For weeks before Greg, her very practical youngest son took her from her 27th Street gingerbread home of plastic seat covers and walnut wood originals, some would even call ‘perfectly preserved antiques’, she had refused to wear the medical alert medallion. Now, at eighty-seven years, her forearms grown progressively brittle and rusty like brown sticks were unable to break the falls that more frequently came, and Miss Eva went into the hospital and soon passed away last fall. It was just about two and a half weeks before my father, Dudley Henry, also entered the hospital and passed away. He, too, was done before I was ready to accept it. Miss Eva and my dad are parallel stories in my life, one of at least a dozen mentors in the village that raised a child. I am that child, and the connections between them and me, I call ‘string’. Her presence fueled my social consciousness and much of my writing, so I start with her to try illuminate the relationships between myself and the world.
Since I was a undersized, quietly observant and inwardly focused six year old, Miss Eva had continually awed me because she was both so prolific a writer, and because she was so human. Greg, her son who is one month younger than me, was the first connection between us, although we had our own relationship over the years. She was, at barely five feet tall, never remote, even in 1953, when I first met her. But, then, I was not intimidated by my own father’s towering height of over six feet—it seemed natural to interact with them even while other adults seemed so remote. In truth, I was never very cowed by any adults, which mystified my peers a bit over my willingness to intrude on the adult world with my own ideas and sense of what should be. But tiny Miss Eva was more than special. She, like my paternal grandfather and a half dozen authors I read, opened me to the world.
First, there were topics of conversation: a world view quite different from, but strongly connecting with my home, church and family life. Conversation immersed in the delight of language; richly peppered with verse, allusion and alliteration and flowing and surging like the tidewater. Then, there was music from outside the walls of the church: Ray Charles and Brook Benton and Miles Davis and hundreds more, on heavy black rubber-like discs that overburdened the arm of her fancy brown and gold record player. Music that was so much more life-like than the Church music diet of my home. Where church music gave the spirit lift, this music’s lyrics gave voice to the twisting of internal organs, wings to the tears of humanity and heartache and balm to the loneliness that etched consciousness into the psyche of a growing boy. It was the knowing escape from existentialism accessible even for a six year old.
On the mahogany rack beside the plaid couch, and next to the stack of LPs, lay the latest issue of Jet, and later, Ebony Magazine, talking about people who looked like us with all the similarity of ‘us’ with ‘others’. Music and magazines all radiated a consciousness about ‘Blackness’ that anchored my life to a the local community and to the world. In my home we had religious books and encyclopedias, we had chemistry and science books, and sometimes even a current Life Magazine, none of which had any black faces to feel connected with. We even had a few classical music records, but race and color were never the topic of overt conversation, even when we went to downtown Washington DC with its restrooms and water fountains labeled “white” and “colored”, and the restaurants we could not eat in unless we went over to the corner counter to stand. When desegregation came and I was sent off to the neighborhood school where I was only one of four black children, the home avoided conversations about race. After a year or two the connection with Miss Eva rushed into that void.
But Miss Eva was more than that to me. When Greg had his annual birthday party just about Thanksgiving, Miss Eva would have the rambunctious boys calmed down by playing a bingo game with language manipulation, I was always happy to win many of these games, I now suspect it was jigged for a boost in my self confidence. And when, at 16 I broke my jaw playing football in summer camp, it was her house that I took refuge in—my mother has said that I was not to get hurt, and I knew that this injury could end my playing days if Mom found out.
Even in mid-June, the last time that I would see her in life, Miss Eva asked me questions about race and culture while she bustled around her house preparing me a piece of my favorite cake--part of a forty-four year ritual of food, pleasure and sustenance for the spirit. She was curious about Oregon, where I now live, and she wanted comparisons of it with California, especially the diversity. She asked me about raising my daughter in a very ‘white bread’ community. But she almost never offered advice, preferring to let me discover places for expansion.
As I understand it, Miss Eva published more than 500 short stories and poems over a fifty year writing span, and as one whose hubris is tied to his intellect even as his profession insists upon publish or perish, the volume and quality of her writing is stupifying. I also know that she expected me to write—although she never said so-- and I had always assumed it was to do professional writing. Coming to the house about twenty years ago, looking for Greg, I sat on the ‘becoming antiques’ in her dining room and living room after my ritual piece of cake, and spent about three hours telling her about my dissertation research and writing of the manuscript. While she was attentive and probing with questions then, I believe now, that I was mistaken. Her urging to me was to the narrative, not the pretensions of scholarship writing. After some thought, I think I have unraveled some of what she was asking me for.
As I reflect, Miss Eva nurtured a response to the world that quite clearly, cannot be located in, or contained with, the styles and subjects of academia. Academic pursuit, at least in these United States, is far too linear. It is too anchored in white Northern European thought, too full of its own importance, and too ignorant about the lives of people from other cultures to even come close to comprehending that for many others on the planet, life is a confluence of rivers and, our spirit lives in the connections of the many facets; none of which can be understood without the other. In my fiftieth year as I struggled with the rejection and ill-consideration of my colleagues as I requested promotion to full professor, I came to understand, a bit better, that the story that Miss Eva wanted me to write was of ordinary people, of Black people, who live spectacularly even as they live quietly without much notice from the media or from white America.
Miss Eva caused me to understand that because our lives are full and rich and meaningful, we fight battles much of the society cannot fathom exist. For us, the whole, unabridged stories are important. In history, which I teach at the university, we are consumed with the stories of the famous, the rich, the generals and the presidents, but it is ordinary people that make history. So I set about to tell these stories as I hope Miss Eva might like to hear about and nurtured me to tell.
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