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My project, Balls: Memoir of a High School Football Mom, shows the experience of millions of American women with their teen-age sons. The narrative is set in one of the last male bastions in America, the game of tackle football.  

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The work started as a series of e-mail messages to my family as I bragged about my youngest son, who elected to play football during his high school years. I was a proud mom, and a mite anxious about his growing-up.

 

He was a smart underachiever, and for the African American mother of a quiet, heavily muscled African American boy, the United States can be a horror.

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And his growing into a man meant a major part of my life, being a mother, was passing away. 

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Balls is my attempt to celebrate the beauty of ordinary existence, a la Andy Warhol. It removes the blinders to the art of normal life by positioning a mirror to reflect on women who play an unacknowledged role in one of the last strictly male bastions of American life, the game of football. 

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Conceptually, Balls examines gender issues and asks, at base, in a society that is becoming increasingly gender neutral, what is it that makes a man, or woman? 

 

This is an important question for African-American women in particular, who have been forced by the legacy of slavery all Americans live with. I feel this especially as an African American woman, who before she was wife was a mother forced to adopt traditional male behaviors to insure the survival of her child. 

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