She said, You want to know about me?

May 7^th, 2020

So you want to know about me?

Well, the first thing you need to know is that I was a pampered little girl, the apple of my father’s eye, the first girl after he had waited many years and seeing the arrival of three big boys. Number one, Charles Justin was a great feat and even named after his father Justin, number two, Stevenson, Steve, named after my mother’s family and number three, Thomas Cresap also named after a Revolutionary war hero coming again from my mother’s golden genealogical line.

He, my father adored me, but he was only a party of one. My mother sided with her sons, every one of them except Charles who was raised in my grandmother’s house while my father was away in World War Two and my mother had to return home while Daddy was away to live with her Grand Dame of a Mother who equally adored my father and his first-born son. So Charles had never been hers, she felt, Charles equally adored his grandmother who, being Margaretta the first, was a powerful woman who could have been a Duchess or even a dignitary in her own right. She got a stroke when I was five so I never really knew her. But she was either a president, regent or lady Chair of any and every worthy organization to which she belonged.

Mother Helm (as she was later referred to after she was gone) was president of the Evanston Women’s Club when I was just four and called upon to go on the Club’s elevated stage to select some winning number (out of a hat) on behalf of my grandmother and some worthy cause that she’d endorsed. All I knew was that I was special because I was Mrs Helm’s granddaughter and name-sake. That was enough for me. That was historic!  After that, the story went dark and for another chapter, one that will delve into my sweet mama’s agonizing silver-spooned upbringing that explains for me why she didn’t like me much. Or rather, she didn’t like women much, didn’t trust them after having an older sister, Virginia, who was so jealous of her that she would try on several occasions to literally bump her off: throw her down stairs or try to strangle her, for example. And when she didn’t have physical access to her, she would call our house and tell me stories about how my mother was a thief, how she had stolen her birthright in the form of jewelry and whatnot.

That story is a novel unto itself. But it figures into understanding why I wasn’t close to my mother until much later in life. Oh, I loved her but I never felt she had much interest in me. If I was loved more by Dr. Verne, my dad, then she would pour her affections on to the other boys.

But frankly, Marjorie, my mum was miserable in ways I didn’t understand until many years later. A brilliant woman but the last born of Margaretta and Wilbur whose very birth was enough to set off Virginia who loved being an only child for many years. She held that status for six or seven years until my Uncle Standiford aka Stan was born. That was okay since he wasn’t serious competition for her father’s affections which she wanted to hold onto most. Stan stuttered and had a gentleness that his mother loved but didn’t impress his father much. Stan went to Princeton University as did Wilbur who first met my grandmother during his undergraduate years at DePauw University where Margaretta was a luminary, a leading light at the country’s first and number one Greek sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta. Wilbur went to Princeton for his Masters degree in the Classics, Latin and Greek and was ongoing towards getting a ph.d when he realized he would lose his chance to win the hand of Margaretta so he rushed back to Indiana to complete the wooing process and win the hand of the woman he knew was the ‘best catch’ he would ever get. So Wilbur sacrificed his doctorate for Margaretta, but he still became a Latin teacher at the prestigious East Coast prep school Philips Exeter Academy before returning the the Mid-West where he became Headmaster at the Northwestern Academy (like the Lab School affiliated to the University of Chicago today). Wilbur actually took Margaretta to Japan where he taught English (I guess) and both he and Margaretta became fluent in Japanese. But they only stayed there one year because she got a hook worm or some such worm that compelled them to return for medical treatment.

Perhaps that is why Margaretta encouraged her son to become a doctor. In any case, after Princeton, Stan returned to the Mid-West to attend Northwestern Medical School as did Verne. The story goes that before the war, both Stan and Verne, who were buddies by then, used to ride horses (apparently military steeds who needed the exercise) at an amphitheater downtown in the City. My grandmother and mother went one day to watch Stan ride and his riding partner caught the eye of my mother and he was hooked after that.

Another version of the story is that my grandmother spotted Verne and decided she, having been an equestrian growing up on a farm with horses in Indiana, spotted Verne and decided that this handsome athletic chap ought to marry her daughter. He would make a good match, was her view apparently. Either way, my mother was stuck in between two very strong individuals who had it in for her. Meanwhile, she had other ideas. At the time, she was still an honors student in languages at Northwestern. But because her family was still emerging from the Depression years, she hadn’t been able to go away to university, despite having been accepted at Radcliffe, the women’s version of Harvard. She had to sacrifice and only stay at the hometown university, which despite being a good school, wasn’t Ivy League as was Radcliffe. The family apparently had to pick between keeping Stan at Princeton or letting her go to Radcliffe. Obviously, the boy won the day.

Marjorie was never a fighter so she acquiesced to her mother’s wishes despite the fact that there was Frank Cooper who had already given her his golden ring and she was already betrothed to him in her heart. But once my grandmother met Verne and also realized my mother’s affections lay elsewhere, Frank was banned from the house on 720 Colfax Street.

My mother married at age 23, after graduating highest honors from Northwestern and majoring in French, English, Italian and Latin. The couple had one good year together after their honeymoon in humble Ephraim, Wisconsin where I hear she had a severe asthma attack and had to spend the night in the bathroom. Verne hadn’t finished his internship and residency, both of which are essential for his becoming a specialist (not a GP, General Practitioner) in Internal Medicine. So they went to Boston, where my mother had entries through her mother into Bostonian high society. I don’t know how high was high, but at least she knew lovely families who welcomed her and her new husband into their social worlds and guided my mother into her native element which was the arts. My mother used to tell me of her blissful years spending days in the Boston Museum of Fine Art and other galleries and gardens. Her ‘job’ was translating medical journal articles for my father that were in any of the multiple languages that she knew. She would also proofread and edit his papers and helped him immensely since he basically wasn’t a big city boy. He like my grandmother was brought up in farm country where he was a big fish in a small pond. He like Margaretta were from families that we were led to believe lived like landed gentry since they were ‘landed’. Myon the other hand was far more sophisticated and urbanized. Her mother had even taken the whole family on a ‘grand tour’ for three months in Europe when she was 13 so she had literally seen the world where Verne had not.

That all changed after they came back to Chicago and to Evanston at Margaretta’s insistence. She had wanted Verne to come set up a medical practice with her dear stuttering Stan. My father had a natural charm and elicited trust on the part of his patients whereas Stan’s demeanor was discomfiting so Mother Helm knew that Verne would improve Stan’s ability to establish a successful private practice. However, Margaretta had a latent cut-throat character as do many mothers who are prone to fighting for the survival and success of their children. After Verne and Marjorie came back to town, another partner was procured by Margaretta who she apparently felt would be a better fit for Stan than my father. She cut the two of them loose, left to their own resources without the family connections which the grannie could otherwise have afforded to Verne. She could have called upon her myriad contacts to come become clients of Verne. Instead, she called them to come sign up with Stan. I don’t know the politics of the practice. What I do know is that my mother felt betrayed once again by her mother who once again confirmed that she, the girl, could be sacrificed if Mother had to choose between Stan or her. It was a bitter realization for Marjorie especially as she adored her mother. But her mother had little time for her. Either Margaretta would be leading some organization or spending time with her older sister Mary who was always coming up from Indiana to stay in Marjorie’s home and spending time with Margaretta, precious time that should have been hers. Ironically, my mother did something similar in my case. She would always be on the phone with Helen Nahl or Annabel or Imogene or any one of a dozen other girl friends that she had. To compensate she put a private phone in my bedroom which was a big mistake since I would naturally emulate her. I wasted hours talking to silly girlfriends whose names I can hardly recall today.

Anyway, the one thing our family of six did together growing up was eating dinner together. We often ate late because my father would be visiting patients in hospital or making house calls (as MDs no longer do today). So my mother would prepare food and then knit sweaters upon sweaters, never wasting a moment while she quietly waited.

We lived in a four story red brick house (the fourth floor is the basement downstairs where we had lots of storage for bicycles as well as my mother’s washer and dryer as well as Charlie’s tool room and another room where we had a ping pong table.) My brothers lived on the top floor, an area that Charlie claimed was off-limits to me since I was ‘a girl’. This effective meant that I learned about gender inequality early on. Yet the irony is that I fought them on this issue all the time. The two older brothers’ (though mainly bossy Charles) wouldn’t let me play chess since it wasn’t for girls, they said. If I was playing with my brother Tom (who is just a year and a half older than me), they would boot us off the chess table so they both could play. Boy did that make me mad. But I made up for it but being a tomboy, climbing trees and playing baseball and running faster than all the girls in school except one, Emel Cambel, who became my best friend. Emel was half Turkish, her father taught mathematics at Northwestern while her mother was a Quaker and a Democrat while my parents were Goldwater republicans. It was to Emel’s house that I wrote to when I was ten and just learning to ride a bicycle. That bicycle would become my key to freedom and my escape from the oppressive low expectations of my mother who didn’t want to teach me much other than how to polish silver and iron men’s shirts perfectly.  I wanted to do bigger things, learned larger lessons and the Cambels gave me that opportunity for a while.

 

May 9, 2020

But long before I met the Cambels and broke out of the family cocoon, I learned there were complications to being my father’s only daughter. For as much as he cared for me especially, he was also an MD who defined caring as taking care of his patients, making me both a daughter and a patient. In fact, he had little time for anyone who wasn’t a patient. It’s not too much to say that he lived for his family and his patients, and possibly his patients came first. Because of his commitment to them, he was much loved and trusted by his patients. In fact, they often seemed to treat him like a semi-god, a super-hero whose word meant everything to them. He deserved that status since Dr Verne was one of those old-time MDs who still made house—calls, a phenomenon that hardly exists among medical professionals in America at least. I grew up feeling I was living in the home of a high priest of sorts since medics in America at that time occupied the peak of the professional pyramid. As such, he was held in high esteem and that status was meant to rub off on me. This was especially true as this was a time, post-world war two, when genetics were in vogue even though Hitler had popularized genetics for all the wrong reasons. Genes seemed to me to be a fatalistic way of viewing the world whereby people were defined by their DNA, not by their character or contribution to society. Genes were something you were supposed born with so if your blood predecessors had ‘good genes’, they were said to pass them on to their offspring who were bound to inherit who knew what. Certain traits manifest by one’s forefathers. To me, it seemed to be a limiting way of looking at life since genes were thought of as predetermining what kind of person a babe would become. For instance, if someone knew there had been thieves, murderers and generally low-class human beings in one’s background, the probability of that person turning out to reflect similar characteristics would be reckoned as easily understood. If one’s relative had allergies, then it was probable that that one would have allergies as well. And if one’s ancestors had been scholars and scientists, then one was expected to succeed intellectually as well.

To me, it always seemed too facile an explanation for the explaining why people did what they did. It was also too predetermined for my liking, which is why I took little interest in my father’s attention to our family genes.

My mother’s family was well known for having ‘good genes’. That had been determined and documented by my grandmother, the Grand Dame Margaretta.  She had inherited quite a bit of funds from her father James who had been a lawyer and a scion in a family closely affiliated with the founder of the university in their hometown, Greencastle, Indiana. Anyway, Margaretta hired a genealogist to research her family and trace them back to their early arrival in North America before the American Revolution. The family took pride in those blood lines, unearthed by Margaretta. But I secretly felt as if I came into the world rather like a race horse, bred specifically embody good genes from both sides of my family since my father also had a history and claimed all sorts of connections with royal Swedes and noble Prussians.

One of my grandmother’s organizations which she headed was the DAR, the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization founded on genealogical and historical ties to the founding fathers (and mothers) who’d fought on the revolutionary side of the American revolution. The DAR was in trouble for most of the time I was growing up. Accused of being a racist organization because something had happened when they were supposed to have a famous African American opera singer, (Miriam Anderson I think) perform in their great hall in Washington, DC, but at the last minute, it got postponed. The DAR has yet to leave that racist label behind despite the fact that they are one organization that funds scholarships for girls from Native American backgrounds. Anyway, Mother Helm was often the president or regent of the DAR and she ensured my mother was a member. But my mother grew up in her mother’s shadow and never saw herself as anything like Margaretta. Instead, she chose to accept membership but only serve as the organization’s Treasurer. She was great at Math and held that positions as long as she was active in the group. In turn, my mother made Tom and me become CARs, Children of the American Revolution. That meant every year, we had to be in the 4^th of July parade, sitting in a slow-moving car waving at the people as if we were royalty. We both got out of it as soon as we could. But later in life, I agreed to be a member since it meant a lot to my mother.

Ironically, she didn’t make me a lifetime member so I haven’t paid my dues in years. But she did make me a lifetime member of the Colonial Dames, another genealogical and historical body of women who also traced their bloodlines back to the American Revolution. On the big difference between them was that the Dames were related to men who fought for the British against the American renegades. They fought for King George III, and I believe to this day, they believe the United States should never have split from the UK. We know people in other former colonies of Great Britain who also feel this way. But frankly, I have never been to a single Dames meeting. I gather it’s considered quite prestigious among certain circles, but I frankly wouldn’t know.

Nonetheless, genetics and blood the bane of my existence for many years. Of course, there’s a part of me that is humbled to know I am related to three of the governors of the first thirteen colonies. And I don’t mind telling people when asked where I come from, that I am a mongrel. On my mother’s side, I am Scotish, English, French and Dutch and on my father’s side I am Swedish and German. But normally it is not a topic of discussion since most people I know don’t care about genes. Ironically, I do love watching crime movies in which the murderer’s identity is discovered as a consequence of getting a sample of his DNA. I know how many ‘cold cases’ of unsolved crimes have been solved since DNA testing became an integral part of forensic science. Nonetheless, by the time I’d nearly completed university, I had studied enough philosophy and religion to believe that one’s mental faculties meant more than one’s genes and the mind was not determined by genes but by study, observation, education and even by a higher power that opened up infinite possibilities to the individual who was open to listening to and learning from that higher concept of mind.

I was bound to take that spiritual route out of the genealogical fatalism that claimed my life was preordained by the blood that ran through veins of people long gone. That whole story must wait for a later chapter. Suffice it to say that for as long as I was under the shadow of genetics in my parents’ home, I was constrained from doing many things that I had wanted to do. In fact, the number of ‘no’s’ that I heard from my father anytime I asked if I could do this or that were so innumerable that I learned the art of stealth at an early age.

The art of stealth.

The art of stealth was a skill I cultivated early on once I realized there were too many things I was not allowed to do. That not being ‘allowed’ to go to Girls Scout camp, to sleep over at friends’ home as other girls did and not allowed to do many things that were prohibited mainly by Verne but also by Marjorie my mom taught me lessons related to the value of liberation. It was probably why I so early identify with oppressed people today, be they Palestinians, African Americans, Africans and even vulnerable women.

I wasn’t very good at breaking out too far from the parameters set for me by my parents. But I definitely found their conservative attitudes were alien to my instincts.

May 10^th, 2020

 Color had never been an issue as I grew up although as I reflect back on my early years, I realize the few people that assisted my mother were only black people. There was Jean who came once a fortnight to help her vacuum the house, but it wasn’t as if she left him to do all the work. She did all the cooking, clothes washing, drying and ironing while he let himself into our house every other Tuesday through the basement door, came upstairs into the kitchen carrying our heavy vacuum and climbing stairs to get to work. I was in school when he left so I never got to know him. Then there was Charlotte, a young black woman who would look after me before I was five while I was taking my nap-time and my mother was either ironing or heading off to some meeting or doing I never knew what. Charlotte was a gentle lovely woman who I also didn’t know well, but our family stayed in touch with her till she passed on several years ago. And then there was Leo, sweet Leo would stuck with my mother for many years. Leo had been a chauffeur to some old millionaire from the North Shore, Kenilworth I believe who was so highly respected by his boss that he’d go with him to trips abroad. He’d even go golfing with his boss, so he had probably seen more of the world than anyone in our family, except my father who went off to World War two before I was born and traveled all over Europe, working to save lives but never telling us much about those awful war years.

It might sound odd to say that Leo was my mother’s best friend, but he was the one person who was with her during her darkest days. Like when her mother died and her sister locked her elderly father out of his own house, and like when my brother Steve was sent to a mental institution by my father who wouldn’t ‘allow’ her to go and see him, and when her own sister tried to toss her down the family stairs and later lunge at her aggressively when her father was deathly ill. Fortunately, my father had been there at the hospital when Aunt Virginia tried to let my mother have it. But the one to comfort my mother when she rehearse all those incredible stories was Leo.

In fact, my mother had been brought up by a black woman since as I said, my grandmother was the Grand Dame of Evanston and had little time to bring up her last born child, Marjorie. Roxie was a gem as my mother told me about this wonderfully wise and loving black woman who’d left her four kids in the South to come North to earn a living so as to educate her own. My mom was the beneficiary and was she blessed for having this soulful woman who gave so much sweet love to my mother and taught her much about humility and grace and laughter and humor.

May 11th, 2020

The one who has taught me the most about humility and laughter with grace is my dear friend Sarah who I only met many years after my mother told me stories about Roxie and the unconditional affection that she shared with my mother. Sarah’s story is long and only begins after I had gone to Africa with my Rotary fellowship and returned to see family and friends in Chicago. It was an instantaneous spark of friendship that we struck as her light-hearted humor hit my rib-cage more quickly than anyone had ever affected me in that way before. I have come and gone from Chicago many times since that first encounter with her and her hilarious roommate, the East Coast pianist and puppeteer Gale Freeman. All this is meant to be a Segway to lead me to last night after Sarah and I had met during the COVID-19 pandemic to watch ‘World of Fire’, ‘Press’ and ‘Baptiste’ at her new flat on Elmwood and Main in South Evanston. Sarah had reminded me to make sure I had everything before I departed from her place as she was about to take her ancient pitbull Zorro out for a late night walk. She said that because she knows I have had too many instances of leaving one item behind at almost every venue where I go. I have tried to correct that ‘habit’ but it often seems to plague me. So when I woke up this morning and got a photo call from Kenya, I felt I needed my ear phones so I wouldn’t waken the Freeman family after maria had invited me to come stay at her home. But I couldn’t find the earphones. I remembered I specifically had left them in my purse, but as I couldn’t find the purse, I couldn’t find the earphones and just turned the volume down on my iphone and tried to also keep my voice down.

After I finished speaking to Stuart Nash, founder and artistic director of the Nairobi Performing Arts Studio, I looked for my purse again. Nope, I looked under the sofa bed which had become my home during the self-quarantining required by the pandemic-fighters. Stuart invited me to attend his zoom class on theatre Production which I happily agreed to do for over an hour. And after that, it took me a moment to recall that I had also received a what’s app message early the same morning from Sakina Mildred Miriichi to attend her film production presentation that she was giving via zoom to the Rotary club of muthaiga. Of course, I had to go!!

Finally, after all that zooming was done (with Stuart, around 20 of us got linked via Google-Meet, a whole other interactive zoom-like platform that I quickly got used to), I got serious about looking for my purse: I went out to check my car three times. I might have left it there; no I apparently hadn’t. after that, I checked under my sofa bed since that’s where I have found the most effective storage space, and I even ripped up my sofa bed since I’d been known to bury one of my two phones in the bedding before. No purse. I called Sarah who hadn’t seen it either and I asked Maria to pray that I would find it. Then I got to work finally on my Swahili since I was taking my first class in a few hours on Tuesday morning.

The bag contained my passport, debit card, drivers license and even my Kenyan credit card. I had called the bank to ask them to put my card on hold. They gave my 48 hours, then they would cancel the card altogether.

But at a few minutes after 5pm, soon after I had gotten a call from Ritesh, my Rotary club mentor, I was busy on my Swahili prep, when the phone rang.

“Hallo, is this Margaret?” the man asked in a thick Spanish accent. “Yes, this is margaretta. May I help you?’ I replied. “My name is Pablo and I have your bag,” he said abruptly. I nearly howled right there and then! I was elated and thrilled and also slightly disbelieving. Is God truly this good! He must be!!

“Where are you? Can I come? How did you find it?” all those questions came flooding out of my mouth. “Where should I come to find you?” “My wife found it near Jerome and California Streets. We also live on Jerome,” Pablo said. “What!!” I was now incredulous. “I also live on Jerome street. I can come to you right now. Where on Jerome are you?” I asked. He specified a house number.

I jumped into my car and drove right past Pablo and his wife Maria Elena. Before I left the house, I asked Maria if I could borrow some money to give to them. $10 or maybe $20. My gratitude knew no bounds.

So I drove and only saw them waving out of the corner of my eye as I sped past them. Quickly I stopped and turned around into one of the few drive ways on this street that had many small houses planted close to each other with minimal front and back yards.  Then I jumped out of my car, having double parked in the middle of the street. The Grandosa’s home was just one short city street block from Maria’s.

There was my little baggalini that I had gotten from Sue for Christmas two years before. “Everything is there,” Pablo said confidently as he stood next to his wife. Maria Elena could not speak English but she did have a job in a Korean factory just down the road across McCormick Blvd, getting pennies for her service no doubt. Pablo explained that she had found it early this morning around 7am in the middle of the street. How it got to California street is a mystery to me as I came straight from Sarah’s house and parked carefully so as to not bump any of my neighbors. Perhaps Maria Elena was mistaken about location. I had only been on Jerome street for the block when I had driven from McCormick to Kedzie and turned left onto Jerome. As there was no parking on the right hand side of the road, I remember that I did do a U-turn on Jerome and Albany but I don’t recall the car door swinging open. Perhaps there was a hole in the car floor and the bag fell out of that. Otherwise, I cant imagine how it landed in the street.

Pablo was right. There was nothing missing. My passport, credit/debit cards and driver/s license were all there. I had Maria’s $10 bill in hand and I handed it to pretty little (she was probably 4’10”) Maria Elena. Then I started looking in my zippers and found another $10 bill. What to do? I pulled it out and handed it again to my petite ‘finder’. I was so grateful to them. She hesitated to take it. I pushed it forward towards her and gestured that I wanted to hug her and him too for what they had done for me. Their selfless effort was wonderful.

Then I asked them how they knew how to call me. They pointed to the T-mobile receipt I had put into my phone when I bought my month-long phone contract. The shop lady had printed the number on a yellow post-it and taped it to the receipt so he pointed to the post-it. There was the number and the receipt had my name. I asked for their names, phone number and address! I must send them a Christmas card or something. I will never forget Maria Elena and Pablo. They didn’t need to go to all this trouble for me. They told me they were from Mexico and had lived in that house for four years. They have three kids and I don’t know what kind of work he does. How can I ever repay such kindness? How can I also thank Maria sufficiently because I also know that her prayers were effective in helping me retrieve that beautiful bag.   

May 13, 2020 Wednesday

We are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic which is why I finally got persuaded by a dear friend to start writing my story. He advised me not to worry about being to chronological or lineal in my development of thought. Just write a minimum of 500 words a day. I have been relatively good at that. But there are so many distractions, despite our living in a ‘lockdown’, previously known as a self-quarantining status. I won’t identify them all since I am staying with a dear friend whose family has gathered to play croquet in their backyard and may happen in on my writing anytime. Interruptions tend to be a big distraction, but then we love to be distracted in these times when boredom is the bane of the many. I don’t have that problem as I have too many things to do and read and listen to and watch and pray about.

Today I thought I would get on with my story and respond to a question I am often asked. People wonder what my background is for having become a so-called ‘legendary’ art critic. First off, I try to dispel the belief that I am both a legend which I am not as far as I am concerned although I have been writing about theatre and visual arts in kenya since the late 1979s and here we are in the early 2020s and I am still at it. Neither am I a so called critic. I hate that notion of the critic as ‘the authority’ to be judge and jury over the arts. I first saw the fallacy of believing that the critic was either all-knowing or more important, more authoritative than the artist in question him or herself. The critic is a subsidiary and a parasite which/who can only exist by virtue of the artist’s creative process. What’s more, most people believe ‘the critic’ is supposed to be negatively critic rather than be analytical and appraising of elements found in the artwork. I am of the view that my role is to be insightful and analytical, not necessarily negative but appraising broader implications of the artwork, be it the context in which is to be found, the artist and his or her role in society or the impact of their art on the local or regional or global scene.

Anyway, when I think about writing about theatre, I realize my experience is from childhood where I grew up surrounded by theatrical characters in my family. All were highly intelligent and interesting to watch. But my mother was the master of comedy and warmth and sensitivity. My father wielded the knife, being a living warrior against bacteria and roast beef and my three brothers kicking one another under the dinner table and telling wild stories every night. But my first opportunity to be on stage was at age four when I had to play the granddaughter of the Grand Dame of Evanston, picking the winning Bingo ticket at the Evanston Women’s Club. I was also in the primary school’s dance company (which I had totally forgotten about) with Miss Omler who taught us dance once a week from the time I think I was in kindergarden. I was the last girl to drop out of her dance class. We had performances every year and while it wasn’t ballet, it was my shot at being a dancer. I guess I never took it seriously, never really took myself seriously at anything much since it was always my big brothers who were the stars. But in junior high school I did land a role in Elinor Rice’s production of Winnie the Pooh. I played Rabbit as I recall, and I was scared to death of Miss Rice. She had actually been my mother’s drama teacher when she attended Roycemore Girls School. Yes, that is how old Elinor Rice was. But she was a living legend in my mother’s eyes. Miss Rice had loved my mother’s performances which were usually comedic. I was a comedian and I never would think of competing with my mother for Miss Rice’s favor. I knew I could never compare and I felt that Miss Rice felt that too. Yes I felt intimidated, so I never got rave reviews at that show. But I did meet a nice boy, Stuart Lauderbach who worked back stage and we became telephone friends and spoke evenings for many months after Pooh. Because I didn’t take myself seriously, I didn’t enroll in high school theatre which was very big at Evanston Township High School. Nor did I act at university, although by the time I met Joan Smutny and accepted her invitation to join her master’s degree classes in Education, I got into the spirit. Joan was and still is all about Creativity as a Godly expression of divinity and thus, she helped me to learn about my own true godly character which had the capacity to express God-like creative qualities in any field. The freedom she taught me is what truly allowed me to go forward in my life and identify with all creative and cultural expressions. Creativity is what gave me the courage to apply for a fellowship with the Rotary International, for its Ambassadorial fellowship, which I amazingly got!! Divine creativity also gave me the power to go to Africa and enroll in University of Nairobi where I had the freedom to select the course of study I really wanted to pursue which was literature. My mother had been a literature major having received highest honors (Phi Beta Kappa) in Languages from Northwestern University. And since I had grown up intimated by most of the brilliant people in my family, including my mother (who was a specialist in playing dumb or at least playing low key and being humble, though quite a snob in reality), I hadn’t read as much as I should have. Books had been the great intimidators since we all knew that my second brother Steve read through one of the two sets of Encyclopedia for fun one summer. But now, living far away from my people I could start afresh and become the best of myself. I savored various departments since most students who had received the fellowship were in the middle of their academic studies and thus went straight into the Kenyan equivalent without a second thought. But as I had completed a master’s degree in Teaching at National Louis University with Joan, I felt free to select whatever I wanted. It wasn’t that easy however since I was told off my the history department star Dr Atieno Odhiambo that he didn’t want fly-by-night American passers-by in his class. He was the first one to alert me that Americans like me wouldn’t be taken at all seriously unless they distinguished themselves in some way. I was already feeling I wanted to be in Kenya as i was among brilliant individuals at the university and I realized I had much to learn and an opportunity of a lifetime. I settled on the Literature Department where Ngugi wa Thiong’o was Chair but he rejected my application since my undergraduate studies had been in sociology, philosophy and religion and lastly education. None of that was Literature. And his British academic background (coming from Makerere University (which was considered the Oxford of east Africa at the time), he could not accept anyone who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree in at least English lit. I had wanted to enroll in a master’s degree program since I already had a BA from DePauw University and the Med from National Louis, but that was out of the question.

So what did I do? I enrolled in the undergrad program in literature and took all the undergrad course with Ngugi and Micere Mugo and John Ruganda and even Chris Wanjala in one year. After that I took all the exams and got into the master’s program at last. But even getting into the undergrad program was a tussle. It only happened after the students’ five-month strike had come to an end, and I request Dr Micere to speak to Ngugi on my behalf, which enabled me to get in. for that I am infinitely grateful to her. After that I spent another two years with Ngugi and took all his MA courses, however he assigned me Dr Kimani Gecau to be my academic advisor which was disappointing to say the least. My master’s thesis was meant to be a panAfrican study of novelists from West, South and East Africa. But Kimani wanted me to write on African American literature since that was his field. So I ended up using Malcom X’s framework of the dialectic between the House Nigger and the Field Nigger and specifically analyzed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I was pissed at Ellison for playing that House Nigger role, being so obsequious towards to white man. But I understand why he did it. It was his means of survival in a savage white supremacist America.

Anyway, while in the MA program, Ruganda invited me to be in the University’ Free Traveling Theatre which had just started the week before. That was in 1975, between my going into the MA program. I had initially refused to joint FTT as I knew I would be treated like the token white girl, emblematic of all the ills that white people had ever inflicted on blacks. But my housemate, a lovely Australian woman married to a black Zimbabwean physics lecturer told me I had to do it. Serena zwangobani said it was an opportunity of a lifetime which I must not miss. So I went and performed in two plays that traveled all around Kenya, performing more than 100 times in a month. Details of that excruciating month will be revealed on another occasion. Not now, it was too painful.

But while in the master’s program, Ngugi invited me to be in his debut production of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi which he co-wrote with Micere and in which she starred. That was the opportunity of a lifetime. First, it was being asked by Ngugi to do anything. This time it was to play the ugly white colonial memsab in the courtroom scene where Kimathi was standing trial. It was also an amazing opportunity since it again gave me an opportunity to see what theatre really mean in a national production since we performed at Kenya National Theatre. And finally, it was my time to meet three wonderful Asian men, all of whom played the parts of white people since no whites other than me would be a part of Ngugi’s revolutionary production. (His kamiriithu production of Ngai hika Ndeda would come two years later). The production ultimately went to FESTAC (the Festival of the Second PanAfrican Theatre…) together with Francis Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City. But I refused to go. I knew that money for air tickets would be limited so why would the kenya government pay for a white American woman when i would be depriving a Kenyan the opportunity to be there. I never gave it a second thought although I know it was a big deal for me to have been there. Always in the three years that I was in class with Ngugi, I kept a low profile, being the only conspicuously white person in the class. I attended all his lectures, workshops, and chats that he held for his students. But I never distinguished myself except in academic or in apparently putting myself forward or seeming to claim the white privilege that was still running rampant in the country and indeed around the world.

That experience at University of Nairobi is what gave me the grounding to be a so-called theatre and film critic for several papers including The Nairobi Times, Target (of NCCK), Kenya Times, Men Only and Nation Media Group. I also took a theatre class with John Ruganda which is where I later discovered Gacheru had taken note of my presence in the same theatre class. “we used to call you Miss Drama” Gacheru told me much later because by then I wasn’t shy about what I appreciated about plays. Ruganda was a complicated character and sadly, an alcoholic, but he was a brilliant lecturer and a genius theatre director who inspired all of his cast members who remained loyal to him and his legacy up until now. Those of us who had the privilege to be on stage under Ruganda’s directorship know one another and know what an honor it was to have been shown how to express the passion of real theatre by a man whose first love and passion was the stage.

May 14, 2020 Sunday

I began doing music when I took my first piano lesson when I was five years old. I had lessons until I was 12, but most of them were with Mrs Lee. She would come once a week and all I can recall of her teaching was that she always poked my fingers with her pencil. I learned little from her and I did not learn to love the piano. I did love the fact that my older brother Steve played the piano very well. I also loved that we had a baby grand piano in our living room which suffered a trauma when the ceiling fell in on the baby grand and damaged some of the strings. But those were repaired and it was fun seeing that it wasn’t I who made the living room messing. The living room was a big deal as it was filled with antiques, some belonging to my my mother, others that had belonged to her mother which she obtained after she and Alice Strom, my mother’s friend purchased my mother’s childhood home rather than it being sold including all the valuable artwork and antiques in it.

Having all those antiques inside the house made the living room look quite cluttered but my mother didn’t mind. The tragedy was that when after my father passed on and she decided to sell our family home on 811 Monticello Place, she got a hustler in to ‘help’ her have an estate sale in our house where most of the best antiques went for a song.

The hustler had a good friend who was an antique art collector so he and the guy made deals that my mother was oblivious to. I on the other hand, tried to tell her she was being robbed, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I guess that is how much she valued my opinion, but I guess she was also fluttered. She had such low self-esteem that she was prepared to have a Man take charge, not caring if he was a crook or not. My mother always preferred men, which I do understand since she learned early that women could be dangerous, deadly and malicious at the drop of a hat. She didn’t look as if she was on her guard all the time. Instead she was always gracious, charming and delightfully amusing in public. But I being the only other female in her home guess this is why I never felt especially devoted to her as so many daughters usually are. That changed after the men in her life passed. That included her father Wilbur who had been under the thumb of Virginia, my mother’s deranged sister, for most of his life. It also included Daddy who passed in the mid-1980, 1986 I think, who was a loving autocrat. It was also after her heart was broken when her second son Steve died under the most horrific circumstances. It is so hard to describe. Suffice it to say he passed alone, in a mental institution where he starved himself literally to death. Their relationship was a bonding that was probably the dearest of her with all four of her children, but it was the most difficult. He was the genius, the high school National Science foundation winner, the Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa and winner of a Ford Foundation fellowship and a Rockefellor Foundation fellowship which took him to Latin America where he got very ill and nearly died. Believing the Morman’s god had saved his life, he became a fanatical Morman who had the nerve to tell our hardworking father that he (Daddy) was not his father; God was his father. That hurt my father so much, he never forgave Steve. But he had already strikes against that son since he was supposed to follow in his footsteps and become a brilliant physician. Steve refused and instead became a brilliant anthropologist. That was too much for Daddy so after Steve got sick in Latin America (Argentina), he refused my mother’s visiting him in hospital. The stories of Steve’s unfortunate adventures in and out of hospitals and out of marriage became fable in our home. He married a Morman girl Kay, who looked almost like a carbon copy of my mother in her heyday. But steve was always searching for truth. At the same time, he was also trying to ‘be normal’. He was such a sensitive, lovely man.

My few memories of Steve are seminal in my life. In fourth grade I remember coming home from Sunday School after being laughed at by children because I did not know the Lord’s Prayer. Somehow I found my way up to the third floor (where only boys were ‘allowed’) and presented my weepy self to Steve who immediately  took me in hand and taught me the Lord’s Prayer then and there.

Another time, while Steve was going through his marathon running phase, I recall I used to spot him as he ran and I road my bicycle. That was so much fun and quite a contrast since he also went through a slovenly phase (I think he was terribly depressed) when he got very fat. Steve was always my hero and I recall I used to periodically look into the drawer where my mother kept the beautiful drawings that he did when he was in high school (or maybe primary school). In the part of the house, she also kept one sculpture that he had created out of clay which had clearly been fired. I knew that steve who taught everything from Latin to Mathematics when he needed a job, could do anything, including making sweet music. In fact, in high school he was First Chair for the oboe in the ETHS orchestra which was a big achievement since it was one of the best musical groups in the state. He could have also been First Chair for flute but he had to choose one. He used to always walk around the house, when he descended from the Third Floor with his oboe reed in his mouth. Apparently, there was something about needing to keep the reed moist as a way of getting the best sound.

Anyway, I was in Kenya when Steve died. Nobody told me until I came home that summer for my annual church’s association meeting. I was devastated not just because he had passed but because I hadn’t been told. That is how close our family was, I guess. My father used to lambast me as being just as horrible as Steve so I guess he didn’t care one way or the other. I always had felt that was a compliment since being a bastard like Steve was like equating me with a smart person. I learned to forgive my father, especially after I went to Africa and more or less refused to come except for those church meetings. And especially after he called me a nigger lover and tried to strangle me after he learned that I had married Gacheru. He had been drinking that night and chased me around the dining room table. He did manage to grab me, but fortunately my mother was there and managed to intervene and made him release his grip. I understand he came from Iowa which was pearly white and Republican. He had never known people of color until he came to medical school at Northwestern. He did have Black patients who he treated equitably I know. He even billed them according to a sliding scale since most of them did not have a high living standard compared to the white folk in town.

In any case, after my learning of Steve’s passing on and their cremating his body without any sort of service, I insisted that we hold a memorial service for steve. My father wasn’t keen but I didn’t care. I had defied him many times before, even when I got serious about a religion that understood God as a loving Father who had the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, etc. I even defied his family ban on any of us going to visit him in the first mental institution that he had been put into. When I went there, I gave a copy of Science and Health by Mary baker Eddy and he read it cover to cover. Steve used to give me books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring long before it became a kind of bible for environmentalists. I even took a bus and train to reach Steve another time when he had been moved to Manteno Mental Hospital down state. My father never knew about that either but I wish I had gone to see him more. I knew he was not mad, only different. So different that his wife threw him out of his own house for not living up to her expectations of having married a big deal Harvard grad. Their one daughter Kay never knew Steve. I think he got booted out when she was like 8 months old. But she could have been an intellectual carbon copy of Steve. I don’t know where she went for undergrad. But she got a ph.d in bio-genetics from the University of Chicago and a post-doctorate from MIT. He would have been so proud of her.

Anyway, I wish Steve had stuck with his music and his oboe. Every time I hear an oboe on the radio or at a concert, I feel he is with me. In my prayer, I know he is alive and making music wherever he is.

May 27, 2020

I think it all started with the eye patch. The transgressive behavior I mean. To transgress (the verb) according to Google means ‘to infringe or go beyond the bounds of … an established standard of behavior’. Yep, that’s what I have been doing for much of my life.

Transgression (the noun) is even more precisely defined as ‘an act that goes against a law, rule or code of conduct; an offense’. Yep, that defines me pretty clearly as an outlaw, which I can easily relate to. More politely, I think I was known as a rebel although I didn’t practice my acts of rebellion openly. Mostly I specialized in stealthy behavior. But not always. I think there were times as in junior high school when I wanted to fit in. But that was never a very big deal for me.

In fact, it was while I was in primary school that I made my first best friend. It was actually in the process of transgressing. It was the first time I got on my brother’s bicycle (which I had just ‘bought’ for a dollar—where I got that dollar I don’t know). The rule that I had broken wasn’t clearly defined but I rode that bike way beyond any place I had ventured with my older brother Tom who was a year and a half older than me. I rode all the way to Long Field which was a one-square city block of grass used for local sporting events by mainly kids. It was there that I met my friend Emel and then rode to her house, another block away. That was when I discovered a whole other world of human beings. They were Democrats; my parents were staunch Goldwater Republicans. They were Unitarians; my parents hardly went to church but when they did, it was to the Methodist church. Plus the dad was a Turk and Northwestern University professor while my parents were purely mid-western. My father was from Iowa and his parents were Swedish and German, while my mom was a born and bred Evanstonian with blood from the English, Scots, Dutch and French Huguenots.  And finally, they read Superman comic books. That was my first taste of Superman who I had only know on Sunday morning TV when George Reeve was the original one who could leap tall buildings with a single bound!

But back to the eye patch. I was born with an eye problem or set of problems. My father said I was born cross-eyed, a problem which apparently got corrected with an eye operation when I was four. But I also was born seeing two of everything and one eye would see far, the other eye was near sighted. So the idea of my wearing an eye patch was for some reason, to strength my far-sighted eye. But now as I think about it, the patch made no sense. Of course, it sounds confusing and it has never been corrected fully. A few years ago, I had laser surgery on my right eye which was the short-sighted one. Now I can see much farther with it, but I can no longer use it to read. I must use magnifiers or reading glasses or else I am stuck. In short, my eyes have been a central issue in my life. My parents used to take me periodically to see eye specialists and ultimately had three eye operations but none could fix the double vision or the duo-sight thing. So as I reflect back, I can see why a four year old me rebelled against wearing the eye patch. Why cover up the one eye that enabled me to see even if it was to only see close up. I intuitively saw that it made no sense.

What was transgressive was my making Tom wear the patch instead of me. I used to gleefully pick on him and one way I did it was to make him wear my patch. I don’t know that it happened more than once. But it went down in family history. The naughty little girl who twisted her sweet brother around her finger. Tom of course rebelled and learned to keep a distance from me, but I still used to follow him to the community golf course near our house when he wanted to practice by himself. I loved Tom dearly but the poor guy was stuck getting less of my father’s adoration and much more of my mom’s. I guess boys need father’s appreciation and Tom didn’t get much until much later in life, after my father retired from a busy medical practice and both of our older brothers, Charlie and Steve were gone literally.

The transgressive behavior was compounded by my father who didn’t realize how his being over-protective of me would have a negative effect on his daughter. Both medically and paternally, he was an autocrat of the first order. Whatever I wanted to do, he seemed not to let me out of his control so he would say no. no my desire would be bad for my health or no, my wish was socially unacceptable. No was the word I came to expect from him whenever I asked to pursue something I wanted to do, like go to girl scout camp or go out with girls to a school evening event. The consequence was that I stopped asking and started doing things scrumptiously. Not always the smartest thing to do as it meant I wasn’t always straight forward with the parents, but it also allowed me to find out about things that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t been a rebellious child.

May 30, 2020

One thing I discovered much later on is that my mother would have probably been a rebel as well if she had lived in another time period and say, lived in my generation or even younger. If she had lived in a time when brilliant women were encouraged to blossom and express themselves, she could have been just about anything. I always think she could have been CEO of General Motors or the Governor of the Federal Reserve or an actress who was a leading light on the world stage since she had the latent theatrical gene and charming sense of humor that made her such a loveable and adaptable human being.

How I know for sure that she would have been a rebel too if only…. is an event that happened to me after I completed my first university degree at DePauw, a liberal arts school started by my great-great grandfather Reverend Cyrus Nutt, the Methodist minister sent out by the church to start a school in the mid-19^th century in the hinterlands which back then was what is now the Midwest, in the place now known as Greencastle, Indiana. Cyrus was the first teacher at Indiana Asbury as DePauw was called initially. His achievement should have been a source of pride for me, but I never told anyone, all four years that I was there that I was the great-great granddaughter of the university’s founding father.  

Anyway, I was slightly at loose ends after graduation. I had applied to graduate schools and gotten into The New School of Social Research in New York and into Yale Divinity School, mostly on the recommendations of great university lecturers. I didn’t have the money to pay the school fees and had already been conditioned by my father to expect a no from him if I asked if he could pay me tuition etc. So I got a job at the Chicago Sun Times in the most menial position of a classified ad taker   (Ironically, I found out much later that my mother had been hired for a similar position nearly forty years earlier only at the Chicago Tribune.) I had been hanging out with radical feminists in the city and only moved back home after I realized I was deeply disturbed by some women in the women’s movement who had issues with me. Suffice it to say, I was verging on a nervous breakdown but my mother chose to send me down to stay with her favorite relatives in Tucson, Arizona, which was the best thing she could have done for me. Her cousin Paul Miller and his wife Marie were the coolest people I could have gone to. He was a trained engineer and lawyer, retired from both those fields and was now into theatre. Marie, meanwhile, was a good buddy of my mom who had been shipped down to Tucson to stay with Paul and Marie’s place ten years earlier when my father couldn’t handle her mental crisis; he thought she was going mad. But once she got together with far-out down to earth people like the millers, she came into herself. That’s also what happened to me. I stopped being so paranoid and began to regain a sense of balance; but I also realized I didn’t really have a clue who I was or what I was doing with my life. I was 21, but I felt like an old soul who felt nothing made much sense, least of all myself.

I found my way back to Chicago nonetheless, and essentially swore off all of my freaky feminist buddies and foes that I previously couldn’t cope with. Soon thereafter, I remembered something my aunt Katherine had shared with me about God that got me back on track. That story is for another chapter. All I can say is that I had been searching for a higher sense of purpose and reason for being alive for several years. I hadn’t found an answer but that malaise was the source of my feeling of alienation before I went to Arisona, and the base of why I felt I was in the thick of an existential crisis after my return. It was that malaise, that thirst for a higher purpose, that feeling that if there was no higher purpose there was no good  reason for my being alive either. I had just begun to get my bearings and had entered graduate school at National Louis University. I was going for a master’s degree in teaching (an MAT) when my mother walked into my bedroom and handed me a document and told me to fill it out immediately. I had no idea what it was. It was an application for a fellowship from the Rotary International. I hadn’t applied for anything of that kind before but here she was. If she had been my age, meaning if she had been me, she would have applied. That was when I realized there was a side of my mom that I really didn’t understand. We were not so different, although it wouldn’t be until many years later that I would realize how similar we were.

In any case, I filled it out the form and started grad school with the tuition fee being covered by my oldest brother Charlie (who I have so much to thank him for since that was a big turning point in my life). A few months later, I got a call from RI for an interview and when I went, I prayed a lot before hand and then was confronted by nine older men, seated around one long table, each asking me questions for a good half an hour. In the waiting room, prior to my going in to meet the nine men, I was joined by a fellow who had just flown in from Harvard for his interview for the same fellowship. Apparently I got it and he did not. My interview with the men was very favorable. I was calm and cool. I felt totally at peace and unafraid with them, in part because I asked for spiritual support from a dear friend who was a healer, and in part because I had grown up surrounded by brilliant older men, my brothers and their friends as well as my father who made me feel I could do almost anything and his patients who I met often and was treated like a little princess by him. After that, I didn’t give it another thought. I implicitly felt assured that if the fellowship was mine, I would receive it, and I did.

The point was my mother was in a sense prepared to live through me since she wasn’t able to do all the things she wanted to since she deferred to my dad who needed her by his side and not traveling the world as she seriously wanted to do. So I would be doing it for her.

June 18, 2020

It was a far cry from climbing the foothills of Mount Kenya and playing baseball with my junior high all-girls baseball team, the Ruthless Babes or climbing mulberry trees near my home and picking the ripe berries before they splashed the city sidewalk just next to my primary school, Orrington School. But I made that journey, and as unlikely as it might seem, I never grew up in the process. I feel forever 16 since I somehow came to the view that everyone over 16 was ‘old’ and I guess I’d acquired a Peter Pan mentality of never wanting to grow up.

I think of those steep hills in Murang’a now because the friend who took me there, Gacheru, was just buried not far from the Equator and the ancestral mountain of the Kikuyu people. On a sunny day, Gacheru said he could see the snowy peaks of the mountain from his front steps. Those steps and that house was where he spent his last days, happily, taking care of his cows, sheep, goats and fish and previously spent time keeping chicken, pigs and even geese and turkey. When we lived in Thika in the Seventies, we actually had the geese, chicks and two turkey. That is when I discovered geese could bite and chicken were messy. I loved the turkey but that time is when I first was first struck with the notion that eating animals was borderline cannibalistic. It is criminal in the US where there is factory farming and the inhumane conditions of keeping domestic animals like cows and hens is cruel punishment. But it was with Gacheru that I began to learn so many new facets of life that were challenging and beautiful to me. I wasn’t sure I could be sustained if I stayed in rural areas forever. But Thika itself was on the verge of becoming an urban industrial area, the first one outside Nairobi in the whole country. That is a whole other chapter of my life that is too large a leap to delve into just now. But it is strange how human beings are so multifaceted that they can land in a foreign land and meet people who don’t know your past but who can intuit your being in the present and be satisfied to begin a friendship from there. Gacheru was so marvelously different from me, I found it exciting just to take hold of strands of commonality that we shared and go with those feelings. We were both at University of Nairobi together, both in Literature classes with Ngugi wa Thiong’o. it turned out we were both in Drama class with John Ruganda, the Ugandan playwright, stage director and charismatic lecturer. (Gacheru told me much later that he and his buddy Watahi [Wangethi Mwangi] used to call me Miss Drama since I was always the one in class who would raise my hand to answer Ruganda’s questions. I had loved that class so much, but as the few other women there were silent and the rest were not terribly responsive to the prof’s queries, I was a woman of note. In fact, I was virtually the only white woman on the whole campus so to say my presence at UoN was conspicuous. I tried to keep a low profile, but that was impossible. I was stalked by more men than I had imagined would be attracted to me. It wasn’t fun, especially I had cultivated a strictly feminist perspective in my last days at my first university, DePauw and had spent time with radical feminists in Chicago who had no time to be involved emotionally with men. But I did make friends with quite a number of guys: Jerry Okungu, the great novelist George Lamming, the East African book publisher Henry Chakava, and my wonderful historian Mosonik Kipkorir. There were more who ‘tried’ me but it got tedious and in fact, the reason I got into journalism and into writing is because I confessed to my dear Sister Janice McLaughton, a Maryknoll sister, that I was tired of men seeing women only as sexual beings and not allowing them to be simply friends without the term ‘friend’ having a sexual connotation. She told me I had to write about my concern. She would put it into the paper that she had connections with, Target of the National Christian council of Kenya. The paper had a cultural section and a woman’s section which she felt could use some spicing up. So I wrote and that first publication led to a whole career as a feature writer with the Kenya papers.

But back to the slopes of Mount Kenya, the journey from Evanston Illinois and from Evanston Township High School to University of Nairobi isn’t brilliant. It was circuitous and involved with my stopping off at several schools in between: DePauw, National Louis University, Northwestern University, Loyola University and UoNairobi. It also involved my teaching at several schools, everywhere from Wilmette Junior School and DePauw (where was a tutor for the ‘Basic Beliefs of Modern Man’ in the Philosophy Department and where I met Jim Sidebotham ‘Side’ who was a whole other story, my entry into the East Coast of America, everywhere from White Plains and New York to Vermont). But I also taught at Loyala as well as at Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman Community Colleges which I loved. I also taught at Kenya Methodist University but I couldn’t stay long since I had to come to Chicago every June for my Christian Science Association gathering and that was squarely in the center of students’ semester. I couldn’t stand teaching them long-distance (which ironically is the only way people are teaching right now during this epoch of Coronavirus or COVID-19). In fact, academia is actually my fertile ground but I chose to be more of a public intellectual in Kenya, becoming a journalist so I could have a job and also enjoy my life on a daily basis since journalism is all about discovering and writing about new things. That is what it was when I got there in the late Seventies through Sister Janice, Okite Odhiambo and Hilary Ng’weno all of whom were instrumental in my moving into the most unlikely position of becoming a so called cultural ‘legend’, gaining that status simply because I have been writing for so many moons, days and decades.

I had already met Gacheru on campus when I began writing. In fact, we had already gotten together and shared a similar proclivity toward Marxism. In fact, we read Marx’s writings together and were never at a loss for discussions about politics, ideology and the local corrupt politicians. I didn’t know Gacheru when I arrived in kenya at the end of June and started classes July 1^st. but his impact on my life began almost from the moment I got there since he was among the rebels who led the university protest against one racist professor in the Architecture Department. That protest led to the GSU coming to campus and teargassing us all, including me. It also led to the shutting down of the school for five months, meaning I didn’t start classes officially until half of my one year’s fellowship was already up.

I had come to Kenya on a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellowship. My local club was the one my brother Tom belongs to, the Evanston Rotary Club and the one that I went to, the Rotary club of Nairobi is the one I belong to today. But back then, the Nairobi ‘club took pity on me and asked ‘Rotary International to give me more funds to complete my one year of study which they did. They also gave me a Vespa motor scooter which I loved driving. But that stopped once I began going out with Gacheru who insisted I stop. I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t relented and put away that bike since it had been my key to freedom, my means of whipping across the city, flying from Westlands, the affluent side of town where I lived briefly with Lady Elisabeth Erskine’s friend, Gloria hagberg and over to Eastlands, to estates like Ofafa-Jericho where I visited my friend Mosonik at the Ofafa police station since his uncle worked there. I was frankly charmed by Makadara where Gacheru came from and by Shauri Moyo where the YMCA would become a place that briefly produced local artists like Wanyu Brush and Boniface Maina. But by the time I got to Makadara with Gacheru, I was taking Number 7 bus since the bike had gotten stored at Gacheru’s brother Moses’ place in Bahati, that fateful Bahati. Once I began spending time at Bahati, our relationship became ‘a fait accompli’.

June 23, 2020

From the time I was a little girl, I can recall that I never wanted to have children of my own. I never wanted to get married either. It wasn’t because my own family was a miserable one. On the contrary, my parents were stellar as far as they could be. We would sit down to dinner together every night, no matter how late we had to wait for my father to come home from his house calls and tours around Evanston Hospitals to check on his patients. No one complained as we all had homework to do and my mother had put a phone in my room which was a bad idea since I waited too much time talking to girlfriends and to Stuart Lauderbach who I met in junior high school when I was in the play, Winnie the Pooh. He had worked backstage and I had played the part of ----. He called me almost every night during junior after the play and while I didn’t pay too much attention, I guess he was quite fond of me. His parents were Democrats contrary to mine who were Goldwater Republicans, but in later years, his mother became a bosom buddy of my mom’s and politics did not enter into the equation of their friendship. My mother never had much time for me after school since she was the one forever on the phone speaking to either Helen Nahl or Francis Alderson, two ladies who kept her fully occupied. But as to why I knew I never wanted to get married, I think it had to do with seeing how smart my mother was but at the same time how stuck she was under my father’s thumb. He left her to her own resources during the day and even gave her an allowance for shopping; but while she aspired to travel and see the world, he had no time for such frivolity. His patients and his practice came first. We were always second and only went on ‘holiday’ to Key Biscayne in Florida when one of us was sick. Then my father would take us south to enjoy the fresh air, I guess. But my mother could never go out of town without him. Nor could she get a job that earned her any financial independence. It wasn’t done for a woman of her class I gathered. I always knew she could have been the CEO of General Motors or its financial manager since she took charge of finances for all the women organizations that she belonged to. She never aspired to any higher ranking she said since it was her mother who would always be called upon to be president of this or that club and she accepted working behind the scenes. I think I also saw that if I was going to have any impact in my life, if I was going to do anything of significance other than becoming a ‘good wife’ and dutiful parent, I would have to be on my own. I had seen how my brothers were always favored and understood how strong women had to find their own ways of operating to be anything other than a pretty face, cute figure and charming flirt of a girl. I was okay at all of those things. Starting young, my big brother Charlie used to bring friends home from Princeton when he was an undergraduate, meaning I was around eight or nine or ten. I used to love to show off by cooking them breakfast and listening to their fun discussions. Our dinner table had always been a source of lively discourse and debate, especially when Charlie and Steve where still there: Charlie left when I was turning eight and Steve left for Harvard when I was turning ten. So in those early years, whether we had visitors at our dinner table or not, our family was a lively place. And that was at least up until I was 10. My mother would preside over the discussions and many a night, one of us would have to run for a dictionary or an volume from one of our encyclopedia to get details about some subject under discussion. So I knew my mom, who had been a Phi Beta Kappa (winning highest honors in languages) from Northwestern University, was brilliant. But I could feel her frustration and I never wanted to be like her in that regard. I especially didn’t feel she was teaching me worthwhile things when she insisted on showing me how to polish silver and iron men’s shirts. But of course, I did learn how to set a table for visitors using my mother’s finest sterling silver. But intellectually, she never seemed to challenge me. She did encourage me to take piano lessons from age five. But Mrs Lee was no fun and all I can remember from years of her teaching me is the way she used to poke my fingers with her pencil. I used to take part in music recitals but I was never wholehearted about it. When years later, I suggested I learn to play the flute like my brother Steve, my mom said no, I wouldn’t take it any more seriously than I had the piano.

In any case, I seemed to make friends with boys very easily and had a lot of them calling on me. Never anything serious, but in junior high through my church group, there was a nice Mexican boy name Manuel who was very sweet. Another boy named Colin was also cute. But it was when I was 14 that I went bowling on a Saturday afternoon with several of my girlfriends, including Laurie Meyers, my sort of best friend, and Gale Sanders who lived down the street from me. I had never bowled before and once I let the ball fly behind my back which made my girlfriends laugh and a group of boys who’d been bowling in the alley next to ours also take note. I had no idea I had drawn so much attention but my mishap became a rally excuse for the guys to come over to see if we were all okay. There was Web and there was David and two other guys. Web fell for Laurie and David decided there and then that I was the girl for him. What I did to convince of this was never to be known by me, but I could not be rid of David after that for many years. In fact, David even intended to marry me, which was the last thing on my mind at age 17 when he proposed. My mother would have been delighted since David was from a wealthy family who lived in Kenilworth, a Chicago suburb having the highest per capita income of any other suburb of the whole North Shore (so named for being on the shores of Lake Michigan and being considered upper-middle class). David was two years older than I and he had a little Blue Volkswagon Beatle which he drove me around in everywhere. Without David I might never have gotten out of my parent’s house in high school since they disapproved of just about everything I wanted to do or everywhere I wanted to go. But with David, I traveled to see other schools since he was a sports lover. This meant I saw scads of basketball games, which I also loved, especially as my ETHS had some of the best black basketballers in the state of Illinois. Because my mother trusted David impeccably, I even got to go with him on a school sky trip (he went to New Trier, the high school up the Shore from ETHS and which had the best facilities of any public school in the state) to Aspen, Colorado. Of course, it was very well chaperoned and my mother had nothing to fear. But it wasn’t my favorite experience since I hadn’t been terribly athletic since primary school and had never skied in my life, so I made quite a scene. I even won a pin for being the most un-athletic of the group. But no matter. In any case, David occupied too much of my secondary school years and when he asked me to marry him when I was only a junior in high school, I was adamant. No way. He claimed he had our lives worked out for us. We would join the Peace Corps and go abroad. Yada yada. First of all, he was the one going away to university not me. He had gone to one of the best private schools that money could buy for secondary but dropped out for some reason. New Trier was a come down for his family. One thing I did enjoy and learn about with David was music since he was obsessed with it. But otherwise, I was happy when he went off to university. It was the time when The Draft had arrived and young people his age were being called to fight in Vietnam. It would be a time when many young people would be wrestling with their conscience and trying to understand the meaning of war, the meaning of being a Conscientious Objector and being finally a Draft Dodger like Donald Trump and David. David managed to dodge the draft by getting academic deferments. I was too ignorant at the time to fully grasp what the War was about. That wouldn’t come until I got to university myself several years later and we would protest in Washington, DC against Richard Nixon bombing Cambodia and generally picking on peasants in Southeast Asia, for what. I wouldn’t start thinking seriously or politically until I got to DePauw. But before that, I was still in high school, trying to decide if I would ever be as smart as my big brothers which I knew I would never be. What I did want to do was emulate my father, so I took Chemistry and loved it, took math courses and always got A’s and even volunteered at Evanston Hospital serving as a ‘Candy Striper’, meaning I had a special red and white striped uniform and I helped the nurses on weekends. That is where I met Jack Clarkson, a football Quarterback from Northwestern who had done damage to his knee. Jack was half American Indian and was from Detroit or Motor City also known for the music of Motown. It was Jack who introduced me to Motown sounds and taught me how to dance! I had gone to Ballroom Dancing classes from Fifth grade with Mr Giordano, from fifth through eighth grade, every week. But I hadn’t learned how to boogaloo or do any sort of funky steps that would be in step with The Temptations, The Miracles, The Supremes or The Four Tops (who performed at my DePauw University graduation prom). But Jack did and I loved him for it. But Jack loved Bonnie, his hometown girl. Besides, he met David one weekend when the guy came home from his university (he went to several) and stormed in onto my family’s living room to act as if the space belonged to him. I escorted David out quicky but Jack said he got the hint. He wasn’t going to mess with David’s girlfriend. I felt jilted and annoyed with the rich kid who thought he owned me. Anyway, candy striping was only one task I practiced at Evanston Hospital, a place that did not yet have carpets on its floors and one could easily hear the rapid footsteps of Dr. Swigert whenever he was making his ‘rounds’. One tasks I learned was how to drawn blood from patients. Yes, an odd practice to perfect but I did it for a time then moved on to other things. But I also used to work at my father’s office where I would learn from his nurse-secretary Rita Madden, how to read patients’ blood tests and their urine analyses. Then when Rita would go on holiday, I would take charge for the Doctor and could eocyniphiles and other blood cells. I can’t remember much of that stuff now, but I took a course in Bacteriology at DePauw thinking I might one day become a Bacteriologist (not a nurse) which was somehow in line with my did who had studied biochemistry and had two masters degrees in Pathology as well as having specialized in Internal Medicine. I gave up that who line of study by the time I got to DePauw where I met Dr. Saad Ibrahim, my Sociology professor who could occupy a whole chapter for me to tell all that I learned from him. Suffice it to say, he opened my eyes to the global, to the Middle East and to contemporary Drug culture which he had me research first hand. It was he who encouraged me to try marijuana (pot, bhangi, weed, whatever name you give it). I wrote a paper on my drug research and got an A. That was the start of a long four year relationship that ended partially when I didn’t marry him but my classmate Barbara Leitham did. Barbara was perfect for him, but we had always been close, from the time he was in love with my girlfriend Penny to his meeting my father’s second nurse-secretary to our studying the PLO and revolutions together. Saad taught me what it meant to be a public intellectual and we met many years later, after he had been sentenced by the Mubarak regime to seven years of hard labor for speaking franking on television about how the president was grooming his son to become the next head of state. Saad had taught the wife of Mubarak as well as the wife of the Egyptian president who got assassinated, Sadat, for making a peace agreement with the Israelis. But Saad was finally released in 2003 after we his former DePauw students went to Washington, DC to protest for his release at the Egyptian counselate. Coincidentally, that was the same weekend that protestors were marching on the White House, telling George W. Bush not to go to war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Some of us, like me, knew in our bones, that it was already a fait accompli, Bush had already set the ball in motion despite his public proclamations that it was not a done deal. It wasn’t long after that weekend that not only did America go into Baghdad, but Dr Saad was freed and considered a fully-fledged Human Rights advocate who had won world acclaim for his stand against the repressive Mubarak regime. I wouldn’t have married Saad, although he and I both expressed our deep affections and mutual understanding which I will never despute. But by my third year, it was already clear I was on a different path, especially after I chose to take the 3^rd year ‘Urban Plunge’ and take one semester off to work and study in Philadelphia on the East Coast. I was supposed to be under the DePauw umbrella but I felt I had to chart my own path. Thus, I would with anti-war people and lived in a commune in Germantown. And I ended up getting involved with a wonderful feminist project to travel to assorted colleges along the East Coast and address the way Advertising exploited the woman’s image, objectifying her as a commodity. Our project challenged that stereotype and raised important issues that would become one of the central threads of debate during the early days of the Women’s Movement. I felt I had found my niche with the feminists who had not yet claimed that name. But one reason I loved those early days of feminism was because they confirmed my view that women had to break out of old myths and conventional practices and challenge traditions in order to discover new dimensions of their own beings. These were heady days when I also confirmed that marriage was not my thing, nor was making babies. I preferred thinking about making a revolution, being part of a women’s revolution.

July 10, 2020

there was a time not long after the tree fell on our house during an especially windy storm that my mother disappeared from home for a while. I think I was still in primary school because I was at a pajama party with a bunch of other sixth grade girls at Laura Robbins’ house on Noyes Street. I’d never gotten to attend a sleep-over with a bunch of little girls before so it was an exciting event for me. But the fun was short-lived when I got a phone call at Laura’s and told my big brother was going to pick me up shortly. I guess somebody thought the storm was going to do damage on Laura;s house as well as

 

July 15, 2020

Listening to Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, speak on a Washington Post podcast about her lineage and background, coming from brilliant parents whose families came out of slavery and other hardships, I feel I want to speak of my parents as well. I was so privileged to have been assigned the two human beings I was given to by some higher power -- if that is the way I ended up appearing in the arms of Marjorie Helm and Verne Swigert. Being the baby and the last born, I wonder whether I was an accident since my oldest brother is ten years older and I feel my mother was done with babies after her first two, Charlie and Steve.  At the same time, I know I was sought after by my father who yearned for a daughter, my mother not so much. She had been soured by her older sister at an early age. She had been the object of dislike (need I say hatred) on the part of Virginia from the moment she came into this world back in the 19-teens. (If Charlie was born in 1939 and she was 23 when she married my father, you figure subtracting 24 from 39 and coming up with 15. Was she really born that early in the 20^th century? I guess so! Then again my father was eight years older than her so he would have been born November 14, 1907. Really? That is remarkable. Funny how we don’t often consider the age of our parents since mindlessly, we may assume they are just ‘there’. Or in my privileged position, I did have two parents who were conscientious enough to be ‘there’ for their kids. I have little doubt that my mother would have left any number of times, especially as the two of them were of such a different temperament: he was born of German (on his father’s side) and Swedish (on his mother’s) extraction while she came from more Anglo-Saxon blood. Blood was such a big deal in my family, it was always being discussed, especially as my father was often speaking about ‘good breeding’ as if we were precious pedigree horses that had been planned (bred) specificaslly, like the Nazi-brand of eugenics. Her family came over to the New World early on, from Holland, England, France and Scotland or so the story goes. My grandmother even commissioned a professional genealogist to do the research (the sort that Henry Louis Gates, Jr is now doing for mainly African Americans).  But apart from breeding and blood lines, my mother’s early American connections meant they were around for the American Revolution and supposedly, we have three of the first governors of the first 13 colonies of America in our line. Of course, I was signed up to be a DAR, Daughter of the American Revolution from an early age. Me and my brother Tom were CARs, Children of the Revolution. But I was also signed up by my mother to be a life-long member of the Colonial Dames, a similar genealogical group to the DAR only they were said to have sympathies for Great Britain. I have to find out details on that group since I believe that ‘Black Lives Matter’ and I need not support a group that supports traitors to the cause of the Union. Of course, most of those early Americans had slaves, but I don’t know whether any in my family had them. It would be of interest to know, especially as the so called War Heroes in those early days who men who went out and fought the indigenous people of the land. Meanwhile, they were considered great for shattering individual civilizations. But let me not condemn my past before I learn more about it. What I do know is that my great great grandfather on my mother’s and grandmother’s side was a Methodist Minister who had been sent by the Church to pioneer in the ‘frontier’ of Indiana and start a school, which he did. Reverand Cyrus Nutt was the first teacher and thus the founder of Indiana-Asbury which later became DePauw University where I would eventually go to university. Cyrus’s son James was a lawyer and a successful one apparently. He also seems to have had land since his daughter, my grandmother Margaretta was considered quite a wealthy woman. She was in fact. So much so that once Wilbur Helm snagged her, leaving his doctoral studies in the Western Classics of Latin and Greek at Princeton University to propose and wed the woman, she had three kids, all of whom she took for a three month Grand Tour of Europe when my mother was 12 and Uncle Stan was 19 and Virginia must have been 24 or 25 and unmarried. Mother Helm (she was called Mother by everyone in our family… for reasons I may explain lateer)  was wealthy enough to pay for a chauffer to drive the family, including Wilbur all over Europe. As the story goes, my grandfather didn’t know Italian but he led the family through Italy with his speaking Latin and was largely understood. When I was a little girl, I knew that jewelry was not only my mother’s thing but also my grandmother’s big deal. Before my mother passed she gave me several exquisite cameos, hand-carved by artists who used the Greco-Roman themes of myth, such as the Three Graces to etch into the cameo material. When my mom, Marjorie gave me the cameos, she told a story which I wrote down as a note to accompany the gems. Apparently, Mother Helm considered these cameos such a good bargain that she bought several to take back to Evanston (where my grandfather had come to be the Headmaster of the Northwestern Academy, high school private school formerly affiliated with NU). Her plan was to have them set in gold and then she would give them to her friends!!! I am incredulous as I think about Margaretta’s generosity and style of friendship. Apparently she didn’t fulfill her plan however since I have several with only one of which was indeed set in gold. Anyway, it was Margaretta who I gather fell for Verne, a handsome, young medical students who was a friend and classmate of Uncle Stan. One day, as the story goes, Mother and Marjorie went down to the City to watch Stan ride military horses which required regular workouts. He and Verne both rode the horses, not as a frivolous venture but as a service in the 1930s when both were students at Northwestern Medical School and my mother was still a university student at Northwestern. My mother had gone to Roycemore, a private girls school just down the block from her home on 720 Colfax Street. She had done so well she was accepted at Wellsley, one of the prestigious Seven Sister Schools. But since it was in the thick of the Depression and Wilbur could supposedly only afford to send one of his children out East, Marjories was stuck at home, attending Northwestern where she  admirably earned a Phi Beta Kappa key for having obtained highest honors for her studies in languages, including Italian, French, and English. One would have never known my mother was a genius  since she had such a self-deprecating and humorous way about her. Her wish was to set everyone at ease which she invariably did. Whether she was so laid back because she was resigned to her lot in life, having married a man her mother adored but she had a preference for Frank Cooper (who gave her his solid gold ring before he saw her for the last time). My mother was banned from seeing Frank since my grandmother was quite willful and my mother didn’t seem to have the strength to defy her. No one cared to defy Margaretta Helm since she was a natural born leader of women and a charming, gracious and generous member of Evanston Society. She took on the presidency of every women organization in town from the Evanston Women’s Club to the DAR to the Kings Daughters and who knows whatever else. I doubt if my father ever heard about Frank since my mother was the epitome of discretion. She wouldn’t have wanted to offend him; she really didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. In fact, as we were growing up she made very clear that mortal weaknesses like jealousy and envy were to have no part in her children’s mentality. At least that was true in my case. She never wanted her kids to envy each other. I don’t know how successful she was since Charlie seemed to be a bit jealous of Steve who won all sorts of genius awards like the National Science Foundation prize in his senior year in High School. Both boys went to Ivy League school (even though they were not prep school graduates like most of those who go Ivy League). Steve also may have envied Charlie since he was the apple of our Mother Helm’s eye and as the first born, Charlie was also the star in my father’s eyes.  Tom may have despised me since I think I wasn’t very nice to him. He was a big boy and got called all kinds of fat-boy names in school so I kept my distance from him, which looking back, I now feel that was horrible of me. I did love Tom however and as we got older we got to be better friends.

Anyway, as I said, my parents came from backgrounds every different from each other and very different from Susan Rice’s. My fahter’s family had a lot of land in Iowa where they grew lots of soy beans and corn. My father’s Swedish grandfather was a successful banker who adored my father. Only my father made the big mistake of not coming at my grandfather wilson’s final hour when he had planned to hand over his wealth to my father (so the story goes). Daddy chose to take his final medical exams which were sa dly scheduled to coincide with grandfather Wilson’s call. So Daddy missed out. His cousin got ahold of the bank and cleaned it out apparently, leaving only a shell. I never got the full story, but what I know is that right before my father passed on, he was visited by the son of that cousin, an Episcopalian minister who came to see him in Evanston Hospital. My father told him off royally and accused him of coming from a family of thieves. Apparently Daddy felt there should have been a sharing of the spoils. In any case, my father’s birthright was lost and he had to struggle financially to achieve the lifestyle he felt my mother was accustomed to. In any case, what I do know is that my parents’ first year of marriage was their most blissful and busy. They had no children and they went to Boston where my father did his residency at the Harvard Medical School and my mother split her time between translating foreign medical documents into English (when they were in Italian or French), typing up the papers he had to write for med school and visiting her well connected Society friends of my grandmother Helm who took her all around Boston, especially to the galleries and museums that she loved so very much. She had done a minor degree in Art History so she was familiar with most of the masterpieces she was able to visit during that first year. After that, they went back to the Midwest, again at the behest of Mother Helm. But Chicago and the Helm family could hardly compare to the freedom my mother had when living in that highly civilized society of Boston and Cambridge..