My father didn’t know much about taking care of children and because my aunt and her husband had children, it was only natural that we live with them. My father was so disconnected that he enrolled me in the wrong grade. I was supposed to be in the second grade and he had the school administration to place me in the fourth grade. What an experience that was! The students in the class looked much older than I did and they were clean. Clean in that their clothes looked nice. I was wearing hand-me downs and sometimes they were the right size and other times you could tell that they belonged to someone else. I didn’t look like them. My hair was combed once or twice a week and my clothes were not pressed every day.
At school, there were days when I was just visible. I sat in my desk quietly so that I wouldn’t draw attention to myself. I would watch the other students interact with one another as if they knew exactly what to do and the teacher would explain the activity to the groups, but I would sit in my desk quietly because I didn’t know what they were talking about. The feeling of being different and knowing that I would receive an F on every assignment was crushing and I was desperate to find a way to turn things around even if it was just in the way I viewed the letter F. I was given an idea from no one other than THE HOLY SPIRIT but at the time I didn’t know where the idea came from, but it worked. I began to see the F as the initial of my middle name, Faye, so when the papers would be passed out and I received mine, the F that was written in red, was for Faye instead of failure. It felt good to view it in a different way and The Lord was preserving my soul, the soul of a wounded little girl—thank you JESUS!
My aunt, like I mentioned before, lived down the street from my grandparents. My aunt was a very sweet and compassionate woman. She allowed my brother and me to live with her even though she had seven children of her own. What a woman and I must add what a man my uncle was to share his home and food with children who could eat well! She never complained about us being in her home and she never mistreated us. Her husband was the type of father who said what he meant the first time. There wasn’t any room for if’s, and’s or but’s. He demanded respect from everyone who came into his home. Whenever my aunt became frustrated with the children, she would call my uncle. He would be sitting in the back area of the house in his favorite chair and he would say, “Sit down in there.” By our reaction, you would have thought he was coming after us with the belt. We would be running so fast and he would be sitting in his favorite spot. He had that much power in his voice. He was truly the “man of his house.” The strength in his voice was backed up by the strength of his body. My uncle never lifted weights, but he had muscles. He was a farm worker and sometimes they had to put down pipes, so his weights came in the form of manual labor. My uncle wasn’t a mean man, but he raised his children to be obedient and when they were disobedient, he didn’t have a problem disciplining them. One time, me and some of my other cousins were sitting in the living room and my uncle came in with one of his sons. He had been disobedient and my uncle was preparing to whip him. At first, we thought it was funny and kind of interesting that someone was going to get a whipping, but when we heard the screams, it was no longer funny and the living room was too close to where they were, so we went outside to separate ourselves from the situation just in case he remembered something we had done.
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