Remembering Mama on Martin Luther King, Junior’s birthday

Mama at a family gathering in Greenville, S.C., circa 1961,
with three of her four girls and possibly pregnant
with sister Kimmie.
 I'm on the right.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday today, thoughts turn to my mother whose compassion for the oppressed came from a place of knowing, too.

This knowing was wrought, first, by birth. Born Catholic and half-Lebanese as she was in the deep, intolerant South, the birthright of her and her family was not nearly what African-Americans were suffering at the time. But there was enough shared commonality to provoke her Uncle Jamile to secretly buy up land to start three black Catholic churches in South Carolina, one of them in my mother’s hometown of Greenville, S.C. 

There was another important piece that shaped my mother's identity as I remember it. That was her mother. Orphaned at a young age by an abusive mother, my mother's mother, my grandmother Essie, was a mean and bitter woman. Abusive in every way, jealous of my mother’s striking Sophia Loren beauty and a childhood she never got to claim for herself, Essie beat my mother and belittled her. “Shut up, you can’t sing,” she would tell my mother when she tried. She forced her to clean and cook and tend her sisters and brother beyond the normal capacity of a sibling and left her with claw marks Mama tried to hide under her Catholic school uniform. Though I did once see Essie throw a pimento cheese carton at my Aunt Cathy’s head and I certainly experienced her stomping through her house like a grizzly on the hunt, I never  experienced a pointblank measure of the effects of her behavior until one day when I was 30 and my mother 50. My mother said something in my grandmother’s presence that seemed benign. My grandmother startled both of us, wheeling around to my mother and with a shriek and eyes I can only describe as evil, said, “You better shut your ugly mouth, Missy.” I watched my 50-year-old mother shrink before my eyes that day to the stature of a frightened little girl. “Yes, ma’am,” my mother said, her head bent, her eyes downcast with what I can only imagine was fear. It wasn’t so overt as a skillet across the head like my mother said she used to experience. But it was enough for me to see. 

As a young mother in the early 1960s with four children by the age of 26 and an oppressive marriage, my mother dug her heels into the proper Southern culture of the times. Unhappy as I now know she was, she dressed the part and looked the part and seemed the part outwardly, taking us to extended family gatherings and signing up to be our Girl Scout leader. She paid for swim lessons and made Christmas cookies.

Cultural Catholics, we attended Catholic school and Mass on Sunday. We belonged to the white church. But she often hied us away to the black one, St. Anthony’s, the church her uncle started. And here is where I saw my mother’s face lift into radiance. Contrary to what my grandmother tried to tell her, she had a strong, lilting voice locked inside, which she only opened when she was here.

“Faith of our fathers! Living faith! I will be true to thee til death!” she sang.

I have strong memories of my mother’s upturned face when she was at St. Anthony’s, of her singing and shaking hands and giving the peace to her African-American brothers and sisters. Her smile was broad and bright, not tight and controlled or non-existent at home like it often was. This sent me an early, subliminal message -- as did her rage when she heard anybody use the N-word. My mother could cower before Essie. But anybody -- including my Mississippi-born father of whom I think she was afraid -- anybody who used this word got the wrath of my mother. Especially if they uttered it in front of me and my sisters. 

“Don’t you ever use that word in front of my children in this house!” she would scream.

My mother showed no sign of derision or prejudice or fear or low self esteem like she did when she was with other people -- only joy and relief, when she was among African-Americans. She once hired an African-American woman named Velma to babysit for us in the afternoons when we got home from school during the short period of time she worked at the Greenville water company as a secretary. Velma was a large woman with an ample bosom, a damp, perspiring face and a smell I can only describe as musky, which I got to enjoy up close and personal when storms would come on a summer afternoon, when she would take me into her arms and rock me, back and forth, singing gospel songs to comfort me. I loved Velma, as did my mother, and when she died, I went with Mama to Velma’s wood-frame shack where she lived with her husband and children. I remember standing just inside the front room of her house, which was lit only by oil lamps as there was no electricity. The children, many of them, stood huddled on the steps, dark, misshapen steps that led to a dark upstairs that we couldn’t see. The steps, instead of being carpeted, were covered in different kinds of fabric. The family seemed stunned that we had come to visit. I guess white people didn’t go in black people’s houses. But my mama did.

My mother eventually divorced and moved us from South Carolina to New Orleans, the city of falling angels, some call it. For years, she was in bad relationships, suffered from depression and did not always know how to be an adult mother to us. But she found her way to “her people,” with the African-American musicians of New Orleans, many of whom became her friends, And when she was in her 50s, she found a way to go back to school where she earned an advanced nursing degree. She got a job on the psych ward at the infamous, inner-city Charity Hospital, where she tended the poorest of the poor as they lay weeping. She seemed to find as much solace in them as they did her, carrying into her soul their stories of joy and pain and wisdom. And then one day when she was in her late 50s, she found out she was sick. She'd contracted Hepatitis C, from a tainted transfusion she received during cancer surgery 10 years before. She quit her job and sank into a suffering I’d never known before.

Mama, a few years before she died, in her beloved New Orleans.

The stories and images of poverty, depression, isolation and self-medication are too many, too dramatic and too distracting to bring up here. Simply put, my mother didn’t know how to help herself. We didn’t either -- all the way up to the day she died in a Baton Rouge hospital, from burns suffered in an accidental fire. Wrapped like a mummy, intubated and sedated, with 38 percent of her body ravaged with third-degre burns, she fought four days for her life, until one-by-one, her systems shut down, and she died with her daughters singing and praying her to her passing. 

That afternoon after she died, we all went back to her house, where we found a holy card taped on the wall next to her bed. Inscribed with a passage from the Bible, the card said “Weeping may endure the night. But joy cometh in the morning.” 

Suffice it to say that my sisters and I learned compassion of the downtrodden by birthright, too, simply by being our mother’s daughters.

I don’t always get it right. I don’t always have perfect thinking about people who are different than me, in whatever way they are different. But I do understand the dream. And every year, on this day when we at least utter the name, "Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior," I find a way to commemorate that dream. Some years, I gather up the children and drive into inner-city Cleveland to participate in activities there. Other years, I drum in an African drumming group, performing before a church congregation in Kent. This year, I joined the Unitarian-Universalist choir in a song that put to words one of MLK’s sermons. It was a sermon delivered two months before he died, during which he spoke with some measure of premonition of his own death. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_major_instinct/

    “If you’re around when I have to meet my day,

    I want you to be able to say 

    That I did try to feed the hungry,

    That I did try to clothe the naked,

    That I tried to serve humanity.”

This was my mother’s legacy, too. 

That she tried. 

That’s all. 

I don’t have to get it perfect either. But I do have to try.