I don’t remember my mother’s face. Not the warmth of her smile or her loving embrace. In fact, I don’t have one memory of her at all. Sherly Ann Lacey. In a drugged-out rage, my sister’s father took her life one night while she slept. Using a shotgun, he blew her brains onto a wall. She was due to have his second child any day.
Naturally the event devastated my, her, family. She was the first of my grandmother’s eleven children to be lost so early in life.
Many will believe it was my mom’s murder that first shaped my life, but that’s not true. It was people’s reaction to it that molded who I became, shaped the conclusions I would draw in life and how I’d react to pain, loss and various levels of devastation that serve as markers in every life.
Nature verses nurture? Nurture wins hands down every time. It’s people who shape people. Hard scrabble environments do not create hard hearts or ill-formed souls. People do.
Louise Lacey, my grandmother, herself a quiet, ‘nurtured’ woman, raised my sister and I. A beauty in her day, giving birth to eleven children by three different men, and being subject to my great-grandmother, who might well have been the basis for a character from Walter Mosely’s Los Angeles, my grandmother eased into a grand-motherly figure. Love.
By the time of my mother’s murder, my granny was an old hand with children. Panic after a miss-deed or the bright blood from an accident didn’t send her reeling. When her brother beat his wife, she’d complain about the noise – after a while…
Hers was the knowledge of survival. Coming of age in the 40’s and 50’s as a black woman was as hard as it was complex. You cried when you couldn’t hold it in any longer. Then you simply dusted yourself off and did the next thing needed to survive. Tough.
I’m surely being too simple, short, and impatient with the telling of her depth of spirit, her staunch faith in God and her unshakable commitment to her family. Like the moon, she’s a silent force that has affected every part of me.
If my granny’s footprint in life was quiet, it was only because my great grand-mother’s, Josie Frederick-Hintz, was so loud. At six foot in her socks, ‘Big Joe’ was a demanding, sharp-tongued, physical woman. She chewed tobacco, ran a whore house and carried a .38 revolver until the day she died – not for show or as a bluff.
Born in 1911 in Louisiana, Big Joe had owned a grocery store, bowling alley, brothel, after-hours gambling den and a total of five different rental properties throughout Los Angeles. She pinned her money in a silk pouch to her bra.
Josie gave birth to two children and raised her brother’s son after his murder. Systemic racism, sexism, abject poverty, rape, molestation, robbery, abuse, beatings, murder, jealous, insecure and ambitious men, their equally motivated, if shrewder, counter-parts in women – Josie not only survived it all in the big city as a veraciously stunning beauty, she was also able to, at times, win herself a few slices of pie.
But those pieces of ‘white only pie’ come at a cost. Josie’s size in life demanded control and that others, people she loved, be smaller in life to make room for the demands of who she needed to be – the boss!
Her biological son, my great-uncle Bill, Jr., was a con who became a homosexual after being violently raped in prison. He was serving time for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury notes, five dollar bills. Her brother’s son, Lemule, would become a vicious, small time pimp.
Large personalities, small egos, violent drama, they were characters you couldn’t make up. My grandfather was from a cattle ranch in Texas, a pimp and hustler who discharged from the army in California.
They were all largely uneducated people save by life itself. Like the rest of us, they had flaws. The one that has been a prominent force in my life was their silence. They seemed to need to marshal their energies to hold it all in and to move forward.
Through my self-education while in prison, I’ve become fairly articulate, but I remember the silence of a time before I became a reader, before I saw the value of language and communication, before I learned to read, comprehend and apply ideas to further my own understanding of me, my world, my actions. Silence.
I know how the lack of the ability to express one’s self in words pushes the thunder of action deep into one’s ears. You’re not deaf… there is no sound!
I came up in the 80’s, MTV, BET, videos, PC, crack victims, empires and hip-hop culture. My family’s silence was a foreign language subtitled on silent film.
Now listen! We all believe our own struggles to be the worst. It’s that forest through the trees thing. But by growing up never having a single meaningful conversation with the adults in my life, I kind of raised myself. I sat waiting for something or someone to influence me, but no one ever took notice.
We are all born into motion. That’s what life is – motion. A body in motion will stay in motion until it’s acted upon by an equal and opposite force. I crashed into Mr. Michael B. Huston.
Teenagers, kids, are like vacuum chambers that suck up everything indiscriminately. Facts, emotions, ideas, words, anything floating through their lives. Sadly, sometimes, the adults who rear them contribute the most trash to the bombardment when they are the primary force policing the intake. They may sit back, looking confused and even offended as the young life bursts for lack of any meaningful release. At around thirteen to fifteen or so, they act out, rebel at the mistreatment.
Now, I grew up on violence without ever being told it was wrong to do this or that to people. Not simply the violence put forth by the men of my family and neighborhood against the women of my home and in my world, but poverty creates its own hellish acceptance of might as a viable means, be it for respect or fear.
When my father, the Baptist preacher, found out I’d been doing robberies when I’d shot and paralyzed Mr. Huston – then an Assistant Attorney General to the State of Oregon – he expressed shock and hurt. “How could you do something so obviously wrong?!” I remember him blurting over the phone as I sat in a juvenile detention center.
The answer, though I didn’t know how to articulate it as a seventeen year old, was that I really didn’t know that it was all that big a deal, that people would place such a huge value on life.
That will sound twisted to some, but as a child it was extremely remedial to me. This may go a long way in explain the Black Lives Matter movement to some. I’d just tried to kill ‘myself’ a few months earlier. There was no panic, anger, or fear from the community. There was no rush to review the issue before various boards. As a child, I never received care or treatment for my mental health.
I’d ingested a small mountain of heart, blood pressure and pain pills. Then I got into bed. I remember passing out. Kids test the boundaries of their world. I didn’t believe I wanted to deal with any more pain in my life, so as no one was ever looking, I sought to move on.
If my life, my ‘black life’ didn’t matter to the world, why would I come to the conclusion as a child that his white one did? Not that race was a factor for me or Mr. Huston at the time. The justice system made that point emphatically.
I was thoroughly and completely confused. As I sat in Court, it was like returning to Central Park, only to find it’s been moved! You know the address, turn the corner, and it’s not there! But how could you, I, be that wrong?
“How could I do something so obviously wrong – ‘to another’?” is the unspoken end to the question.
It’s a question of value(s). Poor, uneducated black boys and girls are taught in a plethora of ways that they have little to no value. So why does it come as such a shock when their value of others falls short in word or deed?
The best lies ever told take place in the vacuum of the mind, there’s no one other to refute, challenge, or evaluate them. So, speak the thought, the feeling, and force the conversation out into the ‘now’. It’s the thing that gives value to human beings… love spoken into a life that is loved – valued, even.
ABOUT THE WRITER. Mr. Jones has an honest and thought provoking style of writing that is exciting to work with. I look forward to hearing more of his insight as well as more of his life’s experiences. Mr. Jones has served 32 years for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old. He can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482
777 Stanton Blvd.
Ontario, OR 97914
