Daydreaming my Mother and Father
My mother repeats often her sister Jenny’s stories about the sex work Jenny had to do to survive.
My mother, nearly her sister’s twin in appearance, would be threatened with jail by “beat police” as she merely waited for the bus.
Accosted a “n*gger” or “bitch” or both more than once by cops whom she in turn rankled “pigs,” perhaps she felt this pejorative rite-of-passage gave her right to speak about the sins of her sister, even to a son, who does not always want to hear it.
Still, she barfs her complaints, and I, her confidante, compel myself to listen.
Especially now, with both sisters dead.
The eldest, Mary, had killed herself—in 1977, not long after I remember her appearing in my life—with a suicidal leap from a roof in East Harlem, not far from where the Lee children were raised on 119th Street.
Through tales told by my mother, I learned Jenny always said she used condoms. Now that I think of it, for my mother this may have been a way to save the face of her sister if my mother ever had to offer to her nieces and nephews a reason for their mother’s early death. That my mother had shared unclean needles with her sister, does not matter to me, especially when I see her face go blank, when she reminisces her brother and sister.
Aunt Jenny and Uncle Vincent were not one of the misnamed and often loved “innocent victims” of AIDS—those, like Ryan White, a White boy who acquired HIV via blood transfusion.
They came of age in the 60s, schooled in Black Power, preached proud by “The Nation.”
Yet a quarter century later, Black politicians and civic leaders, ministers, and civilians, would hide behind a false religiosity that prated against “addicts” and “faggots” but did little to stem the AIDS and drug addiction epidemics.
For example, during the early 1990s in San Francisco, perhaps America’s gay-friendliest city, a Black Christian minister, Reverend Eugene Lumpkin, Jr., who held a civic position as appointee to the city’s Human Rights Commission, suggested gay men be stoned for spreading AIDS. San Francisco’s Mayor at the time, Frank Jordan, immediately removed Lumpkin—who sued and lost—from his human rights post.
Of course, Reverend Lumpkin spoke in religious allegory, likening gay men to the prostitute in the Biblical parable, who faced stoning by townspeople as punishment for her sexual crime.
People living with AIDS, could no longer wait for his empathy.
Nor could my grandmother.
At Vincent’s gravesite, my grandmother picked up a few stones from her boy’s grave as a remembrance. This ritual is supposed to signify her acceptance of his death. Acceptance did not come easy.
Six months after burying her youngest son, three days after Jenny’s death, Grandma called out to the faithful who had attended her youngest daughter’s funeral, “But why?” I then heard her whisper to the air—
“Really…why? I loved them. I did love them. I do love them. I do.”
No matter.
Only one child, a daughter, remained.
* * *
My first memory of my mother—
Supine in my mother’s arm, she carries me as she walks into the sun.
The second—
My boyish face is framed in dark silence.
Light cascades from the kitchen where my father sits disinterested by two White men.
As I focus, the men materialize as police who fixedly gaze at my mother.
This time she lay supine, her coffee-crème-colored knuckles turning white as they tighten around a butter knife.
My father’s punch has flattened her face and sent her crashing hard to the oak floor.
Blood spurts from a gash on her left cheek, twitching with fear.
Her cries disturb my sleep, and I awake in my bedroom where, feigning safety, my mother had lullabied me to sleep not one hour before.
I remember the daylight, the day after, and forever being afraid of the dark and sleeping with the television on and the eerie blue lights and the sirens that crept into my dreams.
But it was not always that way.
* * *
My father once showed me a picture of when he and my mother were—still—in love. Gently, with care, he pulled the picture from the perfect plastic books that had preserved it.
Splashes of primary colors punctuated the knit turtleneck dress that hugged my mother’s proud shoulders, skimpy bust, broad hips, and elegant legs, tapering to her tiny ankles drawn near, the hourglass figure closed at its base.
Covered from nape to anklet, my mother is relaxed, almost melted in my father’s arms, barely contained in his Nehru jacket.
Chest hairs peek through his satiny white shirt, unbuttoned to allow sweat beaded in the Baptist church to be lifted with the wind.
The body forming tight lines of the Nehru broadens my father’s already sizable chest and tapers his ample waist and hips.
His pants, straight legged and cuffed, touch the tops of his shoes, gleaming from the sun.
Daylight surrounds my mother and father as the church in the background frames the embrace that defined this sweet moment.
Such memories I cannot reclaim on my own, so I am grateful for this picture.
I notice the tears welled, then hung, atop the lids of my father’s eyes. Never had I seen, in my own life, this look of love toward my mother.
He was silent and told me nothing. My father’s eyes refuse to drop that tear, perhaps fearful of the waterfall it stanched.
But as that tear hung in his eyes, I imagined this story of the first time he and my mother fell in love.
The Daydream—
Pansy and Freddie met at the afterglow of a preacher’s sermon during a funeral. Folks are amazingly light-hearted after the gospel is delivered that Sunday morning. The preacher, with practiced skill, has forced sorrow and serenity into their souls, then with hellfire and brimstone, has snapped his congregation back high to the salvation and glory and comfort of Jesus. Black folk know how to mourn.
We know how to lift spirits too; emotions linger unbridled; praises and exalts to the Savior climb high as the sky until tears touch the floor. The Holy Ghost moves through the room and, predictably, dances His fire upon the young man’s head. And my father’s feet begin to move.
Freddie Lewis Glover knew how to dance. Tall like a totem pole, with shoulders broad, waist tapered, and thighs thick like trees, my father would make the AME faithful forget about the preacher when, “touched” by the Holy Ghost, he would begin his dance. It always started with a moan—Freddie, lips trembling, and heart receiving the vibes of the organ, first moving slowly, like a Holy Ghost, slipping past knees already askew to the right. For the entire congregation knew—when the organ ground its hum, a bass cleft note, and A flat—this was “Little” Freddie’s cue. Still, they were mesmerized.
The fellas, even my father’s friends, hated this type of grandstanding—for even the prepubescent girls who held their older boyfriends’ forearms were excited and attentive; each would stop gushing at the boy near her side and begin to fuss over “my guy.” First frozen by the moment my father rose to his feet, a few girls, even women, would exhale, then rise with glee. Most others would sneak peaks, for lustful was not what a woman was supposed to be.
Pansy did not like boys. They were mostly rude, rough; falsely arrogant and usually afraid (like the girls) but being boys their posture and lies would pass for bravery. She didn’t like Freddie either, though she did lust for him. She hid this passion well, switching almost imperceptibly when the rest of the church jerked with electricity when the organ hummed, this time sharp with a C.
1963. Pansy was Sweet-Sixteen-plus-two-years old, still a girl in her mother’s mind, but so beautiful—hence her flower namesake. With her hips broadened by the hugging knit dress, her eyes highlighted to hint the glamour of The Supremes, her fine African cheeks in need of no highlight; with her flush lips glistening with gloss and her straightened jet black, slicked-back hair shining in the sun from sweet smelling coconut oils (so sweet!)—Pansy knew she was no girl, but a woman.
Boys undressed her with their eyes. Men, groped for her skirt, like they wanted to undress her in the street. Her father did undress her till her mother caught him, threw him out, and told Pansy about boys, and men, and their penchant to be freaks.
For all the attention, my mother did not (consciously) put forth conceit. This meant even other women undressed her, clandestinely, with a raise of the eyebrow, a smile, and a curl of the finger. “Come here, sweet thing, give me your sugar,” said one woman, my father recalls, which could not penetrate the naiveté of my mother. Pansy’s adolescence meant that sugar still came in bright yellow boxes marked Domino and was stocked by men at the market who also wanted her sweetness. But my mother was naïve.
Most who knew her swear her disposition was at once inviting and acerbic. Like cider vinegar, her smell drew you near, but one gulp and you withdrew in retreat. You didn’t mess around with Pansy. Not a few boys already knew my mother’s knees, quick to the groin, could outpower any boy—her gazelle like legs distancing her from boyish pursuits as she shouted profanities that left male egos as dust in the wind.
My mother believed her beauty a curse. She blushed shame when someone complimented her as pretty. She hated the attention, and thus adopted readily her own mother’s jaded, prudish, yet practical, beliefs. With pursed lips and piercing eyes that shut and cut you from her presence, most boys read my mother’s defenses as calculated, conceited, plainly better and downright mean.
Still, for all her forced meanness and practical prudish conceits, Pansy knew she was sexual. She knew she was powerful. Though, to hear her tell it, her sex and power came from separate places and therefore could not conspire against men. My dad knew they conspired to bring her a husband. Her thin frame was belied by those hips that commanded the frills of her ankle-length dress to sway in the breeze, draping her walk as she strolled in Harlem, 119th Street, where still stands the AME Zion Church on the corner of Lenox, its doors always open so the prodigal could hear the faithful rocking and praising of the Lord—especially when Freddie rose to his feet.
This day he was expected to dance like he’d never done before. The funeral was for his grandmother, who raised the young boy to a young man when his father left, and his mother was too far-gone, channeling places where reality and sanity do not reside. Grandmamma Glover told him it was okay to be whomever he needed to be. It was okay to leave buried in his mind the strange fruit of his boyhood of which Billie Holliday sings. Forget the poplars that dripped blood from its leaves.
“Sweetness,” she’d yawn, “You’re in the North now. New York. Big-time folk, who don’t have time to worry about Black folk. Let your fear be gone. Let yourself just be.”
He was, at long last, in the North. The part of the nation that allowed slaves to escape free. New York City. Statue of Liberty. Land of the Free. It seemed to be true, for when compared to the South, he could move about relatively freely. It was coming up on 1964. Sidney Poitier was a movie star. Malcolm was swaggering, promising freedom. Martin was forcing freedom in his (my father’s) homeland, Georgia. Though my father had heard New York taunted as “Up-South” by the Nation of Islam, he would listen to Grandmamma Glover. Besides, his newness to New York and The North and relative freedom dismissed nationalist polemics, for they rang somewhat hollow and untrue. If this were Up-South, and unrepentantly racist, he would forgive but not forget. There was room for compromise. There were no lynchings, no sheets, no hoods, no fear in the streets, and no fear in his heart. This meant his feet, instead of skimming leaves in flight from hooded bigots and thieves, could stroll free. Besides, the Motor City’s Martha Reeves & The Vandellas sang of “People swayin’ across the nation and dancin’ in the street.”
“It doesn’t matter what you wear, just as long as you are there.”
There, in New York. In the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Today, Freddie would dance proud, one more time for Grandmamma Glover.
When his dance subsided, the funeral was nearly over, his tribute nearly complete. Freddie blinked, letting go of the red darkness behind his shut eyes, opening them to brash lights. Blinded, he almost fell. Pansy, mesmerized by his presence, with the swiftness of a deer, braced his fall with a tender knee. He thanked her, then rose with the thunder of 700 faithful clapping to the beat of the snare drum that had long ago joined the organ to sing praises to his fallen grandmother. He began to sway again, wading his head through the humidity and heat that stilled the air.
Pansy, caught up in the moment, found herself clapping. Her foot caught, then tapped the beat that first frenzied the church and skipped, finally, thankfully, into her heart, rushing blood to her head. Pansy felt like flying and crying and dancing the fire of the Holy Ghost. Her legs skipped to the sacred house rhythms. Her hips swayed, her dress cued by the swoons of my father’s head, his neck stretched to its furthest point ‘til the rest of his body, rubbery and controlled by the beat, snatched its head quick in the other direction, and my mother’s swirling waist, all the time controlled by my father’s dance, steady and sweet. My father’s eyes connected to the softness of the cotton, the sexy rocky motion of my mother’s hips, circling a figure 8, wrapping his thoughts with temptations and lust.
Suddenly silence, as the preacher raised his hand to command attention from the congregation—but the organist, as was his duty, remained the only person among the faithful still focused on the preacher. His music stopped on preacher’s cue.
Without the hums of the organ, the drummer stopped his licks. Caught in the silence, my mother, quickly surrounded by dead noise and embarrassed by attention, ran back to her seat. She was unaware she had impressed Freddie Lewis Glover—an 18-year-old “man” who thought highly of himself and never imagined he would want to beg a girl for “it,” the sugar, the sweetness, the sex.
Strange to my father, his lust lingered but for a moment before a different kind of feeling happened upon him. A tingle in his spine let him know the blood flowed down from his head and up from his slightly erect member and back to his heart.
No pretense
Without pretense, my daddy’s eyes melt with affection whenever they stare down the photo that captures the first time he fell in love.
