Raise It Up
Sometimes Liberation takes a different kind of Love
(Hang in there with me) Sometimes it takes a different kind of love to raise a child
(So don't give up) So don't give up
(When pressures come down) Sometimes it takes a different kind of dream to make you smile
(So raise it up) So raise it up
(Hang in there with me) Sometimes it takes another helping hand to show you the way
(So don't give up) Oh yeah
(When pressures come down) Sometimes it seems impossible
That's why we pray (So raise it up)
—Jamia Simone Nash, “Raise It Up” from the film, August Rush
This post is in honor of Juneteenth, and the woman who first taught me what Love and Liberation meant.
I was raised by a woman named Lillie Mae Bell (photo above). Born to former sharecroppers in Louisiana, Lillie was 33 years-old when she first came to work for my family. I was two years-old. She was with us for over thirty years. She raised our family: my young parents, my brother and I, and, years later, my own son. And I use the word “raise” on purpose. I’m not talking about parenting; I’m talking about something else.
Now, before people get up in arms and start calling me a racist or screaming about White Privilege, let me clarify: I grew up in the South in the Sixties, in which African-American women often worked as housekeepers and nannies for White families. Yes, think The Help. And yes, my family could afford help. I’m not in the least condoning the heart-wrenching conditions that made housekeeping one of the few choices these Black women had, and I am not lambasting the modest wealth my parents had that allowed them to hire help. I am well aware of privilege and it’s lack and the systemic ills that made it so. It wasn’t fair or right, but it was what it was. We’re still working on it.
Yes, it’s Juneteenth, but this isn’t a story about history, politics, economics, race or injustice. This is a story about a remarkable woman to whom I owe so much. Without being the least bit romantic or hyperbolic, Lillie was my mother, my teacher, and the first person who showed me what God looked like. What God felt like. What it meant to truly love. And when I was a child, the color of her skin made not one ounce of difference, even if I came to understand that it made a difference to others. As she used to say, she was “The grandmother of the family.” And she was. I loved her unconditionally.
During the week, Lillie was at our house, cooking, cleaning, bandaging boo-boos and tucking us into bed with prayers. But on the weekends, my little brother and I were often at her house, a ramshackle shotgun shack in the Fourth Ward, or “Freedman’s Town,” the first neighborhood in Houston in which freed slaves were allowed to live after Juneteenth. In the shadow of the glass skyscrapers, a handful of extended families eeked out their livings among free-roaming chickens, stray dogs, and rapacious landlords.
Lillie lived with her elderly mother, Margaret, her blind father Brother Mack, her adopted sister, Beverly (who was my brother’s age and like our sister), an occasional husband (she had 4, or maybe 6, I lost track) and a rotating community of neighborhood mothers, babies, children, old men and young boys that Lillie put to work to give them some sense of purpose and worth. The kitchen was perpetually churning out chicken and cornbread, and people came and went all day and night. There was always something happening at Lillie’s.
But most of what was happening was church.
Just across the dusty, empty lot beside Lillie’s house, another tiny, dilapidated shack with “Jesus Loves You” scrawled on the side in flaking red paint served as the neighborhood church. Lillie and her mother, Margaret, were the pastors, and Sunday mornings were full-on preaching, singing and testifying to a packed house. People old and young crammed into the pews and folding chairs, dressed in their Sunday best: women in their church hats; men trading their work clothes for second-hand suits; and kids in hand-me down dresses, ties that hung down to their knees, and patched patent leather shoes that were often a few sizes too big.
For hours, the residents of Freedmen’s Town prayed and sang, danced and cried, and raised their hearts to God. There was no choir, no fancy, stained glass, no sense of religious restraint. People poured their hearts and souls into song, even though the only instruments were an out of tune piano played by Brother Mack, and a handful of broken tambourines. But it didn’t matter because the joyful noise that shook the rafters of that little shack raised the Heavens.
Sunday after Sunday, my brother and I, two little Jewish kids, sang and danced and prayed with the rest of the congregation. We had no idea what we were saying or singing, but it didn’t matter. It was fun and filled us with a kind of joy we didn’t have in daily chapel at the Episcopal school we attended or the synagogue we went to on Saturdays. Brother Mack even taught my brother how to play piano on that old upright with missing keys (my brother is now a concert pianist and orchestra conductor), and “Amazing Grace” was one of the first songs he ever played in public…at that church.
Mostly, we listened to Margaret and Lillie preach, until Margaret passed on, and Lillie had the pulpit to herself. Lillie could preach. We are talking PREACH! Largely uneducated (she dropped out of school at 6th grade), but filled with a passion for life and God, Lillie went way beyond quoting scripture; she raised souls. She shared stories of her own life: working long hours as a child in a dangerous Poultry House (which, for years, I thought was a Poetry House); becoming best friends with Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels; failed marriages; grief at never having children of her own; and the hardships of others in her community. She even told stories about my brother and I, our struggles at school and the pains of growing up with parents who had their own problems.
Lillie raised these personal stories to level of parable, and used them to teach about love, faith, community, freedom, and perseverance. She taught humility and pride, acceptance, and the fight for justice. Hers was a prophetic voice, but it overflowed with love. She held each and every tale close to her heart. Our lives – my brother and I, and even our parents - and the lives of her neighbors weren’t separate. We were all human, and we all suffered, and we all learned to overcome through love, faith and connection.
When we all streamed out of the church, sweaty and spent, we were elevated. We were “raised.” We were all connected to one another, and to that ineffable spirit that made us feel alive - God, Source, Life.
And we were hungry. Set up in the dusty yard, the Sunday spread was manna from Heaven. We ate, we laughed, we hugged, and joined the other kids chasing the chickens that Lillie promised to put in the pot. By the time our parents came to pick us up, my brother and I were covered in dust, exhausted, full of fried chicken and love, and happy.
But it wasn’t just at church that Lillie raised us. Over cups of coffee at the breakfast table, she listened to my young mother’s tales of woe. She held her when she cried. When my father came home from work, she always had fresh-baked brownies waiting for him (he has a killer sweet-tooth) and listened as he talked about challenges at the office, encouraging him. And when my brother and I came home from school, she sat with us as we worked our painful way through Latin and Algebra, pretending she understood as we tried to teach her how to conjugate verbs or add fractions. And when my first boyfriend broke up with me, she dried my tears and told me not to worry because “There was another bus coming.” She held us when we hurt, sang to cheer us up, and prayed for us constantly. She wasn’t unaware of the differences between us, but she never judged us and she never appeared as if she had better things to do than listen to us whine. She was just present and supportive.
Yet, it wasn’t even so much what she did, as what she exuded. She simply was love. For her (in her own words), “Love has no color.” I cannot, for the life of me, remember a time that Lillie raised her voice or expressed anything other than unconditional acceptance to anyone in my family or in her own. Even when she talked about her own struggles and marriage problems (and there were many), she never bad-mouthed the system that kept her poor, other people, the men who left her, cheated on her, or hit her. She didn’t excuse it, but she didn’t let her turn her into a victim or make her angry at God. It never dampened her ability to love.
I came to realize that it was her deep faith that enabled her to love the way she did. She trusted God unconditionally. God was her rock. Her redeemer. Her source of freedom, strength, and comfort. I didn’t have the faith she had, and, at the time, I didn’t understand it, but I knew that nothing – nothing – would ever shake it.
A few years after a new job took my son, husband, and I across the country, I returned to Houston and went to visit her. She was sitting in the sweltering summer heat in her bare, darkened living room in the one tattered armchair she owned, struggling with the end-stage symptoms of diabetes and congestive heart failure: the results of a life of poverty in a world that didn’t care. Over bottles of Coke (her favorite that she wasn’t supposed to have), we reminisced, laughed, cried and talked for hours, and I offered to take her to see a doctor, instead of waiting until she was so sick that she had to be rushed to the charity hospital emergency room again.
She declined. “God will provide, Baby. God will provide.”
I had heard her say that my whole life, and while I knew she believed it, I wasn’t sure I did. I told her that God was providing me – and I was taking her to the doctor.
She smiled and laughed and pulled me to her with a giant hug that instantly transported me back to childhood. I could have stayed in that embrace forever. “Ain’t that so, baby girl,” she said. “Ain’t that so.”
We never made it to the doctor.
A few days later, I was back in Vermont, driving to work, listening to Ani di Franco’s “Amazing Grace” on the CD player, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I burst into gut-wrenching, uncontrollable sobbing. I had to pull over to get myself together, but all I could think was, “Someone has to sing that at Lillie’s funeral, and I can’t sing!”
In a funk all day, I returned home that evening to learn that Lillie had died. For days, I wailed – wailed - (I’m actually crying as I type this). It was as if God Himself (If I believed in that God) had died. A part of me had been ripped out and in its place was an unfathomably deep, empty hole. Now I knew what people must have felt at the crucifixion. Love was gone.
At Lillie’s funeral, person after person, young and old, got up to speak about her and the influence she had on them. The common themes were the fierceness of her faith, how deeply she loved, and how her love raised them to not just to God, but also to their own worthiness. How free they felt in her presence. Even my normally stoic, restrained father stood up, tears rolling down his face, and shared how, in all his life, he had never met anyone else who showed him what unconditional love looked and felt like, and how in her sight, he felt valued.
We sang “Amazing Grace,” and I did my best to stay on key through my tears. I really can’t sing.
It's been almost thirty years since she passed, and I still hear Lillie’s voice and her laugh almost every day. Whenever I start to forget my worthiness or feel unloved, whenever freedom feels far away, whenever I feel myself get angry at God or at others, or whenever I feel ready to pack it all in and give up, I hear her say, “Raise it up, Baby. Raise it up.”
And then I feel her arms around me, and for those few moments, I am truly loved, truly worthy, truly free, and truly raised.
Such beautiful recollections of a pure and loving soul.
Truly wonderful memories of a remarkable messenger of Good and God