I Can’t Breathe

I grew up on the east end of Long Island, near the Hamptons, in a lower middle class family of five. When I started school, more than half my classmates were “colored,” as we called them in the 50s. They were children of Long Island’s large migrant population who worked on the duck and potato farms. The Long Island Railroad ran though our town and those tracks marked the divide between white and black residents’ homes. North of the tracks most homes were small, often unkempt that usually had a shiny new car in the driveway. The “n” word was prevalent. We used to joke about those sparkling clean cars parked in weed-filled yards. The general attitude in my home and community was that black people were second-class citizens. I’m ashamed that I believed it.

Despite our finances, my mother was adamant that I attend college. So, I entered an upstate university to become an English teacher. Just a handful of black students attended and I vaguely wondered why. I didn’t connect the fact that when we graduated from high school in 1959, few blacks graduated with us.

I journeyed into “happily ever after,” working at my degree, marrying my high school sweetheart, becoming the mother of two. Then the dream suddenly shattered when he disappeared with another woman. I, not yet degreed, was now a single mother of two small sons, with a mortgage, without a car, and without income. I got a job I could walk to but quickly saw the minimum income would not be enough. So I did the unthinkable: I applied for public assistance for my children. Anyone receiving assistance, regardless of color, were second class citizens. Society’s leaches, looking for a handout.

I could barely breathe the day I applied for “welfare.” I felt so shamed, helpless, and angry. In time I pulled our life back together, returned to college, finished my degree. Yet I never forgot those eighteen months on public assistance. To this day, I vividly remember standing in lines for government surplus food. Each time my check arrived, my face burned with humiliation.

I never became an English teacher, for having fully experienced the predicament of my fellow “second-class” peers had changed my life. Suddenly I had a passion to help others move ahead in their difficult journeys, as I had been fortunate to do.

Four years ago I retired from a long and varied human services career, where I often met myself daily in each new client. The need to assist others remains. Now, Ferguson and Manhattan have once more blasted to the forefront our crisis of the unnecessary killing of unarmed black men.

When Eric Garner cried out to the police “I can’t breathe,” he also poignantly articulated the plight of all his peers. When will we all be able to breathe?