There's been some wonderful discussion and remembrances in both zkg's dairy as well as Meteor Blades' late night Obamanos Open thread about those people we wished could have lived to see this day.
I started writing a comment, but felt that once I was done, it was too long to put in an open thread, seemed rude to take up so much space. So indulge me, I know this little diary of mine will scroll off within a short time, probably before I finally get to sleep sometime before dawn. I don't mind. I wrote this because I wrote this, and because I want to remember my uncle, Danny Barker and my aunt Lu Barker today.
My grandmother and grandfather knew Danny and his wife Lu. My grandfather died before I was born, but Danny and Lu often came to parties and family celebrations when they were in New York. I drank deep of their love of music, and it transformed me, a little redheaded kid on the upper east side, a neighborhood that George Carlin would jokingly refer to as 'White Harlem'. My Dad would get out his battered trumpet, Grandma poured the drinks, all the women would cook and serve all the while wearing cocktail dresses glittering costume jewelry, and high heels. The kids ran in and out, until the night settled in, and I'd be scrunched up by the chair Dad sat in, waiting for Aunt Lu to call me out to duet on "Bet you can't shimmy like my sister Kate".
It wasn't until we had moved down to Virginia in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration that I became aware that folks like Uncle Danny and Aunt Lou were, well, treated differently in Virginia in some way I didn't really understand. When our car broke down somewhere in southern Virginia, during a night of powerful summer thunderstorms, Dad walked in the rain for I don't know how far, found a gas station and came back with a tow truck. There was a motel next to the gas station, it had a name that I can't quite recall, but it was something like "Black and Tan Motel". Dad was standing in a phone booth, telling Mom that we were stranded and would be all night, and would have to sleep at the station or in the car until the mechanic came in the morning and could look at the car. I tugged at his hand, the one with the Camel wedged between two fingers, and said "Dad, there's a motel right over there". He looked down at me and said: "Red, that motel isn't for people like us, it's for people like Uncle Danny and Aunt Lou".
I didn't understand. I didn't understand that whole night, stretched out on the big back seat of the Plymouth sedan. What did he mean, people like Uncle Danny and Aunt Lou?
Sadly, in the next decade, growing up in the old border states, I learned what he meant.
The years went by, and my family was torn apart. I lost track of the Barkers, hell, I lost track of most of my family for many years. But the time came when my grandmother had to move into an assisted facility in the town she had been born, back in Indiana. My mother and I went down to deal with her home, and to help settle her into the new facility. There were things to take to her new apartment, things she wanted sent to various family members and friends, things she wanted kept by her sister across the river. We did this work, the 3 of us, grandma in a wheel chair, ordering us about while telling the story of every plate, book and table cloth along the way. After she was moved into the facility, Mom and I kept working for another 2 weeks to sort through all the photos, and the clothes, and the books, and the letters.
The letters.
My Mom went to bed one night, after a few beers and tears. I stayed up, nursing one last PBR, and I opened 'one more' box and found old letters. There were several boxes of letters, and loose photos I'd pulled out of a closet, stacked by the couch to sort when I had a chance. I started going through them to see what they contained. Letters from my great-grandfather and mother, letters from my long-lost and mysterious grandfather, letters from uncles when they were serving in the WW2, and after, while they took advantage of the GI Bill and their own intelligence to go to college, and see some of the world along the way.
Then there was a bundle of letters from Lu and Danny.
I'd only read a few of the letters, mostly about travels and when they were coming to NYC, and how were the kids, how were things, sort of letters, until I came upon one that stopped me dead in my tracks.
It was from Danny, and in it he told my grandmother that he and Lu were moving back to New Orleans. Back in New Orleans, they could have a better life, as much work as they wanted to have, they always missed their hometown. Because the Jim Crow racism in the North was unbearable, they'd rather deal with the racism they had lived with all their lives than stay in the North.
Those two words, "Jim Crow", hit me hard. Because I was an adult now, I knew a lot more about what the Barkers had endured their whole lives, hell, I had seen some of it with my own eyes. And my Irish green eyes filled with tears, thinking of those two good people, and all our people, who suffered so much to break down the barriers and fear and greed that divided a nation for 300 years.
A few nights later, I told my Mom about the boxes I had found, and expressed an interest in going through all the letters, sending some of them back to the original writers, if they still lived, and some, perhaps, to make available to historians of American music and theatre for research. (Another member of the family performed in theatre and vaudeville, and I still have a big box of her memorabilia).
I was shocked when Mom flew into a rage - it was the pain and the booze and the pills, I know, but things had been going so well for so many days. Maybe because those boxes contained letters from her father, who abandoned the family when she was a young girl, or because there were letters written by a sister of my grandmother's who seemed to be very fragile, and died young in mysterious circumstances. Whatever set her off, it was a powerful rage. She grabbed one box and went out of the apartment to the garbage chute that led straight to the incinerator. As I raced to stop her, she crammed the box into the chute, pushed it down until it fell, unretrievable, lost to the flames and rage of my mother's life. She swore that those secrets my grandmother had kept would be never be known by outsiders. She went back and got more, and while I tried to Not Create a Scene in the hall of the seniors only apartment building late at night, she destroyed each and every box that contained what was for me so much unknown family history, illuminating the small graces of people long departed from the earth, great-grandfather Henry's affectionate, floridly Victorian, letters written to his daughter, my grandmother, when she was in nursing school, an aunt's obvious proclivity for evangelical Christianity at a young age were unveiled to me, puzzling over the faded ink and crackling paper. Lost now, forever.
But one secret had escaped, and I carry it still. That two people I held dear had lived under the fist of a society that kept their ancestors in slavery. That two vital, intelligent and gifted people that had so much to give our culture and our nation and they had to fight to be able to do so. And I didn't know. I didn't know when I was a little kid, all I knew was their kindness, and their joy in making music and sharing good and hard times with their friends and family. I didn't know about "Jim Crow" and 'whites only' water fountains, I only knew that I loved them as much as my uncles and aunts from Brooklyn and Kentucky, the relations of the heart as well as blood.
Some part of me, of my spirit, was given life by knowing you both, and I am grateful for the gifts you gave me. For the gift of joyous music, and the gift of knowledge, even the gift, so long delayed in recognition, of knowing the sorrow and oppression that you lived with that made me want to change things, even before I could articulate that desire, before I heard Dr King and countless other heroes and simple citizens demand that freedom and equality so often praised and promised in our stories and principles.
And I wish you were here, Uncle Danny, I wish you were here, Aunt Lu, to see this day. To see the triumph of the angels of our better nature, and to urge us forward into the light of a better world for all God's children.
Now I join with my brothers and sisters, of all races, creeds, genders and faiths, with the First Americans and the newest Americans, and we will go singing into the new day, walking with the spirits of giants to guide us, and the songs of our people will reach to the heavens. I'm pretty sure I'll hear the strains of a banjo pickin', and the joyous voice of a beautiful strong black woman echoing in my heart as I set my foot upon the path.
(edited for typos and clarity, which is what you get when you start writing a diary at 2 in the morning).