Journey With ME

Today I visited several shops and small boutiques in the counties surrounding Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The stores were filled with older White ladies. Scattered among them were people from the many ethnic and racial backgrounds that make up this region.

In two stores, it happened. An older White lady stepped in front of me at the cashier and placed her items on the counter. I am an African American woman several decades younger than each of these ladies. Both times I stood with surprising calm and began to gather my words when… the ladies turned to me apologetically within 5 seconds and asked me to please step back in front of them to be waited on first. And I did. That was it.

Except that wasn’t it.

I didn’t even have time to gather my thoughts before they turned to me realizing what they had done. In one case, the cashier simply looked beyond the older lady right at me and said, “Are you ready to check out?” It was as though the other lady was not even standing there.

I asked myself if these same ladies would have stepped aside apologetically for my grandmothers when they were my age during the 1960’s? Probably not. Would that cashier have looked past the lady when she stepped in front and put her items on the counter? Not likely.

Watching the cashier rang up my purchases, I could only think of my grandmothers and the many humiliations they suffered in department stores, throughout the rural South and urban North.

Why am I writing about these incidents?

Today, I was offered swift apologies by the ladies and treated with dignity and respect by the cashiers (one Black and one White).

I want my grandmother and the millions of grandmothers who withstood degradation, mistreatment, and de-humanization to know how much their sacrifices mean to me.

They stood in store lines when no one would wait on them, when they were sent to back doors, overlooked, insulted, humiliated, told to leave. Because they stood, I was able to stand today in those lines calmly and receive what they should have-apologies. By holding steadfastly to their humanity, those remarkable women forced those ladies that I encountered today to be more human.

As I stood there paying, I felt deeply connected to my grandmothers. This post is to thank them. Truly thank them.

Thank you for your sacrifices, your beauty, your faith, your remarkable grace. In the face of America’s history of de-humanization, you shone light because you stood. You made our home a better place. How can we ever thank you? I certainly plan to try.