Dear Aunt Osibe (Oh-zih-bee),
I miss you. I miss your laughter. I miss your fried catfish and hushpuppies. I miss how you told us your stories, one hand on your hip and the other holding a spatula. I miss the depth of your dignity and the straightness of your spine as you opened the gate and walked to the back of the house where you were a maid in Mount Olive, North Carolina. I miss your determination to never bow down or give in to those White folks who insisted you enter through the back door, even though they called you “one of the family.”
I will never know what it cost you to go around the back of that house all those days, all those years — even deep in the 1970s, when my family came South from Brooklyn, New York, and I sat in the back seat of the car and waved goodbye to you, always confused about why you never entered through the front door. What I do know is that taking all those trips to Mount Olive for family reunions on my mother’s side, and watching you disappear around back, left an indelible mark on my young soul, a mark that was both painful and hopeful.
Dear Uncle Ernest, I miss you and your laughter, too. I remember looking for your radiant face in the airport terminal crowd when you picked me up that time I came to visit you and Aunt Ophelia on my own. I remember how you locked eyes with your beloved wife and beamed her one of your soulful smiles when we got back to your house. Despite enduring incorrigible incivility at the hands of White folks in your rural hometown, you had become the first Black person in South Carolina to earn a commercial pilot’s license, and you went on to train dozens of courageous young Black pilots later known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
I will never know what it cost you to outlast and overcome the worst of what Jim Crow inflicted as you worked as a pilot and a flight instructor. What I do know is that taking those trips to Columbia, South Carolina, for family reunions on my father’s side, and listening to your stories about wars overseas and wars across town, left another indelible mark on my soul, a mark that was both painful and hopeful.
These marks are painful because this nation that you honored with your service and sacrifice, Uncle Ernest – this nation that relegated you to the back door, Aunt Osibe – continues the same painful patterns of hateful, racist, xenophobic, White supremacist, patriarchal politics that you endured throughout your lives. This nation continues to incarcerate Black and brown people disproportionately. This nation continues to dismantle the voting rights that you and your contemporaries risked your lives to obtain. This nation recently inaugurated a president whose hateful and hurtful rhetoric mimics what you heard in the 1950s and 1960s.
Nevertheless, the unbridled joy and irrepressible hope with which you lived also left a mark on me. If you could be people of hope despite being born into Black sharecropping families in the early 1900s in North and South Carolina, if you could be people of joy despite being mistreated by a nation that never saw your inherent worth, if you could be consistently civil as your rights were consistently trampled, then I cannot and I will not dishonor your legacy by sidelining joy and forfeiting hope now.
Aunt Osibe and Uncle Ernest, as a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – a denomination into which you were not welcomed when you were alive – I feel your hands at my back every time I enter the front door of church sanctuaries and declare the truths upon which you stood. I take your wisdom and courage with me every time I teach young Black pastors to hold onto faith, hope, joy and love in the often combative work of ministry.
Thank you both for embodying all that is civil and right.
I promise I won’t let you down.
I love you.
