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TI: Earlier when you were talking about your mother doing that piecework, you got emotional about that. What's behind that? What were you thinking or feeling when you had that image of your mom doing that piecework?

JM: Well, she was making crepe paper... I have poem about that. She's making crepe paper flowers for the American Legion, and the American Legion, of course, represented a very patriotic organization. So it was so ironic, we were living in a very poor south side of Chicago in an apartment where we shared a bathroom with three other tenants. And she would make sure that, I mean, I had two dresses to go to school in, and she made sure every day that she would wash a dress so that I'd have a clean dress to wear to school because she was proud. She didn't want her daughter to look dirty.

And I remember one Christmas, we were so poor, and gosh, this really dates me, and I don't know if anyone know who Sonja Henie is. But back in the day, in the '40s, she was a movie star ice skater, and they made a doll of Sonja Henie. And she was a blond, and she was beautiful, and I said, "Oh, I want a Sonja Henie doll, Mommy." And I would beg her and beg her, so I found this Sonja Henie doll under this little tree that we had, and she was so beautiful and I just loved her so much. And I thought, wow, if I cut her hair and pasted it onto my hair, maybe my hair will grow blond. So I cut her hair and pasted it onto my hair, my mother was really angry with me. But that was so symbolic of how I already, at the age of five or six, that I internalized the self-hatred.

And I think that that is what happens -- and I've been part of many coalitions, women of color, writers of color, etcetera, as well as people at Glide of many, many different races, ethnicities and cultures. And I would say that something that was very common for the women of color when we were organizing anthologies and so forth in the '70s and '80s, that that was a very common thread that we all share, that sense of unworthiness and self-hatred. And I will say to this day that the women and the children who are trafficked in our streets who are women of color are put out there by their parents and they are addicted to that life because they feel worthy of nothing better. So I'm saying in order for -- and I am extremely protective of my daughter, and I am extremely protective of all the women and the children and the families that come to Glide and to use our programs, we have a building for children, we have early childhood education, family parenting classes and so forth, nutrition classes. We have three buildings for affordable housing: one for homeless, one for working class, one for a mixed population of recovering people, people and families.

So I'm very protective of all of that population and really, really trying to understand how do we break that, how do we break that deeply internalized sense of unworthy. How do we say to somebody, "I believe in you. I believe in you, you can do this. You can get through school." And they're so afraid, you know, if they drop out of school they're so afraid, and when they get their GEDs, oh my god, everybody applauds. We get them up in the congregation and you know, people stand up and applaud and they say, "I've got two years of recovery from alcohol," yay. Or, "I earned my GED and I'm going to go to City College," and I go, "Yay." But we also know that in order for us to be able to get to that core place, that core place of shame or self-deprecation, or even self-destructiveness, that you have to have a lot of support. So we understand that you need case management, wraparound care, mental health services, primary healthcare services.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.