He led [her] about, he instructed [her], he kept [her] as the apple of his eye.
As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings:
So the LORD alone did lead him. . .
Deuteronomy 32:9-11 (KJV)
(Slightly modified for gender.)
There is a tradition in many Black churches. On Mother’s Day, the women who are mothers and daughters gather together, at the church. On Mother’s Day, the sanctuary is almost always filled with flowers. There are lilies and carnations and roses. In keeping with this tradition, the women of the Baptist church I grew up in wore roses. Color coded roses. On this one Sunday each year, those daughters whose mothers are still with us in this life wear red ones. And those daughters whose mothers have passed, those whose mothers are dead, those daughters whose mothers have gone to Glory, wear white.
Since November 4, 2005, at 10:05 P.M. EST, I have been a White Rose daughter.
Let me tell you about who she was, my Mama. Let me share just a glimpse into her 72 ½ years on this earth. There are many stories I could share, but I have no space to tell them all. The stories are good stories, and bad stories, and stories in between that teach and inform as much as they make me smile and laugh and cry. I tell them now, for what they are worth, because I learned from my mama that the personal is political. Although Mama never once uttered the phrase "The personal is the political." So, if long writing with almost no pictures and almost no media links, no Obama devotion or Obama hating, is either too boring or not political enough for you, this being another "year of politics" (as Malcolm X once noted in 1964 when warning that it would be The Ballot or the Bullet), feel free to stop reading right now.
My Mama, who everyone called "Flo", was born the 7th child of 16 to a tenant farmer’s family on June 29, 1933 on the outside margins of Prattville, Alabama. Born in a town that was then so small that apparently, even all the white people who lived there were related to us, somehow (but we didn't talk much about that, for reasons those who know the South probably can figure out.) My Mama was born back when a poor family’s blessings were often measured by the number of children who could lend a hand because there was no money. And, for a Black family like Mama’s, segregation didn’t allow for spending it on entertainment like the local movie theatre even if some money could have been found. My Mama was the fruit of a loving marriage that began somewhere between 1915 and 1920, I am not sure of the exact date. All I remember is that it began when my 26 year old granddaddy "stole away" my 17-year old grandmother out of her window in the dead of night, and they woke up the preacher demanding that he marry them now, my grandfather having commandeered his father’s ragtag buggy for this purpose. (Yes, it was a buggy; a word so cute that it always makes me, Ms. Fast Car, giggle with joy to this day.)
(Apparently, they'd been "turning over their shoes" silently in each other's direction at church for about 6 months when this occurred. Love will do that to you, I hear, when you don't get the luxury of courting - and my great-grandfather was apparently not in favor of it where my grandmother was concerned.)
As the 7th child, mama was not going to be "the baby", since there were many babies after her. So, since Baby was not her destiny, she became, instead, the Rock. The strong girl, the one who did not falter. The one who had Sense. But my mama’s spirit was not that of a high-falutin, stern woman. So, in filling her place, her destiny, my mama became the one who laughed, who made others laugh, and who healed others through laughter, no matter how bad things were, no matter if someone thought they just could go on no more.
Mama grew from her childhood, filled with school in the day and work in the afternoon and at night and church at virtually all times between into a statuesque, beautiful woman. She had deep brown eyes. She had perfect skin, smooth as silk and the color of burnished mahogany. At 5’9", mama was never too plump. Never too thin. Always just right.
Illness, physical and eventually spiritual, was the hallmark of her life.
When mama was 17, her appendix ruptured. It was a foreshadowed event, by all accounts. According to the doctors who treated her, it had to have been preceded by days of pain and nausea – all of which my mother apparently bore without saying a word until she just fell out. It seems that it was because she did not wish to burden grandma, busy with the other children and running the home. Or granddaddy, working the fields from sun up to sun down toiling for white men to whom he was boy and nigger yet who got rich paying him and others less than $10 a week and a share of the crops they grew in the segregated South. But mama said nothing. Perhaps because the idea of a doctor meant the idea of money – money that simply did not exist. So she bore her pain until it would no longer bear her. After she finally just fell out, forcing a trip to the colored hospital, money or no money, they gravely said that mama was going to die. And that the family must make ready to send her Home.
But mama didn’t die, even as they eventually had to carve flesh off her ankles and lower calves to save her legs from amputation, because of the sepsis and gangrene that ultimately flooded her system. She lived, although the scars never went away. She grew stronger, after a month in the hospital.
Just a few years later, in 1954, mama moved just down the road to a little city called Montgomery, Alabama. To work. Even though she had graduated from high school, she nonetheless could find a job only as a maid, at that time. Reality was what it was – there would be no college for mama. That was just the way it was, she said. But from love of learning, and love of being in control, she spent some of her spare time learning how to type at secretary school. And reading, always reading.
Despite her health, which remained an occasional trial and tribulation, by all accounts my mama grew even more beautiful. She was tall. Statuesque. A tiny waist and a big behind. Lovely, they all said. With the same cottony soft hair and deep brown , flawless skin, the one beauty she herself always took care of even when she bottomed out years later, even after she went to a nursing home. No need to shave her legs, or her underarms, because her skin remained smooth as silk.
But with beauty, ultimately came men. Not being all that worldly, having been raised in the church, and despite having seen her older sisters’ lives, she met a young man she liked quite a bit but did not love, and found herself quite pregnant when the liking got just a bit out of hand for the Alabama morals operative at the time – at least officially operative, anyhow. Since there was no such thing as an unmarried mother in her town and, since, unlike an elder sister, mama felt that trying to "fix the problem" by "falling" off a horse (let alone other methods of the time, like sitting over bleach or using knitting needles), was going to complicate more than it solved for herself morally, she went to my granddaddy and grand mamma, with her head held high, according to my aunts who were hiding out on the porch just in case, announced that she was pregnant, and announced that she was getting married, apparently before JE (her first husband) even knew. Back in the day, back in the African-American South, one’s life did not come crashing to a halt merely because there was to be a baby where there had not first been a marriage. While it was always a disappointment, it was not a permanent tragedy to be wailed over. It was just another mouth to feed, which would get fed, somehow.
So mama married the young man she liked, but did not love, always method, never madness. Yet a longstanding family joke is that my mother was burning up the ink pen on her divorce petition while being wheeled down the hallway at the colored hospital laboring with her 8 pound, 11 ounce baby boy, that’s how fast her divorce was final once my brother was born. As she told me later, the whole point of marrying was not to be married, but to provide my brother he deserved of the protection of a legal father, a legal name. She did not feel burdened or trapped by marriage – any more than she’d felt burdened or trapped being pregnant. Since, as she always said, it was she who raised her own dress tail for some sweet-talking man when she knew better, knowing full well the correlation between sexual intercourse and childbearing even if back then there was no "health class" that existed in school or birth control that was anyone’s right.
Mama’s first husband, who she remained friends with throughout her life, apparently at first required some convincing that he should just allow the highly false, probably almost slanderous petition alleging all the things you needed to allege back in the ‘50’s to go unanswered. But mama convinced him, somehow. I don’t really know how. But anyone who knew mama knew that those times she got her back up, she became hard as nails. Hard as a Rock. So she bore her son, and got divorced, and went back to living, except this time as a mother.
But she needed a change, she said. A compass, she said.
So in early 1957, at the age of 23 a divorced, young colored mother (we were not yet Black, back then) who felt that her life was not what she wanted left the South, shortly after the Montgomery Bus Boycott in which she walked along with everyone else Black living in or near Montgomery at the time. She just packed her bags and moved. But she moved alone, without her child, because her mama refused to let her take him. The child did not belong just to her, she was told, but was her mother’s child too; our family’s child, too. But she was promised that when she got her life together, she could claim her son when she was ready. That’s just the way it was, back then.
After ½ year’s stay in Lexington, Kentucky, Mama ended up in New York City. In Brooklyn, the 4th largest city in America, where most of the colored people lived back then. Secretary school useless to a colored girl in the northern racist world, she became a maid, just like all her friends around her. And lived her life, always laughing, always smiling.
Around Christmas, 1957, she met a fast talking high-yellow playboy who’d just gotten out of the Army a year or so before. One who reportedly had ½ a dozen women chasing him all over Brooklyn but blew them off without a backward glance when he met her. They were married June 16, 1958 by a preacher at a friend’s home, there being no church wedding possible for a divorced mother, back then. And spent their honeymoon passion on a 30-hour drive to Alabama which ended in an exchange of my mother’s marriage certificate for my mother’s son, who then became my father’s son. But who has always been my brother.
By all accounts, my parents’ romance was what some today would call roller coaster unhealthy. They loved to party, they loved to laugh, they loved to be with other people while being with each other. Yet each was stubborn as mules in their own way - my dad the quiet immovable one, my mom the hell-raiser kicking back at life – which virtually guaranteed cycles of genuine passion punctuated by huge fights. (It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a common theme of the Big Fights was my mama making clear that while she was my dad’s loving wife, while she was "just a woman" and didn’t mind being "his woman" in the slightest, she was nonetheless her woman too.)
To know how it was with them, but especially with my Mama, you have to know about The Big Fight. I have no idea what started it, and have never been told all the details. However, knowing my daddy and his never-ending love of flirting with beautiful Black women, which he still has to this day, it may have been as simple as him looking at a woman the wrong way at a party. All I know is what I was told, which was that at some point what started out as a spat escalated and my Mam took things to the physical (by all accounts, including my mother’s, my father never once raised a hand to her). Specifically, she bashed my dad upside the head with a telephone receiver in the kitchen of my aunt's house. You know that type of receiver: the heavy old-school kind that was used when phones came in only one color. Apparently, she then started working to try and end the fight with a kitchen knife after my dad just stood there cussing a blue streak with blood streaking down his face. Ultimately, friends and relatives pushed him out of the house for his own safety, and he apparently ended up flagging down a passing cab, bleeding like a stuck pig from the hole my mama had put in his head, and went to the hospital. In the meantime, my mother had been so determined to try and fillet my dad that she’d mistakenly grabbed the knife by the blade, thus guaranteeing a trip to the hospital for herself too.
They ended up in the same emergency room at what was then St. Mary’s Hospital, now Interfaith, on Prospect Place in Brooklyn.
The way the story was told to me, hospital personnel and a cop went back and forth between them for about an hour, since it does not take a degree in advanced soothsaying to realize that a man and a woman in the emergency room, at the same time, with the same last name, same street address, and same telephone number might actually have something to do with each other’s injuries. No doubt figuring that this would be the easiest confession they’d get all week, I was told that they put a fair amount of heat on my mom to confess and my dad to ID my mom as the bop-upside-the-header.
Each steadfastly denied having ever seen the other in their entire life.
Today, my mother would have certainly gone to jail, since of course people who "really love each other" don’t Fight with a big F. Back then, since there would be no ID’ng and no confession, was different. So my parents left the hospital eventually, separately, and went home. For another couple, that would have meant a certain divorce if not actual murder later on that night. But for them, the Big Fight was over, my mama’s point whatever it was apparently having been made. Apparently I was born less than a year later, my sister 4 years afterward. And they lived Happily Ever After – at least for a time.
She was by all accounts the consummate wife and mother – a white glove housekeeper, a fabulous cook, and a house party animal -- until she’d had enough, going back to work in 1971 after my sister started kindergarten over the opposition of my daddy, saying she had made her own money all her life and was not about to permanently live any differently just because she had children. I remember it, because when Mama went back to work was when I learned to scrub, and cook, and clean, and knit and crochet and sew and make a home, skills that would ultimately serve me very well just a decade later but which are increasingly lost today, since so many find the very idea of homemaking anti-woman. In 1974, after what to me as a child was living Happily Ever After, there was the last Great Fight, and my parents separated. Over my mother’s drinking, which first took her family, then ultimately tried to take her.
Illness always continued to test my Mama’s strength. In 1975, I came home from school to find out that my Mama had been taken to the hospital while I was away. They said she’d fallen out in the street and narrowly missed being hit by a passing bus. From what we later learned was an intestinal obstruction, which the doctors said had to have had her in excruciating pain for at least the preceding week. A pain about which said absolutely nothing, even as she managed her children and life’s daily rhythm never missed a beat, except for those late night darkened room moments when I’d sometimes find her late at night, drinking scotch and smoking listening to Aretha sing about her lost Man.
In 1975, they told us that Mama was likely going to die, since her body weakened from increasing self-neglect was ravaged with inflammation from the obstruction, and she had a serious infection. They told us, her estranged (mostly; the times I caught the two of them either in bed or just getting out of it on Saturdays when he visited and sent us to the movies with our allowances were too many to count) husband and her frightened children, that we must be prepared to send her Home.
But Mama didn’t die. She was the Rock. And she was Stubborn. With a capital S. So it was not yet time.
When she came home after 2 months in the hospital, although weakened it didn't take Mama very long to get back to her ways. She smoked, she drank. She drank, she smoked. And her family kept falling apart, my father and I running away from her as much as possible (him by avoidance, me by choosing 3,000 miles distance to attend college), my brother’s self-sufficiency despite his disability diminishing and my baby sister becoming schizophrenic as a young adult. Never one to half-step anything, at its worst by 1980 when I myself married at the tender age of 19, my mother was drinking up to 2 fifths of scotch and smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day.
A psychotherapist would have likely said that my mother was trying to kill herself.
Years of bargaining, arguing, pleading, cajoling and hiding her liquor did nothing. She refused to acknowledge her alcoholism, her abusiveness while drunk, her need to be soft and weak and let us take care of her for a while. So, she just let everything go even as she insisted she was hanging on and told us to go to hell. And as I ran away, I largely stayed away, except for my brief visits there, or her brief visits here, throughout the years. We had an unspoken 3-day rule: since 3 days was about how long we could last before we’d be fighting, yet again.
Except that she was still my mother. And I still loved her. Even when she was drunk. And acted like she hated me because I was the daddy’s girl, and looked, walked, talked and acted just like the man who she never stopped pining for. Who when drunk told me once that he had never loved her, after he himself had had too much to drink and they'd been in an argument.
So, as I sat dousing 2 feet of blankets from ruptured waters but no actual labor in 1983, about to bring my first child – who she always called "my baby", but those of you raised by Black mothers may understand this, into this world, my mama stayed on the phone with me for 5 hours, just so that I wouldn’t be alone and frightened even though there was no money to bring her to my side. Through the years as my own marriage began failing, through my husband's 24-hour/7-day marijuana addiction that so many people insisted was an impossibility because of course "nobody gets addicted to marijuana", Mama reminded me that it was possible and good and alright to love with all my heart yet be unable to live with the object of my love.
In June, 1991, as my marriage was ending and right after I took the Bar, I took the older kids home to spend 2 weeks in New York, a visit Mama had been excited for months about even though the list of conditions I imposed was as long as my arm and certain to be ignored. I was excited about the days I would be too, despite the "3 day rule" always in the back of my mind.
This time, however, she was not home when we arrived. When I arrived, I learned from my dad that my Mama was in the hospital. Again. When I arrived at the hospital, my Mama was asleep. Resting when I arrived, resting with an IV in her arm, the bag at the end of the tubing suspended from the hanger or whatever they call it, marked "Chemotherapy Use Only."
That’s how I found out that my mama had cancer. Esophageal cancer – a cancer that is given its most ideal conditions where there is both alcohol and tobacco abuse. A cancer that Mama told me nothing about. Told my siblings nothing about. Told my father about, but then made him promise he would not tell us. Or Else.
She bore her pain, my Mama (yet again), in silence. And when I demanded, always the demanding from my Mama at that point in my life in my anger without offering anything in return, to know why she’d said nothing, especially to me, all she said was "I didn’t want to worry you."
When I spoke to her doctors, insisting that they tell me immediately What Was Being Done, and it better be Everything, they told us that despite aggressive treatment, we needed to make ready. Even though she was only 58 years old, they said her odds of surviving more than 5 years even if treatment was successful that time, were extremely low.
Mama, stubborn as always, didn’t die. Again. At this point, we predicted she would outlive all of us.
But I was so angry with her. I was angry that the Rock would not heal. I was still so angry that I could not count on which mama I would see or talk to each day – the spiritual churchgoing woman that always was full of laughter and love even though she had nothing to give but that. Or the mama who when we spent time together, usually starting on Day 5, raged at me and life when she was drunk, lashing out at me having "left her", having run away from my family as if I was too good for it. Too good for her poverty. Too good for her.
And I admit that I was angry that she refused to put up with it from me, after a certain point.
So, increasingly, I stayed away from my hometown. And from my mama, except for brief periods such as when I remarried in 1998, in a church, with a wedding - and we got to share the Mother and Daughter bride moments she'd always dreamed of (at least until she began pouring sweat hours before the wedding and even though she kept saying she was fine, she was fine, she almost fainted 1/2 hour before the wedding. It was left to my physician matron of honor to tell me, in the dressing room, that my mother was having a diabetic episode - a little fact that my mother never mentioned either, with the usual "I didn't want to worry you" excuse. Even after she’d had what I believe was a stroke in Spring 2000 was hospitalized for a month, and ultimately was placed in a full-time nursing home because she could no longer either speak coherently nor care for herself day to day. I was still angry.
I didn’t plan to run away. Or stay away. But after this, each time I would try to talk to Mama by phone, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. So eventually we stopped trying, because she would cry, and I would cry, over the frustration.
So I just sent messages, and flowers and presents on her birthday, and Mothers’ Day, and gifts at Christmas.
The pro forma love of a distant (angry) daughter.
In contrast, my mama, raised right, always wrote me, always sent me little things: a piece of scripture. Something small she’d managed to crochet. A letter. She never asked me for anything, not even money for getting her hair done at the salon where she lived. Even though she’d been destitute for years by then: unemployed, and despite all her talents and intellect, unemployable because of her killing disease, called alcoholism.
I rarely wrote her back.
In summer, 2004, my father had a heart attack. Quickly followed by a stroke. So, I went home, to New York. Knowing that God himself would strike me down if I went to see after my father, yet did not see my own mother while I was there. Knowing that I could not raise any defense, any excuse, other than my own cowardice and anger for why I hadn't come before.
And when I went, I made my Mama cry for only the second time in my life (the first being eloped with my first husband at 19, her heart broken as she confessed something I'd never known: that she had dreamed of the day she could be my Mother of the Bride, and shepherd me through that right of passage and love me and take care of me the way her mother could not, either time.) She cried, even when my mama could not even really speak, when in August, 2004 she laid eyes on the daughter she had not seen in almost 4 years.
Then she sat, and wrote, and we communicated as best we could: her on paper when I couldn't understand her, me just talking. I saw her every day, and every evening, for the 10 days I was home also seeing after my father.
And I looked in her eyes. And listened to her voice even when I could not understand it. And read her words, which I could understand. They were clean and sober. They were loving. They were supportive. So much so that, over the days, I gave glory to God. Over and over.
For when I looked at her, I realized that God had given me back my mother. The one I remembered from my youngest days, before her drinking had stolen her away from me. And that she'd been here all along, and I hadn't known it, so busy being angry was I to the point where I never bothered to come and see for myself.
I remembered planning for the future after that visit, and how much I would catch up with her. We wrote letters. I promised to come back as soon as I could, but certainly the next year.
So, when I received the call in late September 2005 from my eldest daughter, telling me that she had just seen grandma (at my request, because her doctor had called me but I missed his call) and that I must come NOW, I chalked it up to the usual cycle. They would tell me how sick she was. Maybe even again that I must make ready. But that, yet again, Mama would be Just Fine. I simply didn’t believe my daughter, who cried when she told me of the weight loss Or her doctor, who did not tell me her prognosis over the phone for obvious reasons. I didn't believe them that something was seriously wrong. Not at first.
But then I went home, my eldest daughter having gone to the hospital at my request and called, teary, saying: Mom, you have to come. So I did. And saw with my own eyes, that it was finally – after all the times they’d said she was done and been wrong -- nearing Mama's Time. Nearly 15 years after her initial diagnosis with a disease that has a 5-year post-remission life expectancy. Her cancer having returned, with metastasis throughout her liver, and her lungs. Damned near everywhere. She was skin and bones. Shaky, barely able to walk, and had fallen once, the nurses told me.
Yet according to her nurses, the first time she would let herself sit in a wheelchair was when I arrived.
In between moments of shock, all I had to contend with was a chickenshit doctor who had not even told my mother directly that she was going to die soon. Had not told her that her returned cancer was fatal. He kept dancing and waffling, even as I sat there realizing that my mama, the stubborn one, the one who never gave up, was not understanding fully what he was saying. He left it to me, after he fled like the chickenshit he was, to tell my mother straight. I remember she flinched, when I broke it down to her as quietly as I could, as stoically as I could, how there was nothing anyone could do. Flinched as if I'd pinched her. As if I punched her.
But....then she sighed, and touched my cheek, and said as I started bawling all over the place, "Girl, don't cry. God never promised us tomorrow. I'll be OK."
Funny definition of being OK, I thought at the time. Dead is not OK.
The last time I saw my Mama, we played cards. Outside since it was a rare, warm, beautiful, October day in New York and who could miss that? Bid whist, just as we always had. The game of strategy, of foresight, and yes, of luck too. She whupped my ass two games out of three, as always.
At some point, that day I flagged down the Mr. Softee truck and we bought her an ice cream. A Dreamsickle, her favorite, which she made us share because she didn't want all hers. She wasn't hungry. The Jamaican beef patty that her nurses said she shouldn't have had filled her up.
Through it, woven in gently, I asked all the questions that I did not know the answers to, but felt I needed to know. Her wishes regarding rescusciation, which at first she said she wanted, but then, when I explained to her what that really meant (breaking open her ribcage, etc., and pain from that process) she insisted that she wanted part of none of that. Her favorite color. Whether she wanted to be cremated or buried. Whether she wanted a wake, or just a funeral. She shared her precious few desires, although we could not handle it, either one of us, except as snippets woven through the decks being reshuffled.
Take care of your father, she said. Take care of your sister and brother, she said. And you look after my babies, she said (they always were her babies even as they passed through my body to get here). I will, I said, when I could say anything at all.
After we went back inside, right before it was time for me to leave, I remember asking Mama, quietly, with terror in my heart after having thought about the question for a long time, whether she felt she was ready. Whether she was Right with God. I was so afraid of the answer, knowing how much God meant to her deep down in her soul. Yet also still thinking there must be a lot of wrong, a lot of sin, a lot of not right she had done in this life that she needed to confess.
Yes, I am. That was all she said. And she smiled. And showed me the Bible, and the Big Book, in her nightstand drawer. Both marked and folded and underlined and highlighted in places.
As usual, I had underestimated -- misunderstood -- exactly who she was. And the strength of her faith. Faith that God understands even the weak and the frail, and forgives - if you can first forgive yourself and others.
When we hugged goodbye the last day I saw her alive, when I had to fly home in 6 hours and could stay no longer, I finally broke down and cried on her bosom even as she was so tired, and frail. I don’t know how what was left of you, the skin and bones, still held me so tight, as I cried afraid to hug back tight for fear I'd break her. It was only when I whispered goodbye, knowing that she would likely never hear it from me again, that she broke. She faltered. But she didn't cry. She just held tighter, and whispered: "I can’t, baby. I can’t."
She could not say goodbye, to me. Knowing that it was likely the last time, she just couldn't.
The Rock was breaking, under God's unrelenting hammer called mortality, at last.
I flew home from that visit on October 19, 2005. My Mama died just two weeks later.
For the last days of her life, according to the nurses my father was her most steadfast visitor and companion. And so together, both when I was there and after I left, we tried to make it alright, that it was Her Time. He and I conspired with me to sneak in the food she loved most despite all the bullshit rules doctors had laid down, when it was clear her time was ending, just so she could be happy. He and I collected up the hundreds of pictures of her with her friends, her family, her children and grandchildren that I'd made into two bulletin board collages so that she would see them first thing in the morning and last thing at night, during the last of her days on this earth.
When my Mama died peacefully in her sleep on November 4, 2005, the last person to have seen her, only 4 hours before, was her husband of 47 years, that high yellow playboy who is my father. He’d left her only 4 hours before. The man she’d been separated from since 1974, had been lovers with on and off during the next 30 years, and had never stopped loving. Perhaps because despite the Big Fight and the Second Big Fight and all those other thousands of days in between, his love for her had really never diminished either. She was still, as he said when his sister, my aunt, and I asked him if he needed financial help with the funeral arrangements, his Wife. And he made that clear when he looked at me in one of the rare moments of impatience about me he ever had and said "I can afford to bury my Wife."
If you'd known my Mama, if you'd known even the sad, and the brutal, and the painful, alongside the tenderness, and the gentleness, and the loyalty, and the laughter and smiles, you'd have known she was easy to love. It would have made perfect sense to you, as it did to me, if you'd known her like we did.
But all she is now is my memories on this screen, between tears that still manage to eke out, even though I can still her saying "Girl you need to stop all that crying. You are too tenderhearted. The tears are going to drown you, someday."
I even heard her saying that as I was kneeling before her coffin, her vision, at her funeral.
Because you see, in terms of her children, my Mama always saw me as the Rock. (Even when to me, it was always her, however many furrows and fractures that Rock had.) The one who would Be OK. The one who was smart. The one she could rest easy about, just a little.
The one she missed, who when I saw her in 2004 for the first time in years, could barely form a coherent word and had to write to communicate. Yet she could still manage to whisper, quite clearly "My God. My God. My God" over and over again in shock when I entered her room and she first laid eyes on me. That was before she managed to raise what was already a trembling and too frail body, put her arms around me and pat me on the back, gently just as she always had, and whisper "Thank You, Lord, Thank You, Jesus. I knew you would bring my baby back to me, someday."
Yes, for my mother, and I realized later for me as well, that moment was not just about us. It was about the power of God, and the power of prayer, in our lives.
Because you see, what I thought was stubbornness in my Mama, the refusal to complain about the hand life had dealt her, her insistence that she would live, and live on her terms even when she didn't know what those terms were hidden behind her alcoholism, was her FAITH. And her certainty in the power of that faith, all her life.
My Mama's favorite "mega preacher" was the late Reverend C.L. Franklin. Some of you may have heard of him - he managed in his spare time to have a daughter who today is known as the Queen of Soul. My mother had his records, when we were growing up. I've only listened as an adult to those recordings since her passing, but realize they are imbued with deep politics - the politics of faith, of Black faith in particular.
Of his many recorded sermons, my Mama's favorite sermon was Rev. C.L.'s "The Eagle Stirreth her Nest". We used to listen to that old, increasingly scratchy, Chess records album every other Sunday or so. Mommy, while she cooked dinner and got us ready for school the next day. She was the congregation of one, yet her children around her were her chicks.
The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest is a complex sermon that speaks of the power of God represented by one of his greatest creations, the eagle. The power that He has had over the survival and redemption of the descendants of slaves. The eagle’s grace, strength and omniscience – is the power of God in us. The eagle’s flight is our duty to rise, and soar to whatever heights our perch may find, and lay our own nest make the world a better place. Yet in the sight of God, we are but young baby chicks. Eaglets, a part of the uncountable undistinguished mass, denizens of a human poultry farm. But so much greater than mere fungible life. Even when living in our parents’ nest, made soft and comforting but underlay with thorns, which they stir from time to time to remind us that our role as children of God in this world is not to be comfortable in our nests – but to spread our wings and fly through personal sky.
Yet as the sermon makes clear, we are all just eaglets. Born of generations before us, who built our nests despite the fact that they were enslaved, and toiled, and suffered, so that we could one day fly. Generations shielding us on the finest of down when we are soft and vulnerable, yet preparing to kick us out of the nest fully expecting that we would one day fly, first on their backs, then on our own. Even if the currents of life may make us feel as if we will surely plummet to earth.
Still, as Maya Angelou knew well, as the eaglets turned eagle, we rise.
You know, Mama, that I am a daddy’s girl. That’s what I always said. That’s what you always said. Even though once, long ago, I said that the day you died they could find me hiding under the bed, because I’d be so afraid of life without you.
I am my daddy’s girl, who became her Mama’s Woman.
When I drove the streets with $0.29 to my name to feed my three children when their father was gone to madness, it wasn’t Daddy who drove with me. It was you. You are the one that gave me the strength to set aside my pride, to face another day knowing that God would provide, through me. You taught me the politics of survival.
When I protested, for the first time, the brutality of South Africa’s apartheid, it wasn’t him. It was YOU, reminiscent of your walking in Montgomery, refusing to ride, until there was dignity. You taught me the politics of stubbornness. And when reflexively I put my infant son – your only grandson -- to my breast years later while still hollering protesting the war, his hunger after Snugli slumber taking precedence over what I had to say, it was you again". Because you taught me why my politics matter – and who I was really fighting for. And there is no point in politics at all, but for that.
And when I learned was pregnant with my third child, my Babygirl, knowing with virtual certainty that she’d be raised by me alone, that I’d be alone, that I too might cry in the darkness someday for the lost love of my life, it was you who said, my fears are not enough to justify anything, all by themselves. You taught me the politics of Psalm 27:1.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid?
Today the baby is almost 16, and she has your smile. And yet you understand, I know, why I am only the mother of 3, instead of the mother of 5. The choices I made, that you didn't make, because I wasn't as strong, as honest, as you.
It is so funny. You were never really "political", in the way we think of it today. And today those I am political with would mock your politics, steadfast in the belief in Your God as an ignorant delusion. How little they know, in their arrogance.
And yet you played this sermon in your non-political way, at least twice a month on Sunday, your congregation of chicks either getting dressed and braided and combed and polished to go the House of the Lord to worship or coming home from it preparing for dinner and the next day:
I believe that history has been one big nest that God has been eternally stirring, to make man better and help us achieve world brotherhood. . .throughout history, God has been stirring the various nests of the circumstances surrounding us, so that he could discipline us, help us to know ourselves, and help us to love one another, and to help us to hasten on the realization of the Kingdom of God
How very Not Political, Mama. How so not progressive! How delusional and ignorant, this understanding of the Lord and His power.
No one could have ever looked at this face just a moment in time ago, and seen the years of hard living that had gone behind it:
I may not even go to church today, Mama. I admit that the wailing of Mother’s Day frightened me as a child, and frightens me today, even as I am not a child. I am afraid of what it would mean, the forest of white roses. What it means.
It means that you are on the other side. And it means that, since I am "rational", I must give up ever seeing you again in this life, except in my dreams. Despite God's promise that one day souls that have loved each other will one day reunite.
Is it so wrong that I am not ready to handle that? When I have done you so wrong, and understand so much now what I did not understand before about who you were, and why you deserved better from me while you were here?
The last vision I had of you, Mommy, it was not you, anymore. It was the body in which you’d lived for 72 1/2 years. In the deep, blue dress I finally chose for you, whole family in tow at the mall for 4 hours, after rejecting hundreds over and over again with the unthinking words "Mama would not be caught dead in this," the literalism of it occasionally making me smile before I had to breathe deep because the idea that you would be dead in it was so overwhelming. I remember changing your lipstick, knowing that it was All Wrong. But otherwise, you looked as if you would simply wake up. And be my mama again.
She is so beautiful, they said. She was always a beautiful dark skinned woman.
At first, I just looked down into the face of time rolled back. For you did not look like the 72 year old woman you were. You looked as you looked when I left home 27 years before, to go To School, the last night when I came into your room and you were asleep so I did not get to tell you how scared I was, how much I wanted you just to say You Can't Go so far away from home, and everything I'd known -- even the parts I despised, and hid in shame, and was angry about, like your drinking. In death, all that hard time had been wiped off your face. The magic of a funeral director who also remembered you, Mama, and remembered you well, having seen you every day for the 35 years you lived just across the street.
When you left me, Mama, you taught me one last time, the politics of temporary life and why we must not rest, until it is our time to rest forever. You remember, Mama - I was The One. The One Who Must Approve. Just as you were, with grandma, in 1965. Nobody else could do it. Nobody else would do it. So it fell to me. To be the first look upon you in death made sleeping life through the tender ministries of the undertaker. To be the first to say, "Yes, she is fine." "Yes, she looks beautiful." Who of those who know me today other than my own husband, who stood by my side knowing I was too afraid to enter alone, understand what that first vision meant? Understood that when I saw you lying there, my knees went out from under me and I nearly fell to the ground with the power of knowing you were gone from me?
I have cried many days since you left me. They have been the tears of thank you, the weeping of missing you, the gut wrenching sobbing of being unable to feel you pat my leg just one more time and say "Child, it’s going to be alright. Stop worrying so. You will worry yourself to death." They have also been the tears of "I’m so Sorry". That I like many highfalutin folk thought that just because I’d studied more than you, I’d learned more. When in fact I’d learned nothing, compared to the simple wisdom you conveyed.
I remember the last part of the Rev. CL, too:
My soul is an eagle in the cage the Lord has made for me
My soul is caged in this old body
And one of these days
The man who made the cage will open the door
And let my soul go.
You ought to be able to see me take the wings of my soul
Yes, one of these days
I’ll fly away, and be at rest.
One of these old days
When troubles and trials are over,
When toil and tears are ended,
When burdens are through burdening,
Oh! One of these days
My soul will take wing.
(Excerpts from The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest, Rev. C.L. Franklin,The Eagle Stirs her Nest (Chess Records, 1962)).
On November 4, 2005, at 10:05 PM, my mama’s cage was opened at last. Her decades of physical and heart pain, her illnesses, her alcoholism, and all her weariness, all gone. Lord, I can only imagine how she flew. Out of her tired body, like an arrow into my soul. And the souls of her other children. And her grandchildren, who knew her very little, because despite me knowing everything, and being the political one and the correct one and the judgmental one, I did not really know her, my mama, until the very end.
Today, my mother rests in the New York countryside. I did not pick the place; economics and my father’s service to his country did that. Yet when I saw it, when we escorted her to your last rest, I knew it was if God had picked this spot for her and had been patiently tending it to be her garden. As I looked around, I saw flowers, hanging trees, beauty.
But in the distance, I also saw burnt sienna, what looked just like the red clay soil. The red clay soil of her home in Alabama. Plopped right in the middle of New York State. As if Mama had ordered it in from the catalog, just for her.
That was the first moment I began to believe she’d truly be at rest, at long last. While she waits for her husband, my father.
But I still, sometimes, speak to her in dreams. And hear her talking to me, at my most troubled moments, at my most fearful times. About strength, and where it comes from, and how all I need to do is Let Go, an Let God. No matter how hard life is.
Even at her weakest, even at her most troubled, my mama always was Rev. C.L.’s eagle, the eagle referenced in Deuteronomy, stirring her nest of eaglets, even as she remained herself an eaglet, flying at times, falling at times. Teaching us about the harshness of life without lecture, teaching us about the gentleness and security of home even when home isn't quite what you want it to be. Even when alcoholism began to claim her, her heart broken from life, my mother still listened to her favorite sermon.
Today, I’m not cowering under the bed as I once said in childish times I would be the day my Mama died. I am still standing. I am still fighting. I still give to those who are not as blessed as I have been with what little I have to give. And I still raise my tiny part of what Mama always called God’s army, even as those who don’t understand what either God or being part of his army means except as over-applied rhetoric levied at political enemies who are nothing like me, or like my Mama. Even as so many both coopt and malign the very idea that there is power in this role that biology has conspired to leave to us as women. As mothers, through whose bodies pass the future.
I still cry, sometimes, when I think about my Mama and all the things I didn't say to her. I never know when it will happen, really - sometimes it's a passing thought, sometimes the words of a hymn she sung, sometimes, it is merely the chords of an organ at church. I am crying again on this Mother’s Day, the day to honor my Mama, and all those like her, who neither completely followed nor completely fought stereotype, but who simply were proud to be All Woman. I will likely always cry, sometimes, the quiet, longing tears of the child who has lost their mother. Yet they are not just sad tears of longing. They are thankful tears, thankful to all that is holy, for being the daughter of my Mama. The daughter who carries with her each day a piece of her fierce, womanly, womanist, Black spirit inside her. All because of the complicated, flawed, yet steadfast, love and faith she always showed, even at the worst of times. And to share with others.
This is the politics of my mother. And of her White Rose daughter.
(Ed. Note: This diary was written beginning four years, six months and five days ago and initially completed on Mother's Day, 2006. Until today, however, it has never been shared with anyone. Not even my husband and children. Because I was Not Ready. But since she also taught me "All good things, in God's time", I will just say it finally feels like Time. And, yes, I know that parts of it are written in the third tense and parts in the first. It was not intentional - I was just saying to my Mama some of what remained unsaid, but that needed to be said, before her death.)