Remembering Melissa

2493 Richton, in Detroit, is the oldest place I know. It’s not the address that I was born into, but when I think of “home”, the place my roots lead me to, a place where I always had a place, it’s that house that I think of.

Richton was the home of my Aunt Bernice, my mother’s sister, and her family. It was also the hub of my extended family; the place my brother Rhett and I vacationed almost every summer after we moved to New York, and where so many other family members – some so distantly related that the connection was not always clear – lived for a time when they came north from West Virginia or the Carolinas.

Aside from Aunt Bernice, the person I most associate with this most cherished home of my heart, is her daughter, my first cousin, Melissa. Melissa was the eldest of the small bunch of us cousins growing up together. Her brother Jeff was the youngest. In between them were Rhett and I, and Linda and Terry, whose father Earl was our mother’s closest cousin. The six of us spent so much time together, mostly on Richton, with Melissa presiding over and guiding us. She was only three or four years older than Rhett, but her maturity and confidence made her almost adult in our eyes. Certainly, she was the intermediary between our childhood worlds and all that lay beyond.

I have three standout memories of Melissa. The first dates from our earliest childhood, when the six of us, and a couple of the Spielman kids from across the street, would gather at Richton on a Friday night, left by our parents into Aunt Bernice’s care. Melissa was, among other things, a great entertainer and story-teller, and the bunch of us never tired of Melissa taking us into the basement, turning out the lights, and thrilling us with a scary story.

Our favorite, for which we clamored every time, was about Johnny & the Liver. Looking back, it’s such a gruesome and ridiculous story, but we never tired of Melissa’s re-telling. It’s about a kid who is given a dollar by his mother, to go to the butcher’s for a pound of liver. Johnny decides to keep the dollar, to buy candy or something. So, spying a bum lying unconscious in an alley, Johnny takes his utility knife and cuts out the man’s liver, wraps it in paper, and takes it home. After dinner (and no, I can’t remember how Melissa covered that part!), Johnny goes to bed, where he’s soon unsettled by disturbing sounds outside his window. After awhile, he hears a hoarse whisper, rising to him from the back alley that runs beneath the sill. It says, “Johnny! I want my LIVER back, I’m on the FIRST step!” This was the point at which we kids started to squeal and quake and poke each other in the dark. Melissa would build up the tension, with details of Johnny’s efforts, first to ignore the voice, then to somehow barricade himself against the inevitable retribution stalking him in the night. I won’t even try to duplicate the level of gleeful terror that Melissa would have inspired by the time the vengeful spectre reaches the tenth step, and Johnny meets his fate. Ah, what fun that was!

My second memory finds me at about fifteen, during one of our summer stays in Detroit. Melissa had blossomed musically, and was playing piano and singing in the church choir. I’d started dabbling in music myself, and was sitting one day, trying to pick out the piano part of “O Happy Day”, the gospel tune by the Edwin Hawkins singers that had become a hit on top-forty radio. Melissa heard me going at it, and sat down and taught me a wonderful version of the tune, with the left hand banging out the strong, rhythmic baseline that made the piece so dynamic. Melissa was so patient with me, but also, as excited as I was, as I gradually caught the energy and flow of the song.

My third memory is from just before my 20^th birthday, when I’d dropped out of college to bounce around the country for a few months. Over the years, 2493 Richton had seemed to diminish, somehow. We cousins were branching out, trying to discover our own paths, the elders were older and less active, and I remember a feeling that perhaps something that had been alive and beautiful was now dead and done. But I arrived to find Melissa, not long married, and with her baby daughter, Ramana, just on the verge of learning to walk. I instantly fell in love with Ramana, and seeing my cousin, now married and a mother, was transformative. She’d always been like an advance scout for my generation, into the world of maturity and adulthood. And here she was – ARRIVED! Melissa was still the same young spirit, loving and fun and creative as she’d ever been, and at the same time, she was a married woman, with a child, and an entirely different future to grow into.

But the key thing about that visit was seeing how Ramana’s very presence created that future, not just for Melissa, but for the entire family. We were all in love with Ramana. And I remember my mother, also visiting, and aunt Audrey, the matriarch of the family, great aunt to both Melissa and I, who was living at Richton at the time, and so many others in the family, sitting around for hours at a time it seemed, watching Ramana’s every move, commenting on her every gurble, delighting at every expression and exploration, seeing the future emerging in front of our eyes, bringing new life, new hope, new possibility.

So yes, my strongest memories of Melissa aren’t just about her at all. They are embodied in her children, in those of us she taught, and those of us she guided and cared for. Her life was never just her life, it’s always been the life of an entire family, of a community, of a place that was home for so many. And so, of course I will miss Melissa. But she’ll never be gone, really. She, like love and life, is everywhere. She’s as deep as roots grow, as long as memory, as eternal as hope and possibility, and as satisfying to the spirit as being scared and thrilled in the dark, because, after all, it’s your mother/sister/cousin telling the scary story,  and you know that the light is just up the stairs a way.

Thank you, Melissa.

Brother Love

I have a unique relationship with my brother, Rhett Preston Kirby. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s better than other brothers, or that he does and provides what other brothers do not, though I feel that those things are true. I don’t place much value in comments of the type: “My brother, father, mother, wife, school, country, teacher, cat, chili recipe, etc. is the best that ever was!” Because, well...how could a person  ever really know? It’s meaningless for me to say he’s the best, without offering solid evidence. I’ll pass on the superlatives and just say why he is what he is in my life.

So, what’s so unique about him, anyway? First of all, unique defines his role in my life. Rhett is the only person I’ve ever known who is like him. Sure, you say. So he’s a unique individual. Aren’t we all? Well, it’s deeper than that. And here’s why. My brother and I are about as different as brothers can be. We have different likes, inclinations, personalities, ways of engaging the world. We have different skills and foibles, different things we strive for. We’ve carved out our places in the world using wholly different tools and maps. You could even say that, with all our differences, we inhabit different worlds, and that would be substantially true. What it comes down to is that, without the accident of having been born into the same family at approximately the same time, there’s little chance I’d ever have come to know him. And, it’s why I’ve never really known anyone like him. Which is what makes him so unique to me, as I believe I am to him.

It took me a couple of decades to realize this, and to begin to appreciate Rhett in a very special way. In the sphere of my life, he has perspectives on things completely unlike those of friends, colleagues and partners I’ve attracted over the years. And, because I love him, and he me, I am able to interact with this alien intelligence in ways deep and intimate enough as to instruct, enlighten and inspire me.

Of course, I exaggerate our differences. We come from the same parents, were born in the same city into similar circumstances, and through most of our pre-adult years, our physical and social journeys were parallel. And all these similarities, all that we share, is essential to the love and bond between us.

That bond has always felt absolute and unconditional. We have our disagreements; we used to fight often enough. As adults, we’ve mostly lived far apart, sometimes not seeing one another for years at a time. We’ve hardly ever exchanged Christmas or birthday gifts, and the odd time that something is given, one to the other, it never sets a precedent of creates any kind of expectation.

But emotionally, or spiritually...no, maybe deeper than that, even... on the level of who we are, we are bonded. Maybe it’s on the level of the “story” we believe ourselves to be living, how we situate ourselves and each other in the world of “meaning”. On that level, in that place, we are deeply connected, mirrors of one another, alter egos, each a kind of harmony to the other’s melody, the chorus behind one another’s center stage. We are joined, in simple fact.

He’s been with me from my beginning and populates my earliest memories. In one of them, he’s bent over on the sidewalk in front of our house, retying my shoe lace, teaching me how to do it myself. In another, he’s rescuing me from a tree down the street. With his encouragement, I’d mustered the confidence to climb up it, but wouldn’t come down again. There’s never been any doubt of our connection. And we’ve both noted, as we’ve journeyed through life, our surprise at how few other siblings seem as solid and sure, as quietly passionate about their bond, as we are of our brotherhood.

I came to realize, as I learned to ponder the whys and wherefores of my life, that there were reasons for all of this. Our mutual commitment got serious reinforcement when we moved from Detroit to New York, when I was five and he was seven. For a few weeks or months we were shuttled here and there, sometimes with our father, sometimes both parents, occasionally with strangers, while our parents tried to settle on some place and some way for us to all live together. We changed schools and neighborhoods a few times through the next few years, and so often, we were each the single familiar face in one another’s world. This shifting went on, in one way or another, until we entered our teens. At the height of our life as wanderers, we found ourselves in East Germany, where our mother sang in night clubs and stage shows, on a series on month-long contracts. We stayed in small hotels, and my brother and I would meet the local kids, and learn their games and a few new words. Once we taught a group of boys how to play baseball, in an empty lot in Leipzig, and a small crowd gathered to watch.



Our parents were there with us, but much of the time Rhett and I felt like it was us two against the world. Not ‘against’ in the sense that there was any painful struggle to it. Merely in the sense that everything outside of us was different, and only we knew who we were and where we’d come from. And no one else could ever understand all that. Why even try to explain. We had each other. And it was wonderful! We grew up feeling that, despite any differences, we were sharing one journey, one adventure, one perspective on the big world that lay ahead and all around us. It was one long adventure, and the two of us, the ever successful protagonists in some epic saga.

We moved and moved again, lived with one parent then the other, watched them become disaffected, then divorce, all the while sharing our whispered conversations in our bedroom when the lights were out, our speculations about our fate and what lay ahead. And all the while, Rhett was my protector, my biggest fan, my confidant, my guide.

At one point, we were in a couple of professional stage plays, sharing the same rolls on alternating nights, and bringing our very different energies and personas to the roles. That experience is a great metaphor for how we felt about our connected destinies. However different we were, we knew that we shared a path unique to ourselves, and not translatable to others. Trust, devotion, love. I learned the depths of those emotions from my brother, through those years of growing up.

Eventually, our lives settled. We wound up back in New York, with our father. A few years in the same place led to a renewed sense of home, to new friends who became old friends. We began to develop in our separate and individual ways. Rhett played basketball. I joined the school orchestra. I read books. He caroused with his buddies. So there came a point during our teens when my brother and I didn’t have much to do with each other. We were each too involved in finding and furnishing our niches in life. I remember feeling that he just didn’t fit into mine very well. I went away to school first; he did the same, a year or so later. And that was when one of the differences in us really began to assert itself.

My response to, first, leaving the extended family behind in Detroit, and then, the dissolution of our parents’ marriage, was to try to divorce myself from family altogether. I decided to go it alone, to let relations with family weaken and fall away. But Rhett’s response was to develop a love and commitment to family that’s stronger than in almost anyone I know. He simply didn’t let me drift away. For years, no matter how ‘uppity’ and distant I got, he called, he tracked me down, he visited. He remained “Big Brother” – and friend, fan, supporter, guide. The comforting and mythic reality of “Us against the World” survived everything that might’ve pulled us apart.

I just turned sixty, and in July, Rhett will be sixty-two. And the bond between us remains as it ever was. Rhett Preston Kirby is the deepest expression of love and family that I know. He will forever be the most unique person in all my life. He is my only brother, so of course I have no basis of comparison. Yet and still, the heart has grounds for making claims that no logic or reason can undercut. I assert it because, in this life I have lived, it is true. Rhett is and has been the greatest brother I could ever have had. Without him...well, I just can’t imagine.

Time Travelling on a Tune

Over the last couple of days, I found a number of new links on the internet, to my Mom’s career as a singer in the 60s and 70s.

Mom was a preacher’s daughter, born in Ferndale, Michigan and raised in the north part of Detroit. Granddad and Tootsie (the nickname an older cousin bestowed on our Grandmother) lived off of 8 mile road, and the Mt. Beulah Baptist Church wasn’t far from there. Mom was a smart, imaginative, dreamer growing up. She sang in the church, but may have had more of an interest in writing, going so far as having a small chap book of poems printed when she was still in school. I know that she and her cousin Earl talked a lot about how they intended to travel the world when they grew up.

Her first steps away from home were going off to college, to Bluefield, West Virginia for a time, then to somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe. I don’t recall with certainty what she studied, but I know that she dropped out in her final year, to marry my Dad, a charming, sweet-talking man even now, in his late eighties. He’d run off from small town Indiana to the big city of Detroit, on the night of his high school graduation, and returned there after a couple of years in the military.

When he met my Mom, he romanced her hard, taking her to clubs and ball games and shows, and had even the serious Reverend Hardwrick so won over that they had use of the family car whenever they wanted. Mom put her other ambitions on the shelf for awhile, married Dad, had two kids, and before long, seeing the world seemed the furthest thing from possible.

But it wasn’t a very happy marriage. Dad liked the ladies more than a marriage could contain, and somewhere in there, Mom began to nurture the seed of her own liberation. The story is that the seed broke ground the day she was riding in an elevator and singing a tune to herself. There happened to be an agent in the elevator with her. He said something like, “Hey babe, you got some sweet pipes”. And next thing you know, Mom is doing gigs in local clubs, then going on weekend trips to Columbus and Cleveland.

From there, things changed pretty fast. Mom got called to New York, and went. Dad, after awhile, loaded my brother and I into the family car, and followed her there. A year or so later, she got a chance to travel to Berlin, to be part of an international revue titled, “Schwarz/Weiss” – Black/White, that featured black and white performers from several countries. She was supposed to be gone a couple of months, but the show was a hit and she emerged as its star. When the show kept getting extended, our ever game Dad loaded us up again and surprised Mom when we all appeared at her hotel room door.

We were actually a good family there for awhile, bouncing from city to city while Mom developed a reputation and a career. My brother and I learned German and thrilled at being intrepid explorers in foreign lands. Those were the Golden years of our childhood, and created a bond between us that nothing has ever weakened. Ever since then, I’ve felt sorry for the vast majority of chronologically close siblings who fail to nurture any sense of special devotion between them; but I’ve come to understand that my brother and I had blessed circumstances in which to do so.

Dad may be coming across as the bad guy in this story, but it didn’t end up so. There isn’t a bad guy, or a bad gal. When our parents saw that their marriage just wouldn’t work, they did the smart thing and ended it, before the grudges and arguments could become a fixture in our lives. He returned to New York, then did a round trip a year later to take my brother and I with him. The plan was that we’d go back and forth between them. But that never materialized.

Mom’s career peaked over the next few years. She finally travelled the world, as she’d always intended. The next time my brother and I spent substantial time with her was when she came through New York as the star entertainer on the around-the-world, maiden voyage of a luxury ocean liner. It was apparently just too complicated a life – professionally and personally – for her to feel she could adequately parent us. Which was absolutely the tragedy of my young life. But, on the flip side, my brother and I were fortunate enough to have a father who, despite the entreaties of relatives on both sides to allow them to raise us (because no single man, especially one who liked to play like James Kirby, and who worked nights, should be trying to raise no two kids all by himself in no New York City!) insisted that he was going to raise us himself and love doing it.

Of course there’s lots more to it. I will always be proud of Mom that, in the late 1950’s, she, a young, black woman, broke away from a narrow and unhappy life as a housewife, and turned herself into a globe-trotting, jet-setting, diva glamourpuss! The parts of that I shared with her are infinitely precious. Among my best memories are the times I’d come from school and have long, deep, searching, anything goes conversations with her, while she dressed and made herself up for her show that night. And I missed her enormously all those following years when she wasn’t around.

So you can imagine the thrill when, every now and then, when I do a google search, I discover a missing piece of Mom’s life. The last discovery came as a result of my brother finding some long lost photographs, and that spurring me into doing a routine search. Amazingly, these last finds include a few seconds’s worth of video, close ups of Mom singing, fronting a band and wearing a sleek, glittery gown and stole, and a curly, almost platinum wig. It’s a clip from some 1970 Eurocomedy, and she’s off-screen as the camera focuses on the antics of a nightclub’s patrons. But Wow! It’s about the first moving image I’ve had of my Mom since she died twenty years ago.

I’ll have to send a note to the person who posted the clip, thanking them. What a treasure! What a lovely, heart-warming gift, to see my Mom again, smiling, singing, doing her glam-glam thing!

Generations

My Great-Aunt Audrey lived comfortably on the borderlands of her memory. She spent her last years hardly moving from the upstairs bedroom she inhabited in the house of my Aunt Bernice, which was the hub of the family for more than two generations.

I don’t know exactly how old she was, but to me, when I was twenty, she seemed to be in that place in life of not wanting or needing very much. But she took great pleasure it seemed, from having one of us younguns stop in and sit with her for awhile, and listen while she shared some memory of us when we were younger, or even better, of our parents, whom we so much favoured when they were our age.

Aunt Audrey was the repository of family lore, the keeper of the otherwise forgotten details of how we’d come to be what we were, where we’d come from, and why, and of all the comic and tragic turns that had shaped and informed us. I wonder why we didn’t recognize that, and value it more. Most of us, of the generation of her children and grand-children, enjoyed our sits with her, half an hour or an hour at a time, listening as she shared her recollections of uncles and cousins and nieces, their comings and goings, careers and scandals, and their marriages and dalliances, and the children that resulted from them. But we didn’t value them enough.

I spent a month in Detroit, in the month around my twentieth birthday, right after I’d dropped out of University, restless and impatient about discovering all the newness I suspected was out in the world waiting for me. I arrived there straight from Mardi Gras, and would go on from there to Atlanta, then would hitchhike to San Francisco and live there for half a year before returning to academia to give it another try.

Ironically, only a month earlier, I’d begun to record a journal, which I maintain to this day. But I recorded hardly a paragraph about my month in Detroit, and not a word about all that Aunt Audrey shared with me. I was too busy looking for that newness, too caught up in the changes happening inside me to accord much value to the rambling memories of a sweet, old woman.

But I loved and enjoyed my Aunt Audrey. And so I sat with her many long hours during that month. And She told me how this great-uncle had come to Detroit from North Carolina in the forties, and another from Georgia in the fifties. She spoke of the family from Oklahoma whose daughter had married her brother and then become a favorite aunt to most of her own nieces and nephews.

According to my great Aunt, the family had produced business people and craftsmen, hoboes and preachers (my maternal grand-father, her sister’s husband, had been both in his time), gamblers, musicians and crooks. Most of her memory sessions began with a detail, then took off into a broad sweep of family lore. She’d start in about how her sister Birdie loved music and to go to parties, and then remember that their older brother John loved music too, but didn’t care for parties and would only sing in church, which was something he got from their mom, a real church lady, who kept herself occupied as a seamstress, she had such a talent that way. And how she wasn’t so much of a cook, but she had this way of baking biscuits, different because in her childhood she’d been raised in Louisiana, and how their Daddy liked her biscuits fine, but always complained that she didn’t fry chicken right, the way they did in Alabama, where he’d been raised. And how you could always recognize a person from Alabama from the way they pronounced their ‘r’s, drawing them out – “aw-ruh” they’d say. But one cousin had come North determined to leave everything about the South behind him, so had worked hard to speak like the city folk, and so managed to ‘pass’ in that way. But others had been light skinned enough to ‘pass’ the other way, leaving their connection to the family entirely behind and disappearing into the white world.

It was Aunt Audrey that told me where some of the white blood had come into the family lines, in those days before the ending of slavery, and right after, usually some white man with a black woman, but not always: a white woman had born the child of one of my ancestors, then left the child to grow up in an orphanage.

I was most fascinated by her claim that one of our ancestors had been a “full blooded Indian”, and that another had come to America as a slave from Madagascar. She had some speculations about where in the family tree these two were to be found, and some few added details about their lives, but it never occurred to me then to write them down.

My Aunt died before I ever set foot in Detroit again. By that time, I was more aware of the importance of what she’d shared with me. But when I asked others in the family what tribe our native ancestor had belonged to, they knew nothing of him. And when I asked how it was a slave had been brought here from Madagascar – far off any slave trade route I’d ever heard about – they recalled nothing of that story either.

Many times since losing my Great Aunt, I’ve wondered about all the family history I do not know. I have no details to speak of that pre-date the generation of my grandparents. Of my eight Great Grandparents, I have the name of one, not stored in my faulty memory this time, but recorded in a notebook after a talk with another elder from another branch of the family.

And I’ve come to realize that this isn’t uncommon. Occasionally, I’ve met an individual with a reckoning of their ancestry back as far as two centuries or more. But always, it’s a history of merely one strand of their ancestry. That is, one strand of two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen greatgrands, thirty-two, sixty-four, one-hundred-twenty-eight, two-hundred-fifty-six, and on and on and on. Really, that amounts to not knowing one’s history at all.

On the other hand, there was a claim issued in a scientific study a few years back, that everyone on earth shares kinship, that we all have common ancestry. Somewhere in the past, as those familial inputs double with every generation, our connections get broader and broader, to the point where the numbers of direct ancestors is larger than the population of the world at a given time. It's only common sense, really. Whatever beliefs you have about the 'how' of it, the human population must have started off very small, so we all had to come from a common ancestry. An ancestry that spread itself with every generation, to the point where distant cousins could meet and marry with no sign or notion that they were related. Meaning that we are all multiply related.

Imagine the fascinating web, if each of us could go back even a hundred years or so, to know all we wish to know about each of our eight great-grandparents, or the sixteen that parented them!

I regret that I didn’t attend more carefully to the reminiscing of my Great Aunt Audrey. But even without the details, she left me with a great deal. She stimulated a wonder about the past and its connection to the present that has stayed with me. To this day, I wonder about the African, enslaved in Madagascar and carried half a world away, where he generated a line of descendants that eventually led to me. And I wonder about that Native American, and at the connection he made with a Black woman that led to them having children, mingling their bloodlines in my veins.

And I cannot think of them without speculating for a brief moment about all the others I know nothing about at all. Who might they be? What were their stories? And what an amazing thing it is to think that I am, in some small way, a distillation of all of those myriad stories, and the lived lives behind them.

Thank You, Aunt Audrey!