Life Frames: Tales of a Time

Acknowledgment and Dedication

Many have helped me on this journey. They are too numerous to name. So I won't. I dedicate this work to Bill, Sidney, Obie, and Jannie. I am sorry for not naming everybody, but you know who you are.

Prologue

Mine is not necessarily a remarkable story. Like most of us, I started life as a child; I survived this condition, and I have spent the majority of my life getting over it. This is the story of my journey.

My first seventeen years were spent in a small western Kentucky town where the accident of birth landed me in the integration generation. I went to college less than 50 miles away. I lived the civil rights movement, but it was the televised Watergate hearings that set my life mission—to work for a just society and for honest, responsive public institutions. That resolve led me to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.—then called Chocolate City—where I met like-minded young people, especially a committed group of women of color. We were united in our determination to make a difference in our country and society. We leaned on each other to achieve this and to make our voices heard—not only by the federal government and its leaders but also by both the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Self-righteous and somewhat arrogant, like most of the young, my sisters did do some good. In today’s climate, it appears much of that good is being undone and maligned.

But I ramble. This is not a political book, except in the sense that I lived through a time of great change that shaped me as it did many others. This book tells my story against that backdrop. I was driven to write it because I see today women, people of color, people of different religions, and others all under attack and fighting the same fights that my friends and I fought some decades before. I am heartbroken by the hate and rage that is tacitly accepted by our leaders. But I am buoyed by the outpouring of activism that I see in our young people. I feel a kinship that spans generations.

The stories in this book are personal, but the experience of struggling, overcoming, and finding one’s self is universal. Most people (including me) eventually arrive at some point of peace and resolve. If nothing else, we outlive our tormentors and have only to fight their lingering effects. Not that I speak lightly of these battles, mind you. Still, this is all my rather simplistic way of saying that we are born; we grow up; we live; and, along the way, we somehow manage to banish most if not all of our demons. If we are lucky, our existence has been of benefit to a person, family, community, country, or to the planet.

I offer this book to you, Dear Reader, with humility. There is no great profundity in its pages. It may offer some useful lessons and insights. Some will find parallels with things in their own lives. My salute to those who have been there. I also hope that everyone will find several laughs. For me, the ironic, bittersweet, and funny experiences are the ones that really stuck, and that helped most to make me who I am today. I hope the message is one of resilience and the ability of even a wounded psyche to triumph. There are 17 vignettes, which can be enjoyed separately or read through from beginning to end. As you read each one, let it remind you of something in your life. Then, tell your story to a loved one—a partner, a child, a family member, a friend.

So, enjoy.

VG Brooks, February 2018

Warning: I don’t know if this is a memoir in the strictest sense of the genre, but it certainly is memoir-like. I tried to pin down and confirm facts where I could, but this book relies mostly on my own faulty memory. Sometimes an event or experience just had no ending—or at least none I could recall—or sometimes there were gaps, and so I supplied my own fillers, trying to remain true to the feelings I had at the time. So be alerted: everything is true—except what isn’t. But all of it is a genuine reflection of my life experience.

1: Wild Beginnings: My Country Idyll

I was born in a ramshackle farm house on the outskirts of Hopkinsville, a mid-sized city in western Kentucky. The house belonged to my maternal grandparents, Daddy Ernest and Big Hattie Gregory. Daddy Ernest worked at the local grain mill, and Big Hattie was a much-in-demand cook for rich white families. It was my grandmother’s second marriage; before she married Daddy Ernest, she had been a Chilton. The older Chilton children were in constant conflict with the Gregory household. Ours was a three-generation household that consisted of my grandparents; their two youngest children, Margaret, my mother, and Fannie; and Fannie’s daughter, Diane; and me. I don’t know whether it was a happy household or not, but it was one in which I felt comfortable and loved. My father, Philip, was a frequent visitor. Later, Margaret’s other loves came by—Edward, briefly a lover and a lifelong friend; and, AB (initials only), whom she later married.

My life was full, usually joyous, and I lived with abandon—from the moment I opened my eyes each morning until late at night when I was forced into sleep. While the adults worked, I was cared for by my nurse, Gwen, who lived next door. She took care of every need, and I was treated like an adjunct family member, eating her mother’s good cooking and shadowing her father, Mr. Jack. Unlike children today, I was not over-scheduled, and I was able to explore the large yards, play with Geronimo, our dog, daydream, and play with my cousin. (Diane was cared for by Norma, Gwen’s sister.) Diane and I were each other’s given, each other’s most important thing, and we had no need for other children. When my grandfather came home, he and I were inseparable, and I was often perched drowsing on his lap while he rocked in his hickory rocking chair. Even when his legs grew numb, he refused to relinquish my sleep-heavy body.

I was a keen observer and curious about everything. It took me a long time to decide to walk with or to talk to anyone besides Gwen and Daddy Ernest. But I was so alive in my mind. According to family lore, when I finally decided to communicate with the outside world, I took off like a veteran, speaking sentences from the start. The things that I said showed I had been listening all those months. No crawling or dragging along on the floor for me, either. I wobbled and stood on the first try—or so I’m told. A bit surprised at this new perspective on the world, I somehow started stepping out. It was shaky, but still . . . never an unsure step or a faltering. Not for a second directionless. (I was trying to catch up with Daddy Ernest—fearing that he had left me behind.) I staggered Frankenstein-like, lurching forward, hands conducting an air symphony. Slow, cold molasses-snail-sloth speed. But still, I moved forward, faster and surer that I’d catch him. I was over 40 before it dawned on me that Daddy Ernest had been purposely teasing me onward, tricking me into literally taking the next step in my development. Now I believe these first steps set me on my way to achieving what he always had wanted for his children: to see them stride out boldly into the world. Unafraid. Bursting with unending curiosity. Breathing in the world. Knowing that I was entitled to every beautiful and wondrous thing that the earth—indeed, the universe—had to offer. I graced the earth with each step. (Or at least that’s my fantasy.)

When I was three, Aunt Fannie married Richard Simmons, a soldier and musician, and she and Diane moved to his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. I was heartbroken. For a while, Uncle Richard drove Fannie and Diane down to see us on weekends. As they packed to return home, I’d sometimes get in the car and refuse to move. Uncle Richard often would intervene and get permission for me to go with them and return the following weekend. Those trips later morphed into summer vacations for Diane and me together, split between St. Louis and Hopkinsville. By then, I was riding the train by myself from Hopkinsville to St. Louis. (It was a different time.) I’d go to St. Louis alone, but Margaret would come up at the end of the summer and ride back home with me. In the city, surrounded by a bushel of new cousins and aunts and uncles, Diane quickly grew beyond me. (Being part of a rapidly expanding family just never took for Aunt Fannie, who remained an outsider the rest of her life.)There were lots of diversions, and everyone in the city knew Uncle Richard. Diane also gained a larger audience, whose members could admire her new dresses and beauty. I was interested only in Diane. But it was during those summers that I watched Uncle Richard in his role as a family man—hard-working, soft-spoken, supportive. It was the first time I had experienced this sort of behavior, and for me, it set a standard for what a real man should be like. He was my ideal. He always called me Miss Lorraine. He worked several jobs to support his family, but he was also a successful jazz musician, a champion bowler, and a son and spirit of St. Louis (since his days as a high school athlete). Despite his widespread popularity, he remained old school, considering it his duty to not only provide but to shelter his family from the rampant racism in St. Louis and the surrounding areas. Even after death, he remains the most moral and selfless man I ever knew. He spawned many daydreams about my having a father like that in my own life. I fantasized that my dad was just like him. (My husband is a lot like him. Shortly after Bill and I married, my fondest wish came true: he and Uncle Richard met and liked each other, doubtlessly recognizing kindred spirits.) Despite my frequent stays in St. Louis, my wild-child life was centered in the big house on the outskirts of Hopkinsville.

In Hopkinsville, Daddy Ernest and Gwen created a world in which I mattered and in which I had power. Although Margaret (I never called her mother) was part of the household, she usually lived on the periphery of my universe. I, too, lived in this idyll for eight years. Although Daddy Ernest never complained, years of hard labor had taken a toll on his health, and he was failing. I don’t know exactly what eventually killed him, but I do know that it was a wasting death. I think he was helped along by undiagnosed maladies, including diabetes, as well as a married life of vinegar and bile. Big Hattie was also ill, with the kinds of chronic, deadly illnesses that seemed always to plague Southern black women who ransomed their lives to rich white families. I didn’t care much about her. She seemed to care even less about me and spoke about me usually just to complain about how light-skinned I was. She grew more and more ill, and she died with little fanfare or notice from me. Maybe it was just in my family, but in those days, children were kept ignorant of the fact and ritual of death. We were never at funerals. Certainly not at wakes. Many years later, I was surprised to learn that the traditions of some of my friends brought the fact, face, and body of death right into the house. They were not shut away like me, to emerge into a world in which the dead person’s existence has been brutally excised as though he or she has never been. I remember the silence that slapped against my inevitable question—Where’s Big Hattie? It did not take long for me to learn that important questions could not be asked aloud and that they could only be answered by own keen observation and study. Adults had no answers.

So I should not have been taken by surprise when it came to be my turn to disappear. It was Daddy Ernest who died, but I was the one who disappeared. I was eight years old. My day was typical. Times with Gwen and her family interspersed with me running in and out of the house. I remember it had been a long time since I sat on Daddy Ernest’s lap, which was my favorite seat in the house. He said he was tired, but I didn’t care. I was just happy being near him. More importantly, I knew he felt the same. But after supper one day, Margaret started putting all my clothes and toys and school books into boxes. She never said a word, and neither did anyone else. One of her male friends (I think it might have been AB; as I remember, he was on the scene at that point) came to the house and began loading the boxes into his car. Margaret threw a sweater around her shoulders (I remember it being green) and, with no good-byes to anyone, swept me out of the house and into the back seat of the car. I am stunned now that I said nothing. Until then, I had been