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One year, 8 months and 5 days out: memories of my second mother

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Good morning on this frigid mid-January day. I’ve got both wood-stoves fired up in my cabin, and am letting my chainsaw thaw out inside before heading out to the nearby tornado battleground to cut more heavy heat for the house. I hope all of you are well and warm, that you know where your water is, and that it’s not frozen solid.

This week, I am sure many of us are assessing just what Barack Obama's election says about our nation's racial progress, regardless of whether or not we voted for him. President Obama has often recognized and honored those Black leaders in our nation’s history who paved the way for this day. I want to take a minute to share with you a little story that shows that the way was also paved by the strength, kindness and moral compass of many unknown and unnamed white Southerners. People like my second mother, Mrs. Lilla Rosamond of Columbus, Mississippi, who died Monday night at the age of 98.

I've been thinking about Miz Lilla ever since I learned of her death. There are so many good things I can say about her and her family. Miz Lilla was born into one of the more prominent families in north-east Mississippi, a family wealthy enough to have both an in-town mansion and a country plantation. Unlike many who are born to privilege, however, Miz Lilla’s family was also wealthy for its willingness to serve their community and to help those who couldn’t help themselves. Her grandparents donated the land for the first public school in my hometown, Franklin Academy, that still stands directly across the street from their beautiful antebellum home. Miz Lilla’s father almost singlehandedly funded our small town’s YMCA and donated the land for its summer camp on the banks of the Tombigbee river, a camp that still exists in the hazy summertime memories of many, including me. So public service was nothing new to this privileged daughter of the antebellum South. But one of my first exposures to her still remains one of my most lasting impressions and one of the best examples of what quiet courage looks like.

Back in the mid 60s, when I first met her son Bill (who would become one of my best friends), I was invited to eat lunch at their mansion, a very formal affair with a butler bringing each course. During lunch, Miz Lilla called her house staff (all Black) into the dining room and asked them, one by one, whether they were registered to vote yet in the upcoming election. There were several who said (timidly) that they had not yet registered, which (in retrospect) should have not been surprising given the risk to employment, life and limb that greeted most Black folks who tried to vote in those Mississippi burning days.

So, after lunch, Miz Lilla walked the few blocks to the courthouse with those house staff who were not yet registered and stood beside each one of them as they completed the paperwork necessary to exercise their franchise. Through her silent, unyielding (and very Southern aristocratic) presence, Miz Lilla was determined to prevent any barriers to full participation in the democratic process being imposed on people who she knew and cared for, some of whom from families that had served her own family for generations. As a result, neither she nor her Black house staff got so much as a peep out of the local election registrar that day. A few weeks later, I believe she also accompanied her staff as they went to vote, most for the first time in their lives.

Back then, my young, naive self thought that Miz Lilla’s actions were intrusive or, at the least, patronizing. Of course, as a young White son of another long-time local family, I was pretty clueless then to the real (and too often fatal) risks that Blacks faced trying to vote in my hometown, which was less than an hour away from where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, three young civil rights workers, had just been murdered and buried as back-fill in a farm pond dam. Thinking back on it now, I realize that Miz Lilla was placing her own standing (and perhaps her own safety) in the community aside in favor of the greater good. Most folks would not have thought of her as a civil rights activist but, by those actions, Miz Lilla proved to be just the sort of person -- a moral, democratic matriarch -- that our nation had to have in order to break down Jim Crow laws and racist practices in Columbus, MS and throughout the South.

Over the years, Miz Lilla would model for me many times what graciousness and good sense looked like in practice. Two other memories help reflect that. About two weeks before I entered Vanderbilt University in the fall of 1967, my Dad and I had the kind of argument that often occurs when youthful arrogance clashes with world-weary, whiskey-fueled “wisdom”. Dad and I argued long and loud that night about the Vietnam war (a slippery slope) and about my high-school girlfriend (another really slippery slope at the time too). The reasons for our opposing positions mattered little – what mattered was my Dad’s utterance of those magic words: “Well, if you’re going to live under my roof, you’ll do as I say” (and, by implication, “believe as I believe.”)

Just to prove that my head was as hard as my Dad’s, I went to my room, packed up what I could and left. Like most teenagers at that moment, I had no idea what to do next. So I drove to the Rosamond home. Miz Lilla and I sat in her formal living room and talked for an hour about what had just happened. Then she did two things. She invited me to stay with them until I left for college. Then, when I went upstairs to sleep, she got on the phone to my father, told him I was safe and asked whether he would mind if she sheltered me for a while. From that evening on, Miz Lilla’s home was always open to me whenever I needed a place to stay. She knew that the heat of the moment between my Dad and me would pass and, within a year, it did. However, I did decide to maintain my financial independence from him from that point forward, and ended up paying my own way through my four years at Vanderbilt. Years later, Dad joked that he was half-sorry that he hadn’t been able to provoke similar arguments with my four siblings, because it would have saved him lots of college tuition money.

The other strong memory of Miz Lilla that is with me today involves the constant attention that she gave my friend Bill’s only daughter, Julia. Julia was born profoundly retarded, needing supervision then and now (almost two decades later). Since Bill and his wife Lynn shared the family home, Miz Lilla was always there for her grand-daughter. When Julia was about six years old, she loved to climb the winding staircase in the Rosamond house. It didn’t matter that, by then, Miz Lilla was in her late 70s. As long as Julia’s energy lasted, Miz Lilla would walk those stairs with her, up and down, up and down, for hours it seemed. The image of Miz Lilla holding tight to Julia’s hand as they climbed those steps together, over and over again, helps define for me what unconditional love and unwavering maternal commitment looks like. As sorry as I am for Bill as he grieves the loss of his mother, my heart really aches for Julia, unable to communicate still but knowing (I am sure) that her world is now without Miz Lilla’s warm and constant touch, her quiet, gentle voice. What a gray, cold world this must now be for that beautiful young woman.

If some future dictionary places photographs beside words to illustrate their meaning, Miz Lilla Rosamond's picture will grace the word, "Lady". I owe my broader and more inclusive world view in part to Miz Lilla, just as I know more clearly what having the “courage to change the things I can” looks like in practice. More than some of you reading this, I do know how far we've come and how much better this world is for the brave women and men who came before. Miz Lilla helped recreate our region and our country, a country that now has a place both for President Barack Obama and for my family's own beautiful, biracial darling, my great goddaughter Grace.

So here's to all the people throughout history on whose shoulders President Obama is now raised the strong, sweat-stained Black male ones and the wisteria and lacewrapped White female ones. Miz Lilla, you are surely and sorely missed. But you definitely left this world a better place.

Yes we can. Because (yes) a few brave people like Miz Lilla did what had to be done. Miz Lilla practiced her principles in all her affairs, back during Mississippi’s own dark ages when it was her turn to do the next right thing. A loving, moral Southern matriarch -- made of silk and steel.

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