"Are You Trying Real Hard?"(I)

母亲毅然离开了眷恋的故土和慈祥的继父，陪伴我到陌生的城市求学。在她的关爱之下，我终于学有所成，梦想成真。

My first sharp memory is of running with my mother. Every living thing around us—man, woman, and child, dog, cat and chicken—was running too. I was nine years old, and we were racing for the levee1 that towered over my hometown of Arkansas City, Ark. Another levee up the Mississippi had broken, and the river was on a rampage2. We were running for our lives.

The water was rushing behind us, and my mother was gripping my hand so hard I thought it would come off. Would we make it?

For a terrifying moment, the issue hung in the balance. Then my mother shifted into a higher gear and almost lifted me off the ground as we scrambled up the wet and slippery incline of the levee. Hands reached out and pulled us to safety. But everything we owned—our clothes, our furniture and the few dollars we had accumulated—was gone forever.

And we started all over again.

My mother GREw up black along the Mississippi. She completed the third grade and then was forced by poverty to go to work in the fields. Always hopeful, always cheerful, she moved at an early age to Arkansas City, where she worked as a domestic and became active in local church and service organizations.

“Miss Gert,” as everybody called her, was a short, forceful woman with a big smile and a will of steel. She walked straight up, her head held high, a woman of stature and quality. She had known pain and discouragement and fear. Out of this came the special dignity of a person who’d seen a lot and survived and wasn’t afraid of the future.

My father was a friendly man who didn’t take family responsibilities as seriously as he should have. He was killed in a sawmill accident when I was six. A year later, my mother married James Williams, a deliveryman for a bakery shop. He was a good stepfather, and we never had a cross word, partly because my mother was the dominant force  in  the  household. She  was  a disciplinarian3 who used a switch to emphasize her teaching. People have asked me why I don’t smoke. I don’t because my mother caught me smoke behind the house when I was ten and gave me a beating that I remember to this day.

We didn’t have money, but we weren’t—and this was a crucial distinction—poor. I was never hungry. We had heat in the winter, and when summer came, we cranked4 the old freezer and made ice cream. Still, all through my childhood, I wanted something better than the dirt and sweat and pain around me.

The problem was that Arkansas City didn’t provide a high school education for blacks. So when I entered eighth grade, it seemed that I would soon be facing the same life of drudgery5 and humiliation that my ancestors had lived.

What I hadn’t taken into consideration was the fierce and unflagging6 determination of my mother, who believed you could do anything you wanted to, if you tried. Maybe there was no public high school for blacks in Arkansas City, but there were good public high schools in Chicago and other northern cities. Millions of blacks had migrated north to take advantage of them. We were free to join them if we could save the train fare, a considerable amount of money for us.

The dream of my mother was to bring her boy to the city, where he could get a decent education and become somebody. It takes an unusual person to believe what can’t be seen and to stake everything on a card that hasn’t fallen.

Notes:

1. levee n. 防洪堤

2. rampage n. 横冲直撞

3. disciplinarian n. 厉行纪律的人

4. crank vt. 装曲柄

5. drudgery n.苦差事

6. unflagging a. 不屈不挠的