In the blink of an eye, one of my greatest fears came to pass. After a return of only a few years, my mother disappeared almost as suddenly as she had reappeared. Everything in my world suddenly went to white noise—an infinite grainy uncertainty. When I blinked again, I found myself twelve blocks west at my Uncle Willie’s house on Nineteenth and Meineke—where I would live for most of the next three years. It was as though the script I was living one day got switched and I had to just jump in the next day with a new script and a whole new cast of characters, without asking any questions.
Unlike the evasive reactions I’d gotten to questions at Uncle Archie’s house when I was much younger, or the way that my mother would answer a question generally or partially, whenever I asked questions at Uncle Willie’s house, he or his wife Ella Mae gave no response at all, like I was talking a foreign language.
Almost ten months went by—a lifetime to an eight-year-old—before I had even a clue about what had happened to Momma and where she was. Then, on one of the saddest occasions of my child-hood—at a funeral, as it happened—I caught sight of her standing at a distance with a prison guard at her side. Until that piece of stark evidence showed up—a major puzzle piece that was only further explained decades later—I didn’t know for those months whether or not she was even alive.
To make matters more confusing, it was about this time that Ophelia was sent away. Now the second most important person in my life was missing. Explanations, as always, were vague; but many, many years later I learned that Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae had decided that my twelve-year-old sister would be better off living in a kind of detention home and school for girls who had trouble conforming to rules.
With a full house, counting me and their own three kids, it was understandable that my uncle and, in particular, my aunt saw fit to establish a fairly strict code of conduct. But compared to the easygoing atmosphere that Uncle Archie and TT had maintained, and in contrast to the chaotic drama under Freddie’s drunken reign—where us kids could do what we wanted if we stayed out of his way—the new rules presented big-time culture shock. While Ophelia initially did her best to adapt to the rules, I initially rebelled, hating that I suddenly had a bedtime and had to do chores and that there was one way to do them.
Dishes? I had to do them if it was so ordered by Aunt Ella Mae—dark, tall, and big-boned, built like one of the last Amazons—who watched over us hawkishly in her cat-eye glasses. But dishes? This went against my rules. Actually, it was the subject of one of the few arguments I ever had with Ophelia when Momma had left her in charge and my sister had tried to force me to clean the kitchen—including the dishes. The one time in my life that I ever invoked a philosophy of Freddie Triplett, I refused, insisting, “Freddie says that washing dishes is for girls.” Ophelia was ready to kick my ass, but I ran away laughing.
There was no running from Aunt Ella Mae. At one point she made me do the dishes for a month because she claimed to have spotted some grease on a glass—after I’d sworn to having washed it. She smirked, saying, “I can see grease, and I don’t even have my glasses on.” That was only the beginning.
A woman who stood at least six inches taller than Uncle Willie—who was preoccupied with much more pressing worries than the execution of household chores—Aunt Ella Mae, in my estimation, had simply figured out how to give us more work so she could do less. Plus she really took the adage “waste not, want not” to heart. To conserve milk, for example, she had all of us kids take turns eating cereal out of the same bowl, with a fork, one by one. Once I got wise to her system, I volunteered to go last, knowing that when my cereal was eaten I could turn up the bowl and drink the lion’s share of the milk.
Maybe Ophelia was already at a breaking point from residual anger over our situation, or from an accumulation of the fear and hurt we all had experienced. Or maybe, because she was strong-minded in her own right, she expressed her defiance by acting out. A good, smart, loving person always, Ophelia didn’t do anything specific—to my knowledge—to be sent away, but she must have at least talked back or disobeyed a rule or come home late one too many times. In any case, to blink my eyes yet again and find not just my momma gone but Ophelia too felt like too much heartbreak to bear. Adding insult to injury, Sharon and Kim were staying with family members on Freddie’s side, so I was a stranger in a strange land—even if Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae were family.
It was only after Ophelia was no longer in the household that I really appreciated how she had always been there for me, how we were there for each other. We hardly had ever fought, except for maybe once when I performed surgery on her Barbie doll and sort of decapitated it. Maybe this was about jealousy over her having more Christmas presents than me—some years my take was just socks. Or it could have been my displaced anger over Freddie telling me, “You the only one who ain’t got no daddy,” or it could have been an early exploration of my latent surgical skills. Of course Ophelia was mad at me for destroying her toy. But she soon forgave me. Then there was the time that I spied on her and her friends during a girls’ club meeting. When I was detected looking through the peephole, one of her friends took a squeegee doused in soapy water and splashed it right into my eye! That burned like hell, but what really injured my eye was when I ran home and tried to wash the soap out with a rag that had cosmetics in it already. I was mad at Ophelia for not being more concerned—and it did cause permanent trouble for my eye.
For the rest, we had been almost inseparable, best friends. The previous July 4 stood out in my memory. Bessie’s kids and some of our older relatives and friends had money to go to Muskogee Beach, the place to go. Because we didn’t have that money, our option was to go to Lake Michigan to see the fireworks. To get there, we had to depend on Freddie to drive us there, drop us off, and come back to pick us up.
We arrived in time and enjoyed watching the fireworks with a large, local crowd. That was, until, as though choreographed, the last rocket burst into a thousand glittering chards in the sky and there was a sudden roll of thunder as the rain began to pour down. There was no shelter, and before long we realized that there was no Freddie to pick us up.
After it became really late, the only thing we knew to do was to walk home—like Hansel and Gretel trying to retrace and reverse our footsteps the opposite way he’d driven us. Combating the wet, cold, and hunger and our fear of getting lost, as we walked and walked we talked and talked. Still my main source of information about everything I knew nothing about, Ophelia decided to explain to me why the mail never came on time in our neighborhood.
“Why?” The rain was coming down so hard we had to raise our voices to be heard over it.
“’Cause,” she said, “our mailman’s over at Luke’s with Freddie.” Luke’s House of Joy, one of Freddie’s favorite watering holes, was right across the street from the Big House at Eighth and Wright. We were pretty sure that’s where he was this night, too drunk to remember or care to come pick us up. Ophelia reported that the adults in the neighborhood said that if you wanted to get your mail on time, you’d have to go to Luke’s and find the mailman at his regular bar stool, sort through his bag, and take out what belonged to you. If you wanted to get your welfare check, said Ophelia, you’d have to go to Luke’s and tell the mailman, “Nigger, you give me my check!”
The rain didn’t let up for the whole hour and a half it took to walk home from the lake, but her stories and commentary made the ordeal much more bearable. When we arrived at home, nobody was there, so I managed to break in by squeezing through the milk chute.
That, in a nutshell, was how we survived as a team, cheering each other up, complaining to each other, distracting ourselves from thinking about the troublesome stuff that was too painful to discuss. With Momma gone and without Ophelia close at hand to be my ally, I couldn’t imagine anyone filling the void.
But apparently, as the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, and by the time I blinked once more, my mother’s three brothers had stepped in to occupy that empty place and make sure I wasn’t left entirely unattended. They were father figures, teachers, entertainers, and preachers, each in his own way. The perfect antidote to the no-daddy, no-momma, no-sister blues, they collectively helped me to realize, just when I had started to feel sorry for myself, how lucky I was to be a Gardner.
Whenever I went to visit or stay with Uncle Archie, I took away lasting lessons about the value of hard work, goal setting, focus, and self-education. A union man in his blood, Uncle Archie eventually ascended the ladder to become president of his union, all the while reading, studying, and familiarizing himself with issues of concern to the community.
Then there was Uncle Willie, a character of the highest order who could turn a humdrum afternoon into an adventure full of international intrigue and espionage. Ever since he had come back from the Korean War, so I heard, Uncle Willie hadn’t been quite right in the head. That was one of the euphemisms used for mental illness, which ran strong in different branches of our extended family, it turned out, as well as in the rest of the ’hood—where, besides not being able to afford help, most folks would go to a snake charmer before they’d seek out psychotherapy.
Calling someone crazy—an equal opportunity euphemism that could have applied to someone like Freddie, who was probably bipolar or borderline schizophrenic, made worse by alcohol—was really another form of denying how troubled someone was, which made the problem, if not okay, then at least typical. No matter how bad it was, you’d hear people say, “Well, the nigger crazy, you know. He just crazy.” And no one contemplated therapy. That solution was crazy itself to a lot of people. “Oh, no,” they’d say about Freddie. “He’ll be all right. He just drunk. Probably he should eat something to coat his stomach against the liquor.”
In point of fact, Uncle Willie had been diagnosed with some form of battle fatigue or shell shock that had become progressively worse, though he was harmless. Although I wasn’t told about his condition during the time I was living in his home, it seemed he was convinced that he was in the FBI—of which he is still convinced to this day, and no one at the mental health facility where he lives has tried to correct him on that. Neither did I the first time I had direct experience working with him on “assignment,” a little later in this era. On that occasion we were driving to do an errand one day in his unassuming green Rambler—one of the classic midsixties models made right there in Milwaukee—I couldn’t help observing his cool outfit: a jacket and white shirt, tie with a stickpin in it, and little snap brim straw hat and shades. That became his undercover disguise; it helped him blend in, so he said. Without any reference to his “work,” all of a sudden he pulled over, looked straight ahead, and spoke through clenched teeth, like a ventriloquist, so as not to appear to be talking to me.
“Yeah, they’re over there checking me out right now,” Uncle Willie said. “They’re checking me out.”
“They are?” I asked excitedly, thinking of Bill Cosby’s I Spy series and all the latest James Bond stories I’d seen or read. Wow, this was cool!
Just as I turned my head to look over and see who was tailing us, Uncle Willie grabbed the steering wheel, whispering hoarsely, “Don’t look! Don’t look! They’ll know we’re on to them!”
Unfortunately, I had already turned and looked, only to discover that nobody was there. In one fell swoop, I realized that this meant many of the grandiose claims he’d made over the years, or that others had heard from him, weren’t true. One of those claims that I heard from others, for instance, was that he had some original Picasso paintings stashed in an undisclosed location and that he had willed them to Ophelia. These were glamorous, bold visions, the kind of daydreams that I loved to think about and that I hated to learn were only true in his fantasy world.
Still, he could be very convincing. Not long after I went on assignment with him, one of the Gardner relatives received a call from the Palmer House Hotel—one of Chicago’s most luxurious, illustrious hotels, along the lines of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It seemed that Uncle Willie—who frequented the racetrack—had checked in at the front desk by showing them his winning stubs from the track. With the explanation that he’d pay them the next day once he had time to cash them in, he charmed himself right into the presidential penthouse suite. Once the hotel management figured out that the stubs were worthless—just discarded stubs, not even somebody else’s winning tickets—they called the family to come get Uncle Willie rather than have the negative publicity from police involvement.
As one of the family members along for the ride to coax Uncle Willie out of the penthouse, I had the fortune to catch a glimpse of the stuff of which dreams were made. The luxurious lobby of the Palmer House made the pages of the Spiegel catalog seem almost ordinary. And that penthouse suite—with multiple bedrooms, a bathroom that could house two families, a sitting room here, a living room there, and furnishings made of gold, silk, satin, velvet—was like nothing I’d ever dreamt of, let alone seen. To think that I’d ever stay in such a place was too much to dream, too crazy to want. But as I cajoled Uncle Willie into going home with us, I planted that fantasy inside myself just the same.
Many lifetimes later, after I’d found myself staying in the suites of a few extraordinary hotels, I was invited to the Palmer House Hotel to attend a reception hosted by the president of the National Education Association, one of my largest institutional investment clients. It didn’t occur to me until I arrived at the reception, which happened to be in that very same presidential penthouse suite, why it was that I began to have such a powerful déjà vu. At first, I thought better than to confess the reason I was able to direct anyone who asked to the bathroom, the wet bar, or the exit to the patio, but then I did mention it to a couple of older women, who laughed right along with me.
One of them said, “We all have an Uncle Willie in our family.” The other woman added, “And some of us have an Aunt Willa-mena too.”
At the age of eight I obviously had few insights into the causes of mental illness. So when I started picking up on my family members not being quite right, it gave me something new to fear. If this crazy thing ran in the family, what did that say about me? What if I had it or was going to get it? The fear may have also been why I stayed away from becoming much of a drinker. I didn’t want to lose the little control of my world I had, that modest feeling of being able to respond to rapidly changing surroundings, situations, and circumstances over which I otherwise had no control.
At the same time, Uncle Willie’s stories, delusional or not, gave me a worldview that I had never had before, replacing the old fear of the unknown with a desire to see some of the places he talked about. Besides the foreign ports of call he described from his time in the service—in Korea, the Philippines, Italy, and other stops along the way—he also talked about how beautiful and welcoming the women were over there, a subject that was to become an increasing source of fascination for me.
But the person who most opened the door to the world beyond our neighborhood and made me know that I had to go see it one day was my Uncle Henry—who came shining into my life in this era as if he had been sent just for me. We had seen Momma’s baby brother only periodically in earlier years since he was stationed abroad at the time. Now that he was retired from the military and working as a steel man alongside my other uncles, he suddenly appeared on the scene—as suddenly as Momma had disappeared.
Whenever Uncle Henry came to look after us at Uncle Willie’s house—or better yet, to take me somewhere on an excursion, just the two of us—it was Christmas, my birthday, and every other holiday rolled into one for me. He made me feel as special as Momma had when she visited at the foster home and made candy. Uncle Henry not only made me feel special but allowed me, for the first time ever, to feel love for a man—really to fall in love, in the way that boys fall in love with their fathers and yearn to be like them one day. I knew what that falling-in-love feeling was with the important women in my life, like Momma, with her spreading smile—always reminding me of an opening refrigerator door that the light of hope and comfort spilled from. I knew the love of my sister, how it was without condition or limitation. But until I was eight years old, when Uncle Henry took me under his wing of protection, love, and fun, the dominant messages from a male adult had mainly been “Get outta my goddamn house” and “I ain’t your goddamn daddy,” barked at me down the barrel of a shotgun.
Uncle Henry and I had an unspoken agreement whenever he came to stay with us—if Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae happened to be going away for the weekend or out for the night—that I would go up to bed with the younger kids and sneak back down later. By the time I came tiptoeing downstairs, there was always a party going on, with Henry Gardner at the center. About five-ten—although, like Momma, he looked much taller—Uncle Henry was a pretty boy, single and loved by the ladies, with a lean physique and an athletic, tigerlike way of moving. In his hip goatee, he would scan a room, not missing a beat, knowing the ladies weren’t missing him. Never once did I see him looking anything but perfectly attired, every crease, every cuff pressed to perfection.
At one of these parties, not long after I’d come back downstairs and was checking out Henry’s different friends, watching the various guests—some playing cards, others in conversation, a few dancing—something remarkable happened. When I arrived, there was one distinct groove going on—with soul music, blues, and standards coming off the record player as singers like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Sarah Vaughn stirred up the festive atmosphere. Between the music, laughter, chatter, and smoke, it was hot and happening, boisterous and loud. Then, all at once, the mood changed when a record was put on that I had never heard. Everything stopped: the laughter, the chatter, even the smoke. The record was Miles Davis playing “Round Midnight.” Later I would appreciate the mastery of his trumpet playing, the haunting tone that crept under my skin, and the incredible complexities of tempo and melody. But what got me that night was the power of Miles Davis to alter the mood in the room like that. It was still a party, but much more intimate, more cool, more fluid. It even seemed that I moved differently with Miles on the record player. My decision to study trumpet didn’t happen that night, but I did contemplate for the first time ever how powerful it would feel to be able to change the mood, to make strangers feel something transformational that way. The music bug done bit.
From then on, Uncle Henry and I had Miles Davis in common. The music and the time spent listening together formed a shelter in the storm so that all my angst was forgotten, if only for a while. On those many occasions when he let me stay up late and we’d listen to every Miles Davis recording he could get his hands on, he’d tell me about his overseas adventures in the Philippines, Korea, and Japan. “Come here,” he beckoned to me in the middle of talking one night, and led me to the bookshelf, pulling out the encyclopedia Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae had in their home.
He pointed out the facts and cultural descriptions of these different places, recommending that I always take advantage of resources like the encyclopedia. He made a point of emphasizing that the world was full of many different types of people with attitudes, customs, beliefs, and colors different from ours. Then there was the smile that lit up his face when he described the women over there. He might as well have been spinning the globe for me and egging me out the door, saying, “Here it is, Chris, the world is your oyster. It’s up to you to find the pearls.”
Nothing Uncle Henry said or did indicated that our time together would be limited for any reason, but looking back, I would later wonder if he knew on some level that he wasn’t going to be around forever and was trying to pass on everything he had seen and learned in a short amount of time. In any case, his message wasn’t explicit, but the theme was always clear: live large.
That message wasn’t meant in any kind of negative or selfish way. To me, it meant to dare to dream, to commit to living on my own terms, to pursue my vision—one that others didn’t have to see, just me.
One of our earliest outings together had been to the Mississippi River, where Uncle Henry taught me to swim and where he’d take me boating whenever good weather came around. There was one day on the river that I remember as the essence of happiness, one of those perfect summer days that stretch on forever. Not a cloud in the sky, there was just the sound and smell of the gas engine, the two of us: Uncle Henry in the back gunning the Evinrude engine, steering us across the river, and me up front with my legs dangling over the side, kicking up the water and throwing spray back into my face. Sensations of well-being ran through my senses: the ups and downs of the small craft skimming over the mellow rolling of waves; the feel and sound of the waves slapping on the bottom of the boat; the spray of mist around me, lovingly touching my face and skin.
That was probably the most dangerous position possible in which to ride inside of a small boat, but that was part of what made it the most daring, spectacular fun I’d ever had. Decades hence I would recall that glorious day while watching Titanic and seeing Leonardo DiCaprio shout, “I’m king of the world!” That was the exact feeling that came over me on the Mississippi with Uncle Henry, a feeling of being completely alive. Uncle Henry had a look of satisfaction as he saw me happy, as if he had done well to set me on a path that he might not always be around to guide me along. Or so I later interpreted our most memorable time spent together.
One night at the end of that first summer I’d stayed with Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae, I had gone to bed but was still awake when I heard my aunt cry out, “Oh, no!” followed by muffled crying from her and my uncle. I sat up in bed in a panic, not only because I had never heard grown-ups cry before, but also because I knew. It was Uncle Henry. No question. The pain was so pronounced it reverberated all the way up to the attic where I slept at the time. I prayed more genuinely than ever before: Dear God, please don’t let it be my Uncle Henry. I didn’t sleep, I prayed and prayed, feeling more powerless than ever to alter whatever it was.
The next morning, at breakfast, my Aunt Ella Mae, her eyes puffy under her cat-eye glasses, said in a somber, strained voice, “Henry had an accident. Yesterday. He drowned.”
Reeling from the shock and sorrow that he was gone and the disbelief that he could have had an accident, because he knew everything and was careful and because he couldn’t be gone, he couldn’t, I barely pieced together the details. Aunt Ella Mae was really talking to me, since the younger kids wouldn’t understand, but I was numb, devastated. In that place of stillness where I went to brace myself against hurt, I pushed away the haze and tried to understand the chronology of what happened. Uncle Henry apparently had gone out to fish from a small island, and the boat had come off its mooring and drifted away from shore. When he attempted to swim out to the boat and bring it back in to redock it, the undercurrent was too strong and took him down.
How many times Uncle Henry had warned me about the undercurrent, how you could never tell just by looking at the surface, I couldn’t count. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. My heart wanted to explode into a million pieces, but something inside wouldn’t let me. It was that feeling of not allowing myself to cry, because I was sure that if I started I’d never stop. So I took all that emotion, that weight of the world hanging over me in the shape of a massive question mark, and dragged it deep down below, into a dangerous undercurrent of my own.
After attending so many funerals with TT, I thought that I’d know what to expect from Uncle Henry’s funeral. But of course I was very young then, and we didn’t really know any of the people from church who died. I was unprepared for the finality of his loss, as if I’d been waiting to hear that it was a mistake or even a trick so he could take off and have a foreign adventure without having to say good-bye. More than that, I was completely unprepared to see Momma there, the first time I’d seen her in almost a year.
Every time I tried to move toward her, various relatives blocked my path. We couldn’t hug. She couldn’t tell me where she was staying, what had happened, when and if she was coming back. The atmosphere was surreal enough with all the weeping and wailing, but to see Momma, real and in front of me, yet beyond my reach, was enough to put me in a grave next to Uncle Henry. Maybe because she knew it would have hurt too much, she didn’t even make eye contact or try to speak to me. My only consoling thought was that she was glancing over when I wasn’t looking. I wanted Momma to see that I was starting to get tall, that I was composed, strong, being a mostly good kid. Every time I looked over at her, hoping for some sign that she had seen me, all I saw was the pain of losing her baby brother and not being able to talk to her children. She kept her gaze down at the earth where they put Uncle Henry’s casket.
When it hit me that the woman standing next to my mother was a female prison guard—the only white person at the funeral, dressed in a navy-colored uniform—it came down like a thunderbolt where she had gone. But as one monumental question was answered, a whole batch of confusing new ones were born. Why was she in prison? When was she coming back? Was she coming back?
Only much later would I piece together that this was her second imprisonment. But even that day my gut told me that Freddie was responsible. Though he was the one who should have done time for his abuse, Freddie told the authorities that she had attempted to burn the house down with him in it, thereby breaking her parole. Not surprisingly, he did it without an ounce of concern for what it would do to us kids.
I was also reunited with Ophelia. Seeing her, Sharon, and Kim at the funeral was awkward, with our “don’t ask, don’t tell” family tradition. The warring configuration of emotions inside of me was so overwhelming that I reverted to the need for something to do, some plan of action to stick my focus on. For one thing, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen much of Freddie since Momma had been gone, I resolved to resume the job of putting him out of our misery, a determination I’d only temporarily shelved when my poison potion exploded on me. And another thing, I decided, for however long my mother was going to be away, I was going to have as much of my childhood as I could muster. I was going to hang out with my group of friends, “my boys,” get into a little trouble—instigate some of it too—go riding on our homemade skate trucks put together from wood and old skate wheels, and maybe figure out how to earn some chore money to buy myself a bike. Then me and my boys were going to cruise around town, out to the lake if we felt like it, or pedal all the way uphill to the highest point in our part of Milwaukee, near the water reservoir, and look out beyond, feeling like kings of the world. And then, living large, we were going to take that plunge down Snake Hill, the biggest rush of our lives, taking our feet off the pedals so we could go even faster, pushing the limits of danger and excitement and just letting it rip.
What I also decided at Uncle Henry’s funeral was that I wouldn’t cry. That was my signal to Momma that I was hanging tough and that she didn’t need to worry about me.
For the next two years I did the best I could not to break down. My resolve was severely challenged one afternoon when I stopped by Baby’s house, where my younger sisters were staying. One of the only redeeming aspects of having the scourge of Freddie in our lives was how good his sisters Baby and Bessie were to us. Baby saw how her brother rode me and tried to compensate, saying nice things whenever she could, and she would even kick a few dollars in my direction here and there.
“You hungry, Chris?” she greeted me that day, knowing the answer before I grinningly nodded yes and starting to take out some sandwich fixings. As she did, Baby remembered the laundry she was doing downstairs and asked if I’d go load the clothes in the dryer.
Without hesitation, I head down to the basement and begin to pull the wet clothes out of the washer when a smell surrounds me. It’s the wonderful smell that first came into my senses when I lived in foster care. Not a specific perfume, nothing rich or heavy, just a clean, warm, good smell that wraps around me like a Superman cape, making me feel special, strong, safe, loved, and her.
Standing there loading the dryer, not sure why my mother’s presence is so vivid in my senses, I don’t yet know that Baby happens to be storing some of Momma’s clothes and things for her down here in the basement. I don’t yet know that in a few weeks to come there will be one more blink, and that the channel will change, Momma will come home, and we’ll all be reunited, living just as before.
Just like the scripts being switched back, we’ll pick up where we left off—practically midsentence. Without explanation, and with Freddie.
All I know in the emptiness of Baby’s basement is that I’m about to cry until I can’t cry anymore, as the dam gets ready to bust from ten years’ worth of pent-up question marks and a Mississippi River’s worth of unshed tears.
But first, as her beautiful smell blankets me even more, just to be sure, I turn around and ask out loud, “Momma?”