Where I Met Your Mother

“This is where I met your mother”, he said, turning to his teenage daughter and pointing to the now dilapidated train depot. “This was more than two decades and five years ago.”

“We were both young and raring in our early twenty-something,” he continued as his eyes glistened with pride to speak of his brave but deceased wife.

“I had enrolled in the educational program on Equity and Democracy. I had a white lineage but my heart always bled for the marginalized and those who were systemically subjected to all types of discrimination within the country,” he recounted from his flashback.

“She took the commuter rail from Wakefield to travel to a downtown café in Boston where she served as a waitress in the day. She used the money to pay her lodging and food bills at the shared accommodation where she stayed. At night, she studied hard to receive a Student Grant to get through the School of Law at BU. She had a resolute mind and was intent on acing the law exams at the university someday and making it as the first Black woman attorney from her village.

I admired her Black spirit. She was largely brought up by a single mother. Her father was abusive and an alcoholic. He was perpetually jobless because of his alcoholism which pushed the family into extreme poverty.

The wife and the daughter bore the brunt until her mother took no more. She drove him out and took matters into her own hands. She toiled day and night as a maid and nanny at the house of a White family. They were extremely high-handed and forced her to work for a paltry wage. She had no choice. In those days, work was few and far between for divorced and single Black women.”

“It pained your mother, Casey, to see her mother toil so hard and bring in pennies not enough to feed even two mouths.”

Liam stopped. He looked at the same pair of bright, intense eyes that reminded him so often of Casey. Carol was her spitting image. At thirteen, she was already beginning to show the same impatience to transform things and bring in world order.

This little girl became motherless the moment she was born. 

Liam and Casey had enjoyed a happy conjugal life, but alas it was short-lived. Her dreams came to an abrupt halt when she developed complications at birthing. The doctors had warned which broke Liam to pieces. He couldn’t imagine his world without his beloved wife. He was never as strong as she was. What would happen to their ambitious vision of changing the world together? How can he bring up their little bundle of joy alone? What would he tell her when she grew up?

Today, Carol visualizes in her mind’s eye what it was to be the young, fiery Casey Harris. Her father ritually amused her at bedtime not with fairy tales but with unbelievable heroic stories of her mother from her days at the Law School and the storm she often raised through mobilized movements on burning issues. As an aspiring lawyer, she had already become a prominent voice for the Blacks in Boston. Liam was just so proud of her.

Her life was snuffed out prematurely but he had promised his dying wife that their daughter would be a promising lawyer someday, when she grew up….just like her mother.

It felt surreal. For the first time in years, she felt her mother’s presence beside her at the dilapidated train depot where her parents had met more than twenty-five years back. She silently promised herself that she would complete what her mother had initiated but left half-done…she will, indeed, become the first Black woman advocate from her maternal village which is still to see the light of the day!