An old black and white photograph of seven smiling Black women posing near the rear of a car is one of my favorites. I discovered it in 2017 on a visit with my now ninety-some-year-old Aunt Rubylene. I don’t know who took the picture, what year it might have been taken, or for what occasion. Even though my Aunt Rubylene is in the photo, she blames her failing memory for her inability to offer any of the pertinent details. My great aunt has always been gracious and forthcoming with me, so I want to take her at her word.
My aunt is relatively sure that the photo was taken somewhere in Mississippi. I need no help in discerning that five of the women in this photograph are sisters, a number that includes my grandmother and four of her siblings. The other two women were, according to Aunt Rubylene, close friends of the family. Sadly, all of the women in the photograph, except for my Aunt Rubylene, are now deceased.
The main reason I adore this photograph is that it grants me an extended gaze at my grandmother and my great aunts in the sweet, tender blossom of their youth before the years of marriage and babies and city life changed them into the old, cantankerous, and at times conspicuously country women that I knew them to be. By no means should my description be read as an insult, but rather an honest assessment and statement of fact. Lord knows I’ve always loved those women unconditionally–quirks, flaws, eccentricities, and all–as I know they did and do me. Besides, old, cantankerous, and at times conspicuously country is likely how my own nieces currently describe me.
As tempted as I am to refer to the five sisters as “The Ham Girls” daughters of Hattie Mae and Mott Ham, I know for at least one (and possibly some of the others), this would be inaccurate. What is widely accepted by most is that whenever any of the five, as well as the two absent from the photograph, uttered the word “Mama” the one person they each envisioned was Hattie Mae Ham.
Like their mother, all seven sisters were products of a rural and segregated Mississippi. The birth dates of the sisters fall one behind the other from the 1910s through 1930. Their given names, nicknames, and birth order were as follows: Tori, Geneva (aka Jenny/Genny), Hazel, Zenna (aka Mae), Elzata (aka Ada Baby or Knot), Verna (aka Snooks), and Rubylene (aka Sister).
The two missing from the group photo are my aunts–Genny and Ada Baby. Standing next to my Aunt Rubylene, in the checkered dress with the bow is my Aunt Tori. The first woman seen kneeling on the left is my Aunt Snooks. Initially, I’d mistaken my Aunt Hazel, the woman on the far right with her arm raised, for my Aunt Ada Baby. But I’m willing to defer to my mother who insists that Aunt Hazel was the sole sister with shoulder-length hair. What I do know without a doubt is that the woman wearing the hat, holding the cigarette, and sporting the broad smile is my maternal grandmother, Zenna Mae, who was simply called “Mae” by most, including me.
Tall and lumbering (characteristics I, apparently, inherited), quick to reel off a slew of m.fs and s.o.b.’s when provoked, as well as drink a cold one straight from the can with her scrambled eggs in the morning, like so many folk in my family, my grandmother was quite the character. She worked as a short-order cook in at least two of Memphis, TN’s dark and smokey cafes (one in Binghamton and the other off Chelsea Avenue in North Memphis), and her hamburgers were some of the best I’ve ever tasted. When home, she could typically be found in her favorite chair at the kitchen table where she’d sit for hours and often well into the night, dialing up the phone numbers scribbled throughout her thick and tattered address book. Wherever she went, be it the cafe, her chair at the kitchen table, the bed she shared with her husband of 60 plus years, or even the bathroom in her own home, an over-sized black pocketbook, which, I kid you not, weighed at least a solid ten pounds, was never too far from her side. Her favorite color was any and every shade of red. She owned a rep for being both bossy and gruff, but she was also generous to a fault and seldom hesitated to give all that she could to those in need, including big wads of cash (twenty, fifty, and one hundred dollar bills, no less) from the deep, dark recesses of her closely guarded, heavy ass pocketbook.
While I cherish the privilege of being able to say that I knew my grandmother as well as my great aunts, what is equally true is that I really didn’t know them know them. Sure, I knew their names, faces, and for the most part how they presented themselves in the world. I know many of the things that only close (or the more nosy) relatives do, like whose husband was murdered; who buried adult children; who worked in the homes of white folks; who had the best sense of humor; who moved up south to Chicago; who could really cook and who couldn’t. I know all too well how most, if not all of them shared a distinctive way of speaking and enunciating words that sounded a lot like “The Godfather of Soul” (aka James Brown). I’m talking a choppy, fast-paced, guttural, and somewhat rhythmic cadence that often prompted both strangers and the uninitiated alike to tilt their heads and wonder aloud, “What did she just say?”
But the thoughts and feelings of those same women? Their dreams and desires? Their past loves and/or lifelong regrets? What they or their corner of the world was like when they were children? I only wish I knew. And don’t think I didn’t ask a time or two. But the truth is they weren’t the kind of women to readily divulge that sort of information, much less invite that type of intimacy even with kinfolk.
As someone who feels strongly compelled to add my family’s stories to the historical record, the blank pages that exist where these women’s voices ought to be, matter to me. Unlike their female counterparts, the males in my maternal lineage have always been less reticent when it comes to sharing the details of their lives. I have hours of animated, recorded conversations with my grandfather about his coming of age in Water Valley, Mississippi, the time he spent overseas during the Second World War, and his experiences with discrimination while working at the US Defense Depot in Memphis, Tennessee. Likewise, two of my great uncles, my grandfather’s younger brothers, spoke with me at length about the police brutality and racial injustice they both witnessed and experienced in their youth. While one of my grandmother’s sisters, my Aunt Snooks, readily shared both information and photographs associated with her ex-husband, a Mid-South photographer, whose life I’ve since written about, whenever I attempted to coax my aunt into talking about her own life, there was no mistaking her lack of interest in sharing anything beyond the most basic of details.
Hattie Mae, my great-grandmother, and the mother of those seven sisters, is even more of a mystery to me. Having never met her, the only thing I know for sure is that she was a much beloved figure in my mother’s life. “Big Mama” is how my mother still affectionately refers to her grandmother even though the dark-skinned older woman with the high cheekbones and wearing the proud mother-of-the-bride smile in my Aunt Snooks’s wedding portrait was undeniably slight-figured and small in stature. Sadly, the only other image I’ve seen of Hattie Mae is one of her in her casket, a photograph taken by the groom in the aforementioned wedding picture, my Aunt Snooks’s husband.
According to census records, Hattie Mae was born in or near 1890. Her mother and father were May Raglan Robinson and Eddie Robinson. In the Census of 1910, Hattie Mae was 20 years old and still living with her parents. I can’t find her in the 1920 Census, when she would have been 30 years old, but she reappears in the 1930 Census with five children. Strangely though, in the 1930 Census, Hattie Mae’s last name and the last name of all five of the children in her household at the time was recorded as “Wilson.” Mott Ham is listed in that same household as a 60-year-old “boarder.” I have no idea what any of that means given that those same five children (my grandmother and my great aunts) all claimed that Mott Ham was, indeed, their biological father and Hattie Mae’s husband. I do find it interesting, if not somewhat amusing that those same five referred to Mott Ham as “Mister Ham” in much the same way one might a boarder.
As informative and clarifying as it might be to know why Hattie Mae and her daughters appear in the Census of 1930 under the last name of “Wilson,” I’d happily allow that topic to remain forever clouded in mystery in exchange for some clarity and insight on another. If I could, by some magical turn of events, meet my great-grandmother, the one question I’d surely ask is, “Why did you give your daughters such interesting and, in some cases, downright odd names?”
Names have always interested me and their significance took on even greater relevance when I started dabbling in genealogical research. One of the more notable naming patterns in my maternal line is the name “Mae” (or “May”). As previously noted, Hattie Mae’s mother was a “May” Raglan Robinson. Hattie Mae went on to give two of her daughters “Mae” as a middle name (Tori Mae and Zenna Mae). My Aunt Hazel named her oldest daughter “Dorothy Mae.” My grandmother, Zenna Mae, named her only child, my mother “Bobbie Mae.” I am truly shocked, though incredibly grateful, that I somehow escaped being bequeathed the nomenclature.
While I know that most of my great aunts’ names may not have been particularly unusual in the southern United States during the early 1900s, something about them has always struck me as peculiar. I think I may have met one other “Tori” in my life. The only other “Hazel” I’ve ever known is the one from the ‘60s television show by the same name. “Geneva” and “Rubylene” are names I’ve read in books, journals, and magazines, and heard in movies. My first encounter with the name “Verna” outside of my Aunt Snooks was in an old black and white movie from the ‘40s that I watched earlier this year on Turner Movie Classics. “Zenna” and “Elzata” aren’t names I’ve ever known anyone to have besides my grandmother and my aunt. Only recently has it occurred to me what my grandmother and my great aunts’ names might have in common.
It was Mae’s given name “Zenna” that inadvertently led me to discover what I’ve come to believe is a definite pattern. One day, while chatting on the phone with my friend Violet, I mentioned how strange I found many of the names on my mother’s side of the family. I’m pretty sure the main reason I brought this up with Violet is that she and her sister Velvet own slightly odd names featuring a common denominator. When I told Violet my grandmother’s name, she was surprisingly quick to suggest an explanation that struck me as highly plausible.
Might “Zenna” actually be a substitute for the word “Zinnia,” a colorful annual in the sunflower family?
I might not have been as open to the suggestion had it not been for the fact that my grandmother–Zenna Mae–a woman who I never knew to garden or even like flowers–for years kept a couple of packets of unopened Zinnia seeds in a drawer next to her favorite chair at the kitchen table. Seed packets that I kept after her death with the intent of planting one day.
With Violet’s help, I ran down and reflected on some of the other names– “Hazel” which is a color as well as a type of tree. “Rubylene” is a name that contains yet another color–ruby. Okay, there’s Zinnia, Hazel, Ruby.
“So what about “Elzata?” I asked my friend. “Surely, that’s some made-up, nonsensical name.”
Or could it be, my friend suggested, a Southern-ebonics-James Brown-like pronunciation and spelling of “Azalea?” You know, like the bush?
Get out! Azalea, Zinnia, Hazel, and Ruby–that’s a damn garden and one full of a wondrous array of colors.
Well, what about “Verna?” That’s neither a color nor a flower. Violet couldn’t help me with that one, but I discovered an answer that fits neatly into the puzzle. Verna, as it turns out, is a word of Latin origin that means “springtime” or “spring-like.” And what commonly happens in the spring? Well, among other things, flowers bloom. So, perhaps we should make that a spring garden full of a wondrous array of colors.
I’ve long thought my two oldest great aunts–Geneva and Tori were excluded from this spring garden name connection, which seemed logical, given they didn’t share (or claim) the same father– “Mister Ham”– as their younger siblings. But a quick Google search as well as a flip through my old copy of The Best Baby Name Book suggested otherwise. One common definition of “Geneva” claims it is of French origin and means “juniper tree.” I’m somewhat familiar with juniper trees. A couple of the tall, prickly plants framed my grandparent’s front porch. While juniper trees don’t necessarily come to mind when I envision a spring garden, it is a plant that I’ve learned thrives best in sunny spots.
And finally, there’s “Tori.”
Whenever I hear the name, I can’t help but think of “Tory,” the name of those American colonists who supported the British during the American Revolution. Surely, neither the Brits nor the American Revolution is what Hattie Mae had in mind when she named her eldest daughter Perhaps what she did have in mind was something biblical. In Hebrew, the word “Tori” means “my turtle dove.” From what I understand, turtle doves aren’t common in Mississippi or even the United States. According to my research, they’re known to inhabit parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. But, interestingly enough, they do migrate in the winter to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Does that mean anything? I don’t know. But I do know that according to my mother’s Ancestry DNA results, nearly 80% of her ethnicity is tied to the people of Sub-Saharan Africa. I also know that turtle doves are mentioned in the Old Testament, most notably in the Song of Solomon.
“11 For, see, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come; and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;” (KJV, Song of Solomon 2:11-12)
A turtle dove, a juniper tree, a spring garden of colorful flowers, and all with a biblical reference point. Might it be a fanciful, ambitious stretch of the imagination on my part? Perhaps. It might equally be true that the theory satisfies my need to fill in the gap where the voices and stories of the womenfolk in my family ought to be with something beautiful. Yet and still, while I don’t consider myself particularly superstitious, I am a believer in signs. As outlandish as it might sound, I think during the writing of this piece, Hattie Mae sent me one.
I was in the middle of putting the finishing touches on this essay when I realized something.
In the seventy-plus-year-old black and white wedding photo I mentioned previously, not only is Hattie Mae wearing a proud mother-of-the-bride smile, she’s also wearing a flower print dress that’s adorned with a single decorative corsage.
I can only imagine what life might have been like for my great-grandmother, born Black, female, and impoverished in the rural and segregated South of the late 1800s. She was among the first of my maternal line to be born outside of slavery. The first to know how to read and write. But still, she was bound to the land, red clay, and blood-stained cotton of Mississippi, not unlike those of the generation before her.
I’d like to think that Hattie Mae’s daughters, her little brown-skinned babes, were a welcome source of beauty and joy in a world often devoid of both and that their names reflect such. Certainly, she saw in them what parents from the beginning of time have been inclined to see in their children–the promise of a brighter tomorrow.
These days, when I stare long enough at the group shots I have of my grandmother and her sisters, I can almost feel the warm caress that so often marks the onset of Spring. And for a few seconds, I can clearly see Hattie Mae’s well-tended garden plush with splashes of smile-invoking colors.
And if I tilt my head at just the right angle, not only can I detect the soft scent of juniper and azalea riding the whisper of a breeze, I can hear the distant, repetitive trill of a dove.
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