Читать книгу A Life Constructed - Delon Hampton - Страница 9

MY EARLIEST memory is sitting on a footlocker in front of a window in the living room of our third floor apartment at 3853 South Langley Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, watching for Kat to come home from work.

Kat was the youngest of my two sisters, both of whom were teenagers when I was born. She and I were closer in years if nothing else, and her arrival home from work was a daily marker in my youngest years. Unfortunately, before I was old enough to know her better, Kat was gone. One of my last recollections of her was during her wedding, at a simple ceremony held in our family’s apartment in Chicago with only a few family members present. She idolized her husband, Chat, and Kat and Chat were deeply in love. Tragically, their love affair ended shortly after their marriage, when Kat died from tuberculosis. Chat subsequently slipped into alcoholism, which would ultimately help kill him shortly after the death of the wife he loved so much.

Vera was the older of the two sisters and left home when I was only about five years old. As a result I don’t remember much about growing up with her either, though I also remember her wedding, which—in contrast to Kat’s—was a huge affair at the Blackwell AME Zion Church. To this day it puzzles me how she and my parents could have afforded such a ceremony. Maybe it was because she was the first to get married. As the ring bearer at the wedding, I wore the fanciest outfit I had ever worn at the time: a black and white suit made from velvet, complete with a pair of short pants.

With Vera and Kat gone from our home, my world revolved around the woman I called my mother: Elizabeth Lewis Hampton. I never knew until I was much older just how hard life had been for her, but now that I do, I value and respect all she did for me even more.

The man I called my father, Uless Hampton, worked at the Tuthill Co., which literally helped build the city of Chicago beginning in the late 1800s when it started making bricks, and then later pumps, meters, and other equipment for the construction industry. I never had a serious conversation about anything with Uless, and never had much of a relationship with him either. The only thing I really learned from him was the desire and importance of reading and learning—and that came only after my mother had kicked him out of the house. When Uless departed, he left behind a small but significantly rich library of classics that I devoured, including books by Shakespeare, Churchill, and Plato. And when those books were done, I found myself becoming an avid visitor to our neighborhood library in search of more. How a man who worked in a pump factory and who never finished the eighth grade could become so attracted to such literature is both amazing and inspirational, and it fostered in me an interest in literature and arts that continues to this day. I saw Uless only twice after he and my mother divorced and he left our home: once after Vera convinced him he should give me some money I needed for school, and once when I was attending the University of Illinois and he came with other members of my family for a visit.

I recall meeting only three members of my father’s family. Uncle Jack Hampton and his wife, Aunt Ann, lived in Kansas City, Missouri. I always looked forward to their visits, because they always brought me a gift. Uncle Charles Hampton operated a truck vending business from which he sold produce on Chicago’s South Side. When I was a teenager I briefly worked for him. I remember that the work was hard and the pay was low.

While Uless was steeped in the classics, my mother was a simple woman. Her search for a better life had led her to the big city of Chicago with little more than her small-town Texas sensibilities and her unwavering faith in God. She worked at various times as an elevator operator and as a maid in downtown Chicago hotels. To make ends meet, she also cleaned houses, worked as a maid for wealthy Chicago families, and would occasionally rent out the spare rooms in our apartment.

Elizabeth Hampton’s love life was just as tough as her work life. She was not very good at choosing mates. After Uless moved out, she became involved with a man who rented a room in our apartment. She and David Mixon eventually dated and got married, but his addition to our family was anything but blissful. Dave was an alcoholic who lost his job shortly after he married my mother. From that point on he lived solely off her meager earnings. He and I never got along and clashed frequently, coming close to exchanging blows on more than one occasion. I had no respect for him, and he had no respect for me. As a result, we coexisted in a state of armed neutrality, refereed by my mother.

Yet any love lost on Dave Mixon made the love between my mother and me even stronger. Despite being poor and black and living day-to-day on the South Side of Chicago, she somehow always found a way to make sure we had a good place to live, clothes to wear, and food on the table.

She could not afford health insurance, so the only medical attention I received before going to college (besides the standard preventative vaccinations in primary school) was one visit to a dentist. Instead, my mother would rely on homemade remedies she had learned in her country days in Texas to cure my many illnesses, ranging from jaundice to double pneumonia.

Once, when I had the croup, she took to the streets of inner-city Chicago to find a chicken—not just any chicken, but specifically a black chicken—that she killed and boiled. She rendered the bird’s fat to make a foul-smelling salve that she rubbed on my chest and then covered me with a heated towel. She used the broth from the chicken as a soup to feed me. Later, when I was older and she recounted this story, she remained steadfast that this remedy had saved my young life, all but ignoring questions about how she ever found a black chicken on the streets of Chicago in the first place.

While the fat of a black chicken helped cure my lungs, it was peanuts that saved my eyesight, according to my mother. My eyes were always weak, and my eyesight a matter of great concern to my mother. To make my eyes stronger she began to feed me peanuts regularly. Miraculously, my vision began to improve. And I became addicted to the antidote my mother prescribed me: I still love peanuts to this day, especially when they’re roasted in the shell.

Above all my mother relied on her excellent skills as a cook to keep me healthy. Our home was always filled with the rich aromas of home cooking and hearty spices, and there was always something good on the stove or on the table. Almost always it was country cooking that harkened back to her roots: fried chicken and collard greens, cornbread and chili, beef and macaroni and cheese, and all sorts of rich cakes and pies. Every once in a while I would go to bed hungry—not because my mother had not provided for me, but because I was a finicky eater and she never forced me to eat anything I didn’t want to eat.

My favorite meal, without question, was Sunday breakfast. That’s because that’s when my Uncle Man (Burnette Lewis) and Aunt Alma, who lived a little further south in Chicago, would come over to have breakfast with us. Beaming above a plate of eggs, grits, and biscuits, Uncle Man would tell stories and jokes and talk to me in a way that neither Uless nor Dave Mixon nor any other man had talked to me in my life. Uncle Man was full of life and he was my favorite uncle. I always enjoyed his company.

My mother cooked not just for her family, but for others in our community, especially at her church. She was a devout Christian and a pillar in her congregation at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. If there were such a thing as a ministry of cooking and serving, Elizabeth Hampton Mixon was truly its finest minister. Without religion, my mother probably could not have survived all the hardships she experienced in her life. As a result she tried to give back however she could, whether it was with her cash or with her cooking.

My mother wanted me to come to know God, faith, and religion like she did. But I didn’t. My impression of organized religion came from her preacher, whom I saw living high on the hog thanks to the hard-earned donations from my mother and others. He would often come to our house to beg for money for his personal use, while my mother struggled to put food on the table and clothes on my back. When I was about twelve years old and my mother decided I was old enough to make my own decisions about religion, I walked away from it. I would return a few times. During a stint in the US Army, for instance, I read the Bible from cover to cover and studied other religious books with other soldiers who were into religion. In graduate school I joined the local Methodist church, joined its youth group, and I even taught Sunday school. My roommate at the time, a devout Christian aptly named Henry Moses, who would become an inseparable friend, did his best to keep me on a faithful track. One of the many impressive things about Henry was his ability to reconcile religion and science. He would go on to earn a doctorate in biochemistry from Purdue and become a professor at Meharry Medical College. To this day his faith is still strong.

Despite the efforts of people I loved and respected, like my mother and Henry Moses, and despite my trying, I could not reconcile what I still see as the hypocrisy of many leaders and practitioners of organized religion. How could any religious person condone war, discrimination, greed, the rape of children, or other horrible offenses? And if there is a God, how could He let them get away with such behavior? I also simply cannot accept the concepts of God and the devil, heaven and hell, life after death. But even assuming there are such places, to me heaven sounds boring, and hell seems like not such a bad place. One might even be able to have a lot of fun in hell. Just think of all the great entertainers, comics, and thinkers who will probably be there.

Though my mother could not instill faith and devotion to religion in me, she did instill in me many other redeemable qualities, such as knowing right from wrong, fiscal responsibility, the value of hard work, and courtesy and respect for my elders. Back when I was growing up, before everyone had a car and while Chicago’s “L” was still being built, the only reliable way to get to downtown Chicago was the streetcar. Whenever we went downtown, usually on shopping trips, which I grew to hate (I still detest shopping today), my mother made me give up my seat for any grown-up who was standing. Today when I ride public transit, I never see this happening. Instead, I notice that it is often the parent who gives up a seat to his or her child. To me that seems both unusual and unfortunate.

My mother also instilled in me a desire for a better life. She let me find the path to my future on my own, however. To the best of my recollection, we never had a conversation about my future. She was so busy trying to house and feed her family that she had neither time nor energy leftover to provide that sort of guidance to me. Likewise, she never helped me with my schoolwork either. Partly that’s because she could only help so much, even if she could find the time to do so. My mother, due to circumstances beyond her control, never completed the eighth grade.

What my mother lacked in education, she made up for in her love for me. I would relish the chance to see her again and tell her how much I love her and appreciate all she did for me. But if I believed in an afterlife, I am sure she would be up in heaven, and I would likely be down in hell. Knowing my mother, though, I am sure she would never stop trying to convince St. Peter to let me join her.

For a woman who loved me like a son and whom I loved like a mother, my mother was not actually my mother at all.

I wasn’t who I thought I was, either.

When I was growing up, Elizabeth Hampton spoke often of her place of birth, Jefferson, Texas, and of her relatives there. Some came to visit us in Chicago, and sometimes they stayed longer than a few days. My Uncle Valentine Lewis and his wife, Aunt Tot, for instance, moved in with us for a few years after work dried up in Texas. Uncle Valentine worked as a carpenter for a building contractor, while Aunt Tot worked as a clerk in a drugstore. From them and from my mother, I learned a little about the Lone Star State. To a boy from the streets of Chicago, Texas and everything about it seemed like a foreign land—a place where cotton and corn grew in endless fields, and cows and chickens roamed the prairies like the squirrels and pigeons in Grant Park. I envisioned cowboys and bands of roving Indians, and a sky that went on forever.

So when my mother decided one day when I was about ten years old that we needed to visit her home and meet the rest of my relatives, I naturally was ecstatic. It would be my first trip outside of Chicago. Riding on a real train was exciting enough; taking it to a place as mysterious and storied as Texas to meet members of my family for the first time only made it all the more titillating.

Little did I know just how revealing this trip would be for me.

It was around this same time that my mother told me something else: that my birth mother had died shortly after my birth in Jefferson, Texas, on August 23, 1933.

My birth mother, I was told, was named Alzadie Lewis Douglas. My father’s name was Charles Douglas III. And my name at birth, I was told, was not Delon Hampton. It actually was Charles Douglas Jr.

Before her death at age twenty-five, I discovered, Alzadie had requested that my father give me to her sister and her husband to raise as their son. That sister was Elizabeth Hampton, and her husband was Uless. Why my mother decided that I should be raised by her sister instead of my natural father and her family back in Jefferson, I do not know. I’m fairly sure, however, that my father didn’t put up much of a protest to keep the baby whose birth coincided with the death of his bride.

Discovering my true past, of course, also prompted new questions when I was old enough to comprehend these things. I found myself wondering whether my injection into Elizabeth and Uless’s family is what led to my all-but-nonexistent relationship with Uless, and if it led to their ultimate divorce. I wondered what my life would have been like if my mother had not made the decision to send me away from Texas. And I wondered if my birth father ever thought of me.

None of this entered my mind, however, as my mother and I walked into Chicago’s Union Station bound for my first-ever journey to Jefferson, Texas. For a ten-year-old boy on his first trip out of town in the 1940s, the station seemed bigger than life itself. The limestone and marble corridors leading to our train seemed as long as city blocks. The massive barrel-vaulted skylight that ran the length of the Great Hall seemed like a window into the heavens. Shortly after my inaugural trip from the train station, those same skylights would be blacked out to make the building less of a target for enemy aircraft during World War II.

Our trip from Chicago took us out of the city, past the industrial communities of Joliet and Gary, Indiana, and into the plains of the Heart of Illinois, where corn and soybean farms filled the big windows of our train car. I remember the car being filled with people of all different types and colors, and being able to go wherever I wanted down the aisles of the train that led to the dining and other cars.

That changed when the train stopped in St. Louis. The conductor told us we had to move to a special car, near the front of the train where the noise was the loudest and the smoke from the engine was the worst. When we sat down in our new seats, I noticed that everyone in the car now looked like me and my mother. The car was filled with the smell of fried chicken, cornbread, and other home-cooked foods. Like my mother, most passengers in this car had packed their own food, because there was no longer any other choice if they wanted something to eat.

St. Louis, it seems, was at the edge of the Mason-Dixon Line. As a result, just like every other black person who traveled by rail in America between 1849 and 1954, when segregation in public transportation was finally ruled illegal, we were forced to move to a segregated car. As a boy growing up in urban Chicago, this was my first experience with segregation and racism, but it would certainly not be my last.

Jefferson, Texas, is a tiny speck of a town in the northeast corner of the state, near the borders of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. You wouldn’t know it by visiting today, but there was a time when Jefferson was one of the biggest and most important gateways to the Southwest. Nestled along the Big Cypress River, it was once the busiest port in Texas—second only to mighty Galveston. The riverboats and barges that once filled the waters between Jefferson and the Port of New Orleans, like tractor-trailers that fill the interstate highways today, connected the American West to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

In a state now dominated by the modern-day megalopolises of Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston, it’s not surprising that little Jefferson tends to treasure its past. Almost every building and home in downtown Jefferson has a historical marker out front, from the Old Post Office to The Grove, a clapboard home built in 1861 that is now considered one of the most haunted houses in America.

One of the most haunting historical events that ever occurred in Jefferson, however, is less well celebrated. In 1868, with the wounds of the Civil War still deep and divisive, Jefferson erupted in racial violence that had to be quelled by army troops and martial law. Known as the Stockade Case, the incident began after George Webster Smith and four black men came to town in October of that year. Smith, a former Union officer and well-known Marion County resident, apparently got into an argument with a local former Confederate Colonel named R. P. Crump that led to gunfire. Smith and the black men were put in jail under the auspices that it was for their own protection. But on the night of October 4, 1868, a lynch mob of nearly a hundred hooded men who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan’s Knights of the Rising Sun roared into town with torches and guns and took over the jail. According to accounts from the time, the Klansmen shot Smith through the bars of his jail cell window. They then dragged the black men to the nearby woods, lynching two of them while the other two escaped. After the US Army finally arrived in Jefferson to quell the violence, more than thirty suspected Klansmen were arrested and later put on trial before a military commission. Three of them were found guilty of murder; most of the rest went free.

My family owned a lot of contiguous land in Jefferson and in surrounding Marion County, Texas, and even to this day many of the streets and neighborhoods of Jefferson bear the name of my family—not Hampton, but Douglas. There is Douglas Street through the middle of town, Douglas Bottom out in the country, and the town of Douglas Chapel about ten miles to the east.

During my inaugural visit there in the 1940s, most of my time was spent with one member of the family or the other. When we weren’t visiting, I was helping out on the farm or was out fishing, hunting, or otherwise spending time with my cousin Bubba and other relatives. Since we were out in the country and surrounded by family, we were not exposed to racism or segregation unless we went into town. I was, however, exposed to something else I had never seen in Chicago: homes without indoor plumbing. For the first time I used an outhouse, and I took baths in a big washtub filled with hand-pumped water instead of a shower connected to the city water supply.

All of this made for a great adventure for a kid from inner-city Chicago—so much so that a few years later I asked to go back to Texas during my summer vacation from school. It was another trip that would reveal more secrets of my past.

By then, I knew that I had been born Charles Douglas Jr. What I didn’t know until that second trip to Texas was that I was the second son of Alzadie Lewis Douglas and Charles Douglas Sr.

What I remember most about that first time I met Clarence was simply how elated I was to know that for the first time I had a brother. I was a teenaged boy who had been essentially raised by a single mother and two other females in our home in inner-city Chicago. Now, here I was in rural Texas again, surrounded by men who hunted, fished, and made their living off the land—including, I now realized, my own brother.

Throughout his life and from the moment I met him, my brother Clarence was a strong and vibrant individual. He was a hardworking leader who people gladly followed—including me. When I met him for the first time, he was already on his way to becoming a successful doctor. During the summer I met him, he was home from college and working in the men’s locker room at a country club. I would go to work with him, helping him shine members’ golf shoes.

At the time Clarence lived not in Jefferson but in Shreveport, Louisiana, about fifty miles away. One day he drove over to pick me up, not to go to the country club, but to go back to Shreveport. The reason: to meet the father I had never met before.

Charles Douglas Sr. was a baker who lived in Shreveport with his wife and with Clarence. During my second visit to Texas I would spend some time living with them too, although during the whole time my contact with my natural father was limited. I remember only one thing about that visit. One day my father took me to work with him. I had free reign of the bakery and all its operations, from the giant mixing machines and ovens to the wheeled racks and cases. What I remember most about that day was lunching on hot bread, fresh out of the oven, and drinking chocolate milk. During the weeks of my visit to Shreveport, I never had a conversation or interaction of any significant length or substance with my father. Except for the trip with him to his workplace, he ignored me.

Like me, Clarence did not get much from our father either. It was our uncle, Dr. Raymond D. Douglas (R. D.) and his wife Willie Mae (Aunt Bill), who were principally responsible for rearing and educating Clarence and leading him into the medical profession. R. D. Douglas was active in his community and in Texas state politics. He built, owned, and operated the local hospital in Jefferson, Texas. He also traveled extensively. To his credit, whenever he visited a city in which I resided, he would always call and take me out to dinner. He never gave me advice or counsel, however. I guess he decided taking care of one of his nephews was enough.

Clarence was R. D.’s hope and joy. He helped Clarence through college and medical school. He anticipated that Clarence would return to Jefferson, take over his medical practice, and run the hospital he had established. Clarence had other plans.

During his sophomore year at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, Clarence married his college sweetheart, Meriel LaBrame. Upon graduation he began an internship at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He did well at Mercy Hospital. So well, in fact, that he attracted the attention of a physician who convinced him to establish his practice in the nearby town of Belle Plaine, Iowa. Clarence decided it was a good idea and he and Meriel moved there, built a prosperous practice, and had two children. Clarence became an active and influential member of the community and for many years served as chairman of the Belle Plaine School Board. He also was the coroner for Benton County, Iowa.

Clarence and Meriel’s marriage ended in divorce. Meriel took their children, Everett and Leslie, and moved to her hometown, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she raised them while teaching history as a professor on the faculty of Southern University. Leslie went on to become a very successful physician like her father, and she and her husband, Dr. Keith Churchwell, produced a talented daughter, Lauren. Everett never found himself. He died an untimely death after an asthma attack while attending a New Year’s Eve party. Everett was very talented but appeared to me to have an unproductive life, I believe, because he was never able to cope with the breakup of his family.

Clarence subsequently married Mary Kearney, RN, a union that produced three very successful children: Susan, Sarah, and Stacy—a physician, a corporate executive, and a lawyer. Clarence was as strong and wise a father as he was a brother. My niece, Sarah Douglas Squiers, once told me of an incident that reflected her father’s counsel. While she was in high school, a male student continually harassed her. She told her father and he advised her how to handle the matter. The next time it happened, she followed his instruction: She hit the bully on his head and then ran like hell. He chased her home but never harassed her again. Ironically, years later, from a prison cell, he wrote to her and asked for a date when he got out. Hope springs eternal.

Regrettably, my brother did not live long enough to read these words, dying of pancreatic cancer well before his time. When I saw Clarence the last time, just before he expired, he was a shell of the strong and strapping young man I had met during that second visit to Jefferson, Texas, and just a shadow of the stately and successful doctor from Iowa who in his later years would sometimes fly to Chicago in his own plane and spend time with me. At the time of his death, Clarence was totally helpless. He could not carry on a conversation for any significant length of time due to the pain medication he was taking. I am deeply saddened that his premature death prevented him from fully enjoying the success of his daughters and their children, but I know he can rest well. His children and grandchildren (Lauren, Miles, and Aiden) will make substantial contributions to society. He left a wonderful legacy.

Clarence was a much better brother to me than I was to him. From introducing me to our father, to his wise counsel, to his helping me secure a bank loan in my later years when my business was struggling to survive, he was always there for me. What saddens me the most about Clarence’s passing is the realization that I did not enjoy his presence more during his life, and that his condition did not allow us the opportunity to say goodbye. The loss is mine.

There is one other thing I remember about visiting Jefferson, Texas, that sticks with me to this day. Like learning about Clarence, my father, and my roots, it forever changed and affected my life, although I wouldn’t know it at the time.

Shortly after we arrived in Jefferson during my first trip there, my family gathered at the home of my Uncle Alvin Lewis. The adults were not there to socialize, however—they were there to work. As I stood with the other kids and watched from a safe distance on that hot summer day, the adults and a few of Uncle Alvin’s friends took giant jacks, and to the awe of me and the other kids, they lifted his home right off of its very foundation. They then moved a long trailer underneath the home, lowered it carefully and slowly on to it, and moved the home to another location not too far away where they seated and anchored it onto its new foundation.

Why Uncle Alvin wanted to move his house, I cannot recall. I am sure he had his reasons, just as my mother, I am sure, had her reasons for deciding on her deathbed to uproot me from Jefferson, Texas, and send me to live with her sister in Chicago.

As a boy, the house moving spectacle left an impression on me in other ways. This was my first close experience with an engineering-related activity. And it very well may have been the initial step toward the engineering career that has defined my life.