Affirming My Birth Date Though I Have No Intention of Running For Any Public Office

I became concerned because I know you spend a lot of time on the web and you have discovered a lot of things about me that even I didn’t know and actually hadn’t questioned. For example, a few years ago you uncovered my real birth year so I quite naturally became concerned when you once again asked: was I sure that I was born on June 7th? I wanted to ask my mother when you first questioned me, but you had given me such a lovely box of stationary that I feared were you to be proven correct you might ask for its return though ultimately I could find no one so worthy of the note cards that I manufactured reasons to send notes to you. Now that they are gone I am trying to be a woman about this and face facts : I might actually have been born on June 6.

Unfortunately, the family has used up our allotment of Day Passes for this quarter so I could not zip up to ask Mommy and as you had pointed out she was probably not watching either the time or the day. I know it was at 6:00 am that I first drew my breath on my own, but that was only because I was upset that Dr. Presnell hit me. Even then I found beating the life into infants was cruel and unusual punishment making it a federal case, but Mommy stuck something in my mouth preventing me from making my case. It would be twenty-six years before I remembered to bring that up again.

But thank goodness the Fates are kind when Mother Nature and others of her ilk are hard nosed. The Fates allowed me to call my Grandmother who actually turned out to be the woman I needed to ask since she was not engaged in the distraction of my beginning journey nor the anxiety my Mother was probably experiencing while I began it.

Grandmother remembers looking at her watch because she only had two watches in her life, and Grandpapa had given her this one on their fortieth anniversary. Grandmother always adored, and that should be in capitol letters, two things that were in a non-reciprocal relationship with her: Race Horses and Diamonds. She was madly in love with my Grandfather, adored her three daughters and, I think, took some pleasure in her six grandchildren, but the capitol letters still go to Race Horses and Diamonds. Her eyes would glaze over in ways I have no words for. Grandpapa couldn’t handle horses after they moved to Knoxville from Albany, Georgia. If Louvenia wanted horses she should not have sassed that white woman, he would laughingly say to me. I knew to keep out of it. But diamonds were another matter. As nationalistic as she was, she could justify diamonds because they come from Africa, so she looked at it as a rescue mission. One of the reasons I have never sought a day pass to talk with my sister is she took Grandmother’s diamond rings that my Mother wore all her life and gave them to Thomas. Of course, it goes without saying I can purchase a diamond ring or earrings or things like that, but to me it was never the diamond, it was that I know he saved up for them; earning extra money tutoring Latin and being a Poll Watcher and serving on the Grand Jury. Of course, I recently read they are no longer going to pay folk to be on the Grand Jury which I think will mean folk will decline to do so, but that is not our question here. I am a big fan of paying citizens to do good things, but I natter which I do not intend to do.

I was born on June 7th because Grandmother was there holding Mommy’s hand. My father was there uncharacteristically being supportive until he saw he had another girl, and then turned to my Aunt Agnes and said: Ag, ain...