A Charmed life.


Growing up in the Roaring 20s in Little Rock, Mama led a life of ease privilege.Nowadays I guess she would ahbe been considered a BAP. He father , Daniel Joy Dubisson was the main black 'undertaker in LittleRock. According to mama Gandpa Dubisson had left his home town  Hard Scrabble, Tennessee, at very young age. How he ended up in Little Rock is anyones guess. but it was  a good city for a young black man who was enterpfising and willing to work hard could do well.Althought he had only finished the third grade,he had what folks called drive and  a head for business. He tried several businesses, including bartending and finally wound up as an apprentice of a Jewish mortician, Mr...  aAccording to Mma her father and mu.. had gotten along so well,that Mr. Helllllllllped Dniel set up his own business. they had

When mama was a small child the family lied in samllwell keptpt frame house, by the time she was bout 10, the family thd moved into a large 2 story brick  house at the coronerof 15 anad Ringo Streets. A two sotry brick Prairie style house, , it was on eof the finest homes in the black neighborhood of Little rock. Biuilt by dr. Ish in ...    .My mother lived there with her father and step mother until my dad came ack from the se\\war amd t hey moved to st louis. 

I'm still amazed that duing the Great depression ,my mother's folks continued to live well. I guess death is one business that never slows down. Folks would spend whatever they had to make sure their relatives were "put away right",,  Grandpa either didhnt drive or didnt drie well so one of the men wo worke ant the funeral home had to drive him arouroud t own in on to fhteir fleet cars.  when he bout a new Model A ford, One of the men drove the familyout to Callifornia and b ack. . there begana life time love.Mom loved California and always wanted to live there .for the rest of her life. She wanted to got to Berkely College, but herparents woulldnt hear rof therir only child going so far away. She'd graduated at 16 but had been accepted at berkely and Howard.  Berkekly ws out of the question ,and  sheAfter conferrig with a friend wh lived in Washing ton DC , who refreerd to it a sodom and Gamorrah, Howard got the kibosh. Mother went to Phialnder Smith College just up th estreet from her house. Finally when she was 18 she left for Talladega, where she ended up majoring in hisotry. Just about every summer, the mom and her mothe Cara would go north to  Chicago Michiganc and vacation there. She always spoke fondly of  the time she ahn d hr mother spent in detroit wtih oneof he mothers reinds who lived there and ad a daughter aboutmamas age fonly remembered going to Belle Isle  Shhe told wonderful stories about that  house. One of myfavorites was the at Someone had palanted a shryb called a night blooming Sirius in  hte yard,, adn dhtat  I t only bloomed once every . According to mama when that bush bloomed, it was so beautiful and rare that p there was a steady stream of gawkers dribing pas her house to see the flower.The gotherthin g was that sincee black folks culdnt sty in hotels when celebrities of the day came to town they stayed in private houses. Mother told me that marian Anderson sty at her house when she acame to do a concert in LR.  Admidast a;; apr tje good things, there were tow sad thienesses, that Mama expressed to me. Fist that she's always been lonely, sinc tshe had no seblings,a nd Not mnay playmates. haer  parents life was a whirl of social aactivites and business, so se was often in the companly of adults.
When she got married on Dhristmas day of 1941, she thought no one would come to At Big Bethel to that Whristumas in 1941 to sned off their princess.

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.

taking the leap 

And so it begins. I've thought about doing this so many times. I can't even begin to say why its taken me so long. But here I am, finally ready to try to begin the tale. This is the story of my mama's incredible family tree and how I came to dig it up, without  even being aware of what I was doing. Its the story of three families: the one she was born to, the one that raised her, and, last but not least, the family she made.

Who can say where the beginning is? Certainly not I. So I'll just pick a spot, and  start with what I've known longest and best--the family she made. That's Mama, above, with her last 2 grandchildren, Nina and Miles, a/k/a The Twins, when they were brand new. They've been driving for almost a year now. She's been gone 5 years now, just last month. I'm pretty sure that their dad (my older brother) has told them some of this, but they have no idea about the whole thing. Of course, neither do I--it's still taking shape, even as I write this. Hopefully, someday, they'll pick it up wherever I end up leaving it off. So I'll dedicate this blog and her story to them, and her four other grand kids--Edwin, Chris, Drew, and Alex.♥