Learning to Roar at Home

Some weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a concert/service at my new church, celebrating the 225th anniversary of the birth of that congregation.  I don't know whether the intent was for the concert to be a spiritual experience but it certainly was for me.

About halfway through the program, a young woman sang Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman", the first line of which goes: "I am woman hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore".  The program had been arranged by historical era, so as they were describing the church during the era of the battle for women's rights, this was the featured song.  In the moment, my sister leaned over and said something to me about our great-grandmother's sister, Texelia Pierre, and it occurred to me that I'm one of the fortunate ones who has lived with roaring women my whole life.  It occurred to me that like a lion cub, I learned to roar at home, from the women in my family.

Sometime in the middle 1800s in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, my great-great aunt Texelia Pierre left her (according to family lore) worthless husband because he wouldn't do right.  What that has meant for the females in succeeding generations is that one doesn't simply have to put up with some do-nothing man, or some go nowhere job, one can simply strike out on one's own.  What a legacy to leave to one's female progeny! Would that I had earlier realized the freedom it gave me in every area of my life.

That a black woman in the late 1800's, in the tiny island of Trinidad, educated only with the power to read and write at Elementary level would have the strength, the intestinal fortitude, to decide that alone was preferable to being married to a dolt still astonishes me today.  Not that I wouldn't do the very same, but I'm much more educated than she was and have options that I know Texie didn't and yet it is she who struck out on her own.  Fearlessly.  Me, I'm not so much fearless as fearful.  The lore, if I recall it correctly, was that she became a merchant of some kind but the details were always a little sketchy and I didn't have the good sense to pump Granny for greater detail before she left us.

So my question is, not what's in your wallet, a la Capitol One, but rather, what's in your being? What's in the fiber of your being, handed down through the generations by your mother and your mother's mother, and your mother's mother's mother (or sister).  Apparently, gumption is in mine.  Gumption. Who knew?