The Book of Days VI: Reality Checks

Copyright 2010-All Rights Reserved



Reality checks are my touchstones for living each moment despite the chattering, tricky monkeys in my head.

1. Be yourself whoever you are… and the hell with it.

2. Social Security benefits will never give me/you/anybody enough money to live on. And The Powers That Be make damn sure it stays that way.

3. Everything that I think is NOT true. Let’s put it another way: Because I think it, doesn’t make it truth. My head often tells me lies.

4. Today: The good news is … I feel my feelings. Today: The bad news is… I feel my feelings. Ride with it. Hi-oh, Silver and Away!!!

5. Being kind and considerate helps to relieve some of the unnecessary suffering we put ourselves and everybody else through.

6. Time and friends are as precious as pearls.

7. Having true faith requires me to take the risk of stepping over the edge, so I can take wing and…fly.

8. You can’t outrun uncertainty, change and choices.

9. You are your greatest teacher.

10. Live in this moment. The next one ain’t guaranteed.

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 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 4

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Helen Mae White Lennon ( ? – 1970’s)

Aunt Helen was Uncle Frank’s first wife. She herself said that she was a great beauty when she married my uncle Frank. She dropped that bit of history, along with other tidbits one summer afternoon when she did an uncharacteristic thing by coming from her house next door to our house, sit outside and talk awhile with Daddy while he barbequed. I stayed still as a mouse so as to not miss a word as Aunt Helen recounted her escapades with Uncle Frank before they got married. Seems that there was some hanky-panky going on with Uncle Frank visiting her dorm room (she was a nursing student and he a doctoring student). That blew me away. I just couldn’t picture them together—roly-poly Aunt Helen and staid, passive Uncle Frank. Later on, I saw a photo (not the one posted here) picturing a very young Aunt Helen and she was, indeed, beautiful. The way Aunt Helen told it, she seduced Uncle Frank into marriage. She wasn’t preggers or anything, just made herself so irresistible that Uncle Frank was bound and determined to have her.

Aunt Helen was a drama queen, and an alcoholic. While she was alive, I really, really disliked her. Not because she was an alcoholic—or a drama queen. Really, it was because she always had a sneer about her. As if looking at you down her nose. As if you didn’t measure up. And worse, because you didn’t measure up, you became fair game for her to make fun of. Somebody for her to point at and laugh about. You know the kind that titters behind her hands with the others in her group. For sure, she liked to read you…up close and personal. But she had nerve, I’ll give her that. And she never lost it. Not even when Uncle Frank—tiring of her drinking, the endless parties in her kitchen, and her amorous escapades—finally threw her out. After which, the story goes, she found another man to marry that she thought had some money. Which she didn’t. And he thought she had some money. Well, turned out neither one had a crying dime. When Aunt Helen found out the truth, she divorced him faster than a New York minute. This, of course, was Aunt Helen’s version of what happened as she narrated it to me and Daddy the last time I ever saw her. She ended up living out her days in very modest circumstances, compared to the way she’d lived before. It didn’t humble her. She was a hellcat to the very end.

Family Album 3

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Edgar Frank Lennon (March 1, 1888 – 1966)

My mother named me after Uncle Frank who, being the family doctor, helped bring me into the world at Knoxville General Hospital. Uncle Frank was the firstborn of the three Lennon brothers, all born in March.

Uncle Frank was born in Bladenboro, North Carolina. He graduated from Morristown College in Morristown, Tennessee and finished Meharry Medical University in 1917 as a trained doctor. That was quite a feat for the times and the place where he lived. People forget that a college education was not generally available to the everyday person back then and for a Black man to find a way to become a doctor was a significant achievement. I say this not to brag but to pinch myself about what I’ve read about the times, the general lack of opportunities, the hard-ass road that Black people struggled to trudge in those times. The same year he graduated, Uncle Frank opened his office at 1011/2 West Vine Ave. in Knoxville.

Uncle Frank was a man who did good things. Remember that Black people could not go to the same hospitals or clinics as Whites and so, unless Black doctors had the resources to do so, Black people went without hospital medical care. In 1922, Uncle Frank bought a building, remodeled it, and opened, on Clinch Street, The Helen M. Lennon Hospital and nurse training school with twenty-five beds. I’m sure there’s a story in that. Unfortunately, I don’t know it. I have to wonder: Where did he get the money? How did he manage to buy property in Knoxville? White people would not, did not, sell property to Blacks back then. Which means a White man must have bought it for him on the Q.T. (quiet time). Who was he and what was their relationship? Why did he do that for Uncle Frank? After all, it would have been a risk for him to do that for a Black man. His community would have branded him a “nigger-lover” and made his life hell. Anyway.

When Knoxville General Hospital was built, Jim Crow was making the rules in the South about what Blacks could and could not do. One of the rules was that Black doctors were not permitted to treat and operate on their own patients who were admitted there, so Uncle Frank and other Black doctors led the legal fight that ultimately gave Black doctors the right to practice and operate in KGH’s Negro Unit. Finding that out about him shocked me because his demeanor was not that of a boat-rocker or freedom-fighter. He seemed to be a mild-mannered, quiet man. More of a traditionalist. You just never know about your relatives. When you’re a kid, you come up with these half-baked assumptions based on appearances, your feelings, on a bunch of who knows what.

Of the two sisters-in-law, Mama seemed to be his favorite. They appeared to be good friends—at least, she seemed to be his confidante. I remember many Sundays that, after he divorced Aunt Helen, he came to dinner at our house, and he and Mama would have long conversations while I was in the kitchen doing the dishes. Personally, I found Uncle Frank hard to know. Very reserved. Unlike Daddy or Uncle Matt, he didn’t seem approachable though he couldn’t have been more thoughtful of me… always giving me elaborate presents. But I never could really feel him. Even now, as I look at his picture, my impression is of a carefully shielded man. Or a man shut-down and unemotional. In the picture, Uncle Frank is expressionless. And that’s the way I remember his face. Never animated; just sort of flat, or impassive. And always unreadable. He looks perfectly respectable in the picture—middle-aged, wearing rimless spectacles, a white shirt with thin dark lines, a dark tie, and dark pin-striped suit. His skin is lighter than that of his two brothers…more like his mother’s, and he has her lips. It’s his eyes that are arresting. He’s looking away from the camera, seeing something in the distance, and his eyes tell you about sadness and loneliness. Did Aunt Helen’s partying do that? Or their son’s early and untimely death? I wonder.

Family Album 2

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Paternal Grandparents


Martha J. Samuel Hunt Lennon (1869 - 1948)

My paternal grandmother was born in Georgia and became a teacher. This was no everyday feat for her time. Getting an education was a big accomplishment for Black people. We were just out of slavery, after all. The Klan was on the horizon; White Supremacy (the mother of racism) still beat in the bosom of White America, and the American South’s economic shambles (due to the Civil War) screamed for cheap (or free) labor. The threat of bondage (of one kind or another) loomed over the heads of many, if not all, Black people at the time of my grandparents. For a woman to get an education was gigantic achievement. Other factors aside, Black women—women in general didn’t strike out in the world to be independent and be self-supporting… do whatever they wanted, whatever fulfilled them. That time was yet to come. In the mid-1960’s to be exact.

I was told that she was married twice. My uncle Frank, the oldest of her three children, was the child by her first marriage and my father and my uncle Madison were her children by her second marriage. The second marriage was to George Henry Lennon, Sr. in 1906. They stayed married until he died in 1926. Grandmama outlived him by 22 years. But I only knew her for a too-short four.

Grandmama, I remember, was the color of macaroon cookies. I have a couple of pictures of her. One as a young woman, standing with my grandfather. When I look at the young woman picture, I can see a woman with Native American features. With piercing eyes and smooth, flawless skin. She has on no jewelry at all. But she is a beauty, no doubt, stylish with her long hair swept up into a pompadour, wearing a duster coat over a blouse with a high, lace neck. But mostly, I see I can see myself in her. I inherited her mouth, the full lower lip, via Daddy, her son. The other picture is Grandmama as I knew her. As an old woman. She stands, short, fragile-looking, in the yard of her house. She has on a print dress. She holds her hands, clasped together, in front of her. She is wearing glasses. When I look at that picture, I remember that she steadied me, calmed me. And I still feel her love.

Sometimes, I think I remember that my parents and I lived at Grandmama’s house before we moved into the Meet Street house. Her house, like an old-fashioned, Victorian gingerbread home, seemed to be clutching for dear life at the face of a steep hill. The street itself, either Church or Temple Street, was hilly like others in Knoxville, Tennessee. To reach the front door of her house, you had to climb endless, concrete steps that shot upward at what I thought was a vertical angle. I was afraid of those steps and I climbed them carefully, holding my mother’s hand, making sure not to look back and down, else I would surely fall and fall and fall down into the mouth of the earth.

The rooms weren’t big inside her home. And I remember the house being dark. Probably because light fixtures and lamps weren’t strategically placed as a regular part of a home’s floor plans like today. In the dining room, which had a fireplace like the parlor did, there were sparkling lead crystal objects and do-dads that teased my eyes; there was red and pink hand-painted china, and an all-glass china cabinet which Mama and Daddy inherited after Grandmama’s death. The tiny parlor had furniture that was dark cherry or black walnut. And there was a bay window, I remember, which faced the street. I loved that window, in fact, still love bay windows today simply because I associate them with Grandmama. There was no central heating then, so you had fire places in every room or pot-bellied stoves where you built a wood or a coal fire. In Grandmama’s house, the pot-bellied stove was in the kitchen. I remember her stoking the fire, shoving in kindling (wood sticks) and cautioning me to stay well clear of it. A few years ago, when I was awarded a writing fellowship to Hedgebrook Writer’s Residence, I had a pot-bellied stove in my cabin. Learning how to build and keep a fire going was a new, a fascinating experience for me. It reminded me of Grandmama’s house.

Two strong memories of Grandmama stand out in my mind. That I played in her kitchen though she never complained about me being under foot. If I close my eyes, I can see the pot-bellied, black stove in the middle of the floor and I can see, standing against one wall, her old-fashioned, white enamel stove…one that cooked food, not with gas or electricity, but with coal or was it wood? I can see her washing dishes at the sink by the back door. I associate her kitchen—and always will—with the smell of yeast that came from her homemade rolls baking in the oven. The other memory is seeing her at Sunday morning church services. That was when our church was East Vine Methodist Church. She always sat four rows from the front on the right side. I’d ask Mama if I could go sit with her. And having got permission, I’d run down the aisle from the back where Mama and I sat to scoot in and plop myself down next to her. She’d hug me, squeeze me. And I’d be content then. Just to be near her. She made me know I was someone very special and very precious to her. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.

George Henry Lennon, Sr. (1866-1926)

Born a year after the Civil War, my grandfather, Grandmama’s second husband, came into the world in Bladenboro, North Carolina. He was a Methodist minister. This meant that the family moved a lot because Methodist preachers traditionally never stayed very long at one church. I didn’t know my grandfather. He died well before I was born… before my parents’ marriage even.

I don’t know anything about him but there is a picture. It’s the one with Grandmama. They are young and looking straight into the camera’s eye. Neither is smiling, but they aren’t frowning either—rather they look intense and serious. Granddaddy’s is a dark-skinned man, sporting a moustache and wearing a dark, Edwardian style coat over a neat, white shirt and dark bow tie.

He holds his head just slightly titled to the right in posing for the camera… just the same as Daddy did when he posed for a photo… and as I do now. I have to consciously stop myself from doing the tilting thing when I pose for a picture. I always wondered where I got that habit from. Now, I know. I’ve got some of Grandaddy’s features, too. My eyelids, my hairy eye brows, my oval-shaped face, and my African broad nose. Looking at the picture gives me a sense of belonging to a tribe. I have some folks…some peeps!And I wonder what nations, what tribes of Africa birthed him…birthed us.

Family Album 1

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Frankie E. Lennon

I came squalling into the world on a Tuesday, January 11, at 11:55 p.m. According to my godmother, Edna Arter, I was the only baby in the nursery who kept up a continuous, ungodly howling all night. I weighed in at 8 pounds and measured 18 ½ inches, had copper-colored hair, black-brown eyes, and yellow-brown skin. I didn’t wait long to discover my hands; maybe that’s the reason that I laughed aloud at the end of two months. Who knows? By the third month, I was holding my feet; and the next month, I turned over to check the lay of the land. At 9 months, I took step number one; and by 10 months, I was strolling right along with no help.

Before long, I found out that I was the only offspring of George H. and Mary Estelle Lennon. That my mother’s only living relative was her sister, Annie E. Reynolds. That I had two paternal uncles: Edgar Frank, (whom I was named for) married to Helen, and Madison C.B., married to Claire. And that I was the only evidence of family continuity. My only cousin, Uncle Frank’s son, had died before I was born. Nobody else had any children.

Growing up, I was in perpetual conflict with my last name. I never quite understood or accepted the depth of impact my father’s spectacular career as a high school coach had on Black people all over the south. For that day, time, and place, everybody knew my Daddy and Mama—even White people. It didn’t help any that Uncle Frank was high up on the visibility radar too as one of a handful of Black doctors in Knoxville. I found out early on that this last name I had inherited I was astonishingly well-known. This was not the kind of information that I greeted with relish because I could see I was going to have a hard row to hoe with that name branded on my forehead: No bubble gum chewing, no playing pranks, no cutting school, no fighting, no sassing teachers, no talking in church. I thought I was going to be condemned to a dull and boring life all because of my last name. What a pain!

The Retrospective Series- 3: Banging Our Own Drum, An Excerpt from "Banging Our Own Drum"

Copyright 1978-All Rights Reserved

Author's Note: This is an excerpt from my first published writing. The editor asked me to write it for a community magazine when I was living in Evansville, Indiana. All the pieces published on my blog under "The Retrospective Series" are pieces I wrote years ago. You'll be able to tell when by the copyright dates.

Banging Our Own Drum

John W. Vandercook, in his book, Tom-Tom, said: "A race is like a man; until it uses its own talents, takes pride in its own history, loves its own memories, it can never fulfill itself completely."

Black people must explore and keep alive our own cultural heritage. This heritage must be passed on to our children so they, in turn, can pass it on to their children. It's been said that Culture is nothing if it's not communicated. By handing down our cultural traditions, we understand our common desires, values, strengths, fears, and hopes. We discover how much we share--our views about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is sensible and what is ridiculous, what is valuable and must be guarded with care, what is vain or pompous and needs discarding...what moves us to joy or to grief, to laughter, to rage...what leaves us cold and unmoved... what fires us up.

Through our traditions, our cultural legacy, we find the key to our common identity and our humanity. We must pass our heritage on...because it is there that we find the image and reflection of ourselves. It is there that we find our history, our memories--which can lead us to self-love, rather than self-hate. It is there that we can find something denied and lost for so long: pride in being Black.

Knoxville Remembered Series: Sports or The Curse of the Flying Ball

Copyright 2008-All rights Reserved

When I was growing up, there was one pool in Knoxville where Black people could learn to swim—on the west side at Edward Cothren Pool. In summer, Mama sent me to learn. Janice was usually there too. And Calvin, who eventually became her husband. Easy swimmers, I called those two. They stroked the water like they lived in it. I wasn’t an easy swimmer, but I loved being in the water, and so swimming became something special to me—something I could do well and loved.

One of the reasons I took to the sport of swimming, I think, was I considered it something all my own. Let me explain. Both my parents made their living as gym teachers and when I was growing up, people just expected me to be good at sports. Why? Because they assumed that the whole family would be good at sports. Like it was in the blood, so to speak. It wasn’t. Truth be told, Mama was really an English major in college. The only reason she had this job as a gym teacher because that was the only opening at Austin when she applied, and, thanks to old Jim Crow, Austin was the only high school in Knoxville where you could teach if you were Black. And that was really how sports came to be what she did for a living.

As for me, I was not good at your everyday sports. “Not good” is a kind understatement, “lousy” is a more accurate description. As a kid, I longed to be able to jump rope, my playmates singing chants to keep time while the rope slapped the ground. Didn’t happen. They’d be swinging the rope, I’d jump in, get tangled up, and fall. And forget Jacks. No matter that Evelyne tried to teach me how to play this game where you pick up as jacks as possible before the little ball hit the ground. No way. I could never master it.

I was great at climbing trees, at the swings, and at hand-walking Jungle Gym bars, but those weren’t group games, which I just couldn’t seem to pull off. Swimming, though, that was a different thing. I took to it like a natural. Not like me and softball. Not like me and volleyball. I have to admit that it was a point of pride with me that I could swim fairly well when most Black people in Knoxville didn’t know how to swim.

Even Daddy couldn’t swim. And he was Mr. Sports personified— the revered coach and gym teacher. The reason he’d never learned goes back to his mother who’d dreamed, one night, that he drowned. This scared her so badly that she’d warned him never to go into the water, and he never did. At first, Mama couldn’t swim either; she learned to swim along with me, but I was better at it because I got to spend more time doing it than she did. I can tell you, the best things about swimming, to me: number one, there were no balls that I had to hit or catch; number two, it didn’t require the kind of hand-eye coordination that was my nemesis; and, number three, it wasn’t a team sport.

Unfortunately, at Vine Junior High, I was faced with having to take gym, and those group games I was so bad at playing came back to slap me in the face, reinvented with a new name: team sports. This time, I couldn’t avoid them. Everybody had to take gym every year. And to make the situation even worse, Mama was my teacher.

In autumn, Mama had us playing volleyball. That was unfortunate because when I played volleyball, my feet inevitably tangled up as I looked up, reaching, with both hands, for the volleyball coming my way. My feet would tangle and that’s when I’d fall on the player in front of me, or I’d collide with the player next to me. The other team loved it. My teammates did not.

In winter, Mama had the class playing basketball. She’d point to a couple of girls to be opposing captains, usually somebody like Pansy or Rosalyn or Janice or Judy. Then, the captains called out the names of girls they wanted on their team. Do I need to tell you that I was always one of the last chosen? Always last—after Charlene and Bea. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, and I got fed up with it, but I couldn’t really blame them. Who’d want somebody playing guard position who was so scared of fumbling and falling that she hardly ever moved around on the court? That meant girl I was guarding always got to make a lot of baskets when I was on the floor. My teammates, of course, didn’t like that.

Even the other losers in class who couldn’t play well enough to save their souls got disgusted with me. Folk got real savage about winning the game, you see. So, I resolved to do better next time. Next time came and I found myself guarding Juanita who was moving all over the court like a jackrabbit. I gritted my teeth with resolution, determined to do better, and desperately tried to keep up with her. She faked to her left, and darted forward. At that moment, I lunged at her, heavily off balance, tripping myself up and lurching into her.

Of course, Judy, who was refereeing the game, had to call a foul. She sighed and gave me one of her Judy-looks that said: "I want to cut you a break, but all you seem to know how to do is throw a wrench in the works." After Juanita got her free throw, scoring off my foul, we began again with her moving this way and that way, and me lunging around like a lumbering cow. It was beyond frustrating to me to try to guard somebody darting around on the floor. Why didn’t she stop moving so I could do my job?

Finally, in a reckless attempt to do better for my team, I simply snatched the ball away from her. Well, I can tell you that didn’t go over well. Not with Juanita, who started shouting at the referee to do something. Not with Judy, who was blowing the whistle at me in a long, aggravated screech. Not with my groaning teammates. Not with my mother, who looked at me like I was an idiot. In the end, I ended up on the bench for the rest of the period.

Come springtime, it was softball that was my nemesis.

Once more, I’d always be the last one picked for a team since it was widely known among my classmates that catching the ball was simply beyond me. Because it would have been plain foolishness to put me on one of the bases, I was always assigned an obscure outfield position.

One fine day, after they’d put me out there, Pansy made a hit that stopped both teams cold. Everybody watched the ball go up, up, up into the blue, looking as if it would outrace gravity and never come back down again. Eventually, gravity snagged it; and, slowly, it began to curve down to the ground. Down, and down, and down, it sailed, coming into the field area where Judy, Charlene, Beverly, and I were positioned. As I watched the ball, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be expected to do something... to-- Ohmigod!--catch this thing.

At this revelation, I looked to my right. Judy was running, eyes up tracking the ball as fell downward, her hands out to make the catch. I looked to my left, and there was Charlene, who, like me, lacked the athletic prowess to catch anything--there she was, caution thrown to the wind, making tracks for the ball, too. Behind me, deep in the outfield, Beverly was coming up, full steam ahead, legs pumping, dust flying, looking like the Roadrunner. I looked up at the ball again and trembled. What was I to do? This one, I calculated, was coming in like a cannonball—picking up speed as it dropped, so it would hit somebody or something—hard!

Here was my problem. Flying balls terrified me. I had gotten hit so many times when I was little, standing on the sidelines as my parents’ basketball teams played, that now, the moment a flying ball came my way, I froze, not sure whether to run, put my hands over my face and head, or try to catch it.

Staring up at the ball, I decided right then, it wasn’t going to be me trying to catch this thing that could maim me for life. Let the others come and get it. Let them get knocked senseless. There’d be no more flying balls going upside my head. This ball was not going to make me its target. Not today.

And I stepped back and out of Judy’s way. She caught the ball in a fluid, one-handed jump that was a beautiful thing to see. Her catch won us the game. Our team was still cheering as Mama sent me to the showers. And believe me, I was glad to go.

It makes for a funny story now, but back then, I wasn’t going to risk life and limb for a flying ball. Not then, and not now. No, sir. Not me. So, you can see what I meant when I say I was lousy at team sports.

But I’m not at lousy at swimming.

In the pool, the green-blue water laps at my arms; the smell of chlorine is strong and clean in my nostrils, and the feel of the water on my legs is like luxurious silk. I’m the only one swimming in the regular lane for lap swimmers.

No team members here. No group games. And no flying balls either.

Thank you, Jesus!

(end)

Retrospective Series 2: Anthem

Copyright 1980- All Rights Reserved

Note: This piece was originally written and published in September 1980.

There is an ancient Greek myth about a monster called Medusa—who had snakes instead of hair growing from her head and whose face was so horrible, so terrifying, so repulsive that anyone who dared look upon it was instantly turned to stone.

That legend captures the way I used to feel about death. I’d always backed away in terror and dread from the Reaper. Thinking it an abomination. Thinking it a jeering, pitiless specter that mocked the very essence of life. I thought of death that way until the time that fast, black train boarded someone dearest to me in all the world.

When that happened, the ground under my feet shook and slid away…the bottom fell out. And I knew I had to confront the enigma of death, look it full in the face—because my life depended on it.

It has been said that death and life are twins born of yet unfathomed mysteries in the womb of time. Death and life, two sides of the same coin, bound together like beginnings and endings, a continuum whose parts cannot be separated.

A beginning for me was in 1967 when I came to Evansville, Indiana. At 23, I hardly knew anything of Black pain, Black survival, the Black streets. I understood nothing, then, of the Black, smiling faces masking festering wounds. Understood nothing of standing in unemployment lines stretching around the block; of dodging the rent man ‘cause you got laid off last week and the rent’s due today; of kissing up to Miss Ann at the Welfare Office for food stamps; of the ritual of last hired and first fired. Understood nothing of smashed hopes struggling to live anyway in back alley crap games; of the eternal dream of hitting the numbers for two thousand; of sudden violence waiting at the next corner; of Blue Monday at the joints—laughing to keep from crying, or fighting cause you’re too damn mean to cry; of searching for someone on Saturday night to please, God, give you hard loving and make the night sweet as blackberry wine. Understood nothing of what did I do to be so Black and Blue?

I had yet to taste, in those days, the bittersweet juices of living the Black life—and surviving. For I had not yet found myself trapped. I had yet to hear the underbelly of the blues whispering to me about the bitchiness of a lady called life and the odds of getting over with her. I had yet to come eyeball to eyeball with the truth: You live for today ‘cause tomorrow ain’t promised.

I understood none of these things when I came to Evansville. Nor had I found the precious legacy of Black folk which had been hidden away behind Hollywood mirrors, at the bottom of politicians’ trunks filled with smoky illusions, in the dusty, spider-webbed basements where historians had, fearfully, buried it. The paradox and genius—the essence, the spirit and legacy of ordinary, everyday Black folk had not been my teacher. And at 23, I did not understand it. Not then.

While he lived, Ronald Lee Johnson was, in a very real way, my mentor. Was a man who taught me, by his example, about the Black life. And now his death, though it seems a useless and wasteful one, is teaching me even more. Now, as I try to tally up the things, the events, the people who have influenced my life most deeply, changed it most profoundly—now, in all honesty, I have to admit that what has caused me pain and what has nurtured me must be given equal weight. Both are intertwined. Both are father and mother to the person that I am. For you cannot grow without pain and joy, without setbacks and encouragements, without endings—which are, in themselves, beginnings.

In the thirteen years I’ve lived in Evansville, I’ve seen the complexity, the toughness, the brilliance of the Black spirit. I’ve witnessed the courage, the laughter, and the tears—the resiliency that makes Black folks who they are. I understand, now, that the blues and the spirituals are not divorced from each other, but are one and the same: songs celebrating life. And I have finally seen that nothing is constant. Everything is risk. And perhaps our only hope in this life is sharing and giving love.

Sudden death is no stranger to Black folk, and my anthem is not the first written for a man who was gentle of spirit and who died before he could grow old. From the beginning, Black people learn to live on the cutting edge—with death lurking just beyond the shadows, with promise and despair hovering just above the head and heart. Our lives smolder with the possibilities of hope and despair. Our lives—like a splendid, but tattered cloth—are weaved of light and dark. Of dreams, needs, and disappointments. Of blemishes and of perfections. Our lives are shot through with gold and dross, with midnight tears and noonday laughter, with the copper taste of blood-pounding rage, and the sweet, night-smell of jasmine. Our lives are a testament to the circle of life, affirming its balance, its unity—recognizing no separation in the contradictions of life, recognizing that there are no beginnings without endings, no loving without hurting, no up without down, no life without death.

And so, now, I write a testament, an anthem to my friend who was a Black man. My friend who was of the light and dark. My friend who was a human being—indefinable, unpredictable, ambiguous, paradoxical—a man of tremendous complexity, just as we are. And like us, he was something of a mystery: bewildering, frightening, magical. A delightful tease. A salty pirate. An old-fashioned romantic. A man who tilted at windmills. A human being who saw his own shortcomings and who doubted himself.

Yet, perhaps one can fathom the mystery of a man through those who loved him through those who walked the lifelong miles beside him. Through those to whom he told his dreams. Through those to whom he gave the gift of himself.

For, in the end, it is not a man’s weaknesses, his transgressions, or his faltering steps that he is judged by. A man is judged by those whose lives he touched… and who grew because of it.
(end)