Question: What do you know about the day you were born? Were there any special visitors?

In the vibrant city of Memphis, Tennessee, on balmy October 1, a young nineteen year old girl from West Tennessee was about to become a mama for the first time. There was nothing extraordinary about the day, really: an easy 82 degrees, Memphis was being Memphis with an undercurrent of music and energy. Mama thought the people in that city were friendly and friendliness wasn’t something she’d grown up with. Born into a dysfunctional, often violent family with closets full of skeletons, Mama met my father as a teenager and married him when he asked her because it was a way out. They were from opposite worlds: my mother’s family lived in trailers on a cursed piece of ground; my father’s family was middle class and comfortable. They were living with my father’s family at this time– my grandfather was louder than life and very much an authoritarian, my grandmother gossiped. This was 1980, so a lot was different. One thing, though, was the same: becoming a mother was one of them. Nerves, fear and excitement collided in her as a doctor told her that she needed a cesearean. When she didn’t want one, he explained that the birth canal was too narrow and it would crush my head to try and come through it. A c-section it would be.

I was the first grandchild, first great grandchild, first child. So this unextraordinary day was nonetheless one to remember. Mama’s mother came, my father was there and his mother. But the most special visitor was the pastor Mama asked to come. She’s talked about how it comforted her when he arrived to pray over me. Given that Mama is the reason I grew up with faith and an unshakeable belief in God, it makes sense to me that having the preacher come would be meaningful. For years afterward, she’d anoint the tops of our bedroom doors and our foreheads while we slept, and prayed over us continually. She tells the story of how, sometimes, she’d watch me and, she says, “It was like God was telling me that you were special, that you were going to do something big.” I’ve worked my whole life to believe this; without a mother who did, my world would have been very much worse. One of the scariest events in my life was when my brother died, and I watched her struggle to maintain that faith.

Jaundiced, I spent some time under the lights before being released home. Everyone said I had a “big head.” I was a chunky baby who would grow into a chunky kid and a chunky middle schooler before shedding it finally in high school. I loved playing with keys, pots and pans and eating ice cream. And it wouldn’t be long before I’d begin creating stories.