Sharon Telisha Moore Leigg

vince writer and high- school teacher, Sharon Telisha Moore Leigg, entered kindergarten knowing how to read. That is a wonderful skill for a child, but there is a comical downside. “The only consequence of reading a lot is that I also talked a lot,” admits the teacher of English and Japanese at George Washington High School. Laughing at herself, she continues, “In elementary school, I was sent into the hallway a lot because I talked constantly!” E

On one occasion in fourth grade, that reprimand became a life-defining moment for the Southside Elementary School student because Marilyn Gunter, a language arts teacher, saw Sharon standing there and stopped to talk. A life-long friendship developed. “She taught me for three years and let me read anything I wanted including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Then Mrs. Gunter took

by Joyce Wilburn Making Mom & Teachers Proud

me to meet Maya Angelou!” Gunter’s positive influence complemented the foundation laid by Sharon’s mother who read aloud to her throughout her childhood. “Because of my mother and Mrs. Gunter, I knew I’d be a teacher and a writer,” says the 1995 graduate of William & Mary with a degree in English and an endorsement in Japanese. Explaining her passion for the Japanese language, Sharon continues, “My roommate in college was from Japan. She told me that learning Japanese would be easy.” Acknowledging the falsehood in that statement, she was still bitten by the “Japanese bug” while retaining her love of writing and speaking English. A 2001 master’s degree in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, and several writing workshops rounded out her academic education and gave her the tools to Sharon finds a quiet moment at home to work on a story. Photo by Michelle Dalton Photography

“I like to write about women and most (characters) are AfricanAmerican women so their voices will be heard in literature too,” she comments. Finding a quiet place to write with no interruptions is probably the hardest part of the creative process. She lists the possible sources of distractions: “Bernie and I have twelve-year-old twin boys who are mischievous and a cat who loves to chase the dog. It’s bedlam in my house!” She and Bernie Leigg were married in 2005. In spite of the domestic mayhem, Sharon always finds time and space for reading and writing, even if it’s only ten minutes on the front porch at two in the morning. Mom and Mrs. Gunter would be so proud.

• Telisha Moore Leigg is a local African-American writer. For a listing of 100 greatest books by African-American female authors over the past 160 years, search Zora Canon named for the author Zora Neale Hurston.

Essay on Watercolors by Kwon

fiction by Telisha Moore Leigg

Assignment: Write a memory of how art connects you to life.

I liked the watercolors best. I remember my mother, Mean Keisha, kept shuffling from one foot to another in her new, grey sneakers waiting with the other parent chaperones. We were at the Claude Crawford Art Museum, small but respectable about thirty miles outside our town of Boris, North Carolina. I could see Mean Keisha and Mama Mandy Blue both through the tinted bus window; kids were still on the bus and parents had gotten off. Mean Keisha was the one not smiling. Later she said it was because as she says she don’t like no pictures you can’t hold and put in an album. She said she was afraid she would sneeze in this museum at some paintin’ as she called it, and then have to pay for something. Mean Keisha doesn’t like to be around things she can’t pay for. She only came because Mama Mandy Blue made her.

There was a painting of blue and yellow flowers. I think they were flowers. In fact, art makes Mean Keisha mad, and abstract art makes her positively pissed. I won’t even get started on poetry. “Say what you mean,” she would say. “Draw a damn picture so someone can tell what it is,” she groused. And today, she was angry that she couldn’t smoke on the trip. Mama Mandy Blue gave her a stick of Doublemint gum, and Mean Keisha popped it too hard and too many times making others stare at her. Mean Keisha stared back.

Anyway, if Mean Keisha hated the museum, Mandy Blue was in heaven. She tapped her foot outside with the other parents waiting for it to open. The statues, the paintings, even the structure of the museum, she had researched and told me about them at least five times. She gave me twenty dollars pinned to the pocket inside my blue school jacket and told me not to lose it, but it was okay if I lost it, but try not to lose it because she was teaching me responsibility. Mean Keisha just rolled her eyes. That day outside the bus, Mama Mandy Blue waved to me grinning and rubbing her hands, and some kids on the bus behind me snickered. We bought a picture postcard of flowers in the gift shop. Mean Keisha touched it like the postcard was the art and not what was on the wall. I was seven in the second grade then, and other kids were laughing and talking still on the bus, but away from me. Someone said, “Ask him. Go on!” was none of their business anyway. All, at seven, I could have told them was that Mama Mean Keisha don’t let me call her Mama, flinches from men, but likes me to hug her and will fight like a dog for me. Even at seven, I could tell that her life had been rough and unkind, yet she could still love me.

I had hot chocolate at the museum coffee shop. Amalee Jorsch, a pretty, dark-haired white girl leaned into me and said, “That your mama?” And I didn’t know which mama she meant at first, then thought about it. Oh yeah, she meant the black one, the one I looked the most like, not the white one, not Mama Mandy Blue. I slumped in my charted bus seat. Mama Mandy bought me a postcard with those flowers on it. “Yeah,” I said, in my mind not denying either, but not really claiming either one. For the first time I didn’t think this trip was going to turn out all right especially when Amalee says to Theresea Gordon, the black girl with hazel eyes, “My mama says….” Very little good ever comes out of a child’s mouth starting with the phrase my mother says. And I love her, my mama, Mean Keisha. I knew what “my mama says” words were like, what they thought of the little black boy with the two mothers. It wasn’t good what they thought. I could have told them they weren’t lovers, but I didn’t know what lovers were then. And they weren’t. But that

And I love her, my mama, Mama Mandy Blue. I could have told them about Mandy Blue Eyes and her babies who died so sad choking for air that even Mean Keisha who doesn’t pray says we need to pray for them. How Mama Mandy Blue cries on their birthdays and says the ancient prayers for the dead her classics professor told her, but those prayers don’t bring them back. How her father left her alone and didn’t ever come around. Even at seven, I knew things. I could tell those kids how they took a life of sadness and loss and broke-glass, bleeding pain and made it to someplace in the light. But that ain’t their business either. So I don’t say how my room is blue, that Mean Keisha painted it not perfect, and I got a yellow blanket cover that Mama Mandy Blue crocheted... and how I want to sit with Amalee and Richard, Tavon, and even Theresea behind me, but not enough to leave my mamas. Finally, the museum opens, and our teacher calls us to line up and walk with our parents. So I do.