Remembering My Cousin, Pearlie Mae

I wrote in the guest book of her obituary:

Pearlie Mae. What can I say.
On my family tree.
A cousin but like a big sister to me.
Part of my history.
Here when I arrived.
Could always count on her love.
In my heart she will always reside.

She was a prominent member on our branch of the Windham/Windom family tree. Our grandmother’s Lillie (hers) and Alma (mine) were sisters. It’s hard believing that she’s now resting in peace with those two extraordinary women.

Her obituary states how selfless and loyal she was to family and friends and confidantes and I sure got a sense of that early on in life.

There aren’t many people like her. I mean how many teenage girls would let a little sweaty playful boy in grade school tag along on her dates, for goodness sake? If some of those dudes’ glares could have been manifested through other parts of their bodies I’d still have finger prints around my neck or I’d be at the bottom of a pool of water in a rocky outcropping in Sabino Canyon with cement blocks tied to my feet. She would instruct them to “Take this ball and play catch with him” as I reacted like a tail wagging puppy eager to fetch. I was way more than they bargained for as they, of course, would have preferred to, rather than race me in the park to some chinaberry tree, make out with her underneath the tree. But all they could do was grumble because I was part of the deal. Her love for me was real.

When I look back I can see that our existence was like a snippet of Black History, a story of our people’s struggle. We both, in my early years of life, lived in true shotgun apartments, with short barrels, if you will, where you could trip at the front door and regain your balance at the back door. Mine had indoor plumbing that barely worked, with a toilet that seemed to have supported one butt too many. Hers had one outhouse for all the tenants featuring a toilet with an overhead tank that flushed by pulling down on a rope which appeared to have just one more tug left. That bathroom made the slop-jar high on a list of things to buy the next time you were in Sears & Roebuck – if you could afford one and if you couldn’t then you, as the saying goes, “didn’t have a pot to piss in.” At Pearlie Mae’s house they had two or three and when I spent the nights there my chore was emptying them. Hey, no wonder she was so nice to me (smile).

Our abodes were so rundown that I thought, in my innocence, that we surely must have been living in them for free, especially after visiting the homes that both Pearlie Mae’s mom, Bessie, and mine cleaned long before my mother got a job worthy of her Howard University degree. Homes with living rooms. Dining rooms. Guest rooms. Sometimes two or three bathrooms. Dens. Offices. Dumb waiters.

But we had dignity and much of my sense of decency and morality stems from Pearlie Mae modeling for me how I might want to consider living.

She definitely didn’t want me to become like a few folks in our neighborhood who gave up on life, succumbing to the notion in our society that we colored folks had no worth, that there was nothing for us to hope for or aspire to. I remember hanging out with her one day when we ran into Pete, one of a handful of heroin addicts on our street and she said to Pete: “Pete, it’s so sad to see you this way” and he replied with a glassy eyed “Yeahhhh,” that must have lasted a minute. He was in a world we had no privy to, walking on clouds in some faraway place, in his nod with nothing but superficial good feelings running through his bod, trying to subdue his immense pain, unable to face a world that was hostile to his race.

Pearlie Mae mumbled “Hmm, hmm, hmm” under her breath as we walked away from our troubled neighbor and friend and I said “Yeahhhh” with a glaze in my eyes and she said “Boy, you crazy. Nothing about this is funny” and gave me the biggest hug and her parting glance at Pete was filled with both pity and love, in it a wish for him to have a better life. She didn’t cast him aside. She truly was as stated in her obituary: selfless and loyal to family and friends and confidantes. She tended to her mother in her final years of poor health like a one person skilled nursing home team. Such dedication to someone she loved was truly something to behold.

I’ll always remember when she got married to Joe Purdie, an airman, and they went away to England, leaving me with a feeling of abandonment but I learned from her that distance does not necessarily equate to “out of sight, out of mind” because when she returned to Tucson her love for me was just as strong as it was when she left and so was mine for her.

She lived a wonderful life giving all she had as an educator, as a mother to three beautiful daughters, Lillie Anne, Clara Denise, Jo Michele, as a grandmother to their children and a great-grandmother to their children’s children. No finer human being has ever appeared in the Milky Way. So:

Pearlie Mae. What can I say.
On my family tree.
A cousin but like a big sister to me.
Part of my history.
Here when I arrived.
Everyone who knew her could always count on her love.
In many hearts she will always reside.