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I can't believe you passed
Your words on stage were as fierce as your spirit
You birthed and inspired thousands of poets
so they called you, Momma.
Love Spook
As quite as it's kept, It's easy for Black folk to come up with all sorts of reasons to dislike and hate one another, dating back from the first time a slave was forced up onto the auction block in America.
It's the reason why slave rebellions lead by the bravest of souls, like Gabriel Processer, Denmark Vesey, and George Boxly failed, because of the betrayal of other slaves. This syndrome is know as "crabs in the barrel" and continues down through out Black history to African Colonialism all the way to the two Black people now living in the white house who promised poor Black folk change too, and failed to deliver, and continues forward in various vicissitudes and strengths throughout America. Most Black people are just not honest about it.
Therefore I'll admit, that over ten years ago when I was sitting at the back of the ( now closed) Big Horse Tacqueria and Lounge located in Wicker Park at a weekly Poetry Slam, the first time I saw Momma Maria McCray spit poetry, I didn't like her. It was the way that the audience of mostly white kids, joined with the few Black, Asian, and Latino kids, and chanted "Momma! Momma! Momma!" as she stepped to and commanded the stage. I was also uncomfortable with her combining the masculine stinging wise cracking truth telling and wit of Dick Gregory's "From the Back of the Bus" with stories of her wounds and vulnerability as a Black woman from the American South who on top of it all, served in the Vietnam War. To listen to Mamma McCray was to be forced to experience her raw pain, when personally I'd fled from the South side of Chicago to run from mine. I wanted to hear the far more common political rants of privileged kids, intellectualized from books ( therefore sterilized), and not connected to the open wounds of a rightfully angry, articulate, and brilliant older Black women soldiering it alone. I didn't want to picture her riding on red line from the hard scrabble Roger's Park Neighborhood with her brown bag of poems. And even worse, on those nights when she could not secure a car ride home, I didn't want to picture her, after connecting with her children, alone on that long train ride home looking out the window at Chicago passing by in the night.
Well Momma McCray passed two days ago. I didn't find out from WBEZ, but from one of her children, a Black man from the South Side block that I lived on as a teenager. When I left the neighborhood for school on the east coast, he was the last person I expected to see again. Actually, the last I thought that I would ever hear about him being alive, was on Christmas Break as sophomore year, when I heard that my older cousin's best friend (Dark Mark) beat him down for shorting him on a bag of weed. Years later after I returned back to Chicago, bowed, bruised, and bloodied, but armed with my degree by the skin of my teeth. I had picked myself up and moved out from the segregated South Side, that defines most Black people in Chicago who live and die there, (some never even leaving) and moved to Bucktown/Wicker Park, a place that years ago reminded me of New York City. There, I encountered the person Dark Mark beat down over a dime bag of weed.
Although his home will probably always be on the South Side, he managed to "leave" the bad of the neighborhood enough to grow bigger than the south side as well. Although his face still carries the beatings, he's changed his appearance from hood to urban bohemian, reads books, writes poems, receives recognition as an artists and Chicago activist, and now goes only by his first name. We don't cross paths often as he still lives on the South side and has a child, but I often listen to his progressive political radio show broad casted on a North Side college radio station and keep up with him because we are "Face book Brothers"
It was from his "face book update" entitled "I didn't get a chance to say goodbye.......damn" posted on Monday 7th at 11:14 p.m that I learned that Maria "Momma" McCray passed like the red line train she rode pulling away from the station for the last time. He was one of her children. And I guess I am one too, estranged, who has finally grown up enough to come home.
The only Thing I Miss about the South-
By Maria McCray
I would dig dandelions from around Dad's headstone
......2Feet from Grands....2Feet from Great-grands
.....2Feet from Great-Great-grands...& brag, loud & long to
my captive audience father
about his never-knew grandchildern,
just past where, i find dignity in small gestures..
just Past
