Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone by Itabari Njeri

Description:

With the passionate lyricism of a Maya Angelou and the sharply edged wit of a young Lillian Hellman, award-winning journalist Itabari Njeri creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the extraordinary family in which she grew up., Njeri’s memoir is improbable, complex, grandly dramatic; from her grandmother Ruby, a West Indian matriarch with a devastating tongue and a reverence for Marcus Garvey and Queen Elizabeth, to her father, a brilliant Marxist historian, to her own travels to Georgia to track down the man who killed her grandfather, Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone is a passionate account of a woman finding herself in a world filled with obstacles, from racism to a surfeit of unreliable men.

Excerpt:

Black people in Bainbridge had told me my grandfather was buried in Pineview Cemetery. “It’s the black cemetery in the white part of town,” said Anne Smith, seventy-eight, an elegant, retired schoolteacher. Granddaddy had delivered her baby. “The white cemetery is in the black part of town,” she said.

I headed for the white part of town.

The streets were unfamiliar. I had only been to Bainbridge twice before, in the late fifties.

Mama and I had flown to Tallahassee from New York City. Granddaddy had picked us up and driven the forty-two miles north to Bainbridge, Georgia’s “first inland port,” population 12,714, then. The town lies in the southwest corner of the state, north of Attapulgus, south of Camilla.

My grandfather had moved there in 1935 after his residency at Brewster Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. Shortly before, he’d divorced my Jamaican-born grandmother, Ruby Duncombe Lord, to marry Madelyn Parsons, a much younger woman. Ruby never had a kind word to say about Granddaddy. Their marital problems were myriad, but among them was her refusal to move to the Jim Crow South from New York. “I’ll not step aside for any white people,” she boldly claimed. What she really felt, I suspect, was justifiable fear of a life filled with terrorism. But Bainbridge needed a black doctor, so Granddaddy went.

I spent two summers with my grandfather, and a few holidays. I was about four the first time we met, and properly outfitted for the occasion in a brilliant yellow, silk- and- satin-trimmed peignoir. I believed myself devastating. But the straps kept slipping. The sleeves kept sliding. I didn’t care. Granddaddy hugged me and chased me in circles around the house till we fell down laughing on the floor.

“Oh, Granddaddy, I don’t feel so well,” I’d tease.

“We can’t have that,” he’d say. Then he’d run, get his black bag, and pretend to prepare an injection.

“No, no. I’m fine, Grandpa.” He’d chase me again.

“Sure you’re fine now?”

“I’m sure.” I squealed and ran myself silly. He’d catch me, hug me and tickle me to tears.

Now I was searching for his grave.

The weather was windy, cold, very gray. In the car, outside the cemetery, I sat searching for my sunglasses. I kept fumbling for them, in my purse, under the seat. I had not cried once.

It was my third day in town. I had talked to dozens of people who knew him, trying to reconstruct his life and death. I wanted to be professionally detached, unemotional. I cursed the missing sunglasses.

Thirteen minutes later I gave up and stepped out of the rented car.

I began walking around the southern rim of the graveyard. His would be a big tombstone, I was sure.

“Was he good?” repeated L.H.B. Foote incredulously. “One of the best. He never stopped trying to learn medicine and that makes any doctor good.” Leonard Hobson Buchanan Foote, M.D., did not look his eighty-five years. We had sat in his Tallahassee home on the Florida A&M University campus. For forty years he had been the director of student medical services there. He had been one of my grandfather’s closest friends.

They entered Howard University the same year. “The freshman class of 1918,” Foote said. The year before, my grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Georgetown, Guyana, then a British colony.

“I was just a boy from Maryland,” Foote said, “born and reared just north of Baltimore.” Granddaddy, he recalled, “was tall, slender, a nice-looking young colored man with a foreign accent. I’d say, ‘Man, I can’t understand you. What are you saying?’ He’d say, ‘You just listen real good. I speak the King’s English.’ I said, ‘What king?’ He said, ‘The King of England.’ ‘You’re one of those West Indians, huh?’

‘Yeah, what’s wrong with that?’ ‘Not a thing,’ I said. ‘Welcome here, brother.’

“I felt like I had lost a brother when he died. He had a lot of whites who were his friends, some of them were his patients.”

But, he said, Granddaddy had been the object of some resentment. There are, explained Foote, “three things that the southern white man has tried over the years to keep out of the hands of blacks—education, money and social rank. Your grandfather had all that.”

As I walked to the western edge of the graveyard, I heard voices nearby. Several houses lined the western perimeter of the cemetery. I stared at the windows looking out on the tombstones.

“Rumor was, one of the boys in the car could look out of his kitchen window and see Daddy’s grave,” my Aunt Earlyne had told me.

I searched for nearly an hour. Finally, I reached the north end. About fifty feet ahead of me I spotted a gray marble headstone.

I stepped closer to the tombstone, a solitary monument in a twenty-foot-square plot. It was the biggest headstone in the cemetery: The Family of Dr. E A R Lord.

I stared standing in the cold. I wiped my nose. In the crevice of the chiseled letters that formed the word “of,” dirt and rain had left a sooty streak. It was the only smudge on the stone. Unconsciously, I leaned forward and began to wipe the stain with the pink Kleenex in my hand. I rubbed hard against the marble. The tissue frayed and disintegrated in the wind.

On the slab of marble that covered his grave was the symbol of the medical profession, the caduceus with its entwined serpents on a winged staff. Engraved in the stone was his full name: Edward Adolphus Rufus Lord Sr. M.D.

They called him Earl Lord for short. He was born July 26, 1897, in Georgetown, Guyana. He died October 30, 1960, in Bainbridge, Georgia.