He never lived to see his dreams fulfilled, but when I thumb through his old brown briefcase filled with his paperwork from forty-five years ago, the notes and papers he left behind reveal a man in constant thought: references to Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, and notebooks upon notebooks filled with sermons and Bible verses. His writing was filled with allusions to Chronicles, Isaiah, the Book of John, and Philippians. Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, our interests are entered into the past, he wrote. We talk about other times, other places, other persons, and lose our living hold on the present. Sometimes we think if we could just go back in time we would be happy. But anyone who attempts to reenter the past is sure to be disappointed. Anyone who has ever revisited the place of his birth after years of absence is shocked by the differences between the way the place actually is, and the way he has remembered it. He may walk along old familiar streets and roads, but he is a stranger in a strange land. He has thought of this place as home, but he finds he is no longer here even in spirit. He has gone on to a new and different life, and in thinking longingly of the past, he has been giving thought and interest to something that no longer really exists. This being true of the physical self, how much more true it is of the spiritual self.…He wrote Bible verses on anything he could find—small slips of paper, the back of train schedules, pay stubs. Next to some of the verses he’d scribbled the names and phone numbers of doctors who he thought might be able to help him, cure him of the lung cancer that got him at age forty-five, but they couldn’t help him then. It was his time to go and he knew it.
He left behind no insurance policy, no dowry, no land, no money for his pregnant wife and young children, but he helped establish the groundwork for Ma’s raising twelve children which lasted thirty years—kids not allowed out after five o’clock; stay in school, don’t ever follow the crowd, and follow Jesus—and as luck, or Jesus, would have it, my stepfather helped Mommy enforce those same rules when he married her. The old-timers at New Brown used to say God honored Rev. McBride. The man died without a penny, yet his children grew up to graduate from college, to become doctors, professors, teachers, and professionals all. It was the work, they said, of none other than Jesus Christ Himself.
At the moment, the lady who helped Jesus Christ shepherd Rev. McBride’s children to adulthood—and the surviving founder of the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church—is sitting at the end of a long table on the dais, the only white person in the room, wearing a blue print dress and holding my two-year-old daughter, Azure, in her lap. It took a lot to get Mommy here. She didn’t want to come. The church got a fine new minister in 1989, and one of his first acts was to order my father’s picture to be taken down from behind the pulpit of New Brown, to be placed in a new vestibule constructed with money from the we-still-need-more church fund, all of which fell into the nebulous category of we’re-building-up-God’s-house, which meant it might not happen while Mommy is still alive. To compound this, he made the mistake of not formally recognizing her during service when she came to visit the church. That was a huge error on his part that could have been easily remedied: if somewhere between reading the “prayer for the sick and shut in” list and the “happy birthday to our members” list he could have squeezed in a “We welcome our original founder, Mrs. McBride, to church today, can I get an amen,” the whole thing would have blown over. But he didn’t. Instead he treated her like an outsider, a foreigner, a white person, greeting her after the service with the obsequious smile and false sincerity that blacks reserve for white folks when they don’t know them that well or don’t trust them, or both. I saw that same grin on a black waiter’s face when the Washington Post once sent me to the White House to cover a Nancy Reagan shindig. A smile for Miss Ann the White Lady. Not good.
Ma was so hurt she resolved never to go back there again, a promise she broke again and again, braving the two-hour subway and train commute from her home in Ewing, New Jersey, to sit in church, the only white person in the room, a stranger in the very church that she started in her living room. In all fairness, the minister was new. He hadn’t much experience and did not know her. In fact, none of the new people at the church knew her and at some point the man corrected his error, but that, Ma said, was not the point. “These new ministers have no vision,” she fumed. “They just want a chicken sandwich. Now your father, he had vision.” She compared them all to my father, but there really was no comparison. Those were different times, different circumstances, different men.
For years, Mommy rarely talked about my father. It was as if his death was so long ago that she couldn’t remember; but deep inside she saw her marriage to him as the beginning of her life, and thus his death as part of its end, and to reach any further beyond that into her past was to go into hell, an area that she didn’t want to touch. In order to steer clear of the most verboten area, the Jewish side, she steered clear of him as well. Her memory was like a minefield, each recollection a potential booby trap, a Bouncing Betty—the old land mines the Viet Cong used in the Vietnam War that never went off when you stepped on them but blew you to hell the moment you pulled your foot away. But when she did speak of him it always began with reverence and ended with sadness, with her saying, “I never knew how sick he was.” I used to stare at his pictures and wonder what his voice sounded like until I met my cousin Linwood Bob Hinson from North Carolina, who looks just like him. “If you want to know what your father was like,” Ma said, “talk to Bob.” Bob is about forty. He talks with a pleasant, down-home North Carolina twang. He manages a post office in a small, all-white town, solving problems for angry postal customers. Bob was one of sixteen blacks who first integrated his high school in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, where my father was born. He is a quiet, humorous, religious man of solid accomplishment. He lost his fourteen-year-old son, Tory, in a tragic car accident that sent an entire North Carolina community of blacks and whites reeling in sorrow, and he comforted others even as his own heart was torn in two. If my son grows up to be like Bob, I’ll be a happy man.
But everyone can’t be like Bob, or Rev. McBride, or even Ruth McBride. People are different. Times change. Ministers change. Mommy knows this and despite her personal differences with the new minister, she didn’t want to see what amounted to my father’s and her life’s work disappear. So she gathered a few donations from my siblings and came to the dinner, sitting at the end of the dais. Next to her is the keynote speaker, Hunson Greene, head of the New York Baptists Ministers Conference and a tremendous speaker, who also happens to be the brother of Mommy’s late best friend Irene Johnson. When it comes to Jesus, Mommy, who scorns the black bourgeoisie, has friends in high places.
After a while the young minister mounts the dais and works the crowd like a warm-up comedian. His remarks are short and funny. The steak’s not bad, he jokes, the vegetables not too rubbery, it’s a Saturday night, eat up, y’all, we got church in the morning. He moves down the program swiftly. Three of the scheduled anointed speakers did not show, among them church founders Rev. Thomas McNair, my godfather, and Sister Virginia Ingram, both having pleaded illness or scheduling conflicts. Finally Mommy is called to the podium. The new minister introduces her as “the original founder of our church.” He scores big points there. Mommy sets my daughter down, rises, and makes her way to the stage.
It takes her forever to get there.
She’s seventy-four now. Her knees don’t work that well. The quick bowlegged stride is more of a waddle. The lean, pretty woman I knew as a boy has become a small, slightly stooped, cute, feisty old lady. Her face is still the same, the dark eyes full of pep and fire; the hair is still black, thanks to Clairol hair dye; and because she never drank or smoked, and practices yoga three times a week, she looks ten years younger than she is. But she has heart disease and high blood pressure now and takes medication for both. After her heart disease was diagnosed, my physician brothers wanted to schedule her for further tests with top heart specialis
ts, but she refused. “They’re not going to get me,” she mused, the amorphous “they” being hospitals, the system, and anything else that “sticks tubes in you and takes your money at the same time.” She moves slower now, and stairs are a challenge. Lately she’s been given to talking as if she won’t be around much longer, prefacing each plan with, “Well, if I’m still here next year, I’d love to see …” Disneyland, a grandchild’s graduation, Paris again, a new car. Some of it is smoke, some of it not. All of it sends my heart spiraling to the floor. Like most people, I don’t know what I’ll do when my mother makes that final walk home. When she reaches the podium I snap out of my reverie. In her hand is a crumpled piece of paper containing a half-typed, half-longhand speech. The paper is trembling in her hands. She slowly places the paper down and pulls the microphone closer to her face so that it feeds back a bit. As she does so, every hat, every tie, every spoon in the audience is completely still.
“Greetings to the honorable Reverend Reid and the pulpit guests,” she reads in a high-pitched, breathless voice. “New Brown has—” And she stops right away. Whether it’s the emotion of the moment or just plain nervousness, it’s hard to tell, but Mommy has never given a speech before. Ever. She clears her throat as a chorus of “Amens” and “Go on, honeys” resound about the room. She starts again: “Greetings to the honorable Reverend Reid and the pulpit guests. New Brown has come this far by faith…” And this time she plows forward, reckless, fast, like a motorized car going through snowdrifts, spinning, peeling out, traveling in circles, going nowhere, her words nearly indecipherable as she flies through the stilted speech in that high-pitched, nervous voice. Finally she stops and puts a hand over her heart and breathes deeply as an embarrassing silence covers the room. I’m about to rush the stage, thinking she’s having a heart attack, when she suddenly ditches the speech, the page fluttering to the floor, and speaks directly to the microphone. “My husband wanted to start a church but we had no money, so he said, ‘Let’s start it right here in our living room.’ We cleaned up the house and set up a pulpit with a white tablecloth and invited the McNairs and the Ingrams and the Taylors and the Floods over. That’s how we started.”
“Amen!” comes from the audience. She’s lit the fire now.
“We set up chairs and read the Bible and had service. We didn’t have an organ player like Sister Lee. We sang without it. Those were the happiest days of my life, and I want you to know…” She stops as tears jump into her eyes.
“Amen!”
“Yes!!”
“Tell us what you want us to know, honey.”
She starts again: “I want you to know…”
“Go on! Tell it!”
She takes a deep breath: “I want you to know you are looking at a witness of God’s word. It’s real,” she said. “It’s real!” “Amen’s” roar across the room as she turns and walks away from the pulpit, the pep back in her stride now, the waddle gone, seventy-four years of life dropping off her like snowflakes as she stands behind her seat on the podium facing the audience, overcome. “God bless you all in the name of Christ!” she shouts, striking at the air with her fist and sitting down, her face red, nose red, tears everywhere, in my own eyes as well.
Later on, on the way home in the car, I ask her, “So I guess you’re not mad at the new minister now?”
“Leave that man alone,” she says, as the streetlights twinkle and wink off her face. “He’s doing a good job. They’re lucky to have a young minister, the way things are in these churches today. You should be a minister. You ever think about that? But you need foresight. And vision. You got vision?”
I tell her I don’t think I do.
“Well, if you don’t have it, don’t waste God’s time.”
25.
Finding Ruthie
Back in June 1993, during the course of putting together Mommy’s will—something I had to force her to do—the macabre subject of her burial came up. “When I die,” she said, “don’t bury me in New Jersey. Who wants to be buried in Jersey?” She spoke these words as she was sitting in the kitchen of the home she shares with my sister Kathy in Ewing Township near Trenton, a lovely area of New Jersey.
I said, “We’ll bury you in Virginia, next to your second husband.”
“Oh no. Don’t bury me in Virginia. I ran away from Virginia. I don’t want to go back there.”
“How about North Carolina? We’ll bury you where your first husband is.”
“No way. I spent all my life running from the South. Don’t put me in the South.”
“Okay. New York,” I said. “You lived there forty years. You still love New York.”
“Too crowded,” she sniffed. “They bury them three deep in New York. I don’t want to be smushed up under somebody when I’m buried.”
“Where should we bury you then?”
She threw up her hands. “Who cares? This is nonsense. I’ve got nothing to leave y’all anyway except some bills.” She got up from the kitchen table, bristling, and snapped, “Bury me here, bury me there, what are you trying to do, kill me? I don’t want no tubes in me whatever you do. A doctor will kill you faster than anything.” She reached for the sun visor. “Your sister did this to me,” she said.
“Did what?”
“I had a little bump on my face and she made me see this fancy doctor. Now I gotta wear this dumb hat all the time. It makes me look like a rooster.”
Doctors found squamous cell cancer in a small mole they removed from Ma’s face, a condition caused by too much exposure to the sun. Ironically, it’s a condition that affects mostly white people. To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem. Fortunately the doctors got the mole off in time, but the question of her own mortality is one she seems to be preoccupied with of late, probably because she knows death is the one condition in life she can’t outrun. “Death is strange, isn’t it?” she wonders. “It’s so final. You know time is not promised,” she says, wagging a finger. “That’s why you better get to know Jesus.”
If it takes as long to know Jesus as it took to know you, I think, I’m in trouble. It took many years to find out who she was, partly because I never knew who I was. It wasn’t so much a question of searching for myself as it was my own decision not to look. As a boy I was confused about issues of race but did not consider myself deprived or unhappy. As a young man I had no time or money or inclination to look beyond my own poverty to discover what identity was. Once I got out of high school and found that I wasn’t in jail, I thought I was in the clear. Oberlin College was gravy—all you could eat and no one telling you what to do and your own job to boot if you wanted one. Yet I laughed bitterly at the white kids in ragged jeans who frolicked on the campus lawn tossing Frisbees and went about campus caroling in German at Christmas. They seemed free in ways I could not be. Most of my friends and the women I dated were black, yet as time passed I developed relationships with white students as well, two of whom—Leander Bien and Laurie Weisman—are close friends of mine today. During the rare, inopportune social moments when I found myself squeezed between black and white, I fled to the black side, just as my mother had done, and did not emerge unless driven out by smoke and fire. Being mixed is like that tingling feeling you have in your nose just before you sneeze—you’re waiting for it to happen but it never does. Given my black face and upbringing it was easy for me to flee into the anonymity of blackness, yet I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement whether you like it or not. It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous “white man’s world” wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear
it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo.
I ran for as long as I could. After I graduated from Oberlin College in 1979 and received my master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1980, I began a process of vacillating between music and writing that would take eight years to complete before I realized I could work successfully as a writer and musician. I quit every journalism job I ever had. I worked at the Wilmington News Journal and quit. The Boston Globe. Quit. People magazine, Us magazine, the Washington Post. Quit them all. This was before the age of thirty. I must’ve had some modicum of talent, because I kept getting hired, but I wore my shirt and tie like an imposter. I wandered around the cities by day, stumbling into the newsroom at night, exhausted, to write my stories. I loved an empty city room, just the blinking terminals and a few deadbeats like myself. It was the only time I could write, away from white reporters, black reporters, away from the synergy of black and white that was already simmering inside my soul, ready to burst out at the most inopportune moments. Being caught between black and white as a working adult was far more unpleasant than when I was a college student. I watched as the worlds of blacks and whites smashed together in newsrooms and threw off chunks of human carnage that landed at my feet. I’d hear black reporters speaking angrily about a sympathetic white editor and I’d disagree in silence. White men ruled the kingdom, sometimes ruthlessly, finding clever ways to gut the careers of fine black reporters who came into the business full of piss and vinegar, yet other white men were mere pawns like myself. Most of my immediate editors were white women, whom I found in general to be the most compassionate, humane, and often brightest in the newsroom, yet they rarely rose to the top—even when compared to their more conservative black male counterparts, some of whom marched around the newsrooms as if they were the second coming of Martin Luther King, wielding their race like baseball bats. They were no closer to the black man in the ghetto than were their white counterparts. They spoke of their days of “growing up in Mississippi” or wherever it was, as proof of their knowledge of poverty and blackness, but in fact the closest most of them had come to an urban ghetto in twenty years was from behind the wheel of a locked Honda. Their claims of growing up poor were without merit in my mind. They grew up privileged, not deprived, because they had mothers, fathers, grandparents, neighbors, church, family, a system that protected, sheltered, and raised them. They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their “I was raised with nuthin’ and went to Harvard anyway” experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream.