Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved
Mary Estelle Smith Lennon (July 25, 1909 – December, 1965)
My mother was a southern girl, born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Rev. Nathan Tolbert and Sarah Smith raised her until Mama was five when Sarah died. Auntie left her husband and came home to help the reverend raise Mama. He died when Mama was seventeen and I assume Mama and Auntie left Arkansas around thereabouts. I don’t think she went directly to college. How could she without any money? I’m sure she went to work, but doing what I have no idea. I can guess since Jim Crow still reigned supreme and the survival options for Black women at that time—aside from getting married or teaching—would have been doing day work for Whites, or sharecropping White folks’ fields, or working juke joints…something along those lines. Anyway, Mama, wanting a better life, eventually, made her way to Knoxville, Tennessee where she entered Knoxville College.
After college, on to the world of work she went. The story is that there were no openings at the time she applied to teach at Knoxville’s Austin High (which was the one segregated school for Blacks in Knoxville). She was an English major at Knoxville College (Something I didn’t find out until I was in college myself). Nevertheless, somehow, she snagged an offer to teach Physical Education at Austin. She accepted but the job came with the requirement that she coach the girls high school basketball team as well. It was a job offer, and in those days of segregation, you took what you could get. And thanked your lucky stars for it. The trouble was…she didn’t know one thing about coaching. What she’d learned a thing or two about was English…Shakespeare, Dickens, punctuation and grammar, not about winning plays on the basketball court.
At Austin, she and Daddy met. He was the boys Physical Education teacher and coach. Luckily, he had majored in athletics. So he knew a thing or two. And, he told me, he taught her about coaching. Threw in some help on the Physical Education classes, too, I bet. According to Daddy’s good friend, Henry Lenoir, she’d caught his eye, so her predicament was the perfect excuse, I’m sure, to do some courting on the court if you’ll pardon the pun.
At some point, the Board of Education decided that wives and husbands couldn’t teach at the same school so she moved across the way to Vine Junior High, one of the two segregated, Black middle schools you could attend in Knoxville. Which is how I ended up being in her Gym class (and Health class) from grades seven through nine, fumbling around trying to sink basketballs in the hoop, hit volleyballs over the net, and catch softballs zooming out of the blue. But that’s another story that you can find elsewhere in my blog archive under “Sports or The Curse of the Flying Ball, Parts 1-3.”
Most people said things of Mama like… “She was so nice” and “She was such a lady.” I have to agree that she did give you that image. She was definitely a rule-follower who always did the proper, expected thing. Never one to step out of line. To me, she was the iconic Supermother. Super-responsible. With enough of whatever it took to keep it all together at work. With enough hands, energy and smarts to fix it all, to keep it all together at home. On weekdays, before getting dressed for the day, she cooked breakfast from scratch (no McDonald’s or microwaved Eggo waffles), climbed into the car with Daddy and always got to work on time. After putting in a full eight hours, she’d be home by 4:00, put on her apron, cook dinner (no Papa John’s pizza or Kentucky Fried chicken), and have it on the table in time for Walter Cronkite at 5 p.m. On weekends, she’d turn around to do the same in between cleaning the house, washing clothes, writing out the bills, driving uptown or wherever to pay them, shopping for groceries, grading school papers, going to Sunday school and church, and cooking that special Sunday dinner. Yeah. I have to admit that I did put her up there with Superman because she seemed to leap tall buildings in a bound. But I realize now that a lot of other mothers did the same things.
Still… I looked at Mama through lenses that pictured her as idealized, perfect, and not quite in the same league as ordinary human beings. It’s the syndrome that many of us are afflicted with when it comes to how we see our mothers. We tend to put them up there with goddesses and saints. When I was growing up, I never pictured Mama as wanting or needing to have fun. Never as somebody who’d do an impulsive, fanciful thing. One summer she did though. Pulled out my bootskates while I was at Y-Teen camp and decided to use our backyard driveway as a skating rink.
I could see that it might look like a good idea if you had a notion to go skating. The driveway was concrete. Sturdy. Relatively smooth and even. And it was a long driveway. Distance-wise, if you were walking briskly, it could take you thirty or forty seconds to get from the street entrance to the house. About eighty-five feet end to end, I’d say. And wide enough to let the kinds of large cars made before the advent of tiny VW “bugs” or compacts cruise on through with some room to spare on both sides. So. Plenty of room to skate your heart out if you had a mind to. And evidently, Mama did.
The thing was this: She wasn’t a skater. Really did not know how. And besides the balance thing that you need to master to successfully skate, which she had not, there was the risk of bones hitting concrete. Mama was not a spring chicken. By then, she’d have been in her late forties, I’d estimate…though she kept matters like her age close to her vest, under lock and key, you could say. Anyway, putting aside these matters, she set out and did okay at the outset… for a novice. Then something happened. Maybe a telltale bump, or a rise in the driveway concrete. Maybe a distraction. Maybe a case of overconfidence. Who knows? Whatever it was, she fell. And fell wrong. Fell wrong enough and hard enough to break her arm.
When I found out about the accident, I was put out with her. Upset that she’d done something “foolish” that had put her in harm’s way. And there was the other reason. The light bulb had come on over my head as it dawned on me that she could be injured…just like the rest of us…that she was a “real” human being who could bleed, break bones, and puncture organs. This was a realization that was, somehow, “new” to me. It didn’t sit well with me. Not one bit. Which was the reason I asked her, after I came home from camp, to tell me whatever possessed her to try to do such a thing. There was more than a little asperity in my tone as I asked. She heard it and just smiled…a secret kind of smile, I recall.
Then she said, “Sometimes, honey, it’s just fun to step out of character…doesn’t matter that I fell because it was fun.” And she turned on her heel, leaving me to think about that.
After college, on to the world of work she went. The story is that there were no openings at the time she applied to teach at Knoxville’s Austin High (which was the one segregated school for Blacks in Knoxville). She was an English major at Knoxville College (Something I didn’t find out until I was in college myself). Nevertheless, somehow, she snagged an offer to teach Physical Education at Austin. She accepted but the job came with the requirement that she coach the girls high school basketball team as well. It was a job offer, and in those days of segregation, you took what you could get. And thanked your lucky stars for it. The trouble was…she didn’t know one thing about coaching. What she’d learned a thing or two about was English…Shakespeare, Dickens, punctuation and grammar, not about winning plays on the basketball court.
At Austin, she and Daddy met. He was the boys Physical Education teacher and coach. Luckily, he had majored in athletics. So he knew a thing or two. And, he told me, he taught her about coaching. Threw in some help on the Physical Education classes, too, I bet. According to Daddy’s good friend, Henry Lenoir, she’d caught his eye, so her predicament was the perfect excuse, I’m sure, to do some courting on the court if you’ll pardon the pun.
At some point, the Board of Education decided that wives and husbands couldn’t teach at the same school so she moved across the way to Vine Junior High, one of the two segregated, Black middle schools you could attend in Knoxville. Which is how I ended up being in her Gym class (and Health class) from grades seven through nine, fumbling around trying to sink basketballs in the hoop, hit volleyballs over the net, and catch softballs zooming out of the blue. But that’s another story that you can find elsewhere in my blog archive under “Sports or The Curse of the Flying Ball, Parts 1-3.”
Most people said things of Mama like… “She was so nice” and “She was such a lady.” I have to agree that she did give you that image. She was definitely a rule-follower who always did the proper, expected thing. Never one to step out of line. To me, she was the iconic Supermother. Super-responsible. With enough of whatever it took to keep it all together at work. With enough hands, energy and smarts to fix it all, to keep it all together at home. On weekdays, before getting dressed for the day, she cooked breakfast from scratch (no McDonald’s or microwaved Eggo waffles), climbed into the car with Daddy and always got to work on time. After putting in a full eight hours, she’d be home by 4:00, put on her apron, cook dinner (no Papa John’s pizza or Kentucky Fried chicken), and have it on the table in time for Walter Cronkite at 5 p.m. On weekends, she’d turn around to do the same in between cleaning the house, washing clothes, writing out the bills, driving uptown or wherever to pay them, shopping for groceries, grading school papers, going to Sunday school and church, and cooking that special Sunday dinner. Yeah. I have to admit that I did put her up there with Superman because she seemed to leap tall buildings in a bound. But I realize now that a lot of other mothers did the same things.
Still… I looked at Mama through lenses that pictured her as idealized, perfect, and not quite in the same league as ordinary human beings. It’s the syndrome that many of us are afflicted with when it comes to how we see our mothers. We tend to put them up there with goddesses and saints. When I was growing up, I never pictured Mama as wanting or needing to have fun. Never as somebody who’d do an impulsive, fanciful thing. One summer she did though. Pulled out my bootskates while I was at Y-Teen camp and decided to use our backyard driveway as a skating rink.
I could see that it might look like a good idea if you had a notion to go skating. The driveway was concrete. Sturdy. Relatively smooth and even. And it was a long driveway. Distance-wise, if you were walking briskly, it could take you thirty or forty seconds to get from the street entrance to the house. About eighty-five feet end to end, I’d say. And wide enough to let the kinds of large cars made before the advent of tiny VW “bugs” or compacts cruise on through with some room to spare on both sides. So. Plenty of room to skate your heart out if you had a mind to. And evidently, Mama did.
The thing was this: She wasn’t a skater. Really did not know how. And besides the balance thing that you need to master to successfully skate, which she had not, there was the risk of bones hitting concrete. Mama was not a spring chicken. By then, she’d have been in her late forties, I’d estimate…though she kept matters like her age close to her vest, under lock and key, you could say. Anyway, putting aside these matters, she set out and did okay at the outset… for a novice. Then something happened. Maybe a telltale bump, or a rise in the driveway concrete. Maybe a distraction. Maybe a case of overconfidence. Who knows? Whatever it was, she fell. And fell wrong. Fell wrong enough and hard enough to break her arm.
When I found out about the accident, I was put out with her. Upset that she’d done something “foolish” that had put her in harm’s way. And there was the other reason. The light bulb had come on over my head as it dawned on me that she could be injured…just like the rest of us…that she was a “real” human being who could bleed, break bones, and puncture organs. This was a realization that was, somehow, “new” to me. It didn’t sit well with me. Not one bit. Which was the reason I asked her, after I came home from camp, to tell me whatever possessed her to try to do such a thing. There was more than a little asperity in my tone as I asked. She heard it and just smiled…a secret kind of smile, I recall.
Then she said, “Sometimes, honey, it’s just fun to step out of character…doesn’t matter that I fell because it was fun.” And she turned on her heel, leaving me to think about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment