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Seen and Not Heard

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, the writer was raised by her great-grandmother in a unique and predominantly Black gay church in the Bible Belt. Witnessing the AIDS epidemic firsthand, she lost her uncle and brother to the disease in the 90s. Despite their struggles, they pushed her to persevere, ensuring she graduated and moved forward in life, with their love and determination shaping her journey. This is a portion of her story #WorldAIDSDay

I grew up in the heart of the Midwest during the 1970s, the era of peace, love, Vietnam War protests and what others claimed to be the end of the Civil Rights Era. My mama and I stayed with my great-grandmother, her paternal grandmother, who was an associate pastor of a church during a time when women were forbidden to be behind a pulpit, and she was also head of the mother board. Everyone simply referred to her as, Reverend-Mother. Our two-bedroom house was the color of pine trees and sat on a grassy hill, with steep concrete steps leading up to the door. During the spring and summer, the yard would be filled with blooming red rose bushes, pink and white tulips, and mint shrubs. I shared a room with Mama, with a window that faced the front of the house. On hot spring and summer days, we’d lift the window, and the smell of mint leaves would fill the air. More often than not, I’d smell the mint and then go outside and pick some of the leaves for my great-grandma to brew in a pot of tea. The porch had a white wooden swing that hung from the ceiling, the perfect spot for me to sit and sip my glass of sweet mint tea during the summer months. I much rather have sat outside during the warm months, than the inside on the gold-colored furniture covered with thick plastic, that caused you to sweat profusely and felt as if the top layer of your epidermis would be ripped away when you stood up. I was a precocious child, that noticed everything and said very little.

I was chunky, with large eyes and small teeth. I didn’t like to be looked at or touched; I’d fade into whatever scene I was in, watching my community of people walk down the street with their large afros, bell-bottom pants with an afro pick that had a black handle shaped like a fist. A couple of the women in the neighborhood would lather their skin in gold and silver glitter, their shorts were tight and just hit below the bottom of their buttocks. My mama would call them, “hot pants.” Everyone either wore shoes with platform heels or a pair of high-top tennis shoes.

I’d hear, “Say man, pass me that doobie, brother.” Then, with pinched fingers, a thin white cigarette would be passed from one hand to the next.

“Right on!” the other one would chuckle.

Cars would roll by blasting the sounds of Motown or whatever entertainer that had recently performed on Soul Train, such as the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Bootsy Collins, The Ohio Players and so many more. My first childhood friend, Tina, lived directly across the street from us. When I wasn’t on the porch people watching, I was at her house, coercing her to prepare a sweet treat in her Easy Bake oven, or standing in her front yard, exchanging fairytales of what we thought life would be like as adults. We both were in classes for accelerated students and were never short on words.

I’d ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I’m going to be a teacher and have me a fine ass husband and a couple of kids.” We tended to swear when no adults around. “What about you?”

The honeysuckle vine had bloomed, and I made my way over to the white flowery bush, picked off one closer to the top of the gate, afraid the ones at the bottom had been peed on by stray dogs. I gave her question a little pondering as I plucked off the bottom of the flower and sucked the sweet golden dot from it. Tina joined me in doing the same.

 

I knew my father had recently graduated from medical school and though he was absent from a lot of my life, he was my hero, so quite naturally I said, “I’m going to be a doctor, get married and have three kids and we’ll live in Europe.”

“What’s Europe?” Tina was thin, with long thick hair and golden-brown skin. She always smelled like cocoa butter and when she talked, her top lip would curl upwards.

“I don’t know really; I just saw the pictures of it in my View-Master and it looks cool. It has lots of big castles and wide seas. I think it’s a billion miles away.” I was in the third grade at that time, everything amounted to a million or billion.

She laughed. “How would you even get there?”

“A boooooaaaaatttt…there’s an ocean to cross!”

“You’re odd, Stacy, but you’re my best friend. You want to study for our spelling test now?”

I hesitated, “Yeah…okay.” I really didn’t need to because I always got 100% on my tests. School was easy, and everything just made sense to me. I don’t ever recall asking anyone for assistance with my homework or putting much effort into completing it. In the second grade, I was reading at seventh grade level. That’s the year my teachers began telling my mother I was different from other kids. “Gift and talented” was how they put it.

Mama would say, “Do well in school and I’ll buy you anything you want.” She did, all except for that Easy Bake oven. She didn’t see it as being safe and believed I’d overindulge on the food. Instead, she bought me Barbies, clothes, shoes and lots of books.

My mother was the oldest of six, with her youngest sibling, my Uncle Lockie, being only six years older than me. He was more my playmate than an uncle. My mama had gotten pregnant with me at the age of 20 years old and gave birth to me shortly after her twenty-first birthday. During the 1960s it was frowned upon for a woman to have a baby out of wedlock. Hospitals refused to add the father’s name to the birth certificate and would simply type in “unknown” in the provided space, then prohibit the child to have any other last name, except the mother’s. My dad came from an influential family in the community. They were college educated and his father was the first professional Black photographer in Kansas City. He took pictures for the Mayor, the NAACP, all the large churches, and when the Presidents came to the city, he’d photograph them too. His mother had two bachelor’s degrees in the 1950s. One in education and the other in nursing. My dad denied I was his throughout her pregnancy, causing my mother to flee Kansas City and head to Chicago after my birth. I bounced around from house to house until she returned when I turned 3 years old. It was then we moved in Reverend-Mother

My birth caused a rift between the two families, which made little sense, because my maternal grandmother was also a nurse and my grandfather a taxi driver. They lived in a predominately white neighborhood in South Kansas City. Mama always told stories of being chased home by her white classmates as the word, nigger would be hurled at them. Shockingly, my dad’s family viewed them as the other side of the tracks. My father finally admitted I was his closer to my first birthday, he had no choice, with each passing month my face began to develop more and more to resemble his, but it was too late, the damage of his lie was irreversible.

One afternoon, while riding the city bus with my great-grandmother, I overheard a woman repeatedly call the man she was sitting with a bastard, using various adjectives in front of it. “Worthless bastard…dumb bastard…lazy ass bastard…broke Black ass bastard”

I looked at the large chocolate skinned woman berate the slender copper toned man. The man never verbally responded. He just sat there sucking his teeth and shifting in his seat. The bus driver finally asked her to be respectful of other passengers and she stopped. Bastard? The word circled in my head, and I began to sound out the spelling. Moving my lips yet spouting nothing from them.

“B-a-s-tuh-tuh-erd…bast..ahh…ahh..bastard” When we arrived home, I immediately looked it up in the Webster Dictionary and realized it referred to me as well. I began to label myself with the despicable term, until I called myself that in front of my great-grandmother. It got me a slap across the mouth when my great-grandmother heard me say it. “How dare you!” Her look was stern and filled with disappointment. She left me standing in the center of the living room, with tingling lips as her back turned toward me.

One afternoon, my Uncle Lockie came to visit me. He lived with my grandmother, his mom, only several blocks away. They’d left South Kansas City and were living in midtown near us. He prepared us lunch during his visit. We sat at the dining room table eating butter and grape jelly sandwiches, shoestring potato chips and sipping 7-Up. His eyes were large like mine and his body was lean. I stopped chewing and looked at him.

“Am I a bastard?”

He never looked up at me, and said, “Nope, you’re my niece and the family loves you very much.” His mouth was filled with the sweet and savory concoction he’d made for our lunch.

I never referred to myself as a bastard again.

***

Reverend-Mother carried me to church with her every Sunday and sometimes during the week too. It seemed as if we’d be there for countless hours all morning and into the early afternoon. The choir would march in, 3-5 selections were sung by choir, offerings were taken up at least twice and the pastor’s “I’m closing now” speech lasted an extra thirty minutes after the sermon. All this excluded the church announcements, testimonial time, people running up and down the aisle, speaking in tongues, prophesying and standing around after service to fellowship. We’d turn around and do all that again for night service.

It was a storefront church with a white carpeted aisle down the middle and each side had folding chairs, underneath the chairs was thick red carpets. Dozens of white candles burned during service and there were statues of Mother Mary, Jesus and various other Biblical saints situated throughout the church. The sanctuary had two altars, one in the front and the other in the back. On the altars were large glass bowls filled with silver coins, just like the altars at Reverend-Mothers. When people would ask me my denomination, I never knew what to say. It was called, a Spiritual Church, but that terminology was used less back then.

Reverend-Mother always wore a long white robe, and a colorful overlay with a zucchetto to match. All the women on the Mother Board wore white dresses, thick white panty hose, white zucchettos and white shoes, this included both of Reverend-Mother’s daughters-in-law. They sat on the front row of the church, while Reverend-Mother sat in the pulpit with the pastor. The pastor was a stoutly man, with large eyes and thick keloids around his jawbone. Rumor had it he acquired the scars in a street fight during his younger years. He drove a large Cadillac and would come to our house often for dinner.

Even as a child, I knew our church was different from other churches I’d visited with my great-grandmother and other family and friends. At our church, there were men who had a feminine flare. Men had begun processing their hair instead of wearing an afro, but their hair had a different bounce to it. They carried clutch bags, twisted their hips when they walked, spoke in a higher octave than most men I encountered, their brows were arched, and fingernails manicured. Many of the women wore suits instead of dresses, Stacy Adams instead of heels, and their hair was shorter. They didn’t frost their hair like my mom and her sisters, but the women who sat with them wore the dresses, heels, carried a purse and donned make-up. Even the bug-eyed pastor had a twist to his walk and no wife.

Occasionally as a car drove pass the church, someone would yell from the car window, “Nothing but a bunch of punks and bulldaggers!” The church members would ignore the hecklers as much as they could, but at a low tone someone would say, “Talk all the shit you want, I bet you won’t get out that car and do something.”

I noticed a shift in the church members’ attire. It became more extravagant. Men began to wear flowing dresses, heels, puffy wigs and fully beaten faces of makeup to church. Drag queens, is what they were called. The head pastor didn’t allow this in the beginning, but whispers around the church said the drag queens made huge contributions to the church, causing the head pastor to become more lenient.

Sha’Van was the most popular queen that attended our church. She was even married with a son. On Sundays, I couldn’t help but stare at her defined jawbones, large feet, huge hands, lopsided hips and enormous bust. I told myself she placed grapefruits in her bra. The same way me and my friends would place toilet tissue down our shirts to give the illusion that we were fully developed.

My formative years always left me bewildered; from attending a nontraditional church, having a tumultuous relationship with my father to not understanding my Reverend-Mother’s lifestyle and the way we lived. It was a prosperous life, but questionable. People called her the “Voodoo lady.”

 

One Saturday morning, Reverend-Mother woke me up with a chocking smell of sage and her singing an old Negro Gospel.

“…Jesus, He’s on the mainline…tell Him what you want. I said, Jeeeesssuuusss, He’s on the mainline…tell Him what you want…” She had a strong singing voice and could also play the piano. Her skin was black as the midnight sky, her lips full, her physique plump, she was right under 5 feet tall and always wore black, cat framed eyeglasses.

I stood there looking at the back of her. “Why are you burning that and waking me up?” As if it was my house and I was letting her stay there.

She turned around with one eyebrow raised.

“…if you need more power…” Her singing tempo slowed down drastically before it finally stopped. “I’m chasing away the evil spirits. People leave behind troubles once they depart the house.”

Reverend-Mother was a faith healer and spiritual reader, people would come from near and far to get a word from her. She didn’t care what people called her, to her, she was doing the Lord’s work. She’d told me previously that silver money in bowls draws money to people. I’m not sure where she’d learned that. She was also raised by her grandparents. She told me that she’d join a different church every Sunday.

“Why did you join every church?” I asked.

She responded, “I don’t know. Nobody ever stopped me.”

After being a member there for several years, the church moved three blocks north into an old abandoned funeral home. It was all hands-on deck as church members, both young and old, removed dusty caskets, embalming room supplies, make-up, faded obituaries, heavy black and red velvet drapes and all sorts of other trash. There had to be at least 100 full trash bags when we were done.

Upon arrival to my home, Reverend-Mother had me and my cousin, Amp, who I called my brother, take our clothes off and get in the tub immediately. First me, then him. Anthony, my cousin/brother was a year older than me and had just come to live with us. He was my mom’s oldest nephew—her sister’s son.  I welcomed his company. He was protective of me and had the best sense of humor. I don’t know how it came about for him to live with us. I was in basement one day doing my laundry on a washboard, and when I looked up, he was standing over me smiling. “I live here now too.” I hugged him, and then he bent down and grabbed some clothes to scrub. “Go sit down, Lin, I’ll do it.” He rarely called me anything else besides Lin.

***

In 1982, things changed at home. Reverend-Mother was always in bed, she cooked less, but never missed church. On a regular basis, I’d come home and there would be someone in her Consultation Room, a room she had built on the back of our home where she did her healings and readings. It was a small replica of the church, minus the white aisle and folding chairs. Instead, there was a hideaway bed, a wooden desk and armchair. Those practices in the Consultation Room would come to an abrupt halt. A year later, she was gone. She went to the hospital and never returned. After eleven years, the beat of my heart changed. Growing up in an era, of “children should be seen and not heard,” family members opted to not tell me and Anthony she was dying of ovarian cancer. After her death, I went to live with my mom full-time; she’d left Reverend-Mother’s home five years prior to her death, but I opted to stay with my great-grandmother. Amp went back to live with his mother and five siblings.

My trinity was forever broken, and I struggled to breathe. Tina moved away three years before Reverend-Mother passed and I never knew what became of her, but hoped her dreams would come true as mine had begun to crumble.

***

In 1984, I noticed that quite a few of my fellow church members had begun to fall ill. They were losing weight, coughing, wearing sweaters in ninety-degree weather and the lymph nodes under the jawline would be severely swollen. Someone was always in the hospital. The organist, the choir director and some of the women that hung around them.

In 1986, we got a call in the middle of the night, it was grandmother, she informed us my Uncle Lockie had been hospitalized at Truman Medical Center. “It’s pretty bad,” I heard her say through the phone to my mother. “I’m gonna send ya daddy to pick ya up and brings ya here. I wants all my chirren here right na.”

“You want me to bring my daughter?”

“No granchirren, yet!” I heard fear in my grandmother’s voice. Her Louisiana accent was even heavier.

I fell asleep on the sofa waiting for Mama to return home. The next morning, I woke up to a silent home. The television was off, which was abnormal for a Saturday morning in our home and Mama wasn’t talking on the phone like she’d normally be. I thought maybe she was still at the hospital. I lifted myself from the grey and mauve colored sofa to use the bathroom. As I passed my mother’s bedroom, I saw her sitting on the side of her bed staring out of the window.

“Mom?” I called out to her.

When she turned around, I could see that she’d been crying. “Get dressed, we’re going to the hospital to see your uncle.”

One the way there, she explained to me that it would be disturbing to see my uncle and warned me not cry. As we walked into the hospital lobby, she reminded me of the importance of holding it together.

“I’m not a baby,” I responded to her. She had lectured me the entire time on the 27th Street bus.

“I didn’t say you were, smart ass! Just don’t start crying.”

I was befuddled, because clearly, she’d been crying, so why was she telling me not to cry?

When we arrived on the hospital floor where he was being kept, we had to go behind a double door, afterwards, we had to put on latex gloves, a paper hospital gown, and a mask. We were led to his room by a hospital staff dressed the same way. When we walked through the door, there was my young uncle looking frail, with tubes coming out of his body. He was coughing and covered up, yet, it was warm outside. His lips chapped, his eyes bloodshot red. I pulled my mask from my face in disbelief. I could feel my throat tighten up and my lips quiver.

My mother pinched my arm. “Got-damn-it, didn’t I tell your ass to control your emotions.”

My Uncle Lockie turned and looked at me and patted the bed for me to come to him. I removed everything the hospital staff had given me to wear.

I heard one of them, a woman, say, “You need to keep that on for your own protection!”

“No!” I threw it to the floor and laid in the bed next to my uncle.

He said, “Don’t cry. Have you not seen anyone sick?” It had been three years since Reverend-Mother had passed away.

“Not you!” I cried out as I laid my body down next to his. He was only twenty-three years old. I’d turned seventeen several months prior and was to graduate from high school the following year.

“I’ll be okay…stop crying.”

I didn’t ask him what was wrong with him. I was still feeling the children should be seen and not heard phase, but that evening I heard my mom on the phone with my dad.

“They say he has AIDS…I don’t know exactly where he got it…you know awhile back he went out to Los Angeles and had an affair with some Black choreographer. Our daughter got in the bed with him…hard-headed ass took the protection clothing off too.”

We didn’t need the protection, he did!

I was residing in Section 8 Housing and, from my window, I could nearly see the crack and AIDS epidemic eating my community alive, one person at a time. Trying to pinpoint how my uncle got infected never entered my mind. I still had that chameleon way about me and would overhear my uncle and his friends talk about people going to the “mall,” a place where men would randomly go to have sexual encounters with other men. This mall was located at Liberty Memorial Park, where the soldiers of World War I are commemorated.

I would skip school and sit at the hospital with him. Phlegm would suddenly come up and he’d ask me to get some napkins for him to rid himself of it. He had pneumonia again. I’d hold the napkin to his mouth and, if he was too weak, I’d put on a glove, and scoop it from his mouth with the napkin.

“You should be in school,” he’d say.

“I’m here. Plenty of schools, only one of you.” I wouldn’t look at him. I’d cry.

“Go to school for me. Please. I want to go to a graduation. Your graduation.”

I limited my truancy, to grant him his wish. I didn’t care about school or graduation. My grades dropped tremendously after Reverend-Mother passed away, but it still came easy to me. When I was there, I was successful at it.

A couple of family members placed blame on Reverend-Mother for his illness. They believed she exposed him to the homosexual lifestyle by becoming pastor of that church and encouraging her entire family to attend. Reverend-Mother firmly believed that homosexuals are God’s children too, his forgotten and thrown-away children. They needed a safe place to serve God, despite people telling them God hated them, and she needed a place to preach the Word of God as a woman, even though people were telling her she was out of line.

“I know one of those sissies down there turned him out.” A few family members would say as we sat outside of Uncle Lockie’s hospital room. It didn’t help matters any that Amp came out as gay after Reverend-Mother passed away, as well as two other male cousins. Amp stood in the kitchen of where we both once lived, getting ready for its new occupants.

“Lin…I got something to tell you. I’m gay.” All in one breath.

I placed my hands on my hips and dropped my chin to my chest.

“You know?” he asked, as he smiled and laughed.

“I saw you singing and dancing in my leotard, pretending to be a show girl.” I exited the kitchen, and we never discussed it again. Before he came to live with us, I knew bad things had happened to him by adult men. All the children in the family knew, but we were to be seen and not heard. Plus, Amp always wore this powder blue shirt with bright yellow bananas on it and powder blue shorts to match. The obvious never needs explanation.

***

Uncle Lockie was never what one would consider the” traditional type of boy.” He liked to design clothes, do hair and makeup, and sew. He had a girlfriend, even got her pregnant when he was fourteen years old, but all the taunting and threats by people in their neighborhood caused her and her family to disappear with his baby girl and they were never seen again. I often wondered what his life would have been like if people had stopped mocking and started supporting them.

Uncle Lockie made many trips to the hospital and each time he was there, I was there. One afternoon, he was scheduled for a bone marrow. I went with him and was told to wait outside the door. I heard my uncle let out a bone chilling scream and I busted through the door and instantly regretted it. My uncle was on his stomach and his buttocks was exposed. I quickly exited the room without saying a word.

On the way back to the room, he was being pushed in a wheelchair and no one was required to suit up any longer. I felt him looking up at me and I looked down at him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “I saw your booty.”

Uncle Lockie, a male nurse, and his physician busted out laughing.

Ain’t shit funny! I yelled in my head.

When we arrived at his room, he looked at me and said, “I want to go home.”

“You want me to call us a taxi?”

He laughed again. They brought his lunch moments later. “No, I want you to eat this. All of it.”

I lifted the lid, underneath it was two giant pieces of fried chicken, a breast and a leg, mash potatoes and white gravy, green beans, a dinner roll and on the side a chunk of chocolate cake and a cup of vanilla ice cream. He didn’t have to ask me twice.

As I ate and watched General Hospital, I looked over at Uncle Lockie and he was crying. I’d never seen him cry, not even when Reverend-Mother passed away. I stopped eating. He noticed it. Please keep eating. All of it.

When the nurse arrived, she looked at his tray and said, “Boy, you sure had an appetite today.” Then glanced over at me. Two days later he was back home with my grandmother. He had never moved out from his mother.

 

The following year, I graduated from high school, and Uncle Lockie was at every graduation event. The Saturday cookout with the family and friends, the Sunday Baccalaureate, and the graduation ceremony that following Tuesday, as well as the graduation dinner that Tuesday night. He never stopped smiling. He thanked me for graduating and letting him witness it. A week later he was hospitalized again. My mom had two other brothers, but he was the only one that showed up. Even one of her two sisters didn’t attend. I was perfectly fine with their choices, the one who desired to come was there.

The 1980s rolled out along with the Jheri curl phase, and my uncle was still hanging on. He didn’t drink much, never smoked, and jogged ten miles every morning before falling ill. This gave him longevity, according to the doctors.

By that time, people began to wear red AIDS ribbons on their lapels, collars, cuffs, pant legs, etc. The ribbons were either pinned, painted or tattooed on people. I learned that the ribbon symbolized support for people living with AIDS. The feeling of isolation and clandestine began to decimate as movies such as Philadelphia and And the Band Played On were being released. Award shows with A-list celebrities were coming to the stage donning their red ribbons. When the press released the story of Arthur Ashe and Gia Carangi succumbing to AIDS, the stigma of it being a gay man’s disease was lifted. The world watched as movies stars paid homage to Rock Hudson and witnessed Magic Johnson play with HIV, and how players reacted to his blood injury on the court.

I was in college at that time. He laughed at me once and said, “You hated high school so much, now, you’re going to college!” I didn’t know how to manage crisis and struggled with depression, thus, expanding my time to get my degree.

I rushed out and bought me a red ribbon pendant and stuck it to my clothes. I never missed a day wearing it, even when employers threatened to terminate my employment for wearing it. My motto was: “I was looking for a job when I got this one!” I went to my first AIDS walk in Kansas City and there were a multitude of red ribbons worn by various communities of people.

 

I convinced my two college roommates, Angie and Dani, we should get tested for HIV and make an afternoon of it, with testing, then lunch and shopping. They were Caucasian girls from small farm towns, but exclusively dated Black men, only had Black friends, and pledged Black sororities. I was far from promiscuous but knew you didn’t have to be. We decided to go into the examination room together. An older nurse with silver hair and beady eyes asked us a series of questions. “Have you had sex in the last 24 hours? How many sexual partners have you had? Have you ever had group sex? Have you shared a needle with anyone?” Angie and I answered, no to most of the questions. Then it was Dani’s turn. She answered yes to many of the questions. Angie and I muffled our laughs as we noticed the nurse turning red in the face. The nurse finally stopped asking questions and said to Dani, “You must be a whole lot of fun.” We couldn’t hold our laughs in any longer. We let out roaring laughter as Dani rolled her eyes at us.

A week later, three negative tests had returned.

***

During the winter of 1992, I was home with the flu. I called my uncle and complained about the bitter cold winds and snow. He said, “You know, I’m enjoying seeing the snowfall, hearing cars get stuck in the snow and the wheels turning, watching kids have snowball fights. I love this.” I never excessively complained about the elements again. He found joy in his darkness. Dentists had refused to treat his sore gums due to his condition; people saw the disfiguration of his face and knew he had been infected. His lymph nodes were the size of two golf balls joined together. People didn’t want to stand too close to him in the grocery store. Somehow, he never complained or pitied himself.

Eight months later he was gone. He died two weeks after his 30th birthday. The cries from my family were blood curdling, his funeral was held at one of the biggest churches in the city and people from miles around came to the funeral. He’d left the church we grew-up in right before his diagnosis. He joined the church two doors down from the old storefront church. It was the church of his childhood friend, whose father was the pastor. That was who preached his funeral. Uncle Lockie said he’d had enough of that church, this following Sunday a woman looked at me a beat too long during service. He left and took me with him.

He planned his funeral a year in advance and asked that all the women wore big hats, keeping up with his sense of style. I watched his lifeless body in the casket as his favorite local gospel singer sung “Walk Around Heaven.” Even in his death, he was still the best dressed man in the room. His suit was a dark navy color, his necktie a deep red, laying flat on a crisp white shirt. As we walked around to view the body of my Uncle Lockie, his godchildren dropped stuffed animals in his casket and I dropped a strip of pictures of myself that I’d taken inside a picture booth at a shopping center. I touched his face, for reality, he was gone. My dad’s mother saw me and made me go wash my hands immediately. She told me it wasn’t healthy to have the embalming fluid left on my hand.

As I washed my hands, I imagined that when his body was placed on the table, the morticians not only drained his infected blood from him, they drained the fear, abandonment, sadness, ostracism and skepticism. I sat next to my dad, he was on call that weekend, but traded with another doctor to attend. He said he’d known my uncle since he was a baby. He and his mother, my grandmother marched in with the family.

He’d found love before he died. A mild-mannered older gentleman. My uncle had kept him hidden from the family until he needed to be rushed to the hospital. The family thought his new love would vanish due to the illness; he proved them wrong. He sat and wept quietly at the funeral, sitting in the back.

As we lined up in the church to leave the funeral and head to the cemetery, my mother fainted, falling forward. She was behind me and my cousin, Trenise. As my mom fell, she almost took Trenise down with her, prompting me to quickly let go of Trenise’s hand. Trenise yelled out, “You motherfu—” then most likely remembered she was in church as she regained her balance. I stood there laughing at the entire scene. My mom’s sister, Trenise and Amp’s mother tried to help her up, along with a few men in the family, and then said, “Come on, get up, Sister, I can’t be down any further, I ain’t got no drawls on!” My laughter caused my sides and stomach to hurt.

We rode to the cemetery in three different family cars. The first for parents and siblings, the second for grandchildren, and the third for his cousins and friends. It’s how Uncle Lockie wanted it. Amp and his lover, Terrance, sat in the last seat of the family car. Amp wept as Terrance consoled him. Terrance drove from Iowa to attend the funeral.

As the cemetery staff began to lower Uncle Lockie into the ground, a handful of us heard the older gentleman say, “What am I going to do now?” He was so quiet, we’d forgotten he was there. He left the cemetery alone and we never saw him again.

My two grandmothers never left each other’s side during the repast. I walked pass them and heard the story being told of my uncle having a daughter, but no one could locate her. I saw the strength of my grandmother the day she buried her son. She never shed a tear, though my grandfather did. Every night my uncle slept in the hospital, and so did my grandmother, only leaving to go home and freshen up during the day. My mom told me, the day before the wake, they went to the funeral home to view his body for release, and as she walked in, my grandmother yelled, “Oh, there’s my baby.”

Two years later, on the day I graduated from college, my cousin, Amp, took his last breath at Trinity Hospital, ironically in the same hospital Uncle Lockie took his. He held on just long enough for me to come home and say, “I finally finished college.”

No longer seen or heard, but forever felt…

 

************

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Lindale Banks

Lindale Banks is a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, born and raised there. She graduated from Hunter College's MFA program, studying under Kathryn Harrison and Alexandra Styron. She lived several years in Europe, because of the Harlem Renaissance Writers, wanting to feel what they felt living abroad as a person of color. She went to Paris to connect with James Baldwin's vibe.