I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Lesbian Literary

  • on International Women’s Day, I salute Pretty


    “I knew I was a lesbian, and I also knew I wouldn’t disguise who I was,

    because to do so would send the message to my son Drew

    there was something wrong with it.

    If I didn’t name it, if I didn’t share it,

    if I didn’t acknowledge it, if I didn’t own it,

    if I wasn’t proud of it,

    he was going to believe there was something wrong with it.

    That became my mantra.

    If I never in my life denied I was a lesbian,

    if I treated it as just a part of my life,

    then he would be okay with it.”

    Teresa Williams a/k/a Pretty   (1980s)

    Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home

    Today on International Women’s Day, I celebrate one of the women I most admire for her courage in her journey toward living an authentic life not only for herself but also for her son in the days before Will and Grace and Ellen. With obstacles on every side, without the support of the family who had always been there for her, this warrior mother stood up, came out and never looked back.

    What would I do without Pretty…her warrior spirit lives on every day.  I’m glad she’s on my side, too.

    Drew, Pretty and me 

    Stay tuned.

  • the 21 club


    Although South Carolina has been my home state for nearly 50 years, I was born and grew up in Texas. During one of my countless classic goodbye scenes with my parents in my early twenties, daddy quoted one of his favorite sayings, “you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.” No truer words were ever spoken. My reasons for leaving the state were complicated but boiled down to my attempt to figure out how to live an authentic life as a lesbian away from a family I assumed would not be supportive. I yearned for freedom – from what? As the song “Desperado” reminds me: freedom, oh freedom…that’s just some people talking.

    From 2010 – 2014 I had a second chance to live in Texas by buying another home there in order to care for my mother who was then a freedom seeker herself in a losing battle with dementia that destroyed the woman she had been. While these second chance Texas years were deeply painful, they also gave me an opportunity to experience a new relationship with my mother as well as to renew family bonds with many cousins I had rarely seen for several decades.

    Two of the cousins I spent time with were Eloise Robinson Powell and Frances Kelly Lee. Frances drove me to visit with Eloise in her home on O Avenue in Huntsville several times while I was there – as I had visited there when I was a child. Eloise was a double cousin – her mother married my grandmother’s brother, her father married my grandfather’s sister. Repeat three times.  Regardless of how you explain it, Eloise was a double first cousin of my father, and they were very close friends.

    This past week I learned that Eloise had left her home on O Avenue to move permanently into an assisted living facility in Huntsville. I felt despondent at the thought of that move, but I needn’t have. Eloise called me today, and we talked for almost an hour with lots of laughter and wonderful reminiscing about our double family ancestors. I can’t imagine how she felt about leaving her home of a lifetime, but I know for sure she took her memories with her. She is looking forward to an annual gathering of three friends on March 20th. in her new home where there will be cake, she told me, but no mention of her birthday on the 21st. She prefers to keep her birthdays to herself. I won’t tell either.

    I will tell Eloise is the second member of what we now call the 21 Club. Frances has a birthday on February 21st, Eloise is the 21st of March, I have April 21 and Pretty has May 21. None of us have any excuse for forgetting the other’s birthday, although I have to say Eloise is usually the only member to send a card. If I hadn’t had my second chance in Texas, I’m not sure the 21 Club would have been chartered.

    Earlier this week I received a surprise UPS package from my cousin Frances who is a regular cousin for me. Frances’s mother and my paternal grandmother were Robinson family sisters and oh my, what sisters they were. Whenever those two were together, the rest of the family wasn’t spared from their fun poking and gossip sessions. My grandmother and her sister Thelma got together as often as they could, and my grandmother invited me many times to drive the short distance to Conroe from Richards with her. I never said no to a trip with her.

    The UPS package Frances sent contained three family treasures from the house on O Avenue that Eloise asked Frances to ship to me. I was thrilled and wanted to share them with my cyberspace family.

    William James and Margaret Antonio Moore Morris family – circa 1903

    My great-grandma Morris is the unsmiling woman seated in the first row. She was born on July 14, 1864 and married my great-grandfather William on December 15, 1880. They had 11 children in 23 years. Nine of their children are in this picture. The eldest, John Thomas, had been told to leave home when he turned 18 so he was gone. The youngest, Bernice Louise, would not be born until 1906. The little boy to the right of Grandma Morris was my grandfather George Patton who was born in 1898. Eloise’s mother Hattie Jane was the woman standing to the left on the top row. Aunt Hattie was born in 1889.

    Margaret Antonio Moore Morris and William James Morris in younger days

    Margaret died on June 06, 1963 when she was 98 years old. Since I was 17 years old when she died, I had seen her several times throughout her life in Huntsville. I never met my great-grandfather because he died in 1927.  My most distinct memories of her were her tiny frame clothed in a black or navy dress, her frail appearance as she pushed a small chair in front of her that enabled her to walk through the house, long hair piled in a bun on top of her head, sweetest smile as she spoke, now let’s see, you must be Glenn’s daughter?

    The 21 Club and my great-grandmother Morris are part of my women’s history month. I celebrate these women for their strength, their courage in the face of adversity, our shared DNA, their ongoing sense of humor with stories that always make me laugh.

    When I talked to my cousin Eloise on the phone today, she told me a story about something that happened when she was in the third grade of her rural Crabbs Prairie elementary school in Walker County. The teacher asked the children in the class to give the definition of various words – one of them was the word “income.” One little girl raised her hand, stood up and said, “I opened the door and in come the dog.” The little girl forever was known as Income.

    my cousins Eloise (l.) and Frances in 2014

    (used without permission from anybody)

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • beam me up, scottie – it’s Women’s History Month!


    Last night I took a trip in time travel with Stephanie Rule who narrated a documentary called On the Basis of Sex which looked at the people, places and events that shaped the American woman’s odyssey to become an equal citizen in her own country. The documentary beamed me up, Scottie and I looked down and back to see images no longer fresh but just as real as my participation in the women’s movement during the late 1960s through the failure of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.

    March is Women’s History Month, and we rightly honor the sacrifices of those women who refused to remain second class citizens and stood together to work for the common good so that all women might have freedoms to choose what happens with their own bodies, to choose who they love and marry, to choose where they work, to choose where they govern. I am Woman, hear me write.

    Women today also look back to remind ourselves of our courage and strength in the midst of adversity. Luanne Castle’s award-winning book Kin Types is an example of a contemporary writer who is not afraid of looking back.

    “Kin Types exhumes the women who have died long ago to give life to them, if only for a few moments. Through genealogical and historical research, Luanne Castle has re-discovered the women who came before her. Using an imaginative lens, she allows them to tell their stories through lyric poems, prose poems, and flash nonfiction.” (https://www.writersite.org)

    Storytellers and storytelling – that’s what made On the Basis of Sex compelling for me last night and then another woman merrildsmith had this quote in her Monday Morning Musings titled “Art through Time and Space”: (https://merrildsmith.wordpress.com)

    “I think the life of my community and most communities depends on the storytellers. We only know anything about the Roman Empire or about the lives of the people within the Greek polis from the plays that exist. We can find out from historical archives what laws were in place, but who they affected and how they affected those folks and those people – we only know from the stories and from the storytellers of that culture.”

    –Tarell Alvin McCraney, playwright, from an interview on All Things Considered, March 2, 2019

    I celebrate the storytellers today including Stephanie Rule who beamed me up with memories of game changing days gone by. Check her out on MSNBC.

    Stay tuned here for a post on the first woman elected to Congress, Jeanette Rankin, coming soon. I leave you with a profound thought I read  from yet another woman writer, Canadian Susan Nairn, on her blog “Polysyllabic Profundities” this morning:

    “But time has a way of taking moments and turning them into memories in the blink of an eye.”

    (https://polysyllabicprofundities.com)

  • red rants and raves over lady gaga and the president’s fixer


    Oh my, oh my. Sometimes I long for the wit and wisdom of The Red Man who, sadly, left Pretty and me three years ago this month at the ripe old age of 14. Red, our rescued Welsh terrier who became my alter ego for eight years through his blog Red’s Rants and Raves had an opinion on anything and everything.

    Pick a topic – any topic. Red readily shared his thoughts without filters or fancy speech. For example, one of his favorite phrases was Sweet Lady Gaga. Paw snaps and twirls, he would add for emphasis so imagine the field day he could have had with the 2019 Academy Awards Sunday night when the real Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper sang their cozy, sexy rendition of “Shallow” which won the award for Best Song. Sweet Lady Gaga, indeed. Paw snaps and twirls forever.

    Another frequently quoted phrase by The Red Man was shit house mouse. Yes, shit house mouse loses something when I write it, but when Red uttered those words the occasion called for desperate exhortations, even demanded them. I feel certain the seven hours of testimony by Michael Cohen for the US House Oversight Committee today would be the perfect event for a vigorous shit house mouse.

    From the opening gavel, introductory remarks, closing remarks, banging of the ending gavel and all of the questions and answers in between, the nation had the opportunity to watch a spectacle of alleged criminal conspiracies reaching to the office of the president of the United States intermingled with a multitude of lesser sins committed by the flawed fixer who earned that name over a period of ten years serving as the president’s loyalist. High drama today on Capitol Hill. Shit house mouse.

    Stay tuned.

    The Red Man

     

     

     

  • the battle my grandmother lost


    my early years in my hometown of rural Richards, Texas

    (circa 1949)

     

    my dad and me at a family picnic in matching shirts

    made by my grandmother (circa 1951)

     

    a birthday party dress made by my grandmother (circa 1951)

    my grandmother made this dress and a  picture postcard of me

    for her family Easter card in 1949

    Bless her heart. My grandmother tried and tried to reshape my fashions which upon reflection she probably hoped would reshape my life. One of the most dreaded phrases my mother ever spoke to me – the one that made me cringe-was “Your grandmother is making you a new dress and needs you to walk down to her house to try it on. No arguments, no whining, just go.”

    I absolutely hated to stand on her little stool while she endlessly pinned away to make sure  the pattern she bought from a grand clothing store in much bigger town Navasota  fit perfectly on my small body. She pulled, tugged here and there, made me turn around as she measured whatever cloth she had purchased when she bought the pattern. I prayed silently that the aroma I smelled was her pineapple fried pies…the only possible redemption from the hell of being poked and prodded for a new dress I didn’t want to wear.

    My grandmother Betha Day Robinson Morris and I lived within shouting distance of each other in the tiny town (pop. about 500) of Richards until my dad found a new job that took us out of the place I called home when I was 13 years old. Our new home in Brazoria was less than two hours from Richards so we came back every other week for most of my teenage years. Distance did not deter my grandmother from her sewing, however.

    She usually managed to have something for me to try on whenever we visited. I finally surrendered to her passion for sewing because as I grew older I came to understand sewing was an important part of her life, but to this day I dread hearing Pretty say she brought something home for me to try on.

    my grandmother surveys her granddaughters

    before Easter Sunday church services in 1963

    I was 17 years old and wearing a dress my grandmother made for me

    while my younger cousin Melissa modeled her store-bought outfit

    My grandmother continued to sew for me until I was in my twenties. Every Christmas she wrapped a large box in her best wrapping paper and favorite bow saved from the previous Christmas to give to me. I always opened with feigned surprise at the dress she made for me to wear to church and praised her for being able to still find the perfect pattern and material for me even when I wasn’t there to try it on.

    I’ll never forget the last time I opened a gift of clothing she made for me. She had made a pants suit – unbelievable. I could see she was pleased with herself for breaking from the dress tradition she wanted me to wear to making the pants she now understood would forever be my choice of clothes. The year was 1968 – I was 22 years old – my grandmother would have been 55. The pants suit represented a rite of passage for both of us.

    Unfortunately, I never could bring myself to wear the pants suit which was made with a hideous polyester fabric and a horrible bright green and white large zig zag pattern. I couldn’t bring myself to wear it, but I carried it with me around the country wherever I moved for the next 30 years. I would carefully hang it in my closet as a daily reminder of  the love my grandmother gave me for as long as she lived.

    My grandmother Betha was a flawed individual but what I wouldn’t give today to hear my mother say “Sheila Rae, your grandmother is making you a new dress and wants you to try it on. No arguments, no whining, just go.”

    Stay tuned.

    (A special shout out to my blogging friend Luanne at http://writersite.org for inspiring me to write about clothes.)