Click to access article (Page 22)
“What is most important is that we are both fighting in our own way for what we believe.” Leola Dublin Macmillan (my friend)
You know I like to share “other things” here on my blog. I can’t help it, it’s my life. What I love most about it (my life), is all the amazing people I have met. My experiences, good and bad, and the lessons and joys that come from each and every one of them. Some might find it a curse, but I just love profoundly, the life journey of others I get to cross paths with briefly or intimately along my own meanderings through life. And… I like to share.
Leola (Lee-oh-la) is one of my dearest friend’s daughters. Her mother, I have written about before… Ms. Colson. She helped me to raise my children. Even though my kids are grown and living on their own, Betty Colson has continued to be my friend and we talk at least once a week. We fought together as volunteer education advocates through her connection with the NAACP. We were the “Mutt and Geoff” team (me being the Mutt), for the better part of a decade. We learn and grow from one another and have intimately infiltrated each other’s lives and that of our grown children.
I met Leola when she was about 14. She is incredibly, off the charts bright, funny, quick witted and thoughtful. I won’t tell you how old she is now, because it makes me feel like a senior citizen! I watched her struggle through her teens, give up on college (full scholarship from St. Mary’s on the Eastern Shore). Held her mother’s hand and told her that I had the utmost confidence that Leola would be just fine, she would figure it out. She was just too incredibly smart not too.
I also watched a profoundly polite, but strong willed teenager, go from contrary to rebellious to militant to determined to focused to accomplished to confident to SHE’s ARRIVED!
Leola, is finishing up her PhD dissertation (and I hope to witness her ‘walk’ and be ‘hooded’, but since she still has that lovable militant and contrary quality, I’m working to convince her!).
The journey from here to there and back again has been a long one. But not without growth and monumental success along the way. I am just busting out proud of her. She has found a way to channel her frustrations, anger, politics, observations, and many amazing gifts as a writer and intellectual, to tackle the views of society and self image of women, particularly young girls of color.
She and I have had some very interesting discussions on this subject. And while she is a woman of color and I am not, we have experienced similar things presented in wildly different ways. I’m the blond white woman with blue eyes of moderate beauty and societal acceptance that she contrasts and writes about, and yet, I too have been the subject of assumptions and presumptions as a result of my appearance. So in that alone, we share much reality. However, it is infinitely easier for me to blow it off and move on – of that, I have no doubt. But when we discuss it, I am in full agreement with her and admiring of her work and efforts to contribute to this struggle to change the paradigm (and not in a way that emasculates men, which I probably love most about her views).
How in the world is this not completely off topic as my post title suggests? Well, because in my world of cancer and other things, I have written about Societal Stigmas. In that, this is just one more niche in a genre that I can relate to, even if not fully appreciate in the same way.
In my life, I have found when I’m uncomfortable, I ask “why?” What is it that is making me uncomfortable? It is my emotional cue to confront and engage, only to discover that I can find points of reality and agreement, and then understanding, appreciation, and some semblance of acceptance of others who are vastly different from me and my life’s experience. I talk to and befriend people that “my friends” would ignore, and I am richer for it and feel sad they have missed the opportunity to meet someone interesting and different from themselves. I remember even in high school, being friends with someone in all the different clicks and being interrogated for it by my peers! I guess it comes from being my mother’s daughter – all who knew her would agree, she knew no strangers. It used to embarrass me as a kid, but now I wear it like a badge of honor. It’s a legacy and gift she left me. (See, I was paying attention Mom.)
Me & Leola, at her brother's wedding in May
I feel incredibly blessed to know Leola for a very long time. Watching her morph into the beautiful butterfly that I always saw, even if she felt like a moth. To see her fluttering about with the most beautiful of wings – I am as proud of her as if she were my own daughter, but prouder most, to call her friend.
So what is this all about anyway? Well… last year Leola wrote a review of a feminist artist depicting black women in a tremendously moving way, but who was attacked and discounted because she, the artist, Margaret Bowland, is white. The review is worth every bit of your time to read and starts on page 22 by clicking on the cover icon (at the top), which will take you to the online version.
As a result of this article, Leola has been finding herself recently hobnobbing with some pretty important folks and just last week met the subject of her article in person in NYC at the personal invitation of Ms. Bowland. Leola and I talked about an earlier invitation this summer when she and her husband Craig, breezed through Elk Grove to catch some ZZZ’s on their way to their new home in San Luis Obispo. While Craig slept, Leola and I drank coffee starting at 4 am and talked and talked and talked, until the men woke up. It was too short of course, but we loved it. Anyway…she had understandable reservations, and then a more formal invitation came to a “party” in NYC last month. It was way, way out of her comfort zone to travel across the country to meet folks of this stature, by herself. Craig felt she should go of course, and so did I. So we spent some time talking about why it was important and her considerations.
I got a full report this morning of her trip and finally went out to read the article that started all of this and remembered that I read it in raw form last year (her mother had sent it to me). But now reading it again, as a published work, seeing the artwork of the artist, and hearing the story, I had a whole new appreciation for this wonderful piece she has written. It touched me deeply.
Congratulations Ms. Leola. I always knew you would do GREAT THINGS!
Giving you an phonetic spelling of Leola’s name is a bit of an inside joke, but also so you don’t struggle with it.
So from here, I’m expecting Leola to rather quickly launch into her freelance writing career, in between me teaching her how to weave, drinking wine (hopefully together, but perhaps on Skype) and her finishing her dissertation!!!!! Stay focused Leola, stay focused. 🙂
Praise from outside the family, and in such a loving way, can only have beneficial consequences for Leola… my special long time friend, a woman of color also, died a short while ago and I miss her vitality, her zest for living and most especially I miss the hugs that simply enveloped me fully, showing me that after a rough start (when we met) she came to accept me, as I did her, just as I was. Like you, Lori, I have been blessed with ‘different’ friends who have enriched my life immeasurably.
I’m so pleased you enjoyed it Karen! It is indeed an article of profound and thought provoking images, pain and yes, triumph. I’m so proud of how well she articulated her own initial deep biases and delved deeper inside herself to find the shared reality and life experiences of her and the artist. I have always known she was a young woman of such deep substance and never doubted for a second if she could harness her thoughts in a direction of value she would become someone who could change the way we think. She is such a joy to talk too and have silly conversations intertwined with thought provoking observations.
oh, my goodness, lori – how your heart must swell for your beloved leola! i read her piece, and it opened up a whole new vein of thinking and understanding about so many issues; i can only imagine the feelings of validation ms. bowland must have felt when she read it. and i can understand just how much you wanted to share it, not just to say what a blessed soul leola is, but how her many messages in that one piece can raise the consciousness of our society. please let her know, though i can’t fully absorb all the complexities at one reading, i will re-read it, and pass it on to others. thank you for such an enlightening post.