Some stuff on my mind
It’s not just me anymore. I find myself in a global tumult where up is left and down is about face. It’s all surreal in the deepest sense in that, what the mind sees is appearing before my eyes in vivid color and in real time. What is a woman to do? The answer is what we always do- make it work. I have been watching in horror as a litany of murdered Black people crops up in the news. To be clear, I am not horrified in the general way, saying, “isn’t that a shame how that cop knelt on George Floyd’s neck so I will post Black Lives Matter on my social media page”. I am a Black woman living through this shit for the third time in my life.
In 1968, I lived between my parents and my grandparents on the South and West sides of Chicago. Granny and Big Daddy lived right next to the L on Sawyer Avenue and everyone was used to the train rattling the house and obliterating conversation in starts and stops. When Dr. King was assassinated, the West and South sides of the city blew up. My grandparent’s neighborhood went from a quaint block of brick two flats with their sunny yellow home as the center, to a desolate and violent place to be. Bars went up on the doors and windows. Granny packs a pistol on the way to church in a wrinkly paper bag. Big Daddy slept with his pump shotgun fully loaded at the head of the bed. Smoke and ashes were all down Madison and Kedzie. The stores that we used to shop at were gone and the stores that replaced them, were run by what Granny called Ay-rabs who didn’t live in there and had a lot of the same bigoted notions about Black people as White people did. The ‘hood became a food and cultural desert.
In 1974 I went to high school during the racial unrest in Marquette Park, Gage Park, and Bridgeport where mayor Richard J. Daley lived. No Black person would dare cross that threshold unless you were going to Comiskey and getting the hell out before the game ended. The local neo-Nazi crew, led by an oleaginous Frank Colin, was inciting riots against Black kids going to school in White neighborhoods. I was shocked. Didn’t this happen down South in Mississippi and Alabama already. I did not realize what a racist and segregated town Chicago was and in some places still is in 2020. I was at a private Catholic girls school and took the bus through a neighborhood called Mt. Greenwood. It was the first time I was spit at and called a nigger by a nice Catholic boy. The driver and I were the only Black people on the bus in Mt. Greenwood- a neighborhood rife with White Chicago cops and firefighters. We didn’t stand a chance. I held my breath and waited until we crossed Vincennes into the Black area.
I watched the Rodney King riots in 1991 with a weird detachment. It was across the country and it seemed a singular incident in how the news reported it. I figured that I had run the gauntlet of being Black in Chicago and had settled into Rogers Park which is still the most diverse neighborhood in the city with refugees from every global unrest and over 100 languages spoken.
2020- I am seeing things that echo the lynchings of Emmett Till. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging through his neighborhood. He lived two miles from the place that he was stalked and murdered. The man taking the video that was leaked hit Arbery with his truck and pinned him in for the murderous racists that took his life with a shotgun blast. That video was the same kind of souvenir from the post church gatherings in the South where a Black man, woman, or child werelynched in broad daylight. Pictures of people pointing and laughing. They tore at the burnt flesh and took pieces of the rags worn to the execution. It was a communal event where someone could have just won a pie ribbon. This is still happening in America. Breonna Taylor was murdered in her sleep by police in Kentucky with a no knock policy still on the books. The tipping point was George Floyd being murdered on camera in broad daylight by a racist cop with his hand in his pocket as he put the full weight of his body on Floyd’s neck. It was something that will never leave my mind and has forever brought the stain of America’s racist foundations to the forefront of our society.
So here I am. A Black woman who living these horrors since 1619 in real time.
Aunt Jemima…What Took You so Long?
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On June 17, 2020, Quaker/Pepsico decided to change the name of a long beloved advertising icon. That’s right, Aunt Jemima will no longer grace the syrup bottles, corn meal (yellow, white, and self-rising) or pancake mix in your pantries. America, Aunt Jemima has been emancipated. So the fuck what? When I was a kid, we saw Aunt Jemima products in the store, right next to Uncle Ben, and the Cream of Wheat guy. After January 1st, 1863, America kept on making money from the flesh of Black folks by keeping them commercially, economically, and literally in subservient roles. The rice people tried to tell us for years that Uncle Ben was a real rice grower leading people to believe that a Black guy was getting a piece of every dollar we spent on rice. To clarify, we mostly used Riceland that had the stereotypical Asian in a sampan hat that couldn’t pronounce L’s. Anybody that grew up in the South and grew anything in dirt, knew that Uncle Ben was the same as Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom. Black people didn’t get shit from any of these ‘relatives’ except a proclivity for diabetes and hypertension from all the carbohydrates, pork, and salt.
I grew up watching a commercial where a table full of cherry cheeked White kids and their square jawed White dad waited for breakfast. When White Mom glided into the dining room impeccably dressed with Carol Bishop makeup spackled on her face with a tray heaped with fluffy pancakes, they all chimed, “Aunt Jemima, What took you so long?” Okay, a couple things. The terms uncle and aunt were applied to older Black people who were past the sexualized phase but still useful. We grew rice and became your uncle in a white porter jacket. Wait. You do know that no one wears a white porter jacket to pick rice- right? It made people comfortable to know that a safe Uncle whatsit is cooking and not pillaging White womanhood. Uncle Remus was a happy Negro singin’ and telling stories about Brother Rabbit aka Brer’ Rabbit. He was no threat in his overalls and straw hat. Again, the White folks is safe, and it’s okay for little boys with cowlicks, bare feet, and a piece of grass in their teeth to hang out with a jovial ‘good’ Negro. Someone said something about Mrs. Butterworth. Did anybody think that the syrup was modeled on a Black woman? I certainly didn’t. She was a Mrs., like Miss Evelyn and Miss Lottie next door to my grandparents. Only Mrs. Butterworth was a spinster White woman living in New Hampshire with her special friend . We couldn’t afford syrup anyway. My mom used to make syrup from boiling sugar to pour over our non-Jemima pancakes, because we couldn’t afford that stuff either.
Okay, kudos to retiring Aunt Jemima. It is a step forward from using people of color as minstrel shills, and we can all add the permed and pearled Jemima to our Negrobilia collection. You know what took Aunt Jemima so long? She was profitable because of her desexualized and subjugated Blackness. She made a lot of money for you just like slave labor. Now go spread some of that money reinvesting in educational systems that will free the minds of those in her image. Free Uncle Ben!!
To Baby Sister Two Years Gone…
I got a package in the mail from my nephew Justice. He is my sister Peach’s youngest son. He has been in the Marine Corps and recently got his discharge (honorable, of course). He sent a shirt for Jonathan to sign. If you didn't know, my husband, Jonathan, was one of the creators of Mortal Kombat and the original voice of Raiden. This gives him serious cred with the vintage game-obsessed youth. There was also a package from my brother-in-law, Terrance, in there. I was not expecting a stack of Peach’s obituary pamphlets, dogtag necklaces with her picture, and a copy of her death certificate.
Peach suddenly died on October 19th, 2023, two years ago. My world shifted on its axis. We had reconnected and were having some hilarious trips down memory lane. I say hilarious now, but it took some years to get there. We did not have an easy upbringing and learned some hard lessons. Three of her kids stayed with us in Chicago when they were evicted from their house and were living in a hotel. At first, I was going to have Lyric come because she is the girl, and I could identify with her. To Jonathan’s credit, he paid to fly all three of them here to have a lovely summer despite the mess in Texas.
That was after Mom had passed away, living in Texas with Peach and her family. Jonathan and I visited and had a great time. I could see that things were not easy, and money was tight. I feel sad when I think about how hard her life was and how she always seemed to cope with gracious toughness. They had a slew of cats, a terrier named Esther who hung out with Mom, and a sway-backed dog named Monty. We bought a ginormous bag of dog and cat food, plus groceries, at the local HEB store. It was a lovely Christmas, and it was the last time I hugged my Peachie.
When I got the call that she died- just dropped dead in her kitchen- I felt such a deep and visceral grief. I fell apart and was going to pay for my brother to get there, but it turned out that we had to contribute to pay for the funeral and cremation. I was getting texts from Terrance, filling me in on the arrangements, and that it would be live-streamed and recorded. Two days before the service, I got a text from Terrence, and when I opened it, I was taken aback. It was a picture of Peach in a casket. I know that funerals are for the living, and seeing someone laid out is a way to get closure, but I wanted to cry and rail at the world. She was my sister. I held her as a baby. I drove her and my sister, Tina, to teeny-bopper concerts. They would go in looking all cute and come out feral, with hoarse voices from screaming.
I still feel a deep grief that I will not see her or hug her again. I won’t hear her breathy voice, see her sly smile, or see those gorgeous eyes flash. The obituary pamphlet told how Peach would fight for those she loved. That was an understatement. From the time she was three years old to her last breath, she would knock your lights out if you got on the wrong side of her. One of the stories was about a fracas at the cafe I owned back in the late 90s. She worked behind the counter and was all sunshine and light until three hard-leg bitches came in and attempted to rob her.
I remember the call- breathless and talking fast, “Them bitches came in here…they pushed an orange soda in my face… The ambulance is here. I ran across the street because I thought she was hurt. I got to the cafe, and three girls were sitting on the curb, cut up, crying, and looking like they had been through a storm. Hurricane Peach.
The fishbowl window was shattered, and some of the regulars were helping to sweep up the glass with looks of disbelief on their faces. I walked down the stairs, and Peach was still pumped full of adrenaline. She was all eyes and breathing hard. Apparently, a couple of men had to pull her off two of the girls, that’s right, two of the three. Peach had smashed a coffee pot over one girl’s head, and the other two tried ganging up on her. That didn’t work out well. Peach always fought like a dude, and it ended with lashings, cuts, and weeping by the three dumbass criminals who tried it on with her.
I smiled when I saw that moment in time when Peach was in action. Never a woman to be ignored or given attitude. Ask the guy in Louisiana who got his ass kicked with a weed whacker. The police arrived and asked Peach if this dude could come into the house to pick up his belongings. “Not if the world was flooded with piss and he was the only tree” was the reply. Ask the stupid thugs in training who took a bike from her sons. Our brother Patrick brought her back a Samurai sword from his time in the Marines in Okinawa. All they saw was my sister barefoot, wearing a housedress, and carrying a sword. The bike was returned, and there were no more problems. Ask Sabrina from back in the day, who kept hitting Patrick when he was five. “I can’t hit girls-quit it!” “I can hit girls!” came the response from three-year-old Peach before Sabrina was knocked to the back of the garage.
If ever I need it, I hope that I can summon 1/10th of her courage and no BS attitude. I miss you, Baby Sis.