Mama's Mysteries

What I remember always having known about Mother was her name and vital statistics. Geraldine Elizabeth Dubisson Lee.  Born August 25, 1917, in Butler Pennsylvania. Hometown, Little Rock, Arkansas. Daughter of Daniel Joy and Clara (Stacker) Dubisson (Doo' bis son).

Mama was the only child of well-to-do parents, both of whom were dead and gone before I came on the scene. In fact, her mother Clara died when Mama was just 12 years old. Not long afterwards, her dad remarried to Lula Sue Williams, who was always referred to as simply "Miss Lula". Aside from Grandpa's twin sister, Aunt Mary Lou, and their brother Uncle Elmo in Memphis, and a couple of other aunts and cousins, all we knew of the Dubissons were the few stories Mama told us about them and the yellowed pictures she kept in albums at home in the midwest. In 1952, while Mom was pregnant with my second brother and living in Illinois, her father died in Little Rock. He had outlived both Miss Lula and Uncle Elmo, and Aunt Mary Lou died a year or two later. Mama often said that she cried so much after her father died,  she thought that it caused my brother Harold to be a "colicky"  baby. According to mom, he wailed so much and so loudly that my dad once threatened (facetiously) to throw him out of the window. Our dad, a doctor, was ever the perfect gentleman, so my brother must have been a real screamer for my dad to have made that kind of remark, even in jest.

As far back as I can remember, the only living relatives I ever knew of on Mother's side were her Aunt Thelma Burke--Miss Lula's sister in Forrest City, Arkansas--and a cousin, VanNess McHenry, who worked at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. I remember visiting them both maybe once. By the time I was in my teens both of them had died. I gathered from some hushed remarks that at one time, while Miss Lula was still alive, Mother and Aunt Thelma been close, but at some point they had become estranged. But children didn't need to know about these things...

The Downtown Motor Inn, Little Rock

Going to Little Rock to visit was kind of a drag. There were no cousins to play with, or no family gatherings to attend. In fact, the only reason we still went to Little Rock yearly was that Mama continued to own her father's funeral home, Dubisson Company, which was still going strong after his death, and  she still owned the house she had grown up in and a few other pieces of real estate there. The houses were rented out, so whenever we went down, we had to stay in a motel. Public accommodation for black folks in the segregated south wasn't so great back then, but I do remember by the mid-60s we usually stayed in the Downtown Motor Inn which we thought was cool because it was, well, downtown, and clean, and the rooms had balconies, if you could call them that. It was fun, in a creepy sort of way, to go with Mama to the funeral home. If they were set up for a viewing, the three of us kids would sit in the chapel and look at the dead bodies, all dressed up in their Sunday best, one final time. It always seemed to me that if you stared at them long enough, you could see an eyelid flutter or the chest move ever so slightly. As soon as that happened, we were ready to be gone!

Mama and baby Harold, 1953

Back at home in Illinois, two mysteries dogged me throughout my otherwise Ozzie and Harriet (on-the-black-hand-side) style childhood. First, why had my mother been born in Pennsylvania, when her folks lived in Arkansas? Second, why on earth would she name me, her only daughter at that time, Edith--an old-fogeyish name that I hated? Whenever I questioned her about it, she'd always answer the second question by telling me I was named after her Aunt Edith. What Aunt Edith, I wondered. No one had ever talked about an Aunt Edith, and there were no pictures of her around the house. Mother would put me off with a vague answer, and then quickly change the subject. I knew by the look on her face, there was no use pursuing it any further. As for the first question, her answer was always the same: "One day, I'll explain." After getting that answer, time after time, I finally quit asking. But I still wondered. And I felt sorry for her that she, unlike my dad, had no family left. Whenever I expressed my sadness about it, she'd smile tenderly and look at me with that sweet look she had, stroke my hair or give me a hug and say, "Of course I have a family--you kids and your dad are my family, and that's all I need." And so it was.

Copyright 2012 E.L.Harris, all rights reserved, exclusive of tombstone photo.