Month: January 2022

“What am I doing here?” I thought as the train carried us from Krakow to Auschwitz.

The Holocaust has been a painful thing for me since I was a young child.  Probably because I grew up in a community surrounded by Holocaust survivors, it was very real to me.  It was seared into me by experiences such as witnessing a classmate cry and scream hysterically when our fifth grade student teacher, at a loss of what to do with us next, offered to teach us some German.  “The Germans burned my grandparents!  They burned my grandparents!” she wailed at the flabbergasted young woman, until the principal came and led her away. 

My friend’s father was our veterinarian and when we took our pets to him, I always wanted to ask about the green numbers tattooed on his arm, but my parents told me not to mention them. My “Aunt” Sophie with the thick eastern European accent, who claimed to be my Jewish grandmother, also had a csimilar tattoo. So did Al and his brother Harry, who owned the newspaper stand where we bought our papers after church.  Quite a few of family friends did, but we never talked about it.

I knew there was something sad and sinister about those tattoos, but didn’t know what.  And then I read the Diary of Anne Frank and found out. And it hurt.

Thereafter, references to the Holocaust were difficult for me to confront. While I managed to watch “Judgment at Nuremberg” I couldn’t bear to watch Schindler’s List or Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or Life is Beautiful, nor could I muster up the courage to visit the Holocaust Museum (I was able to get through the Children’s section).  Too painful.

So what in the world was I doing at Auschwitz?

I was in Poland, advancing a trip for First Lady Hillary Clinton. Among other things, we spent several days at a school for Jewish children, many of whose grandparents had been hidden by gentiles and whose families were now reconnecting with their religion, culture and heritage.

On a free day, I reluctantly agreed to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps with two of my colleagues.  I really didn’t want to go, knowing my visceral reaction to the Holocaust, but I also knew I’d probably later regret not going, so there I was.

It was as awful as I’d feared. We heard the gruesome stories, looked through the glass windows at the bundles of hair, glasses and suitcases that told the story of people who believed they were simply being relocated, having no idea they were being sent to their doom.

We stood at the ovens and walked through the barracks where so many doomed souls tried to survive. 

As we looked over the field where the crematory killing factory had been (partially destroyed by the cowering Nazis before they ran away from their crimes), I saw something I wasn’t expecting.

Flowers.  Tiny wildflowers peeked through the grass.

And the sun. It was shining, the same sun that had shone on the inmates decades before.  Until then, all of my exposure to the Holocaust had been through photos and film – and only in grainy shades of black and white and grey. But here, even in this dark place, there was color and light.

Did the concentration camp inmates see these flowers and feel the sun’s warmth? Did the light sustain them or offer them any comfort or hope of survival. Were they able to grasp even tiny nuggets of life in the center of this horror?  

As I pondered this, I suddenly felt an incongruous wave of, not quite joy or euphoria, but something very uplifting and empowering and I found myself saying under my breath “You motherf*ckers didn’t win!” (sorry for the language, but that’s exactly what I said).

Yes. The Nazis killed a lot of people and caused unspeakable suffering. But in the end, they didn’t win. Their mission was not to just cause pain and suffering but to destroy a people. And in that, they failed. 

And they failed despite embodying the worst kind and degree of evil humanity can muster, coupled with and magnified by the most massive force and power theretofore unseen on this earth. 

But even with all of that, They. Did. Not. Win! 

Evil did not prevail.  Jews suffered, died, and were forever changed.  But the Jewish people survived and thrived. That most vicious, powerful evil empire could not stamp out a people, despite the almost unimaginable disparity in power.

I thought back to those little children at the Jewish school a world away in Krakow and smiled at the thought of how their very existence defies everything the Nazis fought so hard to accomplish. They are still here! They survived and they thrived, while the people who did this to them are on the trash heap of history.

We often ask why God lets this kind of evil exist in the world. But that day at Auschwitz, I felt I’d found, at least in part, an answer. Maybe it’s for us to learn that, although evil may exist, it doesn’t have to prevail. In the end, cruelty cannot snuff out the human spirit and, in the end, decency and goodness are far more powerful than hate.

And I had the answer to “Why am I here?”

For me, that was it. That was the lesson.

He told them NO.

One of the great blessings of my life has been that from moment I took my first breath until the second he took his last, my father loved me completely and unconditionally – and I knew it.

But it wasn’t until after he died that the depth and profundity of that love has fully begun to dawn on me. It was only recently that I came to realize how all that love was embodied in one word he said early in my life: NO.

Daddy was always my hero. He was also always old. Always. He was like the train pulling my caboose – no matter where we were on the track of life, he was always 33 years ahead of me. Therefore, he was always old,, regardless his actual age. When he was 36 and I was three, he was old. When he turned 40 and I was 7, he was old (actually ancient – I was sure old age would take him out at any moment after he hit that milestone). When he was 80 and I was 47, he was old. When he was 93 and I was 60, he was old.  He was just always old.

But after he died, that train unhitched and switched to another track. And while it stayed nearby and kept moving, it was no longer always and forever 33 years ahead of me.  His age and persona began to travel back and forth, with his age no longer attached to mine.  Where he was in relation to me depended only on what memory I had of him in the moment. Sometimes he’s older than I am, sometimes we’re the same age, and often he is younger, much younger.

This is most obvious when I look at photos of Daddy at different stages in his life. And looking at photographs of Daddy as a young, single father, I came to a startling realization.

From the time I could remember, I knew the story of how, after my mother’s death at her own hand, her parents and twin sister begged him to leave me with them to raise.

And I knew that despite their entreaties, he brought me back to Youngstown, Ohio where, with the help of his mother and sister, he raised me as a single father until he remarried five years later. I was happy and loved and well-cared for, surrounded by my attentive paternal and maternal grandparents, step-grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and delighting in my special relationship with “my Daddy” as I usually referred to him to the annoyance of my cousins.

I knew it was a wonderful thing that he insisted on keeping me, despite their entreaties, when it might have been easier to turn over the responsibility to them. After all, in those days, it just wasn’t all that common for men to raise babies and no one would have thought ill of him if he’d left me in the care of his late wife’s family. I knew it wasn’t an easy choice, so I always appreciated and loved him for making it.

But looking at photos of him then has bounced me back into another time and place and made me see him in a new light.

When I look at these old photos, I don’t see Judge Jones or the general counsel of the NAACP or the erudite, wise father I knew as an adult.

Now I see a young man, who was born into poverty. A young man who, as a child, had few hopes of going beyond the Youngstown steel mills.

I see a young man who, as a teenager, idolized W.E.B. DuBois, never thinking that one day, he would marry the great man’s niece.

I see a young man who, as a 19-year-old Army private, sat in the balcony of Abyssinian Baptist Church listening to Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. preach, never conceiving that 15 years later, he would become a cherished member of the family of the man who hired Rev. Powell’s father to succeed him as the legendary church’s pastor.

I see a young man, the grandson of slaves, the first in his family to attend college, who had married into a family already into its fourth generation of college graduates. 

I see a young man who was nothing like the light brown scions of other affluent Black bourgeoisie families who vied to marry my mother (and her family) only to have her choose Daddy instead.

And it occurred to me how overwhelmed and insecure he must have felt in the midst of this family, a stranger who had married their daughter and then whisked her off to a faraway land called Ohio.

Within a year she was back in Los Angeles, with a newborn baby and crippling postpartum depression that no one knew quite what to do about, so they thought it best for her to return to be nursed by her family for a time, and return to Youngstown when she’d recovered.

Only she didn’t recover and she never returned. Instead, within weeks of her arrival, the darkness overtook her and when she couldn’t find her way back, she swallowed the pills and slipped away.

After the funeral and my christening the following day, my father prepared to return to Youngstown with me. But my mother’s family had another plan.

“Nate, dear. You can’t possibly raise a baby alone. You need to move on with your life. Please leave Steffie here with us,” my grandmother beseeched him – over and over and over, backed by my grandfather and my mother’s identical twin who believed with all her heart that she should raise her sister’s baby as her own.

And my father – not Judge Jones, but a 33-year-old man whose life had just fallen apart and who was surely swimming in grief and guilt and uncertainty – summoned the courage to look them all in the eye and tell them “No.”

He said NO. To the Grahams.

How was this young widower able to stand up to his late wife’s family like this?  Did he wonder if he was doing the right thing? What gave him the strength to defy them? How difficult was it for him not to just give in, put me in their arms, and run back to Youngstown alone, unencumbered by this strange little creature he barely knew?

I can think of only two things that gave him the ability: Courage and Love.

It turns out that Daddy was a badass who had the courage to push back against an elite and united family. And he loved me enough to fight for me. That love was strong and boundless and secure enough to do all this without bitterness or rancor, but to instead embrace my mother’s family and allow them to always be a part of my and his life. And to their credit, Nonnie and Pop Pop loved Daddy and me enough to let us get on that plane and fly away from them. But we never really left and, over the years, their love and admiration for Daddy grew and enriched us both.

Even after Daddy remarried twice, their bond with their son-in-law remained unbroken (to the consternation of my stepmothers, neither of whom was thrilled about having to explain to friends that these people who introduced themselves as her husband’s in-laws weren’t actually her parents).

Nonnie once told me that when they attended my college graduation, she saw Daddy watching me with tears streaming down his face. She put her arm around him and he turned to her and said, “Look at our little girl, Mother. We did it.”

When I later told Daddy what Nonnie had said, he scoffed and said, “Oh, your grandmother’s telling you a tale.” Which was Daddyspeak for “That’s exactly what happened but I’m not going to admit it.”

My grandfather told me more than once that, immediately upon meeting him, he knew Daddy was an exceptional young man who was more than worthy of his daughter. And that as disappointed as the family was that he took me with him, he also knew that his baby granddaughter would be just fine in this good man’s care.

As usual, Pop Pop was right.

When Daddy died two years ago today, he was mourned by presidents, friends, neighbors, colleagues and people he never even met. But perhaps more telling, he was also mourned by my late mother’s siblings and nieces and nephews, some of whom dropped everything and rushed across the country to say goodbye to their beloved Uncle Nate.

And of course, my sweet, courageous, remarkable father always was and always will be cherished and loved and appreciated by this baby girl he fought for in his darkest days and then never ever let go.

Happy Founders Day to the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi, from the daughter and granddaughter of proud Kappa men.

My grandfather Lorenz Graham was a founding member of the Kappa Alpha Psi UCLA chapter where he pledged in 1924. Pop Pop loved to point out that every Kappa pledge at UCLA must know his name as a charter member before they can cross over.

The Good Judge pledged Kappa in 1949 at Youngstown State University and remained a true and loyal Kappa Man for the next 70 years. Being a Kappa was one of the great joys of Daddy’s life and receiving the Laurel Wreath, the Kappa’s highest honor, meant everything to him.

Their membership in the Kappas intertwined with and enriched my grandfather’s and father’s lives in countless ways and, to a considerable degree, helped to shape and define the remarkable men they became.

The paths of these two Kappa men crossed and then forever merged when, on a trip to Los Angeles to attend the 1957 Kappa Conclave, Daddy’s blind date was Jean Graham, Lorenz’s daughter.

When Jean told her father about her new beau, Pop-Pop was unimpressed. “A lawyer? Meh. Colored lawyers don’t make any money.”

But when she told him Daddy was also a Kappa, Pop-Pop changed his mind.

“The only reason I let Jeanie marry your father was that he was a Kappa man, so I knew he was worthy of her” he teased. Daddy corroborated the story, often reminding me that I owed my very existence to the Kappas.

Throughout the next decades, Daddy took enormous pleasure in being a Kappa, insisting that Kappa Alpha Psi was the only true fraternity – that the other Greek organizations were really just “clubs for young men who wish they could be Kappas but couldn’t make the grade.”

And whenever anyone made the grievous error of assuming he was any other Greek, he’d scoff and correct them: “No, I’m a FRATERNITY MAN.”

Occasionally, when he was feeling extra Kappa-ish, he was known to belt out Kappa songs at the dinner table.

“Oh, you must be a Kappa Alpha Psi, if you want to go to heaven when you die!” he’d warble as we all rolled our eyes.

When Daddy died two years ago this month, the local Kappa chapter asked to conduct a Chapter Invisible Ceremony at his visitation and, of course, I agreed.

I expected a short and sweet tribute from a few of the brothers from the local chapter, so I was flabbergasted as I watched them enter the church, stream down the aisle and gather around Daddy’s casket. They just kept coming. More and more and more. Young and old. I thought the procession would never stop. When they finally were in place, the entire front of the church was a sea of Kappa red jackets.

As the brothers sang and said the prayers that are part of the Kappa sunset ceremony, I was moved beyond words and expectation. I felt such peace and comfort in this heart-wrenchingly perfect moment because I knew how much my Daddy loved being a Kappa and this loving farewell from his Kappa brothers was exactly the sendoff he would have wanted.

Daddy often said he’d be a Kappa Man until the day he died. But that wasn’t quite true. He’ll be a Kappa Man for eternity.

So I wish a Happy Founders Day to the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi, in memory of my father and grandfather. and thank you for being such an important part of my family’s life.

• 

• 

Dear Betty –

I wish I had written this note to you when you were walking around on earth, even if I wasn’t sure you’d ever see it. But now that you know the secret, I’m pretty confident you can also see/hear this story …

When I was little, my parents had no idea how to deal with my thick, naturally coarse hair, so my mother sent me to the neighborhood beauty parlor every two weeks and let B.J. handle it.

In those days, beauticians didn’t often style little girls’ hair, so I got the same treatment the adult women got: a scalp-searing permanent relaxer, followed by a brush roller set with curlers that cut further into that already-seared scalp, eight or nine hours under a 500 degree hair dryer (my tiny frame propped up on phone books so my whole head could fit into the head furnace while I read racy gossip and true crime magazines never available at home), topped off by a lot of teasing with a rat tail comb and a gag-inducing dousing of lacquer hair spray to achieve a shiny and glorious bouffant.

On my first visit, when B.J. turned my chair around to face the mirror for the great reveal (which wasn’t much of a reveal since he pretty much only did one hairstyle on all his customers), I carefully perused my reflection and proclaimed, “I look like Betty White!”

I didn’t understand why everyone in the shop, including B.J. and my mother, practically fell on the floor laughing since the reflection staring back at me DID look just like you, only smaller and browner.

And I was delighted!

Thereafter, whenever B.J. asked “what are we doing today?” Mommy responded “Her Betty White hairdo, of course.”

I’m pretty sure you would have thought it was a hoot that, back in the day, a 6-year-old Black girl was walking around Youngstown Ohio, as big as you please, proudly sporting your coif.

It never occurred to me to tell you this story, but now that I have, I hope it makes you smile or even gives you a chuckle.

And if it does, think of it as a heartfelt thank you for all of the smiles and laughs and joy you gave to the world, from the little girl with the Betty White hairdo.