Kinship is goal for East Cleveland center
Director sets book series in the hood By MICHELE LESIE, PLAIN DEALER REPORTER Keesha McMillian was 9 when she and her siblings moved with their mother from Brooklyn,N.Y., to Cleveland heights, leaving behind grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends and memories of boisterous family gatherings. She was one of only .10 black children in a
Catholic grade school here.The overall experience was good, but she remembers feeling different and; once in awhile, hearing racial slurs. "I fought"' McMlillian said when asked how she reacted. I didn't practice nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr. said." But she also .learned to, speak up for herself and to turn to her mother, Patricia, for help "In any battle I had she .was there”
McMillian said: "No matter what forces I faced on the outside. It gave me a tremendous sense of security." McMillian wants every kid "to have somebody like that. She wants all people to realize that this kind of relationship is essential for a child, important beyond words. As director of family services for the East Cleveland
Neighborhood. Center, McMillian strives to create a sense of family there and, since 1992, in the five cultural awareness workbooks she has published. "The neighborhood center, has always had social and recreational services," she said: "Now we want community volunteers to come in and light up the place. We want people to feel comfortable, like it's a second home." Books, too, should feel familiar McMillian believes. "My motto is, make the child a part of the book. Let them be the main characters." For her "Who Am I?" and "The Struggle Continues: Living in Hood" series,
McMillian worked with members of 50 Families - people from the neighborhood center, friends, relatives. Some lent the use of their homes and businesses for photographs; others posed for them as the characters in her stories. The topics in her latest "Struggle" book
an unplanned pregnancy, the death of a beloved grandmother, divorce, alcoholism, the joy of receiving a scholarship are fiction but based on "a lot of things I've experienced or known about from others experiences," McMillian said. "I just added the details." Each story ends with make-you-think questions and activities. All have the same elements: A problem, a black family whose members are
affected by it in one way or another, and a solution stressing that problems don't necessarily have to be solved to be weathered. "A lot of times people don't see how hope and faith and determination can get you through a bad situation," McMillian said." Everybody has bad experiences, but not everybody looks at them in perspective." The story of her own comeback is not in the books. During her senior year at Cheyney University, McMillian contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome. The nerve disease left her paralyzed from the neck down for nearly four months. She had to learn everything from scratch: to talk, feed herself, crawl and finally walk well enough to graduate with her class. The irony of receiving a degree in recreational therapy on crutches was not lost on her.
"I was totally dependent on other people," McMillian said. "But it reinforced how blessed I was to have the love and support of my family." The illness, she said, "taught me that nothing is promised to you. It taught me to have a stronger sense of faith, to be more determined, more purposeful in living my life."
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