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Mom died the first of May, 1998. She had suffered a recurrence of the Lymphoma she had been diagnosed with nine years earlier. I knew the day was coming when I returned her call from work one day. I had never lost anyone 'close' to me before Mom died, and it was quite numbing to get the call at work from my Dad asking me to meet him at Walter Reed. I knew that it was serious because he'd never called me at work before.
When I got to the hospital with my wife, I met my sister and her boyfriend outside, and we stood out there like we had all the time in the world. Mom was a critical soul. She never missed an opportunity to pick at us, squinting behind her glasses; which made her look even more critical. My sister and I had lived through a mostly distant relationship with Mom at home. I was a thief, a truant, and a lazy, drug using hippie for most of my 17 and a half years at home. My sister was a cocky straight 'A' student who managed to keep her antics from my view, yet, nonetheless, burdened both of my parents with wrecked cars, live-in college hedonism, and abusive boyfriends. We were a pair.
The thing is, we also had what can only be described as a model childhood. We had a suburban home, surrounded by the suburban, middle-class (mostly white) values which progressed from 1970 to '79 in our beautiful, privileged neighborhood. Our parents were not abusive as I later grew to understand abuse to entail for many unfortunate, tragic families. We were very well cared for.
Dad was a high-level government man and a Army Reserve officer. All of that was an amazing achievement for a black man from Reading, Pa.; coming from a family of nine kids on Relief. His family had fled Black Mountain N.C. in the middle of the night after his father fought with a sheriff over the man's wife. He'd run a speakeasy with a still dug in the basement where Dad would fetch the liquor for the folks partying upstairs. Dad was the only one of his family to make it out of Reading alive, except for his brother Al, the 'hit man' from California who the local police would look for at every funeral to nail him for lack of support of one of the many children he'd fathered around town. Dad never lost his down-home roots, even as he spouted off like Clarence Thomas in his job at EEOC as he twisted his handlebar mustache, speaking his extra-proper English.
Mom was an entirely different soul. She was an Albino black from Charleston, WVa. The town her father (Henry Searcy) settled in after moving from the Sears Plantation in Molena, Ga., was proper and downright Victorian in the community's customs and institutions. Her mother was a caring, successful business woman who had the privilege of owning a beauty shop which specialized in the latest hair-care practices of the day. By all appearances, her mother was an ambitious trend-setter. She was striking in her fashionable round specs, and her bold headgear. I imagine that she challenged my mother as well.
Mom went to an integrated grade school and had friends in Charleston who remained so for a lifetime. Their church remained, throughout. Their town center grew, yet still regained the charm of the era when the only department store (still standing when I visited as a child) must have brought a sense of development and progress to the coal town. There was a YWCA, an old laundromat, and a Vally Pride ice cream store where Mom would have us walk to and get her a pint of butter brickle. We'd visit these old friends of hers every summer like they were family; coming in spring and staying at her father's house until the end of June.
Mom left Charleston with Dad. They met at West Virginia State University. Dad said he asked her out because he wanted a blond on his arm to show off to his friends. Mom was not just any pretty blond. Her father had dark-brown skin and the features of an African. Mom looked every bit of a white woman, yet it was her Negro heritage which was her greatest source of identity and pride. She maintained her connection with her race through her friends, and through her membership in Negro clubs and sororities. She was denied membership in the college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha because of the timing of her enrollment, yet she managed to participate in all of the beautiful poise of the college world that graced her youth. It was a genteel time, with manners and expectations which had served society with generations of proper ladies and gentlemen who were granted an ordered world.
You can see in the old photographs how much they must have relied on that order in Mom's day to elevate themselves and their communities above real world difficulties and slights that came with the problems surrounding race. There they are, posing with their perms, sweaters, and pearls; ready to be accepted into the ranks of the respected like their parents before them.
I don't know why Mom accepted Dad into her life. He didn't come with any of the gentleness that she had so carefully nurtured and developed for herself. He was brash and impatient to blow their small town with Mom as his bride. Both Mom's parents were upset and wary at first. Her Dad, though was soon taken with the brash man who had taken just enough off of the top of the college culture, and had taken a ship to New Guinea as a young soldier in WW2; rising to enough of a position of leadership over the other blacks to give him the confidence necessary to see their way into the future. Dad did take Mom away from Charleston, though, and made her his wife. Her mother never seemed to get over it.
There's a picture of her mother at the train station when she came to stand my father down after his new bride was chafing at her choice and had called Charleston for back-up. You can see the determined look on Dad's face, towering over the two of them, confident in his position as he sent her mother right back home. Her mother was ill at the time and died shortly thereafter. I got the sense that Mom never really lived up to the expectations of her once-dynamic mother. That sense seemed to pervade the rest of her life as she accomplished more than most and rose to less notoriety for it than others.
After adopting my sister and I from a home from unwed mothers, Mom went back to school and earned her teaching degree. She started out as a substitute and eventually got a full-time position at Barnard Elementary in D.C., teaching first and second grade until her retirement 30 years later. She went on and volunteered almost every day as a teacher in the District for an incredible 20 more years. I almost didn't believe it when she told me 20 years had passed since she retired and became a volunteer. But there it was. A twenty year gift to the city's children. Here success was well-documented in the hundreds of photos and letters from her students, many grown and writing to thank her for her time and for helping them into adulthood.
I found these things in her attic after she died, in a file cabinet she had guarded for years from my snooping eyes. In that cabinet she had carefully placed what she saw as the most important mementos of her life, and ours as well. I dove in zealously and was rewarded with almost everything she had held back from me, including a curious attempt to cover-up the fact of my adoption to the point of outright dishonesty. We never discussed it.
Mom took me up in her attic a few weeks before she died. She had been promising me she'd let me come over and help her clean it out. It was strangely difficult to get a date set, but it came, and I went over. She took me up there and turned on the ancient attic fan so we wouldn't suffocate. We sat on little benches beside that old file cabinet of treasures. She carefully selected little mementos from my own life and showed them to me (still couldn't touch). There were little stuffed toys, a couple of of my childhood books like Black Sambo, and the N.C. Weyth illustrated volumes of Rip Van Winkle and King Arthur. She wasn't at all softened by what turned out to be our last time consciously together. She was bitter about her life and she didn't make any attempt to hide it. She said that the bulk of folks still around she had called friends, were not. She had a particular bitterness toward the local AKA, who, at last, had allowed her to join. There was an ongoing pettiness from some of the members about her skin color, which wasn't the AKA light-brown, but Caucasian white. They had deliberately made her feel unwelcome, yet she still prized her membership. She was a wreck about it.
Mom looked around the attic at the hundreds of dresses and the hundreds of shoes and asked me over and over, 'What will I do with all of this?' It was an easy question for me to answer. We'd just haul it away, bit by bit. if she wanted. She wasn't really asking that, though. She was really asking why she had collected it all so zealously, and how would she ever be able to shed herself of it all at the apparent end of her life. We said a quick 'I love you' as I left, hours later, after sitting hunched down there, listening to her reflect on our lives.
I got her on the phone days before she passed. She was out of breath - and very sorry, 'She couldn't talk and had to hang up'. I told her I loved her. We had become close phone friends. I think she was pleased with my settled life as an adult. My hair was short and I was raising my own family. She had something to brag on.
Dad arrived at the hospital a short time after we got there. I had never seen him cry, and he was crying, uncontrollably. I realized then, for the first time that this wasn't just a hospital visit. I rushed us all inside and up to the room where Mom lay unconscious. The doctor waved us off into a little room where the bunch of us barely fit. We had to make a decision, he was saying. I looked around the room in disbelief as we were told that there was nothing except for life support keeping Mom there. She had no living will. I knew Mom wanted to live, but everyone except for me had already accepted what was to come. I had never even thought about it. Not once. I held out for as long as it took to go to her, alone, to say goodbye. We let her go.
I took off into the woods in a driving rain the morning of her funeral. I took my camera and hunted the newly sprouting mushrooms for a risky few hours, nearly making our family late waiting for me to return. When we hit the beltway and headed for D.C., a rainbow suddenly appeared on the road before us. It's stripe of colors gradually stretched into the car itself, decorating our fronts with its rainbow band. I'd never seen anything quite like it. Cars were actually stopping by the side of the beltway to look at it. It stretched right across the eight lanes, right across the barrier.
We buried Mom in Arlington Cemetery, in a plot that she now shares with Dad. He got the privilege because of his earlier duty in New Guinea. It's a pretty spot which I visited a few times with Dad before he passed. I haven't been back since the day his ashes were laid to rest there beside hers. I've got to take some time and go there soon; maybe this summer. I'm lucky. I had a chance to grow up with these extraordinary folks as if every boy was so entitled. I wish they had shared their amazing history with me when we were together. I want to tell them how proud I am of them both. I want to tell Mom, again, how much I love her. She never could handle such mushiness from me.
But, that's just too bad, Mom. I do love you, and I'm proud to have known you. Thank you for choosing to be my mother.
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