By Joyce Woods, March 5, 2020 — I don’t even know what I’m going to say. Okay, I’ll talk about me.
Back in 1967, that’s when I decided to leave home and get married. I was 19. So, a lot of people didn’t think that was quite a good idea. “Do you think you should finish school first?” or “don’t you think you should just wait a while? Maybe you should save more money.” My mother had a lot of older friends and my parents were elderly when I was 19. They were married 21 years when I was born. So they’re elderly and I came up by myself so I had a nice calm life. I didn’t even know I lived in the ghetto. This is on our block. I knew everybody, the same people when I left, and even the grandparents. I would go back and take care of my mother. They and all the children would live on that block, the same parents lived there at that time.
So, as far as luck is concerned, I believe in luck, because I know what people mean when they say that. I know what their idea of luck is, and I understand your meaning of it too. I have a very diverse life. I think we have every religion in it from Judaism to Islam to African Methodist, Baptist, and I’ve experienced it all. And what I’ve found, most people want good things to happen for their families. They want a good, honest life.
Well, I had decided since we didn’t have many children in our family — at a very early age, I think I was about seventeen — that I wanted a large family. Eight to be exact. I would draw my little stick figures. The school I went to — I got tired of blue and white uniforms, they were gonna have brown and beige, and I would draw that and it was it in my mind how I wanted these children. Because I was a woman and my father had died when I was nine, I couldn’t understand why you would carry the father’s name. I didn’t have a brother. So, I said if I biologically have children, well they’ll still be a part of my father, and a part of me, and my mother. So, I think I was a very mature child for my age by them being so old. All my friends were old. Even my mother would tell me sometimes, she showed me a picture after I was a teenager, she said, “You see all these people in here?” They were all seniors that had been my friends and passed away. She said, “There’s something wrong with this picture. Everybody on here’s dead but you.”
So, I didn’t have hardly any friends when I got older too much but I did have a large wedding. It wasn’t intended to be large, it was supposed to be fifty people and I think the way I thought I wanted my mother to be happy because if I had lived with my boyfriend she would have died so I decided to go ahead and have a wedding. But it was supposed to be small.
We ended up with nine children. …They were all full-term natural births, I didn’t have any medication— nothing to put me to sleep — not that I was a hero, but we were trying to eat right. During the first time that I first got pregnant, we started reading books and started going to Lamaze classes, everything that we could get our hands on was trying to find out, and it was a very nice experience.
So a lot of times, and you see I’m not really lucky, I don’t gamble. A couple of times I did try to play a number I never win. I’m talking about street numbers back in the day, right? So anyway I did it a couple of times but I don’t like to lose money. I like the shows if you go to Atlantic City. I used to be a lifeguard out there as a teenager.
Okay, sorry. Okay, one more thing.
So, after having nine children, a lot of people look at me like, “oh my God,” you know, they look at you like you’re a piece of meat or something. They have a bad idea. But I thought out how I was having children, and that’s what I wanted to do too, and I think that I have some pretty good children. Not everybody has the same type of experience but I think several of them have gone on to college and finished. One works at NASA and that gives me an opportunity to travel. I met a lot of the astronauts there. When they go to different places I can go as long as I pay for my plane ride, everything else, I’m there. I could be anywhere else in the country. So they’ll send me tickets, and I can’t afford all of these things but having a lot of children in my family worked out nice for me.