YOU ARE MY LADY, EVERYTHING I NEED AND MORE

Many of us have wondered how we can possibly find genuine Black love and make it work, in a world where simply living life is hard enough.

I’ve been blessed to have an amazingly wonderful friend, who is the product of a 40-year-old union. Here, her father, Terry Miller, candidly shares with me an extraordinary love that began amidst the tensions of desegregation and has endured the lures of street gangs, teenage pregnancy, marriage at the ages of 18 and 19, and the untimely passing of his wife, Surverne, while still remaining intact, stronger than ever.

Perhaps there’s hope for us after all.

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Surverne, Terry Sr. and 3-year-old Terry Jr. in a 1969 Christmas card photo

My father owned a floor cleaning business and one of his worker’s sons and I became close. My wife, Surverne, lived behind his house and I had to walk through her yard to get to his house. One day, I was walking through the yard and she was standing on the back porch, and I said, ‘Today is my birthday, why don’t you come out with me?’ She said, ‘Okay, but I have to ask my mother.’ Her mother said yes, provided that her older sister was able to go. We went to the movies that night- it was Surverne and myself, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. It was May 10, 1961.

I remember she allowed me to kiss her once and she had a strange taste. She tasted like strawberries and I was fascinated. I said, ‘Dammmmnn, she tastes like strawberries!’ I couldn’t get over that. I didn’t tell her anything, I just kept thinking to myself, ‘I wonder where this comes from.’

As I said, my friend lived in back of her house, on another street. Everyday after school, I’d go to his house, go through her yard and I’d end up stopping to talk to Surverne. Not about heavy things, but just about things in general because a lot of things about living in the North I didn’t know. I was dealing with an integrated society, that wasn’t friendly to me at all, and the culture shock of being up here and trying to make it.

The most interesting thing about my wife in the early years, was that she was different and it wasn’t just the taste in her mouth that I fell in love with. She was just different-independent, strong, and she spoke her mind. She came from a large family of six sisters and two brothers, and could carry her own. She didn’t allow me to disrespect her. More importantly, she had not been discovered. You know, there’s a diamond out there in the rough, you pick it up, start polishing it off and you begin to look and go, ‘Damn, boy, this woman is pretty’. When I started hanging with her a lot, that’s when the other guys said, ‘Who’s that Terry’s with?’ She was just under the radar and by the time she surfaced, I was in on it. I said, ‘Nope, this one’s mine.’

Along with being a part of her life, carried with it responsibility. I needed to make a decision between being with the gang or being with Surverne. I didn’t want to be in a gang. In the gang I was scared more than anything else. We’d go out of town and we’d be fighting, I’d jump out of the car with chains and acting all foolish. I’ve seen people get hurt, shot and I just didn’t want any of it. My lady kept pulling me more towards her, spending more time with her. During that time, if you had a good reason why you didn’t want to actively be a part of a gang you could kind of leverage that. My father and the people who used to work him, most of them were street guys. They would see me in the streets and say, ‘Man, you got to go home. You can’t be out here with me’. So I had older adults, who had children and were in gangs, pulling me away from it. I had Surverne, pulling me away from it and I had myself. I wasn’t raised to be in a gang and I knew eventually I was going to get hurt, if not killed. I used all of that, especially Verne, to pull myself away from the gang. The more I pulled myself away, the more Verne and I became close, until we were inseparable after that.

At what point did you realize she was the person you wanted to spend your life with?

You don’t think about that person as being the one you’ll spend your life with. You think ‘this is the person I have to get through today with. I got to go see her because she told me that if I don’t come over there, I better keep stepping.’ It was a daily thing. I knew I had someone special and that was more important than anything to me.

I had other dudes trying to hit on my lady, so I couldn’t be out there talking to another girl because my lady wasn’t going for it. She’d say, ‘If that’s what you want to do, there are other fish around’ and I’d say, ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ I never thought about her as the woman I was going to marry, though on her notebook she used to scribble ‘Mrs. Terry Miller, Mrs. Terry Miller’. I would say, ‘Surverne, what are you doing?’ and she would laugh about it.

I had the problem of growing up, trying to adjust and she had problems trying to adjust, trying to make it, so who are you going to lean on, except somebody who you think understands you? She became the one person in my life that really understood me and would go to bat for me. Verne became my best friend and I tried to become her best friend. Other people would be hanging out at parties- no, not me. Wherever Surverne is, that’s where I’m going to be.

I remember taking Surverne to a party one time. I’m feeling nice and I tell a friend, ‘Lets go outside to smoke.’ I say, ‘Surverne, I’ll be right back’ and she just looked at me. I got outside and look into the window, and there she was dancing with this guy. I go back inside and say, ‘Surverne, I don’t want you dancing with anyone else.’ She says, ‘Okay, and I don’t want you outside’. I say ‘Okay, but I’ll be right back’ and I went outside. I look through the window again and this same dude was dancing with her. This time I said, ‘I wasn’t clear. I thought I told you, that you can’t dance with my lady.’ He says something slick and before you knew it, I had popped him in the face and damn near tore up this lady’s house. Surverne says, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t pull on me with force, that’s not going to make it.’ I had to learn to pull on the best of me, the best that I’m all about.

Verne was my teacher, more than any other way I can describe her. I learned from her, I wanted to learn from her. She never got into a fight with another girl over me or any other boy. She said ‘That ain’t worth it. That ain’t what it’s all about. If you want me, you got to bring your best to me.’ My lady wanted me to look nice all the time, to be smooth all the time and I learned. She was my teacher and I was her protector.

Terry Sr. and Surverne on a St.Thomas vacation in 1974

When and how did you know it was love?

When I went away to college she used to write me every week. She was lonely, I was lonely and I would think about the things we used to do. She was my best friend and I could tell her anything. I could really talk to her. We were very close to each other and then we had a baby my freshman year at school.

I had a choice - I could go to Chicago, work, be independent and go to school or go home to Connecticut, get a job, raise my family and go to school part-time. I told my father, ‘If you would help, I’d like to go back to school and within six months, I can bring my wife and my baby and live my life out there.’ He didn’t agree to it, so it was on me - stay in Chicago or go home. I realized in that moment, I was in love with her. I didn’t want to be away from her and what I knew was that it was going to be difficult to raise a baby and try to live life. It was better for me to do it with Verne and we become a team, than for me to go to Chicago, get a job up there and leave Surverne and the baby with her mother.

There were pluses and minuses. One of my friends at school said, ‘Terry, no matter what you do, you’re going to be wrong because you’re never going to know what your life would be like if you stayed in Chicago and if you go home, you’ll never know what your life would be like if you didn’t go.’ It was a situation where there would be some unknowns for the rest of my life. I figured that if there was going to be all these unknowns, I do know my lady, so it’s going to be me and her.

I came home, we got married during the end of the summer. I didn’t have any money or a place to live. My wife’s mother said that she should help as long as I tried and was fair to her daughter. I got a nice job at the steel mill and after a year’s time, I went back to school and just kept on going. My wife was more than my best friend then. She was my best friend, teacher, lover - she was everything.

When I came home and we got married, all of the friends I had before disappeared. I didn’t allow any of them to come to my house and I didn’t hangout in the streets. That helped me because it drew me closer to Verne. I just depended on her for the things in life that was meaningful.

What were the early years like being newlyweds and also young parents?

It was a lesson. Keep in mind, my wife came from a family of six sisters and two brothers. They were always around, especially on the weekends. There would always be a group of us hanging out at the park or doing things together. In that sense, I was blessed.

Initially, when I got married, my wife’s mother said, ‘Terry, if you try, I’ll help you but you have to try.’ I kept getting better and better, and Verne’s mother treated me like her son. She had two biological sons and then she had me. I treated her like she was the queen because she helped me when other people couldn’t or wouldn’t. I fell in love with the whole family.

During the 60s, I got stronger and Verne got stronger. Everything we did was to grow. The interesting thing about my wife was that she would change. I would see her reading and Nikki Giovanni was her favorite poet. She would grow in her thinking and her actions to another level. She would laugh at me because I would try to grow and be at that level too.

What has helped your love last?

The struggle. It was her and I against the world, and in the world. It was her and I. If we made it, it was because she and I did it. I’d go to work, give her the check and she’d make it be enough.

The first apartment we had, the bathroom was on the third floor of the building and we shared it with three other tenants. My lady said, ‘We’re not going to be here long’ and we were there for about eight months. She was a strong woman and would fight to grow.

The thing I knew about my young marriage was that it was myself, my wife, my son and it was up to us to do it.

For young kids today, there’s no road map or somebody telling them how to do it. It’s just life coming at you and you got to be strong enough to try to help yourself.

Terry Sr. and Surverne at a family friend's wedding in 2004

Other people getting involved in your business.

You will grow as your living your life, you will grow. A good friend of mine told me, ‘Terry you got to love yourself.’ You have to learn to love yourself. You have to figure out what that means to you. You’re going to say, ‘If I love myself then who’s next? I love my wife. Who’s next? I love my child. Who’s next? My mother, my father…’

You got to put things in perspective and move forward, do the best you can. If you mess around and you’re shooting up drugs or you’re out there in the street and you want that one woman, and this woman - you can’t do that. You can’t impact other people’s lives in a negative way. You can’t do it because it comes back to you. You go out there and mess with someone else’s wife, someone’s going to sneak and try to get to your wife. I haven’t seen it work any other way. [You] got to love yourself, try to help people and do the best you can. If you focus in on that, then you have a shot at it.

Then you have to have certain things you believe in. When we were teenagers, my lady and I had some rough words for each other but as we got to be adults, no. I would never holler at her, wouldn’t even think about that.

What does your relationship bring to you?

When my wife passed away and the angels came, they were talking to me and they said, ‘Look Terry, here’s your choice: you can be angry that your wife is gone or you can be thankful that you were able to spend 40 years with her. The choice is your’s.’  When I think about the kind of person she was, and everything she gave to everybody, including me, I told the angels, ‘I am thankful God allowed me to spend 40 years with this person’. That’s how I capture my peace of mind is to know I was with a lady who was quality in every sense of the imagination. I never saw her get caught up in life experiences in a negative way.

God gave me my soulmate and allowed me to have wonderful experiences with her. My wife loved to travel and enjoy life. My kids look at me like I’m crazy and say, ‘Dad, you need to go out there and enjoy life.’ I look at them and I say, ‘You don’t understand, from my perspective I’ve had it all. I can’t think of anything that I want because I’ve had it all.’

How do you fall in love, stay in love and go through the 60s? I should have been dead. A couple of times…I should of been dead. But God keeps you around for a reason. Every time I got out of something, it was based upon Verne orchestrating something for me to get out of problems.

My wife was beautiful! And, here I was, this half-ass con, ready to kill the world if the world looked at her. (Laughs to himself) I was blessed with the opportunity to be with this woman for 40 years.

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Terry and Surverne’s song: “Our Day Will Come” — Nancy Wilson

Our day will come/and we’ll have everything/we’ll share the joy/falling in love can bring/no one can tell me that I’m too young to know/I love you so/and you love me…