Chapter 28: When Life Gives You Lemons, Give Life Black Girl Magic: A Story of a Memphis Girl Overcoming Homelessness and Educational Inequity

The chapter below follows a proverbial phrase “When Life Give You Lemons,” you make the best lemonade ever tasted. The lemons in the recipe represent life’s adversity, the water in the recipe represents the essence of people of color, and the sugar represents the blessings that come in life. This chapter uses my life experiences to model the method other young women can use to overcome life’s adversity.

In the early hours of a fall morning, my parents fighting jarred me from my sleep. I got out of my bed, walked from my side of the house, passed the living room, and through the kitchen to my parents’ bedroom. I looked through the door with the gaping hole in it—the hole that had come about when my father tried to beat the door down when my mom locked herself in the bedroom. I knocked on the door. When my father opened the door, I saw my mother crouched in a corner. My father barked at me that I should mind my business and go back to bed. As the door slammed in my face, my mother’s words, “the choices you make today, Jamesha, will affect your tomorrow” rang out in my head. That day, at the age of eleven, I decided that instead of being a bystander to my father’s abuse of my mother, I would fight back.