The True Vyne

I’ve decided to do something I have not done before. I’m going to blog about my previous experience of working and living in another culture. You probably won’t believe all that you read, but I can assure truth is stranger than fiction, and I won’t waver from truth.

I grew up in the white suburbs with all its privilege and safety. As children, we played safe and sound outside far from our house until hunger or dusk called us home, whichever came first. Dickens and Sally Struthers commercials about starving African children summed up my knowledge of poverty issues.

However, as an adult I felt curiously drawn to work with children from a much different setting- the inner-city of Knoxville. Because I worked with children, I developed relationships with parents and leaders in the neighborhood. A few years after I began working with a group of community developers, Urban Community Vision (since then all the people of that organization have settled into pockets of ministry on a wider city scale), that I realized I needed to live there to make a difference. Much to my dear mother’s misery, my husband and I sold our first home- a cedar sided contemporary home in the woods of South Knoxville, and moved to a small white cottage smack dab in the middle of the city. I was pregnant with my first child.

I feel free to tell the stories from that time now, because the children I worked with are now grown and making their own way. I run into some of them from time to time or hear stories of what has become of them.

What sparked memories in me of those seven years in the city? I was listening to India Arie on CD yesterday as her song trailed off in a lyric, “I wanna be where the wind calls my name. India, India, India.” At the mention of that name, I instantly felt something made of melancholy. My mind traveled across my blue emotion to settle on a woman from the inner city I once knew named India. Though she birthed four little girls, she was childlike herself. She spoke in a small soft voice except for when she’d tell an animated story of an everyday event which she wove magically into incredible folklore. India possessed and distributed the gift of laughter- the kind that wells up in the belly and gushes out like a fresh geyser of joy. She wore clear bronze skin and a smile as wide as the state of Tennessee. She lived in the project housing across the street from my work. Though it was sparsely furnished, India’s apartment usually seemed tidy and smelled a little like bleach. She attended a delightful sewing circle friends and I put together, A Circle of Hands, so we kept in quiet regular touch. I considered her a friend.

India’s done up hair and ethnic clothes captured her unique and beautiful style, except for the times she turned inward to a depressive state. I’d occasionally run across India with nappy wild hair, pj’s and slippers, shuffling slowly to the gas station to buy a Coke or a chocolate bar- a tragic expression written across her furrowed brow. I watched in astonishment as her parents kept taking in her babies one by one as she’d be reported by neighbors to The Department of Children’s Services for neglect, abuse, or abandonment.

I distinctly remember the hot summer day India dropped by my house to obtain formula for her infant daughter named Mary whom she feeding a red drippy plastic sleeved Popsicle. India, and most every other mother within a few blocks, knew I always kept baby supplies on hand and gave them out to anyone, no questions asked. My heart ached as I wondered what other things she fed her tiny girl baby in desperation. That day I didn’t wait and let India wander home to make the formula- I asked India inside for a snack, and also prepared the baby a bottle on the spot. I have never witnessed such frantic hungry sucking from a anxious baby, and it broke my heart to watch. I knew India urgently clung to the idea she would be able to raise this fourth child on her own, and I regretted the relief I felt when I heard the news not long after that summer day that Mary was removed from India’s care into DCS custody, then given to India’s parents.

I wonder from time to time about Mary and her sisters. Did India’s parents find what they couldn’t give India to raise these girls well?

I wish I could end this story with in satisfying and uplifting way, but like many of my friends from those days, tragedy overcame India. In a catch-up phone call from Circle of Hand leader Beth, Beth gently informed me that India had been murdered. The police believed it was a case of a prostitute who crossed someone, possibly her pimp, and India was left dead in the bath tub of her apartment in the projects.

Please reserve any judgments of this girl for my sake- her heartrending life and death require your gift of compassion. And I did love her, appalling faults and all.

Impoverished urban life takes it toll. Another woman in our sewing Circle of Hands somehow managed to continue breathing day by day after losing her three young children in a blazing house fire. Another member suffered a stroke not long after the shooting death of her teenaged son. Poverty and violence usually escalates to more poverty and violence.

So today, when I hear India Arie croon “I wanna hear the wind call my name. India, India, India”, I wish I could drop in and smell the faint bleach of India’s apartment, see her infectious smile, and hear a simple story in a southern black woman’s drawl which might make me laugh so hard that tears might escape my eyes.

Instead I cry in another way.

India.
India.
India.