The Book of Days III: Back in the Saddle

Copyright 2009- All Rights Reserved

No matter if I’ve been out of town or not, transitioning back from summer vacation into teaching the fall semester of college is usually easy. I always have my syllabus copied and ready for each class since the copy machine is subject to break down from last minute overuse by instructors. No hassle. No frazzle. But…this time was different. I had to cope with an unexpected problem that started almost as soon as I landed in L. A.—jet lag. I haven’t really been plagued with jet lag before last week and it took me by surprise. Had I known that it would show up, I’d have made some changes in coming back to town.

Time zone change. Jet lag is born out of crossing time zones. Crossing time zones throws off the biological clock and upsets the body’s natural patterns and rhythms based on day and night, sunrise and sunset. According to what I later found out, a two hour change isn’t too bad but a three hour change is trouble. I had gone through a three hour change coming home from vacationing all summer down south. My watch said that I’d landed at 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon but my body recognized the time as 6 p.m. It was ready to wind down but now that I was home, there was way too much for me to do to give in to that.

My first class was going to be at 9 a.m. the next day and I had to get ready, jet lag or not. In the sixteen hours between my plane landing and walking into the classroom, I greeted my neighbors who’d kept watch on my mail and my apartment, unpacked and put my clothes away, drove to the grocery store for food, put my dinner together and ate, made some telephone calls, put my classroom materials in my pack bag, laid out my clothes, checked a box full of mail accumulated over three months, and, finally, at 10 p.m., I went to bed. I didn’t sleep well—not a good thing; still, I got up at 6:30 a.m. the next morning. Although I was feeling tired, I walked my neighbor’s dogs for 10 minutes (my usual morning exercise routine), fixed and ate my breakfast, bathed, dressed, and left for work.

For three months, my days had started around 10:30 or 11 in the morning and I’d enjoyed living life at a decidedly slower pace. No more. Here I was back to alarm clocks, time schedules, negotiating morning traffic, and setting myself up to do or accomplish entirely too many things in one twenty-four hour period. As I drove to work, I heard on the radio that the weather would be in the upper 90’s. Great. I thought I’d left that kind of weather in Georgia. But here it was again! By the time I got through my classes, I was definitely feeling jet lag symptoms—grogginess, tiredness , mild depression, and disorientation. The heat made things worse and I asked myself a thousand times what I’d been thinking of when I’d booked a plane back without giving myself a day or two to rest before going to work.

I was fading away by Monday evening and I knew I had to find a solution…quick, fast, and in a hurry. Logic and a little internet research helped me come up with a plan. What I decided to do was slow way down for the rest of the week, stay in a cool place more often than not, take afternoon naps and cool baths at night, eat light meals, and put a limit on the kind of exercise I’d do every day for a week. It’s worked pretty well. Next time I travel, though, I’ll find out what other things I can do to minimize jet lag. That includes coming back home a couple of days earlier, not a few hours before I have to go to work.

Jet lag made it a bit harder and longer that first week to shift back into L.A.’s fast lane. I do miss the lazy days of summer, the sound my “Songbird” singing me awake every morning, my leisurely breakfast each morning with my summer hostess. Oh, well. Time to take my sweet memories of summer into fall and the new school year. It’s back in the saddle for me.

Family Album 10

Copyright 2009- All Rights Reserved

George Henry Lennon, Jr. (March 31, 1907 – May, 1980)

Note on Photos: Daddy pictured alone, 1970. Group photo, circa 1940's. Mama, Daddy on front row with Austin's coaching staff.

He was Daddy to me. We played cowboys together, shooting it out in the living room. We wrestled and he was my opponent though I mostly lost because he got me in a hammer lock every time. He was my fellow conspirator at night in figuring out ways to get Mama to let me stay up way past my bedtime. He introduced me to two things I loved: the movies and Mr. Brown’s barbeque pork ribs. He was many things, but I want to talk about him here as Austin High School’s beloved Coach Lennon.

When I was growing up, I never really understood the depth of my father’s impact on Knoxville’s Black community—specifically, his impact as a high school coach in a segregated school system and what that meant for competitive athletics during Jim Crow’s reign. I didn’t then. But I do now.

From 1934 to 1968, Daddy was head coach at Austin High for football, basketball, and track, Austin’s sole Physical Education teacher, and its Athletic Director from 1958-68. Ironically, integration killed his career. But while he was coach, he was damn good. Excellent, at what he did and got his players to accomplish. I don’t think, though I could be wrong, that any other high school coach of that time and place—the South—came close to beating the record he set for winning. When his record was spoken of or written about, nobody stuck a qualifying adjective in there to “ghetto-ize” his record, to classify it and him according to race. His record was being compared to everybody…White and Black. Those who followed sports, the media, and people in the sports profession called him “The Winningest Coach in East Tennessee.” This is why.

In football, while he was coach, the Panthers (Austin’s nickname & symbol) were National Champs 3 times, Southern champs 5 times, State Champs 6 times. His teams racked up 221 wins, 7 ties, and only 63 losses. In basketball, they were State Champs 4 times and Runner-up for State Championship 11 times.

He told me that every year he set his goal to win championships. He expected and worked for it and let his players know he expected them to set the same goal. In his player-tryouts, he looked for a boy’s willingness to sacrifice time for practice, to train, and to stay in condition. Mostly, he looked for that burning desire to play and win. As a little girl and then a teenager, I remember watching him during game time pacing on the sidelines all through the game. Daddy didn’t allow his boys to mug it up with the crowd. He expected them to pay attention to what they were doing. If they let themselves get distracted and foul up a play, they’d get chewed out in one of his famous locker room sermons. That’s what the boys told me years later. Which was probably pretty funny on one hand because Daddy was a short man and, as a rule, most of his players were giants by comparison. But shortness of stature didn’t stop Daddy one bit. He was a little man with a big mouth, and he breathed fire and brimstone when it came to the game. Like all great coaches, he regarded the game as sacred. Any player who made it through the cuts to get to first squad had to be of the same mind. He always reminded those who made the team that they were Austin Panthers and that the panthers had a winning tradition…just like the New York Yankees or other professional teams.

I can’t help but be somewhat awed by Daddy’s attitude. What he told those Black boys was that they were just as good, better, really, than any White boy playing sports. What he expected of them was to set high goals and work for them. Forget skin color. That didn’t matter. Social class and money didn’t matter. All that claptrap about Black folks being inferior, or less than the next person didn’t matter. When I think about it, that was pretty radical stuff to put in somebody’s head back then. In fact, it’s still pretty radical stuff.

I asked him once what made a great high school basketball or football coach. He said you had to be a stickler for details, and that you had to have great insight and great foresight, but, most of all, you have to be a stickler for the fundamentals. Makes sense to me that whatever you choose to do—football player, coach, actress, musician, painter, writer—to do it well, you have to cover/know the basics. From there, you can play variations, make your own special pallet of colors, so to speak, on the fundamentals you’ve mastered.

I interviewed Daddy for a booklet I did on him (The Thrill of Victory) a couple of years before he died. His ambition, he said, was always to be a high school coach and teacher even though back in the 1930’s very little Physical Education was taught because there weren’t any gyms. Still one of his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers encouraged Daddy to apply for the P.E. job at Austin and, in 1934, he was hired. He'd gotten his bachelor's in 1931 at Bluefield State College where he'd picked up the nickname “Dusty” probably because he was, as he said, “pretty short for a football player” (Daddy was 5’4”.) People called Daddy either “Dusty” or “Coach” all his life. I never heard anybody except Aunt Helen and Aunt Claire call him by his given name, “George”—not even Mama.

Though I'm sure he could have coached at a college with the winning record he had and with his professional credentials (he not only had a bachelor's but received a master's in 1942 from the University of Wisconsin, no easy feat back then when teachers generally didn't have a master's degree and certainly not one from a White university in the midwest where Jim Crow was alive as well), interestingly enough, he never wanted to go into college level coaching because those careers were insecure then. Daddy said there was no tenure (permanency) and no long term coaching contracts paying substantial sums at Black Colleges (though there were at White colleges and universities).And he said that pension benefits were much better in a school system, even a Jim Crow one, than those at Black colleges. I wonder how much has changed now.

Were there any advantages to teaching and coaching in a racially segregated school system? Yes, he said. For one thing, you could get some extra motivation from them by appealing to race pride, to community pride. And he and the players were like family and because the Black community was segregated, everybody knew one another. The players and their families knew that he was interested in seeing them do the best job they could and that he expected them to do no less than their best. But he said he wished that Austin could have played the best White teams.

Well. For a while, they did play a White school on the Q.T. (Quiet Time) way up in the Smokey Mountains. But those games never got reported to the media because White and Black teams weren’t allowed to play each other. Somehow, the Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association (TSSAA), which excluded Black teams/schools, got wind of the sneak games and they threatened to drop the White school from membership in TSSAA. The jig was up for that. So Austin continued pull together games with the few and scattered member Black schools for the Tennessee Negro High School Athletic Association (TNHSAA). Ultimately, Austin had to go out of the district, region, and out of state (as far as Roosevelt High in Gary, Indiana on some occasions) to make their game schedules.

I asked Daddy to tell me about three high points in his life that gave him great pleasure. One was when he was in college at Bluefield State. He ran a 60 yard touchdown against Virginia State that won the game for Bluefield. As a coach, he remembered when his football team defeated parker High of Birmingham, a school of 5000 students. Austin had only 600 students. The Panthers upset their lead of 13-0 and came from behind to win14-13. The next day, Daddy and the team got off the train to be greeted with a parade that Knoxvillians had put together. They all rode through Gay Street, downtown, in a victory celebration…something you just didn’t see done in “Jim Crow” Knoxville, Tennessee. The third high point was in 1977, after Daddy retired, when Austin-East High School’s stadium was dedicated to and named after Daddy.

Ultimately Austin High became Austin-East High School because Austin High was phased out in 1968, thanks to integration. Most of the students and teachers were sent to East High which had been all White. Daddy says before the phase-out, he could see the writing on the wall.

Here’s the skinny. Like other Black schools being integrated, Austin was scouted, Daddy said, to take their best players. In this case, East high got them. Plus, to make matters worse, Austin’s junior high feeder schools (Beardsley and Vine Junior) were scouted and their best players bribed and given favors to attend White schools. That left Daddy with very little material, so it was a struggle just to put a team together for those last few years.

Finally, the axe fell in 1968. Daddy wasn’t assigned to a school until a week before school opened that fall. Why? Whatat was going on? No school wanted Daddy, a Black coach on his staff who, for years, had the best coaching record in the city, Black or White. East High was out because the head coach there already had a White coaching staff; plus, they thought that there’d be trouble if they hired Daddy as Assistant Coach with his former players on East’s team now. (He had been Athletic Director and Head Coach for decades, mind you!) At the last minute, Daddy was assigned as Assistant Coach at Fulton High. His duties, I remember, consisted of being in charge of study hall every day. In effect, his coaching career was phased out with Austin High. Not only did they take his positions, they took the money, too. That first year at Fulton, his salary remained the same as before at Austin. But not after the first year. From then on, the pay level for being Head Coach and Athletic Director was revoked and he was paid as a regular teacher until he retired in 1974.

Integration as an idea of leveling the playing field, giving everybody an equally fair chance was thought to be a good idea. In theory. Because White folks were never going to give up the advantages that Jim Crow segregation afforded them, in practical application, integration turned out to be a bad idea, I think. Only because you never force your opponent to come to the bargaining table still able to summon and use all his power. Why wouldn’t he, then, turn the situation to his advantage?

What do I remember about Daddy as a coach? I spent many evenings watching Daddy nervously pick at his dinner before a football or a basketball game and I rejoiced when we won and despaired when we lost. After school, if I didn’t want to walk directly home from Vine Jr. High, I’d sometimes hang around Austin’s practice field or gym watching him relentlessly drive his players at practice. Daddy was a disciplinarian as a coach. If a player was caught drinking or smoking, he was off the team. If Daddy caught a player out late at night during the season, the next day, Daddy would run him around the track until he was ready to drop in exhaustion. I remember the endless traveling that Austin’s teams had to do to compete with other Black teams and fill out the schedule for the season. I remember that there was never any public housing for the teams when they went somewhere overnight. No motels or hotels. There were no places to eat unless somebody’s wife invited them for a meal. There was no money for uniforms either. The school system wasn’t about to provide anything in the city school budget for us Colored folks. Even though we paid taxes just like White folks did. And I remember that players who’d graduated would always come back, come by our house to see Daddy because they respected and admired him. I think he was a man to be respected and admired. It couldn’t have been easy to accomplish what he did in the Jim Crow South. But he did. I know there are those that thank him for it.

Family Album 9

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.

Family Album 8

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Annie E. Reynolds (birthdate? –1970’s)

(Note: Auntie is pictured with Mama embracing her as they stand in the back yard of Auntie’s Alcoa home.)

On my mother’s side of the family, by the time I was born, there was only one relative: Annie E. Reynolds. Mama called her Sister. Daddy called her Mrs. Reynolds. I called her Auntie. Sometimes Auntie would come from Alcoa to babysit me at the Mee Street house, though I can’t imagine how my mother got her to do it since I was told, years later, by one of my no-relation aunts, Teri Lenoir, that Auntie didn’t like me.

According to Mama, Auntie, like Grandmama Lennon, had had two husbands, the second of which, I was given to understand, left her. He left her—Auntie said, repeating this mantra for years—because of my mother-- that is, because Auntie had to raise my mother after pledging that she’d do so to her own dying mother. I don’t know if I believe that he left her because of that. It sounds so extravagantly dramatic, that line. Dramatic and manipulative. It casts Annie Reynolds—a young Auntie—in a circa 1940’s Hollywood movie as an unselfish, sacrificing, noble woman who utters the line: I gave him up to raise you. Music up. Handkerchiefs out. Cut and print! This is just the kind of line that somebody would drop at the just the right time and in just the right situation to work a person. You know? And work Mama it did. On my mother’s lips, the line morphed into: “She gave up her marriage to raise me.” Mama used to repeat it a lot to justify why she went to such exhaustive lengths to please Auntie.

Auntie did not approve of wild things. But, according to my mother, she had been rather wild, as a young woman. Party girl? Auntie? I could never feature her as a party girl. For that matter, I could never feature her as a carefree, young woman. Because as I knew her, Auntie was heavy-duty into the kind of religion that requires you to endure life, rather than rejoice int it. I guess, by then, she had repented her "wayward party-girl life" and was doing penitence for it. She was Baptist, but she seemed more to me like the stricter type of denominations—all straight and narrow, all grim and granite hard. The in-your-face type of religious person that constantly screams: Repent! Or face the everlasting fires of hell!

I remember the first and the last time I went to church with Auntie. It happened because the person who ordinarily took Auntie to church couldn’t pick her up one Sunday. I had my driver's license, so I had to be in high school then, and Mama decided I’d have to drive over to Alcoa and take her to church that Sunday. Auntie was a Baptist. (Before Mama married Daddy, she was a Baptist, too.) That meant Auntie's church was different from mine. Way different, I soon discovered. Their style of worship service wasn’t what I was used to. My church was Methodist…bland and very, very quiet. Auntie’s church had a spicy flavor. And it was noisy by the standards I was used to. People were saying Amen left and right…talking out loud, responding with a happy liveliness to whatever was being said from the pulpit… whether it be the deacon’s announcements or the preacher’s prayer. At my church, you did not do that.

At my church, the choir sang very "White" Methodist anthems—not music to call up the spirit, nor to clap your hands to. Definitely not music to set your feet adancin’ that holy ghost dance. But here, at Auntie’s church, they moved, so to speak, to a different rhythm. Their music was a little "bluesy." Africa had stepped into the mix and changed things… from the vocal arrangements and the minor key of the melodies, right through the beat taken up by tambourines and piano.

That sunday, the music got people Amening, and rocking. I looked around at the sea of Black people moving like rippling ocean waves. I started to feel a little tense. And I wondered what was going to happen next. Just then, Auntie jumped up, screaming: Oh, Jeezus, have mercymercymercy!

Astonished, I looked over at this little old, white-haired, wild woman jerking and throwing her arms. My mouth, I’m sure, dropped open. For I’d never seen Auntie lose control. I’d never seen emotion sweep her up like a tornado and throw her about like a puppet. Women with nurse’s caps on their heads ran to her with fans and handkerchiefs in their hands. I scrambled out of the way, not wanting to be rolled over and mashed flat. Her shouting set it off. The whole church began to get the spirit and folks started shouting, moaning, screaming, and falling out in the aisles. Because I had no reference point for this kind of church service, for the meaning and history of this ritual in Black culture, the whole thing simply scared me to death. It was not until years and years later that I began to learn, to understand, and not be frightened by something that we Black folks brought across the ocean and cultivated, like precious seed, to see us through on our hard, soul-testing journey in the Americas.

Family Album 7

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Claire Marguerite Lovejoy Lennon (Sept. 24, 1902 – Aug. 18, 1992)

Aunt Claire and Uncle Matt couldn’t have children, but she was the kind of woman that kids and teenagers automatically fell in love with. A listener who always had time for you. Someone who explained things. Soft-spoken. Empathetic. Understanding. She was the kind you wished, when you were a teenager, that you could have as a mother when you’d messed up with your own for the third time and knew you were going down for it. In a time when folks were making Ma Bell rich with their long distance calling, Aunt Claire was an old-fashioned letter-writer. And a very good one. In another time—a later era, she might have tried her hand at writing as a profession. She used to write me very long letters when I was in high school and college. They got shorter as I got older, but letter writing was something she did all her life.

Aunt Claire was born in Warm Springs, Georgia. Her obituary says that she was one of four children and that her parents began their children’s education at home. Apparently they did so well that when Aunt Claire entered school at 6 ½, she was placed in the third grade. She started teaching when she was seventeen.

Like everybody else who taught school then, she was a product of “the normal school” which was set up specifically for public teacher education. After finishing it, you could teach right away. This kind of school is not to be confused with the colleges that existed in the late nineteen and early twentieth century for the upper classes (code words for rich White people); those colleges, by the way, looked down on normal schools as “poor relations”, so to speak, that educated teachers for the “common” or public schools which were for the “unrich” masses. Later Aunt Claire went on to college—Georgia State, Tuskeegee, and Atlanta University—because we all know Black folks have to do double or triple the amount White folks do, just to qualify.

By the time I was born, she was Superintendent at Allen High, a private school for girls. Later, she worked as an administrator at Palmer School, and later, still, she worked with the YWCA. Eventually, she went to Spelman College with Uncle Matt and served for a time as First Lady of the College since the President, at the time, had no wife to fill that role for the college.

I once saw a picture of Aunt Claire as a young girl and I have to say I didn’t recognize her at all. She looked like a White girl—a gorgeous White girl. That means, of course, that she could’ve passed if she’d wanted to. Obviously, she—like a whole lot of others who could’ve passed—didn’t want to. She told me about the time after Uncle Matt had died when she shared a cab with some White women also living at the same large retirement complex as she. They were all going to a concert in Asheville. Some of the women in the cab knew each other, but none of them knew her. On the way, a couple of them began talking about Black folks, making observations that were, to say the least, unflattering—and demeaning. Thinking they were all “one of a kind”, the silver-haired duennas pulled out all the stops, holding nothing back in their conversation, showing—in a manner of speaking—their true colors. Then, one of the old ladies turned and asked Aunt Claire what she thought. Aunt Claire opined that since she was Black, she thought…. Well, you can see where that went. They turned red and clamed up, mumbling some inane excuses and half-hearted apologies. She smiled to herself and proceeded to have herself a good ole time at the concert.

I tell you this story to show you that ladies of her day either decided to pass as White or they declared for Black. No half-stepping code words like “Biracial” to set themselves apart and tell the world they were light-skinned folks who could pass if they had the nerve to do it. No, sir. They didn’t live in the world of gray, being neither this, nor that. They were Colored folks—and damned proud of it.

Family Album 6

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Madison C. Benjamin Lennon (March 26, 1909 – Spring, 1976)

Uncle Matt held a distinctly romantic aura for me and I fell completely under his spell. I had heard from bits and pieces of grown-up conversation that he had been a road musician, that he had traveled “all over” as a member of a jazz band. I wonder now how a p.k.—preacher’s kid got away with that. It wasn’t a respectable occupation for Black folks in the 1920’s, 30’s, or 40’s.

Uncle Matt was born in Savannah, Georgia and grew up there as well as in Daytona Beach, Florida where he attended Bethune-Cookman High School which was later named Bethune-Cookman College (one of the historic Black colleges). His junior college years were at Morristown Junior College in Tennessee. Then came his discovery of his feel for music during the years at Wilberforce. He said that his major was Political Science and had planned to go into Law, but he got deeply involved with a band on campus and a love affair with the music muse was born. Uncle Matt told me that from 1930 to 1932, he was on the road with various jazz bands—the Chocolate Drops, for one, and Zack White’s Beau Brummels, for another. Later, I found out he was on the road for about three years immediately following his graduation from Ohio’s Wilberforce University. Marriage to Aunt Claire in 1933 soon put an end to musician’s road life.

He got his Master’s in music at Ohio State University and did further work at Columbia, U. of Wisconsin, U. of North Carolina. So he was well-rounded, variously experienced and definitely qualified to step into the classroom. His teaching life started in LaGrange, Georgia and eventually took him to Asheville, North Carolina in 1941. It was there that as Director of Bands, his bands at segregated Stephens-Lee High consistently made their mark as the state’s best marching-concert bands, often walking off with first place honors in competitions.

Asheville was a 3-hour drive from Knoxville over the Smokey Mountains so going over there was a treat that we did only so often. When we did go to visit Uncle Matt and Aunt Claire, my favorite aunt and uncle, I could see how the students loved him. They called him “Doc” Lennon there. He got a lot of respect, as did his band. Though I only got to watch his band a few times, a blind person could see that they were A-Number One; they could even beat Austin’s band with their unique marching style—which was a definite crowd pleaser. I remember that the drum line set a wicked beat and the drum major and majorettes behind him gave us a performance that had you clapping and hollering. I heard people often compare his band to the revered Florida A & M State (another historic Black college) that routinely turned out the very best in college marching bands—White or Black. After integration closed the doors of Stephens-Lee, Uncle Matt went to Atlanta to teach at Spellman College (yet another historic Black college) as Director of Instrumental Music from 1966 until he retired in 1973. After he retired, he organized and directed a rhythm band with Asheville Senior Citizens until he died. I think it was Asheville High School that established a music scholarship in his memory for deserving young musicians planning to go to college.

Uncle Madison was my music man. My Jazzy Boo. He was so cool. I do miss him.

Family Album 5

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Avice Evans Lennon (December 4, 1905 – September 30, 1998)

Aunt Avice was Uncle Frank’s second wife, and he was her second husband. A year or two after he divorced Aunt Helen, which was around 1960, he and Avice got married. Aunt Avice was a professional woman in her own right—a pharmacist and business woman who owned College Drug Store on the West side of Knoxville, in Mechanicsville, just down the street a piece from Knoxville College, a Black college that dates from 1876. Actually, she was the first Black female pharmacist in Knoxville, having gotten her degree as a registered pharmacist from Xavier University in 1950.

I think Uncle Frank wanted to marry Aunt Avice because she was a I’ll-stand-by-you kind of woman. I don’t believe he was well and was probably looking for someone who’d see him through. Aunt Avice, unlike her predecessor, was an honorable woman who did just that with much compassion and love. After everybody in my family had died, the only relative I had left was Aunt Avice, who was living with her sister, Aunt Teenie (Armentine Pickett, one of my “no-relation aunts” from years back). I loved “The Aunts,” who, in their golden years, were good-looking women with snow white hair and a hearty sense of humor; they also happened to be super-sized, die-hard Laker fans. Once, I had baseball caps made up for them with sequined letters showing each of their names on the backside, and inscribed on the front with the words: “Laker Fan”. They wore the caps while they watched the games, yelling at the players, screaming in joy when one of them made a basket, and generally having such a good time that you’d have they were ringside at all the games.

Aunt Avice was the relative I came out to back in 1990. The others were dead by then. Most people who’ve read my book, The Mee Street Chronicles, want to know what she said once I phoned and told her the truth about my sexuality. In a syrupy southern accent, she said something like: “Why, honey, I don’t care about that.” During the same conversation, I told her I was getting married at my church in Los Angeles to a woman, and she replied in typical Knoxville fashion: “Is she a nice girl? If she is, then that’s all right.” They don’t make ‘em like Aunt Avice anymore. She was one of those Black Knoxville women with true grit. And true heart. She laid down to rest a bit at age 93. I hope she’s restin’ good.