You are here: Home / Archives for family

Citizen Jordan

by Leave a Comment

Dear Great-grandfather Jordan,

I wrote to you about eight years ago, around Independence Day, when it’s common to hear recitations of Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro.” That speech was given some years before you were born enslaved in Devereux, Georgia. Mr. Douglass was speaking in Rochester, New York, and I doubt that his words reached your parents, Holland and Judy Priscella:

My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery.. I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!

Frederick Douglass

The headlines in 2018 have me thinking about the meaning of the citizenship that Douglass so casually claims here – a right he can assert because he escaped from his slavemaster. It’s a right that he knows he can lose, because under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, it would have been legal for his former master to kidnap him back into bondage.I’m thinking about Douglass and you because there’s been talk in the news about rescinding or reinterpreting part of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution – the part that accords citizenship to anyone born on US soil, with a few narrow exceptions.

It was the 13th Amendment that made your enslavement illegal, the 14th Amendment that gave you citizenship, and the 15th Amendment that gave you the theoretical right to vote. Of course, it took almost another century to make that last right real. Now, it seems some people think some parts of those measures should be up for debate.


The last time I wrote, I told you how I learned about you from an off-hand comment from my dad, your grandson, as we watched the TV miniseries Roots. We watched Kunta Kinte get beaten for not using his slave name and we saw him get his foot chopped off for running away, and my dad quietly said, “My grandfather talked about that.”  I told you how older relatives told me you and your sister Elsie talked about beatings and everybody being forced to eat from horse troughs. Cousin Mel told me that you said the Master beat your daddy in front of all of the slaves “to show how it was going to go.” And they also told me about the camp meetings, and the singing and dancing on the holidays, how, when word came that Civil War was over, everyone was singing and shouting, “We are free!”


And I told how I went to Princeton University library, where I was an undergraduate, searched the 1860 Slave census and found an inventory of slaves of one John HW Mitchell. It was Cousin Ella who confirmed she had heard tell of that name. All these years since, I can’t look at those records without wanting to cry.

  • An excerpt of the slave rolls for John HW Mitchell in the 1860 census
  • The last of JWH Mitchell’s listed slaves.

 Being a child of the Civil Rights era, I had already come to Princeton with a commitment to the struggle for human rights. That document further galvanized that commitment, because it told me that the nation that Francis Scott Key dubbed the “Land of the free and the home of the brave” only took notice of our family as your “owner’s” inventory – and even that wasn’t worth the trouble of listing you by name. If you were fortunate and they hadn’t been sold away, your parents, brothers and sisters were in that document, but your relationships to each other were not important enough to note. And let’s not even mention your forebears. I measure the value of my own work by the extent to which I help people see the insidious consequences of defining human beings as mere commodities to be bought and sold.

The precariousness of your family bond was underscored for me by a document from 1795 recorded in Lois Helmers’ compilation, “Early Records of Hancock County, Georgia.” In that document, one Daniel Richardson declares that :

[O]wing to the natural love and affection which I have unto my beloved daughter, Polly Thomas…I  have given my negro woman Jenny and her increase… one boy named Tom and a girl named Malinda…”

Lois Helmers

Any “natural love and affection” Jenny might have had was not worth noting, of course. That’s the way it was. They could tear you away from your family to provide for their own.You and your family do show up in the 1870 census, and your father is in the Returns of Qualified Voters,  Reconstruction Oath books 1867-79. In the 1870 census, you are listed as being 10 years old having the occupation of “farm laborer.” It says your dad was 58 and your mother 45, and they had both been born in Georgia. The box for parents of foreign birth is unchecked. And thanks to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, the box “Male citizens of US 21 years and upwards is checked. It also says none of you had attended school in the previous year, nor could you read or write.

There’s an 1882 marriage record for a “Jerdan” Mitchell and a “Mittie” Holsey which may belong to you and your wife, Martha. The 1900 census says you gave the year of your marriage as 1883, and Cousins Ronald and Eva said there’s a framed copy of your marriage license somewhere with the 1883 date, although I’ve never seen it and my cousins are with you now. But Ronald did say that it was a point of pride for you and the family that you were legally wed. Apart from religious sanction, being married theoretically gave you the rights of a patriarch – something your father didn’t have.

The 1920 census records your younger children starting to attend school. It looks as though Mattie – your daughter and my grandmother — got the farthest, which was 6th grade.  For a time, she and her husband owned a house. From being property to owning property in one generation. She sold it after he died in 1959. She died during my first semester at Princeton.


These things all became legally possible because of those Constitutional amendments rendered you and your descendants legal persons, and that provided the foundation for the decades of litigation and protests it took to get laws and enforcement mechanisms to make the promise of citizenship real.


Your grandchildren were part of those protests. It’s what made it possible for a black man to be President, and for a black woman to have a chance at becoming Governor of Georgia. I think you might have an idea how much excitement that created – and how much anxiety, too. You were a teenager when black men were elected to state and local office during Reconstruction, but by the time you were in your early 30s, Jim Crow law undid those gains. A black man who got ahead in business or who demanded fair wages risked lynching. During the time we had a black President, threats against his life and that of his family were a constant worry. In the two years since he left office, hate crimes have been on the rise.

Southern violence was part of what motivated you and your wife to join your children and their families in New Jersey in the 1920s. Once there, you all found the same battles in a different guise. So I was raised with an awareness of the need for both hope and vigilance.


The people who want to repeal birthright citizenship say they are targeting the children of unauthorized immigrants – that in fact, they want to return the 14th Amendment to what they see as  its original intent – granting citizenship to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. I wonder what you would say about that if you knew about the 2015 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that undid a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Ever since, lawsuits and charges of voter suppression have been on the rise. In Hancock County in 2016, sheriffs went door to door threatening to take away people’s right to vote unless they came to the courthouse and proved that their addresses were valid. One of the people quoted in the newspaper talking about it had the last name of Warren, same as the family your daughter Melvina married into.

You lived through the Second World War, so you saw what happened when Germany decided to take citizenship away from millions of its people – including the grandparents of my friend Tamar. It was a prelude to the Holocaust. Tamar’s mother came to this country as a refugee from Nazi Germany.  She was naturalized and she married an American, so Tamar is a citizen by birthright. Our family histories have impressed upon us the fact that our rights are only as secure as our willingness to defend them.

I suspect, Grandpa, that birthright citizenship is the one thing that you were hoping that your family could count on. It was the foundation for getting voting rights, access to education, the means to earn more than a subsistence living. It’s still the foundation for the legal struggle to protect those rights – and to address other disparities under the law. If I understand anything about your legacy, Grandpa, it’s that I need to use the education that your struggle made possible to ensure that we never lose sight of what it took for you to become a legal person – and how easily those rights could all be undone if we lack the will to protect them.

With love,

Kim

A meditation on intimacy

by 1 Comment

I don’t, as a rule, blog about personal relationships or intimate feelings. I do, however, care deeply about how we build community, and how we constitute family and social connection is at the heart of that. As since age and disability have brought me to a place where I understand what it is to be erased, to feel invisible, I think a great deal about how we set expectations and manage communications about intimacy and community.

I think we do a poor job of it. Or at least, I have observed many instances in which we — I — struggle to do it well. And I think this has larger implications, which is what makes it worth blogging about.

A Facebook friend shared a blog post by a couple named Josh and Lolly Weed that set me searching for language this particular morning. In the post, they explain their decision to end their marriage. They are devout Mormons who, despite their deep affection, children and generally happy home life, have decided that their marriage cannot accommodate Josh’s same-sex attraction. We are assured that there has been no infidelity, but that it’s not healthy for them to remain in a marriage where he can’t love her the way she deserves to be loved, and neither of them is free to find love with someone else. This paragraph from Josh, especially, sent me off on a reverie that had little to do with their revelation:

The love I felt [for Lolly and their children] was real, but something in me wanted to die.
 
It’s the thing that wants to die in all of us when we don’t have hope for attachment to a person we are oriented towards. It’s actually a standard part of human attachment: when we don’t have attachment—and have no hope of attachment–our brain tells us we need to die.

The post is worth reading  for its testimony about people of faith struggling to reconcile what their church teaches about homosexuality with their lived experience. I don’t intend to address that here. What I want to say about that paragraph is that it resonated deeply with lived and observed experience – a lifelong crisis that I once thought existential, only capable of being articulated in art, but increasingly, taking shape in public policy.

Too many of us don’t know how to create and sustain connection to other humans. Too many of us live outside of structures of extended family and community. Experts say the lack of connection is killing us. The UK now has a Minister of Loneliness. A former US Surgeon General took to the pages of the Harvard Business Review to declare loneliness a public health crisis and to call on employers to change their cultures. A 2010 AARP study found a strong correlation between loneliness and poor physical health.

Weed’s words triggered very specific memories.

When I was a child, far too young to know of romantic relationships, there were two songs that moved me to tears, that touched something that I knew deep inside from having been uprooted and displaced: Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” and Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” I never spoke of the way these songs made me feel. I suspect that Aretha’s song sounded like the pain of some of the adult women I saw in my neighborhood, or heard my aunts and uncles talking about in conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear: “Ain’t no way for me to love you/If you won’t let me…” But “This Bitter Earth” spoke to a fear I carried:

This bitter earth
Well, what a fruit it bears
What good is love
Mmh, that no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust
Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose
What good am I?
Heaven only knows

Oh, this bitter earth
Yes, can it be so cold?
Today you’re young
Too soon you’re old
But while a voice
Within me cries
I’m sure someone
May answer my call
And this bitter earth, ooh
May not, oh be so bitter after all

I was a lonely child, unsure where I belonged, how I fit in, and Dinah Washington spoke to that so powerfully that I resolved not to listen to that song, lest I give in to despair. At that age, it was a slew of things that loom large for a child, but less so for adults, such as being told by a relative, “You must be a genius, because you are weird.” Or being bullied in school. Or thinking Janis Ian’s ode to teenage angst, “At 17,” was written for me. I grew up, and have lived much of my life in the friend zone, hopelessly crushing on people who would confide their love for my best friends. Oh, well. l learned early on to be philosophical about this.There’s a reason my middle school classmates called me Spock.

Later, I would be told that I had been a rebel in college, not adhering to the expectations of how young women were supposed to behave, ignoring people who were attracted to me (or in the words of one friend, supposedly in love with me.)  The truth is that my parents pretty much raised me to read books, take care of home and family, and exercise. I was rarely allowed to date or have a job other than babysitting. This is how my parents hoped to keep me from being derailed before I got a chance to have a life.

I didn’t break the rules; for the most part, I never learned them.  So if you wanted to step to me, you had to make it plain.   Later, of course, I learned that most of us are misfits in our own way. Sometimes we find others who understand our nerdiness, and we can be misfits together. Sometimes that connection comes through a partnership called marriage that lasts for decades. And sometimes not.

Anyway, it’s with this understanding that I came to Josh Weed’s words. And then I thought about people I had met from other cultures, other stations in life.

I thought about the people I have met who come from cultures that consider “love marriages” inferior to arranged marriages. I know women in arranged marriages who are at peace with their lot, for whom intimacy is built on shared history, values, and priorities. I don’t know how they process the idea of the kind of passion of which Josh Weed speaks. And then I remember the young man I met in Biratnagar, Nepal, who told me how his wife’s family disowned her because she chose her husband. He was from a lower caste – which wasn’t supposed to matter, but it did. I remember having a conversation with another man, a student, who said he couldn’t possibly enter a love marriage, despite the fact that they are growing in popularity. It would be too devastating for his family; it would ruin his career; he would lose standing in his community.

These are the dilemmas of the search for intimacy: to conform to the expectations of one’s culture at the expense of the possibility of deep connection. To search for connection and fail, repeatedly, because you can’t measure up to set of rules you may or may not understand. To follow the rules as you understand them, only to realize that you don’t know what healthy connection looks like. To enter a marriage with hope, and to stay for decades out of a sense of soul-crushing duty. And, occasionally, to stare in wonder at that rare couple who has managed, against all odds to find a way to be together until, “the last of life for which the first was made.”

I have sat with older people, some close relatives, who no longer see a purpose or place for themselves. Spouses gone or dead, children grown, work life behind them. I remember some of them deciding they were done, and before long, they were. I remember a lively widowed friend in her late 70s who ached for a companion, and I hear there’s a bar in town that has become something of a pickup joint for seniors. Well, why not I say. Just be careful out there – STD rates are rising for older people.

I have participated in support groups and forums for other people with disabilities struggling with the pain and disappointment of losing lovers and marriages because their partners can’t understand or cope with the ways in which their bodies and lives are changing. I am also reminded of the happily coupled people I know who happen to use wheelchairs or have some other impairment, and what it’s like to deal with others’ assumptions that their dating and marriage options are limited.

I am living Josh Weed’s fear – “no attachment, no hope of attachment” – but I am determined not to die.I have resolved for myself to stay connected to life, through writing, through work, through church and community involvement, through friends.

I appreciate the connections I have to old classmates. Even if we weren’t intimates in youth, we are at an age where we share much that is meaningful that younger people wouldn’t understand. We don’t have to read a book to know what it felt like when the Kennedys and Dr. King were murdered, or why Vietnam was so divisive, or why wearing pants to school was a radical act. We’ve had chronic illnesses and scares and losses. We remember Carol Burnett and platform heels and Belmont Plateau and Summer Madness. We go out, share a meal, dance to old songs, sometimes accompanied by a man, sometimes not.  And then we laugh and tease about how we’ve still got it.

I think, in this next phase of my life, I will revisit Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, which I read when I was far too young to understand. I am one data point in this public health battle against loneliness, but I think that this quest for deep connection is a researchable problem, and I will be part of its solution.

The Good Mother, part 2

by

Hi Mommy,

What was it like for you to be back in New Jersey busting suds and picking crops, after spending those years in Hartford, Connecticut, learning etiquette, elocution and the other skills essential to becoming a proper bourgeoise? No doubt it was a shock, and not just for you. You loved your New Jersey family and they loved you, but sometimes you just didn’t understand each other, and maybe that was to be expected.

For one thing, your sisters and brothers couldn’t get over the way you talked. Your sister was chuckling about that just recently. South Jersey folks of that generation have their own kind of country drawl, but you had a New Englander’s clipped enunciation. You had a way of saying, “Look at the the dogs!” that sounded more like, “Look aht the dahgs!” making your family double over with laughter because they had never heard anyone speak that way. It hurt your feelings, but then, lots of things hurt your feelings, and you could say things that they found just as cutting.

Not that there weren’t good times there. Along the White Horse Pike, between Camden and Atlantic City, and over the Ben Franklin bridge to Philadelphia, there was a world to explore. Near as I can tell, your Mom, Eileen, moved you and the kids around, depending on the most affordable and livable arrangements available at the time. Mostly you were in Chesilhurst, near your grandfather Ashton’s family, and not far from where your father’s brother built a home.

And your dreams of high school proms, high school dating, and eventually, college receded into heartbroken imaginings.

Start in South Philly, a place that you all visited on occasion. Eileen’s father, John Henry Farrell, had his own “Sanitary Barber Shop,” as his business card said. John, Jr. was the first colored elevator operator for one of the big department stores downtown. And his brother, Wendell was a mechanic in the Air Force. Sometimes Aunt Gladys came to visit, and Eileen would get together with her and sisters Lynn and rarely, Edna, who moved to Elizabeth early on. Lynn was something of a glamour girl and you all got to be friend with her kids, all being around the same age.

Cross back over the Ben Franklin to Camden, either on the bus in a car like that big pink Studebaker your Mom used to drive. Camden was a working class town, but it was in much better shape than it is now. There was plenty of work at the Campbell Soup plant, and if some folks had to shop at the Goodwill on Broadway, there was also a Tiffany’s.

But if you were young, black and looking for fun in the 1950s, the action was down the White Horse Pike, in Lawnside.

A former stop on the Underground Railroad, Lawnside was the first self-governing African American community north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Peter Mott House there is now a historic landmark.  In the late 19th century, it was the childhood home of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the novelist, poet, teacher and editor credited with launching the publishing careers of such leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.  For the last few years, they’ve celebrated Jessie Fauset Day in Lawnside with poetry competitions and historical observances. But in the 50s, Ms. Fauset had moved back to Philadelphia for a few years of genteel retirement before her death, in 1961.

The Spaniels

By the 1950s, the striving town of Jessie Fauset’s youth had become better known to local African Americans as a place for barbecues, picnics and dancing. Jack Brady’s Dreamland Cafe saw its heyday during your childhood, boasting the likes of Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan. I never heard you all talk about Dreamland or the Cotton Club. But I did hear tell of the Whippoorwill and even as late as 1975, you all were still going to Loretta’s Hi-hat for family wedding receptions.

Daddy tells me there was a place next to the Tippin’ Inn where you go could for food and dancing if you weren’t yet of drinking age. That’s where he and his brothers used to go before he got drafted into the Army during the Korean War. He was going with your older sister when he got drafted. Then another man took your sister to the altar while the man who would become my father was doing his bit for Uncle Sam. It was later, after he got back, when he met you.

In the meantime, your older brother and sister were hitting the Hi Hat and you and your closest brother E  were winning dance contests at some of the local joints. Not that you all even needed to go out to have a good time. Even in my youngest childhood, I remember how you and your Mom and brothers and sisters would get together to eat, play pinochle and dance.

Grandmom cooked for white folks on the Main Line, I recall, but her family menus were strictly down home. Ham, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, string beans, potato salad, cornbread, apple pie, sweet potato pie, white potato pie, tomato soup cake — there was always something good in Mom’s kitchen. Maybe somebody put some music on a record player or maybe it was just a radio. The bop was the dance of the day.

Maybe it was at one of those contests that you met Thornton James “Pookie” Hudson from the Spaniels. Their signature  tune, “Good Night, Sweetheart,” had come out in 1954 when you were only 15. You told me that the two of you dated for a time. Given that Pookie was five years older and touring regularly, it’s likely that the relationship was more serious on your end than his. Nonetheless, you told me that you lost Pookie to a girl named “Tina” — a girl who so captured his heart that he wrote a song about her that the Spaniels recorded. You played the song for me; it mostly consisted of Pookie wailing her name.

I got an email from a cyberfriend when Pookie died in January, 2008. I thought about telling you, but I didn’t want to make you sad. I suppose you know by now.

Another time, you told me you met Arthur Prysock, and even sang backup for him. I never did hear the whole story, but I got the impression it wasn’t a serious thing — maybe even that he just let you get up on a stage with him one night and sing behind him. Who knows? It was one of those things you would say and leave unexplained, the same way you would say that we were related to Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Who can say?

From what I’ve read about Lawnside in those days, it was a place where everybody mixed with everybody, so hanging out with  big stars such as the Spaniels is not as exotic as it might seem to us today. African Americans flocked to Lawnside because they weren’t allowed to be anyplace else.  Not long ago, Dottie Smith, a singer who played the Lawnside clubs in those days, told an interviewer:

“On Sunday, a lot of people would leave church and go right over there for the rest of the day,” she said. “That’s why it all felt so much like family. There were grandmothers and kids and musicians and shriners and everybody from all walks of life. Blacks didn’t have a Blue Book or a Country Club. Lawnside was where we went. It cost practically nothing to enjoy yourself. I remember in Philadelphia there used to be this weekend saying that it was time to ‘go down the ridge and over the bridge,’ which meant heading out for Lawnside and the clubs and all.”

You were popular with the fellas, I’m told. At your memorial service, a man who had grown up with you, whom I only knew through your church, talked to me about your beauty with all the wistfulness of an old man remembering his first schoolboy crush.

This was your life: work, child care, hanging out with friends on your off hours. School was not part of the picture for you or your peers. Dropping out of high school to help the family was pretty common in the 1950s. Heck, it wasn’t unusual to meet kids who had bailed on elementary school. Nobody was sending truant officers out to make sure poor black kids went to school.

The jobs available to blacks in Camden County didn’t require more than an elementary school education. They were jobs that needed strong backs more than good brains. Also, you had to have a high tolerance for being called “boy” or “gal.” And never talk back to a Jersey cop. People warned each other,  “They’re as bad as the ones in Mississippi,”

But you had seen another world – a world where a black woman could get an office job, instead of having to clean a white woman’s house or wash her clothes. A world where little black girls took ballet lessons and dreamed of going to college. A world with doilies and flowers and husbands who save up their money to buy you a string of pearls. A man who, as you were fond of saying later, “brought something to the table.”

That was the world you wanted. Sometime in 1956, when you were 17 and he was 24, you decided that my bookish father was the man most likely the partner you needed.

Yes, Ma’am. I’m going to get some rest now.

Love,

Kim