Little Girl Down The Road

The little girl down the road lives a tough life. She went to school in a one room school house, learned of her brother's death at the hands of white doctors who refused to treat black patients in an all white hospital and barely saw her mother due to working away from home as a domestic worker. She was taught to be tough and grateful but to value hard work. That little girl is my grandmother. She grew up in Centerville, Maryland and had a difficult life. When she graduated from high school at 15 years old, she had two children from a previous relationship and moved to Philadelphia working as a domestic worker. She met and married my grandfather and had seven more children they brought up in the catholic church and was stay at home mother. This girl grew to be a woman enduring hardships but wanted her children to have a home where their mother was around. Opportunities for her were few and she lived the best way that they could. When someone coming from the hardest life, becomes the first it is something that happens where they prove they can contribute as much as anyone else. This piece I did in tribute to girls of the era my grandmother came up as a child. The depression period where people experienced hardships. Over the weekend, I went to the Let Us Not Forget museum and learned about the intense history of slavery and black people. Some of the information was a bit difficult to learn regarding babies used as alligator bait on the bayou in the south to the mental state of black people lead to see themselves forever as a slave. It reminded me of my grandparents and what they and those before them went through. The system the exhibit pointed out, was a process to keep black people one generation after the next oppressed. Children in my grandparent's era were encouraged to see themselves as not superior to whites. They saw accomplishments of those in the community who became the first. The exhibit shown pictures of black people and the inventions. The caption between the photos of these individuals read They Did It And They Hid it! It pointed out people who made history and how it was hidden resulting to those in our community not knowing about them. They are unaware about the inventions of the Nintendo switch by engineer Jerry Lawson to Dr. Gladys West inventing the GPS. They held their head and celebrated these people but knew that those making history becoming the first did so on a truthful platform where they never intended to be the first but happen to become it as mentioned, showing they can perform well as everyone else. The little girl down the road in the piece represents those who witnessed it.

Little Girl Down The Road. Oil Pastel. 2020