Momma

A few days ago,  I found out that a woman, of whom I thought was my older sister.  Is actually my mother. Ain’t that a kick in the ass?  The truth slipped out during our annual Mother’s Day gathering.  I thought that they were all just drunk, and I dismissed it immediately, but later on that week,  I called my “niece” Lisa and told her what had been said around the dinner table, (she had to work at the Emergency Room at our District Hospital that weekend, as she is a trauma nurse). Lisa said that she didn’t know anything about the rumor, only that she had heard whispers of that before.  A couple of days afterward, I called my “sister” Minnie and asked her about the rumor of her being my mother.  She just laughed it off, said that was drunk talk.  She said that I knew that when our family gets enough Wild Turkey in their system,  that we’re subject to say anything. We talked about another thirty minutes, and we hung up.  My sister is 14 years older than me, and for the first time,  she had told me and something I didn’t believe a word that she had said.  But I just let it go, and that was the way it remained until Lisa came over with a DNA test from her job.  Lisa had always tried to be the truth seeker in the family, and the rumor must have bothered me more than I would have admitted, because Lisa caught the angst in my voice when told her what had been said.  So she brought the test to hopefully resolve my fear of the unknown. I have always had a special place in my heart for Lisa.

I thought it was going to be a blood test, hell, I’d even rolled up my sleeve.  Lisa laughed at my rolled up shirtsleeve, and asked me what century I was living in.  But the last time I took a test for paternity was 1979, for my oldest daughter’s custody hearing.  What the hell do I know?  Lisa produced this long Q-tip looking thing and told me to open my mouth.  She took a swab of my saliva, and put it in a protective case. After sealing it, she wrote on it, and had me sign a form.  Then she did the same to herself, and signed,sealed, and delivered hers into the test kit. I asked why she used the test kit on herself, how was she going to test Minnie’s DNA?  She explained that he was going to check Minnie’s DNA by taking her own,  she said that her test should show the same maternal DNA as Minnie. If Lisa’s and my DNA show the same maternal match, then everybody in the family,  has been lying to me for 52 years.  Ten very long days went by,  without a word from the lab that was handling the test.

I knew what Lisa was going say when I saw her silver BMW parked in my driveway.  Getting out of my truck that day was the hardest thing that I had ever done.  Momma, Pop, and all my 3 sisters had lied to me.  The only thing that was left to discover,  was why they did this? Not that it really matters, now.  But what could have been so bad, that it required this kind of cloak and dagger secrecy?  I went on in the house, making sure that I left my lunch pail in the mud room, as my wife had brow beat me into submission, so that I did it every day when I got off work.  I absent mindedly put it on her kitchen sink one day, and she went ballistic.  Everyone is worried about my cholesterol,  I have to take this rabbit food to work with me each day. I went on through the house and found my “niece” in the study with my wife. They both had that “undertaker’s” look on their faces, I said hello to them as I headed behind the bar to get myself a cold, low cholesterol beer.  Lisa began the looming pity party when she said “Uncl-…..Jed……I have some bad news for you.  Without waiting, I finished her sentence. “Your mother is my mother! And that means that they all lied to my face for 52 years!” Lisa looked at me and then away.  Then she looked back at me and said ” I’m afraid so.”

We sat without talking for a few minutes.  It was my wife Carolyn that finally broke the silence.  ” Minnie will have to be confronted at some point.  Your Mom is 85 years old, but she still has all of her faculties. Your dad of course, will be little help if any, he has been in the nursing home for the last three years.  Most days he doesn’t know who he is, let alone what has happened over the last fifty years.  I drowned out what my wife Carolyn was saying,  my immediate thoughts were with my coming confrontation with “Momma” and Minnie.  Those two, in my mind were they ones who were the most responsible for the long-standing lie.  Those two, could have any point, told me the truth, but it seems that it was their intention, to carry the secret to their graves with them.  If I hadn’t been persistent, I would have never known that Minnie was my true mother.  Even though I wanted to get to the bottom of this, Lisa and Carolyn convinced me to give myself a few days to cool down before discussing with the rest of my family.  Namely Mom and Minnie, although Rita and Pearl were the older sisters, Momma probably swore them to secrecy long ago.

I took a few vacation days off from work and took the boat out to the lake.  I fished, drank beer and thought. I had ask Carolyn to come with me, but her philosophy was to avoid the “wild” as much as possible.  She would come out for a few hours, but never overnight.  Which I thought was ironic, because she had insisted that we bought the top of the line boat, with all the amenities, so that she would be comfortable whenever we took the boat out.  My eldest son came out on Saturday and stayed all day.  He asked about the situation with Grandma and Aunt Minnie.  I told him what I knew so far, and he again cautioned me not to react in anger because I didn’t know the reasons why they kept it a secret.  I told him that I would handle this matter with the utmost delicacy, and that any reasons they gave me would be thought over carefully.  When I brought him back to shore to get his truck, he asked me if I was okay.  I thought it was a rather peculiar question for him to ask me.  Sure, I was a little depressed by this news, but I wasn’t thinking about jumping overboard or something idiotic like that.  I responded “Yeah, I’m okay. Why do you ask me that?”   He said ” You know Mom sent me out here to check on you, she say that you have been down in the dumps since you found out about Granny and Minnie.”  I reassured him that I was okay and told him to tell his Mom that I was alright out here on the water.  As the sun fell on the lake, I called Carolyn and talked with her.  She said that she was coming out tomorrow after church service, so I could expect her about 1P.M. at the boat ramp. I told her that I loved her and that I would see her tomorrow.  After I hung up, I sat there on the deck,  and watched the moon rise until about eleven o’clock.

I came back to the boat ramp a little after one the next day.  I’d had an excellent morning fishing.  As I approached the dock, I could see Carolyn’s Escalade on the shore.  I parked the boat and moored it up to the dock.  As I finished the last of the ties, Carolyn, Momma, Minnie and my other two sisters came up the dock.  I have to admit I was surprised,  Mom had been out the lake only one other time, when we first got the boat.  I greeted them all as they boarded the boat, Pearl nearly fell in the water when she stepped her three hundred pound body off the dock.  She blurted out a “Help me Lord!” as she bounded onto the deck.  We took the boat out again,  they talked among themselves as I steered the boat.  Once I was back into my fishing spot, I dropped the anchor and baited my reels. I went back to rest of the family was gathered.

Momma started the conversation by saying ” We all know why we are here,  Jed you want to know why I never told you that Minnie is your birth mother.  It started out as a white lie in 1960.  Back in that time, a pregnant unmarried girl was a shame to a family.  It could cause you to lose your job, your housing, and even get you thrown out of church.  Abortion was out of the question, because that is a sin against God.  Minnie was too far along when we found out, that all we could do was hope that we could keep it a secret.  Minnie was always a fast, hot tail girl.   We come to find out that she had been doing grown up business since, she was eleven, and not just with the same boy.  We took Minnie out of school during the last four months of her pregnancy, because she was so big that we couldn’t hide it any more.  She went into labor in late July,  and I felt so sorry for her, being pregnant in the dead heat of summertime.  You were born at midwife’s clinic on the hottest day of the decade in Detroit Michigan in 1960.  Eight pounds, three ounces.  Back in those days, most colored folks had their babies at home.  To avoid the ugly treatment by white folks at the hospitals.  They even had segregated hospitals in the North, and even though we cooked, cleaned, and raised the children.  They considered us beneath them.  The mid-wife had a butcher’s meat scale to weigh the babies on.  and the mother and child had to go down to the Office of Vital Statistics and pay a dime to get a birth certificate.  I, of course had to register you as my own child, because as I have said, a scandal like that could cause our whole family to lose our livelihood.  Minnie returned to school the following fall, and I raised you.  Your Papa was so pleased to have a boy in family,  we had only had girls before.  He named you after his father, that he lost so long ago, down in Mississippi.  We kept custody of you for so long,  we sort of forgot that you were our grandchild. After awhile you had grown up to the point, that it didn’t make sense to tell you all of this.  Minnie left for the Job Corps at 16,  and when she graduated, she got sent to Baltimore Maryland.  She married Stewart out there and never moved back to Detroit until Stewart passed away in 2002.  We had held the secret for 42 years at that point,  and we had decided to leave it lay.

It was at this point, I looked over at Minnie with her head down cast.  She had not said a single word.  I could only imagine how she might be feeling, with all of the guilt pent-up within her.  I still felt a little miffed, but I reached out to her anyway.  We fell into each others arms and hugged for the first time as Mother and Son.  Through her tears, she said ” I am so sorry, Jed.”  Momma joined our embrace.  I fought back the tears that were aching to fall from my eyes.  Poppa had always said that it was unseemly for a man to cry.  That it showed weakness in a man’s spirit.  We talk until the the sun was nearly down, she told me that I looked like Clyde,  a young man that she used to go with.  She said that she never told him of me because his family moved after his father was killed in a barroom fight, over some money that his pop had bet.  Minnie said that she was four months pregnant with me then, and she was really begin to show.  Most colored people still believed in shotgun weddings at that time, and if she would have said his name,  he would have been obligated to marry her, under the threat of a loaded 12 gauge double barreled shotgun.  Minnie said she saw one of Clyde Pendergraft’s sisters in 1965, she said that Clyde got killed in Vietnam.  I never got to the point where I could call her “mother” or “mom”, even after a year or more of knowing that she birthed me.  I can’t seem to get the words out of my mouth.  We now have a fair relationship, but it will never be parent/child.  Poppa died a few months after our day on the boat, he never knew that I had found out the truth.  I think about what he might of said to me, if he knew that I had find out the family secret.  I could see him stare off into space, thoughtfully formulating a reply.  He would have come back with a witty response like, “Does this new knowledge going to change the law of gravity? Will it make a 100 pound cotton sack weigh 500 pounds at weigh in at the end of the day?”  I would probably answer no,  of course not.  He would say that it makes no difference then.  Life is too short,  to worry about things that don’t matter.  It’s like getting up in a tree in summer time and raking the leaves while they are still attached to the tree.  A waste of time and effort.  I smiled,  when I thought of him breaking it down in such a way that even a dummy could understand it.  He had a way of making things simple, cutting through the red tape of any situation and rendering it to it’s basics.  Even though he would not know me when I went to visit him at the nursing home, I miss his deep quiet voice as he would tell about his boyhood in Mississippi.  I go out to the cemetery and talk to him twice a month.  Sometimes, I think I can even hear his voice…….