This is a harrowing and powerful reminder of what some of the invisible people in our society have to deal with. The writer is El Jones and she must be heard.
My grandmother’s mantra to her daughters was, “just remember, you are a lady.” When my mother’s oldest sister, the first Black woman to enter the convent school, was taunted by classmates, she was reminded she was a lady. My grandmother would wake up early in the morning and do all the chores so that when her daughters’ friends came by to walk with them to school, she would be sitting at the table, dressed perfectly, as if the maid had just left, like a lady. In all the humiliations and oppressions of colonialism, pawning the possessions to eat, scraping for school uniforms, my grandmother insisted, “you are a lady.”
And when my grandfather’s women one after another knocked on the door of her house and asked for him, she never made a scene. She was a lady.
Sometimes a picture does speak a 1,000 words.
The Polislice 