More than once, random rounds of machine-gun fire woke us up in the middle of the night. Each time, it sent us scurrying to the floor in fear. Were they showing off or killing people? I did not know, but the increasing violence in my inner-city neighborhood brought me to my knees concerning my thirteen-year-old son. It was only a matter of time before trouble would find him, and if not him, his friends, and that would break his heart.
“Take him out of the city,” is what I heard in answer to my prayer.
So we left the cozy apartment above the funeral home and moved to a suburb just outside the city limits. With my in-laws’ wedding gift as a down payment, we purchased an old house that had four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a spacious dining room where I did my homework on my new desktop PC. There was even a washing machine and dryer in the basement.
God is good!
The Gateway computer was a surprise from Cap. I came home from work one day and found huge cow print boxes all over the dining room floor. In 1993, I took: Systems Programming (B-), Software Design Methodology (B-), and Programming Languages (A).
I distinctly remember the first day of my Programming Languages class. It was right after we moved. I was the only Black person in the class, and the only female, too. That didn’t faze me; I had gotten used to that by my third year of computer science at Pitt.
That night was different, though.
The professor’s narrowed blue eyes scanned the classroom until they landed on me. “I see we have a girl in here. I wonder how long it will be before she quits?”
Cap said I was sobbing when he picked me up from school that night. I don’t remember crying or anything else that happened in that classroom after that professor declared his spiteful point of view. All I remember is that I did not quit. I did not have to. I was the top performer in that class, acing every programming assignment he handed out.
Take that villain!
If you have just joined us and are wondering what this story is about, start from the beginning. I promise it will all make sense.
A Speculative Memoir
In a 1989 journal entry, I poured out my dashed dreams to God. Those few precious moments became a watershed event in an unfolding narrative that began ten years before when I turned my back on God. Turning my back on God did many things, most of them sad, but foremost it made me forget who I was. But there was someone who never forgot. Someone who neve…