Miss Chloe Read online

  No one was more surprised than I that I got to know Toni Morrison in this life. We had one of those classical relationships between women: crossing generations, spanning several cycles in life, exhibiting high and low notes, reaching and dipping and finding its way. Our friendship involved a studied and charismatic personality, famous enough that her appearances needed curating. Our shared experience staked in the trajectory of a wobbling, waffling, acerbic nation.

  WOMEN DEPEND ON EACH OTHER here and everywhere. We rely on each other to model, to trailblaze, to hold up the other end of the banner, to bring up the rear, to second-line, to cheerlead, to affirm, to caution, to rally. Complexities, eruptions, laughter, awe, and joy—all presented. Our relationship was ultimately, to me, an alchemy of season and light, often agitated by our opposite stages in life and by the unarguable presence of genius, the unyielding pressures of time. Our exchanges were soothed by keen imagination and sometimes serrated by the heft of her expectations. Nonetheless, we graced each other with what we had to give. We applauded our mutual offerings.

  I DREAM A WORLD

  My first novel, The Good Negress, taught me that our knowledge is dated to the age of our parents. We know their music, their heroes, their ideas, even dances popular in their time. Because I was partly raised by grandmothers, my early knowledge dates even further back. I know my parents’ and my grandparents’ era, too. The further back we go in our history, the fewer celebrations or ceremonies we were allowed. In our family, we celebrated birthdays as if cake and candles and presents were indicators of self-possession and a familial locus of control. My sisters and I always reference our birthdays as touchstones of our family life and childhood. Our earliest knowledge was imprinted at birthdays; we had a celebration, even on weeknights, for every birthday in the family. Our creed: little brown children will be celebrated, serenaded, routinely informed of their value and specialness. Ditto for the elders. Full stop.

  We called one of our grandmothers “Ma Howell”: she was both the queen and the general of birthday party celebrations. In our family, because of Ma Howell, everybody’s birthday was roundly, soundly acknowledged. Dinner, punch, cake, candles, the birthday song. Even the adults were treated to their favorite meal. Cakes so loaded with candles that the whole room flickered with flame. Around birthday dinner tables, we young people learned who we were and who we came from. Consider the candles torches; consider the knowledge passed.

  As a very young child, unaware of whose birthday had arrived, I looked most forward to the punch and the brightly colored aluminum cups. The cups were my signal that there was a birthday, before I could make sense of time and date and age. We celebrated our birthdays at Ma Howell’s house, where she lived with her elderly parents. Choosing our own cups represented the same agency as choosing crayons, though rarer and more festive. A cold cup, a bold color. That the temperature of the cup was so like winter fascinated me, as most of our birthdays are in warmer weather. Ma Howell would settle her entire aluminum ice tray down into the pitcher of punch, on the birthday table—the whole ice tray, with its pull-up handle undisturbed. I don’t know why the pitcher did not fall over.

  Toni Morrison’s parents were dated to Ma Howell’s age and era—so, I would argue, her wisdom would be sourced to that time, too. Our grandmother Ma Howell graduated from Howard in 1932, about twenty years before Morrison arrived there. Ma Howell taught me things that I later learned Morrison understood. The word negress, for example—so rarely used—is from her parents’ (and my grandparents’) era. Most of the fun we had and the jokes we made with each other, Morrison and I, began with some date-referencing language. Words carry luggage, and for us, playful uncovery of the luggage of language inspired our conversations.

  My grandmothers represented living history to me. Their era happened to coincide with Morrison’s lived experience of her past as well. I was the anomaly, because I had two grandmothers and three great-grandmothers. My lived experience included references far behind my birth and awareness. My great-grandmothers—who helped raise me—were born in the nineteenth century. They struggled through youth in a handmade time, with Jim Crow hovering and hassling them and chasing them away from self-possession and from freedom. And still they made their way, they made a way for us. I defined my whole cohort of grandmothers as wise women, women in the know.

  IN THE LATE 1980S, WHILE I was in graduate school, Brian Lanker published a photography book, I Dream a World: Black Women Who Changed America. I counted up my quarters and bought a hardcover copy. You talk about a book to change your life! Everybody is in this book. Full-page black-and-white photographs. Facing pages contain life stories and advice written by the women. All the women still alive who cut a path or paved the way or made a way from none: Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy Height, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Wilma Rudolph, Leontyne Price, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Beah Richards, Sherian Cadoria, Johnnetta Cole, Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Elizabeth Catlett, Oprah Winfrey, Maxine Waters. This is but a subset; the list goes on. Each woman writes or submits what she has to say about life or about something inside life. Often, the women explicate their career choices, their trajectory, their accomplishments.

  Lanker’s photographs are phenomenal, mostly because of the beauty and intensity and power of his chosen subjects. The book approaches the ascendant, the wildly inspiring.

  In her section, opposite her fierce photograph, Toni Morrison writes:

  I remember myself as surrounded by extraordinary adults who were smarter than me. I was better educated, but I always thought that they had true wisdom, and I had merely book learning. It was only when I began to write that I was able to marry those two things: wisdom and education.

  . . . When I turned in the manuscript of The Bluest Eye in 1968, there was a lot of interest in certain kinds of black expression. But I had written something separate from the harangue and the confusion.

  This. This encapsulates our lives, our home experience, our ventures out into the learned world. In our homes, in Black America, herculean efforts are made to keep wretched oppression at bay, to keep the oppressors and their insanity outside the door. In the larger world, only the struggle, only the insanity, only the harangue is “of interest.” How we wrestle with this harangue is how our country likes to watch us. Seemed sadistic to me—how our nation entraps us and then ogles our struggles.

  Toni Morrison recognized the interior wisdom—the work of smoothing, of soothing, of making hard lives bearable in an unbearable nation. Wisdom in works, wisdom in action, wisdom under warm hands. Wisdom from successful survival. She recognized herself as well-read, as literate, but as possessing information that could only stand still and hold a flickering light to the real work of self-preservation, of nurturing the continuance of life.

  Morrison’s locus of wisdom is a site I totally recognize. My life and my experience, in that regard, was just the same. A whole corps of wise women participated in my raising, and we girl children learned exactly where our wisdom lived. An understanding of the source of our strength, of our past, and of our future was the knowledge that launched us. We could ignore our speaking, protective, wise antecedents at our own peril. Few of us were dismissive. Mostly we watched, studied, learned. Emulated.

  WISE OLD WOMEN

  A Black woman who has lived to her wisdom years has been through some things, some thickets, has likely been witness to a whole host of crimes. An aged Black woman peers at the world from the corner of Seen Before and For Shame. A Black woman in her wisdom years sees and speaks shrewdly. She may shriek. A silver-haired Black woman has met peril in the daylight, has stared him down, and has strode on through. You have to march to keep up with the program. She knows what’s important. Keeping the pace—persistently—must be part of how we play the game. Life gives us teams, but there are few substitutions. A Black woman who has lived to her wisdom years knows what’s important. She has hidden from and stood up to the harsh realities of scarcity, refusal, race
prejudice, gender mistreatment. She has often grown into sweet serenity or fierce toughness. When I met her, Morrison was learned and literate and ascendant—and entering her wisdom years. Reaping the rewards of decades of work—imaginative writing, dogged revision, ruthless historical queries. She had demonstrated devotion to the grace of creativity and dedication to the tasks at hand. Either she was deferential to her blistering imagination, or her imagination made demands. Morrison showed the world what Black America makes.

  Compared to Morrison, I was a young’un. But I learned about women of Morrison’s age growing up with my chorus of grandmothers. My sisters and I were girl children, cooking in a wisdom stew.

  Those children whom people called old souls—I was not one of those. I was precocious, rambunctious, curious, and occasionally querulous. I asked questions and “created theories,” using surprising vocabulary for a child. I made arguments no one expected. When I was very young, I mixed up the creative and the true—until I understood fiction defined. And then I realized that fiction is a whole world, a matrix, an industry, a whole set of strategies separate from, but similar to, reality. Fiction is far more than telling stories. Fiction is architecture, daily visitation, imagination brought to the table and given soup and a crown.

  Until I was thirteen, my mind lived on a diet of books and the advice of old women. Voluminous years for learning and for learning how. Years of raw, tender, full-open consciousness. Eons in a child’s life. I grew up reading and learning and trying to peg reality, with no locus for the language my beloved books revealed.

  Our three great-grandmothers and two grandmothers stood up as our pep squad, government, nutritionists, and personal trainers. We referred to the whole group of them loosely and inaccurately as “grandmothers.” All of them but one aged in place and said what they had to say, either by food or by phone. I grew up on a soundtrack of folkways—commentary on the bridges we needed to cross from here to there. In time, Morrison enters this trajectory—a woman bursting with book learning, enlarged by big ideas, formed by contentious experience, and adept at laying down language for any complexity, any simplicity, any inanity.

  Morrison and I worked on the same faculty, at Princeton, and that’s when we got to know each other. For a few years after Princeton, I traveled to see her when I could. I met her either at one of her houses or somewhere she was traveling to. When Morrison stopped traveling, and I moved back to DC, we saw each other infrequently, but we talked on the phone consistently. Calling her in those years was like talking to my grandmothers; all of them were gone by then. I don’t know, but I had the sense that Miss Chloe carried her phone around in her pocket. I had the sense that phone conversation was all the same to her. Less movement involved. Less planning involved. More leisure, more flânerie. No need to go open the front door. The soundtrack of old women that seemed a familial and specific circumstance opened up to Morrison as if there were still a party line. She listened to my brief history, and I listened to her meanderings. For Morrison, her history included what she’d written. She loved her work; her work was a huge part of her past and present tense. For me, my history included the women who preceded me, the hopes I had for language, the hoops I’d jumped through until then.

  MY FATHER’S GRANDMOTHER LOUISE, WE called Grandma—because that’s what our dad called her. Louise Smalls Young—she was the last of our chorus of five to go. She was in her seventies and eighties during my childhood—still caretaking, still cooking, still going up and down stairs. She was the eldest of three sisters. She took care of everyone and their children. When we disagreed with Grandma (which was rarely), and she didn’t feel like arguing (which was always), she would light a cigarette, blow out her match, look winsomely at us, and say quietly, “You don’t get old being no fool.” That was her final line of defense, her rock-bottom bona fides. Take it or leave it, smarty-pants.

  Her daughter, my father’s mother, we called Ma Jones. She taught us to work, and she taught us to be kind. She predeceased her mother, dying at sixty-five. All the time I knew her, she had three jobs. She loved Al Green. We took her to see Al Green live when she was in her sixties. As part of his concert, Al Green tossed out roses, and our grandmother kept trying to catch one; she smiled deliriously the whole night.

  My mother’s maternal grandmother we called Ma Viola. She rarely left the house. Ma Viola sat in a chair in her bedroom most of the day. After school, when my sister was in first grade and I was in preschool, Ma Viola made us walk down the street to the middle of the block, so we could cross the street where she could see us. The crossing guard at the corner was belligerently unhappy about our crossing down the block. But Ma Viola wanted to stand at the bottom of the steps in front of her house and watch us cross the street when she said go. The person at the corner was outside Ma Viola’s line of sight, and so, for Ma Viola, that was disqualifying.

  My mother’s paternal grandmother buried only her son, my mother’s father. She lived double his life after him. She was a cook, a neat, quiet cook. She could feed people full dinners and have a clean kitchen the whole time. We called her Ma Goldie, and she had plenty to say.

  My maternal grandmother is where I get my name. Ultimately named Jimmie Verdelle Williams Howell, my grandmother Ma Howell (the birthday queen) was born to parents who wanted a boy. Viola Moore Williams and James Franklin Williams loved the daughter they were given and decided to use a version of the name they’d planned. You can call a girl child Jimmie, and so they did. Her generation and her parents called her Jimmie; in her work life, she went by Verdelle. Jimmie Verdelle lived a life characteristic of the 1940s and ’50s, when Black people learned and earned and saved and proved and tried to stay away from white venom and white ugliness and white violence. She never mentioned that raging Jim they called Jim Crow. I remember wondering about the name, Jim Crow, the first time I saw it written. Had Jim Crow been a name? Where had that name come from? This name for white racism. The whole world of striving Black people in our emancipated past worked to free themselves from the vile meanness of white racism. Such an enormously tragic way to spend (or waste) lives—trying to dodge the vile rancor of people who hate as routine and who murder as entertainment. Black people who could insinuate themselves within communities so that their lives and their savings and their hopes for their children were out of reach of irrational, rancorous white pursuit. Within our own enclaves, which were as protected as we could arrange, we organized our lives around our natural humanness, which seemed then (and now) beyond the capacities of white racism to acknowledge, observe, or let be. Morrison erected dozens of these communities in her works.

  Addison Scurlock, “Negro photographer,” took a portrait of my grandmother Ma Howell in the early 1930s. We grew up looking at this portrait, marveling at its grand, historic, and stylized tone. It was sepia, it was romantic; Ma Howell’s hair was a wonder of straightened and loose curls. She looked like someone from a book about Negroes. It was a classic portrait with a circle surround; this was nothing I knew when this portrait was a fixture in their house.

  Addison Scurlock was the James Van Der Zee, or the Roy DeCarava, of Washington, DC. Jimmie Verdelle was probably a student at Howard when the Scurlock portrait was taken; or it could have been a graduation photo taken shortly after 1932. A studio photograph was precious and expensive then, worth preserving and worth personalizing. Jimmie inscribed the Scurlock photograph, which was the convention in those days, “To my dear mom and dad.” She signed her name, “Jim.”

  WE CALLED JIM’S PARENTS PAPA and Ma Viola (pronounced VY-luh). Both of them were born in the 1800s—a fact both stunning and endlessly mysterious once I could finally figure out centuries and dates. The use of a boy’s name for their daughter was further amazement. I could not help but think that having a boy’s name must remind you all the time that the boy thing must not be everything. That being a girl and then a woman holds power, too. You can’t forget about power when somebody is calling you Jim, or Toni, or Bob. I imagine Papa exp
lained to his daughter, Jim, that she could learn as much and do as much as any boy.

  Papa was the oldest person alive as far as I knew. I can still see him from my earliest childhood: small, focused, frail, peering, proud. Barely able to see. For Papa, a great-grandchild was a wonder of the world. He leaned over us and watched us as if every day we were hatching. He sang to us: Papa’s little bright eyes / Papa’s little doll. There is a famous family story that one of us did something wrong one evening, and my father promised a spanking once we got home. Papa objected but was ignored. So, after my father piled us in the car to drive us clear across town to where we lived, Papa called a cab, because he could not calm his distress. And so, my great-grandfather, close to sightless and infirm, and in his eighties, got into a cab to follow my parents clear across town. He wanted to make sure no little doll got hit.

  Papa worked as a cook on the Southern Railroad—for decades. Cooking food for whites who could ride in the comfort Jim Crow had arranged and violently perpetuated, while men and women his color crowded into “Colored” cars and shared aging food from greasy bags and shoeboxes—if they could manage to take a train at all. Papa’s job kept him on the road—or on the rails, to be precise. His income established and maintained a household within walking distance of Howard University. His wife, Ma Viola, and his beloved daughter, Jim, maintained the house he funded, receiving a stream of cousins from “down south” over the years, serving as a family nexus in the interest of the Great Migration.

  Once, on the railroad, Dwight Eisenhower ordered a steak cooked according to instructions. After receiving and enjoying said steak, General Eisenhower asked to see the cook, who was Papa. After dutifully reporting to Eisenhower’s private car, Papa was commended for the steak and given a ten-dollar tip, almost ceremonially. A legendary story in the family. A routine of our history, being “tipped,” our centrality unrecognized, our caretaking disregarded. What does it mean when your food is cooked and set in front of you? It means you have money. It means you are not feeding yourself. It means you summon a colored man wearing chef’s whites, and you ceremonially offer him a gratuity to the general and a small fortune to the negro cook. A commendation that must be a public ceremony.