eight hours. But she’s never left my side, all that grace, all that brilliance, all that artistry in the body of one almost 5-foot-4 Black woman who was born during those Great Depression years that stretched out longer, burrowed themselves deeper into the lives of Black Americans who’d just before had been seeking the warmth of other suns.
I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown . . .
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom
Richard Wright
Mommy never spoke of that time as a time of scarcity. The one faded scar of a her childhood experience: there was small pond in front of her Grandmother’s house where she lived for a period. In that pond was her pet duck who was named, accurately, Duck. Then one day, Duck was unceremoniously demoted back to duck with little letters as in roast duck or we’re having duck for dinner. Other than that story, my mother spoke of those years as good years, years with her grandmother, years when people traded and shared and made sure that no one was left out.
A Memory: Mommy’s Mommy
I’m with Mommy at the old house at 777 Francis Street in South Bend, Indiana, the one we still visited annually then because Aunt Mary and Uncle Art were still alive. Just about everyone else in the family had long ago settled in Chicago but Aunt Mary was Harriet’s sister, and Harriet was my Mommy’s mommy. And her sister, Mary lived and loved and then one day left from right there in South Bend, the city where she once held hands with her sister Harriet.
Aunt Mary’s love was that good, unfussy, non-dramatic, steady Midwestern kind of love. It was a defining love–for her husband, her six children, for all of their children. But before they arrived, there was Mommy, her big sister’s little girl. And for Mommy, Aunt Mary’s love was absolutely life-saving when the circumstances of my mother’s so little, little, tiny, young life shifted the brutality that to this day, is nearly unspeakable to me.
At four-years-old, my mother stood over her own mother, my grandmother as she was lowered into the freshly dug grave at the cemetery I would visit over the years. I can see Mommy there, Mommy at four, obliging the adults explaining it was time to say goodbye, something wholly incomprehensible to a child of that age.
I want to believe it was Aunt Mary who held Mommy’s hand that day so I do, as she did as instructed. Goodbye Mommy, she must have said to Harriet Anderson, her mother, my grandmother, who succumbed to pneumonia at just 26. Mommy once told me she never expected to live past that age, that she was stunned when she did.
But the details of my grandmother’s death were weirdly thin to me as I rushed through the secure door of a childhood I only now realize I deserved to linger longer behind. Not that any single person could have convinced me back then that I wasn’t in fact absolutely grown enough to walk all the way into the world when I chose this writer’s life, this equal parts breath-giving and breath-stealing life of journaling, of documenting.
Hosting VP Harris at the first-ever presidential town hall conceived and produced by and for people directly impacted by the criminal justice system. Source: asha bandele
But that day in the house on Francis St., Aunt Mary sat Mommy and me down on the couch and just kind of told us. Her voice was that low kind of almost-whisper that always telegraphs that what is about to be said will be said only this one time: Abortion she finally told us at the end of a long story forced short. My grandmother, my mother’s Mommy, died alone on her kitchen floor of a self-induced abortion two years after her husband, my mother’s father, left and never came back.
Maybe the baby was his, maybe he cooed his way back into my grandmother’s life. Maybe learning she was pregnant, he disappeared for good. Maybe she knew she could not be single and pregnant. I know she knew the way people talk, which is the bottom line, the only thing we know for sure. My grandmother was so scared of how she’d be received with another baby but no man, she thought the risk of using probably unsterilized kitchen tools and certainly bleeding out, was better than the risk of being gossiped about. Bullied.
If Aunt Mary knew more the cause of death, she didn’t tell us that day and I doubt strongly she ever said more to Mommy. After the few lines of quick verse that tried to pass themselves off as a whole narrative, after she said the word itself-–abortion–in the extra-hushed way people used to say AIDS, she pivoted: “I’m only telling you all this because this one is so nosy,” she said, her head nodding in my direction. “Won’t stop asking questions.”
“Not from the day she started speaking,” Mommy concurred, following the pivot to me, part of generation between my mother’s and my daughter’s. I was the only one of us who came of age assuming a certain body privilege so thoroughly that it wasn’t until we were a few miles into this new millennium that I even noticed that privilege for real, for real.
Love Wins. It Does. It Does.
Oh my Mommy: how she never said a word in the way of her women. But she always knew the universes that grow between having no privilege and having even just a smidge of it. Not because of her mother’s story, the final chapter she wouldn’t learn of until she’d almost edged out of her 60s, looking all of 45 with her beautiful self.
She knew because once Mommy was 16 trying to outrun the Christian Science judgment she feared would choke her in broad daylight on the streets of the Chicago Southside that became home after her grandparents took their final bow in South Bend. The Southside she knew was a world of such mean strict borders only a human-invented God would have deigned to create.
But the Southside she knew as also the Southside of Englewood High where she graduated from top of her class–and two years younger than her peers. It was the Southside of The Chicago Defender, the paper that fueled the Great Migration’s hope and fought the lynchings of terrorists’ hate. And it was the paper that on a February Saturday, just a few short months before Mommy crossed the high school stage to graduate, put her picture in it.
The caption: Miss Dolores Anderson, Crowned Sweetheart of High Schools, will be honored on March 4th at the Pershing Ballroom. I doubt she knew she was already pregnant with my brother John.
His father, like my mother’s father, left. Didn’t look back.
By the time of me, a little more than decades, had passed between the opening of my brother’s life and the opening of my own. Mommy was married to my Papa for more than 10 years into what became a 67-year love story. I grew up in a house where I never once saw my parents fight. I grew up in the arms of a woman who cared for the same adults who once denigrated a scared, isolated girl, told she’d be nothing, never imagining the Phi Beta Kappa double-degreed woman who was right about to finish her doctorate at Columbia University when suddenly there was me.
“Well I suppose people thought there was a choice: you or my dissertation. But it wasn’t ever a choice.” She told me that her whole life, sealing her words with a forehead kiss I’d seal right back on her forehead.
Marian Robinson’s Baby Girl, Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama
When Michelle Obama took the stage at the DNC and grounded her offering in the love and power of a great woman, her mother, Marian Robinson, who left on a day in May of this year, three years after my Mommy left on a day in May.
Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama, daughter of the Southside like Mommy, Dolores June Anderson Bullard, was a daughter of Southside where our family still lives (shout out East 108!). Michelle Obama showed us just the smallest measure of the pain she feels. I know that because I know that pain. I know it in ways I’d never imagined I would I know it. I know the mean wizardry of it that makes it so most never notice all the ways it makes you bleed out, again and again and again and again.
The Late Marian Robinson Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty
I don’t believe you can ever measure the loss of the person who loved you so hard in a world that did not, that she could plant a seed, nurture it across the years, light it so perfectly that it became an entire magical forest called courage that was you.
And all the oxygen and fruit that forest gave to the world was its indefatigable commitment to Do Something!
Listening to Michelle Obama, for the first time since May 8, 2021, I felt the right to grieve, to do what we really don’t know how to do in this American culture. Grieve as we walk our own distinct footpath up the door we need to open to begin to truly heal. So I could cry openly like I am right now, without trying to be silent. Cry and reach through the years and planes of existence so that I felt, actually truly felt like the arms of my mother, Dolores June Bullard, holding me. Holding me like she would never stop holding me.
That’s why I knew that in across the virtual of it all, I was in the presence of a master healer, our Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama, who in calling her mother forward, called my mother forward, called all of mothers far from us now, forward.
She called them with love, she called them with hope, and each of expressions, a one word prayer.
In her own words:
“…I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of [American] hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future. And for me, that mourning has also been mixed with my own personal grief.
“The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother — the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency, the woman who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my own voice…I still feel her loss so profoundly. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to be here because of the sense of duty that I feel to honor her memory. And to remind us all not to squander the sacrifices our elders made to give us a better future.
“…[M]y mom, in her steady, quiet way, lived out that striving sense of hope every single day of her life. She believed that all children, all — all people have value. That anyone can succeed if given the opportunity. She and my father did not aspire to be wealthy. In fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed.
When Black Women Win
Michelle Obama is talking about her mother, but its all about you too Mommy. Michelle Obama who swole you full up with pride from the very beginning, We loved all-black t-shirt and leggings, hair pressed and pulled back and fist bump Michelle just like we love Monse and Jimmy Choo. Some people took a moment to see her and only did after the political stylists came through. But all-black and fist bumps was all it took for you, for me. You were all in, Southside girl to Southside girl. Women who believe they are called to create a beloved community. Women who don’t eat if everyone doesn’t eat.
You who always had room for another mouth even if meant cold water stretching the eggs.
You who survived 16 and being sworn off by almost everyone except the most important one: you.
I know you were quiet in your refusal to accept their words. Neither did you ever brag or even consider bragging it when your life showed them the power of a young girl’s refusal that allowed her to become a woman who would go on to lead the creation of the first-ever childcare center at the City University of New York. Other girls and young women would not have to wait as you had to wait, 20 years, before knowing the dream of earning a college degree, that Pomp and Circumstance conferred moment.
And you, Mommy, who became a Dean of Students who chose to march alongside students who were protesting during those Black Power years, never once thinking that calling the police could be a consideration. I was so little, but I can almost still hear those dinner time discussions you and Papa had about the responsibility to young people you both dedicated your lives to.
Oh Mommy. I don’t want to know this moment of Black and Woman and Oval Office mixed to form one word: Kamala. God, how you would have smiled. How you would have talked about the role Michelle Obama played in ensuring we arrived here. We had a small taste of it in 2019 and again in 2020 but by then the meds were more harmful than the cancer, and the doctors were harmful than both added together.
Source: asha bandele / Asha Bandele
The night before the last day, you said what I could not imagine would be the final words you’d say to me, but there they were: “I love you. Just write,” you made sure I heard you say, you made sure I promised you I’d would.
I couldn’t for so long, Mommy, not after you left and then Papa followed right behind you and Greg Tate followed right behind you and Baba Sekou followed right behind you and Mommy, then Peter, our Peter, three years and two days he followed after you too.
But last night I heard Michelle Obama as though I was hearing you, Michelle, daughter of Marian. Her presence arrived last night as a promise: healing was possible. It was a choice if any one of us, if I, choose to Do Something. I believed her Mommy, Me, asha, the daughter of Dolores. Dolores who healed herself and healed a full generation of young Black women.
And Mommy, I’m writing to say I’m doing something. Mommy, I’m writing. As best I can, I am writing the way you told me I had. I’m writing a love letter to another daughter. I’m telling her about you. I’m writing about you, Mommy. I’m writing.
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