Lula M. Brown says an Aunt taught her, at a very young age, the importance of family values that involve family members staying as close and cohesive as humanly possible at all times.
Schedules, distance, and even qualms and quarrels aside… to the Browns, family is everything, no matter what happens in life. When this is all said and done and the chapter closes on another life within the family circle, all a family really has is each other.
Today, on this Saturday morning, it’s a monthly “family breakfast” that the Brown family holds on a regular basis. They like to see one another and keep up with what the others are doing and take occasional note on how their family is growing and progressing and accomplishing good things in life. Though all family members aren’t available to attend all functions at all times, everyone knows what is going on and where, and they join in as time and locale makes it possible.
I first met Carolyn S. (Brown) Foster in grade school.
I had just been snatched out of my childhood fantasies in Denver and Detroit and shuttled down south on a racially regressive train with my mother, her mother, a brother, an elder sister, and a baby sister, barely six months old at the time. All I remember about that trip is that I hated Columbus, GA from the moment I set foot in it, and that I could not wait until I “got grown” (18) so I could get the ‘blank’ out and head back to Denver. And yet, somehow, there is always a bright spot to be found no matter how dark and dreary the world seems to be.
My earliest memories are of the one child (my age) in the classroom who chose to befriend me -as a new student in a strange place- rather than berate, mock and ridicule me as the others did.
I remembered that she was a supportive friend as well as a definitive “social butterfly” and industrious type who always had something to do and somewhere to go, when allowed by her mother, a woman I remembered only as cordial and congenial and nurturing every time I saw her. These were activities that any young/teenage girl would be expected to attend in order to be a part of the ‘social graces’ of getting along with other people in the world — and especially of getting along with “the boys.”
Over the transom, more than 25 years later, circumstances caused me to leave Columbus and some such other circumstances brought me back.
I was blessed to be reacquainted with Carolyn and eventually with her mother, through talking to a member of the church I chose to attend. We had not seen each other since our sophomore year at Jordan High, but I had never forgotten her or her mother from my childhood, and that was the one bright spot, out of so very few, that made me look back at Columbus and smile.
My mother wasn’t so nice about the idea of me hanging out with other girls my own age no matter what the situation was; but there again, I cared more about having A singular friend than gathering a bunch of so-called friends by trying to play the role of Miss Popularity. Being able to interact with Carolyn at school every day was good enough for me.
Things didn’t work out as planned during the time I lived in Atlanta, northern California, Arizona, or southern California, but I often wondered what might have happened if I had had that all-important family support in the pursuit of my own dreams. Without an intact family of my own, in spite of my best efforts to make it happen, I did meet families who did not take a core member who was missing in action (often for decades) for granted.
My family was good at the philosophy of “who cares.” About anything. And I thought that to be the most ungrateful insensitive two words anyone could use when it came to the Christian mandate to love one another even as we love ourselves.
Paraphrased:
If you don’t love your brother whom you CAN see, your profession of love for a God that you cannot see is nothing other than a lie. – I John 4:20
The Obligatory Matriarch in the Root of the Black Family
I know that anywhere there is a strong family constitution, there is almost always a matriarch -and sometimes a patriarch- who is adamant about the family “sticking together” no matter what happens, or why.
Mrs. Lula Brown’s family readily admits, everything … “hasn’t been all peaches and cream.”
But when I find myself joining them at several family functions as an invited family guest -with my own family split off and broken up even before I was born- I don’t just ask how they do it, but I often wonder why they do it, even after certain members of their closest inner circle have gone ‘off the deep end’ from time to time.
From my people’s perspective, walking away from blood kin is as easy as flushing a wad of tissue down the toilet, which action is quickly followed up with the words “who cares?”
My family was a “who cares” breed of people from root, and the unfortunate news is that “little old sensitive me” hated every second of it. It was the main reason I felt I had to get as far away from them as I could, and as you can readily guess, no one bothered to find out where I was even as a lay in a hospital in southern California dying from a disease called Stevens Johnson Syndrome. The story of my ultimate survival is a severely dramatic one, but when nurses told me that calls to my “family” back in Georgia went unanswered even after doctors had pronounced me dead, I knew that my childhood torture was not merely the imagination of a lost and forlorn child thinking she was rejected from birth, it was a materialized fact.
But aren’t we supposed to care? Who does that “who cares” thing when it comes to family members? I left because I considered it an inherent evil that had to stay with them, and I had no intention of letting their credo spread to my own children, even if it meant I would be the missing one who wasn’t seem or heard from ever again.
The motto is “The family who prays together stays together,” and I say again, “the family that clicks and kicks it together, sticks together.”
At these breakfasts and other pre-planned annual and semi-annual family functions, the Browns and all of their blood kin and namesakes don’t seem to mind giving God the glory in all things. Even when there is dissension and discord and strife among them, the perfected part comes in with their undying commitment and willingness to stand together, and more importantly, to CARE what happens to other family members.
I was saddened to know that #SandraBland’s own family sat on their offset behinds during a time when a trip from their hometown to the place where she was jailed would have taken only a few hours to complete; yet, they waited THREE FULL DAYS–until their kinswoman was murdered in a jail cell in “Godonlyknowswhere,” Texas. The young woman, a professed and highly popular Black activist, was accused of committing suicide, which no one believes happened. However, even if she did ‘kill herself’, those who jailed her most assuredly gave her the tools with which to take her own life, including the reported ‘plastic garbage bags and marijuana’, AFTER she was stripped, abused, and knocked unconscious — then stuffed in jail garb and had a “photo shoot” done while lying on a cell floor with her life seeping slowly from her body.
Three days … about the same length of time it would have taken to get from Washington, DC to Sausalito, California, all the way on other side of America, 3000 miles away.
From all available published records, they not only did not turn out in full numbers to find out exactly what the hell their kinswoman was doing in jail over such a mediocre matter, but didn’t even so much as return her phone calls from the inside. They did not demand IMMEDIATE bail for her, nor did they make a wellness check to hold the people who jailed her accountable for anything that happened until they could get there. And we all know what “they” and their cohorts do with people that they believe have no family and no one who cares about them. Anything goes, from beatings to rape, and even worse than that.
Maybe Bland’s family is not to blame for their failure to respond quickly, but let it be known that Black families in America can never EVER afford to leave family members in the hands of racist whites in small country cuckoo towns like the ones in the typical deep south and trust that anything good will come of it.
Family Defined
Carolyn S. (Brown) Foster and Mom, Lula Mae Brown
Forensic definition says that “Family is important because it provides love, support and a framework of values to each of its members. Family members teach each other, serve one another and share life’s joys and sorrows. Families provide a setting for personal growth. Family Support is defined as an integrated network of community-based resources and services that strengthens parenting practices and the healthy development of children in a true partnership amongst family members. The family is the nucleus of civilization and the basic social unit of society. The family is nature’s established association for the supply of mankind’s everyday wants.”
In a nutshell, in order for the at-large society to thrive, families must thrive, and ergo, so must each individual person within that family. Broken families make for a broken world, and the “fix” for broken families is not innumerable mandates from governments or churches, it is solely a decision that is made to keep the familial constitution strong and unbudged no matter what happens inside or out of the circle.
Take this Cliff’s Note page from The Grapes of Wrath, where a strong matriarch is all that keeps the Joad family -in dire straits economically- from falling apart. Social maladies in the neighborhood and community are internalized, and they all start with personal issues coming from families and friends, not just mom and dad. The old “hurt people hurt people” adage is never truer than it is with families who start life off in an aura of mistrust and jealousy and infused hatred.
The emotional and physical backbone of the family, Ma’s primary obligation is to take care of her family, to provide them with nourishment, comfort, healing, and support. Her family will only know fear and pain through her, so she works hard to deny these emotions in herself. Likewise, they look to her for laughter, so she builds joy out of small moments. Above all, however, her calm, unflappable strength binds everyone together. Ma finds this strength in love. She is the embodiment of Casy’s idea of love, possessing the same intuitive sense of morality that Tom has. Although her primary focus is to take care of her own family, she is the first to nurture others. As Casy observes, “She don’t forget nobody.” During the Joad’s trek to California, Ma, in her desperation to maintain family unity, finds her role expanding. As crisis threatens to tear the family apart, she shifts to a position of active leadership. With each assault against the unity of her clan, she gradually takes over Pa’s role as head of the family. When Tom suggests splitting up the family, she threatens him with the jack. While camped at the Colorado River, she wields a skillet when confronting an officer who orders the family to leave, although her greatest concern is that he will anger Tom. She forces the family to action in the Weedpatch camp and keeps Pa strong by giving him something to fight against. In the end, it is Ma who demands they leave the boxcars for higher ground. This is not to say that Ma desires to be the leader. Her function within the family remains rooted in traditional feminine traits of nurturing and protection, and her primary desire is to “keep the family whole.” She wishes nothing more than to reach a place where they can be a family with clear, logical boundaries. Her attempts to school Rosasharn in the way to be a strong woman, keeper of the family, reinforces Ma’s attitude toward her function within the family framework.
Admitted faults and all, Mrs. Lula M. Brown’s family exemplifies the strength of a deep desire to maintain their closest ties at all costs.
That is something too many of us seldom see any more, and the good news is that it is working for them. They simply don’t see anything out of the ordinary with doing the same things-after all these years-that families once did together as a matter of tradition way ‘back in the day’.
But that was back when Carolyn and I, and other girls like us, used broken rocks to draw hopscotch lines on the ground, and learned to “make a way out of no way” even when jumping ropes and balls and jacks and store-bought board games were scarce and hard to come by.
The true key to “generational wealth” isn’t found just in seeing if you can get everyone to the table to start a family business or a family-owned credit union, but it is also in understanding the true riches embedded in a very simple idea: Care enough or more than enough to make the initial building blocks of the neighborhood and community -the family- matter, and matter deeply.
If Americans would follow that kind of example, of instilling the value of the eternal universal Village into each of its family members, more than 90-percent of our society’s worst behaved individuals would be reformed in quick time without the intervention of unnecessary outsiders and strangers.
Excellent article of the Brown Family. I concur with the writer about the Brown’s being a “tight knit” family, they are very close. I too, have attended several events with Carolyn, her sisters and Mrs. Brown who always do everything together as a family unit.