The signs that someone like Donald Trump was coming were right there, in online comments lousy with creatively spelled racial slurs that slipped past even the best filters. They were in the vicious tweets and voicemail nasty grams aimed at journalists of color, especially when we wrote about race. It was in the hundreds, if not thousands, of racist and xenophobic emails that clogged my inbox during my 11-year-tenure as a columnist at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.
Never before had white readers been exposed to the regular opinions of a black woman; I was the paper’s first black female columnist. But even as this angry tribe of white readers grew, many of my non-black colleagues—particularly editors and publishers—insisted these readers were outliers. (And I knew these readers were white because they almost always told me so, using phrases like, ‘I’m a white reader in the suburbs and I want you to know I’m tired of your racist shit.’) Never mind that all the basements in the world couldn’t contain all these folks.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
There’s a nagging suspicion inside you that something is wrong.
He calls you names. He denies your feelings. He talks over you; yells at you; humiliates you; and re-writes reality, including the reality of what happened to you.
Maybe you wouldn’t call it abuse, or can’t. Maybe he’s never lifted a hand against you, but his words weigh you down like lead. It’s confusing, isolating, and shameful, or feels like it is. How do you explain this to other people? If you protest, he denies it—or it gets worse. You’re stuck in circles of blame and panic.
And on TV, you see a man a lot like him.
It’s no secret that this presidential election season has been incredibly difficult, the violence, hatred, and accusations impossible to escape, but if you’re one of the women currently married to, living with, or under the control of an abuser, or if this describes your history, it’s even harder. It’s hard to sit through the news, and it’s hard to think about your country’s future when you’re struggling to stay safe through your own day-to-day.
I write this to you.
I am one of the women who survived this kind of treatment, and I want you to know that you’re not alone. Not alone in the head pounding, heart racing panic you may have felt watching or listening to the presidential debates, your lungs tightening, throat constricting. You’re not alone in feeling flashbacks. You’re not alone in fighting tears.
And you’re not alone in what we can do about it.
Women who have been shoved; women whose keys have been taken from them and whose friends and family have been denied to them; women whose use of the phone is restricted; women who have been forbidden to work or forced to quit jobs; women who have been called crazy, stupid, worthless, bitch; women who have been locked in the car so he can continue yelling at you as he drives miles past your place; women who have locked themselves in the bedroom so that he can pound on the door instead of on their bodies; women who are reading this quickly before he comes back; women who are afraid:
You are safe in the voting booth.
When you vote, no man can come with you. No man can stand beside you except your minor children if you chose or have to bring them with you. No man will be looking over your shoulder. No man will know what box you check, or oval you shade, or button you press. No man can discredit you. No man can disbelieve you.
To vote is to stand up for yourself and others. To vote is to exercise a right and protection that you have under law. To vote is to take control.
Advocates and experts say, in situations of violence, it’s okay to lie to keep yourself safe, to lie about things like your whereabouts. This includes how you vote. Your husband or boyfriend or whoever is hurting you doesn’t have the right to know who you really chose. Nobody does. No person can deny you your right to vote—and no person can tell you how to vote. No one will actually know.
This is your choice, this time. This moment: you are alone. He won’t be with you. He can’t legally be there.
Maybe you remember what it’s like to be shouted down, shut down, or knocked down. Maybe you’re there now. Maybe it’s your nightmare or maybe it’s your reality. But your vote is safe—and you can vote differently than him. Differently than your husband or boyfriend, girlfriend or wife; differently than your brother or father, mother or sister; differently than your church or religion; differently than your teachers; differently than your town; differently than your history, differently than anyone tells you to or insists you must vote.
People say a lot of things that you must do, including that you must leave an abuser right away. The reasons why women can’t always just leave abusive situations are complex, personal, and extremely hard. The only thing you must do, whenever possible, however possible, however you can, is to keep yourself safe.
In this presidential election, which has been called triggering, traumatic, and abusive, it often feels like there are no safe spaces. But there is one. Cast a vote in it.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
In our Fort Wayne neighborhood, Halloween is a serious candy free-for-all. We bought 12 pounds of candy and were out within an hour, and this as kids were still dashing from house to house, parents in tow.
But the real treat for us was recognizing how costumes had changed from our time in the 1970s and early 80s.
A little African American girl, maybe five or six, walked up with her mom. The girl wore a Spiderman costume, sans mask.
“I love your costume,” my wife and I said.
The pony-tailed girl puffed out her chest.
“I know,” the girl said. “Isn’t it cool?”
It sure is, kid.
In an election year when a woman is trying to break the highest ceiling in American politics, even as women have been denigrated and the phrase “Make America Great America” sounds like an easement back to traditional gender roles, my wife and I couldn’t help but be entertained by young girls stretching past cultural norms and expectations.
We saw lots of girls wearing Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Supergirl costumes, but we also saw a surprising share of girls like the pony-tailed Spiderman, sporting Superman and Batman gear.
We saw also girls dressed up as first-responders, soldiers and astronauts.
There was a young woman dressed as Eggs from the cartoon film Boxtrolls. (She was quite surprised that we knew the character.) Eggs’ is male in the film, but his gender is superfluous. His character is moved in the movie by love and sacrifice, understanding the nature of “others,” and rising up against power that uses fear to corral a populace.
The Mad Hatter stopped by. She looked the part and played it up down to voice and mannerisms. How can you not love that?
My wife, who teaches sociology, multiculturalism and women’s studies, noted first out loud what I was observing internally. We grew up in an era where costumes stuck to gender norms. There were lovely princesses, not Boudica, the leader of a Celtic tribe made popular in comics and games. Nurses were matrons from central casting, not valorous and celebrated. Wonder Woman was less fierce.
So here we were on our porch handing out candy to girls who represent a re-imagining of our culture. We saw some Ghostbusters costumes, some store bought and others handmade, worn by boys and girls.
“Ghostbusters!” Lisa said to one of girls. “I love it. Jillian rocks.”
The girl, probably about 10, blushed and grinned.
“Thank you,” she said before scampering off.
The moment meant something Lisa. We were both disgusted by the vitriol leveled at the women cast in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters remake, particularly the racist rants hurled at Leslie Jones and homophobic nonsense flung at Kate McKinnnon.
Our son absolutely loved both the remake and the original. Our 12-year-old seventh grader understands that stories reconfigured and retold aren’t that big of a deal. The original Ghostbusters is a funny, quotable touchstone, but it’s not the Battleship Potemkin. Nor is the female cast an abomination tantamount to Hollywood adapting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with Matthew McConaughey in the lead.
Of course, we what we didn’t see was boys bending or breaking norms. Lisa and I came of age in the androgynous 1980’s when musicians such as Prince and David Bowie took joy in poking a finger at the establishment by upending social and gender norms. And Hollywood is full of actors who’ve made a habit of cross-dressing for comedy, from legends such as Milton Berle and Flip Wilson to Tyler Perry as Madea.
Yet the thought of a boy letting loose and dressing up in roles considered female is still troubling to some. So on Halloween night, we saw boys (and girls)- dressed up as doctors, but no boys dressed as nurses, for example. But if a girl could dress up as Hagrid, Harry Potter’s giant of a friend, why can’t a boy pretend to be Professor McGonagall? It’s not the gender of these characters that we admire, but their wit, charm, intelligence, and loving spirit.
Still , what we did see, the discarding of gender norms by girls and their parents, is a good thing. It nurtures creativity, and, more importantly, it breaks down barriers between the false gender norms that define what is a “male” role and what is a “female” role. Watching the kids on Halloween is one of the best things I’ve observed in an unnerving year.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
Did a Saturday Night Livesketch last week hint at a future hard to envision in today’s bitter political climate — a future in which black and white people join forces against a broken government?
That’s what Colleen Wessel-McCoy hopes. She and hundreds of others are working to organize a New Poor People’s Campaign in the spirit of the movement Martin Luther King Jr. started nearly 50 years ago.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
A heroin needle. Photo credits to Wheeler Cowperthwaite via Flickr Creative Commons.
Even when it comes to drug addiction, black lives matter less.
Consider the current opiate epidemic, where the overprescribing of Vicodin and Oxycontin has corrupted minds, crippled bodies and shook politicians to reconsider long-held beliefs about substance abuse and criminal justice.
Crack cocaine’s disruptive effects did much the same thing to black minds and bodies in the late 1980s and early 90s. But the political, policy and media response to the two epidemics could not be more different.
Today’s opiate abuse fits the narrative of the age: white middle-class is in pain, a literal agony and figurative malaise from the vanished American dream. Heroin addicts are seen sympathetically, as people struggling with the challenges of hard lives.
Consider the recent hand ringing after an Ohio police department released a photo of a white couple overdosing on heroin as a 4-year-old-boy sat in the back, strapped to his car seat. The police say they wanted to highlight the tragedy of the scourge, while on social media, people were angry that the photos shamed those suffering from addictions.
Or how one policy expert describes heroin addiction on Scientific American’s blog as a dependence formed as a result of childhood trauma, mental illness and job loss, personal risk factors that lead people to self-medicate.
Or how politicians such as New Jersey governor and former presidential candidate Chris Christie delivered an impassioned plea last fall where he kicked the base that supported the notion that people who abused substances are “getting what they deserve.”
The opiate emergency even unites political rivals. Former Congressmen Democrat Patrick Kennedy and Republican Newt Gingrich discussed at a June press conference personal and logical approach for their joint project “Advocates for Opioid Recovery.” Gingrich echoed Christie’s repose.
“There’s this myth that everybody can just will themselves off of it,” Gingrich said. “Imagine that we said, ‘You know, we shouldn’t give people insulin – they ought to will themselves to the correct diet and exercise and giving insulin makes them weaker.’”
Imagine if Gingrich’s response to the crack epidemic of the 1980s had taken the same measured approach. Back then, crack cocaine was a battle in the culture wars that became a chance to exploit racial divisions for political gain. There was little sympathetic discussion about how the people addicted to crack suffered the same risk factors as the white heroin addicts of today.
Instead, Gingrich, along with other policy experts and politicians, advocated a stronger crack-down on arrests and jail time. A 1989 profile of Gingrich in Mother Jones included the then-House minority whip’s response to the draconian tactics of the government’s war on drugs, and by extension, black people.
“Eventually he acknowledges that his prescription—more prisons, police, prosecutors, paid informants, border guards, and executions—“is very old-fashioned, because it works,” Beers wrote.
There’s more.
“Gingrich talks vaguely of the need for ‘much more empowerment, much more self-control,” of those using drugs, Beers wrote.
In September, 1989, William Bennett, the nation’s first Drug Czar, announced his $7.9 billion battle plan to combat drugs, specifically crack—70 percent of which would be spent on hiring more police and building more prisons.
The crime bill that passed in 1994 exacerbated the problem by lengthening sentences for crack, but not powder cocaine use and sales, as well as defunding prison education programs. The outgrowth is the police militarization that has stomped over black communities. Between 1995 and 1997, the defense department donated 1.2 million pieces of military hardware to police departments, including armored personnel carriers, rocket launchers, laser scopes and intelligence gathering equipment.
These efforts targeted black communities, not aided them, says legal scholar Kenneth Nunn, and fuels the anger and distrust against police so prevalent today.
If today’s heroin stories are about white pain, yesterday’s crack narrative focused on the unrestrained id of Negroes. Like the current opioid crisis, the crack cocaine problem elicited mounds of articles and hours of TV stories, specials and documentaries, but unlike the opioid crisis, there is a lot less empathy.
“Between October 1988 and October 1989, for example, the Washington Post alone ran 1565 stories … about the drug crisis,” wrote the editor of the 1998 book “Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice.”
“The Post’s own ombudsman … editorialized against what he called the loss of ‘a proper sense of perspective’ due to such a ‘hyperbole epidemic. He said that, ‘Politicians are doing a number on people’s heads.’ “
I remember those days quite well, which is why I agree with Yeshiva University law professor Ekow Yankah’s assessment of that time in history in his PBS NewsHour essay last March comparing today’s heroin headlines with the visuals of the crack era.
“Television brought us endless images of thin, black, ravaged bodies, always with desperate, dried lips. We learned the words ‘crack baby,’ “ he said. “Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans.”
But crack’s black face was exaggerated. When neighborhood was taken into account, there was no variance in race and crack use in racially mixed neighborhoods. Even today, crack is still viewed as a “black” drug, although whites smoke it in higher numbers than African Americans.
A most prevalent hyperbole was the “crack baby” craze. When juxtaposed with how the media portrays the plight of heroin babies today, wounded angels clipped by a mother’s pain mismanagement, the sci-fi scary analysis of the crack era is as contemptible as it is laughable.
Journalist Kali Holloway highlighted the duality when she compared editorials that call for empathy for heroin-addicted mothers instead of scorn to the fear mongering in the 1980s crack era commentary that created the idea of a generation of sociopath “super predators” roaming the countryside.
Crack did lead to an increase in the education gap, but the nightmarish scenarios didn’t come to pass. Yet the threat became so believable that it may have been hardwired into how white people perceive African Americans, particularly males, as threats.
“I suppose what that really suggests is how sad it is that black American humanity remains unrecognizable for so many white Americans,” Holloway wrote.
Opioid addiction is a public health emergency, and it is a good thing to see that party boundaries drop and lawmakers consider policy decisions that treat both the present crisis and the future effects. Compassion, compromise and restraint ought to be hallmarks of our democracy. Too bad these traits were not present 25 years ago.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
It is no secret that the opioid epidemic is ravaging communities across the United States.
In my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, it seems like every nightly news broadcast brings stories of still more opioid overdoses and deaths. But there was a local news story this month that stopped me in my tracks.
It was a video of an 8-year-old boy being told that his mother had died of an opioid overdose. Since it was posted on October 10th, it has been viewed millions of times. That means that millions of people, around the world, have watched a child find out about his mother’s death. Millions of people have witnessed an intensely personal and vulnerable moment in a child’s life.
The boy’s father, Brenden Bickerstaff-Clark, who appears in the video and made the decision to upload it, says that he shared it with the world so that people would know the dangers of heroin use. As his Facebook post sharing the video states, he hopes that seeing his child’s grief will “maybe help save a child’s parent’s life”.
This is not the first time that a child has been used to showcase the destruction that opioids can bring to individuals, families, and communities. Early in September, police in East Liverpool, Ohio, posted photos of a 4-year-old boy in the backseat of a car while his grandmother and her boyfriend, victims of heroin overdose, were slumped in the front of the car.
The City of East Liverpool’s reasoning for publicizing the photos with the child’s face visible mirrored those of Bickerstaff-Clark. In a Facebook post accompanying the photos, they stated that, “This child can’t speak for himself but we are hopeful his story can convince another user to think twice about injecting this poison while having a child in their custody.”
But that’s exactly the problem. Why are we using children who can’t speak for themselves as symbols of a national battle against heroin and opioids? In the 21st century, these pictures and videos will never go away. In addition to coping with the loss of their parents or guardians, these children will live in shadow of this internet publicity forever.
In addition, the use of children to raise awareness about heroin addiction demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the opioid addiction problem in the United States, and therefore the ability of photos and videos of children to solve the problem. Even though the City of East Liverpool’s post above explicitly mentions the injection of heroin, many opioid users are not heroin users, especially at first.
The major drivers of the opioid addiction epidemic are prescription opioid painkillers. Almost half of young heroin users surveyed had first used prescription opioids before switching to heroin. In 2012, the CDC reports that 13 states had more opioid prescriptions than people in their states. Ohio was one of them. In Ohio’s Scioto County alone in 2010, 9.7 million doses of opioid painkillers were prescribed to only 78,000 people.
Is a video of a sobbing child who lost his mother to heroin going to keep a man with chronic lower back pain from becoming addicted to an opioid painkiller? Will it stop a patient recovering from surgery from taking an opioid more frequency than directed by her doctor? Probably not, even though these can be the first step towards becoming addicted to opioids and eventually switching over to heroin.
Make no mistake, children are often victims of the opioid epidemic. Communities like mine are in crisis, and drastic times sometimes call for drastic answers. In addition to opioid related neglect and abuse, children themselves can fall victim to opioid dependency. In Scioto county, an epicenter of the opioid epidemic, one in ten babies was born opioid dependent in 2009. This is a tragedy that these communities must grapple with.
There are no easy answers here, but it is clear to me that publicizing the faces, the grief, and the loss of children affected by opioid abuse is not the right one.
Combatting the opioid epidemic will not be easy. It will require the cooperation of doctors, public health departments, state and local government officials, medication prescribers, law enforcement, rehabilitation centers, and, of course, caring and informed citizens. What it will not require is exploiting grieving children.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
About 13 years ago, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer. The going was tough. I moved to the Eastside where the rents were lower, and the paint was peeling off the old manor-style houses. Soon, I noticed that friends were reluctant to visit me. At night, I heard the “pop-pops” that I wished were firecrackers, but knew were gunshots.
You probably aren’t familiar with the Eastside of Charleston, but you know a place like it: It’s segregated by race, and associated with poverty, crime, and violence—derogatively called “the ghetto” or “the ‘hood.” It’s the part of town that you have been cautioned to avoid.
More and more Americans who struggle to get by are living in these marginalized, disinvested communities where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and an increasingly militarized police force is the primary contact residents have with government. But for two years, Americans have been expressing confusion as one neighborhood after another—from Milwaukee to Baltimore to Ferguson to Charlotte—are rocked by protests, looting, and riots after the police shootings of unarmed black men.
Is it really a surprise that many of the renewed outbreaks of civil unrest have taken place in these communities?
Although the impact of living in high-poverty neighborhoods has been well documented, it’s hard to fully explain the toll it takes on a person’s body and soul. Frustration over high prices, high bills, and high unemployment rates is worsened by the bane of many a poor community—the local drug economy.
The vast majority of my neighbors, young and old, did their best to avoid the drug trade. My next-door neighbor was so overprotective of his two daughters that he refused to let them leave the house after 7 p.m. I knew many teenagers who resisted it for years, but faced with no prospects for their future, or for good jobs with good pay, they decided “to go to work”—usually in the summer when they were out of school. Dealing drugs was the neighborhood summer job program. And for many young neighbors who were expelled from school (because administrators are more likely to punish black students than provide more holistic help), the drug trade was less an alternative than an inevitability.
Outsiders often criticized Eastside residents for not taking care of their own community, or not doing enough to stymie the drug trafficking. This victim-blaming ignored the roots of the drug problem—the lack of opportunity, racism, and economic forces outside of residents’ control—and it ignored the role that outsiders played. It was common to see long lines of cars that clearly belonged to nonresidents (that is, mostly whites) trolling every night to the wee hours of the morning, looking to score drugs with no concern over the consequences for families, mothers, or children trying to sleep.
I eventually saved enough money to leave the Eastside, but not much has changed since I left. The kinds of investment in the community that would have convinced me to stay didn’t exist (and still don’t). It was no wonder that those of us who lived there believed the city, state, and even the nation did not respect—or even consider—our humanity.
The Eastside is hardly unique. If you look at the statistics associated with any of the marginalized, predominantly black communities in cities that have erupted in civil unrest, a pattern becomes clear. In Baltimore, an overwhelming majority of public school students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches (which are often used as a proxy for students’ socioeconomic status). The median income in Freddie Gray’s own neighborhood is just $24,006 a year. A Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri confirmed that the municipal police department engaged in poverty exploitation by targeting blacks for traffic violations, singling them out in a city where 53% of blacks live in poor neighborhoods. Milwaukee has been called one of the most segregated cities in America.
There’s an obvious solution for these communities (and it isn’t gentrification, which simply displaces generational residents). The solution lies in more targeted investments—for example, in jobs or education programs—that give people a chance to succeed. The bleak situation for the 13.5 million people in high-poverty neighborhoods must be ameliorated, or else somewhere, sometime soon, civil unrest will break out again.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
The wispy-haired 4-month-old Mark is held timeless in a frame in front of me. The 12-year-old, shaggy-haired Mark is fast asleep in the room right above my makeshift office. I used to read Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby” to him, as my mother read to my brothers and me, as her mother read to her three children. Now, he falls asleep reading Rick Riordan. He is fascinated with the world of mythologies, from ancient Egypt to mythical Asgard to mysterious Boo Hag in the Gullah tales.
I thought when my wife and I had our son, we’d have the usual parenting challenges, teaching him to be a good person, not to run with scissors, to look both ways before crossing the street. But parenting a multicultural, multiracial child with a black dad and a white mom who looks white but identifies as black has offered a unique challenge in a country swirling with the complexities of deep racism.
It has led my son and I on a journey of self-identity that has brought him to a series of choices that represent the dichotomy of being black and white in America.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
I want to watch the video of Terence Crutcher being killed by Tulsa, Oklahoma, police, because I want to see something that would explain why police killed him.
Like maybe the 40-year-old black man moved too quickly or too slowly after his car broke down Friday and a white officer came upon him and his car. Maybe Crutcher’s body took some form so aggressive that even police in a helicopter above could tell that the father of four was a “bad dude,” as they were recorded saying on an on-board camera.
Even after the years-long processional of hash-tagged lives, the brutal end of which are often captured on video, part of me watches the videos in search of something to make it all make sense.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
Community Change proudly recognizes a staff bargaining unit affiliated with IFPTE Local 70, a union for non-profit workers.
On June 16th, I celebrated my youngest daughter Coraline’s second birthday. While she opened presents, I relished the memory of her entering my life. She was born a month after I’d graduated college, during a time when I was totally unsure of how I’d find enough work or how to make it as a freelancer. This year, as I watched her eat cupcakes, I felt our journey intensely—how far we’d come since the beginning— in part because that afternoon, I’d accepted an offer with a publishing company, Hachette Books, for my book.
Exactly 11 months after my essay about cleaning houses was published on Vox and went viral, I accepted the offer for my memoir—an expansion of that essay. For months, I’d spent what I felt were luxurious hours not writing for pay, but working, quietly at night, with a sleeping baby in my lap, crafting the perfect book proposal with my agent, Jeff Kleinman at Folio. It felt incredibly strange to be going after something I’d wanted since I was ten years old, and at first, I didn’t have much faith in it. For over twenty years, I had been writing, reading, and studying the art of writing. It was shocking to even have an agent.
Three years ago, I shared an essay with one of my writing instructors, Debra Earling, who now heads the creative writing program at the University of Montana. It was a piece called “Confessions of the Housekeeper,” which I’d written in a workshop the semester before. Debra and I met one afternoon at a coffee shop to discuss writing and my application for the MFA program. I timidly handed her the pages from across the table and got up to order coffee. When I returned, she was sitting in the exact same position, but with her hand clasped over her mouth.
“This,” she said, looking up at me. “Stephanie, this is going to be a book.” She went on to describe, in detail, my book tour, and my success, and even my finding love. It rolled out of her, like a fortune. On my walk home, I remember skipping a little. Someone believed in me and in my story.
I would work on that essay for the next two years, chiseling away at it little by little. When Vox bought it for $500, I about fell over. It seemed a massive amount of money, especially since I had spent the last eight years on assistance programs, and my current hourly wages from various freelancing jobs were about $10.00. I thought it would surely be the most I’d ever receive for my writing. When the essay went viral, with almost 500,000 hits in the span of three days, my career took off. Within two months, accepted a position as a writing fellow with the Center for Community Change, and had several more pieces published, including one through Barbara Ehrenreich’s Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In May, just before sending out the finished book proposal, I was finalizing a new essay with an editor at the EHRP, which would go on to be published in the print edition of the New York Times. I also sent her my book proposal–all 70-some pages of it–and asked if she might be able to show it to Barbara. Maybe Barbara could possibly read it, or even write a few sentences about it?
Two days later, she emailed back with sentences in quotes from Barbara, my journalist hero, a woman I have long admired:
“We need more books like MAID, with the view from the fridge and under the couch. Stephanie Land has something to teach us about both sides of the inequality divide. Neither is what you are expecting.”
With that, MAID became real. My book, my memoir, was finally happening. Not even a week later, I accepted an offer from Hachette Books to bring my story out into the world.
I spent four days talking to editors, publicists, presidents, vice presidents, marketing teams, and senior editors from publishing houses all over the country about myself and my book. I felt so small, just some girl in Missoula, Montana. I paced around my living room, headphones in, gesturing wildly. It seemed unbelievable that I was talking to the very publishers who had been responsible for bringing my favorite writers’ words into the world.
The sleepy Thursday afternoon of Coraline’s birthday was the first day since the publishing conferences had begun that I didn’t have any scheduled calls. The only call came from my agent, asking me what I thought about an offer by Hachette Books. Because four or five publishing houses were about to make a bid, they had made a preemptive offer to take my book off the table, in order to keep it from going to auction.
Hachette had been my last call the day before, and it wasn’t like the others. I talked to a group of four people, and all said they’d reacted to my story differently. Krishan Trotman, who would become my editor, is also a single mother, and we gave each other a verbal fist-bump. I could tell by her voice that she felt a passion for the message I wanted to share.
During the meeting, I felt comfortable enough to be vulnerable. When they asked me what scared me most about writing this book, I answered honestly and easily. I closed my eyes, breathed in, and told them my fears of not writing the story as it played out in my head. Of not getting it perfect enough. Of jumping into something so huge when I was so small.
When Jeff called the next day to ask if I wanted to accept their (amazing, incredible, beyond my wildest dreams, life-changing) offer, I held my breath.. Alone in my tiny apartment, I said yes. And then went out to buy cupcakes for Coraline’s birthday.
A couple of weeks after I accepted the offer, Krishan and I spoke again on the phone. “I just have to tell you,” she said. “Our office, our floor, is all open. When we received the news that you’d accepted our offer, everyone jumped up from their desks to cheer, and started hugging each other. Even the CEO of the company came out to give me a hug. I’ve never seen anything like that in publishing before. It was amazing.”
When I told this story to my best friend over a celebration dinner a few days later, she got tears in her eyes. While I’ve told this story several times to friends throughout the last couple of months, I haven’t been able to formally announce it through my platforms. There was a part of it that didn’t feel real unless I talked about it. This summer has been a hibernation of sorts, an internal resting and journeying, knowing that I was going to begin full-time work on the book in the fall. I slowed down with work, and stopped hustling to pitch and publish articles. I gave myself time to mentally freak out. I made some feeble attempts at planning the next two or three years, all the while knowing that I had no way to even imagine it.
While in this limbo period of time, waiting for the publishing agreement to be negotiated, I have worked less, which has meant less income. For most of the summer, the cupboards have been almost bare. Now, I’ll still have to budget, plan, and live the same life we are, but I can buy the groceries I want without feeling anxiety building in my chest as I watch the total increase at the register. I can get the axles fixed on my truck. Hell, I can get a real stereo for my truck. I won’t have to stare at this little piece of paper next to my desk, detailing which bills are due on what date, and for how much, figuring out who I can pay and when, and who I can skip.
I’ve been sitting on this news for so many long days. Publishing this post and sharing it with all of you is what finally makes it real. So I celebrate today with all of you, my friends, and followers, who have stuck with me through all of these years. Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading. I can’t wait to share my book with you. I can’t wait to change the stigma and narrative of single mothers in poverty. I can’t wait to raise my voice for the domestic workers who aren’t paid enough to make ends meet. I can’t wait to bring attention to how the system of government assistance fails millions. And I can’t wait to share my own journey, the moments of heartache and beauty, the bone-numbing exhaustion, the deep love I carry for my daughters, and the pride I feel for having gotten where we are today. With all my heart, thank you for being someone I can share my story with. Thank you for being someone I can depend on to read it. That support will carry me through the next year of this new journey, and writing this book, tentatively titled:
MAID: A single mother’s journey from cleaning house to finding home.
Visit Community Change’s platform for the stories of real people making real change, featuring the op-eds, videos, photo essays, audio stories, and podcasts of our Communications Fellows, staff, and partners.
With that, MAID became real. My book, my memoir, was finally happening. Not even a week later, I accepted an offer from Hachette Books to bring my story out into the world.