Good Morning POU!
If you thought they were rough at the wedding, just wait until you read about a funeral. LOL
“Girl, it feels like the end of an era.”
They came from Harlem, from Brooklyn, from New Jersey, from Washington—from as far away as Los Angeles and from as nearby as Scarsdale and New Rochelle. On this damp fall evening, close to nine hundred people jammed the sanctuary as dozens more lined up outside to make it standing room only at the seventy-year-old white limestone Grace Baptist Church in suburban Mount Vernon, New York. It was a somber event that brought together disparate groups from New York’s black society world. It was the funeral of Nellie Arzelia Thornton, national president of Jack and Jill of America.
“I can’t believe it. She was just fifty—just fifty,” said a woman who held a sprig of green ivy in her hand as she stood in one of the front pews with the other AKA members and looked over at the Links and Jack and Jill sections of the church. As my father and I took an available seat in the back half of the sanctuary, we saw long lines of solemn black women in full-length mink coats, diamond earrings, and white dresses being led down front to view the body and catch a final glimpse of the woman who had united most of us. I could see my mother in the fourth row with her fellow Links members. She could have sat with the Jack and Jill women, since that was the group that had originally brought her and Nellie together, but they had actually become closer friends through the Links chapter they had chartered, along with their longtime friend Betty Shabazz.
Although each of the three organizations of women would eventually make its own presentations that evening—the Links with candles, the AKAs with the sorority song, and the Jack and Jillers with flowers—everyone there wanted to say good-bye personally.
“Why isn’t this in New York? This should be in the city,” remarked a tall, light-skinned woman with a mink hat. She seemed to be in her late sixties. “If they really wanted people to show up, they should have had this at St. Philip’s.” “Yes, but she’s Westchester,” remarked a younger woman standing nearby. “She’s not from New York.”
The tall woman turned back to the younger woman and shook her head. “Not from New York? That’s the problem with you new people. You haven’t been out here a hot minute, and you Negroes act like you forgot where Harlem is. They could have had this at St. Philip’s—or even Abyssinian—and really had people show up. All this suburban foolishness. She belongs in the city—not mixed up with all these West Indians and Westchester wannabees”. “You know, I kind of agree,” another older woman interrupted. “Not that she’s really one of us, but she is representing Jack and Jill, and a New York church would have been able to really bring the right people in. I’m sure Wyatt would have let them do this at his church.”
The woman turned around and looked at the unfamiliar white people and the occasional row of dark faces she didn’t recognize. “After all, the Amsterdam News isn’t going to send Cathy Connors out here to cover a group like this.” The tall woman nodded in agreement. She liked Grace Church and its head minister, Franklyn Richardson. He and his wife, Inez, were Boulé people—Links people— her kind of people. And Grace had a strong and accomplished membership. But this was still not familiar territory to her. It wasn’t the Harlem clique, and it wasn’t St. Philip’s. Since my mother and several of our cousins had been friends of Dr. Miriam Weston, wife of St. Philip’s rector, Dr. Moran Weston, I’d long understood the historical significance of the 180-year-old St. Philip’s Church on West 134th Street and the position it once had within the world of old-guard New York blacks.
“Exactly,” the woman with the mink hat continued. “At things like this, you want to see people. You want to know who shows up. Like the Girl Friends, for instance, are they even here? And the Boulé? How can you even tell? I know she wasn’t from an old family or big money, but they really should have set this thing up right for the rest of us.” The younger woman, a suburbanite, shrank back, not quite knowing how to respond—and possibly not comprehending the points that seemed to be so important to the two older ladies, two hard-boiled New Yorkers who saw only one way to do things. “And there ought to be a section for the Fisk people—she went to Fisk—and the Washington people,” added the increasingly annoyed woman as she attempted to impose her own form of order on the occasion.
As I sat there with my father, thinking about Nellie Thornton and her credentials—Fisk graduate, school principal, AKA member, Links chapter founder, Jack and Jill national president, wife, mother of two, owner of a white turn-of-the-century mansion—I thought about how rigid these women might have seemed to an outsider who didn’t understand their world. “And what’s this all about?” the woman removed the fur hat as the church suddenly fell silent. She sat back in her pew and grimaced as four young, dark-skinned black girls outfitted in black leotards walked to the front of the quiet congregation and stopped just to the right of the casket. After a few moments of silence, music began.
The young girls, who seemed to be no more than twelve years old, looked out at the somber audience and began to sway in unison. They swung their heads sadly in circles and then shook their slender bodies to a rising rhythmic African beat. Moving their legs and arms with colorful flowing scarves, they introduced an almost whimsical counterpoint to the harsh, chilling music that played behind them.
Some of the people in the congregation seemed to watch approvingly, while others—many of the ones I knew—sat looking somewhat astonished, unsure of the course of the evening. “What’s with this jungle music?” asked a middle-aged man in front of us. “I guess they are children from Nellie’s school,” a woman whispered back. “I’m not sure I like this.” The woman paused tentatively and then nodded. “I don’t think I do either.” The girls in the black leotards shook and shimmied, then bent down toward the floor, still writhing and shaking to the beat of the loud drum. “Bringing that African stuff into a church. Did she go here?” The woman shrugged. “I heard somebody say something about St. Philip’s.”
“Well, I doubt that.” As I looked around the sanctuary, it became obvious that here was a clash of New York cultures.