“I do daywork” is what I remember hearing her say. It would be a few years before I knew what that was and more than a few decades before I understood what it meant. Aunt Bell’s life was a closed book and we were only privy to a few lines of the table of contents. It has been almost 30 years since Aunt Bell passed away and there’s not a day that she is not present in my psyche.
She was a mystery, and none of us—including my mother—knew much of her story. We know that she was married once, back before my mother was born, and he left her. She had no children of her own, and my sisters and I are the children of her sister’s daughter (my mom). Aunt Bell’s sister Alma, our grandmother, passed away at the age of 19, leaving behind our Aunt Margaret and our mom.
I don’t know if Aunt Bell ever legally divorced her husband, but she kept his name. That must have been somewhat haunting and strange, keeping the name of the one who abandoned her. Was it an act of hope, or one of defiance? Maybe both. I heard that he left angry, as if he wanted to seal off the opening to any hope of return by causing an avalanche.
Aunt Bell loved us big! She never forgot a birthday, took care of my five sisters and me some summers, and she somehow always had money for Mom when she got in a pinch. She did all of this on a housekeeper/maid’s salary. I think she preferred the term “daywork” to describe her life’s work. She never mentioned any other job. I got the impression that the people she worked for were generous. Her furniture and personal items were those of someone making upper middle-class wages. That explains the very nice furnishings and beautiful trinkets around her house, which was always spotless, by the way.
As I sit here in one of the chairs that was positioned in her magazine-like living room throughout my childhood, I think of her. I miss her. And oh, how I wish I had known her…
The small snippets of her life story added so much to mine. But I wonder what experiences, feelings, and emotions are on the pages of that book of her life. What were my great grandparents like? What was her childhood like? What did she want to do? What did she like to do, just for fun? How did she and her husband meet and why did she keep his name? I wonder if they ever formally divorced.
Aunt Bell had a pithy saying that I play back in my head, even now. When we were on the phone and it was time to hang up, she would say “okay, talk to me later.” She told us to always wear clean underwear and sent it to us through the mail. We were to wash our necks, especially. To be around her evoked a reverence and honor.
My grandfather moved to Detroit when Mom was a child. We moved to Detroit about 25 years later. This was a real challenge for Aunt Bell, I imagine for a number of reasons. Mom would be farther away from her and with a new family. According to Mom, Aunt Bell had worked throughout her life to keep that from happening.
A few years after we moved to Detroit, Aunt Bell came to see us and agreed to join us on a visit to our grandparents’ house. She would be meeting our grandfather’s wife for the first time, who was every bit our grandmother from the moment we met her. The photos show Aunt Bell’s struggle to maintain her composure, but also the courage to step into the challenge to engage with the one whose firstborn she had loved so much that she did not want to share her with him. It was that firstborn who would move her from St. Louis to Detroit after a cancer diagnosis and care for her until she joined the ancestors. Aunt Bell had kept it from us until she couldn’t any longer. Several members of the family she worked for came to her funeral and expressed their love and appreciation for her.
Frequently as I sit with Mom, reminding her that she is in her home of over 30 years, her heart and mind move to Aunt Bell. Although the details of Aunt Bell’s death are gone, Mom remembers that she misses her, how much she loved her and was loved by her.
Every family has at least one Aunt Bell tale, one story worth reclaiming and sharing.
We are our stories, the ones we live to experience and share and those that are passed down, generation to generation. We need them; without them, the tapestry is incomplete.
I think about where we, as African Americans, came from and how our people had griots and scribes to gather and record the stories, sometimes by memory. It is the stories that are the threads of the tapestry that is us. The image of a tapestry holds deep meaning for me. Innumerable individual threads together, creating a cohesive, intricate whole. Despite hundreds of years of slavery and the stripping of our identities, we are still here. Our stories still exist and are waiting to be told, to be shared and added to the beautiful tapestry that is us so that we can behold one another and see in each other the treasure, the Divine. I wish I had known then what I know now of its importance. But I have now to share my story and to encourage others to share theirs.
The stripping of our identity severed connections to specific narratives which we can work to reclaim. This work has a resilience which adds to our narratives. By honoring those who came before us, we fill the gaps, restoring a sense of continuity that was once disrupted. Even though we might know little about some ancestors, our efforts to connect with their legacy give new life to the tapestry, strengthening our stories.
I like to believe that by keeping Aunt Bell’s story alive, I’m holding on to a piece of her; that she is, indeed, still talking to me across time, connecting me to one of the many threads of my story. May we never forget the vital ones.
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