Bronx Mama Bear
Alice hiked across the 149th Street Bridge, cradling her infant son, Gregory, leaving behind a million memories on 161 West 143rd Street’s stoop. On the other side of the Harlem River, where I was born, she transformed from Teen Mom to Bronx Mama Bear.
Six miles and a thousand lifetimes away from her native land, Alice lived in a place of deeply-rooted, and often justified, fear of someone hurting her tenement cubs. When summoned to protect my older brother and me, Bronx Mama Bear gulped adrenaline faster than an ice-cold Pepsi on a humid summer day. She beat a man in the head with her shoe for unraveling my ponytails on the bus. She stormed into the principal’s office at Sacred Heart School to crack open a can of whoop ass on Sister Dominic, the nun who thought the two of them worshiped the same Jesus. But Alice’s Jesus would never give a short, old, angry white woman permission to split her son’s hands with a yardstick for sketching in his composition book. Sister Dominic bore the brunt of generations of parochial school teachers before her, who dismissed Black artists as “unteachable,” Black bodies as, “unbreakable,”, and Black souls as, “unreachable.” Poor Sister Dominic was one of many teachers in my family’s future who would know that there was at least one Black bear in the PTA willing to fight for justice.
Long after our family hiked from the Bronx to the burbs, Bronx Mama Bear continued to lose sleep, in restless pursuit of all real and perceived threats. She attacked a neighbor’s Toyota Corolla with her bare hands, a swift grizzly response to the grown-ass woman who offered me drugs and alcohol. Gregory’s high school was the first in the district to discover my mother’s passion for Black History, after Bronx Mama Bear slammed the Social Study teacher’s hand in a textbook that depicted Harlem teenagers bathing in their kitchen sink.
The night before I departed for college, Bronx Mama Bear ceremoniously presented me with a metal-tipped, wooden bat, engraved with the slogan, Don’t Kick ’em, Hit’ em. I held its weight with both hands, each atom enlivened with the power of my mother’s mighty brown claws. That same bat was my mother’s travel buddy whenever she left our home at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Just in case. When I was five years old, the bat landed Mr. Jackson’s ear, the vegetable peddler’s who slapped Gregory over some missing apples from his stand. Its metal tip sent 1520’s super to the ER, after he made the fatal mistake of pulling a knife on one of Mama Bear’s adopted Bronx cubs.
Since I was a far less confident bat-wielder, Mama Bear taught me to greet all potential threats with the Street Face, a mask that had been used to protect generations of Brisco women. Roll eyes. Just once. Squint the left eye only. Upturn top lip. Only slightly. Too much will make it look like a pucker. Quarter-turn neck roll. Again, only slightly. Too much of a turn and it may resemble curiosity. Turn face back to front. Look straight ahead. Neither to the left or right. Straight. Street Face was accompanied by Street Walk, a highly complex stomp, with just the slightest swish of each hip. Too much swish will send the message of being cute. Street Face was beautiful, but never cute. When translated, it said, “If you come over here, you better be wearing a helmet.” It stopped bad guys and crazy men in their tracks, allowing these courageous women a moment for a safe place to breathe.
On those rare occasions when Bronx Mama Bear paused to catch her breath, she dreamt big dreams for us cubs. She pulled Black history facts out of her Afro wig every morning on our way to school, until I was certain that Frederick Douglass was a blood relative. Although the New York City school system attempted to oppress her into invisibility, she nudged me to fight classroom predators with my intelligence, ensuring that no teacher overlooked her daughter’s face.
Bronx Mama Bear was a fashion pioneer, sporting African head wraps long before any other mother on the block and inspiring her once chemically-relaxed daughter to do the same. She transformed fabric scraps into closets full of maxi-dresses, gauchos, dashikis, and evening gowns, all custom-designed to beautify her cubs. She retracted her claws for months, painstakingly hand-stitching a thousand crystal beads into my wedding gown. Sitting by the window of my Lenox Avenue apartment, surrounded by pins and a vision for her cub, Bronx Mama Bear became my Harlem Vera Wang.
Big Mama, in the full silence of our morning meetings, showed up to remind me who her daughter was:
Your mother lost her best friend when she lost me to Stroke. She didn’t know how to talk about love like you do. But she gives you all she has. Let her show you love in the ways that she can. And do what both of us need you to do, so you can be better than us.
What’s that, Big Mama?
Love yourself.
First.
Dr. Sabrina N’Diaye is the granddaughter of Marion Brisco, and the daughter of Alice Diggs. She is writing their stories in her first book, Big Mama Speaks: Love Lessons from a Harlem River Swan