Jeremy

During my recent trip to New York, I met for the first time, my cousin Jeremy who has been estranged from my family for most of his life. I am still working through it, and here are my thoughts on it so far, as they unravel. Our fathers, the two oldest in a large, black, Southern Baptist family of nine children, were brothers. Jeremy stops by briefly to visit me early on Memorial Day at my grandmother’s apartment. He is tall and broad shouldered, his height is closer to that of my father’s than his own. Immediately, there is a familiarity about him, something in his manner that shows a gentleness of spirit and confident walk that is always present in the Pelt men, something that I see in my oldest son. He walks through the doorway and for a fleeting moment there is a pain in my chest and my breath catches in my throat. It is the same feeling I have sometimes when I look at my uncles or when my cousin Donalda tilts her head or a smiles in a certain way that reminds me of my father.

My father died when I was 12, Jeremy’s died when we were two (we were born 8 months apart). His father died suddenly in a car accident, mine died after years of illness spent in and out of the hospital. We feel the pain of the loss equally but in different ways. We both grew up far away from the environments that our father’s had been raised in, and spent summer’s visiting our grandmother’s in New York. Soon before my father died my parents moved to Texas and I was raised in the suburbs of Dallas by my liberal, feminist, white mother, which sometimes leaves me on the outer edge during large family gatherings. When his father died, Jeremy’s mother lost touch with the family and he was raised in California. Jeremy is now a professional jazz musician, a gift he gets from his father’s family (our uncle Ike played the trumpet for Marine Corp Marching Band, and my father was a professional actor, singer and pianist).

Unlike Jeremy, I always had a thread, no matter how thin, that connected me to that part of my history and where I came from. I visited our grandmother and cousins regularly as a child, allowing me to maintain a tenuous grasp to my father’s people. I grew up hearing stories about what it was like for my father growing up in segregated NYC, struggling to establish his identity as an artist, and an intellectual in a society that expected little of him other than to become a manual labor, or perhaps, a minister. My father talked to me about how it felt for him to be poor child, and the son of a minister, growing up in the Harlem projects, a culture that was an odd juxtaposition of poverty and excess. His parents encouraged service, Bible study, and giving back to the community, while his friends in the neighborhood sought to stem the pain of poverty and living in a racist society by creating a new culture all their own. Much of that culture was defined by material goods such as stylish clothes, excess jewelry, and flashy cars, external proof that they were worthy. He told me about how when he went away to college at Howard University, the first thing he did was overspend his budget of hard earned money saved from years of working at the Post Office, to buy a new wardrobe so that he could be the “Cool Kitty from New York City�.

My dad also told stories about Jeremy’s father, Uncle Tim. He talked about how Tim, the shortest of the boys in the family, was always the first to get to the table. Although I don’t remember my Uncle Tim, I grew up knowing that his favorite food was waffles, and how he beat everyone to the table early on Sunday morning’s for breakfast. I know that Tim, like my father dreamt of fame that would catapult him out of poverty. Both were struggling actors, who tried hard to strike a balance between breaking away from the mold set by what they saw as the too involved, closed- minded, family, they had grown up in, while maintaining a relationship with a family they knew loved. As children of a minister, growing up in Harlem, expectations were many, but opportunities were few. My protective grandparents struggled to keep their children in touch with their roots of southern culture and religiosity as they entered adulthood during a time of civil rights, free love, drugs, and self discovery that was the 60’s and 70’s.

I decide to go see Jeremy perform at a bar a few nights later. On the subway ride back, I try to fill him in on the little I know of our family. I tell the stories I remember about his father. I speak of how my dad often became frustrated as he tried to pull his younger and brother and sisters away from the sinking undertow that was life on 129th street. We talk about what it was like to grow up without the comfort of an extended family. It is difficult, I have little to share, I grew up far away and with experiences that were different from many of my cousins. I have a hard time talking about my father, a void in my life that I still feel all too strongly. Like Jeremy, I am one of those who got out. The circumstances of my life, no matter how difficult at times, I cannot begin to touch the desperation that they have grown up in. Although I have struggled financially at some points in my life, the middle class values, education, and even my light skin, have afforded me opportunities far from the culture of poverty and hopelessness that comes with growing up in the projects. Yet I often envy them, as I sit on the outside of their camaraderie at large family gatherings. I have been back to NY to visit my father’s family once in the 10 years since I have been married.

A few nights later, we have a family dinner at an Italian restaurant, to celebrate my visit. An uncle and 9 grandchildren are present. My grandmother sits quietly in the middle of it all, smiling, and proud, the Queen of Harlem, happy we are all together. Jeremy and I are sitting next to each other, encircled by relatives who stubbornly treat us with a familiarity that is as if we had never been gone. We lean our heads together for a moment, struggling to hear one another over the noisy laughter at a nearby table, as I ask him to refill my water glass. My Uncle Butch looks over at us, and mistaking the action for one of intimacy, asks us to lean in more as he snaps our photo from across the table. It is an awkward moment, yet as I look at the image of the two of us in the digital camera moments later, I am surprised at what I see. There we are, looking just like Family.