"DAVID BILLINGS!"

 “DAVID BILLINGS”

In mid-April, Caroline and I traveled to Baltimore to see Susan and to see the play that she directed at her university (UMBC).  The title of the play is “John Proctor Is the Villain,” an answer to Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” from the early 1950’s.  It is quite a good play – indeed, the Broadway version has just been nominated for 7 Tony awards.  Susan was prescient, and Caroline and I are hip because we have seen this highly regarded play, as well as being proud of Susan for her fine direction of the play.

Several of our friends came down to see the play, including my long-time friend David Billings and his spouse Margery Freeman, who traveled down from the Bronx to see us and to see the play.  David and I were remembering that we had known one another for 70 years!  I remember meeting him in the 4th grade at segregated Helena Junior High School (it was 4th-8th grade at that time).  He had moved from McComb, Mississippi, leaving his family home to go west.  Over the years, we became good friends.  I was drawn to him by his mind, by his sense of humor, and by his kind heart.  He was a “regular” guy – liked sports and played them, dated a lot, was religious and a solid citizen, and like me, believed in white supremacy.  I was more on the periphery – shy, didn’t date much, believing in white supremacy, but wavering a bit as I hit high school.  We hit it off because of our love of ideas and because we knew that there was a deeper and wider world out there.  He also loved being around my mother, who encouraged our nascent free thinking.

We went off to college – David to Ole Miss, me to Rhodes (then Southwestern at Memphis) – but we stayed in close touch.  We both had experiences in our first year that began to break down the hold that white supremacy had on our hearts and our minds.  David loved history and literature, although he was a math stud as well.  I was a math whiz, but my heart leaped when I took a philosophy course.  I remember sitting at Nick’s Cafe in Helena with David during Christmas break of our college sophomore years.  We had both done hard physical labor the summer before, and we were determined to do something different in this upcoming summer.  It was 1966, and through various contacts, we ended up being accepted to work in a summer youth program at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and we were ecstatic!  New York!  Getting out of the South, getting out of small-town Arkansas – finding a new world.

It was a huge leap – I don’t know that either of us would have gone up to NYC without the other, but together we felt like we could do it.  Indeed, a few nights before our departure to Brooklyn, I almost backed out.  I had begun dating a young woman in Helena, and in my lack of experience, I dreamed that we were falling in love.  I did not want to leave Helena and risk losing her.  I remember sitting on the hood of David’s car on a summer night on a dirt road in the middle of a cotton field, telling David that I did not think that I could go to Brooklyn because of my love for the young woman.  David stepped up that night and convinced me to follow that dream that we had discovered earlier in the year.  If the love was true, he said, it would be there when I returned.  “Besides,” he added, “this is a chance of a lifetime to see a brand new world – in New York City!”

We did go to Brooklyn in that summer of 1966, and it changed our lives forever.  The shackles of white supremacy began to loosen their hold on us, and before we returned to Arkansas at the end of that summer, we acknowledged to one another that we could not go home again – we were not the same.  As I have written elsewhere (see my most recent book “She Made A Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World”), when we came back to Helena, the whole world looked different.  We could no longer abide in the white supremacy that held us when we headed to Brooklyn, and for the next few years, David and I would be fellow pilgrims on a new journey towards liberation and wholeness – many miles to go before we slept, but on the journey, nonetheless.  David writes the story of his journey in his book :“Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life” – if you haven’t read it, get it and learn from it.

David and I have remained friends and colleagues and comrades over many decades, and I’ll be writing this year about some of our journeys together – seminary days, Nashville and New Orleans, anti-racism work, Ole Miss football and Nellie Fox and the dreaded Yankees (how could a man of such insight be a Yankees’ fan?), writing days, and now in our latter years, looking back over lifetimes of friendship, engagement and encouragement, pushing and pulling, supporting and celebrating one another and our life together.  We’ll have a chance to visit again when Caroline, Susan, and I spend a few days in NYC in late May on the way back from granddaughter Emma’s college graduation.  I look forward to that, but for now, I want to say:  Thank you, David, for all your gifts to me and to so many others!

"MOTHER'S DAY"

 “MOTHER’S DAY”

Last summer, Wipf and Stock published my book on my mother and me, entitled:  “She Made A Way:  Mother and Me in a Deep South World.”  For Mother’s Day, here is a tribute to my mother from that book.  If you haven’t gotten your copy, please do so.  It will make a great Mother’s Day gift!  

    As I have noted before, I was raised by a single mom, Mary Armour Stroupe, and we lived with my great-great aunt Bernice Higgins (I called her “Gran.”) My father abandoned my mother and me for another woman when I was an infant, and I never met him again until I was 23 – he never contacted me or ever came to see me. 

    Though we lived in a patriarchal world in Helena, Arkansas, my mother escaped much of it because she worked as a beautician at Ted’s Beauty Shop in downtown Helena at the other end of Porter Street, about a mile from our house.  I don’t know how or when Mother started that job at Ted’s – she was there when my memories began.  In my younger days, I thought that it was owned by a man named “Ted,” but Mother let me know that it was named after the woman who owned it – Ted Bostick.  I can remember nothing else about Ted, but as I write this, I am just realizing that such female ownership reinforced the sense that beauty shops in the 1950’s were a woman’s domain, whether one was classified as white or Black.  No males, except salesman, were to be found in those beauty shops.  

    Ted’s was located in the Cleburne Hotel, which had been opened in 1905 and named after Confederate General Patrick Cleburne.  It had a colonial revival style with huge columns in the front, facing Cherry Street, the main downtown street.  In its youth, it was quite a grand place, near the railroad depot for travelers to stay, housing barber and beauty shops and other stores. I would often stop by Ted’s Beauty Shop on my way home from school.  It was a fascinating place to me – a woman’s world!  All women beauty operators, and all kinds of white women there, getting their hair done, getting pampered, getting listened to, getting a chance to share their stories and local gossip, getting a chance to exhale and be accepted without the censoring or lustful eyes of men to put them in their places.  

    It was a refuge from patriarchy, even though they were often getting their hair done and having themselves made up for their men (and other women).  When I would enter Ted’s, there was an intriguing set of smells wafting through the air, a mixture of perfume, shampoo, dyes, chemicals, hair spray, and cigarette smoke.  As a young boy, the women there - both operators and customers – would fawn over me, and I loved the attention.  Part of it was my relationship to Mother, and part of it was that in my childhood, I was still in my innocent youth, a young male fascinated by being allowed to enter this women’s world, not yet so tainted by the crushing patriarchy (and sexuality) that awaited them outside the confines of the beauty shop. 

    I remember when I was about 6 years old, waiting on our front porch for Mother to come home from work.  We had no car, and she had to walk a mile home from Ted’s after being on her feet all day.  I was waiting with great anticipation because I wanted her to play catch with me, to toss the baseball around with me.  I remember feeling excited when I saw her - in her white beautician’s uniform and heavy white shoes - climb the big hill on Porter Street, now only about a block from our house.  I would run up to her and say, “Mama, let’s play catch!  I’ve been waiting a long time.”  I do not ever remember her saying to me: “Nibs, I’m just too tired. Let’s do it another day.”  My memory of her is that she always said “Yes, Nibs, let’s do that – let me change out of my uniform, and we’ll throw the ball around.”  

    I never realized what I was asking of her until I had my own kids – how tired she must have been, how stressed out she was with our tenuous financial situation, how she likely longed to sit down for a while and put her feet up.  Later in her life, I asked her if she ever said “No” to me when I asked her to play catch right after work, and she said: “Of course – often I was just too tired.”  I am intrigued that I do not remember those times – my memories are focused on the “Yes,” not the “No.”

       And, that’s how I remember my mother – the one who stayed, the one who loved me, the one who gave me life.  I know that some people have trouble with the idea of Mother’s Day – bad relations with their mothers, the sentimentalism and commercialization of Mother’s Day, those women unable to have children – but for me, it is an opportunity to say “Thank you” to my mother, to Gran, and to all the other women who provided mothering love to me.  It is also a reminder that all of us, regardless of our gender identity, are called to share that mothering love with one another – comforting, enduring, challenging, nurturing.  Let us be mothers one to the other.