Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton
Foremost among them was Lucy Cummins, my dear “Nursie”—nanny, mother, companion—who as in many well-off white families provided what neither of my parents could or would provide: companionship and positive expectations—as well as a light dose of discipline.
There were many overcast days in the valley of the Ohio River where I was raised and even as a child I was disheartened by them. Lucy would often claim on an overcast day that she saw “A patch of blue big enough to make a pair of Dutchman’s breeches.” I imagined those breeches as being like bloomers, requiring a lot of material. This patch meant that eventually the sky would clear completely and the sun would shine. Whether this happened often, I don’t know, but the possibility lightened my gloom.
And then there were the African-American women who peopled my childhood. One man, too, but he was silenced by the trauma he’s suffered as an enlisted man in World War One, and the brutal treatment he and other black soldiers were subjected to when they returned home, some of them expecting or at least hoping that attitudes in the U.S. had changed.
The women were not silent. Lizzie Baker sang, or rather hummed tunelessly, like the murmuring of a large bee, while she went about her housework, rocking along more slowly as she aged on her bent feet. At the end of her life, Mother placed her on a chair in a tub of warm water in order to soften her age-gnarled toenails; they needed cutting and Mother bent to the task while Lizzie probably urged her to quit.
And there was Ollie whose shrill laughter, half-suppressed behind her hand, told me that we white people had again said or done something ridiculous, although Ollie would never tell me what it was.
In the midst of lives lived during Jim Crow when the advances of reconstruction were brutally dismembered, these women preserved their ability to laugh.
Lucy, who was white, grew up in rural poverty where she was often left in charge of her younger brother and sister while her single mother went to town to look for work. She learned early to replace fleeing adults.
We might also remember that there are many women who do not relish devoting their lives to raising children; they have other interests in the wide world, career options they need to pursue. The brilliance of choosing their replacements, highly schooled in human relationships rather than highly educated, shows that we are capable of discerning what our children need and finding women who can satisfy those needs, allowing ourselves to be to some degree replaced. That is generosity of a high order.
Lucy taught me creativity of generosity. On walks, she helped me collect leaves, acorns, bits of this and that which we then housed in what I called “Cooka Boxes”—I have no idea what the name meant—teaching me by example the preciousness of what the woods gave us and igniting my passion for the natural world and its preservation.
But Lucy also taught me limits. “I’m going for my lunch…I need to rest…I’m putting up my feet for a while…” It was a lesson that took me a long time to learn.
A bitter-sweet story, this story of Lucy. So important, these stories of women whose lives were used up as if they were of no importance, yet which were of such importance to the children they raised.