Sunday Breakfast

I didn’t know Randolph Scott was in Roberta, did you? When I press the INFO button on my DirecTV remote the cast listing displays as Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, that’s all. But that’s clearly Scott in his blonde and hunky 1935 prime charming some wily old dowager—can’t bring the actress’s name into focus just now; it’s not Marie Dressler though I simply adore her (Did you ever see her giving Chaplin as good as she got in the hilarious 1914 silent, Tillie’s Punctured Romance? Most people who remember Dressler think of the wicked funny repartee between her and the brassy, dressed-to-the-nines Jean Harlow in Dinner At Eight)—and yes, there’s the elegant and witty Miss Dunne trying to calm an apoplectic Ginger—what’s she fuming about now?—in what appears to be the next room.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve really only ever enjoyed the Astaire-Rogers pairings as far as the dancing went. The rest of the movies, the surrounding plots, were generally too silly to pay any attention to and in any case seemed interchangeable. I mean, you know, Fred’s pursuing Ginger and, usually due to a series of farcical miscues and misunderstandings, Ginger is in a snit about it throughout nearly all of the film. Sorry, tedious! The one exception is 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway, their last film together, and yeah, they bickered and misconstrued in that one too, but Rogers was different somehow. Earthier. Funny in a more knowing and womanly way, like the characters she played in Stage Door, The Major and The Minor, and even Monkey Business. I even liked her and Astaire’s dance routines better, especially the droll “My One and Only Highland Fling” and the playful, assured “Bouncin’ the Blues.”

My mother loves the Astaire-Rogers movies, ridiculous set-ups and all, her favorites being Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee. She was not watching Roberta though; she followed me into the kitchen (where I was attempting breakfast), eager to talk about the comments she was hearing on V-103’s Sunday morning urban affairs program, Chicago Speaks. The topic today was Prop 8.

Now, my mother is 72 and Catholic and though she’s been very loving and accepting of me since my coming out, and has over the years had her own personal quarrels with the Church, she I have not always agreed on queer issues. So, when after a good morning peck on the cheek and several minutes good-natured teasing about my pancake-flipping abilities she cleared her throat and said “Well, people are calling in to Ty and Mary’s show about this Prop 8 thing and most of them are saying—“ I groaned inwardly and braced myself, half-preparing to mount a defense. So much for a pleasant Sunday breakfast…

But Mom did what she does best—she surprised me, or maybe I should amend that and say she surprised me somewhat, since I could pretty well guess the prevailing viewpoint of the average black radio caller regarding anything to do with homosexuality and I didn’t really expect her to throw in with that. She didn’t. On the contrary Mom was thoughtful and dismayed at the bilious rancor of the callers, most of whom not only defended their support of Prop 8 but also their denouncing of homosexuality as a choice (sigh), as though, assuming it were true, that justified denial of full citizenship, including the right to legally marry, to LGBT people.

And all these callers, she said, pointed to the Bible as proof of the moral rightness of their arguments. Well, I mean, of course. If there’s anything black folks feel safe staking their reputations on, it’s Holy Scripture. Who was it that said Americans pour religion all over everything, like chocolate syrup? Did I read it in a book? Was it a line from a movie? Whatever its source it was not a charge aimed specifically at African-Americans but there have been times in my life when I’ve felt it could have been. It represents to me the dark side of my people’s faith, the robotic insistence on letting words in an ancient book that can be interpreted a thousand ways do your thinking for you, or perhaps more properly circumvent your ability to think, to take the world as it comes, and deal with it standing on your own feet.

“Honey, don’t throw that away! I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.” Mom was holding out her plate for the comically misshapen misfire I was trying to scrape out of the pan. I didn’t used to like pancakes, don’t remember now why. Mom used to like to fix them for my brother Joey and me when we were little and I ate them well enough then. She also used to attempt homemade waffles, using one of those big old-fashioned iron contraptions that had belonged to my grandmother. They were always a disaster, those waffles. Poor Mom. She was forever misjudging the timing, either jerking open the top of the thing too soon, exposing a half-cooked, dripping goop of bubbling yellow-white batter, or way too late, after noticing curls of grayish black smoke coming out of the sides: waffles like blackened rock, like corrugated brick. I can still see the perplexed exasperation on her face and the resignation on my little brother’s.

My third, fourth and fifth pancakes were a lot more successful: golden, slightly fluffy and not too tough. I started adding in pecans halves and small chunks of banana, cocky now. Mom ooh-ed and ahh-ed, hurrying to set the table, pouring the orange juice. I drizzled more batter into the sizzling pan, trying to concentrate and halfway listening to my mother, half lost in my own thoughts. My mind conjured up angry dark faces and full lips twisting in disgust. This one made six; that should be enough, three each. Oh, maybe one more since there wasn’t much batter left anyway. Might as well.

“But there was another caller, finally, a young male,” Mom was saying, “saying something I thought was very important to all those folks using the Bible to justify their attitudes.” I waited, looking from her to the pan and back again.

“He made the point that the Bible says a lot of things” –Right on, I thought sardonically, banishing the faces as I loaded and passed her our plates—“including ‘Do unto others.’ You know, treat others as you would have them treat you? He said ‘I’m not gay myself but I don’t understand how it is that our people can’t see how the way they are acting towards gays is so close to how white people treated us. White people used to say we were only 90% human, that we weren’t their equal, and they used that to defend wanting to deny us full rights, including the right to legally marry each other let alone any other race.’” I was nodding vigorously as I chewed. I started to say something about irony, but the subject had obviously touched a nerve with my mother, and she plowed on, eager to speak her piece as I refilled our juice glasses.

“…And you know something, honey? I think in the back of the minds of a lot of black people is the suspicion, or the fear, that our rights—the rights we fought so hard for forty, fifty years ago—might one day be taken away, and if that ever happens there are certain issues we don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of—you know what I mean?”

That one caught me mid-swallow. I stared at her, not sure I knew at all what she meant. Mom shifted in her chair and leaned across the table towards me, her eyes intense.

“What I’m saying is—well, sort of like what that young man who called in to the show this morning was trying to say. That we seem to be taking our cues about how to feel about gays from whites who feel that way about gays and about us, siding with people who not that long ago didn’t want us in their churches or living on their street or being around their kids in the schools. As though to say, ‘See? There’s no need to discriminate against us, we feel just like you do about all that mess.’”

Ah, yes—I got what she meant. I thought of the writer James Baldwin, who was so outspoken during the civil rights struggles in the 1950s and left the United States to move to Paris, never to return. Baldwin was gay and his vehemence at social injustice was not limited to racist White America but extended as well to bourgeoisie Negroes who would seek to ingratiate themselves to sympathetic whites by incorporating white hypocrisy about class, sex and sexuality.

“When I was about seven years old there was this young gay woman—a girl, really, she was about the same age as your aunts Mary and Maxine, and I think Max said she’d been a classmate at Corpus Christi before she dropped out—anyway, this girl lived somewhere in the neighborhood, I could never figure out where, and no one would tell me. To this day I don’t know how this girl lived or who took care of her or what; her parents had kicked her out of the house and wouldn’t have anything to do with her. We would see her in church on Sunday mornings and after Mass she would come out with all the rest of us and linger for a few minutes, looking around at everybody. And I would watch the way everyone avoided making eye contact with her, nobody would speak to her or even acknowledge her presence. A few people (including your aunt Jean) would glance at her and then shake their heads… and I would pester Mama and Jean and everybody, asking ‘But what did she do? Why won’t anybody talk to her?’”—Here my mother laughed a rueful little laugh and shook her head—“And of course no one would answer me. No one ever told kids anything in those days. Your grandmother would just sigh and say sadly ‘Oh, honey…’ and that was about it.”

“And all this because she way a lesbian?” I asked, frowning. “How did you all even know she was gay?” Mom looked slightly embarrassed.

“Well…she wore men’s clothes, even the hat. Nobody ever saw her dressed any other way. Keep in mind this was in the early ‘40’s and we weren’t used to seeing that. She had a very pretty face, and pretty hair that she’d clipped short and slicked back. And there was something about the way she carried herself—you’d see her walking down the street somewhere and she had this kind of soul brotha strut.” Mom chuckled, remembering. “I used to cross the street when I saw her coming.” Her smile faded and she looked at me guiltily, her eyes pleading. “I was afraid of her and I really didn’t know why, except that I knew—I mean, it had been communicated to me by Mama and everyone else—that she was a bad person for some reason. She wore men’s clothes…”

I was trying not to get impatient with my mother, but all I could think about was how lonely and isolated that girl must have been, how terribly hurt, to be thrown away by her family and neighbors. I was blown away too at her stubbornness and courage in showing up for Catholic Mass each Sunday even though her welcome—or lack thereof—could not have been clearer. How old had she been? Max and Mary were in their teens when my mother, the family youngest, was seven; if this young woman was their contemporary, a classmate, she couldn’t have been much over sixteen. I watched Mom digging into her breakfast and said finally, “You know, you say she was pretty—wait, what was her name, anyway?”

“I dunno.” She shrugged, chewing. “I don’t think I ever learned.” I looked at her. She shrugged again, uncomfortably.

“Okay… well, I’m thinking maybe the menswear was a way of keeping men at bay, you know Mom? She might have liked the clothes, but maybe also they were meant to discourage unwanted attention.”

At this my mother brightened and smiled admiringly at me. “Yes! You know, it hadn’t occurred to me before, but now you say it that could have been it. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that back then.” I snorted. “It doesn’t sound to me like any of you were doing much thinking. You were all so busy being afraid and disapproving of her. All you God-fearing Christians.” Mom flushed and her guilty look returned. I softened. She’d been only seven at the time after all.

“Yes, well... but the weird thing,” she said, frowning a little, “was that there were these two men in the choir at Corpus Christi—they both sang tenor but Teddy, he had a beautiful voice, could have been a professional singer if he’d wanted—and everybody liked and accepted them. Nobody ostracized them. And they were a couple, Lorraine! It took me a quite awhile to get my mind around that, though I don’t know why since they did everything together; they lived together, they came and went everywhere together... They were part of our group, invited to all the parties and get-togethers and social functions we all went to—and they were a couple.”

I smiled, crookedly. “But they never talked about it, did they. Never touched each other, never told any of you, never talked to each other the way a hetero couple would, at least not in you all’s presence—“

My mother shook her head vigorously, her eyebrows up. “—No, they didn’t, and they would mock openly gay men, I mean the femme-y, swishy guys we knew, the hairdressers, you know, the ones who said “Girl” this and “Girlfriend” that, calling them sissies. Everybody called men like that sissies, even when we didn’t think we were being insulting. Freaks—your father used to say that—and sissies.” She looked at me sympathetically, reached out and squeezed my arm. “That girl was ostracized by all of us but Mel and Teddy weren’t. They were our friends. They were one of us.”

We were just about finished. We paused and stared at the dishes and the spoons and the coffee cups on the table. “I wish you all had gotten to know her too, Mom,” I said softly. “I wish you’d at least learned her name.” She sighed again and smiled, gently.

“Me too, sweetheart.”