It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  names in America and suddenly—as cleanly

  as the air, you've lost

  your name … “6

  6.

  Our second baby girl was born May 28, 2002. It was my fortieth birthday. Elanna proclaimed immediately she would select a name. Thank God.

  After Adanya, I knew finding a special name would be complex. But I also knew that if one child has a unique name, all of your children should have unique names. You don't name one child Spartacus and then turn around and name the next one Jim.

  But what name? I kept wondering. I was out of names. Another African name? A name from a famous African-American? What about Harriet Tubman Gilmore? Maya Angelou Gil-more? Fannie Lou Hamer Gilmore? It was mind-boggling. Years ago I met a Black guy named Crispus Attucks Davis. He was very proud of his name. He also told me he had just got out of jail after doing nineteen years.

  Elanna warmed up to one name eventually: Lirit.

  She came across Lirit in one of the many name books we had been carting around. Lirit means “poetic” in Hebrew and is the name of a Hebrew Writers’ Association and its online literary journal. It caught both of us. I am a poet, so the name was alive. I had not heard of it either.

  My second child, born on my fortieth birthday, is named Lirit because her father is a poet.

  7.

  On Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006, Elanna gave birth to another African-American baby girl. The child experienced some minor complications and was admitted to the hospital for a week in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). This gave us time to think about names.

  I told Elanna days before that I only had one name and that if she did not like the name, she could name the child anything she wanted. It was her show this time; it was tough. I knew now why there were millions of Ashleys and Hannahs in the world.

  After just two days in the NICU, the wonderful hospital nurses fell in love with Baby Gilmore No. 3 and wanted to put her name on her incubator. We had no idea what to name her. We stalled them.

  Finally, Elanna asked me for the name I had written down weeks ago.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “What is it?”

  “Pannonica.”

  She was speechless.

  That evening Baby Gilmore No. 3 finally had a nametag outside her crib: “PANNONICA.” She was released a few days later, doing well.

  The week she came home, I sent out a mass e-mail telling our friends and family the significance of the name:

  “Pannonica” is a song composed by jazz pianist Thelonious Monk & named after Pannonica de Koenigswarter who was named after a butterfly that her father had once tried to catch. A descendant of the English branch of the Rothschild family, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, or “Nica”… was considered as one of the most important patrons of modern jazz musicians. Not long after marrying Jules de Koenigswarter, a pilot during the war who joined the French diplomatic corps, Nica and her husband moved to Mexico City. She quickly became disinterested in Mexico and, evidently, her marriage, and in 1951 headed to New York City, where she rented a suite at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifih Avenue. She plunged into the New York jazz scene, attracting scores of musicians to her apartment for rest, relaxation … and impromptu jam sessions. Quickly she became somewhat of a patron to jazz musicians. … Her suite at the Stanhope, unfortunately, is perhaps best known for being the place where Charlie Parker died in 1955. Because of Parker's death, the baroness was forced to leave the Stanhope, so she took up residence at the Bolivar Hotel, where she lived for many years. Thelonious Monk's composition “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” was named for the hotel. … Nica first met Monk in Paris in June 1954… introduced to Monk backstage by a mutual friend—pianist Mary Lou Williams. … In 1972, when Monk became so ill that he needed special attention, he moved into a room in the baroness's New Jersey home.

  8.

  My girls will get calls for job interviews. When I tell people what Adanya means, they immediately fall in love with the name. People will think Lirit is Jewish because her wonderful name is Hebrew in origin. Pannonica will fool them all; they will wonder if she is, in fact, one of the Rothschilds. Some will think she is a jazz lover.

  Our girls do not have to worry. They love their names; their names love them. We, African-Americans, are all becoming something more each day here in America, and now naming, for special meaning, is still the ultimate statement of love and freedom.

  Isaiah 9:6 reads “For unto us a child is born …”

  Howard Fast, 1914—2003, writer, is considered a “literary phenomenon.” He is the author of approximately eighty books, including Spartacus, the legendary story of a slave rebellion against the Roman Empire. However, Fast is also known for being labeled a Communist during the Red Scare period of the 1950s and being jailed for refusing to testify at hearings convened by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  http://www.nber.org.

  W.E.B. DuBois, the great writer, sociologist, political thinker, and race man, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He died in Africa in 1963.

  Haki Madhubuti, poet, writer, and cofounder of Third World Press in 1967, was born on February 23, 1942.

  Sam Hamod, Dying with the Wrong Name (Anthe Publications, 1980).

  Grandpa Dutstun

  SIMONE BOSTIC

  IT TOOK ME twenty years before I could think of my paternal grandfather as Grandpa. It took twenty years for me to feel compassion for him, to view him as a person and acknowledge that though we never had a traditional relationship, he made a contribution to my life and to the person that I have become. Twenty years after he was cold and dead I saw him staring back at me from my mirror. I had to first face the sting of life, love, and loss too, though not absolve him from his sins, forgive him and understand the factors that could have made him the person he was and how he related to the person that I am. The majority of that time my view of him was through the eyes of a child and overshadowed by one especially vivid memory of him that I have relived in one form or another in my nightmares over thirty years.

  I was five years old and I loved to count.

  “One. Two. Three. Four.” I counted aloud each narrow step that led to our house at the top of the hill. I already knew that there were eighty-five—eighty-seven if you counted the triangular step at the turn and the extra step that I had to make on the side because my legs could not make it up the knee-high step in front of Ms. Linda's house. Sometimes I forgot to count the sixties and seventies and so ended up with over a hundred. One day, I would bound up the steps two and three at a time like my sisters, Tonia and Anne; then I would only have to count up to twenty.

  “Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.” I waved at my mother. She was almost to the top, being better at navigating the rough, uneven risers, some little more than stones held in place by poorly mixed concrete or a piece of lat or anchored by rebar and filled in with dirt. With a houseful of work and two other children, Mummy did not have the time to count steps with me, though she sometimes took time-out to humor me.

  The narrow passage was little more than an alley linking Barton Lane and Layan Hill, parallel thoroughfares that would otherwise be half an hour apart. In most places, two grown people could not pass each other abreast without either rubbing shoulders or having one step up onto the drains that ran most of its length on either side. Short, stubborn tufts of grass and shining bush sprang up close to concrete walls rising like a bull run on either side, effectively channeling travelers forward.

  “Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.” I was not the most graceful duck on the pond; dirt was attracted to me, and on more than one occasion, I had tripped and fallen on these steps. This time, however, I kept my eyes on my feet and my hand stretched out to one side to keep my balance. I did not want to fall or dirty my dress and shoes because I had promised my mother to make a special effort to keep myself clean—especially the shoes that she had had my sister Anne whiten with liquid polish till th
ey glowed.

  “Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-thr—” Something made me raise my gaze to locate my mother. It was not so much a noise or a movement as a ripple that runs over the surface of the soul, a sixth sense, like a gazelle has when a lion materializes out of the shadows. He stood there. Eight feet tall. He was dressed in the black three-piece suit and felt hat ensemble that he wore when he went out—whether it was to the doctor, a funeral, or out drinking in the local rum shop. How many times had he used this hat's predecessors to beat us or chase my siblings and me away, like stray dogs begging for scraps? He called out a greeting to Ms. Linda and began his descent. A chill caressed my skin. Sweat prickled the back of my knees. My belly spasmed and bubbled. Gas seeped from my body. Spittle crept down my throat, choking me, like strands of hair accidentally swallowed. I searched for my mother. My eyes locked with hers, and I found them a mirror of my emotions. She stood there—frozen. She had already passed his gate and he was sandwiched between us.

  Like an agouti cornered by the venomous Mapipire Za-nana, I searched in vain for an escape. I pivoted to head downward, but he was gaining on me like an avalanche. There was no way that I could make it back down fast enough. I was trapped. Panic fluttered in my chest and gripped my throat in its vise as my body shivered under the blazing sun. I stepped into the canal, pushing myself against the sloppily whitewashed wall in an attempt to make myself flat. Or disappear. Anything but just stand there! My shoes slipped and skidded in the mossy muck of the canal, and I clawed at the wall to regain footing. Rough, broken, clay bricks audibly rasped the cotton of my dress, scraped the backs of my thighs, and pulled at my hair; they bit into my little palms as I forced myself back against them. I could go no further. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and waited.

  To the rhythm of his falling feet and my heart pulsing in my head, he brushed past me. I smelled him more than I felt him. A musky mix of male, must, and mold with the sickly-sweet smell of the rum that my father swore ran through his veins in such quantities that he “would take a long time to rotten when the devil called him.” The scent seeped from his pores, assailing me as surely as the sting of his hat. It lingered, mixing with my sweat and sticking to my skin, to the walls of my nostrils, filling my mouth and throat even after he had long since disappeared from view.

  I opened my eyes. He was gone. Swallowing the taste of his smell, I inhaled deeply. Did he look at me? Did he look at her? Did he even notice me? What had transpired in the couple minutes that it took for him to pass me by? I didn't know.

  “Come on, Moonie babe,” my mother coaxed.

  I slowly disengaged myself from my perch and dusted the tiny concrete chips from where they were embedded in the soft flesh of my burning palms. I examined the grid of scrapes and welts that crisscrossed its surface and wiped the blood and grit on the back of my skirt. My hands came back white—coated with dust and flakes of paint that marked the back of my dress where my body made violent contact with the wall. My white shoes were now green while milky rivulets streaked the canal, slowly mixing with wastewater. Hot tears pooled between my eyelids. I looked toward home, lowered my head, and swaddled in a blanket of shame, silently resumed my ascent, accompanied by the warm, rhythmic swish of the urine puddled in my shoes.

  This incident epitomized the relationship between my grandfather and me. His mere presence was cause for terror. In the years to follow, my mother often recounted this incident while I actively avoided any close contact with him, limiting our interaction to my peeking at him through the crack in the curtains. When inebriated, which seemed more often than not, he would empty his small two-room house of all furniture and, lining them up, proceed to give them a sound whipping while he informed them or one of his invisible nemeses, of what he intended to do to their mothers’ reproductive organs. Some days he would turn his attention upward to where our house stood and berate my mother, who remained stoic and unresponsive to his barrage of venom. He seemed to have a hate for my mother and would encourage my father to mistreat her and, by extension, us.

  When sober, he was a workaholic who, having nothing else to do and for reasons known only to himself, manually cut the banks that bordered his property, terracing the hill and expanding his boundaries at the expense and irritation of his neighbors. With the speed of a tractor and without the aid of machinery he tirelessly moved tons of stone and earth from the high bank on one side of the yard to the other. My father called him Dirtstone—pronounced “Dutstun” for emphasis.

  The only knowledge that I had of his past was what I quilted from stories that I had overheard or was told by people who knew him as a human being. He was born Gladstone Bostic in St. Lucy, Barbados. His father, a European, after marrying and raising a family with “an acceptable woman of his own social status,” in his old age married a Black woman young enough to be his daughter. The family lived on preabo-lition lands, to the chagrin of the gentile community. As was the state of justice in the turn of the century, when his father died, his young wife and their two dark-skinned sons were disinherited by the claims of his full-blooded White siblings who were decades his senior. When his mother passed, the two brothers migrated to Trinidad. I was proud of my heritage and especially proud of my great-grandfather. In an age where it was acceptable for a man to have a Black mistress but totally unheard of to marry one, he defied society. I wondered how a man of such strong character could spawn the likes of Dutstun. Now, as I have faced discrimination, I can only imagine how growing up a “molasses mulatto” in colonial society could be damaging to a person's psyche.

  My cousins, however, were blessed with Bostic looks with their “good” tawny hair, light eyes, and cafe au lait coloration. Every day they hustled up to my grandfather's house, where they each got a quarter for tuckshop money while our little fingers scrounged in the recesses of the clay bricks and corners of our house for stray pennies to take like trophies to my mother, who used them to purchase rice or sugar to sweeten our flour porridge. He would become enraged if we played with his other grandchildren, so we devised a sign to warn of his approach. The lookout would signal “Cross Coming,” and they would scamper into their house while we would retreat up the hill to the safety of ours.

  “These children who you chasing like strangers,” I overheard Ms. Linda warn him gravely, “these are the selfsame children that you going to be begging for one day.”

  When asked why he favored one set of grandchildren over the other when we looked more like him, he told her, “My daughter's children I know are mine. I can never be sure about my sons'.” I, however, believed that we were a constant reminder of his shortcoming though he seemed to fail to realize that his children leaned toward his chocolate coloring more than to the cream of his wife. One day, from my vantage point lurking in the shadows, I overheard someone gossiping that “the African woman's blood” was strong in us, but in my childhood's over-imagination I concocted that, denied her rightful place in life, she refused to let the family forget that she was here in death, and secretly I reveled in being her coconspirator.

  Ms. Linda was the only person that I knew who knew both my grandparents when they were young. She had lived in the neighborhood since she got married at the age of fourteen. The only immediate neighbor not related by blood, she piled me with warm coconut tarts as I begged her for stories about my grandmother. She filled my head with her memories, insisting that in their heyday my grandparents were the star couple. She was the architect and he the contractor that brought her visions to life, and she was his life. I had seen her pale face staring back at me from a faded black-and-white photograph, but it was in the houses that she designed that I felt her presence. She was from a good family in Panama and to her mother's horror married my grandfather. From all accounts she was happy and he was a totally different man from the one that I saw every day. She was headstrong and fun-loving and ambitious. In the few years that they were married she had a house built for each of her children during her pregnancy so that each child was born owning propert
y. It was this determination that eventually killed her. While moving into their new house just before the birth of their fifth child she lifted a heavy object and hemorrhaged to death, taking her unborn baby with her. My grandfather was never the same. Both my grandparents died that day; his body continued respiration for thirty-plus years more, but his heart was buried with her. The rest of him he buried in drink.

  Dad said that his father quit his job in order to stay at home and take care of his four young children, who then ranged in age from two to six. He spoke of how he tried to get married again in order to give his children a mother, but he and his bride had a legendary quarrel at their wedding reception about her cake; she left him after less than two weeks of “wedded bliss.” The family became locked in a downward spiral. The children were left to raise themselves whenever he worked, and increasingly larger portions of the money went to drinks. He systematically lost the family's property—and status—in games of cards except for one house that my aunt was able to buy back from a debtor with the earnings from her first job.

  Their stories were contradicted by the monster that I saw before me, so in all good sense, I decided to keep my distance. That was until my mother called us three girls and informed us that our grandpa was sick and no matter how we felt about him or what he had done to us in the not-so-distant past, he was family and it was our duty to take care of him. We three, with my sister Anne in the lead, dusted, scrubbed, and swept. We cleaned every corner of his house, washed his clothes, and ensured that his mug was clean every morning. Ironically the grandchildren whom he showered with affection scorned having anything to do with him in his illness. Grudgingly, one of the girls would take him a mug of hot chocolate every morning and, unceremoniously, pour the piping hot beverage into the cold, curdled remains from the day before.