[Luke 22: 63-65. The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him. They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?” And they reviled him in saying many other things against him.”]
When my younger niece called and asked me if I knew my
mother’s real name, I was surprised that she was surprised. “It certainly is no
secret,” I told her. “Everybody knows that Mama made up her name.” In fact, I
went on to explain, all of her names were self-constructed, and done at a very
early age. Until that conversation I had
not made much of that fact. It was just the way it was. But then, has it not
ever been so, in all communities and cultures?
Names are bestowed at birth, or soon after, in many cultures. In some,
the name is whispered in the infant’s ear. At some point in the life of the
children of other cultures, the name is earned and confirmed by the community.
And especially in our American history, the names of immigrants were almost of
necessity or out of expediency or disdain changed to suit the interrogator or
the individual who wanted to assimilate.
In African American culture, the name of any individual can
be adaptive to the extreme. Just who was “Frederick Douglass” can become a
challenge to be puzzled out while reading any or all of his narratives.
Sojourner Truth. Malcom X. The central
characters in almost any foundation novel in African American literature (with
Morrison’s Song of Solomon setting
the standard for the naming ritual in hyper-drive).
So my mother named herself. Lolita Arralean Luster – not any
element of that name was bestowed upon her at her birth. And since she was not going to have “LAB” on
her license plate, she shifted her name to “Arralean Lolita [Brown]”. Only in
becoming reintroduced to her one piece of professional writing has it become
clearer to me – this woman removed the signs of victimhood from her identity –
if not entirely from her mind and spirit – by calling herself names of beauty
and music and freshness.
In the year before the destruction of the World Trade Center
buildings in New York City, my mother, fighting and resisting all the way,
finally created a brief memoir about a relative, her mother’s sister, “Aunt
Sue.” The essay was to be part of the
series that Nikki Giovanni had been editing, concerning relatives, from
grandfathers, to grandmothers, to uncles and then, to aunts. But the upheaval
of the times did not permit the publication of the collection about aunts. My
mother wrote the essay and, as she handed it to me, declared, “Don’t ever ask
me to do anything like this again. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to
do.” No. The hardest thing was surviving
the atrocities contained in the story from one part of her life. And in
surviving the other abuses of the body and soul that she endured before she was
ten years old. Physical abuse; sexual abuse; separation from her mother.
Whoever the world tried to make her become, she named herself; and in that act,
and in many other acts of survival, she made herself into her self.
Her essay is presented here, with a comment afterwards, to complicate with
a degree of cosmic irony, some of what followed after the story she put into my
hands.
********************************************
AUNT SUE
A few things I
remember and some I repeat from family conversation about “Aunt Sue.” May her soul rest in peace.
My mother said Aunt
Sue, her sister, persuaded her to bring me, at about age two or three months
(in early 1911), to Arkansas to live with her family. And she could work while Aunt Sue and her
family kept me.
Sometime during the
“sitting” period, Aunt Sue gave
me paregoric to keep me asleep as much as possible. Also her husband, John White, kicked me off
the porch with the statement to her “to get rid” of me as he didn’t want any
“bastards” with his
children. Presumably I was about 6
months old at the time. I was born in December, 1910.
My mother found a family by the name of
Partee who wanted me, so she handed me over and went back to Tennessee and
subsequently I was with Fannie Partee-Wiley until I was 10 years old. I lived in several cities before that age.
Aunt Sue and her
family got down on their luck and although Mother and I lived in a 3-room
house, she let Aunt Sue and her family take over all of the house, except
Mother and I were sleeping on a roll-away bed in the kitchen.
Aunt Sue had helped
to keep Mother and her husband separated by that time, so she took over. Mother worked in East St. Louis, Illinois, at
the “Glass Factory,” and supported all of us.
Mother got a vacation and she and I went to visit her brother Ben in Bemis, Tennessee, and while we were gone, Aunt Sue told the social workers that Mother was not a “fit mother,” so I was taken to the Detention Home and Mother was forced to go to court to get me back. I stayed in the home almost a year. I was in the seventh grade at the time, and I was in Miss India Maxwell’s homeroom at Lincoln School, in East St. Louis.
Years later, while
Mother and I lived with the original family who had taken me in (the
Partee-Wileys), she and Aunt Sue got into an argument. I don’t know all the
details, but Aunt Sue lived on South 25th Street and we lived on 26th
and Tudor, and Mother went to see Aunt Sue to try to clear the problem up and
Aunt Sue drew a gun on Mother while she stood on the front steps. The gun did not fire, which is why Mother
lived, but I don’t think the
argument was ever cleared up.
Years later, Aunt
Sue persuaded my grandmother (Alice Pirtle) to come and live with her, then
mistreated her and my grandmother left her and ended up living with Mother and
me and my family. While my grandmother
was still with Aunt Sue she “ran
away” and was found many miles from home and brought to us. Aunt Sue came to try to make her return but
she refused. My grandmother lived with
us until her death at the age of 101, in 1949.
Aunt Sue had a
daughter, same age as me, who had a son who was born blind. I was told that she would not let her keep
the child, but sent him to an institution for the “unfortunate,” where he was educated well enough to take
care of himself. When he left it, he had
been a switchboard operator, among other things. His father’s sister brought him to East St.
Louis to live with her. It is my
understanding that he receives a pension, so he is not a financial burden to
his aunt.
Many years later, I
had major surgery and vowed that if Aunt Sue died before I did I would not be
at her funeral. She died while I was
recuperating, so that ended the story. --ALB (2001)
********************************************
In the past I have
honored my father as my primary teacher in all things cultural. It was always
my intuition that my mother gave me the real writing skills, even though no one
in those days would have been able to tell me that the skill manifested itself
in how she used words in the storytelling, not necessarily in the
transcription. But, oh, the playing with language. A skill that still
circulates at every family gathering. She had the narrative impulse. And she
had the pain of life that could never be easily disclosed.
What is the irony?
When my family moved back to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1965, after nine
years of extreme hardship in Beloit, Wisconsin, the only house they could find
that was affordable, was the house where Aunt Sue had died (in 1954, I think).
The major surgery that my mother mentions was the removal of a cancerous
kidney. And yes, her recuperation period was long and delicate. Aunt Sue had
some condition that did not allow her to lay in a bed and sleep, so she had to
sit in a chair, during the night. Being
a child, myself, no more than ten years old, I did not interest myself in such
details. I know that my grandmother never stopped visiting her, and taking me
and my younger sister on those visits. We walked from 20th Street to
Kansas Avenue; and back. And I wondered how the old woman could endure so much
pain.
But now I know that
it was not about Aunt Sue’s pain, but the radical forgiveness that is spelled
out in my mother’s memoir – how her mother walked past the abuse, singing to
still her anxious heart. And how my mother went many steps further than the
Spiritual that says, “I told Jesus it would be all right if He change my
name.” What radical saints are our
ancestors. They told Jesus it would have to be all right because they were
going to change their names.
And live as they
defined themselves.
