In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  “Aunt Jennie taught me to tie my shoes right there on the steps,” Toni Sims Scott said, pointing to the potted flowers near the porch. “I was five.”

  An older woman came to stand beside the girl watching us from the gate. They spoke to each other in Spanish.

  “I slept right up there, in the attic,” her father, John, said, pointing at the dormer window. “Damn, it was hot up there in the summer!”

  Bobby said, “All of us boys slept up there in the attic. You, me, General, Stanford, Bill Bagley. All those cardboard partitions! And Jennie put us to work! We worked at the ice house, right there on the corner.”

  The old ice house was a recycling center now, with Latino men wheeling carts full of aluminum cans and bottles.

  “She charged us rent,” Bobby said. “We had to haul ice all over town, on Robert’s flatbed truck. Those ice picks!”

  “But there was always food at Aunt Jennie’s,” John said, turning to my daughters. “We were so hungry in Tulsa that my mother lost the marrow in her bones. She was close to death.”

  I looked at that house, a classic style of bungalow found all over America in downtown or historic areas, built anywhere from the 1880s to 1925 or so: deep eaves over a concrete porch, redwood frame or shingles, lath and plaster, dormer windows in the attic, maybe three bedrooms, wavy original glass in the living room window facing us. My own house looked exactly like this when Dwayne and I bought it.

  But our house was only a mile from where we’d been born.

  The purchase of this house was the culmination of Jennie Stevenson’s badass life, as a woman who never bowed to any man. Jennie made this place a harbor for all her kin. I felt a thrill to see that porch.

  Later that day, we went to the California African American Museum, only about five miles from Jennie’s house, for the multimedia installation Bloodlines, created by Toni Sims Scott. In an exhibition room at the museum, about fifty relatives gathered to walk through the history of their lives.

  At the entry was a large ship hanging from the ceiling, fabricated from translucent photo images of enslaved people, survivors of the Middle Passage across the ocean, moving slightly in the air. Nearby was a wooden slave cabin built by Uncle John, who’d left his initials in the eaves of the rough-shingled roof of the single room. There were cotton plants lush with bolls nearby. Farther into the room was an elaborate and massive family tree, an actual tree with branches and leaves upon which were hung translucent reproductions of historic photographs of Hardimans—Minerva and her formerly enslaved parents—and Simses, Stanford and his formerly enslaved parents, along with Fine, Jennie, Callie, and other relatives, along with the forebears of Toni’s mother, who had been pioneer black residents of Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

  People touched the faces of their ancestors, who dangled there twirling in the breeze created by our movements. Uncle Bobby and Uncle John sat on a long bench and began to speak. Bobby, a large man, his white guayabera shirt pleated down the front, cried, his cheeks glistening with tears. He said haltingly, “We used to lie in bed in the back room, all of us in that bed, head to toe so you’d be smelling the other fella’s feet, and the wall was so thin I could hear our mother just crying, praying to God, asking him to give her strength to work one more day so we could eat. She was begging God right there on the other side, and I’ll never forget hearing her.”

  Callie had worked as a domestic six days a week for a white family in Tulsa, making $250 for the entire year; the children were teenagers, finishing high school at Booker T. Washington. I remember one day in the driveway, General II and his brothers declaimed the poems they had to memorize, as did high school students back then. Their resonant voices and beautiful diction were amazing. I remember Uncle John joking with me, “Even the gangsters back then had perfect English! We all did, because we learned how to recite poetry and speeches in high school. You could see a guy in a ba-ad suit and hat and he’d be a real gangster, but he’d sound just like the president.”

  Callie sent her children one by one to Jennie’s house in Los Angeles. Once again, Jennie had gone ahead. She had gone as far west as possible.

  Jennie left Tulsa in 1927 because her husband, Robert, miscalculated the depth of her badass. He messed up big time. After one moneymaking night in their home—a “hush-hush,” where people could drink, dance, and gamble—during a disagreement, he’d pushed Jennie around. The way the cousins tell it, he didn’t hit her, but he shoved her. Jennie wasn’t having it. She still kept her gun in the bosom of her dress, even in her own house—but she didn’t pull it on Robert. She took her money and got on a train for Los Angeles.

  Robert’s brother, Steve Stevenson, had been shot in the knee during the Tulsa Riot, in 1921, and he was done with Oklahoma. He’d moved to L.A. and bought a small house and piece of land, where he operated a junkyard with his flatbed truck. Jennie stayed with Steve. She worked, ran numbers, and made money, while from Tulsa, Robert repeatedly begged for her forgiveness. Finally, she allowed Robert to come to Los Angeles, and eventually, they bought the white house on Twenty-First and Central.

  Robert got his own flatbed truck. Los Angeles was segregated then, in the 1920s and 1930s, though some Americans forget that; there was only one hotel for black people, the Lenox, on Central Avenue, the artery bisecting the heart of historic South Central Los Angeles, the broad street of jazz clubs, barbershops and salons, clothing stores and—my father-in-law’s favorite word—haberdashers. Every day, Robert went to Union Station downtown, near the historic Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, and waited for black people to get off the train. He took their heavy trunks onto his truck, and drove people to the Lenox or to the boardinghouses catering to black arrivals—including Jennie’s house.

  Jennie’s house was full of her kin, and the people she considered her kin. Two years after General died, Callie had a baby girl with a man in Oklahoma. This daughter, Loretta, was sent to Los Angeles when she was only two, in 1941. Sister followed, then each boy—but Jennie also housed boarders and other people who needed a home.

  Minerva married at eighteen, Stanford married at nineteen, and Robert married Lee Myrtle, who had graduated from nearby Roosevelt High, when they were nineteen. General II came to Los Angeles in 1950 and joined the Marines. Callie traveled to California just after that with John, who was sixteen. Everyone remembers General’s rebellion: Once he stole Callie’s last dollars and ran down the alley behind Jennie’s house, while his mother chased him with a shotgun and shouted, “Are you going crazy?”

  “He turned, spread out his arms, and yelled back, ‘Yeah, you want to come?’” everyone used to laugh, retelling it in the driveway. “Then he climbed a tree and hid. ’Cause Callie and Jennie didn’t mess around.”

  That day, with Gaila taking notes for her history project, we crossed the street finally, to greet the young woman at the wrought-iron fence. She spoke Spanish and English, and I speak English and Spanish—in the order of our fluency.

  We told her about Aunt Jennie, and she opened the gate and led us all to the driveway, past the profusion of flowers. The resonance of history was miraculous. Her aunt owned the house, a woman in her forties with a round kind face, voluble hands that swept the vista of house and attic and driveway and shed, and a story of her own. She had immigrated from a tiny town outside Guadalajara, worked two jobs, and bought this house, probably not long after Jennie lost it to foreclosure before she died, in 1982. This aunt was raising her own family and also a host of nieces and nephews who had come from Mexico.

  Everybody had a job. An elderly man and a middle-aged man and a young man sat on folding chairs in the driveway. They brought more folding chairs for Uncle Bobby and John. We all sat in the shaded concrete driveway, two clans speaking different languages. Our uncles asked her uncles about the layout of the house, and discussed the outbuildings constructed back in the 1930s. The niece said the attic rooms were still hot, and everyone laughed. I couldn’t believe we were sitting there, nearly eighty years aft
er Jennie arrived in Los Angeles, smiling with the present iteration of women who made this city home for those who had to leave a different home. Slavery, migration, borders, violence, poverty—clan will always reclaim humanity.

  Gaila presented her paper on black Los Angeles in the 1950s at Caltech. Delphine wrote her college entrance essay about Aunt Jennie and the legacy of Sims women; when she moved to Los Angeles, to attend the University of Southern California, her dorm room was on Jefferson, about fifteen blocks from Jennie Stevenson’s old house. Delphine hung on her wall an original painting by Toni Sims Scott, a portrait of a young woman in blue.

  I met Jennie once. Teri Andrews, daughter of Minerva “Sister” Sims, lived with Jennie in the white house; Teri says we were both at Fourth of July 1981, at Uncle John’s house off Crenshaw; in the line of older women sitting in the shade, Jennie was there. She would have been close to ninety. I was twenty. It was the first time I saw the aunts as minor goddesses, arranged like the chorus in their folding chairs, talking about dancing days gone by, studying us bemusedly as the younger people snuck into the alley to drink and smoke weed and flirt, as if no one else had ever done those things. Aunt Jennie had black cat’s-eye glasses, with the same slant as my blue ones from the past, but she looked cool. Glossy pressed curls. I had not seen the haughty fur-collar portrait of her yet. That day, her elegant cheeks were soft, collapsed like cake at the sides of her mouth, but she was smiling.

  Teri told me that Jennie had a boyfriend then, and teased that there’s still time for us. Lying awake at night, hearing the faint sounds of eight or ten teenagers in my living room laughing at YouTube videos, my girls and their cousins making popcorn, I think to myself, “This is nothing compared to Aunt Jennie.” I write about fictional men who look like Michael Ealy and Idris Elba and A Martinez and Daniel Craig. Maybe Teri is right. I might get a boyfriend when I’m ninety, like Jennie did.

  I learned about kin from General II. Though he’d been the wild brother, by 1958 and until his death in 2008, General II was the anchor for three more generations of Simses. At the house on Michael Street, he and Alberta never turned anyone away. They helped raise nieces, nephews, young cousins, and neighbor kids. General could be brusque, and he made all the young men work on the truck, hauling those branches and pushing those mowers—just as Jennie had. Alberta did biblical miracles with food, especially during her famous Sunday breakfasts: chorizo, scrambled eggs, and monkey bread.

  Later that same year, 2009, I found a beautiful word—biraderi—to encompass what Jennie and General had done, what Sims meant, and how I’d tried to continue the legacy at my own house when I could. My cell phone rang at 1:00 a.m. My nephew Sensei said, “Auntie. You told me to call.”

  “Yup,” I said. “And?”

  “I’m alive.”

  “Excellent.”

  Only two serious rules, my daughters kept telling Sensei, when he came to live here: Don’t eat chocolate or red foods on the beige couch (why I bought a beige couch was a matter of eye-rolling conjecture). Call at night so she knows you’re alive. Don’t blow that one.

  I lay there in bed, two phones beside me as always—the cell phone, and the purple Target cordless landline that always died. I never knew which number someone who needed a ride might call. Sometimes I fell asleep with a flannel shirt on, a phone in each hand, sitting up against a pillow, like someone with important clients, except I looked like a sad small lumberjack. But that night, I stayed awake, thinking about clan. The tribe. Your people.

  I learned the word biraderi from a vivid essay on Pakistan by Daniyal Mueenuddin. “An untranslatable word,” he wrote, “something like clan but more visceral and entailing greater responsibility and connection.”

  I loved this word. I told my daughters about it, and they told their friends. I’ve spent my life writing about the biraderi of black America, the way diaspora and clan and unshakable devotion to blood family and chosen family have kept children alive. Gaila’s friend Carly, whose mother is Mexican-American and father Scottish, said they should all get the word tattooed on their shoulders.

  The massive biraderi of Simses means I am called Auntie by maybe a hundred nieces and nephews, young cousins, second and third and maybe cousins, great- and great-great-nieces and -nephews, and kin of geography.

  I am called Auntie by Eddie Chandler IV, the son of Eddie Chandler III and Revia Aubert, whose mother, Zerlie, lives on the corner of Michael Street; but also by Stacy, Revia’s brother’s daughter by his first wife. I am called Auntie by Keshae, the granddaughter of Margaret Chandler, who is raising her after the murder of Margaret’s daughter Maisha. I am called Auntie by Aashanique Wilson, whose mother, Tina, grew up a few doors down from the Sims house, and went to school with me, and is family.

  My own daughters call those same adults Uncle and Aunt—and for them, people would drop everything and drive for ten hours to help.

  It seems complicated to outsiders. But it’s not. If you have ever been close to anyone in our huge extended family, we will feed you. Give you clothes, a bed, a car. Help you find a job. We have your back. Even after divorce—as is evident by the fact that Dwayne ate two or three meals a week at my house for years, and slept in his truck for a few hours, parked at my curb, if he’d gotten off work at 7:00 a.m. and we had a basketball tournament at 11:00.

  Shirley, the woman Sensei still calls “Mom,” is not his mother; she had a daughter, Ericka, with General III. She is my sister-in-law, even though she and General III were never married; she is Mexican and black, a tough woman shot at twice when she rode with a motorcycle club. She is the woman who kept Sensei most, even when she wouldn’t speak to his father, and that is hella biraderi, as we put it in my house.

  The biraderi aunts and uncles provide graduation money, rent money, baby-shower gifts, tuition for college or cosmetology school. Sensei is a skateboarder; he eats a lot of tacos and breaks a board every ten days or so. But lying awake at night, doing the math on new skateboards and shoes (what the heck do boys do to Vans?), worrying about whether I could handle having him here, paying his community college tuition and realizing I’d have three kids in college and Rosette in high school, I shrugged. He is a direct descendant of Jennie Stevenson.

  I remember so vividly all those summer midnights when all three of my couches (even the one outside) were draped with sleeping teenagers, when I waited for the last of my daughters to come home, or for Sensei, the unmistakable clack-clack of his wheels on the sidewalk cracks, then the skateboard parked by the front door; my girls hollering that Sensei had clearly applied too much Axe.

  I hope we are enough. I could never be as brave as Aunt Jennie, her cheekbones like shields under her velvet skin. But we will always honor kin—the faces around our table, in the candlelight, the ones with whom you can lay your head down by your empty plate and even cry, you are so relieved to be with them again.

  34

  A Place of Style and Refuge—White House #2

  Riverside, California, December 2011

  Dwayne called me one morning, his voice rough and clotted with pain. “Grandma’s house burnt down last night. I just drove by. There’s people standing everywhere.”

  The two-story Victorian house was much more grand than Jennie Stevenson’s or mine. It was white wood frame with elaborate fretwork and scallop-shingled gables on the second floor, with cedar closets where kids used to hide under her immense collection of elaborate hats; with windowsills where hundreds of sweet potato pies and teacakes had cooled until they were delivered by Daisy Carter’s grandchildren to customers who swore there were no other pies like those; with a long upstairs bedroom where Daisy Carter’s last husband received her grandchildren “like he was a king,” according to General III. The house burned in the way newspapers report as “spectacular.” When I went the next day, people said flames had shot out of the second story, which collapsed onto the first floor in a huge sparking sag. The side porch, where two benches once faced each other, where young men used to w
alk past hoping for a sight of Daisy’s daughters, was gone.

  “They used to sit on them benches, two and two,” Mrs. Zerlie Aubert, who is ninety-five now, born in Lutcher, Louisiana, said to me from her white wire chair on Twelfth Street, just around the corner. She pointed to where ashes were now heaped. “The four sisters. Oh, all the men were in love with them four girls, yes they were.”

  That day in December, a post-quinceaneara party had been in progress in the yard, with guests of the Mexican-born residents who rented the house. The crowd escaped to the sidewalk to watch the fire burn. No one was inside. The flames appeared to have begun in the attic bedrooms, where two teenagers were living. There had been candles.

  Most of American history had come full circle, in this white house. Built in 1910, when white people lived on Kansas Street and black people could not; bought in 1947 by Daisy after she married Ernest Carter Sr., decades of black history resided there: slavery, reconstruction, railroads, migration, munitions, reinvention, and generosity.

  Ironically, in 1940 Daisy and her daughters and Aint Dear were living in a tiny cottage on Denton Street, only a few blocks away. Eventually, when their children fell in love, Daisy met Callie, whose life had begun in Denton, Texas. (One of Dwayne’s favorite childhood memories is Sunday afternoons, after church, when the men were in the driveway, and three women would sit inside the living room to share a single bottle of Miller High Life and one surreptitious cigarette each: Callie, Daisy, and Alberta.)