The Bag Lady

I saw the subtitles on a large screen while rushing to my gate in the Dallas-Love airport. And I froze in place.

All the words and sensations of the memories whooshed by me like sand being sucked into a vacuum hose. I gasped, put my hand to my mouth and tears surfaced as everything in the chattering airport went completely silent. All I could hear was my own heartbeat. Deafening. My fingers felt numb. 

What did my body know that my mind did not yet understand? I was reacting viscerally to something that I couldn’t yet comprehend. And as I read her name again on the screen, I heard her laughter as if down a long hallway. Far away and yet nearer to me than the CNN ticker-tape.

“I am what everyone fears they will become… I am a bag lady.” I recalled her clearly pronouncing to us one day in the perfect diction I coveted. She was anything but what you think of as a bag lady. She was employing a creative speaking device.

I could hear her words from long ago so clearly my ears began to ring. My family had continued walking on to find our gate, not realizing that I was paralyzed.  They hadn’t noticed that I froze in place… staring at the screen trying to take it in and yet lost in time…

“These bags, they carry parts of me…” She gave the hint of a smile as she proceeded, “I have my school bag, with all of the items I must remember to bring for my day, I have my purse and in it my make-up bag that carries my face, I have my favorite bag of all my church bag that holds my lessons and notes about Bible study or a message that I might deliver to tell people about my Lord.”  She went on using this clever speaking device to tell us about her organizational technique to keep everything in her busy life straight. I thought it brilliant, but I was biased, I thought that everything that she did or said was brilliant. I was a fangirl. 

She was everything that I am not, but what I longed to be. Well-spoken and wise, poised and eloquent without the slightest touch of snobbery or stuffiness. When she laughed you knew how draperies felt when the windows opened after a long cold winter. Her impossibly short haircut was brave for even the most beautiful of women. It made you realize just how beautiful she was without even trying, inside and out. She was tall and trim and even if simply put together it was always perfect. A wife, mother of three, teacher, running coach, and church leader and and and… She was Super Woman incarnate. She was so at ease in her brownie batter skin that you’d never know that she was facing a great fear. And for that, I envied her all the more. How could she be SO CALM? 

She never clubbed us over the head with religion and yet if you asked anyone you would know that she was a practicing Christian… not the hypocritical kind that soured my religion years ago. No, in my experience, she was one of the rare ones. She lived what she believed. It was just there. Quietly. Proudly. I respected that.

As a speech pathologist, her elocution was perfect. I was always a little nervous speaking around her because of my darned marshmallow mouth. I wanted to send her a message and ask her how I could rid myself of this dreadful cursed lisp. I wanted to sound like Lauren Bacall, not like Ralphie from a Christmas Story. Maybe she could help me, surely she would… but I never sent that message. That still bothers me to this day. The unsaid thing, the unsent message. 

At the airport someone in my group noticed that I wasn’t with them and came back to find me, trembling, eyes streaming, glued to the silent television reading. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton had been worshipping at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, when a gunman entered and took nine souls including this incredible woman. The church was on the same street, one block down from where I met her a few years before in a conference room at the public library on Calhoun Street.

She never knew it, but she had been my role model at those nerve-wracking Toastmasters meetings. I thought about the bag she was carrying with her that day. I looked down at my rolling bag. And as I pulled myself together and rolled it to my gate, dumbfounded.

My bag now holding her memory.