Writings / Essay: La Vonda R. Staples

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Another Burden

A traveler almost always goes forth, along the way that he is forced to travel or chooses to travel, with burdens. We are accustomed to thinking of that word, ‘burden’, with pejorative connotations. To give someone a burden is to somehow give something which is unwanted, pleasant, heavy or light, but a burden still is not seen in the same light as the word, ‘gift.’ A gift can be a burden as well. Ask anyone who makes a shopping trip to an outlet mall and finds everything that they didn’t know they had a pressing and dire need and they will answer in the affirmative that all of the delightful purchases did indeed carry a cost. In this sense, the cost is the additional weight one must carry on a bus, plane or train or walking back to lodgings. Indeed, we have words we use in context which fall short of their definitive uses.

Another word, ‘journey,’ is meant to imply a trip to a geographical location. A few miles or a few thousand miles and the word is thought to have application in this sense. In the ideological sense it is possible and probably to travel, to make a journey, from locales as different as night and day and still remain unchanged. Eating the same food, speaking the same language, and observing the same cultural rules. Life goes on as if the journey never occurred. Why shouldn’t it? What has changed other than an address?

I lived more than 46 years of life at an astonishingly rapid pace. Of course, there were times when my movements were constricted by events, which must be observed such as pregnancy. But having never been sick, or confined or imprisoned, I was free to run through every moment without too much thought. Nothing ever seemed to touch me. I was never all the way present in any environment because my mind was already at the point at which my body would join, some time later, in the future. I was not in motion. I was motion. Cancer, a diagnosis of a terminal cancer, halted that pace. Thinking upon it now I don’t believe that anything except this particular type of cancer, one in which there were precious few who lived past three years, could have stopped me. The only other thing, which would have eventually slowed my pace would be old age. And yet, today I sit, wondering if I will arrive at that point in my journey. Old age, to me, after all of these months of sitting and thinking, is more of a destination and not a state of being.

I, like so many others I suppose, had grown to think of old age as a time of sicknesses and isolation. But as I aged through my thirties and half of my forties I was still a very young person. No diabetes and no arthritis and very few instances of illness where even an antibiotic was necessary for healing had been part of my physiological resume. I had been blessed and never took the time to thank God or even consider the weight of good health. I had come to life bouncing, brown and healthy. I had grown to maturity nicely shaped and attractive. I had long legs. I had most of the things that other girls go and pay doctors to inject, nip and tuck. In my defense I thought of these things, specifically being attractive, as a burden and to be brutally honest I thought of being attractive as a curse. In my experiences I have been told and shown that pretty girls, pretty Black girls, are to follow a certain script if they are to maintain friends and good relations. If I was going to be a successful pretty Black girl I would have to learn these rules and learn them well if I ever wanted to be included in milestones such as other girls’ weddings. I never thought too much about looks. No, it’s true. I didn’t. I had grown up in a pretty family and these things weren’t emphasized as much as being smart, a good Christian, keeping a good home and being a good mother. In my world, ruled by my grandmother, good looks couldn’t pay a mortgage so they were nothing in which I should invest too much time.

Good looks, to me, were just another burden. Something which became a reason to hurt my feelings. To be ostracized due to other girls’ lies. Something which required me to know every game, ruse, or scheme a male could conceive for a few moments of pleasure (for him). I wouldn’t ask God to remove the burden but I wasn’t holding too many parties to honour my own image. And besides, I had the kind of looks which drew the wrong kind of attention. Where I grew up, in urban St. Louis, this was the source of so much grief. Grief and abandonment, which on one occasion, were the impetus which lead me to try and take my own life. I wanted to die, to leave this Earth, just one year before the diagnosis which would lead to an epiphany regarding this gift of life itself. I wanted to live after they told me I was going to die. And I wanted to live in such a way that others would see and know that their lives were worth living as well. Our lives are journeys and the words of doctors, somber deliverances of confirmation of disease, can sometimes be the final burden in a lifetime without freedom from bondage to the consequences of events which preceded birth. Skin color, in my country, is another burden. Gender, being a woman, is a burden as well. They are all alternatively heavy and light, assets or detractors, there are very few things which are only one thing: good or evil.

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