I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • Outing at Soldier Field – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Outing at Soldier Field – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)


    On Sunday, Game Day, we were caught up in our shared football passion. What  would we wear to sit in the cold at Soldier Field?  Most of our fan apparel was for warm southern weather so we had to wear layers of our blue and black Panther colors that we brought. Scarves and gloves and stocking caps, too.

    what we would have worn in South Carolina

    “Let’s don’t bother with the blanket,” I said. “It’s too much trouble to carry it through the Art Institute.” Did I mention we were taking a detour to spend a couple of hours at the Art Institute on our way to the football game at Soldier Field? “I think we might need the blanket,” Teresa said. “You know I’ll be glad to carry it.” I reluctantly added it to our bag of extra scarves, head gear and binoculars.  And off we went. The day was breathtakingly beautiful with bright sunlight, but the wind whipped its way into our bodies as it blew across Lake Michigan and onto the streets of Chicago as we walked.

    The Art Institute was crowded with the people who were not on their way to the Bears game. We covered as much as we could and were thrilled with the works of some of the same European artists we loved in Florence, Italy, last year. The mixture of artists and mediums was a visual assault. The personal discovery of a painting by Antonio Mancini called “Lady Resting”captured our attention. It was the only one by him, and we couldn’t believe how much this eighteenth century woman looked like Teresa with her dark skin and even darker eyes and hair. I remembered when my Uncle Ray met her the first time he visited in our home from Texas and asked if she were Eye-talian. How little we know of ourselves in this life. Maybe she was?

    We left art behind and joined the processional of Bears fans walking to the playoff game. Da Bears were out in full force – we were quite conspicuous in our Panther blues. We walked and walked and walked some more through Millenium Plaza and Park down to the Field Museum across from the new Soldier Field. I had to stop for a breather to sit for a few minutes before the final push to the game. And Da Bears just kept coming.

    We made our way to the entrance where we handed our tickets to the gatekeepers. Teresa went through just fine. “Your bar code’s invalid,” the ticket guy said to me when he scanned my ticket. My heart stopped. I couldn’t speak. I had ordered the tickets from an online ticket vendor called TicketDaddy, and I was nervous about their appearance when I got them in the FedEx package before we left. The man kept trying to scan my ticket without success and finally called his supervisor to take a look. He must have sensed that the senior citizen with the ticket was about to go into cardiac arrest if she didn’t get past him. The supervisor tapped my code into a hand-held computer that accepted it and told me to go in. I could breathe again.

    Teresa had been waiting for me while this minor melodrama had taken place but hadn’t heard what was going on. She said it was better she hadn’t. We were handed souvenir Bears rally towels as we went in. I almost didn’t take one. Then the fellow passing them out said, “Hey, it’s the Playoffs. You’ll need yours for crying when you lose anyway.” I took one.

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    Congratulations – you’ve made it through to the second round of the story! One more to go…please stay tuned.

  • Outing at Soldier Field – Part 1 (from Not Quite the Same)


    I realized at a very early age growing up in the piney woods in rural east Texas I was somehow different from my family and friends there. I didn’t understand the difference completely as a child.  And to tell the truth I spent a lifetime evolving from that early recognition to the social justice activist I became in my middle age years in South Carolina. “Coming Out” happened over and over again in many settings in my more than sixty years as a lesbian. At some point in your life, though, you begin to feel there will be no more surprises or discoveries. As they say in football, that’s why they play the game

         “Look out the window. It’s pouring snow,” I said as our plane touched down on the Chicago runway. Why do I say those things to a person who minutes earlier  clutched my arm and said with hushed hysteria, “We’re going down! We’re going down!”? And that was when the landing gear made the noise it always does in preparation for landing.

    “It doesn’t pour snow,” Teresa said. That’s my girl. Even the peril of impending death won’t interrupt her brain’s ability to spot an obvious grammatical gaffe. I love that mind of hers, but next trip it will definitely be sedated before takeoff.

    We were on one of those remarkable unexpected escapades that had never been a part of my life before Teresa. She is the definitive impromptu whirlwind that spices up my studious planning Taurus nature.  Life is an adventure, and I found it is not necessarily wasted on the young. This was going to be a big weekend for us.

    The Carolina Panthers, our pro football team in Charlotte, North Carolina, were in the 2005 NFC playoffs against the Chicago Bears. Teresa and I were both huge football fans and made the two hour drive from our house in Columbia, South Carolina, to see every home game during the five years we had been together. We watched some dismal losing seasons, but this year was a banner year. The win against the New York Giants last Sunday made this happen. So the following Friday we were on a plane from the warm and sunny state of South Carolina to the frigid windy city for the big game on Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field. Unthinkable in my prior life.

    The weekend was as remarkable as she is.  From the moment we got to our hotel in the city’s theater district downtown, we didn’t stop. In the midst of the wintry mix that night we walked to see two movies that weren’t playing in our town. Not one, two. Capote and Brokeback Mountain. Two movies with gay themes that would take several decades to be shown at home.  We saw them at a marvelous old theater called The Esquire that reminded me nostalgically of the downtown theaters of my childhood visiting Houston in the 1950s. Of course, the interior of the Esquire was broken up into the little theaters they all have today, but I could still recall the magnificent old Texas theater lobby in my mind. The smell of the buttery popcorn was the same.

    In between the movies, we had a wonderful Chicago pizza in a warm noisy restaurant near the theater. The people were friendly and in a jubilant mood. Tables and booths were packed. Standing room only. It suited our festive mood. By the time we finished the second movie and walked back to our hotel, we were exhausted.

    On Saturday morning we took a train out to the suburb of Oak Park, walked the streets of Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright. Teresa is a lover of books and authors, so this was sensory overload for her. We had a guided tour of the Hemingway family home for just the two of us. It was a slow Saturday for literary greats. We were the only visitors in the Hemingway Museum during the hour we were there.

    Next was the bitterly cold walking tour of the neighborhood where Frank Lloyd Wright began his career designing homes for his friends. My legs ached, and I could see my breath in the icy air. But Teresa’s face was alive with enthusiasm at the wonder of all we were seeing. Her intensity was invigorating, and so we moved on. She can never know enough. We never have enough time to see all she wants to see. There aren’t sufficient books in the souvenir shops for her to buy to read later to see what she missed while she was here. Never enough time to read them when she buys them. Her passion for knowing and seeing and doing is boundless; her energy is contagious.

    I was thrilled when we finally came to rest late that afternoon in a fabulous Mexican restaurant with plenty of heat besides the warmth of the picante salsa. I could feel my tired old bones begin to thaw. Teresa glowed as she related her favorite sights of the day. We took the train from Oak Park to downtown Chicago and made our way to our hotel. The plays in the theater district looked inviting, but we were afraid we’d pass out sitting in the dark for that long. Our hotel bed welcomed us with open arms.

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    When the heat index is over 100 degrees in South Carolina this week, I thought I needed a breath of cold air…brrrr….stay cool and please stay tuned.

  • Happy 4th of July from St. Helena Island, SC

    Happy 4th of July from St. Helena Island, SC


    4th of July Celebration at Texaco Station on St. Helena Island, SC in 1939

    photographer Wolcott – Library of Congress

    Their ancestors from places now known as Spain, France, England, Central and West Africa among others were enslaved laborers on St. Helena Island, South Carolina alongside Indigenous Americans from the early sixteenth century through the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 through a Civil War begun in cannon fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina a hundred nautical miles north of their island in 1861 when Union forces set up occupation on St. Helena and freed all slaves working on plantations.

    The Declaration of Independence celebrated that 4th. of July at the Texaco filling station on St. Helena in 1939 is the same one we celebrate in 2023 for the hope, the promises that begin with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    The poet Maya Angelou said when she gets up every morning, she doesn’t think those people in the past are gone and forgotten, but when she gets up, she says everybody come with me.

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    Happy 4th. of July! Everybody come with us.

  • Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    “I know Papa has gone to heaven, and that is where I want to meet him. The Old Devil gets a hold of me sometime. I slap him off—and pray harder for the Lord to help me be a better Christian. I realize more that I need the Lord every day, and I want to love the Lord more and try to serve Him better. He alone can take away these heartaches of mine. I want to have more faith in Him. I have been so burdened, and I want to be happy. Serving God and living for Him is the only plan.” (excerpt from a letter written by my fifty-six-year-old maternal grandmother to a sister following the death of their father in 1954)

    My maternal grandmother’s belief that faith was the sole solution to the multitude of problems she faced throughout her life beginning with her husband’s accidental death that left her penniless with four children to raise during the Great Depression, a belief she expressed in the above letter to her sister, reflected her daily approach to “have more faith” that included a ritual of reading Bible passages while she sat at our small kitchen table and I lay in the darkness watching her from the next room, wishing she wouldn’t get up so early. But there she would be, struggling with her third-grade reading level to look for godly guidance in the ungodly hours before dawn. I want to be happy, she said, and God was her only plan.

    Shockingly, my paternal grandmother glossed over the deeper issues of faith in favor of a focus on hope. The Bible says there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them is love. This grandmother wasn’t concerned with the intricacies of faith nor did she overtly exhibit love toward others outside her immediate family, but she attended the same Southern Baptist church faithfully every Sunday. Her hope was for humor, however. Her belief was that in every Sunday church service she could find something or someone or, preferably both, she could use to entertain her family at the dinner table later. The poor preacher was irreverently skewered on a regular basis; no one was sacred at that table. She was a woman in charge of her home, family and most of the conversations that took place within both.

    This was the faith of my grandmothers. The church was the teacher for one, the Bible the textbook for both, and the interpretations ranged from the holy to the inadvertently profane. I listened and watched these women for as long as they lived and throughout my childhood absorbed their diverse values that blended with the Sunday School teachings and preaching of the Southern Baptist churches my family attended. I learned to sift the messages and keep the ones that appeared to lessen my likelihood of going to hell in an afterlife.

    My maternal grandmother’s duel with the Devil evokes strong feelings for me, but they are feelings of sadness for her inability to achieve that higher level of trust she desperately wanted, the trust that would bring her happiness. Her faith never could be quite good enough, and I refuse to believe in a god that inspires fear and irrational guilt. As for my dad’s mother, her irreverence gave me permission to begin to overcome feelings of shame when I faced the puzzles of sexual identity that were my life. My life has involved many choices, but my being lesbian was not one of them. My paternal grandmother had a unique relationship with her God, but her words and sense of humor helped free me from the somber sermons of damnation in my youth and encouraged me to think for myself. I wonder if she knew.

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    “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews XI, 1)

               

  • Payday Someday – Part 2 (from Deep in the Heart)

    Payday Someday – Part 2 (from Deep in the Heart)


    Sunday School at the First Baptist Church of Richards was boring, as usual. But the Sunbeams class was interrupted by a surprise visit from the revival preacher himself. Our teacher, Miss Mary Foster, was obviously thrilled to have him single out our class for a personal visit. He was a short stocky man with a round face, black wavy hair, big smile for Miss Mary Foster as he stepped briskly into our room without knocking.

    Good morning, Miss Mary and children, he said. My name is Brother Hector Rodriquez and I am preaching your revival this week. I’m very happy to be bringing God’s Word to you. I came by to tell you that you must be very good in the services, listen carefully during my sermons because I’ve heard some of you are not saved yet. When he said that, he paused and looked intently at each of us as though he knew which ones were lost. His dark brown eyes smoldered, and his bronze skin seemed to radiate heat. I thought he looked like he was about to explode. His whole expression was disturbing and unsettling, but no one in the room moved. We had been struck by human lightning.

    I’m going to tell you about your sins and what you must do to keep from going to hell, he went on. I’m sure no one wants to go to hell, do they? Eight small heads in the tiny room shook back and forth because we had been taught about hell in Sunday School plus I had heard the word mentioned by my Uncle Toby at home when his walking canes got tangled. Brother Hector seemed satisfied that we would be excellent candidates for his persuasive powers. Very good, he said. I must leave you now to prepare myself to receive the Holy Spirit in time for my sermon. He turned away from us and left the room. I was relieved to see him go and silently promised to be nicer to Miss Mary Foster in the future. Give me boring Sunday School lessons over the intensity of revival preachers any day. I began to feel a sense of foreboding in my bones.

    The quartet from West Sandy was singing Just a Little Talk with Jesus with great conviction, and Charlie Taliaferro was playing the piano so fast for their accompaniment people said later they thought they saw smoke rising from the keys on the church piano. The church was packed with visitors from the Methodist Church that had canceled their services to come hear our revival preaching. I sat between my paternal grandparents Ma and Pa on their usual pew toward the middle of the small sanctuary as the special music ended and the deacons got up to collect the offering for the revival preacher. I surveyed the sanctuary to locate my family. Dude was sitting with Uncle Toby a couple of pews back. Uncle Marion had finished one of his cigarettes in the parking lot behind the church, slid in late like Mama predicted in the kitchen at our house that morning, and was in the very last row. Mama and Daddy were sitting in the front pew so they could get up when it was time for the invitation hymn that Daddy would lead after the preaching because Daddy had the loudest male voice in the church and Mama would play the organ with no pipes because that’s what she always did.

    Oh, and there was Miss Inez Wood and her son Warren in their usual spot halfway back. Miss Lonie Fulghum and Miss Edna Kelly were in their favorite pew under one of the six four-paddle black ceiling fans in the church. They claimed to have no tolerance for hot air which must have been another reason Mama thought they were odd. Scattered around the church were the Methodist visitors who didn’t know where they were supposed to sit since the Baptists were so particular about their favorite places.

    Brother Hector Rodriguez was about to take center stage in the pulpit. He looked very pumped up, almost like a prize fighter getting ready to spring from his corner of the ring. Evidently he expected this contest to be a fierce struggle. He was about to wrestle the devil, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. All of our souls were resting heavily on his shoulders. He took off his coat and placed it on the pulpit chair. He loosened his tie; I saw his starched white shirt already had sweat stains under the arms.

    Brothers and sisters, he began in a somber tone. The Holy Spirit has placed a message in my heart for you today. I call it Payday Someday. All of you are lost like sheep without a shepherd wandering in the wilderness of your own sins. If you don’t repent, I can promise you will have a day of reckoning with the Lord Almighty who is the great check-casher in the sky. He listed many of the sins he knew would be our downfall and reminded us of Adam and Eve’s Payday experience when they were banished from the Garden of Eden. He droned on and on with rhythmic intensity and increasing volume. He was definitely on a roll. I checked to see if Miss Inez Wood was awake and was disappointed to see that she was. No help for relief there.

    The preacher moved on to higher ground. One of the sins that was most horrific to him was the sin of unnatural affection. My radar zoomed in at this, and I tuned back in to listen as he raved about men lying with men and women lying with women, or something like that. A vague feeling of unease and guilt began to spread through my seven-year-old brain. I glanced to see if anyone had changed their expressions. Did anybody know I was the person he was talking about. How had he figured out from Miss Mary’s Sunday School class all I could think about was that little Methodist girl Tinabeth?

    Something in his dark eyes had exposed my innermost longings. Now he knew my secret life. God help me if he told Mama. I was panicky, and I needed desperately to formulate a plan. Brother Hector warmed to his subject. This was a sin of the first magnitude that would result in the deepest pits of hell. (Excuse me, which level of hell was that?) He was sorry to be the one to tell us, but some of us were doomed. Payday Someday was today. Now. This very minute. He was shouting at us – his eyes were on fire. He was waving the Bible in his hands while his whole body shook. Sweat flowed down his face. He slammed his Bible on the pulpit lectern and closed it with a resounding thud. He shut his eyes and began to pray for our souls.

    After the prayer, he nodded to Daddy who stood and walked up the three short steps to the podium to lead the invitation hymn Just as I Am; Mama took her place at the organ without pipes to play softly for background music. Brother Hector Rodriguez made his pleas for us to renounce our transgressions and turn to the Lamb of God who made us all new creatures and forgave our sins. At his instruction, we all bowed our heads and closed our eyes as we sang the familiar words. Verse after verse. I could feel the tension and discomfort growing as the music slowed for the last verse. The Methodists were the most nervous since they had shorter songs in their hymnals. Clearly my grandmother had been right about the revival preacher. No one was leaving until a soul was saved.

    Finally, one of the boys in my Sunday School class walked down the aisle to say he was saved. It was seven-year-old Mike Jones, the brown son of our regular pastor whose wife was a Filipino woman he met in Hawaii during the war. Mike was crying and visibly shaken, but we all breathed a collective sigh of relief as the service came to a successful conclusion with the addition of a new name written down in glory. Hallelujah. Can I get an Amen?

    I avoided getting in the crush of people lining up to shake hands with Brother Rodriguez after the service. Everyone wanted to congratulate him on a wonderful beginning to the revival. As I eased my way through the crowd and out of the church, I was already feeling the first twinges of the stomach ache that would most assuredly prevent my coming back for the evening service. I knew I had to convince Dude to tell Mama I was too sick to go.

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    The writing instructor at Midlands Technical College asked her students in the fall of 2006 to write about a vivid memory we had from our childhoods – Payday Someday was the result of that assignment for me and inspired my first book Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing published in 2007, dedicated to Teresa, the little girl who said yes.