This post was supposed to go up on Sunday…but well life happened so better late than never.
Growing up in rural America during the 70’s and 80’s the only exposure I had to people who didn’t look like me were the Native American kids I went to school with and the people on t.v. Shows like The Jeffersons, Different Strokes, The Cosby Show, A Different World, Sister Sister and Family Matters, and Punky Brewster.
These 30 minute shows showed families like mine, the only differences they were in the city, while I was in the country, and the color of their skin. To be honest the color of their skin wasn’t something I thought about, to me Jaleel White and Malcolm Jamal Warner were just as hot as Charlie Sheen and Stephen Dorf. I thought about how city life was very different from where I lived, and the kids didn’t have to worry about their teachers having grown up with their parents.
When I was twelve and reading my way through the school library, the librarian pointed me to the biographies. I read them all, Molly Adams, Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King.
Reading about the last three’s lives changed something in me I didn’t recognize at the time.
When I was 14 we moved from the country to Vegas. Suddenly I was going to school with people who looked the kids I saw on t.v. My neighbors were all from Lebanon and none of the parents spoke English.
My escape became the library, both the school and local library. The public librarian gave me romance novels to read and the school librarian…well she put in my hands a book that forever changed my life, though like those other books I didn’t realize it at the time as I was a 14 yr old girl.
It wasn’t until years later when I was in college taking my first of many literature classes that I realized the impact this book had on me. I’ve never been able to explain it. I just know it changed me. It impacts how I am as a wife, mom and teacher.
So in honor of Maya Angelou and her life changing book I know Why the caged Bird Sings this month we’re going to highlight women who have made an impact and changed how we see the world, and all through the power of the written word.
P.S. If you didn’t figure out from that last paragraph the book that changed my life was….
