I can follow a recipe or simply throw something on the stove to see what happens, but I don't think of myself as a cook. That's probably because I don't love cooking. Still, watching this 1993 episode of Julia Child's PBS series, Cooking with Master Chefs, swept me into a misty nostalgia, memories of my grandmother and mother at the cutting board.
My grandmother -- now, she was a cook!
In the video I've posted, Child introduces Emeril Lagasse who cooks shrimp étouffée, which is a type of smothered dish that can be made as well with crawfish or chicken. Generally, any poultry, shellfish, or meat that will not overcook during the smothering process will do.
Emeril, a young up-and-comer then, carefully guides viewers through his method, taking time to explain various terms and show some of his techniques at least twice. As I watched him peel and clean the shrimp, I recalled my grandmother and my mother teaching me how to peel and devein the little scavengers. But what really brought back memories was Emeril's preparation of the mirepoix, the chopped vegetable mix that Cajun/Creole cooks tend to use for almost all dishes. A mirepoix consists of bell peppers, onion (my grandmother always used scallions), celery, and garlic, occasionally carrots, too.
My grandmother and mother never called the mix a mirepoix that I recall, but I definitely remember my mother saying, "always use these seasonings" for dishes such as étouffée, shrimp and okra succotash, gumbo, and so on. My mother was not a fan of cooking either, but she could make a good dish when she chose to. She didn't spend much time guiding me in cooking, but this video reminds me of one of the few times she gave me a cooking lesson.
Side note here, Julia introduces New Orleans Cajun/Creole cooking and lists its influences; however, she leaves out a major influence, African. I'll just assume the tourism board didn't make that clear to her back then.
On follow-up, I'm posting that Solange, Jay-Z, and Beyonce have issued a statement about the now-infamous elevator brawl. Essentially, the statement says that we, the public, should let this matter go and accept that the Carter/Knowles family is only human. Well, I agree with that, but here's the actual statement as reported by the Associated Press earlier today:
"As a result of the public release of the elevator security footage from Monday, May 5th, there has been a great deal of speculation about what triggered the unfortunate incident. But the most important thing is that our family has worked through it," the statement said. "Jay and Solange each assume their share of responsibility for what has occurred. They both acknowledge their role in this private matter that has played out in the public. They both have apologized to each other and we have moved forward as a united family."
The family also denies that Solange was intoxicated. ABC News also reports that the hotel employee who released the video tape has been fired. Well, we knew that was coming, right?
Also, here's CNN folk discussing the family's statement.
Following the release of the elevator pictures, there was speculation that Solange attacked Jay-Z to stand up for older sister, Beyonce. Allegedly Jay-Z was getting too chummy with fashion designer Rachel Roy. That explanation makes Solange sound as though she doesn't understand how marriage works. A sister-in-law going off will not stop a husband from flirting or cheating, and I'm pretty sure Beyonce can take care of business herself. But I've never had a sister, so what do I know.
Here in Solange's adopted city, New Orleans, the media loves her. Since she moved here, the Times Picayune has been following her doings. I'm glad she decided to come back to her Louisiana roots, but just as I never bump into Brad Pitt, I also never bump into Solange. If I did, however, all I'd say is, "Thank you for being here."
I'm old enough to be Beyonce and Solange's mother. Having grown up in a time when black female entertainers, though popular, never ruled the airwaves like this (not even Diana Ross), I'm sort of fascinated that so may people of all ethnic groups keep up with what Beyonce does or doesn't do. But I suppose Oprah, too, paved the way for black female stars to be just as idolized as white female stars. And Michael Jackson paved the way for such idolization of black stars in general.
Solange's instagram account shows that she has deleted all pictures of Beyonce except one, and Beyonce posted the following prayer to her Instagram account six days ago, reports Billboard and other sources. Did Solange really delete her sister's pictures? I don't know, but here's Beyonce's prayer.
Lord, I lift up every one of my relationships
to You and ask You to bless them. I pray that each one
would be glorifying to You. Help me to choose my
friends wisely so I won't be led astray. Give me dis-
cernment and strength to separate myself from
anyone who is not a good influence. I release all my
relationships to You and pray that Your will be done
in each one of them.
Beyonce's prayer appears to have come from a spiritual or Bible workbook. I have absolutely no comment to add to this painful celebrity drama, but I've posted the prayer because it's edifying.
I have read two reports about the Solage vs. Jazy-Z incident that say Beyonce stood off to the side, as though the superstar whimpered in a corner of the elevator. One even says, "Beyonce stands there, adjusts her dress." But when I look at the TMZ video, I see that Beyonce does not just stand there. Somewhere between the 00:25 and 00:30 second mark, her lips are moving, and she faces Solange, and later she and Jay-Z seem to be talking to each other.
Read update: Solange deletes all pictures but one of Beyonce on Instagram account while Beyonce posts a prayer asking God for discernment about all of her relationships . . . Click here.
According to the original TMZ story, "All three walked out of the building together -- Solange looks pissed -- but while Bey and Solange get in one car ... security walks Jay to a different one." So I'm guessing in the elevator, Bey was saying to her sister something like, "Girl, you better get a hold of yourself" or "Solange, calm down. There are cameras in this elevator." Per TMZ, Jay-Z, Beyonce, and Solange were coming from a Met Gala, and as you can see in the video, body guards restrained Solange.
And on this extended video, when Solange is no longer restrained but makes a move toward Jay-Z again (02:06), not only does the body guard position himself between Solange and Jay-Z, but so does Beyonce.
The NOLA.com blogger rightfully points out that Solange, who recently performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, lives part-time in New Orleans, and the post includes the following tweet from a New Orleans resident.
I want to believe Jay said something like, "Did you read latest @nytimes travel piece about #NOLA? It was garbage," then #Solange attacked!
— Brian W Boyles (@BrianWBoyles) May 12, 2014
Yes, that tweet made laugh.
If my brother were still alive, he'd probably say something like, "That's that New Orleans coming out in Solange," which is what he told me when I yelled at this woman in New York once to stop doing something, and she stopped, too, but I don't know what came over me.
People forget that the Beyonce and Solange have a Louisiana heritage via their mother's family (Beyonce gets her name from her mother's maiden name, Beyincé). The family is considered to be "black Creole," but technically they're black Cajuns if this Wikipedia article is correct. According to the entry, in addition to African ancestry, the Beyincé family traces part of its line back to Joseph Broussard, the Cajun leader who organized the Acadian resistance.
I'll add that in general, Cajuns are considered to be a feistier bunch of European immigrants (Basque to Acadia to Louisiana) than French Creoles. So, while a lot of people are probably talking about Solange today and linking her feistier side to her black roots, it could be those Cajun genes were showing themselves. I'm just saying.
I'm guessing that we'll never know what set Solange off or why she and her sister, Bey, left in a separate limousine. The obvious reason is that another outburst would have been harder to control in the confines of a limo. But men, please take note, nobody swung back at Solange, which is probably the only positive thing that can be said about the video. I tire of men who justify beating a woman up because she was the physical aggressor. I'm thinking now of all the people who defended Chris Brown because Rihanna allegedly threw the first punch.
And what do we learn from this video? Nothing that we didn't know already: no matter how rich, no matter how famous, people have problems with in-laws.
I just heard about Shirley Temple Black's death. I am an African-American woman who associates the child star with my childhood. Apparently she passed away last night, Monday, February 10, on my birthday. At age 85, she was almost 30 years older than I am now, born one year later than my mother. But in my mind, she's still around 6 years old, the symbol of a sweet little girl who can make it through any crisis.
Perhaps, even, she is the first media image I encountered that seemed to prescribe what a perfect female child should be according to Hollywood: cute and curly-headed, sunny and pleasing. How was I to know then that girl was myth?
During the 1960s, it seemed almost every week one of the television stations was running one of Shirley Temple's movies, usually on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes I'd sit with my cousins around the black and white television in my grandmother's home in New Orleans's Gert Town. Sometimes I'd watch alone in my 7th Ward childhood home. Reruns or not, we'd watch her adventures as one character or another. And after the studios colorized the black and white films, we watched again.
This was pre-800 channels, pre-cable. It was either the Little Rascals with Buckwheat, Cowboys killing "Indians," the Three Stooges, or Shirley Temple. Thank goodness for books, but even in those we were hard-pressed to find positive images of people like us.
Most of her films were more than 20 years old when I first saw them, and although my favorite was The Little Princess (1939), when I hear Shirley Temple's name, I see her walking down that airplane aisle singing "On the Good Ship, Lollipop" in Bright Eyes (1934). That may be the image that pops up first because that's often the clip played when anyone discusses Shirley Temple in a documentary or child stars in general from that era.
I link Shirley Temple with happy times. She was innocent, I was innocent, often the center of attention in my family because my parents had struggled to have a child. I had a grandmother, a nurturing aunt, a father and mother all in the same town who I saw daily, and sometimes relatives from California or Tennessee would visit. They made me feel special, too. For the first eight years of my life, I was spoiled. After that is another story.
Back then it was common to coif little girls with "Shirley Temple curls" for holidays and other special occasions. She was so popular that a child's drink, a non-alcoholic cocktail, was named after her. Sometimes, when my parents took me with them to Dooky Chase Restaurant, I'd have one. But now, oh, what creepiness, the symbolism of a little black girl in the 1960s South imbibing Shirley Temple.
And yet, I was not fascinated with Shirley Temple the way the fictional character Pecola Breedlove is in Toni Morrison's classic novel The Bluest Eye. I had no Shirley Temple dolls, no cups with her blond curls shining and her blue eyes staring at me. In fact, I'm not even sure I registered that Shirley Temple had either blond hair or blue eyes because I first watched her in black and white. To me, Shirley Temple was just another white face on television in a time when black faces rarely appeared.
However, by the time I was six years old in 1966, I was aware that many white people did not want black people around them. After all, the ugliness of racism revealed itself on the nightly news. I doubt my parents removed me from the room when the footage rolled of dogs let loose on black teens and high pressure water hoses blasted black bodies during the marches. And these scenes played again over the years as the Civil Rights struggle remained in the news.
Also, I had a personal experience when I was about 4 or 5 years old that I still recall. My mother and I boarded a public bus in New Orleans. It was the mid-sixties, so the buses had been desegregated for at least six years by then. There must not have been many window seats because I did not sit by mother. I sat by the window in a seat next to a white woman. I guess, now, the woman must have been in her late fifties. Soon after I sat next to her, the woman huffed, got up and moved, clearly angry. My mother, watching, called me to her and said loudly, "That's okay, baby. Anybody who doesn't want to be by you is missing the opportunity to know a wonderful little girl." But I was not a dull child, so while I did not yet know the word "rejected," I recognized disgust and knew the woman thought something was wrong with me.
As a child then, for me, the measure of whether a white person was "nice" or "mean" was, Will they let you be near them? I had seen Shirley Temple dance with Bill Robinson in The Littlest Rebel and Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm, so she must be nice. At 5 years old, that was as close as I came to today's critical race theory.
It was not until later that I understood the movie's racialized images and the racism that produced them. Bill Robinson, Uncle Billy in the movie, was the slave of Shirley Temple's character Virgie. Yes, Virgie's family was on the wrong side, but I didn't know that when I was 4 or 5 or 6 because I was not old enough yet to have learned in class that my people were once owned by white people. That's not information black parents share before they have to. And Shirley, when she filmed the movie, didn't know that either, according to what she said in interviews during the 1990s. Still, I knew more about racism when I was 6 than she did when she was 6.
Back then, I also did not know how seeing Shirley Temple on television had begun to shape my understanding of what it meant to be an adorable girl. I don't recall trying to emulate her. According to an older cousin, I was more likely to imitate an adult, but I do recall hearing my mother say to my aunt before she straightened my hair with the hot comb, "And give her Shirley Temple curls."
I recall as well at age 5 that I walked down the aisle of New Orleans's old Municipal Auditorium to the lofty sounds of "Pomp and Circumstance," a train flowing behind me, my body covered with a white, pearl-encrusted gown, a fake piece of hair to hold my tiara in place, and my own hair bouncing at my ears in those desirable curls. I was the princess of my dance school because my parents had raised the most money for my age group. A teen was the school's queen. But I was not very sweet or adorable that night, my mother told me. I didn't want anyone to stand in the pictures with me.
Did I think I was like Shirley Temple? I don't remember thinking that. Did I ever want to be Shirley Temple, no. Like Claudia in The Bluest Eye, I was not impressed with my white baby doll. I recall holding a black doll, and later I think I begged my parents for a life-sized doll (3 feet tall) that only came in white. Of course, it had blue eyes. But once I had it, I didn't like it. It scared me, and I hid it in the closet. The next year, I gave it away.
Was my mother trying to make me Shirley Temple? No. She was the one who made sure I had a black doll and the one teaching me black history facts, telling me about George Washington Carver and the story about my grandmother meeting him. She was the one who taught me about Phyllis Wheatley and had me memorize James Weldon Johnson poems. She was also the one who made black history intimate. Not only were W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Nat Turner important, so were my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother, so were my great-uncles and aunts.
As for my father? He liked Westerns, war movies, and every sport on the planet. He had stories about cows, Gypsies, snakes, his grandfather's horse, and Mount Vesuvius erupting as the Germans bombed because he was there. He didn't watch Shirley Temple. He kept an ear out for The Platters and an eye out for Lola Falana.
Eventually, I no longer watched Shirley Temple movies. I moved on to swashbuckling tales, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Dracula movies, and Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney teen flicks. I liked those more than the teen Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.
But I could never really get away from Shirley because America kept talking about her, so sometimes, I'd see one of those late night commercials from Time Life or something like that, selling The Shirley Temple Collection, and I'd wonder, What's she doing now? What's it like to no longer be a little darling? Did that make her a nobody? Hardly. She became a public servant, unscathed even by her ardent support for Richard Nixon. So, she'd show up in the news occasionally.
Her name filled the airwaves again when I was 14. President Gerald Ford appointed her the American Ambassador to Ghana. That may have been when I noticed that she'd married, and her last name was Shirley Temple Black. With that appointment came the great controversy. It was the mid-seventies. African-Americans were still riding the "Black is Beautiful" high, and the segregationists' flight to the Republican party remained fresh in black people's minds. So, some argued that because Shirley was a conservative, white Republican, she should not be an ambassador to an African nation. And due to the hostility African-Americans sensed from the Republican party, the belief spread that she was also "a racist."
I was in high school then, and not paying attention to why people were calling her that. All I heard was, "Hmph!" and "Shirley Temple racist." Typical teenager, my attitude was "Blasé blasé, par for the course." By that time, I had become more acquainted with disappointment and the personal wounds of racism.
With her death, these accusations have arisen again and where else other than on Twitter. Is the controversy worth anyone's energy? I have strong doubts. At this point, isn't it really about what Shirley Temple represented to those who were aware of her or influenced by her icon status in society?
I went for years without thinking about her unless her work appeared on television. Next, my daughter was watching The Little Princess and Bright Eyes. Honestly, I thought that Shirley Temple had passed away already sometime while I was in the middle of divorce.
When I had to do a presentation on The Bluest Eye two years ago, I didn't even bother to look up Shirley Temple despite her presence in the book because I felt I already knew what I needed to know about Temple's reach. I knew enough to understand Pecola Breedlove's obsession with the star, with her desire to drink milk from a Shirley Temple cup. After all, Pecola's story unfolds during the 1940s when the blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel was still everywhere, probably on billboards towering over towns, and her movies were in theaters on a big screen, not small in a little box.
And Pecola didn't have a mother teaching her black history or a decent father or the Civil Rights Movement and "Black is Beautiful" posters. She didn't have Diana Ross and the Supremes on the Ed Sullivan Show or the Julia sitcom on television or anyone to crown her "princess" for a night and counter the forces of her self-hatred and destruction. I count myself blessed as Claudia was blessed.
And yet, six years before I conducted my presentation, I wrote a poem, "Ducks and Swans on the Lagoon (at City Park in New Orleans)." In it, the spirit of Shirley Temple appears. I pulled that poem out today and studied it. Then I posted it to my blog. So much stuff is there: the heaviness of navigating race as a child, of steering around demeaning images of the self, the idealization of whiteness, and rising above America's tragic racial history. Somehow, I had processed it and made something for myself.
No, I don't hate Shirley Temple as Claudia did. Neither do I love her madly. She was part of the scenery of my childhood, and like it she, too, now is gone.
This is an incredible story from CNN news. Friends at Tulane University in New Orleans discovered that they have the same sperm donor. They're lovely girls who look related.
As the New Orleans Advocate reports, Mikayla Stern-Ellis and Emily Nappi, both freshmen accepted to Tulane, found each other on the school's website. Mikayla was looking for a roommate and noticed how much she and Emily had in common. So, she wrote her; however, Emily had a roommate already.
In a Father's Day Facebook post, Mikayla thanked her Colombia sperm donor. Emily told her that a Colombia sperm donor was her father as well. But they thought it was unlikely they had the same sperm donor.
Once at school, they became friends and joked about being almost sisters, they told CNN, but it wasn't until they compared their sperm donor numbers over a holiday break that they found out it was not a joke but true.
This story lives up to the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. And it's so nice to have a happy story to tell rather than a tragedy these days.
ADAMS Benjamin James Adams, age 45 years, a native of New Orleans, LA, and a permanent resident of Slidell, passed away on Friday, November 9, 2012. He was a devoted member of Calvary Tabernacle CME Church and a regional loss prevention manager for Payless ShoeSource. He was also a graduate of St. Augustine High School and Southern University at New Orleans and a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. He is preceded in death by his mother and father, Fannie Reddix Adams and Norwood Edward Adams, and his mother-in-law, Zeporah Spencer. Benjamin was the beloved husband of Rhonda Spencer-Adams and the brother of Nordette Naomi Adams. He was also the son-in-law of Stonewall (Emma) Spencer of Bellefontaine, MS, and the brother-in-law of Kenneth (Charlotte) Spencer of Starkville, MS; Jeff (Sonya) Moon of McDonough, GA; Mae (Gregory) Browning of Roanoke Rapids, NC; Janet (Jack) Brinson of Atlanta, GA; and Pamela (Michael) Simmons of Bellefontaine, MS. His surviving aunts and uncle are Pinkie Reddix, Jacqueline Reddix Hawkins, and Roscoe (Fannie) Reddix. His godmother survives him, as well: Bertha Holmes Johnson. In addition, surviving Benjamin are 22 nieces and nephews, a multitude of cousins and friends (many of whom he cherished as a sibling), and the children of friends and relatives who looked up to him as their playful "Uncle Ben". The family is especially grateful to Benjamin's friends who tarried with him and his wife during this challenging time: David Tibbs, Edwin Blanchard, Rocky and Tammy Tomboli, and Rev. Duane and Sharon Hill. Relatives and friends of the family, as well as pastor, officers and members of Calvary Tabernacle CME Church are invited to attend the funeral services at Calvary Tabernacle CME Church, 3629 Dryades Street, New Orleans, LA on Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 12:00 p.m., noon. Visitation will begin at 10:00 a. m. Interment in Mount Olivet Cemetery and Mausoleum. You may sign the guest book onwww.gertrudegeddeswillis.com and nola.com/obits. GERTRUDE GEDDES WILLIS FUNERAL HOME INC., IN CHARGE.
As published in The Times-Picayune from November 13 to November 16, 2012
This blogger mourns the loss of her younger brother, Benjamin James Adams.
A young Barack Obama with his grandmother
Madelyn Dunham of Hawaii. She passed
away in 2008 at age 86 due to cancer.
I can only guess at the reason my blog suddenly has so many hits from people searching for information about President Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was his maternal grandmother, the mother of his mother, Ann Dunham.
The president spoke about Madelyn Dunham last night during the presidential debate, and to the left is the well-known picture of her hugging him when he was a younger man.
Some readers also may have heard that KitchenAid had to apologize for an offensive comment someone connected to the company tweeted last night when the president mentioned his grandmother. It came from the company's official account. Companies need to stop letting any idiot have access to their social media accounts.
Below this paragraph I've added links you may find useful if you're sincerely interested in his relationship with his grandmother Dunham, his white grandmother (I don't think the president knew his African grandmother. The Sarah Obama of Kenya that Yahoo image search shows as the president's grandmother is not his biological grandmother. ). However, it is through his grandmother Dunham that Ancestry.com research (pdf) tentatively traced the president's "white" roots back to an African slave. His white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, however, has not connection to slavery. He was English and Irish.
Here is a video of then-candidate Obama speaking about his grandmother in 2008 after her death. He said that she was a humble and plainspoken person, a quiet hero.
To educate the people who are coming by looking for pictures of the president's grandmother and are being sent to my post on the First Grandmother, I must inform you that Yahoo is sending you to the wrong picture. The First Grandmother post is about First Lady Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, who is alive and well.
So, one day you get a phone call. Your crazy cousin, Great Aunt Edwina's son, has died. Actually, he was your mother's first cousin that you didn't know well because your mom never liked him, and you were glad she kept clear of the man since he made racist comments about celebrities you like and then took to quoting Glenn Beck.
Now you recall also that he smelled funny and had hoarder tendencies, and wasn't he an anti-government conspiracy theorist? Your mom figured he would die alone with maybe some guns and a trunk full of apocalypse-ready tuna, but, as it turns out, food and ammo were not all he hoarded, and with your mom gone to glory and the weird cousin having no children and no will specifying bequests, you're his only heir. That's so sad, people dying alone, but . . . Cha ching!
When my father, age 91, told me a few weeks ago that a woman, born Augustine Lemieux Stevens (a.k.a. Gussie), had died, I shuddered for moment in a spasm of grief. I grieved not because I knew Ms. Gussie but because I did not know her.
Born on September 13, 1911 in Vacherie, Louisiana, of St. James Parish, she lived near him when he was a child growing up in that rural town. Vacherie sits on River Road, next to the Mississippi. It is in an area of small farms and sprawling historic plantations, such as Oak Alley. Vacherie is a place of sugar cane and rice fields, of Br'er Rabbit and of the slavery/Antebellum South tourism industry.
Ms. Gussie died on October 7, 2011, so she lived almost a month past her 100th birthday. According to my cousin, she was still cognitively sharp and had worked in her garden almost until her death. My cousin said she and her sister would marvel sometimes when they drove by and saw Ms. Gussie nearing a hundred years old out in the ditch in front of her small house, pulling weeds.
I chided my dad mildly for not telling me of Ms. Gussie's existence sooner, before she passed away. With knowledge of her her passing, I grappled again with my fear that the ordinary black history in Louisiana and my personal family history, the stories of everyday working men and women, are also passing away, slipping farther from my grasp daily and the grasp of the rest of America.
My family is one of many families that lost during Hurricane Katrina tangible and intangible pieces of their history--photographs, family bibles, and other official forms of identification that tie us to our past and the sad or silly stories that elders, some undone through the storm displacing them, no longer tell. I may think about these matters more or be more stricken with a sense of loss because in 2008, my mother, our family historian, died after suffering from Alzheimer's for at least eight years. I suspect she may have suffered longer, may have had other signs and symptoms that she hid from us because she feared losing her memory; my mother had watched her own mother wrestle with what was more often called senility back in the 80s, and the terror of being a bright woman trapped in a thorny thicket of dementia haunted her.
Not hearing of Ms. Gussie until after she died illustrates the challenge black historians and genealogists in particular face as they race to collect stories, artifacts, and wisps of memory that yellow and decay in a senior citizen's home or live in the collective consciousness of our elders left alone or in retirement homes or who wait forgotten with a caregiver who has also been forgotten. Too often these artifacts and memories--shoved into cobwebbed closets and minds--will never receive the attention and respect they deserve. A younger and ignorant person may toss out the dusty Bible heavy with strange odors or ignore the story told and retold by an aged and irritating aunt: old people and their mutterings in our youth-obsessed culture are rarely deemed important unless with them come shiny objects that look like something an antique dealer or pawnbroker may appraise and match to monetary value.
I was disturbed, for instance, to learn in October that years ago the great-niece of one of my maternal grandmother's aunts, had misplaced the family Bible. In it was a genealogy going back to Africa, kept by the great-aunt, a childless woman.
Years before her death, this great-aunt had shown a great-nephew--one of my distant cousins who started doing genealogical research in the 1970s--this family Bible. She had told him also that her father--my great-great-grandfather, Tony Green Mott of Alabama--had been a runaway slave from South Carolina. As the story goes, Tony ran away after his master sold his parents. Apparently, he had learned from his own grandfather on the plantation that his family came from Africa's Gold Coast. The cousin who had been doing the research, but who has had a stroke since he began the work, thinks the family's African country may have be Ghana, but he's unsure. He said it perturbed him that the young niece had no clue about the family Bible's location: "Didn't she know how important that was?"
For the past two years I have actively pursued information about both sides of my family, in particular I have been seeking more information about my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal, and so, I have been interrogating family members as they and I have time. Anyone involved in genealogical research can attest that tracking our mothers, grandmothers, aunts' histories through official documents proves difficult; women's names change through marriage and rarely are their names on property deeds. Nor do they show up often in military records. A conversation with Ms. Gussie may have provided me a hint about my paternal grandmother's family, a suggestion of where she came from because no one alive now seems to know. Her origins have been a mystery for as long as I remember, a topic my father and his siblings did not discuss often because their mother--my grandmother--was half white, a potential passe blanc, fair enough to pass for a white person if she had so chosen, some say, but she never tried to pass.
I have stories about possible relations who visited my grandmother when my father was young, but many of these people went by nicknames and were known to my father only as children tend to know older adults, by titles with names such Aunt Veve or Uncle Sweet--rarely a legal name that may appear in a census record or on a baptismal certificate. Therefore, talking to Ms. Gussie, whose memory was intact and who was nine years older than my dad and had grown up across the street from him in the 1920s when my grandmother was still a relatively young woman, may have given me exactly the kind of information I needed.
Perhaps I would have gotten a name from Ms. Gussie that would help me dig a little deeper and find more clues about not only my grandmother's origin but also about the relatives of her husband--my grandfather. His father, my dad's grandfather, was born a slave. I know his legal, post-slavery name, but I have been curious about why people also called him Pop Dadon--or was it Dada? I have to take Cajun and Creole accents into consideration when I am told names and nicknames from Vacherie.
Among Louisiana slave records, there is a slave who insisted on being called "Dada," his African name. Who was he? Such mysteries abound in black families trying to unearth their roots back to the boats that brought their ancestors from Africa through the middle passage to the United States of America. Almost everywhere we look fog rolls off the Atlantic, obscuring conclusions.
Nevertheless, nearly each day I find out new information about my father. Parts of his past pop from his mouth at the oddest moments. Sometimes he speaks after seeing something in the news that means nothing to me. Sometimes a story erupts with while he's eating a sandwich or sorting his mail and has no clear segue. The anecdote may be one I have never heard such as the one he told me a few months when I asked him about his service in World War II. He was in Italy when Mouth Vesuvius blew, news to me, but he told my younger brother this years ago,, it turns out.
Two days ago he told me about his adventures as a teenager in Vacherie's rice fields. I have a friend who has been writing about rice cultivation technology, which came to the American South via African slaves, and she had told me less than a month ago how she wished she could find someone who knew something about the old technology. I advised her to find someone who owned a farm when humans still harvested the majority of the rice, someone who knew what rice farming was like before rice cultivation was mechanized. It never occurred to me that my dad may have been the person she should talk to.
So, after he mentioned, unbidden, what is was like to harvest rice, I asked him about the fields' irrigation system. He told me about water being piped from the Mississippi River into the rice field ditches and that when the ditches overflowed, the water seeped into the fields. "You can't grow rice without water," he told me.
He also talked about how he would itch after dealing with the rice and about the danger of encountering cotton mouth snakes. He avoided that part, which required that the field worker stand in water and reach down into leaves where a snake may be hiding. He also said that nobody in Magnolia, a black area in Vacherie, ever bought rice. They would just collect fresh rice from whatever the fields' owners left behind in the collection area.
He told me as well that the workers were paid about 45 cents per day. However, the "old Creole" (could have been a Cajun) that paid them wasn't too swift, and maybe the old man could not tell some of the black workers apart, and so some days the workers would return to the pay line and get paid two or three times.
Photo from USA Today's article on Louisiana's African-American history trail. I posted that picture of a slave's room because I know from my father as well as the writings of Ernest Gaines that while my dad lived in a house that his father bought in the Magnolia section of Vacherie, as late as the 1960s some black people in rural Louisiana still lived in the slave quarters on old plantations.
Patti Labelle tribute at BET Awards 2011 with Marsha Ambrosius, Cee Lo, and Shirley Ceasar. Patti herself performs at the end. I enjoyed watching the show with my aunt and cousins last night, three generations in one place with a difference of opinion about what is good music. The younger ones were more into the rappers. And Kevin Hart's Real Husbands of Hollywood made me laugh until I cried.
I'm joking. I don't think today's census workers would ever write down what this census work did in 1880. Check what's listed as Joseph Jean Baptiste's occupation.
Also notice how neat the handwriting is on the snippet of the screenshot from the original document. I doubt this guy was walking and writing at the same time.
Mr. Jean Baptiste was most likely a farm worker living on the Laura Plantation or St. Joseph Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana. Most of the white people listed on the form are Waguespacks. While slavery was technically over, it's quite possible Joseph Jean Baptiste never spoke to the census worker himself and an overseer or somebody from the "big house" gave the census worker the information. But if that worker did talk to this black man himself, I can only imagine how that conversation went.
In addition, here in Louisiana census workers often ran into people who could only speak French, and so, sometimes what made it to the census form was not accurate for that reason. But it's quite possible the man himself said "drunkard" out of his own mouth.
Last semester I read Ernest Gaines's collection of short stories, Bloodline, in a class. I recommend the short story of the same title about the passing away of old plantation life and the complexities of the Laurent family to anyone who wants to see how the effects of paternal and overt racism as pathology worked itself out on the plantations of River Road. However, it's also a class issue. No census worker would have dared write anything so negative about one of the plantation owners even if he'd come upon him dancing naked in a drunken stupor on the veranda.
By now you've heard the news that Oprah Winfrey has a half-sister named Patricia. Oprah did not learn of this news until late October of last year, and on Thanksgiving, she and Stedman Graham drove to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to meet Patricia.
The talk show host has made it clear that Patricia is the daughter of her mother Vernita Lee and is not the daughter of Oprah's father, Vernon Winfrey. Also, Patricia, who has two children of her own, resembles Oprah's deceased sister of the same name, Pat, in an eerie way. Read more at WritingJunkie.net, where you will find video and more links to Oprah's family reunion story.
Adding social media drama to the Carlina White kidnapping case, ABC News reports Ann Pettway aka Agnotta Pettway used Facebook to turn herself into authorities. Pettway is the woman who raised White under the name Njedra Nance, and is expected to face federal kidnaping charges in court today in Manhattan court.
White was kidnapped from a hospital in Harlem, New York, when she was only nineteen days old by a woman disguised as a nurse and was possibly Pettway. The young woman recently solved her own kidnapping 23 years later and has since been reunited with her mother Joy White and father, Carl Tyson, as well as her siblings and extended biological family.
Pettway is reported to have been pregnant during the time of the kidnapping, but lost her baby.
This is an amazing story from the New York Post, ABC News, and other sources:
Carlina White, separated from her family when she was kidnapped as a baby 23 years ago, followed her instincts to reunite with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson.
I remember this kidnapping being in the news after it happened in the late 80s. The woman who kidnapped Carlina was disguised as a nurse, and I shivered thinking about the grief of the baby's mother. My own daughter was about six years old then. The kidnapped baby was 19 days old.
According to ABC's story, Carlina always thought something was off between her and the family she grew up with in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It bothered her that the family didn't have a birth certificate, social security card for her, or other paper work and that she didn't look like them. Recently, she decided to look up her birth year on the website for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and spotted a picture of an African-American baby kidnapped in her birth year along side an age-progression image of what the baby would look like now. She thought it looked like her, and so, she called the center and told them "I don't know who I am." DNA testing confirmed her birth mother is Joy White of New York. Her father is Carl Tyson.
She's been reunited with her biological family, which includes her parents, siblings, nieces, and aunts who are praising God and elated to have her home. Carlina also has a child of her own. It was her attempt to get prenatal care and a driver's license that made her aware that the woman who raised her did not have any documentation for her. When confronted, the woman admitted she was not Carlina's biological mother. ... Continued at WritingJunkie.net.
Happy Father's Day. I also published a post about the day at the Urban Mother's Book of Prayers and included a link to an old poem about my father written in 2005. The picture of him in this post is the one I used with the poem, and it was taken in 1990 when my son was born and my dad came to Georgia to help us. My former husband, our daughter, and I had just moved into a new house, which is why there's a bed in the living room. I had a c-section.
I also wrote a poem related to him in 2006, "The Mermaids Singing Hush." As men get older, they fight loss of controlling their own destinies, and back then my dad lived with my brother and his wife. My mother did as well, due to Hurricane Katrina flooding their home. My brother didn't want him to drive anymore.
My dad is now 89 and living with me. He went to church this morning with my brother and his wife. Today he uses a walker. He can be bossy and ornery, and yes he still drives. However, I've been thinking that should end soon since he almost drove off the Twin Span Bridge a month ago.
In February I told a story about him waking up and thinking a white man was in the house. And I tweet about him often. I think the last time I tweeted about Dad was a few weeks ago when he woke me up around eight in the morning to ask me about dinner that night. I'd had only three hours sleep. Loss of sleep is a small price to pay for how much his presence has benefited his grandchildren.
Thinking about how often I mention him, including this poem, "Dusk," that I'd forgotten, I guess it's time to give him his own label here.
It's a customized hero video from a Swedish company. Yes, I'm the hero, but it took me by surprise. Seriously, I laughed my rear off. (Uh, if only I could get rid of my bottom so easily.)
I kept thinking the person in the video would be some famous person. And so, after seeing it, I decided to make one for BlogHer.com founders, Jory DesJardin, Lisa Stone, and Elisa Camahort. The site is celebrating its fifth anniversary, and they have a 5 words contest going in which they're giving away 5 free passes to BlogHer 10.
I'm thinking about investigating my roots, and so you may see me posting more research methods for genealogy in the future. This video will reference National Geographic's Genographic Project. Here's the link for that.
You may have seen the promotional ads for Janet Jackson's upcoming November 18 interview with ABC's Robin Roberts. Roberts is getting two primetime specials before she moves forward to her new position as anchor. Per the AP, "The Jackson interview is the type of important "get" for which Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters used to compete."
The interview is being touted under the umbrella of Janet Jackson speaks out for the first time since her brother's death. According to MTV, Ms. Jackson says in the interview that she believes Michael's doctor killed him, and they pulled that from this ABC story on the interview, "Janet Jackson Blames Dr. Conrad Murray for Michael's Death" that has a tag line "In Exclusive Interview, Jackson Tells Robin Roberts Brother's Death 'Felt Like a Dream'."
She tells Roberts what happened on June 25:
"I was at my house in New York. You know, another day. Another morning. And I get a call ... [my assistant] said, 'Your brother's been taken to the hospital. It's on CNN right now,'" she told Roberts. "I called everyone's. There's a line busy or -- someone wasn't picking up. I spoke to mother. I spoke to Tito. I spoke to my nephew Austin. I spoke to my sister La Toya." (Janet speaking in ABC story)
She wasn't the only family member to find out from CNN or a media outlet that Michael has been rushed to the hospital. In a June 27 article at the New Orleans Literature Examiner, I wrote about Joe Jackson hearing from family friend, musician, and New Orleans resident Kevin McClin of Michael's collapse. McLin, one of Michael's former publicists, heard it from the media.
Janet tells Roberts also that "It's been a tough year. You have your days where it's just really -- it's hard to believe. And a day doesn't go by that I don't think about him."
I and others have always had the impression that Janet was possibly closer to Michael than some of his other siblings. While I don't know if that's true or not, certainly the way Michael's children clung to Janet during the memorial service indicates theyh feel close to her.
I'm sure somebody else online somewhere has already said it. Perhaps that someone was even me and I've forgotten, but while I was writing tonight, I started playing "Together Again" by Janet Jackson. Even though I previously associated this song with losing a romantic companion to death who you now believe is up in heaven, I reapply this song now to Michael. This song is quietly joyful song with a twist of bittersweetness that fits how so many fans feel regarding Michael Jackson, that he's at peace and we should come to peace with his rest joyfully, celebrating him through his music like he's still with us. (Nov. 4 post)
And I was right that somebody had already said it, the irony is they said it in 2006, three years before MJ's death. Here's the Youtube tribute to Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson using "Together Again" by a fan in France.
The photo of Janet comes from the BET Awards show that was supposed to be a tribute to her brother.
I'm working on a Domestic Violence Awareness Month post for BlogHer.com, and had planned to include the question from a woman in my hometown to Barack Obama during his visit to New Orleans on October 15. The president was keeping his promise to visit the city before the year's end to check on progress four years after Hurricane Katrina. He held a Town Hall at the University of New Orleans, and I couldn't go. Dental surgery. However, I was able to watch his appearance live on TV.
One woman's question stuck with me regarding the need for more legal aid funding for victims of domestic violence. I thought I would include her question in my BlogHer post. However, as I was working on that, I decided it was too long, and too much. I know we need more funding, but I didn't have the time to gather the figures behind the fact. And so, I realized that it would better to post her question here on my blog as a reference link with a little commentary following.
Here's her question and the president's response.
Q Hi, Mr. President. My name is Narkise Barack (phonetic).
THE PRESIDENT: Is that right? Wow! (Laughter.) You and me. (Laughter.)
Q And I'm a single mom of three daughters. I have my eldest here -- she's 12 years old.
THE PRESIDENT: Hey, you. What's her name?
Q Yasmine.
THE PRESIDENT: Yasmine? That's a nice name.
Q Yes. And she goes to Lusher, which is one of the top schools here. (Applause.) My question has to do with an article that came out today in the Times Picayune in which it reported that Tom Perrelli, the Associate Attorney General, was lauding local non-governmental and governmental agencies in the effort to help women who were victims of domestic violence.
I don't know if you know, but the rates of domestic violence rose quite dramatically after Katrina and have continued to rise. And one of the problems is we've got agencies that are helping women with things like therapy and food and help with their children. The problem is that our legal aid clinics -- Tulane, Loyola, NoLAC -- all of these clinics have been so overburdened with cases that have to do with Katrina, that a lot of people can't get access to legal help.
Now, the segment of the population that's most suffering from this are women, and by extension, children. You can sit in court in Jefferson Parish, in Orleans Parish, for a whole day and watch a whole docket of cases, and not a single woman has legal counsel. So I wanted to ask you -- I know that you and Mr. Biden have been supporters of the Violence Against Women Act, and I was wondering what you can do to ensure that women in Southeast Louisiana have their civil rights protected and their due process protected. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: That's a great question. As I mentioned, speaking broadly, obviously there continue to be concerns about crime in the region, post-Katrina. And not only have we helped to fund Mayor Nagin and others to be able to rehire cops and rebuild police stations and so forth, but also to build a more effective judicial system, because that goes with it. We've set up a violent crimes task force that is up and running, and coordinates between the FBI and all the various local and state agencies.
So there are a range of steps that we've taken generally to address crime. But I think you're making a really powerful point, which is that when it comes to domestic violence, oftentimes that's under-reported because women don't feel that they have the support they need in order to step out from those situations. The issue of legal representation is still a big problem.
So what I'd like to do is to learn more specifically about what's happening here. I will ask -- I'll probably ask Tom Perrelli, since you mentioned him, who is Deputy Attorney General, to make sure that he investigates specifically how we can work more effectively with the legal aid organizations down here to provide more support. So thank you for bringing that to my attention. That's great. (Applause.) Transcript at LA Times
The president was correct that his man Perrelli is the one who should have an answer. The Deputy Attorney General preceded his boss and was in the city the day before talking about the domestic violence crisis in Katrina's aftermath.
“It’s rare that any community would face devastation across every aspect of the system, from transitional housing to courts,” said U.S. Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, in visit to the metro area.
Perrelli spent the day in New Orleans, meeting with advocates who work with domestic violence victims and getting a first-hand look at efforts to confront the problem.
“Louisiana, historically, has had incidents of domestic violence among one of the worst in the states and [was] number one based on the 2007 data, the most recent data we have,” Perrelli said.
The problem, though, extends beyond the city limits and into rural areas. One such instance occurred last month in rural Livingston Parish. That is where 50-year-old Dennis Carter killed his estranged wife, his son and his two-year-old grandson, before killing himself. Carter’s wife had filed a restraining order against him. Victims’ advocates said protecting domestic violence victims in rural areas remains a challenge.
“We’re talking about very rural, remote communities, where truly innovative solutions need to be found for those needs,” said Catherine Pierce, with the Office of Violence Against Women. (New Orleans Top Stories)
We had horrible domestic violence stats before the storm, and just as domestic violence is reported to have increased across the nation with the recession, cases of domestic violence seem to have worsened as Gulf Coast families buckled under Katrina devastation.
And yet, the domestic violence crisis down here, the increase and the need for funding still doesn't get the media attention you'd expect. Yes, the media will cover a murder but doesn't do as much as it could to make the public more aware of the signs of domestic violence and what we can all do to prevent abuse among family members.
For instance, I surfed our daily newspaper's site, NOLA.com aka The Times Picayune, for stories on the domestic violence crisis. Despite it being domestic violence awareness month, the paper's search engine found only one story specifically focused on domestic violence and proactive solutions published in the last three months. It's about a program in St. Bernard Parish. What appears to be a second such story on domestic violence funding is a repeat of the first St. Bernard article, and the only other stories are those about specific domestic violence crimes, in other words, run of the mill if it bleeds it leads news.
In fact the only other story I can see to add is one about Perrelli's visit and his praise for the city's progress under duress.
Even in the paper's story about the president's visit to the city in which the single mother's question is mentioned, the reporter underplays the value of her query to the president, writing "But the rest of the queries concerned domestic violence prevention, immigration laws and the ongoing health-care debate -- issues that could come up in any American city, even if some of them are felt more acutely in post-Katrina New Orleans."
My adventure in reading about domestic violence and New Orleans causes me to say that the action vice president for NOW is most likely right, domestic violence is not getting the attention from mainstream media that such a serious topic deserves.
