The
Accidental African (posted Dec. 27, 2017)
It was by
accident that Sally found herself on the largest continent in the world, a land
mass that could contain the USA and Russia as well as China and still have
space wherein to keep sheep and goats and ducks.
It was her
mother who precipitated her coming to a land she’d hardly given a thought to
before she was forced to consider where in the world she’d want to go if given
the freedom to choose. Otherwise, Africa was only the land where
African-Americans had come from. It was a place that had been robbed blind of
centuries. Of that she was sure since she’d grown up among Black people and
with a benevolent mother who employed them regularly.
Frankly,
Sally’s first nanny was Black. She recalled from the age of three, it would be
Charlotte ironing the family’s laundry while she was meant to be napping. Then
there was Jean the cleaning man who would arrive through the back door, come
through the kitchen where her mother would invariably be standing at the sink
washing something or other, and then Jean would disappear into the basement where
he’d change into his work clothes and proceed to vacuum the three other stories
of Sally’s big old red brick house.
But it was
Leo that she knew best. Leo came after Jean and he had been the driver for many
years of a local millionaire who used to take him on trips around the world, so
fond was the rich man of Leo. Also, Leo clearly had become indispensable, just
as he had to her mother. For Leo was not only smart and resourceful. He was
also loquacious and loved chattering away for hours with her mom in the kitchen
once he’d completed whatever tasks he’d been given that day. For Leo wasn’t
just a cleaner. He was a handyman who could fix anything which was one other
reason he became indispensable to whatever employer he had. But above all the
other attributes that Leo had, he was honest. The only other quality he had
that her mother loved most was his rare ability to listen to her, something few
people did in the way that Leo was able to do.
Sally’s
mother had stories, a multitude of stories, especially about her own upbringing,
her family and even about the Black nanny that brought her up while her own
mother was being the Grand Dame of Evanston. Sally used to hear many stories
about Roxy. She was the one person in her mother’s early years who taught her
the value of affection and emotional honesty. She also taught her mother
superstitions which were remarkable for a woman of her background to believe
and also to practice. Things like knocking on wood whenever she’d say something
positive and knock to scare the demons away. We weren’t allowed to walk under
ladders or walk on separate sides of street signs or poles. All sorts of
beliefs did my mother pick up from Roxy, but by far, the most important was the
compassion and empathy and appreciation of black people’s humanity. In my
heart, sally know her mother was not a racist. But her class background meant
that she was thrown into those inescapable master/mistress-slave relationships.
But having been brought up by Roxy who became her surrogate mother, there was
no way she could ever have held that black people were less human, less worthy
or less intelligent than whites like herself.
++++++++++++++++++++++++.
The big
problem Sally’s mother had faced was marrying the man her mother told her to
despite her caring for a man I never met, Frank Cooper. Mother Helm as Sally’s
grandmother was called (Mother for short) felt her daughter Marjorie’s future
would be more secure if she were in the keeping of Dr. Shaw, the man who became
Sally’s father.
That
marriage somehow had a great deal to do with Sally’s becoming an accidental
African. But let me not leap ahead of myself. The point was that Dr Shaw was
quite a bit older than Marjorie, had come from a very different background and
was very much married to his medical career. He was a brilliant MD who was
dedicated to his patients, but that meant he left Marjorie alone for hours on
end. What made that worse was when he was home, he never had time to take the
family on vacations other than Sunday dinners and trips to Key Biscane when
anyone got sick. Otherwise, Marjorie had her dreams of seeing the world but
they remained dreams and press clippings that she would regularly cut out of
the daily newspaper and would then carefully file alphabetically, just in case
she ever had a chance to go to Fiji or Florence or take that Rhine River boat
trip she had always longed to do.
Sally speculated
that the reason her mother pushed the Rotary Foundation application papers in
her face one day after she had graduated from university was so Sally wouldn’t have
to get stuck and stay at home forever as she had done. Sally wondered if her
mother wanted to live vicariously through her journeys, but was undoubtedly
part of Marjorie’s motivation. But she also had wanted her daughter to experience
the freedom that she had never had. The fact that that one gesture, giving
Sally those papers and insisting she complete them right away, was going to
seal both Sally’s and her mother’s fate. Sally would soon be ‘gone baby gone’,
rarely to return. The accidental African was about to be born.
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