Denise Bledsoe Slaughter - Deal

 

Okay. First of all, I want to say that I'm going to strangle my friend, JR, who talked me into doing this. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]

 

So, you all support murder. [audience laughter] Thank you. I am 66 years old. [audience cheers and applause] I went to grad school at Brown University. [audience cheers and applause]

 

This is a brief story about Pearl Wolf, one of my two mothers. Everybody should have a black mother and a Jewish mother. [audience laughter] Okay, I have been privileged to have had both. [audience laughter] And Pearl was my Jewish mother at Brown for six years. And my last year of grad school, I had custody of my younger brother, who I might note, I still have custody of [audience laughter] 45 years later. You do the math. [laughs] He's gotten worse with age. But really, he was in the ninth grade. I took custody of him. My brother's gay. He and his father, my stepfather, were not getting along. I told my mother, “I'll take him to school with me for a couple of weeks.” It turned into the whole year. 

 

And Providence weather is not that bad, but it can get cold in the winter. And it did. It changed the trajectory of my life in many ways. One of those was that I had to work. And the money that I made was not enough for that first oil delivery. So, we were cold. I called for family members around the country. We were not poverty stricken, but it wasn't a whole lot of extra money. I called my older sister. “Oh, wow, I wish you had called me a couple of weeks ago. I just got back from Nassau. I don't have any money to spare.” I called my mother's famous sister, Velma, [audience laughter] whose husband's name was Jacq, actually was Jack [audience laughter] when I first met him. 

 

And as soon as I mentioned money, she says, “Oh, you need to speak to Jacq.” [audience laughter] Jacq, of course, says, “We don't have any money.” I knew it was a lie. I needed $180, which today doesn't sound like a lot, but what's this, 1976, that was a lot of money. So, I'm whining to Pearl, with whom I work. And Pearl, you got to imagine, is this short, squat woman. You know, she looked like she was a bodybuilder in her youth or something. She had a cigarette permanently glued to the inside [audience laughter] of her lip. She could talk with it like Susan Hayward in the movies. [audience laughter] And so, she says, “What do you need?” I said, “$180.” She said, “Come by the house tonight. I'll give it to you.” I said, “Pearl, I don't know when I'll be able to pay it back.” And she said, “That's okay. That’s okay” 

 

And so, she loaned me that money and it got us through the winter. And the point of my story, is that at the end of that year, I told her I would pay her back. I still didn't have $180. She said, “You got a little refrigerator, right?” And I said, “Yeah, I do,” as a matter of fact. “What are you going to do with it?” And this was the end of my grad school years, I said, “I don't know.” I said, “You want it?” She had three children lined up to go to Brown. So, she said, “I'll take the refrigerator.” So, that was my introduction to bartering. I paid off my debt to Pearl in any number of ways. 

 

And just as a footnote to my story, my brother who went on to become a soldier, so thank you for your service, I thank him for his, he also was diagnosed with HIV in 1983 and he's still alive. He survived all these years. [audience applause] 

 

Oh, no. No, that would be too simple. [audience laughter] He became a crack addict and an alcoholic, and that is what you should be applauding. He survived that. He finished his undergraduate years and just got his master's in rehab counseling. [audience cheers and applause] So, I thank Pearl Wolf for keeping us warm.