Using today’s term, I think it would be fair to say my mom, Lee Black, was the perfect tradwife. Of course, this was in the ’40s and ’50s, when tradwives were pretty much the norm. But she was exceptional. 

She knocked herself out to do everything “right,”  to live up to the social expectations of the time, as depicted in the popular women’s magazines of the day. In our suburban New Jersey, red-brick, three-bedroom house, she was a stay-at-home mom to her four little kids. She excelled at cooking and baking and got better-than-passing grades at housekeeping and laundry. After a full day of housework and cooking, she prettied herself up to greet her husband, my father, with a big smile and open arms when he returned home from work at dinnertime.

Her approach to parenting, on the other hand, was fairly laissez-faire. We kids were encouraged to play outdoors from post-breakfast until the 12 o’clock whistle blew, then from after lunch-and-nap until the fireflies came out. Like feral kittens, we were free to roam and explore in the surrounding woods and the fields, with zero adult supervision. We loved that.

Lee never complained about her lot, even when her tall, handsome, burly husband, my father, would disappear for days and return home drunk and violent. She didn’t even complain when he gave her black eyes. She was stoical, resigned. “Into each life some rain must fall,” she’d say with a sigh, fluttering her pretty hands. To my young mind at the time, the “rain” in her life was torrential.

Yet she persisted. She seemed to believe that men — which is to say, white men, since there was no other kind in our conservative suburban world – were superior beings. Their word was law. And our job as females, she taught my younger sisters and me, was to do men’s bidding, to be their handmaidens. Whatever men said or asked for was to be met by a slight nod, a sweet smile, and a soft, “Yes.” My older brother and father were the beneficiaries of our early training.

This untenable structure was, of course, doomed to fall apart over time. After my brother left home to join the Marine Corps and my father took off for who-knew-where for good, my mother didn’t fall apart. She bent down and picked up the pieces. She got a job as the secretary to the president of our local bank to support what was left of our family, and she retired from tradwifery forever. 

One day, I’ll never forget, she gathered my sisters and me together in the dining room and announced, “Girls, the bedrooms are upstairs, and the kitchen is over there. Sleep when you’re tired and eat when you’re hungry. I’m not a housewife anymore.” By this time we were teenagers, so she knew we could fend for ourselves.

She never preached to us, but she made strong suggestions about how to behave in public: Never discuss religion or politics; these subjects were too controversial, taboo. And never talk about your personal problems – because, she said, “nobody gives a damn.” Our role, as pretty young things, was to be decorative and agreeable.

Lee’s hope for me, her eldest daughter, was that I would become a secretary like herself, right out of high school, then marry a rich, older man, who would always see me as young and beautiful. Higher education was not in her cards for me. To her, girls didn’t need to be educated; they just needed to be pretty. And good looks, she’d stress, “don’t last forever.”

To her dismay, I always saw things differently and went my own way. Ultimately, my yearning to learn and to escape from Lee’s small suburban world led me to Columbia University in New York City. When I applied to attend as a scholarship student, I knew I was shooting for the stars. To me, Columbia was the best university I could ever hope for, with the best reputation and the best professors, offering the best education. My mother was so opposed to this idea – “You’ll become someone I won’t know how to talk to!” she claimed – she didn’t speak to me for weeks after I enrolled. 

(My Alma Mater)

Nevertheless, I persisted.

In my first memoir, SOMEWHERE CHILD (Viking Press, 1981), writing in the third person about my experience as a scholarship student at Columbia majoring in Literature and Writing, I wrote:

“She loved Columbia the way she loved snow-capped mountains, star-flecked skies, crashing waves, and African sunsets: distantly and reverentially. She thrilled at the old buildings with their marble staircases worn down by countless students’ shoes, the professors with their esoteric specialties and their messianic drive to share their knowledge, her earnest classmates discussing the protagonists of novels the way doctors might discuss their best cases.

“But in most of her classes, she felt ill-equipped and overawed, scrambling to keep up with the lectures, trying to take careful notes, straining to make sense of it all. Often, she felt as if she were an interloper, a gate-crasher at a highbrow cocktail party.

“It was only in her writing classes that she felt she belonged….”

I count my decision to attend Columbia University and my determination to graduate with honors among my life’s greatest accomplishments. And I’ll be forever grateful to Columbia for teaching me that I mattered: that I have a good mind as well as a good heart, and it is my responsibility as a citizen of this world to use both for the common good. At Columbia I learned how to learn and how to think, how to read closely, write clearly, form informed opinions, and how to act on my beliefs and express my truths. 

(My most valued possession)

In time there, I no longer thought of myself as Little Miss Nobody from Nowheresville, New Jersey; but rather, Bonnie Lee Black, who would one day have a byline on a published book.

One of my most memorable classes at Columbia was in African Literature, and two of the classic African novels we studied, THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe, and THE PALM WINE DRINKARD by Amos Tutuola, had profound effects on me. These two courageous Nigerian authors went against the accepted grain and told their stories from the inside, from the African point of view, rather than that of Nigeria’s British colonists. 

(A life-changing book)

There’s an African proverb that goes something like this: “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.” Both Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola were, in my view, African lions bravely telling their sories against great odds. Reading them, I said to myself, If they could do it, so can I! They gave me the courage to write my own story, SOMEWHERE CHILD, about a grave injustice, which later helped to change laws.

Today, as we all know by now, Columbia University has been very much in the news. This, my cherished alma mater, like so much else the new Trump administration is attacking, appears to be trembling, on the verge of falling apart. It’s becoming unrecognizable to me. 

To some extent I can understand why Trump and his henchmen want to weaken the best universities and discourage higher learning at the highest levels: Citizens who know how to think are a threat to dictatorships. Much better to keep people ignorant, docile, obedient. This is what dictators do: ban books, muzzle instructors, punish outspoken students, intimidate administrators, withdraw financial support. In other words, cage the lions.

It’s likely, though I don’t know for sure, that courses like the one I took in African Literature will no longer be taught at Columbia because the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department has been put “under academic receivership” – whatever that will come to mean. Will anyone now study THINGS FALL APART and have their life changed for the better by it?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Postscript: Shortly before she was due to retire from her position as Vice President of the bank in our hometown, after having worked there twenty-plus years, my mom Lee Black was diagnosed with brain cancer and died not long after. At her memorial service, which I led, there was standing room only. She’d become beloved in the little town she so loved. 

I as her eldest daughter learned a lot from her, not the least of which was resilience: When things fall apart, bend down and pick up as many pieces as you can, then stand up again and move on.