The Late Arrival

When I came back from our family trip to Pierce City, Missouri a few years ago, my dear friend wanted to know all the details. We met for lunch and I told her that, yes, my daughter, my husband and I stood at the graveside of my third-great grandmother who was born in 1795. That we even took pi ctures of the expansive greenspace where my second great-grandfather’s house once stood before he and his step-son had a firefight with an angry mob who torched the place with them in it. It’s quiet, pastoral and unassuming. That we stood on the land my ancestors used to own before they were driven from it. And that, yes, we held vigil with a small group from the community on the very ground where an ancestor was lynched that night in 1901. You should really write a book about this , she nudged. Maybe if I can sort it all out in my head. It’s just a lot.   I mean, I wished I had a picture taken of my daughter and I by our maternal ancestor’s grave. I can still feel the rugged rock and rough...

My husband posted a pic collage on social media a few days back to commemorate Loving Day. Admittedly, I was less than enthusiastic considering, uh I don’t know…EVERYTHING. Yay. Loving Day. That’s when Aunt Mag and Uncle John popped up in my memory.  I grew up seeing their portrait on the family’s upright Mason & Hamlin piano; and, in passing at least once, my mom explained: Who Woulda Thought? That's your Aunt Mag and Uncle John. People said he was an old white man, but no one ever really talked about it. I was young enough to remember that and young enough to be puzzled. IT? What was IT, and why was IT a secret? I moved on from my confusion and, I guess innocence, until about FIVE YEARS AGO when I was introduced to Loving Day , and out of nowhere, the light broke like a two-by-four splintering on my head: OMG, nobody talked about Uncle John being white because his marriage to Aunt Mag was ILLEGAL. Aunt Mag was my grandmother’s aunt. Her family – m y family – survived a triple...

A true story. They always seem to come without warning out of the clear blue with some deep truth that's eluded me for most of my adult life. This was one of those times. I was feeling all high and mighty for encouraging my kiddo's discipline throughout the stay at home order (like that's not part of the parenting gig, but whatever). Well...what was I supposed to say? Seriously, what is it like to be a teen right now, nonetheless a teen who's busting her butt academically, much less one whose school year was shut down in the blink of an eye? But to hear her articulate MOM. I'M BLACK. THIS IS WHAT WE DO. And yes, she's white and black, but she's realized in her whole short seventeen years, she is perceived as black, so she embraces it. But still... THIS IS WHAT WE DO. I've always taken the THIS IS WHAT WE DO as a given. She's well aware of my family being at the center of a triple lynching and then starting a new life here in M...

At around 10:00 Sunday morning, I'm sitting on the porch half-broiling in Milwaukee's special brand of humidity while relaxing away the time before we have to pack up and head back to church for volunteering at the church picnic. *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * In between wiping beads of sweat from my upper lip, my thoughts drift back to seven days before when we were tackling that last pain-staking two hours from St. Louis to Joplin and then later, Pierce City. I can still feel the silent fatigue hanging over my husband, my daughter and me as we drove those 200 hundred miles. We finally arrived, settled in, had dinner and then worried whether that we'd have to take cover from an impending tornado as National Weather Service suggested. But life in Joplin went on, as it was going on in Pierce City. In fact, the sun was shining. So we went. Back in 2012, I serendipitously found Editor of the Monnet Times, Murray Bishoff on the internet. He had re...

The endless countryside is dotted with hay bales in random, yet organized rows. Then more hay bales, then meadows grasping on to the last greens of summers, then signs for rest stops, lodging and gas. Maybe a few cows and horses. Then more random hay bales. We're probably at mile 175 of a 600 mile road trip to Pierce City, Missouri. As rest/gas signs become fewer and fewer, my mind does what it always does: What would happen if we needed gas before the next exit? I imagine my daughter and I waiting roadside as my husband grows tinier in the distance, a lone figure walking into the sunrise with a telltale red gas container toward the next truck stop exit.  In this imagined reality, I will myself into not complaining or being passive-aggressive (my specialty) even in the face of being stranded gas-less on some abandoned stretch of beat-up road in Wisconsin...even though my husband could've just stopped for gas when we were at a half tank, and he does have  I am Capt...

The most I know about my grandmother on my mother's side is that she was born in Missouri, had a short temper and that she didn't suffer fools gladly. Mom said that on Saturdays, my grandmother would take mom and her siblings on the streetcar to Milwaukee's Central Library. On one of those trips my mom, who was short, was struggling to keep up with my tall grandmother's long strides. Evidently the sidewalk was bustling with people and mom was holding my grandmother's hand for dear life. Mom ultimately tripped up a curb and ran smack dab into the stomach of a tall man going in the opposite direction. All she heard upon impact was OOF . My grandmother impatiently stopped, looked down at my mom and and said Geneva, you oughta sue the city for building the sidewalk so close to your a$$. Yeah, she's smiling here but I still wouldn't mess with her  and I'm her granddaughter. Mom said the extended family gathered every summer someplace in Missour...

It's my favorite cuisine: German. Give me sauer braten, knackwurst and strawberry schaum torte. It's a Dr. Watts hymn sung by earnest deacons at Sunday devotionals before service starts. It's a Mighty Fortress sung at the right tempo at Reformation and Gott Ist De Liebe on Christmas. It's sweet potato pie spiced to perfection on Thanksgiving. All of that is home to me. I asked my daughter what home was to her. Insightful enough to realize that home can be a place or a state of mind, she asked, exactly how I defined home. I told her that her definition was up to her. She called upon memories of when she was young. She said she saw them as sunny faded Polaroids flecked with orange shimmers. She giggled and remembered the time when she believed she led her preschool class in a Happy Feet dance on the playground. Then her face grew dark when she recalled awkward situations at summer camp in the years that followed. Home is different for everyone --...

My daughter's friend's mom stood up and publicly acknowledged her daughter for who she was, the blessing she was to her parents and community, and then prayed for her daughter to keep the faith.  This was my very first  Quinceañera  mass and it was all in Spanish; and, even though my brain doesn't speak Spanish, my heart totally does. So the Baptist call and response tradition in me was all... via GIPHY BECAUSE I COULD FEEL EVERY WORD THIS KID'S MOM WAS SAYING even though she was speaking Spanish. The mom was barely five feet tall and wore a sparkly beige dress with blue accents that mimicked her daughter's dress. Tasteful, but not full-on mother of the bride or anything. I figured she and I were around the same age. We're in that phase when you shave your legs less and pluck your chin more. Both of us understand that we've got more years behind us than ahead. Both of us understand this isn't a drill -- it's real life. ...

Given the choice, I'd take singing a solo to millions over speaking to a crowd of fifty. With songs, there's a verse, a chorus, another verse and a chorus, maybe a coda and then I'm done. Speaking on the other hand, especially without notes, leaves the verse, chorus and coda to me and vulnerable to top-of-mind tangents liable to spur other tangents that could possibly last for hours. With that in mind, I told a story at tonight's event: nervous, shaking and determined to tell lost stories -- like those of the Fair Housing Marches held in our city a mere fifty years ago. Up until 1968, there was no forceful organized push-back against nefariously embedded red tape designed to keep brown folks in one corner of the city and white folks in the other. The march, the people who marched and the related untold histories were the centerpiece of this event that was held at Wisconsin's Black Historical Society . Oddly, and sadly enough, I really didn't know much...

The clock’s minute hand in the doctor’s office echoes as I wait clad in those flimsy paper gowns hastily designed for privacy. My feet swing back and forth nervously off the examination table's side. Soon enough there is a courtesy knock, a Hello and the doctor emerges. Just a few family history questions, says the doctor glancing at my chart. I see here you have a daughter. I nod and smile. What I’m about to ask isn’t just for our records, but for your daughter too – there may be hereditary conditions of which she should be aware. That hits me hard, and I volunteer information in rapid succession: Well, my mom, grandmother and great aunt died of cancer. I’m also realizing my mom dealt with depression, sometimes I struggle too. I make sure to watch what I eat – kind of – because people are overweight in my… STOP. STOP NOW the doctor interrupts. My feet haven’t stopped their nervous swing, and I shrink into a ball of bewilderment and irritation. The doctor continues, T...

Today's NaBloPoMo post also appears in Metroparent Milwaukee . I don’t remember mom enlisting me to help her with Thanksgiving dinner prep, it somehow happened naturally. It was an annual exercise that ultimately helped me absorb family recipes and replicate them now that I have a family of my own. We must have exchanged a thousand stories in between the stirring, chopping and tasting. Now, in the week before Thanksgiving, the stories of social and political unrest and extreme violence frighten us. But startling as they are - they are, unfortunately nothing new. History is a continuum of life-changing, civilization-changing events – many of them frightening. How I feel about it all is heavily shaped by motherhood; and sometimes, I wish I knew how my mom felt of about the social issues going on when my siblings and I were kids through her lens of motherhood. But throughout our years of Thanksgiving cooking and stories, those particular stories were never told because I ne...

People, places, odors, phrases can hit me in a visceral way. Dying autumn leaves, for instance, take me right back to the time my mother was fighting cancer. Phrases like No offense, BUT… shoots a reflexive, defensive clench from my jaw to spine. Whatever comes after BUT is never good and always offensive. In the past week, the infamous Spring Valley High School video was the visceral gut punch to me, and I just carried it around inside. I swallowed back tears seeing that girl tossed around like a rag doll. I stifled back the anger and exhaustion at history’s echoes of rationalizing abuse of brown and black bodies. I got quiet and relegated the incident and my feelings about it to another place within myself that was far enough to be safe and out of reach to write about in a post. I’m guessing that any time I write about race or my feelings about injustice or structures that uphold the unevenness of it all, one of the five people reading my words will roll their eyes an...

The more I think about it, the more I think we’re all on that plane with William Shatner flying through the Twilight Zone, seeing a monster on the wing that no one else does. It’s one of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes, not because the special effects were extraordinary, but because the episode tapped into our most primal fear and our most basic need: to be heard -- or at the very least acknowledged -- and the fear we won’t. Shatner’s character sees a creature on the plane's wing . At first he tries to convince himself it’s only a manifestation of nerves, and his fellow passenger and flight attendant assure him that’s the case. And he desperately wants it to be the case. Because he’d rather think he’s crazy then deal with the reality of the monster on the wing. The events playing out in Ferguson, Missouri on the heels of an unarmed black teen’s killing by a police officer convince me that in some way, all of us are riding along with Shatner on his Twilight Zone bo...

Percy . I only called him “Dad” selectively, usually when I needed something. My friends marveled that I had the balls to call my dad by his first name. But it wasn’t an act of rebellion, my mom called him Percy and we just parroted what she said. He never seemed to mind. It’s taken years to piece together who Percy really was – and how that same Percy intersected with Dad -- a title I instinctively started using only after the picture of who he was as a man, as a father, became clearer as I grew older. *** “Shell- LEE !” I hear the smile in his voice as he bellows his pet name for me up the stairs on my birthday morning. I race from my bedroom to the top of the stairs.  He’s standing at the base, a shadow pitched against sunlight behind him and balancing a faded blue Huffy 3-speed that was my ninth birthday present – a surprise. It’s easy to hear his smile and see his broad white grin, a sharp contrast to his dark chocolate skin because Percy didn’t smile a lot. ...