Friendship in a Lonely Worldናሙና

My very first friend was my grandmother. She was old, but she really was my first friend. When I felt downcast or when somebody did something to me and I couldn’t get back at them, I’d cry and go sit by the fireplace. And I’d put my head in her lap. Her fragile hands would stroke my troubled head and some of my sadness would go away. She became a safe place for me . . . like an anchor in stormy waters.

That was important for me as a child growing up poor in Mississippi in the Jim Crow South. My mother died when I was seven months old. She took me to her breast and gave me her last ounce of strength. She died of starvation and, because it would have been difficult for my father to raise us alone, I was left to be mothered by my grandmother, who raised thirteen children. She did the best she could and I’m grateful that she took me in. Our house was always filled with children but I still felt alone.

Maybe I was especially needy because my mother was gone and my father was absent from the home. I always struggled to see how or if my life mattered. Early on I wanted to know that I was important, that my life carried some kind of significance. I felt unimportant and very alone.

If it’s true that our significance is reflected in the eyes of others, then I suppose I was at a great deficit as a poor black boy in Mississippi. There were no doting parents who looked with pride at my first steps or who listened with anticipation for my first words. There were no teachers whose eyes lit up when I walked into the classroom. But I am forever grateful for one teacher. Mrs. Maybelle Armstrong taught me the stories of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown, and encouraged me that I too could one day be a leader. This gave me a deep love for my blackness and it kept me from feeling like I was less human than anyone else. Maybe she could see something in me—even as a young boy—that I could not see in myself. But somewhere between third and fifth grade, I stopped going to school and went to work picking cotton.

I learned more lessons about my insignificance in the cotton fields of Mississippi. On one particular day the lesson was so raw and cut so deep that I still remember it more than seventy years later, just like it was yesterday. When I was eleven or twelve, I worked a whole day hauling hay for a white gentleman. I was expecting to get a dollar or a dollar and a half for that day of work. But at the end of the day he gave me a dime and a buffalo nickel. Even as a child I understood that by his actions he was saying that I had no value or worth.

A few years later when my brother Clyde was killed by a police officer, I learned that a black man’s life wasn’t worth much of anything, at least not in Mississippi. So, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, I set out to find the Celestial City, a place where my life mattered, and where the huge void of insignificance could be filled. My pilgrimage took me to California. It truly was like the Celestial City to a black man from the South. I was able to find a good job there. I saw my worth and value reflected in the eyes of people I met, both black and white.

In my mind’s eye I can imagine God bending down and scooping up clay, smoothing out the rough places and carefully forming the body of Adam, the first human being. Like a sculptor, He stands back from His masterpiece, taking in the beauty of what He has made. Surely this must have been the image that the psalmist had in mind when he wrote that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14). And finally God kissed life into Adam. “And the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7).