Calling Mom

Illustration By Jason Stout

"We don't say 'nigger,'" my mother told me recently, during a long telephone call. This was news to me.

Actually we do say "nigger," and have been saying the word for most of the half-century it's been my pleasure to be associated with my family. In addition to "nigger," we say "colored," "Negro," "African-American," and, when we're being pretentious or silly, "person of color."

Recently my own relationship with my race has been increasingly informal. If you're a black person living on this side of the Atlantic, at any latitude north of Brazil, you find yourself swept along like everyone else -- white, yellow, or brown -- by the casual elegance of Afro-American culture. As my mother ages, however, she is becoming more and more formal. She identifies with black people only unevenly. Negroes, she calls us still. She recognizes parts of our mutual culture, but niggahs are not included.

Wasn't always like this. At one time she was more open-minded. By her own admission she's now trying to tie up loose ends, getting everything in order for her death, when she presumably wants to present a unified, consistent, above-reproach case to St. Peter. Her bet is that the Almighty doesn't say "nigger" either. Let's hope she's right.

In the same telephone conversation she informed me that she prefers to be called "Mother" instead of "Mom." This was not news to me. My mother has always been into that dignity/respect thing that most people are into, but especially black American women of a certain age, who can still remember a time when their dignity and person were at the whim of Anglo men they might not even know. Once several years ago Mother chewed me out for having addressed an envelope to her that did not include her legal title, Mrs. In addition to chewing me up, she blew my mind. After only ten years of marriage she had long since cut loose the source of that title, my father.

When my oldest sister heard about the Mrs.-on-the-envelope disturbance she responded with a pretty good one-liner. Melanie is a lawyer by profession, which means she has a certain verbal dexterity. One-liners, sound-bites, even the occasional cheap shot -- she excels at any kind of speech that will keep a jury awake and alert and interested through the messy and sometimes boring facts of daily life, rehashed in a courtroom. What Melanie said in reference to the envelope and the title "Mrs." also touched on my mother's long-ago decision to show my father to the door. (Melanie said this to me one day as she steered her BMW, which later morphed into a Mercedes and, eventually, a Jag. Personal injury law is a good living.)

"She always cherished her 'Mrs.,'" my sister said of our mother, with a quick sideways smile to alert me that a zinger was on the horizon, "but not her mister."

When you're telephoning your mother for the first time in ten years -- no visits, no cards, no calls, no contact -- catching her cold after a long break in the parent-child relationship, there are, basically, two ways to proceed. You can try to think of a really good excuse for the long lapse. Or you can act as if it's just another day in the big city, and call her and talk to her as if you just had dinner together Tuesday evening. That was my plan.

"I'm eighty-seven years old!" she said, after the initial shock of contact. "I still have," she informed me a moment later, "all my marbles."

She sounded a little surprised by her own long life. She shouldn't have been. My mother gave birth to me, the last of her six children, when she was forty years old. She has never smoked, never had more than an average of one drink a week -- usually none -- and one of our last visits together more than a decade ago had been interrupted by her exercise routine to the tune of Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money."

When my mother began to mention her aches and pains, at the same time emphasizing the maternal disappointments an old woman feels in her children, that only encouraged me. My mother has always had the physique of an Amazon. She also has an Amazon's heart. Chances are that she will live to bury me, not vice versa. Still, that doesn't mean life hasn't been tough for her. She had a particularly hard row to hoe, and even if she wasn't picking cotton, some days it must have seemed just as tiring. In fact Mrs. Lomax is part of that (disappearing) generation of American black people who have, or had, good reason to hate the white race.

Of course Mother doesn't really hate anyone. But she does begrudge the time she wasted being forced to play a game she couldn't win. For my mother's generation, and those who came before her, being black took maybe eighty or ninety percent of life's daily energy. For the first, oh, half of her time on Earth, every morning she woke up, only one thing was certain: It would be another long day. Jobs, legal rights, schooling, meals, everywhere she went as an ebony-colored African-American (not able to pass for white even if she had wanted to), everything she did, was immeasurably more difficult because of the hue of her skin.

To put my mother's age and circumstances in context, when she was born, Jim Crow was still a relatively young man. Lynchings were still semilegitimate public entertainment, kind of like raves are today, with the police turning a blind eye as long as everyone was well-behaved. A black woman who was raped in Texas, where Mother was born, or any other Southern state for that matter, had practically no legal recourse. (On the international front, Kaiser Wilhelm was the Saddam Hussein of the period. Instead of alleged weapons of mass destruction, the greatest threats to America in the year of my mother's birth -- 1915 -- were unrestricted German submarine warfare and Pancho Villa's horsemen.)

For my generation of "colored," by comparison, the degree of difficulty started closer to forty percent and has been steadily declining. For kids today, it's like ten percent. Today black young people have the freedom to screw up, intentionally, or act a fool -- just like white kids. Only a generation ago a black person could screw up if he or she liked, but it was still risky behavior. Fools did not survive. A white man might want to make an example of you, teach the brother his place. Now things are cooler, you might say. In a very basic sense, times have changed. Today even the gang-bangers have agents.

If you asked me what was my mother's secret, what got her to the new millennium ahead of others like her younger sister (suicide), or her older brother (suicide), or her ex-husband (the Big C), or many of her friends and contemporaries (booze, drugs, car crashes, gunshots, fried food, white people, fatigue), my answer would be ... books. Surprisingly, despite the demands placed on her by life, Mother always took time to read: Russian novelists and U.S. history, mostly. She reads still. Just lately she reports she's been entranced by a biography of the late great U.S. Grant. Gen. Grant is number two on Mother's very short list of outstanding white men. First is Abraham Lincoln, naturally. Franklin Roosevelt is third.

There is no number four, although if she were forced to choose she would probably name Lyndon Johnson, a fellow Texan. She can still remember when President Johnson went on television and told the country, "We shall overcome." On the other side of the coin, somewhere in her mental attic she still remembers driving through Mississippi, in 1964, and seeing a car decorated with a bumper sticker that read, "Any water but Goldwater." She feels that way now. Any bush, she tells me when we talk, but George W. Bush.

You would think that Mother would be ecstatic to have lived to see the changes in the world today. But in this greatest age of African-American accomplishment her approval is lukewarm at best. Colin and Condoleezza? She doesn't trust 'em. She thinks Oprah is on a massive ego-trip, although the Big O's money (reportedly $1 billion, and still counting) does impress her. Tiger, she likes. She has yet to express an opinion on Serena or Venus, but something tells me it won't be entirely good. Serena may possess a mean serve, but off the court her dress is sometimes inappropriate. (Actually, in my family we don't say "inappropriate" that much either. We say "common," instead.)

Don't ask Mother about Denzel or Halle. She doesn't watch many movies and never has. When she does, she sometimes refers to them as "pictures," as in "moving pictures," which is what films were before they became movies. My mother was around -- although not yet my mother -- and already taking care of herself and a younger sister when Gone With the Wind premiered. She wasn't invited to the showing, although a pretty good argument can be made that she knew more about the script than Clark Gable or Vivien Leigh. For that matter, she was around when Birth of a Nation came out too. Unfortunately, she knew that script as well.

Music? She briefly dated Duke Ellington's son, if that counts for anything. But Puff Daddy (let alone P. Diddy) or Lil' Kim? She wouldn't even know what you're talking about. She turned off the radio when Nat King Cole died. Except, of course, if Donna Summer is singing. She and Donna have a lot in common. They both worked hard for their money.

They worked hard for it, honey.