The Color of Love
November 6, 2014 § 1 Comment
I was digging around in my Just Like Family content files recently and came across a letter-to-the-editor from a 1997 Utne Reader. I had always meant to locate the article, “The Color of Love,” to which it referred, and finally, with some effort, I found it in the archived magazine collection in the dusty basement of the local university. The letter-to-the-editor states the following:
As a black woman, I am weary of reading these oh-so-tender stories of white families who “love” their black maids. I have never heard a little black girl say, “I want to be a maid when I grow up.” I suspect that, just as Daniel Stolar [the author of “The Color of Love”] has never seen the upstairs of Lillie’s home, he has never envisioned the “upstairs” of her ambitions. After her years of faithful service, did he and his parents ever ask Lillie what her dreams were, and how they could help make them come true? If their “love” for Lillie was contingent on her continuing to clean up after them, then I respectfully suggest that a more appropriate title for Stolar’s article would be “The Color of Money.”
Lillie (no last name given) worked for Stolar’s family for 27 years, raising him as well as doing housework and cooking. When Stolar was 12, Lillie’s son James, an older playmate of Stolar’s, was imprisoned for murder—he drove the getaway car after his accomplice killed a white man in St. Louis’s Forest Park and was jailed for life. Stolar’s affluent and civic-minded family had led the effort to restore the majestic urban park, the second-largest in the country, which, for a period of time, was “surrounded by row upon row of dismal boarded-up tenements.” The kind of housing that Lillie lived in. The tall muscular James, who had tried out for the St. Louis Cardinals, was at once distant and attentive. He coached Stolar in baseball. James was his idol. In later years, Stolar questioned whether James’s coaching was nothing more than an extension of the servant-employer relationship his mother had with his parents. Although Stolar’s influential parents were able to convince the courts not put James on death row, he was later killed in prison by another inmate. After James’ death, Stolar was discomforted when Lillie would say that she had only one son now–him.
Since childhood, Stolar considered what to call Lillie—maid, housekeeper, nanny, even good-friend-of-the-family, or adopted aunt, or surrogate mother. His need to give title to Lillie arose from his “inability to explain her role in my life and my embarrassment about it. But these are not titles that clarify. In their very inadequacy, they point to an underlying cliché, colored perhaps with racist assumptions: Jewish white boy raised in a well-to-do inner-city enclave by professional parents with a black maid….”
Still, at 76 (her age in 1997 when the article was written) she came to work at his parents’ home two days a week. She continued to cook dinner, wash dishes and go on a weekly grocery-shopping trip. The family also used a professional maid service for what the parents called “the real cleaning.”
Stolar contemplates if he could be part of the murder instead of James. “No matter how I try, I can’t imagine arriving at the handball courts as James did that afternoon. It could never, ever have been me in the car with the black man who became a murderer that day. This is the real answer to the questions that troubled my 12-year-old mind. The reality of living 24 hours a day in a black man’s skin in north St. Louis is unimaginable to me. How could it be otherwise?”
Stolar visited Lillie often after she retired and states that after many visits he had never been upstairs in her house. The letter writer sees this as evidence that Lillie did not feel the intimacy toward him that he felt toward her. He says, “I’m still trying to figure out exactly what Lillie’s role has been in my life. Yes, I love her. Yes, I have depended on and confided in her. But have I really known her? Have we ever met on equal grounds?”
Stolar’s questions are, of course, rhetorical. He knows that he and Lillie could never meet on equal ground. Like his reflections on James, how could it be any other way? He was the son of affluent parents. She was one of many exploited black women in the middle of the 20th century caught up in someone else’s household, stereotyped in the figure of “Mammy.” At that time in the United States, Lillie was viewed as an inferior. She was there to cook and clean. And like many whites raised by African American women, Stolar felt guilt and shame, not knowing who his caretaker really was, what to call her or their relationship. The care-giving relationship would not have developed under any other conditions. Lillie and Stolar were as far apart as people could get even after a lifetime of connection. We can’t know how Lillie felt or what her dreams and aspirations were or whether her employers sought to help her reach some goal as the letter writer doubts. All we know is that she worked for Stolar’s family for 27 years and was in a relationship with them that was surely fraught with the confusions and sublimations characteristic of connections based on the inequalities of race and class.
The Split
November 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
I am pleased to introduce Lucia King who has posted the following essay about the African American woman who raised her and her experience of confronting the nuclear age. She, like many others, struggles with the conflicts and confusions, as well as the presence of love, that the relationship engendered, which continue to haunt her today, and the absurdity of the possibility of nuclear war. I think many will recognize and empathize with her experiences.
In addition to being an essayist, Lucia King is a poet. Her poem, A Litany On The Origins Of Our Nuclear Dilemma: 1981 is published below as part of this post after the “More” tag. Despite it being written in 1981, the themes of the poem are relevant today. She writes about loss in childhood. “Childhood–the great burial ground for human pain.” And “How does a child understand this skewed picture of life–this split?” And nuclear war’s verisimilitudes that converge with memories of childhood. ‘ “We are now a global nuclear community tied together by warheads checkering our global landscapes, not unlike those seemingly random memories from childhood landscapes.” ‘
* * * * * * * * *
Honoring Julia
by Lucia King
In 1981 I wrote a poem entitled “A Litany on the Origins of Our Nuclear Dilemma.” I wrote it around the time of significant negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear arms reduction I call “Litany” a therapy poem. I was engaged in family systems therapy when I wrote it, trying to give voice to the many dualities that had marked my childhood. As described in the poem, one of the dualities I was struggling with was how we treated the black woman my mother hired as our maid in 1948 a few months before I was born and who worked for my mother and father for 24 years until I and my three siblings left for college.
Julia Miller and Lucia’s Sister
As toddlers we couldn’t pronounce Julia, so we called her Ju-Ju. My experience with Ju-Ju, was loving and fun, and yes, she scolded us when we were naughty. However, from the perspective of the white, segregationist culture in which I was raised, my relationship with her in childhood created a painful duality I could not understand, and a duality in which, as an adult, I have harbored a lifetime of guilt. Ju-Ju fed me, changed my diapers, rocked me in the old wooden rocker, took me out on strolls, and listened to my ramblings when I came home from school–you get the picture–she was the other woman who mothered me. But I was taught that she was different from me, and therefore she, and those like her, had to be separate from me.
In the poem I refer to meals with Julia–she did not eat at the table with us. I took a little poetic license in that verse– Ju-Ju did eat at the table with us, but only when she attended us on family vacations. In our home Ju-Ju had her own bathroom off the kitchen. We called it, “Ju-Ju’s bathroom,” even though we used it. After the workday, she lived in a separate neighborhood across the tracks. She didn’t have children. I always thought of myself as her child, as well as my mother’s. As I learned in Memphis in the 50’s and 60’s of my childhood, there was a litany of do’s and don’ts that were supposed to separate Ju-Ju from me and vice versa. I was taught that Julia was not like me and I was not like her, all because of the color of her skin. Of course, no one ever said we were actually separate because of the color of my skin.
How does a child understand this skewed picture of life–this split? I couldn’t. I was confused by this picture. But I accepted it and from my culture learned to internalize that difference. That split in my culture became a split in my psyche. I had two mothers, one who loved me because I was hers, and another who loved me unconditionally even though I wasn’t hers.
In 2012 I signed up to take a course on the craft of writing poetry at a place called Writerhouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, near where I live. The last assignment the teacher gave us in that first eight-week session was to write a poem about my mother’s kitchen. Ju-Ju figured prominently in that poem. One poem about Ju-Ju led to other poems about my life with her, and other poems led to essays, my first one describing my experience in attending her funeral. Julia died in 1983. Now, thirty years after she died, Julia’s love is still sounding within, helping me let go of the guilt about the culture of segregation in which I was raised and allowing me to give voice to my unresolved grief and love for her–and to honor her.
Julia at the beach
In my exploration of Julia’s presence and meaning in my life, I realized I needed to read more about the culture and history of the south. I needed to come out of my silence and face the history of my place of birth and culture. In my research I have heard a term which was new to me–intergenerational trauma. Understanding its meaning and realizing that it applies to both the oppressed and oppressors has opened up space for me. At the time I wrote the poem, “A Litany on the Origins of Our Nuclear Dilemma” in 1981, I did not realize that my “therapy” poem was giving voice to that intergenerational trauma. I did understand my need for reconciliation and peace. This has been and is a lifetime journey for me. Here is “The Litany.” « Read the rest of this entry »
Llewellyn
May 13, 2013 § 3 Comments
Simms and Llewellyn Interview
In 1994, I conducted an interview with my first cousin, Simms Oliphant, about Llewellyn Rowe Hopkins—an African American woman who worked for our grandmother for 50 years. The interview was done as part of my early research for the documentary film, Shared History. Shared History is a PBS film about the connection of the descendants of the enslaved families at Woodlands Plantation and my family, who were the slave owners.
JUST LIKE FAMILY 