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 6

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

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

Copyright 2009-All rights Reserved

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.

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 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!

Testimony- Part 1

Copyright 2008-All Rights Reserved

I was raised as a Methodist—not C.M.E., not A.M.E., not United Methodist—just vanilla-plain Methodist. My mother’s adopted father was a Baptist preacher, I’m told, and my father’s father was a Methodist preacher. When they married, my mother joined Vine Avenue Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. When I was born, I was christened at that church and was made a member when I was an adolescent. I didn’t want to join the church, but I was expected to. I registered my protest with my mother but I knew that I was captive to my family’s reputation (my parents were teachers), and to the expectations of the Black community. In that era, the fifties, good little middle-class adolescent girls were taught to conform to and expected to tow the line set by community values. I could see that my protest was in vain, and so I grudgingly went to the baptism preparatory classes that were supposed to teach me about being a church member.

I can’t remember a thing I was supposed to have learned about the Methodist canon or liturgy. The dominant impression I remember of the classes is that they were painfully boring, and you were not to ask any questions. Only occasionally were questions invited, and then only the most insubstantial were welcomed. That was not a situation that I could thrive in because I was a Black girl who always questioned everything. The church adults frowned on this, and probably tried to get my mother to stamp out this annoying characteristic. She didn’t. Frankly, I don’t think anyone could have. I still ask questions today and think that people who don’t ask questions are dangerously conformist, dependent, non-thinkers.

Later, after I had done my duty and joined, I encountered only one adult church member who was willing to listen to and answer my questions, and who actively encouraged us teenagers to ask them. She was Leontyne Kelly, the wife of one of the many ministers who pastored our church. This was, of course, before she became the first woman bishop, I believe, in the Methodist denomination. Unfortunately, the Kellys didn’t stay with us long.

And so, it was back to Sunday school lessons heavy on men I felt no connection with who lived light-years ago in the past—Moses and his tablets, Joseph and his coat of many colors, David besting Goliath with a stone. It was back to Sunday morning sermons preaching dogma which never even mentioned what was happening in Montgomery after Rosa Parks wouldn’t get up—sermons that never characterized Jesus as the radical boat-rocker, and liberator, who came with new messages of love and freedom, messages which mostly didn’t conform with the theology in the Hebrew’s Torah and the letter of their laws. No, we didn’t get any of that.

We also didn’t get any fire and brimstone preaching on Sodom and Gomorrah, the sin of homosexuality, lesbianism, transsexualism, or bisexualism. If we had, I think I would’ve remembered because I knew for sure, by the time the hormones kicked in (around 7th grade)that I didn’t want to be with boys, that I liked girls. That I was "funny, as they used to say in the street vernacular. On that taboo subject, no preaching at my church, and for sure, no questions entertained by anyone in Christendom, as far as I could tell. That kind of sexuality was a grievous sin. Heterosexism reigned. Amen. Case closed. I promptly went into the closet and tried to make myself comfortable.

Through the public school years, I learned to equate not only my Methodist church, but all organized religion with people who conformed unquestioning to the rule of the majority; with people who never walked their Jesus talk; with people who couldn’t explain why I liked girls and why that was supposed to be wrong if God made me; with people who were silent on contradictions in the Bible, and where the story of Adam and Eve came from when there was nobody, at dawn of human beginnings, who was writing down words to convey ideas.

By the time I finished my undergraduate degree, I had tuned out, turned off, and dropped out of organized religion.(I had also begun, though I didn’t know it then, my twenty-seven year journey into alcoholism.) On the trip home from my Indiana University graduation, I told my parents I wouldn’t be going back to our church. By then it had been relocated and renamed Lennon Memorial after my uncle Frank gave a huge sum to the church with the provision that its name recognize his long-dead son. Moreover, I told them that I would never again—on my own—join another church. I’m sure they were saddened as well as aghast at my announcement for they were very active church members. I’m sorry they didn’t live to see me become a member of Unity Fellowship Church, Los Angeles.

My mother died when I was a first year student in grad school and my father remarried. After I got my Master’s at I.U., I moved to Evansville, Indiana . Those were the days when I was drinking every day, closeted and desperately trying to be heterosexual. Maybe I hadn’t been preached at and damned to hell for being same sex attracted, but I’d gotten the message loud and clear in every other way that I’d better hide my true nature. So I began to play the straight role. While my friends—those straight and those not—got married, I found a way, without really being aware then of what I was doing, of avoiding the marriage trap. I’d find myself “attracted” to men who were already married or about to get married. Then, I could conveniently “fall in love” and be in a relationship that could never go down marriage lane. It worked. But at a price.

(end Part 1)

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)

Knoxville Remembered Series: Old Austin

Copyright 2008 -All Rights Reserved

In my time, Austin High was the only high school that Black kids could attend in Knoxville, Tennessee. Jim Crow ruled as law and lord of the land in the South, and that was the way things were until public school integration in 1964 or thereabouts when the Knoxville had to cave in to the Supreme Court’s decision.

The original Austin was built at 327 Central Street in 1897 by the efforts of Miss Emily Austin who came South during Reconstruction, just as many Whites did, to teach Black people. That Austin was built to educate “coloreds” (the politically correct terminology in that day) from ages six to eighteen and it graduated students who completed the tenth grade; later, in the Roaring Twenties, Austin added the eleventh grade, and, finally, in 1936, the twelfth. By then, the city had constructed the Vine Street Austin, old Austin—the one I still dream about. This was the Austin where I grew up, where I was like a mascot, adopted by faculty, staff, and students. I called this one “old” Austin because by 1952, a new Austin went up right next door; then, old Austin became Vine Junior High.

At both Austins, my daddy—Coach “Dusty” George H. Lennon—was the Physical Education teacher, the Head Coach for football, basketball, and the occasional track and field event. That was his job way before I was born and he kept it until integration. When Daddy was Austin’s football coach, games in Knoxville were nighttime affairs because we had to “borrow” a White school’s playing field at night since we had none of our own.

On the afternoon of Austin’s games, the band paraded through the Black community down Vine Street, and on up—uptown—to Gay Street, majorettes strutting their stuff, drumsticks tapping a snappy beat, the Band Director, Mr. Cobb, dressed to the nines in white shoes, white socks, and a uniform suit of white with gold trim on his hat and epaulettes. Everybody turned out to see the band. Because everybody’s child went to Austin sooner or later, and it was likely that a band member or majorette or cheerleader was a sister or a cousin; and if kin wasn’t a band member or cheerleader, then perhaps one of them was your neighbor’s child, or the child of a fellow church or club member.

When we were very little, Janice Tate and I were the band’s tiny tot mascots, marching just behind the drum majorette. I remember we were still living on Mee Street then, so I hadn’t made it to second grade yet. I must have been in kindergarten, at least. Janice, too because she and I were always in the same class. We were small enough to be “cute” but not big enough to last throughout the entire march. I remember that Daddy would pace us in his car so that from time to time Janice and I could scramble into the front seat and rest for a few blocks before jumping out and marching again. I liked being the band’s mascot—liked marching to the rhythms of the drum line—like showing off my little legs, even though I was convinced that Janice had prettier ones—liked being recognized by the community folks—and I liked the attention the drum majorette gave us.

In a very real way, Austin’s band was our community property; all Black folks owned a piece of it. When they heard the “Street Beat”—a syncopated rhythm beat out by the drum line without accompanying music—they poured out of their houses and watched, beaming with pride, as the band marched by, not a foot out of step. They shouted compliments like—“ Go on, girl! Do yo thang, baby! Y’all know you tuff stuff!”—and sent the band, smiling, on their way to the next block. The community held them high in esteem; we just knew Austin had the baddest band in town.

White folk downtown on Gay street turned out too—bankers, merchants, sales girls, and shoppers alike. They loved the performance: a high-stepping band dressed in spiffy-looking, orange and blue uniforms, playing a toe-tapping-head-nodding-hip-shaking beat, and to top it off, they were led by a drum majorette—always good-looking, tall hat, short, peekaboo skirt, tasseled boots, showing off the kind of legs that White “cheesecake” movie stars of the time, like Betty Grable and Jane Russell, wished they had.

The band was always one of my very favorite things about Austin, where the world was all Black. To me, Austin housed a village—elders, griots, mentors, all of them, extended family. There was gangly Mr. Davis, the principal, and the pigeon-toed, bespeckled Mr. Ford, a musical genius who regularly turned out top-grade Choral Arts choirs. There was dark-haired Madame Stokes, our French teacher, whose eyeglass frames matched her colorful blouses—pink frames today, and tomorrow pastel blue or lavender ones. And, of course, there was Mama, the English major turned girls’ basketball coach and gym teacher. When I had to miss first grade, Mama would take me and my tricycle to school with her and I’d turn Austin’s gym into my own personal race track when no one was around. And when I got bored, I’d run outside and sit in the dust, watching Daddy and his boys at football practice.

That Austin, like that Knoxville exists now in my dream time. Integration marched in and kicked ole Jim Crow segregation out. And other things. For one thing, school integration killed off the jobs of a lot of Black teachers and coaches all over the South. I realize today, to my sorrow, that integration —in education, in public spheres, in the marketplace, to name just a few—killed a great many other things as well—among them our community cohesiveness, our sense of worth, and a lot of idealistic values based on something finer than greed and conspicuous consumption. Back in the day, Black folk championed integration—had high hopes for it, in fact. Who knew that it would backfire in our faces? When school integration came, for example, Daddy had seniority over other White coaches and teachers, but the powers that be swept that aside. Daddy’s track record as the “winning-est” coach in East Tennessee, Black or White, mattered not. The powers put him at the previously all-White Fulton High where he was to serve as assistant to the White coach. But that didn’t happen. Probably because the coach was too intimidated by Daddy’s winning record and experience to let him near the football field or the basketball court; so unhappily, Daddy ended up being study hall monitor all day, every day for the rest of his days until retirement. When Daddy died in 1980, The Knoxville News-Sentinel headlined his death calling him a “Giant Among Area Coaches” and The Knoxville Journal said “he maintained a brilliant winning record in both football and basketball.”

The Knoxville of my growing up—the one where I’d see a “White Only” sign over the water fountain at Kresge’s five and dime—exists no more. That Knoxville, where I only saw white people when I went uptown with Mama to go to the bank and pay bills, is no more. That Knoxville is gone. Gone is that time when we could only go to Chilhowee Park on Thursdays—the day when White kids and their parents stayed away because Black kids and their parents were allowed in to ride the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel. Our place to swim--Edward Cothern Pool, the only place we could go swimming to cool down summer’s heat--is gone. So is The Gem Theater on Vine and Central, serving up second or third run Hollywood B movies to us Black kids who could only see movies there or in the balcony of the Bijou. All of those things have vanished. Time rolled in and rearranged things--as time always does.

Yes, like the old song said: Time brings about a change. Time merged the two Knoxvilles—one White and the other Black—into one. Time changed Knoxville, just as time changed Austin so many times. The 1952 Austin—the one I graduated from—is no more. Now there’s another called Austin-East High School. Which was supposed to school both Blacks and Whites. Supposed to.

Change is not always easy to swallow. But life is change.

The city named the football field at Austin-East for Daddy while he was still alive. And I liked that. I like remembering Old Austin because that memory is part of what defines me. Austin's legacy is still around. And I like knowing that. It's good to know that there’s still an Austin around in Knoxville, Tennessee.