Tuesday, April 27, 2021

"Tell Them What You Want"

"I'm Bernie, and I'm seven.... A social worker ... just picked me up from the Hamilton Ohio hospital and is taking me to live in some town called Oxford.... I was born in Lincoln Heights, a Colored part of Cincinnati, Ohio on March 1, 1946." 

Bernie's mother had been arrested, along with Johnny McVay, a violently abusive man "mama takes up with" at what Bernie calls the "Devil House." She is forced to cut the grass with scissors and had been severely burned from the fire Johnny insisted be kept going in the backyard. He calls her "Puke." 

Hospitalized for malnutrition, she is now headed to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles, an older, caring Black couple willing to take in the "State kid." Bernie's story spans the 1950s to the 1980s in the midst of a burgeoning civil rights movement. She faces immense challenges in her quest for a college education, but she's not a quitter. 

"Tell Them What You Want" ($16.95 in paperback from Culicidae Press; also for Amazon Kindle), by Laverne Merritt-Gordon with Beau Grosscup, is a stunning story. 

Merritt-Gordon was born in 1946 in Lincoln Heights, Ohio, one of sixteen children. She has degrees from Miami University in Ohio and Purdue University. She now lives in Florida with her husband Denman P. Gordon.

Beau ("Bobo") Grosscup--Chico State Political Science Professor Emeritus--shows up in Bernie's story. Growing up in Oxford, Ohio he meets Bernie when he is ten. "It takes fifty-some years of friendship," he says in the book's prologue, "before Bernie tells me her secrets."

As the 1970s pass, Bernie reflects on her college experience, two unsuccessful marriages, her two sons, Byran and Benton, and her efforts to escape that little girl who endured so much. 

She remembers "getting whipped with an ironing cord, eating food from garbage cans, flames burning up her belly.... My body sags as I realize that little girl is still with me. I thought, yes prayed, I had left her behind.... But she's still here, deep in my soul.... Slowly, the thought of little Bernie clinging to me for dear life begins to make sense."

Readers will never forget her.