Legends
Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald—They both had the kind of voices that can do what the instruments do. It was Ella who started runs—she showed what you can do with your vocal. I still listen to them today and I’m young! It’s music that’s legendary. Their music will always be around.
Aretha Franklin—She is my favorite singer. She has a voice like no other. I have to say that I have been blessed enough to meet Miss Aretha Franklin. She has wanted to get to know me better. She has given me her phone number and it just sits until I’m ready to call her. I’m not ready yet. After a couple of months, I went to my mother and I said, “Mama, I can’t call Aretha.” My mother said, “Why not? Just talk to her!” And I said, “You can’t justtalk to Aretha!”
I love you, Aretha! And that’s why I haven’t called you yet.
7.LikeMother,
LikeDaughter
The highest propsfor my success go out to my mother. Diane Barrino is my biggest role model. She is my angel. My mother is my guide and my friend. We are almost the same person. I can tell her anything and she doesn’t judge me. We never judge each other. We both have done it all, lost it all, found out what we were made of, and managed to change our lives. And we are both still standin’.
I come from a long line of strong women who have kept their heads up through a lot of adversity and hardship. My grandmother, Addie, was born on Christmas morning in 1941 in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her mother, my great-grandmother, died from bronchial asthma at the age of thirty-two when Addie was only eight years old. She had told Addie that she was going to the doctor to see about her asthma and sinus infection and never came home. She died in the doctor’s office. Addie moved in with her aunt and uncle, who took good care of her and made sure she was raised right. My grandmother was raised in the church and got saved when she was fifteen years old while attending Oak Grove Mississippi Baptist Church. She also became the first victim of our “generational curse,” as my mother calls it, by having children too young, but at least Addie was married. My grandmother married my grandfather, Neil Washington, at nineteen years old and had her first child and namesake, Addie, at twenty.
Over the years, Addie had two more daughters, my mother, Diane, and Surayda, the youngest. But, my mother told me, like so many of the men in my history, Neil was an alcoholic and he was abusive throughout my grandparents’ marriage. Although Addie was going to church and doing all of her regular activities with a smile on her face, she was constantly covering up bruises, which were the result of Neil’s beatings. He would blacken her eyes right before prayer meetin’, so she had to go to church with a face full of crusty makeup, trying to hide her swollen eyes and busted lips. As scared as my grandmother was of Neil’s rages, she felt she needed to honor her marriage vows, which were made before God—she took her promise seriously. She also did not want to disappoint her beloved aunt who had raised her. But Neil’s abuse got worse—any little thing would set him off. If Addie didn’t make his dinner just right, or the house wasn’t just right when he came home, he would beat her. After a while, he didn’t need a reason, and he beat her in front of her girls. Addie was convinced that one of Neil’s punches would eventually kill her and leave her precious daughters with a man who might hurt them, too. But Addie never left him. It was Neil, not my grandmother, who finally broke the cycle of violence. After fourteen years of marriage, he asked Addie for a divorce with the soured smell of liquor on his breath.
Addie finally had the escape she had wanted but had been unwilling to bring on herself. God had intervened. Addie heard those words from her husband, “I want a divorce,” and realized that she could raise her daughters on her own. Addie decided to move with the girls to High Point, where she had family who could help her. She didn’t have a plan and she didn’t have much money, but she had a faith in God that was unshakable. And she knew that after living through fourteen years of hell, she and her girls would survive.
My grandmother had a dream for each of her daughters. My grandma says that my aunt Addie, the eldest, was “all business,” even as a young girl. Aunt Addie was on a mission to get out of High Point as soon as she could, and so she eventually attended the Wilma Boyd Career School in Pennsylvania. My grandmother was so proud because it is exactly what she wanted. Aunt Addie graduated, took a job in Dallas, and never looked back.
Aunt Surayda, the youngest, was also ambitious, and my grandmother had high hopes for her, too. Rayda wanted to get her certification and become a registered nurse. Unfortunately she never got the chance. Two weeks before the start of her first nursing job, a stranger came to Surayda’s house, calling out her boyfriend’s name. When she opened the door to say that he wasn’t there and she hadn’t heard from him in a while, the man opened fire and shot her in the neck. Surayda fell dead in front of her daughters, Kima and Kadijah, who screamed over their dead mother’s body. The murderer was never caught. My grandmother says, “I am still living with that.” She has never gotten over the death of her baby girl.
My grandmother had dreams for her middle daughter, too. She had hoped that my mother, Diane, would find happiness in her gift of
